Elastic Hearts (Hearts #3)(30)

“I’m saying it because he’s an *, and they’re not back together,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I added that bit for them or myself, but it felt like it needed to be voiced. Both Mia and Estelle shared a look before looking at me. “That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“He doesn’t seem like he’s an *,” Mia said. “Nicole is beautiful. Is she that pretty in person?”

I nodded, swallowing, trying not to think about just how beautiful she was. Just how good she felt.

“That’s his mom,” Mia said, pointing at the woman walking beside Nicole.

Gabriel’s mom? Jesus f*cking Christ. What a happy family. And that was just about when I decided to send Nicole a text message. If she wasn’t going to answer my calls from the office or Corinne’s calls and voicemails, I was going to start hounding her via text. And I hated anything that could be used in a court of law as evidence, which included text messages, but f*ck it. Desperate times and shit, like my sister and Mia liked to say.

If I had to sit here all night watching them on screen, I was going to make sure her discomfort matched mine.





IT WAS BAD enough that I was stuck in this award show, and much worse that I’d given myself strict orders of staying one hundred percent sober throughout. The only good thing about the entire thing was that Gabe would most likely win the award he was nominated for, and it was for a movie filmed during a time when things were still . . . okay between us. Maybe they hadn’t been okay then, but I still had hope. I guess that was the difference. Forgiveness always feels like a possibility in the presence of hope. Hope of which we had none now. Not enough, anyway.

The second good thing about this experience was that as I walked the red carpet with him and he joked around about the cameras flashing—the way he’d done when we’d attended our first red carpet event together—I realized I hadn’t seen him as more than a friend or stranger for a long time. I think we lost that magic somewhere between picking up his vomit, dealing with his incoherent insults, and suspecting his infidelity. Despite all of that, I wished him well. I wished this guy, the one walking with me tonight—the sober and unassuming one—to have a good life.

His mom, Deborah, was with us tonight, so while Gabe went off to do his rounds talking to people, she and I found our seats. He joined us soon after, settling in the seat beside me, closer to his male costar in the movie he was being recognized for. Deborah kept pointing out the different celebrities that kept walking by, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was begging me to stay with her son. It was such an uncomfortable conversation to have with someone who loved a person the way only a mother could.

She didn’t know about the drugs, and that was something I couldn’t bring to light. But she knew about the women, or at least as much as anybody could know about the women, which was that they were definitely around. If the tabloids had it right half of the time, he’d been sleeping around with more women than I could name. How he found the time to do it, I would never understand. How the women hadn’t cared that he was married was intolerable. To Deborah, that didn’t matter, because to her marriage meant standing by your man, even when he was off screwing everybody with a vagina.

I understood her standpoint, I really did, but it was something I understood the way I understood statistics in college. I got it, but didn’t apply it in my life. It shouldn’t have to. I grew up in a time when women didn’t need men. We didn’t need somebody to make money for us, or give us orgasms, or even impregnate us. We had the ability to make our own money, buy our own dildos, and go to a clinic. And f*ck anybody who thought we needed to put up with the bullshit a man brought into our lives without questioning it. I was thankful when my phone vibrated in my purse and I was able to excuse myself from the conversation as I pulled it out.

I frowned at my screen when I saw an unknown number, and then a message that read: We need to talk. - V

My heart started to race. I shoved it back into my clutch before anybody around could catch the words. Who the hell would send me that? I looked at Gabe, who was being overly friendly with his co-star, Lina. It wasn’t him. I thought about the people in my life, men and women, who would have been watching me, and looked around. Nobody seemed to be looking at me. My phone vibrated again.

323 8374949: Anything I should know about? –V

I typed back, Victor?

323 8374949: . . . I asked you a question.

Me: And I can’t answer that if I don’t know who I’m answering.

3238374949: There’s a reason I don’t have conversations via text.

I smiled, shaking my head. Definitely Victor. I saved his number under V since that was what he kept sending me messages under.

Me: I’ve been busy.

V: Clearly.

Me: We can talk tomorrow.

V: Because you’re planning to stay busy tonight?

I held my phone in my hands as I thought of a response for that. Did he mean busy with Gabe? I was sure that’s what he meant. I pictured him sitting at home looking all upset over that possibility and nearly laughed.

Me: Depends on who’s keeping me busy.

V: . . . . .

Me: What the hell does “. . . . .” mean?

V: It means I don’t know how to answer that.

Me: Which means you’re thinking you should be the one keeping me busy?