Without Scars (27 page)

“He doesn’t hate you…” Ghost said with a sigh, but hesitation rang in his voice. “Okay, whose call are you expecting? Nikki…or that young girl who pops up every once in a while? Is she your rebound? Because you said you and Nikki—”

“Which young girl? Oh,
Fallon
? Jesus,
no
…” I scrunched my face and shoved my phone inside my pocket. “She’s…a friend. No, not that kind of friend.”

“Wait…
Hannah Montana
is your
dealer
, isn’t she? Fuckin’ shit.” He studied me a moment. “Look, it’s hypocritical as fuck of me to say anything about this, but dude…I don’t want to get a call from Ella or Vikram about you being in the fucking ICU or something, it wouldn’t…be good for me, okay?”

“I know, man…”

“Even Dee—”

When Julian opened the door I saw Samira standing at his stove, overseeing, but she knew better than to touch. “Gabriel and Charlie.” Julian embraced us one at a time and ushered us inside.

“Hey, old man,” I said. “Thanks for having us. And this is for you. For your
glaucoma
, as requested.” I pulled a pill bottle from my pocket and handed it to him. It was the seven grams of pot he’d wanted.

Julian nodded and shoved money in my hand. “But where is your lovely girlfriend? She has not been here in a while. I miss her cupcakes.” He meant Nikki, of course. She’d taken my suggestion and started coming here on her own. I guess now that we were having problems she didn’t want to bump into me, or maybe she thought I didn’t want her to come anymore.

“She’s good,” Ghost said before I had a chance to stammer and make excuses. “Busy with work, right, Charlie?” I nodded. I saw the back of Lux’s head as she peered through the sliding glass door to the backyard, slapping her hand on the glass and squealing at whatever had her attention.

“Sweets, Cha-Cha is here!” Samira said.

“Boog!” I called out. “Come here, baby doll.” She spun, smiled, and ran toward me. “Cha-Cha?”

“That’s going to be your name to her. Seems like karma for calling her snot,” Samira explained when she hugged me. At least Samira and I were back on good terms. The reason was why we were here—well, Ghost just came to eat. Mira had already set up her laptop on Julian’s dining room table, and a booster seat was on a chair.

“Just in time for stuffed plantains and oxtail stew.” Julian set the platters on the long table he used when he invited the neighborhood over. I wasn’t hungry but I wasn’t going to turn down Julian, so I took everything he offered.

“Charlie, those caffeine shakes are getting worse,” Samira said to me.

“Yeah, they are…” I said. Ghost looked at me and if his stare had been a bullet, I’d currently be bleeding to death on the floor. But he kept his mouth shut. He was my friend and friends were supposed to mind their fucking business on occasion.

“And, my god,
eat
. Have you stopped working out? You’re losing muscle definition.”

“I’ll try to get sexy for you again.”

She shoved something vomit-green and vomit-pureed into Lux’s mouth. “Please do.”

“So, you’ve been talking to Nik?” I whispered to Ghost as Julian and Samira chatted. I asked not out of jealousy but because I was edging into insanity wondering how she was doing. Every night I’d wondered. My heart would be beating so fast from the drugs and thoughts of her—already pushed to the limit when I couldn’t get Chuck and Sami right—and I’d want to call her. But I never called. Instead I’d get in my car and find curved roads with no end in sight, and then drive until my brain went numb. I missed her so fucking much.

Okay? Okay is really all you have to say?
After all Nikki and I had become, after everything we’d built, I’d reduced us to a four-letter word. Man, I’d failed her. Failed us.

“Lea and I went to the reopening thing a couple weeks ago at SoBe,” Ghost explained.
Weeks.
We’d been over for weeks. It still felt like hours ago. It still felt like I was being torn in half.

“And? They closed the Sinners & Saints lounge? Why?” SoBe paid decently, but she didn’t get a check if she didn’t work. Shit. Was Nikki okay financially? Would she even take money from me if I offered? If she wouldn’t, I’d make Ghost and Lea tell her it was from one of them. “Is she doing okay? Look, we’ll stop at the ATM on the way back and then you can—”

“It was just a few nights, man,” he said with a reassuring smile.

“You’re absolutely sure she’s not strapped for cash? Ghost, if she told you not to tell me she’s in trouble because she doesn’t—”

“Chill out. This is Nikki we’re talking about. She’s
fine.
And even if she weren’t, she knows how to survive.” I cringed at the wording. “Not letting anything get her down. She’s coming to Lux’s half-birthday. You’re not gonna stop her, right?”

“No. Why would I?” I’d get to see her and be in the same room with her. It would be torture at the time, and still worth every bad feeling I’d have.

After Samira put Lux down for a nap, we ran our idea by Julian for a potential web series. We wanted to get his permission to use parts of his background and give it a script treatment. It was a compromise between Samira and me because I’d already started working on his would-be memoir, so we had something to turn into a script. Julian happily agreed. Eventually, Lux woke up disgruntled, and Samira left Ghost and me behind. I needed to stay busy before thoughts of Nikki invaded, so I volunteered the two of us to help Julian set up for tonight’s gathering. I hadn’t told him yet I wasn’t coming. I wasn’t really in the mood to socialize.

“You’re quiet today,” Julian said to me, but he was staring at my hands as I vigorously scrubbed the cooking grids for his grills in the backyard. Could he see them shaking? “It’s over with the lovely girl? Nikki?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I didn’t want to say how I’d almost lost it in the car twice. How I couldn’t bear to tell my mom when she asked about her. How for the first time in a long time I missed the way Deacon and I used to be.

“You never want to talk about you…” He hauled a lawn chair over and sat.

“I come here to talk about you, Julian. So talk. Tell me what happened at the Tropicana with the girl.” I’d never heard the end of the story. “She showed up at the club and then what?”

He held a compassionate look on me, like he wanted to say something that would cheer me up. I was glad he dropped the idea. Nothing would, anyway. “It was my wife. Future wife, at the time. Which you probably figured out. She told me she couldn’t leave anymore because her brother, Marcos, had just killed her husband.”

My scrubbing slowed. “What?”

“Yes, and she was shaking, like she was cold, and there was a huge bruise on her face—it looked like a handprint that she’d hastily covered with makeup. There were even bruises around her wrists. It happened during a fight. She said they needed an alibi.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ghost said in a whisper that became a yell. He was standing right behind us, tearing a soda can off plastic rings.

“Watch your mouth.” Julian glared at him. “Anyway, she asked me to help her get rid of the body.”

“Holy shit,” Ghost said, and then made a face. “Is that better, old man? ‘Holy shit’?”

I tried to picture Julian—those hands that stirred pots and flipped ribs and welcomed people without question into his home—lifting a dead body. You really never knew people at all. Even the ones you knew. “You told the people who come here this story?” I asked, laughing a little, studying him.

“I might have left a few specific details out. So, anyway, I agreed to help Lucia. Marcos arrived shortly after, and I made sure the three of us were in every picture that was taken that night at the Tropicana. Bribed a few bartenders to remember Lucia and Marcos being at the bar all night. To remember Lucia and me dancing. Then we went to her house and got rid of Enrique Chavez. We put him in my trunk and took him somewhere no one would ever find his body. And no one ever found it. Maybe because he was a cruel, abusive drunk, no one paid much attention when he stopped going to work and stopped showing up anywhere
at all.
The theory was maybe he got mixed up with the wrong people...” Julian slowly shrugged. “And someone took him out.”

“And all three of you kept the secret your whole lives?” I asked.

He nodded. “Marcos has never told anyone as far as I know. And Lucia took it to her grave. So, yes. We all kept the secret. But it put a strain on our marriage in the beginning. You’d be surprised how the act of sharing a secret can drive two people apart. She closed off for a while. I think she always carried the guilt of asking me to do it. She probably knew I loved her deeply by that point. Which meant she knew before she asked that I would do what she needed me to do. She hated that she’d put me in that situation, though, and she thought some day I would resent her for it when
my
guilt over it got to me.”

“Did you ever regret it?” I asked. “Do you regret it now?”

“It was wrong what we did. It was a crime. I think of his mother not ever knowing what happened to him. His entire family. But, no, I don’t regret it. Because I
did
love Lucia. So, so much. And I would’ve done anything for her. Absolutely anything. I probably would’ve killed Enrique for her.”

I shivered. “That’s dangerous, isn’t it?” I asked. “What people are willing to do for each other when they are in love?”

“Very.” He nodded.

“I guess love is as dangerous as it is powerful.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s dangerous because it
is
powerful.”

Chapter Fourteen

Nikki

I bet you think I started drinking again.

I said this to myself as Samira’s inspecting gaze hit me when she opened her front door. I hadn’t. I’d done a lot of other things instead. I called Fallon Gregory like she was the mistress, and I breathed heavily through her endless hellos, and then hung up like
I
was the mistress. I did this until she blocked my number. Lea and I cuddled a lot. We ate our combined weight in pizza. The Sinners went to Universal Studios to celebrate the success of the show. In every one of the pictures I was dead-eyed. Mariella Dara and I became texting buddies. I thought a lot about what she said about pain. And I realized it was also comfortable and easy to sink into for me. Some people couldn’t help living with it; their brains were wired that way. Pain was still inevitable for the rest of us, too, but I was starting to see how it had replaced alcohol for me. I had become so dependent on feeling guilt as heavily as possible since the accident. And that person who went to Stu’s, my past, she fed on it. Now, it was time to starve her to death.

RIP, bitch.

Camryn told me I looked like shit this morning, and then I spent hours of my life fretting over how today would play out between Charlie and me. My money was on spectacle. My heart was already slapping my ribcage. More than one whole month had gone by. A whole entire month without the person I’d spent every day with. None of this right now felt real.

Samira gave me a quick tour of her “suburban hell” as she called it. But it was hardly that. This was the home of two people rebelling against the white picket fence: clashing patterns, vintage furniture, and black and white movie posters framed on the walls. All safely tucked behind baby gates. We passed Patrick in the family room on our way to the kitchen. He was making bouquets of helium-filled balloons and watching something exciting on TV. He yelled every once in a while. Then Lux yelled, too, mimicking him and laughing. Between the toddlers and Charlie, today would be extremely hard on my lady parts.

I was late getting here, after promising Samira I’d be early (look, you try finding the perfect outfit in just a few hours when you were going to see the ex-boyfriend you were still in love with), so we didn’t have much time to deal with what was left to do before the guests arrived. Samira set me up to make different types of tea sandwiches, as she concocted a fruity punch that was disproportionately made of alcohol.

“So, did Charlie tell you that Hillington really liked
Once Upon a Time in Havana
?” Samira asked as we worked. The knife I was holding slammed into the cutting board, missing the cucumber I was slicing, completely. I almost severed my fingers. Like, all of them. She still didn’t know we were broken up? Was Charlie not talking to our friends about us? Was he talking to anybody?

Was he okay?

“No. We broke up, Samira…”
What do you know?
I studied her, but she looked genuinely surprised.

“Well, I figured something was up with you two when he moved to his parents’ place. I thought maybe the apartment reminded him of you or something. And then he and Ghost were acting
really
weird when we were at Julian’s, trying to talk about you in secret, like I’m not nosy. But I figured it was a short-term thing. A couple’s first major fight,” she said as I trailed her to the backyard carrying the tray of sandwiches. She had the punch dispenser. “But it’s, like, we-can-see-other-people-again broken up?”

After we arranged everything on the serving tables, she took a moment to admire her decorating skills. Lux was apparently “over pink,” so deep violet streamers and lilac paper tablecloths flapped in the light breeze. There was an area for face painting, a bounce castle, and a photo booth. She’d set up a candy bar for the adults: jars brimming with color-separated jelly beans, Skittles, M&Ms, and lollipops. There was so much candy my teeth were tingling.

“Yes. I think so. We’re done,” I said. I ignored how speaking it felt like choking. I wanted to say more, tell her that Charlie wasn’t being the best to himself right now. And he was overwhelmed and keeping so much of it inside that he’d become a drug addict. But I didn’t. And it was so wrong to protect him. So wrong. I knew better but…

I shook my thoughts away.

Her brow furrowed as she tore open a bag of ice and dumped a mountain of it into a large plastic barrel marked ADULTS ONLY. “So, this is the first time you guys are seeing each other…since he texted me to say he was at Vikram and Ella’s?”

“Wait. Why is he not at the apartment?”

“He punched Deacon.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you know Deacon…his penchant for, well,
Deaconing
finally caught up to him. He said something stupid about you, apparently. Charlie lost his shit.” Samira drank a full cup of her punch without pause. “This is going to be a disaster.”

“We’re adults,” I stressed, even though I agreed. “We can handle being here together. Deacon and Charlie will be here at the same time, right?”

“No, I told Deacon he couldn’t come. Charlie is Lux’s godfather, so he has to be here.” After a beat of silence, she downed another cup. Her pupils pulsed. “This is going to be a gigantic fucking disaster.” Her phone buzzed. “It’s my brother. He’s supposed to pick up Lux’s cake. Knowing him, he’s at the wrong bakery. Oh God. I was kind of sad that Lux isn’t even going to remember this party, but I’m okay with it now. I’ll remember it, though.”

“We won’t embarrass you, Mira.”

“I wouldn’t put
any
money behind that…” She answered her brother’s call and walked back into the house. Then the doorbell started ringing and never stopped. The place filled up quickly with adults and kids. Music and laughter. Sunshine and familiar faces. I spent most of my time pacing near the serving table for the older kids, passing out sandwiches to sticky hands. And looking toward the house every time I heard the low rumble of a male voice. They were all
his
for a moment. Then definitely not his. My palms were clammy. I was so antsy, too full of
everything
humans feel,
all at once. I padded back into the house.

“Everything already feels like it’s snotty and sneezed on,” Denise whispered to me when I spotted her investigating the appetizers. “I don’t know how people do this. Thank God for Depo shots.” All her words were muffled behind her hand. She was using it as a facemask. “And a half-birthday sounds like a way for parents to force you to pay
more
attention to their kid.”

“Quit…and Samira promised the adults were going to have just as much fun as the kids. Have a heart, bitch.”

“Nope.” Denise shrugged. “Gonna have a drink instead.”

“I can’t take you anywhere,” I called after her as she walked toward the kitchen. Before she could get too far, I grabbed her hand and pulled her back. “Do I look okay? Should I have worn this?” I pointed to my strapless floral print dress and regretted starting this conversation right in the instant. Since when was I insecure about how my clothes looked on me? This breakup was doing a number on me.

So much masturbation. Not enough rationality.

“Are you serious?” Denise whispered in irritation. “Is this about Charlie? He used to put his
penis
inside you, you know…regularly…like a few weeks ago. In fact, he agreed to not put it in anyone else while he was doing that.” I snorted and laughed. “So…
pretty sure
he liked what he saw then. He’s
going
to like what he sees when he gets here. He’s still going to want to put his penis in you.” She squeezed my hand and shook her head, but her look was tender and understanding. “You are being crazy. Stop it, crazy.”

“
Okay.
”

“And I thought you were mad at him.”

“I am. It’s complicated.” She shook her head again and left me standing there. The breeze from her walking by had barely blown before Samira approached me with a guy who looked strikingly like her husband on her arm.

“This is my brother-in-law…Michael. Mike. He’s Patrick’s older brother. And this is my friend, Nikki.” Behind him, she mouthed,
Wanted to meet you. He’s great, really, but no. No.
I grinned. We shook hands as she went to greet more guests.

He was attractive, like one of those guys who were always standing in a sailboat with wind-tousled hair in Ralph Lauren print ads. But he wasn’t my baby. My love. My Charlie. I looked toward the front door quickly when the bell rang, and more unfamiliar people poured in. “So, you’re Patrick’s brother?” I asked.

He laughed. Probably because Samira had literally just told me
he was Patrick’s brother
. “And you’re a ballet dancer?”

“Yeah.” I curled my toes when Samira shrilled at the arrival of more people. I looked toward the footsteps behind me again.

Michael tapped my hand because I had turned to face the door completely. “You okay?”

“Yeah...is this house hot to you?” I swallowed and fanned my face. My nerves were like jumping beans. I was ready for Charlie to get here. God, I was going to be a sweaty mess by the time—

“Happy half-birthday, Booger!” My knees went weak. Charlie burst in without knocking, hardly able to walk with the large Toys ‘R Us and Target bags swinging around his feet. Frisson sliced straight through me. I could’ve burst. Damn, my ex was sexy. He was clean-shaven and wearing a black Polo and blue jeans.

Samira hugged him and took the gifts. “Charlie! My God! This is too much! You do realize she’s probably going to play with the boxes more than the actual toys, right?”

Lux ran straight for his legs, screaming with glee the entire way. I had on my favorite Fuck You! outfit; my heart should’ve been a freezer. But I was
awwing
under my breath as Charlie picked her up and smashed kisses on her little cheeks. “I know…but
look at her
,” he said. “Hi, Booger.” She held onto his neck and laid her head on his shoulder. Why did she have to like him so much? What chance did I stand against a guy who adored a baby who was equally crazy about him?

Ahsha and Priyanka walked in next, and smiled and waved as soon as they saw me. My return wave was weak because I was so focused on
him
.
Look at me.
My heart swelled and I held onto the counter, waiting. Because no matter what, I still wanted him to want me.
Look at me look at me look at me look at me.
Just as he set Lux on the floor, a woman shut the door behind her and took his arm.

My heart crashed into my quivering stomach.

I looked over at Samira with a questioning stare. Oh no.
Oh hell no.
My current panic and sleeplessness from the prior weeks boiled into fury. They were barely past the foyer when I ambushed. “Really?” I said. “Really? You brought another woman to our friends’ house?”

She was pretty. I’d give him that. It was a valiant attempt
at an upgrade. If you were into leggy, nice boobs, smooth skin and…still fucking touching my goddamn ex. “Who’s this?” she asked.

“First…don’t talk.” I shook my finger in her face. Even while knowing it was irrational to be angry with her, especially when she was all deer-in-the-headlights in the eyes. “Don’t talk at all. Not a goddamn word. Don’t even—”

“Um, Nik…we should walk away now…” Denise’s voice hit my ear and my tunnel vision cleared. The faces around me came into view. It was only a few faces but, oh, wow. This was a scene. And I was causing it, offering up ringside seats to our mess.

Charlie’s gaze rolled over me from toes to head. My insides burned. “Samira is
my
friend…and Patrick, too, by association. And by the way, the original owner of said friends gets to control what kind of friendship the ex has with them.
Cosmo
didn’t clear that up for you?”

“Oh, fu—”

“Why
don’t I ever get to have nice things?” Samira said to no one.

“I don’t think I like it when Mom and Dad fight,” I heard Denise say as Samira yanked both Charlie and me into the kitchen. The two of us just stared at each other. I managed to keep standing even though the sweep of memories threatened to throw me to the floor. Yes, I’d had a life before Charlie. But when I measured it against
the after
—after this man loved me and made love to me—I didn’t remember much of it anymore. I only knew those hands and that kindness and those eyes and those arms and those lips…and that heart now. “Guys, you cannot have your
Bravo
reality show
shit
play out here. My in-laws are coming. They like me.
You
”—Samira pointed at Charlie—“sangria duty. And you…back to sandwiches.” She pushed a tray of them into my hands. Those stations were on opposite ends of the backyard.

I let Charlie go out first. The space between us got busy fast as the house bled party guests. Samira had to be directing them to the yard. I had a suspicion she wanted Charlie and I as distracted as possible. It didn’t stop him from watching me, though. Every time I looked up he was focused on mixing sangria. And putting
way
too much fruit in it. Because he was watching me, like I was watching him.