Loving Ashe (12 page)

Why did you leave me without telling me what I did wrong? Why did you pay me off, $20,000, all in cash like I were some hooker you needed to silence? Why?

But Gareth never got the chance to answer her questions that day, even if he’d wanted to. Halfway through the basic pleasantries as they sat opposite each other in a restaurant booth, someone recognized him. Soon it became impossible to talk about personal matters, not when people kept walking past them pretending to go to the bathroom again and again.

After the waitress delivered their beers to the table, Riley counted three trips made by two women who constantly giggled as they walked past them. One woman made four trips before finally slipping Gareth a piece of paper with her phone number scribbled on it. He glanced at it and shrugged, setting it aside next to the salt and pepper shakers.

“Is it always this bad?” She asked.

“It’s neither good nor bad,” he said, taking a sip of his second beer. He’d managed to down the first one in one long gulp before ordering another. Riley wondered if he could possibly be nervous. Or guilty.

“You’re only as good as your last project, and when people stop recognizing you on the street, then it’s time to figure out why they’re not paying attention to you.”

“You always liked the attention.”

“I’m an actor, Riley. Of course I like the attention, and anyone who says they don’t like it is lying. It comes with the whole package now and, if you don’t play the game, don’t be surprised when your phone stops ringing and the texts stop coming. It’s not enough just to be good at acting these days, you’ve got to constantly sell yourself to the public — and diversify,” he said, frowning. “Somehow you make it sound so bad.”

“No, I don’t,” Riley said. “It’s just an observation. But then, you always hated being alone.”

“And I still hate it,” he said, reaching across the table to hold her hand. Riley pulled away, resting her hands on her lap.

“Do you hate me that much?” he asked, his big green eyes sad.

Riley wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. She shook her head.

“I waited for you that night,” he said, flashing his puppy-dog eyes at her. “After that damn pepper spray thing nearly blinded me. I could have sworn it looked just like-”

He stopped and stared at her, his eyes narrowing. Then he leaned back, frowning. “Shit, I just figured it out,” he said.

“Figured out what?” Riley asked, suddenly nervous.

“How Ashe met you,” he said, a look of surprise on his face. “He got trapped in the elevator with someone, but no one ever came forward to say,
Hey! I got trapped in the elevator with Ashe-fucking-Hunter!
You’d think you’d hear about it on Twitter or Snapchat, or even those rags that pay for those kinds of stories. But, no, because only you would keep it quiet — and Ashe, Mr. Anti-Social. No wonder he didn’t want to say who the girl was, and Collette was pretty evasive, too.” He frowned. “Ashe must have told her not to say anything.”

“I think you’re making something out of nothing,” Riley said, avoiding his eyes.

“And that’s why Ashe went to see you at the Library,” Gareth said, still deep in thought. “Did you tell him about me?”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Riley said. She pulled out a few bills from her purse and set them down on the table. “Look, it seems we’re not going to get around to talking about what happened three years ago, so I’m going home, okay?”

“And now you’re avoiding answering my questions,” Gareth said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe Ashe did this behind my back.”

“Ashe is not doing anything behind your back, Gareth,” Riley said, sliding out of the booth. “In fact, no one’s doing anything behind your back because you left me three years ago. As far as I’m concerned, that’s ancient history, and anything that Ashe decides to do has nothing to do with you.”

Riley made her way out of the restaurant, her anger building with each passing second. Three years after he had left the way he did, and all he could worry about was Ashe. Gareth hadn’t changed at all. It was always about him.

She was two blocks away from the restaurant when Gareth caught up with her. He took her arm and pulled her to a stop, turning her around to face him. Then he drew her into an alley, away from the sidewalk where everyone could see them.

“Is this your way of getting back at me, Riley, for what happened between us three years ago?”

“Are you kidding? Why would I do that? What would it accomplish?” She asked, rolling her eyes.

“To hurt me. Because I hurt you by pursuing my dream,” he said.

“
Your dream
? Now, just wait a minute!” Riley stared at him. “Your dream was my dream, too — our dream. Remember? That’s why I did everything I could to help you achieve that dream. And you did. But what did you do then? You left! Not only that, but when I flew to LA to see you, you told everyone at that party that I was a deranged fan who was so obsessed with you that I made up stories about how we’d been together all those years. That’s what I heard you tell your manager-”

“God, that was three years ago. I can’t remember what the hell I said. Besides, I was drunk,” Gareth said, his jaw tightening as he spoke. “Fuck, you were high as a kite, too, Riley, if I remember right. Who the hell tries coke and heroin without having tried anything else first? You never even smoked a damn joint before and there you were, self-destructing in front of me. I made up the story, alright? I had to get you out of that damn party because you’re not like those people.”

“And you are?”

Gareth took a deep breath and exhaled. He looked at her and Riley could have sworn she saw a lost boy in his eyes, the way he’d always looked when, as a boy of ten, he’d knock on their door at night and ask her mother if he could stay over for the night.

Dad’s at it again, Mrs. Eames. And Mom – well, Mom is Mom.

Barely seven years old, Riley was old enough to understand that sometimes grown men beat their children for no reason whatsoever other than that they existed — like Gareth, and even her, after her mother died.

At first, her mother would let him sleep on the couch, and then one night Riley told him he could sleep on the extra bed in her room. After all, she had a bunk bed and with Paige having her own room already, it meant that Riley had a spare bed.

“You’ll have to take the top bunk,” she’d told Gareth, who informed her the following morning that it was even better than his own bed, which was a ratty old mattress and a bed frame his dad had found in the dumpster, too frugal to buy a new one, or even a used one from a second-hand store. Riley remembered the first time she had dressed his wounds, playing doctor for real with her anti-bacterial spray and Band-Aids, and Gareth let her, too tired to argue. Who was she but the baby sister of the girl he’d always liked anyway – Paige, who always got all the attention?

Still, after that night he became a fixture in the house, even after the fire that gutted the apartment building and killed her mother.  Though Riley no longer had a bunk bed at that second house she shared with her father, Gareth still came to spend the night, usually sleeping on a sleeping bag on the floor next to Riley. Paige was already living in Manhattan then and working as a commercial model, but Riley didn’t mind. She had Gareth, and he had her. And this time it was his turn to comfort her, for he’d grown his own set of balls, he said, to ward off his father’s attacks, though he wasn’t always successful. Sometimes his father won.

“You’re not like them, Riley,” Gareth said again. “I wish I had done things differently back then, but it’s too late now. I’ve always hoped you did well these past few years, and now that I’ve seen you back there at the Library and heard that you’re now part-owner, I’m happy for you.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’ve missed you, Riley. I miss your goodness. There’s not a lot of that back there. Sometimes I wish I could return to the way things were when they were much simpler, when the only thing that mattered was you and me,” he said, lowering his voice, keeping his eyes pinned on hers till whatever resolve he had left in him faltered and his gaze traveled down her face to settle on her mouth, then lower still to her chest. That had always been one of his favorite parts of her anatomy, she thought. Wasn’t that why she’d decided to get the piercings? So she would like her breasts herself and feel beautiful?

But whatever thoughts Riley was entertaining about boobs and beauty disappeared as Gareth drew closer. He leaned towards her and closed his eyes, his lips touching hers like a painter’s first brushstroke upon the canvas — uncertain at first, not knowing if the stroke should be light enough to outline things to come, or broader, to paint the backdrop. Would the final choice be light and airy or dark and uncertain? As Gareth’s kiss grew more confident, his mouth now covering hers, Riley felt ragged, her edges fraying. In the barren wasteland that he’d left inside her she suddenly saw the mattress he’d left behind, lying in the middle of the apartment, a symbol of what he thought she was good for.

Riley pushed him away, shaking her head. “No, Gareth, whatever you have in mind, it’s not going to work. Not this time.”

“What’s not going to work?” He asked, his gaze still on her mouth. He was distracted now, his mind on one thing only.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” Riley said. “I don’t know why you sought me out online a few weeks ago. I don’t know why you wanted me to come over to the hotel other than for a booty call, because God only knows I would have done anything you wanted me to do right then.”

“And now you won’t?” Gareth asked, frowning. “Is this because of Ashe? Is he your new man now? Do you really believe he’d go for you – Mister Perfect?”

Riley’s eyes narrowed. It made sense now, she thought, Gareth’s sudden appearance. Had he see the picture of her getting into the taxicab that night? “You showing up at the Library was never about us, or what we had, isn’t it? This is about Ashe and what you think is going on between me and him.”

“What
is
going on between you and him?”

“Nothing,” Riley replied, doing her best to keep her eyes on Gareth. One slip and he’d know that she was lying, because she was. As of last night, there was something going on between her and Ashe, if only Paige stopped interfering and let things just happen the way they were meant to happen.

Gareth’s eyes narrowed. “You were always a terrible liar, Riley. That was one thing I loved about you — you couldn’t lie, even when your life depended on it. Does Ashe know about us, our history together? That we lived together? That you are mine?”

“Excuse me, Gareth, but I think your verb tense is wrong.
Are mine
?” She chuckled drily. “You don’t own me. You gave me up a long time ago when you traded me for Hollywood.   All those years we had together — it was like it never even happened for you.”

“Do you know where I was this morning?”

Gareth’s question caught her by surprise. He always had a way of tilting her off-balance by shifting topics quickly, just when she’d gotten a handle on the previous one. He’d learned that from having to deal with the drunkard that was his father, grasping early on how to dance around a person like a boxer waiting for his turn to deliver that killer blow, except that Gareth didn’t have to physically punch anyone. All he had to deliver were punch lines, at least in the beginning, using humor as a way to escape his father’s drunken rages. Later on, the punches he delivered were metaphorical, memorized from lines written on script pages and books they used to share in their old apartment.

“Where were you this morning?” Riley asked. What punch would he deliver to her now?

“I went to the old neighborhood,” he said as Riley’s heart skipped a beat. “Old man’s still there, though I hear he’s got a liver problem now. Do you know, he’s still trying to beg money from me! Does he really think he’s going to get a dime? No good son of a bitch. Mom’s living with some guy, I have no idea where, but she’s always done whatever she wants. At least she’s not begging.”

Riley held her breath.

“I saw your old man, too,” Gareth continued. “He told me a few things, like how your sister is making a fortune with her blogging empire, even though he has no idea what that means. But that’s Paige for you. Nothing stops her from getting what she wants. She was always a go-getter.”

“Well, she is,” Riley said.

“Then he told me about you, Riley, about what happened to you.”

Riley looked away.

“Did you really get hooked on heroin, then overdosed?” He asked, angry now. “What the hell were you thinking? He said that if Paige hadn’t come down to check up on you because she hadn’t heard from you for a few days, you’d have been dead. He wouldn’t have found you till — ”

“Till he got sober?
If
he got sober?” Riley said, shaking her head. “Anyway, I just overdid it, that’s all, and I haven’t touched the stuff since then.”

“That’s because Paige put you in rehab and paid a whole lot of money for it, too,” Gareth said. He sighed, took off his trucker cap and smoothed back his blond hair. “Jeez, Ri, that’s exactly why I didn’t want you in LA. They hand it out like fucking candy back there.” He shook his head. “But it didn’t matter anyway. You found your own drugs here. Shit, I can’t believe you almost died because of me.”

Gareth paused and before Riley could stop him, he pulled her in a deep embrace, holding her for a few moments till she relaxed. When he pulled away to look at her, Riley could have sworn she was looking at the old Gareth she had known, the one who always made her laugh, who cracked jokes so easily.

“I never meant to hurt you, Riley,” he whispered, one hand pushing a loose strand of hair from her face. “I only wanted to keep you away from all that, but I got in too deep and got selfish. I just…I just wanted to make it on my own for a while and come back for you, you know?”

“You were always real, Riley,” he said, his face closer now. “As for me, I’m just … just living a lie. Convincing myself I’m happy when I’m not, drinking myself to sleep every night because I don’t remember the name of the girl sleeping next to me, wondering how the hell I’m gonna kick her out, because I’d rather be alone than with someone I don’t love the way I love you.”

“Oh, shut up, Gareth,” Riley said, pushing him away from her. “You don’t love me. You love yourself more than you love anyone else, and you’ll do anything to get to the top. You-”