Hollywood Nights (21 page)

I steeled my heart against them both, backed the Corolla out of the garage, and pulled out of the driveway. Once again I had nowhere to go, and no one wanted me. I didn't care.

I kept driving.

“S
o let me get this straight.” Kenneth placed his phone on the sticky restaurant table and folded his hands as he studied me. “You’re getting back together with Lana.”

“She’s pregnant with my child. What choice do I have?”

He shrugged. “A few. She could get rid of it.”

“That’s totally out of the question,” I said through gritted teeth. “Don’t bring it up again. Lana wouldn’t consider it, anyway.”

“All right.” Kenneth lifted a hand and glanced around at the other restaurant patrons. “Forget I said it. Wrong choice of words.”

“Here you are.” A skinny waitress with long dreadlocks placed a margarita in front of Kenneth, a Dos Equis in front of me, and a large basket of chips and salsa in between the two of us. Then her eyes roamed over my body but if she recognized me, she didn’t mention it.

Good.

I’d chosen Tito’s Cantina in Encino for one specific reason: It lay tucked away on a quiet street in a random corner of the San Fernando Valley. People wouldn’t bother us here. We could talk. And drink. I’d been doing a lot of that in the last few days.

“Bottoms up.” I lifted the Dos Equis bottle and tipped it at Kenneth, then swallowed a large gulp of beer.

“Like I said before, I don’t mind drinking with you, but we’re not getting drunk. I’m not dealing with that at a restaurant in the Valley.”

“Got to keep taking the edge off.” I’d repeated that mantra over and over again since Brynn had walked out of my life three days before. So far, it hadn’t worked.

“When are you and Lana going public about this… ahem…
reunion
of yours?”

I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Just want to know what I should prepare for.”

I slammed my beer bottle on the table. “Speaking of which, you weren’t exactly prepared when it came to Lana’s big announcement, were you?”

Kenneth grabbed a tortilla chip out of the basket and dunked it into the salsa. “I don’t think anyone could have been,” he said in between crunchy, loud bites. “This literally came out of nowhere, and that morning, I got about an hour warning before the shoot. I called over to the editor and she assured me…” He ate another chip. “I still thought you and Lana weren’t speaking to each other.”

My attention wandered around the room, looking at the rest of Tito’s sparse patrons, but I didn’t
see
them anymore. I kept thinking over and over about that night at the Polo Lounge, and the things that happened before it. What an epic fuckup. And now I would get to pay for it in more ways than one.

“I feel like I don’t have much of a choice,” I said to Kenneth. I propped my elbow on the table, and shoved my hand through my hair. “I’m not going to abandon her. Not if the baby is mine.”

“So you’re saying you have no choice but to try and make this work.”

“This would be a lot easier if Brynn would talk to me.”

I fished my iPhone out of my pocket and unlocked it. Nothing. No text messages from her. No Instagram posts. Nothing on Twitter. No Snapchats. Zero. I sighed and threw it down on the table. She must have meant what she said. “At least I can think of one good thing about this situation.”

Kenneth sucked down a large gulp of his margarita. “Which is?”

“Brynn’s better off without someone like me.” I picked the bottle up and drank some more beer. “She always was. I guess somewhere deep inside I always knew that.”

I
didn’t allow myself to cry until I made the last turn, the one that took me off State Route 437 and onto the gravel driveway. When I got there, I wept, crying harder than I had any other time in my life, and I still cried as the car rolled up the drive and came to a park.

At the end lay the familiar blue and white house with the same rusty shutters and broken front steps. Nothing had changed in the last few years, not even the rusting washer and dryer on a concrete slab about ten feet away from the house.

The screen front door opened five seconds after I parked the car. He’d been waiting for me ever since he picked up the frantic phone call I’d placed on the road a few miles outside of Albuquerque. I’d told him everything, from the setbacks of my life in LA to the arrangement I had with Tanner, then the way my feelings grew for him, and how it felt to find out Lana was having his baby. I hadn’t been so honest with him in years.

After I got up the steps, my dad folded me into his arms.

“It’s all right, bumblebee. You’re okay.”

I sobbed against his chest, finally letting it all go in a tidal wave of emotion I had bottled up since putting the Californian sunshine in my rearview mirror and Ohio in my front. It felt so good to cry with no consequences.

“Everything’s so screwed up,” I said against my dad’s denim sleeve. “My whole life. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

“It’s okay. You’re only in your twenties. You don’t have to know.”

The kindness in his voice made me cry harder. Pretty soon, his sleeve had a large wet patch. I tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t hear it.

“Come inside.”

He led me through the front door and into the small living room. The walls had their familiar wood paneling, the green couch still sat across from the battered tube TV, and my senior pictures hung from the wall. Dad didn’t like change. When I was younger, that bothered me almost as much as his recurring drinking problem. On that day, I wouldn’t have asked for anything else.

I sank onto the couch. Every bone in my body wanted to give up. It had been a long drive—more than thirty-two hours on the road. While I broke the trip into three days, I still drove it all carrying nagging anxiety, lingering anger, and stress that wouldn’t leave my back or my shoulders. Tanner hadn’t helped either. My phone had twenty-five text messages, three Snapchats, and five DMs on Twitter from him. Every time I read one on the drive from California to Ohio, I wanted to respond.

But I didn’t. And I wouldn’t.

“Here’s some water.” Dad handed me a blue plastic cup and took a seat in the fake leather La-Z-Boy recliner. “You look like you need a good night’s sleep.”

“Haven’t had one of those in a while.” I sipped the bitter tap water and relished the familiarity of the blue plastic cup’s fading Cincinnati Cyclones logo. It was good to be home, and better than I had expected. “What I need is a new life, Dad. Or maybe my old one. I still can’t believe this is happening to me.”

“But it’s not happening, sweetheart. Not anymore. All that drama is two time zones away, and whatever you’ve been doing in California isn’t real life.” He gestured to the rickety house where he’d lived for more than thirty-five years. “This is reality. This. Day-to-day stuff like hard work and paying taxes—not media manipulation for the sake of tabloids, blog posts, and fame.”

“When I was a little girl, I used to think my whole life would be better as long as I got out of Griffin. I hated it here, and I wanted everyone to know it.”

My dad nodded. “That’s your mother’s fault. You’ve got a streak of her in you. Stubborn. Headstrong, I think.”

I bristled; I didn’t like thinking about my mother. She took off when I was five, after an epic argument with Dad about money and his inability to make much of it. I remembered her standing in the driveway, red-faced as she’d yelled at him about the mounting bills, and how he’d never amount to anything. She’d moved to Atlantic City and then to Rochester, New York; neither of us had heard from her since my sophomore year in high school.

“I didn’t want you to know how things were going out there. I mean, before I met Tanner, I was working at a strip club.
A strip club
,” I said, a sob welling up in my chest once again as my mind rolled over the previous few months. “I wasn’t a dancer; I didn’t get naked for money. I was a cocktail waitress, but I thought if you knew things weren’t going so well you’d be so disappointed, so—sad for me. I didn’t want to let you down.”

“You could never make me feel that way.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know what it’s been like out there.”

“I do know one thing. Would’ve been more disgusted if you’d stuck around a guy like him.” He shifted his weight in the recliner and patted my knee. “Anyone who hurts my daughter can’t be a good man.”

“I need to sleep,” I said as I wiped my eyes. “I’m exhausted.”

“Your bedroom is the way you left it,” Dad said.

I sighed. I didn’t know what Tanner was anymore, but I knew he was a mess. A mess I didn’t want to deal with. And a mess I wanted to forget.