I finally slid off the counter and went to get dressed, stopping at the stereo to turn on some music. I just pressed ‘play’ and kept going to the closet, as I stood there I frowned at being unable to tell what was playing. I went back to the stereo and turned it up and suddenly, “maybe we can make some time, thoughts of pretty you and me…you’re a sinner, I don’t care… we can fuck until the dawn… Erotic City come alive” came blaring at me and I giggled. One of only two Prince songs I liked (the other being “Pussy Control”, of course), “Erotic City” had been one of my best pre-sex tease songs. I’d also gotten Nick a shirt that had said that, “Erotic City – come alive”. I loved it… it was dirty… but not completely. I shook my ass around the room and continued singing along for a while as I got dressed.
Some mornings I wondered why I even bothered getting dressed… it wasn’t like I was going to see anyone. I was so not feeling the next song that came on, so I went to get my iPod and dropped it in the dock. I pulled one of Nick’s shirts out of the closet and slipped it on, waltzing myself around the room and singing loudly. “It’ll get worse before it’ll get better, but it will get better… You’ve got to look on the bright side… The same rules apply for me and you… As for anyone ever going through… There’s no forsaking… This heart’s for breaking… All there for the taking… It’s love in the making.” (*)
I pulled on a pair of my own track pants and turned off the stereo, then skipped down the hall to the kitchen. Since there was no one else around to entertain me, I was obviously going to have to entertain myself. I kept humming the song as I perused the pantry for breakfast… it seemed so fitting in so many ways.
I picked up the phone, wondering who I could call. Nick wasn’t an option, I wasn’t going to harass BJ again, and … what other options did I have? I wasn’t going to call Macy or any of her friends – I could only imagine what kind of reception that would get. Guess I could try calling someone from home…. Home. Where the hell was that now? Since Nick had jumped Zack’s ass about all the calls, I hadn’t heard anything from anyone back in Florida. Not even my supposed “best friend”. I snorted at that. She’d never really been that good of a friend and particularly not nearly good enough to be the “best”. I’d just kind of acquired her, along with all the rest of Zack’s friends when we’d gotten together, because all of the “couple” friends Nick and I had had sort of… fallen away. It’s too damn hard to keep friends like that… so I’d left them behind and traded in for much, much less.
I grabbed my phone and dialed her number, opening the fridge and willing food to appear magically since I’d checked it last night.
“Hello?” She sounded a little suspicious when she said it, but I knew she’s seen it was me on her phone.
“Hello, Gia… it’s been, oh, 3 months? Nice of you to call and check to see how I was doing…” I said, trying to keep my tone as light as possible, even though I meant exactly what I said.
“Zack said I shouldn’t call you. You were such a bitch to him, Summer.”
I knew immediately where this was going, “Zack said, huh? At any point in your life are you not going to be his lapdog? How long did it take you to start fucking him, Gia? I bet he was at your place the night they let him out of jail… you probably picked him up didn’t you? It must be great for you now… me all the way across the country and the two of you, just laying around bitching about how awful I am…” I just spit it out. I knew she’d always had a thing for him, and I suspected part of the reason she’d “befriended” me was simply to keep an eye on me and tabs on how my relationship with him was.
“I’m glad you’re gone! You can stay out there chasing your loser boyband gay ass ex-boyfriend and hoping he’ll take you back! Now Zack and I don’t have to sneak around anymore. We were together before you left!”
She kept shrieking on the other end and I just rolled my eyes. “You two deserve each other.” I said and hung up on her. I promptly deleted her number from my phone and tossed it onto the kitchen table. “Fuck ‘em, both.”
----
I needed a distraction- I didn’t want to sit around and mope all day. I’d resisted the temptation this long, but I couldn’t stand it anymore… I had to do some snooping. See what he was keeping and where. I’m pretty sure he figured I would… he knew me… if there was anything he REALLY didn’t want me to see, he’d have taken it with him. And I wasn’t about to go tearing his place apart... I wasn’t looking for anything specific, I was just curious, I guess… as to what I’d recognize. Was there anything left of the way he used to be? Did anything of “us” remain? I figured there’d really only be one place to look – I knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t hide anything in his bedroom – if there was anything to be found, it was going to be in his office.
It was the one room I really hadn’t been in, mainly because nothing in there was of significant interest to me. I knew he kept receipts for anything he bought that cost more than $100 (and that alone resulted in entire file cabinets of wadded up receipts)… I didn’t need to flip through the pages and pages of crap in his portfolios from real estate or on the record label or the publishing company… I didn’t care about any of that. I had no desire to see how the ball-o-rubberbands was progressing (if memory served, that was located in the top left drawer, along with the collection of business cards he’d accumulated.) I’d learned the really good stuff was hidden in the bottom drawers, stashed in the back, and piled under the folders of very boring, trivial-looking stuff.
I went into the office and flopped down in his chair, disappointed that it wasn’t more comfortable. But then again, it was entirely possible he’d never actually sat in the chair, either, but probably just dropped down on the desk when he used the phone. I spun the chair a few times and then pulled open the bottom drawers on both sides. I reached to the back of the drawer on the left and felt around. I pulled out an empty Twinkie box and cracked up laughing. He never could totally commit to staying away from junk food. I stuffed the box back in the drawer and closed it, then swiveled the chair to slip my hand into the right drawer. I found a giant stack of papers covered with random scribbles and chunks of song lyrics. I set the papers on the desk and reached in again, more than a little surprised when I grabbed a hold of a photo album. Nick had always liked pictures – but he wasn’t really a photo album kind of guy. I’d put lots of albums and scrapbooks together when we were dating, but I didn’t recognize this one. I flipped it open to the middle, startled when I saw pictures of myself. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it. If it were going to be pictures I’d have figured it would be a box of, like, naked pictures that fans had given over the years.
I closed the album and got out of the chair, taking the book to the living room and getting comfortable on the couch – this looked like it may require some time spent. I stared at the front of the album for a moment, wondering if it was like The Girlfriend Album. Would it start with Mandy and then go to me… and then Paris with a few of Macy at the end? Highlights of the serious relationships? I finally opened the book – and there I was again. I was in the beginning and the middle… I quickly fanned through the pages without really looking at any of the pictures, but could tell that it was all me. The entire book.
I went back to the beginning and began to look more carefully through the photos. I couldn’t believe how young I looked – how young we both looked. One of the pictures was Nick and I – I was nibbling on his earlobe and his face and shoulders were all scrunched up, like he was enjoying what I was doing but wanted me to stop at the same time. He was so young… fresh-faced and almost innocent looking. Did I even remember that guy? Hell, did I remember the girl who was with him? There were a few more of the two of us – some at the beach, one from a party…then I turned the page. There was a big picture of just me – wearing one of his And1 hoodies and it didn’t look like much else. I was sure I probably had on a black thong or something else… but in the picture I just had the hood up over my head, a few whisps of hair were sticking out of the hood, I had a totally mischievous smile on my face and then my legs which seemed unreasonably long. It was pretty hot, really. I flipped through a few more pages of just me doing random, silly things and stopped again at one that really sort of took me by surprise... I barely recognized myself. I looked caught off guard, my eyes a little wild… and my lipstick smeared everywhere… we’d been kissing… and he must have grabbed the camera right as I was expecting him to strip off either his clothes or mine… because I looked like he was about to get attacked. I understood why he’d kept that one. More pictures of just me – on a surfboard, at the park, in Aspen all bundled up. And then a few more pages of the two of us – older, at the end of our relationship… but god, we still looked happy. Hands all over each other, laughing and smiling… and in the last picture in the album, kissing. I had no idea when or where it was taken – black and white – outside somewhere, but it was just one of THOSE shots… it could have been a poster. I got a little… I don’t even know what I was feeling… but my breath caught in my throat and my heart was beating faster… fuck, I missed that.
I literally jumped when the phone rang, startling me out of my reverie of memories. I closed the photo album and set it on the couch, then ran for the phone. “Hello??”
“Um… did I interrupt something?”
“Nick!” I squealed. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t talked to him in a few days and I missed him. “I’m glad you called…”
“Me, too… it’s always good to hear your voice,” he told me. “So what did I bust you on?”
“Oh, nothing… I was just thinking about some things and the phone scared me.” I wasn’t lying… I’d been thinking about him… about us… and the phone scared the hell out of me.
He chuckled a little, then asked, “What were you thinking about?”
“Just… us… who we used to be…” I said.
“What brought that on?”
“I was just… looking at some things… brought back memories.”
“You were in my desk, weren’t you?”
Damn… he was good. “Maybe…”
“You’re not as sneaky as you think you are.” He said, but there was a definite hint of laughter in his voice, I could tell he wasn’t mad.
“Neither are you or you’d learn not to ‘hide’ things in the same places all the time.” I told him.
“Who am I hiding things from? I know you know everything… and no one else would know where to look… so is that really even trying to be sneaky?” he asked.
I actually had no idea what to say to that. If he knew I’d look, did he leave it there for me to find? Now I was totally confused. “Did you…” I just stopped, because I didn’t even know what I was asking. Did he want me to see it? Did he…what? Want me to think back and remember?
“You didn’t think I wouldn’t keep anything, did you?” his tone was kind of sharp, moreso than I would have expected. “Maybe you weren’t the only one who was a little fucked up when it was all over, you know? There’s things I wanted to remember, too…”
“Nick, no… we’re not rehashing this conversation… it took me too long to recover from it the first time.” I was absolutely curious about what he would have said…and there were plenty of things I wanted to ask him, but I just could not go there again. At least not right now.
“Okay… alright…moving on.” he said. “What have you been up to?”
“Well, today has been particularly fantastic… I talked to Gia…who informed me that not only is she now with Zack… they’d been fucking around while he and I were… together…” I got a nasty queasy feeling as a thought came to me – they could have had sex in my bed. EEEWWW!
“Shit, Summer…”
“Yeah, apparently everyone cheats on me. Whatever.” I might as well be flippant about things, it was probably the only way I was going to avoid tears.
“Gia was a bitch, anyway.” He stated, totally ignoring my comment, which was likely for the best.
“She totally was… a vapid, selfish, bitchy whore… wait… does Paris need a new best friend??” I cackleld, at the thought, they’d be amazing together.
He laughed a little, too. “If she doesn’t today, I’m sure she will by the end of next week.”
--
I talked to him on the phone for over an hour, before he was called off to do something else. I told him I loved him and hung up, going back to the photo album and looking through it again.
I kept thinking about all the albums and scrapbooks I had – there were some just like this… just pictures either of us or just him… just the memories and just the good times. Then there were the others – ones that I’d made that he’d never seen. The clips of stories from the tabloids, the print-outs of forum posts and blogs and the email lists and groups – accounts of meeting me (some closer to the truth than others), accusations (always untrue) and theories (mostly false) about me or me and Nick… the pictures fans had taken and sent around the internet… The World Wide Web had been my best friend and my enemy… I could find out exactly what people had thought of me within a few hours… and then obsess for days about each little comment. I’d never been the kind of person that had cared what other people thought, but for some reason, reading the opinions of those jealous girls had gotten to me so badly sometimes. They hated my clothes, my hair, my make-up, my personality, everything about me… and usually for no good or apparent reason, except that I had the guy they wanted. Why did I keep all that stuff? Who knows… but I had probably 9 or 10 giant scrapbooks filled with the stuff I’d collected.
I stared again at that last picture of us – and it still just gave me the weirdest feeling. Like… that was my life right there, that was how it was supposed to be. Supposed to have been. I decided to take some of the pictures, mainly the ones of he and I together, and make copies of them. I thought of copying the ones of just me, to see myself how Nick saw me… was that how he liked to remember me? Was that how he’d seen me then?
I set the album on the kitchen table – I’d take it out later… probably in the early hours of morning when no one would be around to look over my shoulder as I copied the photos. I decided to go for a jog … get some exercise and clear my mind.
I went running along the water’s edge out at the beach, thinking mainly about the things Nick had said. I laughed a little recalling him saying Gia was a bitch. They’d met only briefly, but that was usually all it took for him. You’d never know it for all the awful people that have been in and out of his life, but he was always a pretty accurate judge of character. The asshats in his life… he let them stay for reasons that made sense only to him… and he was always aware of what they were up to. Maybe it was one of those ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ things.
I tried to push all the thoughts out of my head, I really didn’t need all this on my mind. I’d had so much time to think and mull things over… but where had it gotten me? Nowhere. I was arguably more confused than I’d been when I got out here. However, it was confusion over entirely different topics, so I guess that could have counted as some form of progress, provided I was willing to take a wildly skewed view of things.
I slowed down and walked a little way back toward where I started. I dropped down into the sand by one of the lifeguard stations to people watch for a little while as the sun started dropping into the water. No matter how amazing the sunsets were on the west coast of Florida, watching the sunset over the Pacific was just insane. There were couples walking along the shore, holding hands and taking pictures of each other in front of the brightly colored sky. Admittedly, I was jealous. But I tried to ignore it until the sun had completely disappeared and I got up to go home.
I made the walk home last forever – I was just chilling, taking the scenic route and enjoying my surroundings. What else was I going to do? I certainly didn’t have a hot date to go get ready for. I got into the house and stripped down on my way to the shower and really, I was kind of depressed. I don’t know if it was watching the couples at the beach or just the way my head had been all day – but I wanted someone with me. I wanted someone, or maybe a specific someone – to be chasing me down the hallway, ready to slip into the shower with me.
Ten minutes and some quality solo time in the shower later, I was less sweaty and not so much horny, but I was still a little bummed out. All the time alone and the memories were definitely weighing on me. I contemplated having a little pity-party for myself and sitting around listening to whiny-ass music and drinking too much, and then quickly decided against it. I threw on some clothes and went back to the kitchen, wondering if I’d bought enough stuff at the grocery store last time to actually make anything.
As I was standing in front of the fridge, waiting for something to materialize that looked appealing to me, the doorbell rang. “Oh hell…” I couldn’t even imagine who it was going to be… unless Elias had been dumb enough to come by again.
I went to the door, unlocking it and wondering if I should have checked before I opened it. I peered around the door completely surprised at who was standing there. Gia and Zack could have been standing there and I’d have been less taken aback. Hell, just about anyone could have been standing there and it would haven’t thrown me for such a loop. “Hey Macy…”
(* = “love in the making” – Roisin Murphy)