AllFreeNovel
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“Are you two friends now?” she asks, but there’s trace of what shereallywants to know.
“We are friends. There’s something I need to tell you, but we arejustfriends.”
She presses her lips together and nods before lowering herself to sit on the lounger beside me. “What is it?”
I sit up so that I’m facing her and enclose her hands in mine. “Bernie Butler asked Adelaide and me to pretend, or at least put it out there, that there could be something between us.”
She huffs.
“For the sake of the movie. Another director and studio are putting out a superhero movie a month before ours, and he figures a romance between us would be good for sales.”
It sounds so stupid, but with Bernie, my hands are tied.
“Oh.” She slides back in the lounge chair.
I lean forward, squeezing her hands harder. “You know Bernie, there’s no choice, and with our fight and…” Not wanting to go into everything we’ve decided to leave in the past, I move to what I’m going to do in the future. “That’s over. Screw him. But I wanted you to know.”
She faces me, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands under her chin. “Okay. Do you want to… be with her?”
“No!” I grip her hands tighter. “Not at all. It was all a ruse for the press. I promise.”
She’s silent for an excruciating minute, her eyes on our hands. She weaves her fingers through mine, running them along the length, watching as we come and go together. “Can we talk for a minute?”
My heart thumps. I don’t know how I know—maybe it’s that I’ve known this girl my entire life—but this isn’t going to be a throw-away conversation.
“Of course, what do you want to talk about?” I pick up the bottle of water I have on the table and take a sip. I’d kill for a beer right about now.
“Us.”
One word. Two letters. Yet so profound.
“Us?” I clarify.
She nods. “First, I want to say thank you for arranging rehab and letting me stay here afterward. I fully intend on paying you back for the cost of sending me to Utah, once I figure out what it is I’m going to do with my life.”
I shake my head. “Lilah, you do not need to—”
“I do though. I need to pay you back. It’s important to me.”
I’m never going to accept her money, but I nod, figuring we can save that argument for another day.
“I also noticed that you removed all the alcohol from the house… thank you.” She whispers the last part. “I hope there’ll eventually be a time where I can be around alcohol and not have it be an issue, but I’m not there yet.”
I grip her chin and squeeze it until she straightens up. “I’d never knowingly put you in a position that would make it harder for you to cope. I know how hard you’ve worked to get this far.”
She nods. “I have worked hard. I have. And it’s still a struggle, but one I’m committed to getting through. Which leads me to my next point…” She lets my hand go, straightens her back, and puts her hands on her knees. I can’t help the way my gaze dips to her chest when she does that. “You have to stop walking on eggshells around me.”
The line between my eyes deepens. “What are you talking about?”
“Jimmy,” she sighs. “You walk around here like the place is loaded with land mines and if you say or do the wrong thing, everything is going to explode in your face.”
“I just want to make this as easy as possible for you.”
She places her hand on my cheek for an all-too-brief moment. “And I love that about you. But I need to learn to deal with life—real life—and also be sober. For the longest time, my coping mechanism was to numb myself. It’s important that I use the skills I learned in rehab, so they become my new normal.”
I bundle her hands in mine. “All right. I get it. I do.”
She smiles, and it reminds me of the way she used to look at me when we were kids—as if I hung the moon and stars.
