Let's Try This Again Page 17

  “I’m done making excuses; I can’t look past it anymore. You’re everywhere I go, everything I taste, and everyone I see. So instead of pushing you away because you’re too good for me, I want to be good enough for you. I want to become the guy that is good enough for you.”

  “Prove it.”

  I tore the headphones off my ears and walked out of the booth. As I passed them in the hall, the producers rushed to tell me how well the interview had gone, how great it had been for their show, how much they’d love to have me come back again. I stared at them, nodding like I cared at all about what they had to say before spitting out a good “fuck you” and leaving.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Later That Night

  I drove up to my house and found Carter parked outside, waiting for me. He sat in his car out front, the light on so I could see him, but I walked past it. I wasn’t in any mood to fight—my brain felt like Silly Putty, mashable and fragile enough to be squished by a four year old’s hand. He hopped right out after me.

  “So what, we aren’t going to talk about this? You’re just going to go inside and act like that didn’t happen?”

  “What happened? I got a phone call that I didn’t want and never asked for. You think I wanted that to happen?”

  “You asked him to prove it to you.” Carter chased after me, grabbing at my wrists to turn me around, but I kept wriggling away from him.

  I could hear the fear and the hurt in his words, and I knew I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

  “Carter, please. Not right now. I don’t think I could talk about it even if I wanted to. I have no clue what to say, I don’t have any clue what to think. I’m sorry about that, but I don’t want to lie to you and act like it didn’t fuck with me a little.”

  “How can you say that? How can you still let that asshole affect you? Affect us?” Carter was pleading, his voice straining to sound strong as he followed me up to my front door. “He knows exactly what he’s doing, Josie.”

  “Well that makes one of us then, I guess.”

  I went into my house, opening the door just enough for me to squeeze in. I turned to face Carter, looking as apologetic as possible. Because I really was sorry that this was all happening. But it didn’t change the fact that when Isaac called I had wanted to hear what he had to say. I had wanted him to tell me he loved me for so long, and I hated it that the one time he did it felt like it made up for all the times he hadn’t. And I needed to figure out how to act accordingly. I was fucked up, and I needed to unfuck myself—without him around.

  “So what?” He pressed his forearm against the doorframe, trying to inch his way in without me noticing. “For the rest of your life you’re going to let this loser pop up and ruin everything for you? Just because you wish you two were meant to be? You aren’t, Josie. You’re not meant to be with him. I don’t know if you’re meant to be with me; that’s not what I’m trying to say. But you’re not meant for a guy who only loves you when he can’t have you. I loved you when I couldn’t have you, and I love you now, when I do.”

  Carter was saying everything right, he was totally correct. And he absolutely knew that. He was the one being smart here, and I wasn’t about to act as though I thought he was being a huge animal, lashing out unprovoked. But my thoughts and everything I have ever felt in my whole life were buzzing around inside of me, and I had had no time to collect them yet.

  I needed him to not be so right. Just this once.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Carter, or that I don’t love you. I’m just saying that I have no fucking clue what I do know. And I need some time to figure it out.”

  “Fine. What. The. Fuck. Ever. He turned and walked back to his car, punching the air (he very well could’ve been envisioning my face, which I wouldn’t blame him for). Swinging his door open, he glanced back to toss one last thought at me, though I’m not sure if he even knew I was still standing there watching him. “Have you ever needed me to prove it?”

  Nope. I hadn’t.

  I went into my house, flopped on the couch, stuck my face in a pillow and screamed. As loud as I could. Screamed for all the girls whose hearts had been glued back together only to find out the glue was Elmer’s instead of Crazy. Screamed for all the ungettable boys who never wanted relationships because a bitch like me broke them, ruining them for the next poor sucker. Screamed because I was part of a vicious cycle, functioning as both the start and the end of it. Screamed because I didn’t want to be able to hear myself think yet.

  When I looked up, Trevor and Skylar were staring down at me, very concerned.

  “We were just about to call Olivia Pope, girl, cause it seems like something needs to be handled.” Trevor sat down next to me, patting my leg.

  “Yeah, her or those nice men with the tight white jackets,” Skylar joked. “Which no one would judge you for after the day you’ve had.”

  “You heard the interview,” I squeaked out, my voice a little hoarse after my glass shattering moment.

  “The interview—and the follow up performance at our front door just now,” Trevor gently added. I groaned, falling face first back into the pillow. “Sky, get the wine glasses and call out of work for tomorrow. We have a long night ahead of us.”

  “I don’t know if I really feel like drinking,” I grumbled. I had enough things scrambling my brain up I didn’t need booze complicating whatever thoughts I could manage to pull together.

  “Well, it’s an experiment.” Trevor patted my head.

  “An experiment? How much wine does it take to make a girl forget literally all her problems?” Skylar came back with the glasses and three bottles.

  “About two and a half bottles; I’ve done this one before,” I said.

  “No, silly girls.” Trevor chuckled, shaking his head and attempting to look like he knew so much more than we did when he really sounded just like the Trix rabbit. “We drink until you can answer one question without hesitation.”

  We just stared at him as he paused dramatically.

  “If you were drunk in a room with everyone you have ever and could ever love, who would you want to take you home?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Morning After Everything Blew Up

  I woke up with red teeth and a headache the size of Jupiter. (That’s the biggest one right?) But those issues paled in comparison to the fact that I still had no clue what I was going to do or, worse, how I felt. Well, no. I knew how I felt. Confused as fuck, like Carter had one half of my body and Isaac had the other and we were standing on opposite sides of the highway, waving our respective hands at one another.

  “Jeez, did you swallow a magic marker?” was Molly’s first comment to me when we Skyped.

  “No, but the amount of wine was probably just as toxic. I’m going to need a white washer for these stains.” I scrubbed at my teeth with my finger.

  “What happened yesterday? You said you would call me back when we talked after the interview,” Molly yelled

  “I’m sorry, things got a little out of hand.”

  “Did you figure anything out?”

  Trevor and Skylar had successfully kept me up all night talking it out, drinking it in, but I could never answer his question. Sometimes the answer was Isaac, sometimes it was Carter. Sometimes it was Zac Efron; I feel like we could have had something special. But each time I chose, I immediately took it back and said the other name. There was no clear answer; there were pros and cons to both of them.

  “This is so unfair – isn’t it supposed to be awesome having two guys want you? Every movie I’ve ever seen with guys fighting over one girl makes it seem romantic. This is giving me the stress sweats.” I showed her my armpits as evidence. “Not cute.”

  “Yeah, let me just say, that, on paper, this really could make a girl hate you.” She laughed.

  “It’s like… Isaac. How long have I waited for him to do this? How long have I wanted this exact action from him—and now I’m just going to throw it away and pretend it
doesn’t matter? It’s always mattered.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She nodded, waiting for the moment to pop her opinion in, which I wasn’t going to give her just yet.

  “And Carter. Sweet, lovely Carter. I didn’t have to wait at all for him…he’s been so straight up with me about everything. He’s given me everything I wanted. You know, with every other guy I’ve ever been involved with, I feel like I was the one who always left claw marks. I was the one holding on, the one that had a hard time letting go. And now someone is clawing me, and I’m running from it.”

  Molly hummed a little and shook her head side to side as if that would shuffle her thoughts around into sentences.

  “Okay,” she finally spit out, her head stopping still. “Do you think that maybe instead of clawing someone…or being clawed…it would be better to be clawing each other?”

  “I think we’ve taken this claw situation too far.”

  “What I mean is,” Molly bit her lip. “Relationships are about loving each other, not figuring out who loves whom more. With Isaac, you felt bad because you cared more about him than he seemed to care about you. With Carter, you feel bad because he seems to care about you more. That’s not it, chick. You don’t want to drag someone into loving you any more than you want to be dragged. What’s the point? Neither of those seem just right to me, Goldilocks.”

  I had always thought Molly didn’t want to be in relationships because she didn’t know what it was to love someone like that—but maybe it was because she knew too well.

  ***

  I stayed in bed for the next week, watching a lot of Netflix (I had managed to get my own account finally) and acquiring a lot of hair grease. I had taken a new approach to the problem —ignore it. Have you ever tried that? They say ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away, but when you’re ignoring it you technically aren’t thinking that it’s even there, right? So it kind of does go away? And yeah, yeah, blah fucking blah, it’ll still be there later on, and you’ll have to deal with it then and whatever. But I was ignoring it at the moment, so I didn’t have to think about that. They also say ignorance is bliss, and ignorance must come from the word ignore. Hence, a state of bliss for my bed and me.

  I wasn’t taking phone calls—not from my mother or my sister, not even from Molly and Ellie because I knew they would just want to talk about it. Therefore not allowing me to ignore. Carter hadn’t called. I wasn’t surprised because I had told him I needed time, and Carter had always given me what I needed. Isaac, on the other hand, rarely gave me what I needed unless it was a solid orgasm, so I was surprised that I hadn’t heard from him either, other than a text the day after the fiasco.

  “I will prove it to you,” was all it had said, and I hadn’t answered. So far, he was just proving all the things I already knew to be true about him.

  I was also ignoring calls from Carter’s (and I guess mine by default) manager, Max. I’m sure that was driving him crazy because we had a big EP release in a week. At this point I’m sure Carter had sort of filled him in, and now he was wondering whether or not I would show. But answering Max and talking about the music meant thinking about Carter, which meant thinking about why we weren’t speaking, which meant not ignoring the problem.

  So I Netflix’d and focused on fake problems instead. Fake relationships with fake outcomes that don’t matter in the real world. And you know what I realized? I root for the failure relationships. I always wanted them to pick the guy they don’t pick. I wanted the guys that were clearly wrong for them. I want them to be with the guys that showed the most passion, the crazy ones that threw their entire world out of whack, made them rethink everything they had ever thought to be true. Love should do that, shouldn’t it? Shake you up, turn you inside out, burn you to the point where you have no choice but to shed your skin and be brand new. But if I was always choosing the guys that they didn’t end up with, that was an issue. An entire room of professionals had delicately chosen the path for these characters and decided they were meant for other people. So what was I seeing that they weren’t?

  Or what was I missing that they hadn’t?

  And it wasn’t even just that I was, like, “Oh, man, I wish she had picked him. Bummer.” It was like a deep-seated, soul-eating pain that consumed my brain for days. The love that survives against all odds—that’s what I wanted to see. That embodied the unconditional essence that any true romance was supposed to have. If I dug too far into it, though, I felt as if I might find answers to problems I was currently ignoring, so I just let what I felt was the ridiculousness of these stupid girls who chose “Mr. Right” keep me up at night instead.

  Though obviously what was really keeping me up at night was the ridiculousness of my own stupid girl self.

  Friday, six days after the initial breakdown, I woke up to two guardian angels staring down at me. I had only gotten about six hours of sleep in the past three days, between my brain refusing to ignore things and binge movie watching, so I thought I might be hallucinating at first.

  “Her eyes are open…”

  “But her pupils are like—I can’t see any iris.”

  “She’s not acting like she can hear us.”

  “Should we pinch her? I saved a water from the plane, and we could splash it on her?”

  “Do it and die, bitch,” I croaked out, rubbing the grog from my face. Molly peered into my eyes, on her knees next to my bed. Ellie stood, hunched over us. They both perked right up, jumping onto my bed once they confirmed I wasn’t in a coma. “What are you guys doing here?”

  “You went MIA. No one could get in touch with you. Trevor and Skylar said you were locked away and that they’ve pretty much just been checking to make sure you’re alive. You think we were just going to let you slip into oblivion? We knew that you moving to LA meant a potential breakdown on all fronts, but we aren’t going to stand by and let it happen.” Molly jumped under my covers, snuggling into me while Ellie sat against my spooned body.

  “So this is a rescue mission? Who sent you?” I glared at them but hugged them closer.

  “Everyone, basically. But Max paid for our flights,” Ellie explained. “He wanted us to make sure you get to the EP release. Carter must’ve told him we were his best hope.”

  “Truthfully, if you had told us about it we probably would’ve tried to come out anyway. It’ll be a nice change to see you perform live instead of having Skylar FaceTime us into the gigs,” Molly added. “And getting a banging tan is just a bonus.” Ellie swatted at her head. “OW! And I mean this whole music thing has been your dream for almost—what?—a whole year now. And we are fully supportive.” We all rolled our eyes in synchronicity. It was wonderful to have the true loves of my life here in the sunshine state.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  That (Millionth) Time My Friends Saved My Life

  It was an incredible weight off my shoulders to have something to busy myself with. I spent a couple days showing them around, bringing them to my favorite restaurants, pointing out the beaches that are less touristy and the best spots to sit and wait for celebs to stroll by. It made me see LA through big, wide eyes—the way I had first viewed it when I got here. Now, I sometimes woke up wishing it would rain just so I wouldn’t feel guilty about staying in bed all day. I complained about smog and traffic and didn’t even look up to realize the Hollywood sign was directly in front of me. I had become a jaded Californian in such a short time. The world was so big, and this city was so full of opportunity and magic I had yet to touch.

  Getting lunch the second day they were there, we saw the girl from the summer’s number one movie, the front man of Ellie’s favorite band, and the kid from that one cereal commercial that went viral. Not together, obviously. Ellie and Molls ate it right up – it was fantastic to finally have people with me who cared about star sightings (besides Trevor, who was difficult to take out in public for this very reason). People born and bred in LA, or people who just want to seem like they were, always act too cool for fucking school ar
ound celebrities. If you’re seen taking a (discreet) picture of them, you’re given looks dirtier than Hugh Hefner’s diary. If you bring up the fact that OMG (insert whatever It Girl is trending) is riding next to me at (whatever indoor cycle studio is trending), they scoff at you like “And? My brother’s girlfriend’s cousin went to high school with her. She’s just, like, a regular person.”

  She’s not. She’s wearing designer leggings to sweat in, and she can hire people to wax her upper lip in the privacy of her own (million dollar) home every godamn morning while her assistant makes her an egg white frittata and sets up a play date for her son with the President’s dog.

  Alright, most celebrity’s sons aren’t playing with presidential pets probably, but it’s possible any celebrity could run into any president at some charity event and get that ball rolling. It’s not out of the question is all I’m saying. That’s what’s normal. So act like it, you fucking losers.

  At lunch, Ellie got a text from Max. He wanted to know what their progress was for getting me to the show. I already knew I was going to do it; I had let Carter down enough in the past few weeks, I wasn’t about to blow his shot at his career comeback. We let Max sweat a little, though, because he was footing my friends’ bills, and we were hoping to get a few extra days out of their trip if I “made my decision” only just before the show. That way, he couldn’t book their flights home yet. It was manipulation but all in the name of love.