“Fucking asshole,” Quintin muttered when he came back inside. He stopped near the register where I was clinging to the bar top a bit too tightly. The world was spinning, and my breath came in spurts. I wondered if this was all some kind of twisted dream.

“He just comes in and out of your life whenever he wants, doesn’t he?” I finally said to my brother, noting that he was similarly dizzy. “Doesn’t give a damn—”

“He’s just like that, Rem. It’s cool. I’m not the one who wanted to marry him,” Quintin said, jabbing me.

My heart burned with a moment of sadness, of memory. But instead of falling into it, I shrugged. “I was eighteen years old, Q. That wasn’t me who almost did that. That was someone else.”

“Is that how time works?” Quintin asked, marching around me and filling several pints for some of the locals far down the bar. I watched him work, my thoughts racing.

God, Wesley had looked good. He hadn’t been on social media whatsoever, and it wasn’t like Quintin took photos of their get-togethers over the years. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him—his rippling muscles beneath that leather jacket, his dark blond, wavy hair, his penetrating blue eyes. He’d grown into himself and become a rugged, handsome man. It was clear he’d torn his way across the states, forward and back, for years. He looked both exhausted and hungry for another round. My heart bumped in my chest, aching for his touch. God, the way his lips had burrowed between my legs, his tongue licking at my clit.

---

I’d been so young. Unable to understand that the world was a cold, lonely place.

“Why do you think he’s back?” I asked Quintin, and made my voice strong. I wouldn’t fall into Wesley’s trap again. “Just on his way somewhere else?”

Quintin looked uncomfortable, as he always did when I asked questions about Wesley. The best day of his life had been the day Wes and I had left one another behind, turning away from the timeline we could have built together to other, more creative and volatile worlds. Worlds without love.

“He mentioned something about his old man wanting to see him,” Quintin said, his voice heavy. “But I don’t know. I don’t think they talk that often. Especially not after Hank died.”

Hank had been Wesley’s older brother: a more prosperous, intelligent man, who’d been engaged to a social media manager at a San Francisco-based tech company. Hank had worked closely with their father, and he was instrumental in catapulting their tech company to the forefront of the industry. Suddenly, magazines featured images upon images of Hank, a less handsome, yet somehow more formidable version of Wesley, with titles like, “How I Made My First Billion.” I’d spotted the magazines down in Los Angeles, at grocery stores while I’d counted pennies from my purse. “Do you think Hank will give Wesley any of that money for his ‘Jack Kerouac’ adventures?”

Quintin hadn’t known if Wes was seeing any of that money. And over the years, he’d felt too uncomfortable to ask, wanting instead to retain whatever kind of “boyhood” relationship he and Wesley could still have, given everything that had happened. Given my and Wesley’s breakup. Given the fact that Wesley’s family was growing into the elite “one-percenter” population of San Francisco, while Quintin and I fell deeper in debt.

Hank had died the previous year in a car accident, when I’d been shooting a television pilot on-location in Rome. Of course, the pilot hadn’t been picked up. I hadn’t been able to make it home for the funeral. According to Quintin, Wesley had shown up, his eyes heavy with sadness. He’d boozed with Quintin for two days afterward, mumbling about how he “couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations for him.” It was true that his father had put everything into Hank. And now—what would Wesley do?

The clock ticked toward seven-thirty, and still, the bar didn’t fill. I continued to pour pints for the sloppy old people whose eyes turned toward the television. As Quintin scrubbed several glasses in the sink, an old commercial I’d done a few years before swarmed the screen. I was wearing this little, tight pink dress and buying a new car. My hair was blown back, and my teeth were bright white, almost too shiny. I hadn’t seen the commercial in years, and it brought strange tears to my eyes.

“That’s why I go to Tellman Auto,” this woman, who was no longer me, spoke in a loud, sharp voice. “I always get the best deal, no matter what.”

One of the old boozers grunted at me, pointing. “That girl looks like you,” he said. “In another life, eh?”

I nodded, my mind stirring. What the hell was I supposed to say? I shrugged toward Quintin, murmuring, “Hey, I know you’ve been here all goddamn day. If you want to head home, eat an actual meal, even meet up with Wesley, I don’t care. I can take over for the night.”

Quintin’s dark eyes burned toward me. After a soft sigh, he nodded, shrugging. “You know, fuck it. I haven’t had an hour off in like a week. If you don’t mind.”

“It’s a slow night,” I told him. “Get out of here. Let me do my job for once.”

“Ha.”

Quintin clapped me on the back as he prepped to leave, slipping his backpack over his shoulders. “You’re one of the best, Rem,” he said, almost mocking me. “Glad you came back.”

I watched as Quintin jumped onto his own motorbike, rocked away, and left me in the growing darkness of the bar. I eyed the windows, watching as the blonde girls, sipping margaritas, slipped away—without paying. My legs itched to chase them. But instead, I hung back, making a mental note to fill the register with what they owed. No more than fifteen bucks. Wasn’t worth it to me to run after them.

Instead, I flicked through my bag beneath the register and drew up the screenplay. Already, it was one hundred and twenty-four pages long—amounting to over two hours of movie time, if I ever had the money, or the balls, to make it. I flipped through to page fifty and set to work making heavy circles around areas that needed an extra dose of work. I’d written the screenplay in a stream of excitement, between acting jobs back in Los Angeles. “It’s time I start writing things I actually want to be in,” I’d told my boyfriend at the time, the PR-rep Tyler Crawford. “It’s not like I want to be another murder victim on another murder television show.”

“But you’re so good at it!” he’d said, kissing me on the cheek. “My pretty little dead girl.”

My screenplay followed a young woman from San Francisco, who struggled as the owner and operator at a bed and breakfast, and thus began an underground bar and strip club in the basement of her house. She served up cocktails, and sometimes—when she got a bit too tipsy—even performed for the locals, who gave her extra funds for her services. Midway through the movie, her mother arrives back in town after abandoning her at age eighteen, and she begins to help her with the illegal bar. But her mother’s still a drunk, and their relationship remains strained after six years of not seeing one another. It was a complicated drama, one charged with real-life feelings about my mother’s death. And I so yearned to craft it: playing the role of the daughter, maybe, and directing it.

Of course, as was the theme in my life, I didn’t have the funds. The plan had been to save up money with the acting gigs—perhaps even become a top-tier actress in Hollywood who eventually went on to screenwriting and directing. The PR-rep boyfriend had had this seemingly fiery belief in me, at least for a while. “Baby, you know you can do anything you put your mind to,” he’d told me. “God, with an ass like that, you could book any commercial, play any pretty-girl role—”

“But I don’t want to be the pretty girl all the time,” I’d told him, feeling increasingly misunderstood—especially as I’d gotten into my later twenties and no longer felt like the prettiest girl at the ball. “I want to write. I want to direct.”

“Leave that to the men, beautiful. You’re a flower. Let us treat you like one.”

I’d known then that I would eventually have to drop him. To step out into the light of my life and claim freedom, claim the bravery that had driven me away from Wesley and to Los Angeles in the first place. And when I finally had, it had ripped me through the heart. Now, I was borderline washed-up, at least to me, slinging foamy beers across the counter of my brother’s bar and wondering where I’d gone wrong.

Essentially, Tyler had been my only other long-term thing, besides Wesley. My relationship with Wesley had been one of passion, of wild arguments and rage-filled fuck-sessions, which normally led to dripping tears and whispered I-love-you’s and aching hearts. It was nearly impossible for me to verbalize just how I’d felt about Wesley. He’d been this dominant bad boy, eyeing me from the corner of math class with those penetrating eyes. I sensed his eyes on my ass, my breasts, and yet, I fell for his curiosity in me. I waited for him after school nearly every day for three weeks, aching for him to approach me. And when he finally did, he spoke the most arrogant words in the world. “Don’t suppose you’ve been waiting for me all these weeks, have you? Because it’s been pretty pathetic.”

But I knew from his smile he was teasing me. That he wanted me just as much as I wanted him.

I fell into him after that. I inhaled his musk, drew my lips along his neck, his hairline, his ears. I fucked him with a lithe body, in the back seat of his Chevrolet. In my mind, I saw no other road besides the one in which we got married, moved into an apartment in the Mission District, near to both my parents and Quintin.

Of course, Wesley had had other plans. And when he’d mentioned them, I’d felt spurned. I’d drawn back, suddenly recharging. Acting, writing, creativity: Would I truly still have those elements of my life if I fell in with Wesley and immediately created a family?

“Maybe we should just get married,” Wesley had screamed at me, mid-fight. In my memory, it had been our very last one. “I don’t want anything to do with you, but I also don’t want to be without you. Isn’t that what marriage is?”

“You’d hold me back.” I had cried. “You don’t want to do anything with your life except fuck around. And I want more than the next buzz.”

The words still echoed in my mind. A reminder of how he’d shown me where the door was, and I’d pushed him out of it. I was lurching along—a lonely nineteen-year-old girl, faced with an evil and desolate Los Angeles scene. “Don’t smile too much. You’ll get wrinkles,” had been the advice of my very first roommate. And my heart had ached for what I’d left behind—knowing I could never go back.