Jason: Just got off the phone with your brother after talking to your parents. All is good. He says hi. After dinner, I’m going to download your book and start getting ready for my upcoming role.
Me: Glad you were able to patch things up. Talk to you in a few years.
“Olive?” I heard Lucy yell from the safety of her own room. “The suspense is killing me!”
“I still hate you,” I yelled back.
“Oh, I love you too, but, I meant what is he texting?”
“You’ll never know.”
She came out of her room and gave me the most innocent look with those pouty red lips and innocent eyes.
Just when she was about to sit down next to me, Marcus appeared at my door.
“Olive, can we talk for a second?”
I straightened up and invited him in.
Lucy eyed Marcus for a few seconds before she looked at me and said, “I’m going to hop in the shower before I go to bed, I have an early class in the morning. Before I sleep, I’m gonna stalk your Amazon ranking for a while. Talk to you later my green Olive.”
They threw each other hostile glances as Marcus entered my room and Lucy got out. It wasn’t that Lucy hated Marcus as a person—they’d actually been friends with each other longer than they had been with me—she just hated the fact that Marcus had dumped me because he thought I was spending too much time with the fictional characters I’d created in my mind. He never thought I would actually publish, let alone be successful on my first try as a writer. Honestly, neither had I, but that wasn’t the point.
Closing the door, he crossed his arms across his chest and leaned back on the wall, watching me with silent eyes. When he didn’t like something, he always did that. Always stared you down until you squirmed in your seat before he actually opened his mouth to let you know what was wrong.
“Is this what you want to do with your future, Liv?”
Oh and also, he never ever called me by my full name. He found it ridiculous.
“What do you mean?”
“Char said you skipped a class today.”
“Yes,” I said slowly, wondering where he was going with that. “I had a meeting.”
“Is that what’s important to you now? Hanging around movie stars and squealing with Lucy?”
“I know one movie star, Marcus, only one, and Jason insisting on giving me a ride home isn’t exactly hanging around a bunch of movie stars. Like I said downstairs, I was seven years old when we met him, as a family, not just me. He was barely eleven twelve himself. He was like a second brother to me.”
I wondered how many times I would have to lie with a straight face before the day would end. But it wasn’t exactly a lie, was it? He did see me as his sister. It was me and my heart who had muddled the waters in my own head, and all of that aside, I still cared what Marcus thought of me.
Despite what Lucy and Char thought, for the short year we were together, I’d been all in with Marcus. He was intelligent, interested in me, confident in himself, and had a vision for his future—one I wanted to be part of. Having a relationship with someone I already shared a house with had been oddly exciting. And the sex? That was good too, especially when we were sneaking around Char and Lucy.
It had felt like we were right for each other until he decided to slowly tear me down and mold me into something I wasn’t ever going to be.
He quirked his brow. “Are you sure? You didn’t look like someone who had seen her long lost brother to me down there.”
“Why do you do this to me?” I asked, genuinely curious.
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“Question my every move. Undermine my decisions. Make me feel like I couldn’t possibly do anything right in your eyes. I published a book, Marcus. People are actually reading it. A lot of people are reading it. A fucking movie studio wants to option my book. Why can’t you be happy with me? For me? Why are you bringing me down like this?”
“That’s not what I’m doing, Liv,” he said, coming to sit down next to me. He lifted his hand as if he was about to grip my thigh, but then let it rest on the bed, next to my knee. “You lost so much weight while you were trying to write this book. Hell, sometimes you didn’t even have time to shower before your classes, let alone hang out with me. Our relationship ended because of this book, because you were more in love with your fictional characters than you were with me. Even when you are not writing, you are lost in your dreams.”
“That’s not why it ended, Marcus. I’d been writing this book for years, long before you, but you already knew that. When we started something, you knew how much it meant to me, finishing this book.”
“Maybe that’s what you want to believe, but it’s not what happened, Liv. I thought once you published, you would take things easier, patch things up between us, but now I can see that it’s changing you for the worse.”
Shocked, I responded, “I’ve skipped one single class. How could it possibly have changed me, Marcus? And even if I was skipping classes left and right, you also know that I’m enough on top of my classes that I’m graduating early.” Neither one of us said anything for a short time. Then I softened my voice and tried again. “Did I unknowingly do something that would make you think like this? If that’s the case, if I did something or said something that hurt you, I’m sorry. No matter what happened between us, you know I care about you.”
“I cared about you too, Livy.”
Past tense.
He rose from his seat and stopped by the door. “When you decide to come back to reality, I really hope it won’t be already too late.”
“I’m sorry to hear you think like this, Marcus. Truly, I am.”
When I didn’t say what he was obviously expecting me to say, he nodded curtly and left me alone in my room.
Feeling slightly angry at him for somehow managing to pull me down when I had every right to feel excited about my accomplishment, I jumped out of my bed, pulled the drapes shut, and turned off the lights.
When I was comfortably snuggled under my covers, I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the fact that Marcus still had enough power over me to get under my skin.
Soon enough, I fell into a fitful sleep where I was still a little girl who dreamed and wished for things she could never reach.
***
When a door slammed shut with enough force to wake the dead, I startled awake with a gasp. Catching my breath, I had to blink a few times to get my bearings and realize that I was in Los Angeles and not in my childhood home. Patting the bed in search of my phone, I gave up when I couldn’t find it and instead got up to check on Lucy.
“Lucy,” I whispered and knocked on her door quietly. When there was no answer, I opened it and saw she was already deep in sleep. Closing her door, I padded down to the kitchen to grab a water bottle and get back to my room before I came face to face with Marcus, just in case he was the one who had slammed his door.
When I was safely back in my room, I turned on the lights and finally found my lost phone down on the floor by the bed.
Seeing the two notifications for new text messages from Jason, my heart decided it was time to have a heart attack. I hugged the phone to my chest, took a deep breath, and exhaled. Wanting to be alone in the dark, I turned off the lights again and got back in bed. My phone was still tightly clasped in my hands.