he taxi finally rolls up to the entrance of the building, and as I sigh, I watch Helen and Ben exit the car. “Alexa!” she greets me excitedly as Ben and the driver get all the luggage out for her. “It’s so good to see you.”
I give her my best cheery smile. “Aw, Helen, welcome home!”
“Yes, home.” She sighs. “That’s what this is. Thanks for looking after the place, Alexa. Very sweet, very responsible of you. You never know just how much you appreciate another person’s help until you’re off enjoying a couple of months in Thailand.”
Helen steps to the side to allow Ben to lug their bags into the building. “Hey, Alexa,” Ben says, in his usual soft-spoken voice. He looks incredibly tired.
Meanwhile, Helen is the image of perfect rest. “Come in, come in! You don’t need an invitation. After all, it must have been nice to live my life for a little while, right?”
“Uh, sure,” I smile at my stepsister.
“Maybe it’ll give you something to aspire to? Goals?” she says, grinning with every comment at the edge of meanness. “Start at the bottom, see you at the top some day?”
I follow her into the apartment, where she immediately begins wandering around, telling me she’s reacquainting herself with the place, when in reality I know she’s making a quick check to make sure I haven’t destroyed anything.
Or, knowing how suspicious Helen is, maybe she’s looking to see if I’ve stolen anything.
I roll my eyes, careful to be sure I stand behind her, as she paces back and forth and tells me about her suite in the downtown Bangkok seven-star hotel.
“I thought stars only went up to five,” I point out.
“No, darling, they go up to seven these days. But, funny, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a six star hotel.”
Helen leads everyone — Ben included, who having taken the luggage, returns to his fiancée’s orbit — to the kitchen. “Oh dear. The espresso’s out.”
I don’t say anything.
“I guess it’s too much to have expected you to be able to afford to replace it,” Helen says, dismayed.
Ben quickly adds, “I’ll go out and buy some. It’s really just a small thing, Helen.”
“Well, it’s the small things that count,” Helen observes, doing her best to keep her tone from sounding like an overt attack on me.
I start to turn to the exit. “Guess you’re going to want your private time now. Uh, great seeing you, Helen. Enjoy your evening, and thanks for everything. You too, Ben.”
“See ya, Alexa,” Ben nods. Helen, however, is already preoccupied with checking the kitchen cabinets, murmuring words like, “Oh! We still have full stores of that nice Algerian cumin.”
I exit her place, their place as it certainly is now, dejected. Realization lands on me that at this moment, I have just formally become homeless.
My stuff is already at Sonya’s place, but we haven’t actually had that discussion yet about me staying with her. I’ve been putting it off, not wanting to depress myself further.
Either way, time’s up. I’ve got to face it now. I pull my phone out and dial Sonya’s number.
“Hey,” I say glumly to my best friend, who picks up immediately.
The optimism in her voice is a lighthouse to me right now. “Couch’s all done up. Don’t you worry, babe. You can stay as long as you need.”
Her kindness touches me. And the emptiness of the couch.
There’s more than enough room to recline in the three-seater couch that takes up most of Sonya’s tiny living room. I grip a sheet of paper tight, trying to will all my determination that’s left into it.
My resume.
Sonya pops her head in from her bedroom door. “If you need anything, just holler, okay? Otherwise I’m going to bed. I’m on an early shift at the paper tomorrow.”
“You’re the best, Sonya. Plus, it’s not like I haven’t been here a million times before. I’ll try to keep everything quiet,” I say, smiling at her.
My best friend returns to her bedroom and I have to return to my resume.
There isn’t much I can embellish or glamorize here. The reality is that I don’t have a lot of work experience, much of it the result of my controlling ex.
He was the one who never wanted me to work, telling me he was more than happy to pay for everything. “I want to spoil you,” Stefan used to say, but in reality, this all turned out to be a part of his elaborate manipulation.
Making me dependent on him for money was a way of controlling me.
Sigh. I should have seen through it, but I was young and dumb, and he was just so forceful. If I had seen the red flags sooner, I’d have, I don’t know. Maybe I’d have been able to get out of the relationship and make more of a life for myself?
Oh well, the past is past.
My phone rings loudly and I immediately go to silence it. The screen tells me it’s Jagger calling, and my mood is so low that I find myself hesitating to pick up. I really don’t want Jagger having to deal with me this way.
In the end though, just his name on the phone is enough that I’m unable to resist him — especially when I’m banking all my hopes that a short conversation with him will help me feel even the slightest bit better.
“Hey, Jagger,” I say, trying to keep an even keel with my voice, but anyone who’s even slightly observant would be able to detect that something’s wrong.
“Are you okay?” he asks, sensing it immediately.
“Just fine, just a lot on my mind. Nothing major, though,” I deflect. “How are you? Did you just land?”
“Sort of, yeah,” Jagger says. “I thought I’d call you. Nothing like hearing your voice to give me energy.”
Nothing like his voice to pick me up. I sneak out of the couch and head to the balcony, pulling the sliding door shut behind me. Don’t want to disturb Sonya, especially with the walls so thin here.
Her building is pretty high up, and her apartment rises about a dozen floors up, giving me a good vantage point of the city’s other tall office buildings and apartments. I lean on the railing and sigh, forgetting for a moment that Jagger’s on the line.
“Oh, okay, I can talk now,” I say. I look straight down from the balcony, and take a nervous step back. Whoa! That’s too high.
“I’ve got the rest of the story, custom-written for one goddamn sexy Alexa,” Jagger says. “It’s yours when you want it.”
“Mmm,” I murmur, enjoying the attention from Jagger. “You know just how to treat a girl right. Yeah, tell me the story — in a minute. Let’s just talk in between first, okay? It’s nice to just talk.”
“Of course.”
We trade some quick anecdotal updates about ourselves. He asks about me ‘helping my friend’ move, and I make some vague references to it. I want to tell him about Helen, just to complain a little, but I keep feeling reluctant to bring her up. Part of me worries that Helen’s his type, not me.
The person he met, wearing all those designer clothes, fierce and confident and unafraid to embrace her liberated sexuality? That’s me, but only when I’m draped in the luxuries of Helen’s wealth. Now, wearing an oversized V-neck tee, I feel nothing of the sort. But feeling my voice mingle and dance with his, it conjures the girl I had been for him, the girl in the Dior and Manolos.
Will I ever be able to be that person again? At this moment, just for now, while he can’t see me, I can close my eyes and on the wave of his voice, I’m Alexa the Glamorous.
“Right,” I say, as soon the small talk dips. My voice sounds like an imitation of me, but I believe I’m distracted enough. “On with the show. What happens next with the princess and the thief?”