Sweet as Sin

53

I flew off of him before he could stop me and staggered to my feet, desperate to get the hell out of that room, out of that house. I found my discarded clothes on the floor, dressed in record-making time, went to my duffel on the dresser, and shrugged on my jacket. The entire time Nico watched me silently from the bed.

At least he had the decency to zip up his f*****g jeans.

On my way through the door, Nico said, “You’re not even gonna ask me why?”

He sounded bitterly disappointed in me, which pushed me past the breaking point. I spun around and shouted, “Why doesn’t matter, Nico! It doesn’t change anything! It doesn’t change how you feel!” I put a hand to my head, almost dizzy with another sickening realization. “God,” I whispered. “I should have known. I did know. What an idiot.”

Nico sat up. He swung his legs off the mattress and sat staring at me with the light streaming in behind him. His face was in shadow, but I didn’t need his expression to identify the anger in his voice. “Should’ve known what?”

I turned away. I walked out the door. It didn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, it really didn’t. But I’d only gone a few feet past the threshold when I turned back to look at Nico one final time.

“You remember that story I told you about the reason I hate my birthdays?” I was surprised my voice was so steady when everything inside me was dissolving into dust.

Needed you to know I’m a man who’s gonna take care of your heart.

Beautiful lies from a beautiful liar. I angrily wiped the moisture from my eyes.

“I left out one little detail. When I said “I should have known,” I meant I should have known better than to get involved with a musician. Musicians are unreliable. There’s always something more important to them than you.”

He watched me, waiting, his shoulders rising and falling with his uneven breath.

“I know because my father was a musician, too.”

Nico stood from the bed, moving toward me, but I was already gone.

I went to Grace’s.

I walked down the long hill, tears streaming down my face. At the end of the hill I called a cab and waited under the shade of a flowering jacaranda. It was only once I was seated in the back of the cab and had given the driver Grace’s address that I realized I wasn’t wearing shoes.

The soles of my feet were raw, blistered, and bleeding. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

Grace lived in a high-rise condominium building in Century City that catered to wealthy older people, celebrities, and women recuperating from plastic surgery. The security was top-notch. There would be no paparazzi, and no uninvited visitors.

She opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “Oh, honey.”

I fell into her arms.

Without another word, she led me to the guest bedroom, where she used an antiseptic wash on my soles and applied bandages, then covered my feet in a pair of ankle socks. She made me a cup of chamomile tea, and made me drink it, along with a Valium. Then she put me under the fluffy duvet on the queen bed and rubbed my back until I fell asleep.

Girlfriends are sometimes the only thing that make life bearable.

I slept deeply, without dreams. When I opened my eyes in the muted twilight of early evening, it might have been the same day, or a thousand years later. I used the toilet, avoided my reflection in the mirror, then shuffled into the living room to find Grace working on her laptop at the dining table.

“Rocky Horror Picture Show is on at the ArcLight,” she said, not looking away from the screen. “You up for it?”

It’s an incredible blessing, when someone who knows you well understands you’re in pain, yet allows you to take a breath before expecting you to talk about it. Grace had long ago mastered the art of the gentle handling of wounded souls. It was comforting to know that if I didn’t want to, I’d never have to talk about what had happened between me and Nico at all.

Even more of a blessing: there would never be an “I told you so.” From Grace, anyway. My own conscience was already kicking and screaming about it.

“Sounds good.” I went directly to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and poured myself a glass of wine from the corked bottle in the door. I sat across from her again. Grace didn’t bat an eyelash at the size of the highball glass I’d poured the wine into.

“It goes on at nine. I was going to order from Electric Karma first.” Her level gray eyes met mine above the lid of the computer. “Can your stomach handle it?”

Indian food might not have been the best idea under the circumstances, but, surprisingly, I was hungry. “Only one way to find out.”

A smile lifted her lips. “Atta girl.”

She phoned the order in. The food arrived thirty minutes later. In the meantime, I drank another highball of wine. I did a serviceable job with the naan bread and tandoori chicken, but the smell of the curry from the lamb tikka turned my stomach sour before I even had a bite.