“I’m more than my job.” The words came out bare. Truth without accusation. The first lesson, though not the last, that she’d learned from Josh.
Inside, she heard the band begin to tune up. The drumbeat was almost visible in the stifling Nevada heat. Why had she come here?
Up close, it was stupidly obvious that Everett was never going to want her. He was never going to look back on their friendship and wish for more. Never going to lie awake in bed wondering where he’d gone wrong. Never going to see her name in the Sunday wedding section and taste regret. Hollywood had promised her that if she loved hard enough, pined long enough, threw herself in his path, again and again, eventually, her childhood best friend would fall for her.
But real life didn’t account for free will.
It didn’t matter how many reasons she could list why Everett should love her. He didn’t. Not in the way she’d always wanted. And until she stopped waiting for a love she felt she was due, she’d never be able to imagine the future with anyone else.
Everett ran his hands down his jeans-covered calves. “I guess you’re not the girl with Popsicle-stained lips trying to dunk me in the pool anymore.”
A giggle made its way out of her mouth. Oddly painful. God. What an absolute nightmare. She’d been waiting all summer for some kind of closure. For him to say something or do something that would complete the narrative of their one-sided love affair. No wonder she couldn’t get closure from Everett. As the architect of her own suffering, Clara was the only person who could bring this emotional pilgrimage to its conclusion.
With a glance over his shoulder, he tapped his foot against the concrete, a nervous, itchy tune. “I should probably head back inside.”
As Everett got up, turning his back on her for the second time that summer, she realized she didn’t have any of her usual responses from close proximity with him. Her breathing was calm. Her face cool. The only impulse she fought was one to check her watch. At some point over the last few months, Everett’s position had shifted in her memory and her esteem, the evolution occurring so gradually she hadn’t noticed until now.
She could see why she’d once liked him. He was still handsome. Still said her name like a caress. Fourteen years of fantasy built up a lot of scar tissue. But Everett was no longer her “one that got away.” No, that title was desperately in danger of belonging to someone else.
Josh might have acted like a self-righteous idiot, but one bad day didn’t change the fact that he’d spent his summer making her feel exceptional in every way.
Everett was . . . she considered a handful of words most commonly attributed to women: flighty, ditzy, bimbo. Figures there aren’t as many readily available terms for men.
The very idea of loving Everett suddenly struck Clara as ridiculous. A wannabe rock star living off his daddy’s money who forgot to return her phone calls. She didn’t need Everett Bloom with his cleft chin and his Ray-Bans and his halfhearted apologies. What an embarrassing catalyst for her fall from grace.
It’s amazing how wrong you can be about a person. About yourself.
Clara pressed her lips together to avoid smiling. She wondered if it was hindsight or the tequila buzzing in her veins that transformed tragedy into comedy. Discarding old dreams was surprisingly liberating.
“I loved you for a really long time,” she said on an exhale, letting the truth out into the night air.
Everett froze. “Clara,” he started, but then didn’t seem particularly inclined to take the sentence further, as if her confession were an inconvenience more than anything.
Oh, for crying out loud. She’d been the one to carry a torch for fourteen years; the least he could do now was hear her say it.
He ran his thumb along his eyebrow. “You’re just saying that because we’ve known each other forever.”
She let her eyes swipe across him then and came away cool and impartial. The sky’s last traces of sunset surrendered to dusk, and in those impossible blues, Clara saw Chagall. She saw Josh when his hair fell into his eyes. Her heart, which had been screaming in her chest all day, had finally found a way to speak to her brain.
“I think you’re right.” Everett had eclipsed her ambition, her drive, her hunger, all of the things that she now loved most about herself. All the things Josh celebrated. “I think I loved my idea of love. Of passion and partnership. Of someone else’s hand in mine. My name on the lips of a man who wanted me. I craved certainty. The excitement and reassurance of knowing who I was coming home to at the end of the day.”
It was strange to want something for so long, to turn it over so many times in your mind, that the image became as faded and worn as an old Polaroid. To become so consumed by the yearning in your heart that when you got what you’d always longed for, you could hardly recognize it. “But still, I pinned that fantasy on you for longer than I’d like to admit.”
“I’ve been a shitty friend.” Everett let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry. I want to say that I didn’t know how you felt all those years, but I did. I knew and I pretended not to know because it was easier. I didn’t wanna lose you. You’ve always been there for me.”
It was a crummy answer, but honest, and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter very much. She took the hit like a pinprick.
“You know what’s funny?”
Everett pulled a new cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “God, I hope you’ve got something good, ’cause I feel like a colossal asshole right now.”
Clara grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it on the ground. Even if she wasn’t in love with him, she didn’t want him giving himself lung cancer.
“You came through in the end. Not intentionally, of course, but through sheer dumb luck. Because you got me to Danvers Street. You got me to Josh.”
Everett’s eyebrows shot toward his forehead. “Don’t tell me you and Craigslist guy . . . ?”
She sighed. “I think he might be the best mistake I ever made.”
“The Clara Wheaton I know doesn’t make mistakes.”
She whistled under her breath. “I guess you don’t know me anymore.” Her months in L.A. had been about more than Josh. Somewhere in a falling-down bungalow in West Hollywood, she’d built Shameless and a version of herself that she admired.
Honestly, so what if people knew she’d invested in promoting women’s pleasure? For twenty-seven years she’d held a nearly perfect record, and all it had landed her was a life she could walk away from at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was her Wheaton blood, or falling head over heels for the last person she’d expected, but somehow, some way, Clara had finally developed a taste for scandal.
She got to her feet, her mind already miles away. “I gotta get out of here.”