738 Days: A Novel (45 page)

I close my eyes. “It’s complicated,” I say.

“It better be.”

The keys to the rental car might be in my suitcase, maybe. But as soon as I turn in that direction, I’m faced with the sight of my shirts, the ones Amanda borrowed, folded neatly on the sofa cushion. On top of them are her visitor credentials for the set, with the cord neatly tucked to the side, and her hotel room key.

It steals my breath and for a second, I’m just gasping for air.

She’s gone, and she wanted nothing of me to go with her. Fuck. I have to fix this. I have to undo it.

“Chase?” Karen asks, alarmed.

“It didn’t start out that way,” I say, bending over, resting my hands on my knees. “It was supposed to be simple. No one gets hurt.”

Karen gives a derisive snort. “That’s what she said, right? Elise?”

“I didn’t realize it wouldn’t work. I didn’t realize that I would feel—”

“So it was real. You fell in love.”

“Yes!” I glare at her.

“And you still didn’t tell Amanda the truth,” Karen says in a resigned tone.

“I couldn’t tell her. I knew she would hate me, and she might leave. And I—”

“Was a giant fucking coward. Again,” Karen says flatly. “Ran away, maybe not literally this time, but close enough.”

Sometimes having a brutally honest friend who knows you this well is not as much help as you’d want.

The tightness in my chest increases, and I duck my head to catch my breath.

Karen shifts her weight, inching closer to me. I can see only her legs with my head down.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and I can hear the frown in her voice.

“I’m fine.” I just need the damn car keys.

I straighten up and push myself to cross the room to the window and dig in my suitcase on the wooden luggage rack, spilling clothes, chargers, and shoes everywhere.

“What did I do with them? I just had them the other day.”

“What are you looking for?” Karen asks, making no move to help me.

“The keys for the rental car.” Which are nowhere to be found. “Damnit!” I shove the suitcase away from me, and the rack tips over, colliding hard with the wall and tearing a gash in the beige wallpaper.

“Where do you need to go?” she asks warily. “Your call time is in forty-five minutes.”

“Amanda’s not answering her phone.” I tried a dozen times in the cab with Karen on the way over from the police station. “I need to talk to her.”

Karen raises her eyebrows, the piercings giving her severe look even more intensity. “Chase, you need to leave her the hell alone,” she says. “If you show up now, she’s not going to open the door to you. She might even call the police and you’ll enjoy a second visit with the local authorities.”

Even if Amanda doesn’t, her family might. And they would be right to.

I sag to the floor. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I have to
do
something.” I look up at her, pleading silently for her to have answers. I can’t take it back, I know that, but surely there’s something that will make this better.

But Karen just shakes her head, her twin braids wobbling with the movement. “Some mistakes you only get to make once.”

She sounds so tired and defeated, instead of pissed or disappointed, and that somehow only makes it all worse.

“Who asked you?” I demand, shoving myself to my feet. Anger is better. Fury is easier to handle than this other feeling, the one that tells me that Karen is right, that I’ve messed up one too many times and too badly with this girl.

I stalk out of the living area and into the bedroom, keeping my gaze focused on the nightstand drawers rather than the bed, which holds memories that I can’t let myself think about right now. “What are you even doing here anyway?” I ask, searching the drawers in the nightstand. They hold a Bible and an outdated phone book.

No keys.

I slam the drawers shut and head for the bathroom, the one place I haven’t searched. “I could have called a cab from the police station.”

I pause at the threshold and turn to face her, a very belated realization clicking in. “Wait, how did you know I was there?”

As soon as I walked out of the police department, she was in a taxi out front, waiting for me. At the time, I didn’t question it, my mind too preoccupied with trying to reach Amanda.

Karen takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, like she’s holding some big secret that needs to be broken to me with care. “I’m here because Leon called me and asked me to come,” she says.

“I’m fine,” I snarl. “I don’t need him to—”

“Oh, yeah, you’re great,” she says. “Clearly.”

I glare at her. “That’s not—”

“He called me because Amanda asked him to,” she says grimly.

I can’t move.

“Before she left. She said she was afraid if they released you, you’d do something dumb.”

My mouth works but no sound comes out at first. “She was afraid of … Jesus, she’s afraid I’ll come after her?” Oh my God, how badly have I fucked this up?

“No, she was afraid
for
you, hon,” Karen says with a frown. And the endearment, instead of her normal “dumbass,” makes me panicky. It must be so much worse than I thought if she’s resorting to kind names instead. “That you’d hit the bottle.”

Suddenly, Karen’s position in front of the mini-bar makes sense. Too much sense. Cracking open everything in the fridge sounds like a much better idea than a likely doomed-from-the-start mission that I can’t even find the car keys to begin.

Except I had the hotel take out all the bottles before I even got here. My resolve was so strong then. Still, there are ways around that. Especially if I can find the stupid car keys.

Because even after Amanda learned exactly how I had lied to her, she was still watching out for me.

“You don’t deserve her anyway, Chase,” Karen says with a shrug, more a statement of fact than an insult toward me. “I can’t believe I encouraged her to trust you. I thought…” Her mouth thins into a line. “But I was wrong.”

“I know I don’t,” I choke out. “But what am I supposed to do?”

“You handed control over to someone else. Again. You sacrificed things that weren’t yours to give, all for your career.” She looks at me with distance in her expression, like she doesn’t know me anymore. Maybe she doesn’t. “But you got what you wanted, so I suggest you don’t blow it. Go to work. Or else it was all for nothing anyway. You did the shittiest thing I’ve ever known you, or pretty much anyone, to do.”

“Yeah, I know, but I—”

“Do you know?” Karen demands, folding her arms across her chest, the edges of her fish scales peeking out from the fake fur on her jacket cuffs. “You, the great actor, decided to throw just a little more icing on top of that shit cake that is her life. Why? Because
you
needed it. Because
you
wanted it.”

I want to protest that it wasn’t like that, but it was, maybe, a little.

“So you want to know what to do? Take some fucking responsibility. Go do your fucking job, the one that was supposedly worth all of this. If you throw away the results of what you did, then you’re throwing away the pain you caused her, too, making it nothing.”

I swallow hard over the lump in my throat. “Kare, I don’t know if I can—”

“Chase, for the record, I don’t care what you think you can or can’t do right now,” she says wearily. “I don’t care if they find you passed out in a steaming heap of vomit tomorrow morning. Just like old times. But I’ll tell you one thing you’re going to do. You’re going to leave that girl alone, the way you should have from the start.”

With that, she walks away from the mini-fridge and toward the door to the hall, pausing only once to lift a set of keys—the keys with the bright yellow rental tag, the keys I tore the room apart looking for—off the center of the dining table and pocket them.

Then the door slams shut behind her, and I’m alone.

33

Amanda

By early evening, it’s like I never left home. I’m camped out on my bed, with my class work spread out around me while my mom finishes cooking dinner downstairs and Mia complains loudly about setting the table.

Any reporters or photographers who might have been hovering in our front yard after those first pictures of Chase and me broke obviously decided Wescott was a richer hunting ground. They’re gone now, the only signs of their former presence a few discarded coffee cups in the matted-down grass.

My mom, upon her return from the grocery store to find me in the kitchen with Liza, dropped the bags on the floor immediately—with no care for the eggs, it turns out—and hugged me so hard I felt my ribs creak. Clearly, I was forgiven for what I’d said on the phone.

When she got a good look at me, though, she suspected something was wrong. It’s hard to hide from your mom, especially when your eyes are swollen and your nose is red from crying. But when I refused to answer her questions and she started to push, Liza jumped in with an amazing floor show of distraction, bringing up a series of my mom’s favorite hot-button issues—suspected unfair grading (in Liza’s civil procedure class), the dangerous chemicals in microwave popcorn (my dad’s favorite snack), and the decline of handwritten thank-you notes as a common courtesy (Mia’s THX texts to elderly relatives who barely know how to use their flip phones to make calls)—until I could escape to my room.

Mia, herself, though, was a harder sell.

After she returned from school, she walked past my room on the way to hers, stopping with an almost comedic lurch when she saw me.

“Why are you here?” she asked with narrowed eyes.

“I decided to come back,” I told her, forcing a shrug. “That’s all.”

“What happened?”

“It just … it wasn’t going to work,” I said, avoiding her gaze. “You know, the lure of Hollywood life. He was going back, and I’m staying here.”

Mia frowned at me, studying me for a long moment, until I was afraid I was going to break and either tell the whole awful story or cry or both.

“So you’re just done. With him. With all of it. Just like that?” she asked, suspicion heavy in her voice. “Even after you spent the night with him?”

“Yep,” I said, trying for casual. “Sad but true.”

Which is an unfortunately accurate descriptor for the entire course of events.

I don’t think Mia believed me, not entirely, but because I’m doing an okay job not being a total wreck, she and the rest of my family are willing to let it go. For the moment.

And really, I’m fine; I’m doing okay. It’s been a whole ten hours. Maybe Liza’s flip-them-off-and-scream technique really does work. Or maybe I just cried so hard earlier I’ve got nothing left. An empty tank until I rehydrate.

I’m going to be okay. I’ve survived worse than this. I’m going to be okay.
I’m just going to keep repeating that to myself until it feels true again.

At the moment, I’m trying to focus on homework between loads of my laundry, which requires ignoring the smell of Chase on my clothes—his deodorant, his soap,
him
—until it’s obliterated by the fresh, nothing scent of our sensitive-skin laundry detergent and that teddy bear fabric softener that my mom started buying just because I liked the character on the box when I was five.

I haven’t showered yet. I should. I can still feel his touch, his mouth on me.

But Wescott and Chase Henry are miles away, just sixty, though it might as well be a million. When I wash him off me, he’ll be gone forever. And though it might make me the biggest doormat in the history of ever, I’m not ready to do that. Yet.

Even if his feelings weren’t real, mine were.

Are.
Mine
are.

And that’s an accomplishment I’m not ready to let go of at this exact moment. It’s not enough, of course. It doesn’t make up for what he did, the lies.

I shut my eyes, remembering the burn of humiliation. I think that’s the worst part. Before I loved him, I
liked
him. If Chase had explained it to me and told me what he needed, I would have been all over the chance to help. We could have been just friends. Maybe.

That’s what sets the rage to a slow, thick boil in my chest. All he had to do was ask. That’s it. But he didn’t. Why? Because it was more fun to trick me? Because he didn’t know me well enough to realize I would say yes? Because he’s completely brainless, spineless, and operated solely by Elise’s hand on his penis?

I don’t like any of those answers, and yet they might all very well be true.

Despair bubbles up in me, breaking up the contained broth of fury into something far less manageable. And it’s not just directed at Chase, but myself. How could I have fallen for it? How could I have decided to trust someone like that? Even worse, after all of it, how can I still ache to see him?

I’m such a sucker.

A knock sounds on my open door, startling me out of my thoughts.

I look up to see my dad in the doorway. I didn’t know he was home.

My shoulders tense automatically. If he’s seeking me out, that means he’s going to yell or demand answers I’m not ready to give.

That’s our pattern: when he’s not ignoring me, he’s radiating stern disapproval. Gone is the patient father who used to teach us about changing flat tires and putting. This man looks like him but he’s been made sharper and harder by everything that happened.

But instead of shouting, my dad hesitates in the doorway, looking uncomfortable. “Your mother asked me to come tell you dinner is ready,” he says, rubbing at his beard with a faint roll of his eyes.

My mouth curves in a smile. For a brief moment, we’re united in the absurdity of this premise. My mom, if she wanted to, could just shout up the stairs as she has a million times before. Or, better yet, give Mia the excuse to turn it up to eleven and bellow for me.

But evidently, my unexpected arrival home has triggered in my mom the desire to bring my dad and me together.

Not that it’s going to work. “Liza has class, so we’re eating now instead of waiting,” my dad says, already turning away like I don’t exist. It is, I suppose, the better of the two options.

Still …