Chapter Two
Elly
It was after four in the afternoon and I was still packing. I didn’t even realize I had so much crap. I didn’t want to leave any of my stuff out, though. I wasn’t overly possessive, but Susie’s friend that would be staying with her was a guy. I doubted he wanted frilly stuff in his room.
“So where do you guys start out?” Susie asked. She was sitting on my bed…supposedly helping. Mostly, she was just getting in the way.
“Las Vegas—MGM Grand,” I said with a smile. I’d never been to Las Vegas I was excited about it like a kid on Christmas.
“Cool,” Susie said. I love Las Vegas. Will you guys have time to do anything while you’re there?”
“Not a lot,” I told her. “I think we stay one night and then move on.”
“And then you just keep going east?”
“Yeah, we go east and then south, I think. I know we have a show in Texas and one in Florida, too. I’m hoping while we’re in Florida we can go to Disney World.”
“Cool. I haven’t been there since I was a kid. You got really lucky getting this job,” she said.
“Especially considering they fired me,” I told her with a smile.
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you….you think that hot executive Jake guy wants to fuck you?”
“Susie!”
“I’m just saying…he hired you back after the other producer fired you and he’s kind of had his eye on you from the start…don’t you think? It seems like he’s trying hard to get close to you. Isn’t that unusual for an executive and an intern?”
“I guess it’s not the norm, but it happens. Are you saying that you don’t think it’s possible for me to just be really good at what I do?” I knew it was silly, but I was kind of hurt. It was as if she was saying I couldn’t possibly be so good at my job that he was genuinely impressed with me.
“Of course not. That’s not what I’m saying at all,” she said. “I know how awesome you are. I just know how men are. They think with their dicks. Usually when you think they’re doing something nice it’s because they expect something in return.”
Susie was very cynical for a twenty-two year old. She’d been in more than one bad relationship. She was attracted to older guys, and more than one of them had turned out to be married. Susie dumped them as soon as she found out, but it left scars. She wasn’t nearly as trusting as she used to be.
“I don’t think they’re all like that,” I told her. I liked to not judge any one person by my past experiences with others. “Jake hasn’t been anything but professional and a gentleman. I might be tooting my own horn here, but I think he really likes my work. Even when all the crap was going on with Tristan and me sneaking around, I think I stayed pretty focused. The other girls get all ga-ga when he walks in the room, but I’ve never even flirted with him. Maybe he finds that refreshing. I think if he was going to give someone the job just to get a piece of ass out of it, it would have been one of those girls.”
“Or, maybe he finds it hot…maybe he thinks you’re hotter than those other girls,” she said with a grin.
“Shut up!” I threw a pillow at her, “I want to believe I got the job on my merits.”
Turning serious she said, “I’m sure you did. I’m just being cynical because I hate men right now.”
“Boo!”
Susie and I both screamed. Tristan had stuck his head around the doorframe and yelled at us. I hadn’t even heard him come in.
“And I rest my case!” Susie said, holding her heart. “Hey, jerk! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
Tristan shot back, “If you haven’t had one yet looking at that face in the mirror by now, I think you’re safe.”
“Fuck you!”
“Okay, you two knock it off.” Sometimes I felt like I was the mother of two adolescents…maybe even pre-adolescents. They bickered like children, always trying to one up each other in the insult department. The funny part was I thought they really did like each other. It was how they showed it.
“Are you still packing?” Tristan asked. It was a rhetorical question, I’m sure. One look around the room and it was obvious that I was still packing.
“You don’t even try to sound smart, do you?” Susie said. She liked to tease him about being dumb and he teased her about being ugly. He wasn’t dumb and she wasn’t ugly, but for some reason that was the relationship they’d settled on.
Tristan ignored her that time and said, “I’ve been here for an hour, listening to you talk about me.” I tried to remember what we’d been talking about and then I saw him grinning and knew he was full of shit. He told me then, “Ethan texted me, he said that he and the other contestants are going over to Sal’s for dinner. You want to go?”
I did need some time out and getting to know the people I was going on tour with couldn’t hurt. “What time are they going?”
“Now.”
“Oh. No, I can’t. I have to finish this. I don’t want to leave it a mess.”
He looked around and grinned and then said, “Alright, I’m going to take off then. Just make sure you have the bed cleaned off when I get back. That includes Susie, too. I don’t want to bump into that in the middle of the night.”
“You know you’d give your right arm for all this,” Susie told him.
Tristan snorted and said, “I’d tear off my right arm to beat it away from me.”
I rolled my eyes and tried not to laugh. It was mean, but funny. His personality was showing through more since he wasn’t numb all the time—or pissed off. I kissed him good-bye while Susie rolled her eyes and then I asked her, “Are you going to do something to help me or are you just going to sit there?”
She pushed herself up off the bed with a tortured sigh and said, “Sure, you don’t defend me when your boyfriend insults me, but please do let me help you.”
“Shut up! You give as good as you get. You don’t need me to stick up for you.”
“True,” she said with a grin. “I could outwit him seven days a week and twice on Sunday. I’m not sure what you see in that Neanderthal anyways.”
“Stop it!”
“Sure, he’s good-looking in a cave-man kind of way…”
I laughed, “Knock it off. That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about.”
“You poor thing,” she said, still grinning. “I think we should celebrate your last night here…even while we’re packing. How about you go open us a bottle of wine? I think it would help me pack faster.”
“You’re hopeless,” I told her, shaking my head. “Not only are you not doing anything, you want to distract me with wine.”
She picked up a shirt and folded it and said, “There, I did something; now get me some wine.”
I rolled my eyes; she really was hopeless. I went to get the wine, though, just as she knew that I would. I wasn’t just a pushover when it came to Tristan—it was how I lived my life. As I walked by the couch, I saw Tristan’s duffel bag and a canvas bag just dumped next to it. I sighed and shook my head. He acted as if he had maid service or something that was going to come along cleaning up behind him. I guessed it was a man thing; my dad used to do the same thing and my mother and I would go along picking up after him.
I went over and picked it up to put it in the bedroom; when I did, a thick pile of paper work fell off the top. I bent down and picked it up. I hadn’t ever been to court for anything, but my late boyfriend had…plenty of times. I could tell from where I stood that it was something official. I sat down on the couch and looked at them. They were legal papers, and as I flipped through them, I saw that he was being sued for back rent. I sat there and read where it said how much he owed and how long he’d owed it. According to these papers, he was evicted sometime during the summer. He’d been staying with me for three months and he owed for the three months before that. That son of a bitch had never said a word. What the fuck? He’d been lying to me the entire time?
I dropped the papers and the bags back down where I got them and went into the kitchen for the wine. I opened the bottle of red wine that Susie and I had chilling in the fridge and took a swig of it right out of the bottle. Then, I took it and two glasses back into my room. I sat them on the dresser and collapsed down on my bed, somewhat dramatically.
“What happened?” Susie said.
I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not. Tristan hated for other people to know his business. I trusted Susie, though, and I really wanted to talk to someone about it, so I said, “Apparently my boyfriend is broke and has been for a while. He was kicked out of his apartment a few months ago, just about the time he showed up on our doorstep with his suitcase. He’s also being sued for back rent.”
“I knew he was a bad seed,” Susie said with a grin.
Her grin didn’t sit with me well at the moment and I lashed out. “Shit! I’m glad you find it amusing.”
“I don’t, I’m sorry.” She sat down next to me on the bed. I could tell she felt bad for making a joke and I felt bad for snapping at her.
“The least he could have done was tell me,” I said. “Three months, Susie! He’s had three months to tell me. You think there would have been one moment when he could have brought it up in conversation, or even in one of his groups at the rehab. He never even told his therapist he got evicted…at least I don’t think that he did. I’ve been there for almost all of the meetings.”
“You’re right, he should have told you,” she said, cautiously. I had the feeling she was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear. Hopefully she wasn’t going to defend the lying S.O.B. I didn’t want to hear that right then. She finally said, “But, think about it….you’ve been supporting him, Elly. It wasn’t really hard to figure out that he didn’t have any money. I mean, you knew he didn’t have much money, right?”
I looked at her and said, “Yeah, I knew he didn’t have much. I wanted to help him, so I wasn’t worrying about it. But right now, I guess I just feel kind of like he’s been lying to me all this time. I hate to be lied to.”
“Yeah, an omission of that size is the same as a lie…to us anyways. I tried telling that to my last married boyfriend. He never said he wasn’t married, but still…men see the truth differently, I think.”
“I know, you hate men today. I’m starting to see your point. The truth is the truth; there are no varying degrees of it.”
“And yesterday and probably tomorrow….” Susie was still talking about hating men. She smiled sympathetically and said, “I agree with you. The truth is the truth and he should have told you.”
“I guess I should look at this from the bright side. In nine months, my boyfriend is going to be a millionaire. I’ve never been with a millionaire before.”
“Yep, that’s definitely the bright side. You should get him to propose before he gets it so when you divorce him, you’ll get half.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah, there’s a plan. Then I’ll be a half a millionaire…as long as he doesn’t blow it.”
“Oh! There’s your solution! Don’t blow him no more until he comes through with the cash,” Susie said. “Like I said before, they all think with their dicks.”
That made me laugh, I could always count on Susie to lighten the mood.