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I put my beer down on the table and shrug out of my jacket. It’s summer in Los Angeles—I don’t need it. I only put it on before going into the police station earlier to hide the boob tube and back tattoo. Nothing quite screams ‘Working girl’ like a tatted, pierced blonde wearing a crop top in a police station crowded with uniformed men, and even though I didn’t care, the girls did.
They care a lot.
Sometimes, too much.
Rye doesn’t even blink when he sees the skimpy scrap of fabric covering my boobs—onlymy boobs. He leans back in his chair, stretches out his long legs, and crosses his ankles, completely at ease with my semi-naked state.
“Got a smoke?”
“Nope.” He links his hands behind his head and levels his dark brown eyes on me. “We quit, remember.”
“You’re telling me you don’t have an emergency supply?”
“Nope.”
“Fuck.Why?” Emergency smokes don’t count—everybody knows that.
“I have liquor?”
“I drove.”
“You can stay.”
I search his face, trying to gauge if there’s any hint of suggestion in the offer. I must look a little too long because he adds, “I got the sleeper couch fixed—for when Luke comes over.”
“Thanks, but I have a date later.” The lie slips off my tongue easily. Over the last three years I’ve had to lie a lot, and, as it turns out, I’m quite good at it. Lying routinely takes either a lot of genuine sentiment or a shit-ton of crazed confidence. Jules and Cat are convincing liars because they care. They’d rather lie than hurt anyone’s feelings. Antoinette, Lizzie, and I…We’re a whole different class of crazed confidence.
But Rye can always tell when I’m hiding something. He tilts his head and looks at me as if he’s trying to decide if it’s worth pursuing. His anger flares just beneath his curiosity. The one thing—theonlything—we don’t talk about is escorting.
Needing an out, I cross my arms over my chest and say the words I’ve rehearsed for this exact moment. “Do you remember a few weeks ago, when I came over and we watched that DVD…” Unlocking my arms, I tap my palm to my head, pretending to try and remember the name. “The one with the treasure hunter…”
“National Treasure.”
“Yeah.”
“I do.” Rye frowns, clearly confused as to where I’m going with my side story.
I pause, momentarily afraid of what I’m about to say. On the table, Rye’s phone starts vibrating. ‘Jade’ flashes on the small screen, and although he doesn’t answer it, he scoops the phone off the table and puts it in his pocket.
“If the police come over, asking about last night, can you tell them you were with me, watching that movie until one-thirty in the morning?”
Epilogue
Catherine
December 25, 2008 – Five Months Later
“Maybe this is a bad idea,”I say to Aiden as we pull into the gated driveway of my childhood home. In front of us, the electric gate looms, the spiked steel points seeming both elegant and violent at the same time, designed to keep trespassers out while passing the neighborhood’s aesthetic muster too.
“Just relax.” Aiden doesn’t press the intercom button. He turns to look at me, sitting in the passenger seat. “What’s the absolute worst that could happen?” His brown eyes glint with amusement.
I smile and shake my head, knowing the game he’s playing. It’s something I started after Sascha took me, in the months afterward when Aiden was too anxious to leave me alone. I’d say, ‘I’m going to be with Jules all day; what’s the worst that could happen?’ Or ‘Lyla is picking me up in ten minutes; what’s the worst that could happen?’
It didn’t take long for us to start using it to talk ourselves into the things that scared us. Aiden started that streak with, ‘Move in with me; what’s the worst that could happen?’ A month after I moved in, we were cooking dinner in the kitchen, waiting for our friends to arrive for family dinner and he'd put his beer on the counter, pulledme into his arms, and said, ‘Marry me; what’s the worst that could happen?’
We don’t just say it—what’s the worst that could happen? We run through the options, presenting each other with the absolute worst things that could result from any one of our decisions. “He could tell me he doesn’t want to see me,” I say now, being completely honest. My heart clenches at the thought.
“And?”
