“No.” Zia shook her head, stunned at the question, which, of course, made perfect sense. “No, that was… there’s no other photos like that.”
His eyes were narrowed, arms folded over his chest. He wasn’t sure whether he believed her. “So, what: you wanted to sell it and your sister got there first?”
“What? No!” She took another step forward.
Clay’s hands shot up again. “Don’t come near me.”
Anger lashed through her. “Jesus, Clay. I’m your girlfriend, and I took a picture of us. A picture for me. My sister stole it. I didn’t show it to her. You were leaving for six weeks—I wanted something to remember us, to keep us safe.”
“Safe? You wanted to keep us safe?” Clay was shouting. “My cock is on the internet. Forever. Do you have any idea how degrading that is? Anyone can see my penis anytime they want. That’s a sex crime.”
Zia started crying hard, overwhelmed with revulsion and humiliation. She was a survivor of an abusive relationship. But Clay was right: this was a sex crime. “I’m sorry. You don’t know how h-hard it’s been.” She was shaking. “You keep me so far away.”
“We’re together all the time!”
“But I can’t talk about you to anyone; I can’t go anywhere with you. We never talk about the future. I make myself constantly available for you. I plan my life around you, your needs, your schedule, your rules. You have complete control over me.” And only as she said the words out loud did she realize how true they were, how she’d repeated the same pattern: let a powerful man call the shots, telling herself it was okay because they were in love.
In love.
They hadn’t said it to each other yet. But she did love him, and she thought he loved her, and what an awful time to fully realize it all. “I needed to take something back. So, I took a picture. For me, just for me.”
“A picture that now the whole world has seen.” Clay sat on the back of the sectional, his eyes burning with suspicion. “It just seems kind of… calculated.”
Zia tried to swallow. There was something nightmarishly recognizable about all this: being distrusted, being accused. “Calculated?”
“Yeah. You always say family comes first. I bet fifty grand really helped your sister out.”
The ugliness of it made her gasp. Her shame boiled into outrage. “You don’t believe me? I’m telling you the truth, Clay. I’ve always told you the truth.”
He looked back at her with cool eyes and the fact he was still trying to figure it out made her want to break something. When he spoke, his voice was low and quiet. “Zia, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“I need to be around people I can trust. I don’t trust you anymore.”
It was so painfully absurd, she almost laughed in disbelief. “You’re breaking up with me?”
“I’m sorry. But this is goodbye.”
The smile he gave her was sad and full of remorse. And, final. Without another word, Clay turned and walked out of the room.
70
Once Darlene allowed herself the pleasure of fantasizing about a future with Zach, it was hard to stop. So easy to imagine.
It’d start with sex in a plush Hamptons hotel room. In a mountain of pillows, his body on top of hers, her legs wrapped around him, undulating in rhythm, their eyes locked on each other. “I love you, Zach,” she’d gasp, close to climax.
“Oh, Dee,” he’d sort-of-groan-sort-of-moan. “I love you too.”
Moving in together, white bridal tulle, fat brown babies: it was all impossibly possible.
But there was no two ways about it: her fake boyfriend was acting very strangely.
Darlene phoned Zach back after leaving the bookstore in Cobble Hill, to finish setting up the dinner he seemed so jazzed about. But the call went to voice mail and only after messaging him twice did he text back that he was leaving for the Hamptons early and they’d meet at the wedding. He didn’t even drive her up.
It was one thing for him to be distant and distracted at the rehearsal dinner, an eighty-person affair at a restaurant in Southampton. Both the Livingstones and the Chois had planefuls of extended family in town, and Zach was expected to charm and circulate and take selfies with distant cousins. But when he elected to stay at his family’s home and not with Darlene in her nearby hotel, she felt confused and disappointed. It was supposed to start in the hotel. She’d booked one with two beds, but she was under the impression they both knew what would happen. Sort-of-moans-sort-of-groans. I love you, Zach.
But now he was backing out.
The rehearsal dinner was over, but the night was still young. Zach caught the eye of someone over her shoulder and called out an inside joke Darlene didn’t get. He turned back to her perfunctorily. “I’ll sleep on a couch. Just feels like I should be with my family.”
A couch? Zach’s hardiness when it came to sleeping rough was on par with the princess and the pea. Something rotten was curdling in the back of her mind. Something she wasn’t ready to look at. Disappointment, bordering on nerves, leaked into her bloodstream. “Well, what about the after-party everyone’s talking about? Should we go?”
“Oliver, you ponce!” Zach called to a disheveled boy about his age. “You’re not even pissed, ya girl!”
“Screw you, mate!” Oliver barreled over and hauled Zach into a headlock. They roughhoused like children, almost knocking Darlene over.
Zach addressed Darlene from the headlock, his face at Oliver’s hip. “See you tomorrow, ’ey, love?”
“Yeah, love, see you tomorrow,” mimicked Oliver. They broke into giggles before shoving each other and hailing a passing taxi.
Darlene tried to enjoy having a huge hotel room all to herself by drawing a bath and putting on some music. Zach had gotten a bit drunk and was excited to see old friends, that’s all. Tomorrow, the actual wedding, would be different.
It had to be.
The day dawned crisp, but by midafternoon had warmed to the midsixties. The shuttle dropped guests at the side garden, which led out to pre-ceremony drinks in the football-field-size backyard. Darlene was in one of the first groups to arrive. She felt proud of how she looked. Zach had seen all the dresses she usually wore to black-tie weddings when they were performing, so she’d gone to considerable effort to borrow a new one for her very first black-tie wedding attended as a guest. The gown was floor-length forest-green silk. Strapless, with a full skirt that rustled when she walked. She’d gasped when she saw herself in the hotel mirror. Now, she was eager for Zach to have the same reaction. She approached a server with a tray of appetizers and was stunned to see it being proffered by Zia. Her shirt was slightly wrinkled. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. Darlene dragged her to the party’s edge. “What are you doing here? You did not have to work today.”
Zia’s voice was flat. “Being alone is worse. And I need the money.”
Darlene softened, wanting badly to help fix the mistake Zia had made.
The Jungle of Us had to delay their shoot date in order for Clay to work damage control on various late-night shows, where he endured a lot of bad jokes with a big smile. Only those who knew him best could see how much it hurt. This narrative recast the photo as stolen from a hacked cell phone and Zia as a former fling from months ago. Zia was able to convince Clay’s legal team that it wasn’t her intent to post the picture, an act which would’ve constituted revenge porn, a class A misdemeanor in New York. Thankfully, this refocused the legal team’s efforts away from her and her sister and onto suing the site that bought it.