Can't Look Away(37)
“No, Sisi.” Jake turned his head to the side, his discomfort palpable. The music continued to blare; Bruno Mars morphed into something hammering and awful from Swedish House Mafia. “You’re drunk,” he said. “Let me call you a cab.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. “I’m not drunk. Why her? Tell me why her.”
Jake closed his eyes, exasperated.
“Go home, Sisi,” he said. And then he disappeared into the crowd, under the flashing lights, gone from me again.
But I didn’t go home. Instead, I wandered up to the second floor of the club, devastated, enraged. I stood near the edge of the balcony and looked for Martelle, but she was nowhere in sight. From above, I noticed Jake had wandered back to one corner of the dance floor with Sam, Hale, and the rest of their group.
I didn’t think too hard about what happened next; I only knew something had to be done, and the opportunity was now. Now or never.
The two girls next to me were college-aged, wearing glittery eye makeup and drinking Amstel Lights. I could tell by the way they were dressed—tacky polyester getups, probably from the bargain bin at Forever 21—that they could use the cash.
I moved closer to them, lingering at the perimeter of their conversation for a few moments before I pounced. “You want to make a grand tonight? Each?”
They glanced at me, their eyes narrowing in confusion. The trashier one—a short, curly-haired platinum blonde—scowled. “We’re not hookers.”
“I know that. See that guy over there?” I pointed at Jake, down on the dance floor. “The tall one with the dirty-blond curls? Navy T-shirt?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“If you walk right up to him and start kissing him…” I looked at the blonde, then turned to her friend, a pudgy redhead. “And you take a picture of it—a clear, relatively close-up picture—and then text me the picture, and never tell a soul about any of this, I’ll wire a grand into each of your bank accounts tonight.”
Big Red looked at me like I was some kind of mental patient, which, in the throes of my obsession, perhaps I was.
The blonde nudged her. “That’s, like, two months’ rent, Sally.”
Big Red placed her hands on her hips. “How do we know you’re not full of shit?”
“You don’t,” I said, crossing my arms. “But see this Cartier love bracelet on my left wrist? That cost six g’s, and I have the matching ring at home. The diamonds in my ears are real, and I have a trust fund so deep, I can buy whatever I want. You can choose to believe me; if not, no big deal—I’ll find a couple of girls in this club who do.”
I began to pivot on my heels, turning forty-five degrees before Big Red placed her meaty hand on my arm. “We’ll do it.”
And that, Molly, is how you ended up with the photo in your email inbox, the photo of Jake kissing a random blonde at a sweaty club in West Palm Beach.
It was easy to get your email address—all I had to do was call Bhakti Yoga and pretend to be a student who adored a teacher named Molly, who was dying to write her to thank her for such a life-changing class.
It hurt to see that picture, I’m sure. I can imagine the sting. But like I told you before, Jake belonged to me first. I was well within my rights to do everything in my power to get him back.
Chapter Sixteen
Jake
2014
The fourth morning Jake woke up without Molly beside him—without her warm body inches from his fingertips or the sight of her messy blond hair strewn across the pillow—he climbed out of bed with a fire in the pit of his stomach. He put on a pot of coffee and grabbed his notebook and sat down on the floor in front of the table where he liked to do his writing.
And all day, Jake wrote. And rewrote. And crossed out sections and crumpled up pages and strummed lightly on the guitar in between, until he was sure the new song was nothing short of perfect. Then he called Sam.
“You okay, Danner?” Sam sounded concerned. “We haven’t heard from you. We have a show tomorrow, remember.”
Jake rubbed the nape of his neck, realizing he hadn’t bothered to brush his teeth all day, or change out of his sweats. He hadn’t eaten anything except a couple of pieces of toast around noon.
“Molly left,” he told his oldest friend. “We had a fight the night we got back from tour. She left and hasn’t answered my calls since. I’ve sent texts, emails … but nothing.”
“Oh, Danner.” Sam’s voice was heavy, empathetic. He was in a long-term relationship with a girl named Caroline. Jake knew that Sam, more than Hale, would be able to understand. “What happened?”
Jake sighed, considering the question. He thought of Molly’s words the night she left—This is about more than just the picture, Jake. It’s not what you did, it’s what you didn’t do.
It shouldn’t have taken Jake until now to realize what she meant—he knew that he was emotionally stunted in this way—but the truth was, he’d needed a few days to process, to let it all land. Jake had never loved a girl the way he loved Molly. Sisi was his only other serious relationship, but what he’d had with her didn’t compare. He’d had an especially weird taste in his mouth regarding Sisi ever since she turned up at the show in West Palm Beach and came on to him at the club. He couldn’t shake his vague suspicion that Sisi had had something to do with the photograph Molly received in her email—the one of him being aggressively kissed by that random girl. But that was insane, Jake told the more rational half of his mind. Sisi might’ve been drunk that night, but she wasn’t crazy. At least not that crazy.