Gemma
Adonis had hunched over, folding into himself like he was cold and shivering in the back of that cop car, instead of warm and safe in a house high atop Malibu’s cliffs.
“She was fine. More shaken up than anything. I’m not sure how much she remembers. The frat guys had definitely slipped her something, blood tests showed. Dad picked her up at the hospital after he left me at the jail.”
“Jail?” The Americans did love punishment and prison. She should have guessed he’d end up there, for killing someone.
“I failed the sobriety test. I was a point one-oh-three.”
A drink-drive offense, she calculated in her head. But what about the girl?
“And Emily?” she asked.
He realized he’d never quite communicated what he’d seen with certainty. “Dead on impact with Pico Boulevard. The collision of her skull and spine on the cold, hard pavement had ended her life. No seat belt plus ejection from the SUV was a formula for death. No matter how many times I’ve replayed the events, everything went wrong. Everything.”
“What happened after that?”
“I spent two years at the bottom of a tequila bottle. I woke up most days feeling no better than the worm. God knows how horrible I was to my friends and family. I don’t actually have any friends from before,” he admitted.
“My dad sold his half of the business to his brother, Alessandro, liquidated his savings paying for a defense attorney. Guy kept me out of jail. Time served, plus community service. Took me a couple of years to get my license back.”
“That was it?” Gemma asked, shocked at such a light sentence. Surely death added up to more than that.
“Plus a lifetime of guilt. Yeah, that was it,” he answered.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.” Gemma looked everywhere but at him while she processed what he’d shared. Of all the things that were possible, drinking and death hadn’t crossed her mind. Not once.
With what looked like a ton of effort, Adonis plastered a half-smile on his face. She had to appreciate the effort. She too wanted to do whatever she could to break the tension, to bring them back to where they’d been a few days earlier when their time hadn’t been clouded by truth and tragedy.
“It’s not my opening with women. Hi, I have all my hair, teeth, and a business, but a manslaughter in my past.”
“That’s not funny,” she said after his lame attempt at humor fell as flat as a pancake.
“I know. Nothing about it is good or funny. There is no silver lining.”
“How did your sister handle it?” she asked. He hadn’t been the only one to survive that night.
“I don’t know. We don’t speak,” he said, his tone clipped.
“About the accident?”
“About anything. She went back to school then moved abroad for ten years.”
“Her comic is about her life abroad. She made that her entire life,” Gemma said, fitting the pieces of a puzzle together. That she could understand, doing whatever you could to cope. Running away. She’d run away, not as far, for certain, but away from all those who would condemn her. From her agent and aunt and all those who reminded her of what she wanted to forget.
“Until now,” Adonis was saying. “She came back a few months ago after Dad collapsed in your living room.”
“Right. God, I was so stupid about that.” Gemma could feel heat stealing up her face. Panic about exposing her location to potential stalkery fans had clouded her judgment big time. Imagining that turning out like Adonis’ bad call scared the spit out of her. She needed to apologize to Dominic about that once and for all. “Sorry. So Zoe, that’s her name right, she and you never got past this?”
“She blames me. I blame myself.”
“Does she know the whole story? The Colton bloke who was probably going to take advantage of her. The fire stuff. All of that?” She couldn’t imagine Zoe not forgiving her brother if she knew the lengths he’d gone through to spare her from harm, even as he’d put her in harm’s way.
“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “She knows nothing. She thinks I was being a chauvinist pig for not trusting her to drive, for taking the keys.”
“But she was drugged.”
“She doesn’t remember any of that. Doctors say trauma blocked out most of that night. Brain self-defense mechanism. I know it’s true for me. I don’t remember much after that night and two years later.”
“Gosh, you’ve both suffered so much.”
“In her mind, she had a little punch that wasn’t spiked, then I did the caveman big brother thing and wrestled them home, killing her best friend along the way.”
“Are you going to ever tell her the entire story?”
“What’s the point, Gemma? It doesn’t make me any less guilty for doing what I did. Doesn’t make Emily any less dead.”
Gemma’s phone beeped. After she pulled the smartphone from her pocket, she looked at it like it was an alien being landed on Earth. Giovanni. She’d never forgotten about her appointment before. Usually she sat in the house tapping her foot until she could get in her car and make the drive south.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. Suddenly she moved around the room, trying to remember where she’d last left her keys, dog leash, and the rest of it.
“Go? Go where?” he asked, glancing from the computer monitor, she and O’Bryan frozen onscreen, to his watch, to her, and back toward the screen again.
She stepped forward and slipped her hand around the back of the monitor until she found the button to turn off the onscreen image of her—naked, stupid, naïve. “Appointment.”
She could see he didn’t believe her. Thought she was running away from the hard stuff. Maybe she was, though she’d say she was running toward the harder stuff.
“So…”
“I’ll see you in the morning. Cabinets, yeah. Sounds like it will be a big day or two. Then after that they measure for the stone, right?”
She might not be an expert at relationships, but she was becoming quite knowledgeable about home renovation project management. But like learning fencing or learning to play violin—like she’d done for movies—it wasn’t a skill she was likely to need again.
Gemma wanted to answer the question in his eyes, but couldn’t. She had no idea what they were to each other, where all this honesty left them. Lovers? Friends? Something more? A lot less?
“You slept with your contractor?” Giovanni said to her forty-five minutes later.
“I didn’t show up without an appointment,” she grudgingly acknowledged, hoping that would deflect him from Adonis. She did and didn’t want to talk about him at the same time. “I can be taught.”
“Did you agree on parameters?” Giovanni persisted.
“What do you mean, parameters? We used protection, if that’s what you’re worried about. I won’t show up pregnant and further toss my career in the loo.”
“I’m probably the only person on Earth not worried about your career, Gemma. But I don’t know if we have time to play the avoidance game today. If you want to do the hard work, you’re going to have to dig deep.”
She turned her head and looked at his shelving. The inset halogen lights were a nice touch. She’d have to review her own plans to make sure she’d remembered to include that. They’d set off the Oscars, Golden Globes, and her one SAG award and bound scripts pretty nicely. Her future might be up in the air, but she did have some past achievements that were worth honoring.
“What does that mean?” she finally asked, turning back to face her therapist head-on.
“It means, you can’t walk into my office, tell me you’ve managed to sleep with this guy you’ve targeted, the first man you’ve talked about other than Andrew O’Bryan, then discuss inappropriate boundaries and whether or not you’ll be working on a film in the next six months. We need to start with the most immediate and intimate.”
“Fine.” Gemma clasped and unclasped her hands. Thought about buffing her nails when she got home. Considered her pedicure. Thought about whether Sylvester could find someone to do a massage at her house since her old therapist didn’t drive north of Beverly Hills.
“Gemma?”
Giovanni didn’t say the clock was ticking, but he might as well have.
“He wasn’t an asshole,” she started. Thought better of it. Took a course correction. “I mean, he was nice.”
“Did you tell him you intended it to be a one-night stand kind of thing?” Giovanni asked. He was leaning forward, his brown eyes intense.
Now she remembered, parameters. She was supposed to let people know what she was looking for from a relationship. She was supposed to speak her mind and not let herself be railroaded by someone else’s agenda. She’d forgotten all that in the heat of the moment. Pleasure had obliterated rational thought.
She shook her head. “It kind of happened again today,” she admitted. “So maybe two-night stand?”
“Most people, Gemma. Most people can handle a new and budding relationship. As a matter of fact, they’re probably looking for it. Are you? We’ve talked a little about trust, and you don’t have much. If you haven’t told him that you only want something very casual and very secret, he may not know that. His expectations may be very different from yours.”
“Who hasn’t violated my trust?” she asked. Adonis seemed sincere, but she did half expect her face to be plastered on one of the newsstand rags, or online next to a snap of her builder. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but a month from now when her project ended.
“I haven’t.”
“It’s your job. You’re probably required by law to keep secrets. Plus, everyone I’ve met in the last few years has been papered over by NDAs.” One violation and she’d probably own Giovanni’s house. Not that she’d take the action threatened in the agreement, but she didn’t think it had zero effect on keeping people in line. Which is why she had Sylvester deliver one to every single person she talked to, from builder to house cleaner.
“It is my job, Gemma. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of people in this town from talking. The tabloids operate on the very notion of violation of trust. Do you trust your contractor?”
“I trust Adonis.” She smiled at his quick smile. Then they both laughed. Tension eased in the room.
“Where’s he from?” Giovanni asked. For just a moment, Gemma’s breathing eased. With Giovanni’s voice so friendly, she could pretend that he was a friend and they were gabbing about her new man. Not like she was a woman past thirty whose emotional growth was stunted.
“Chicago. Has the accent.”
“How long has he been out here?”
“Fifteen years, maybe? His whole family left and came here after he graduated high school.”
“Why California?”
“Maybe to run the construction business? I don’t know.”
“These are the kinds of facts people share about themselves when they’re starting a relationship, Gemma. Usually before they jump into bed together.”
“I wasn’t planning on getting into a relationship,” she countered. “I’m not sure I even want one. My goal was to try to get my own stuff together, you know. Figure out my career. Try to make friends. Figure out if I’m ready to deal with my aunt’s betrayal. Romance was not, is not, in the picture.”
“Then why did you sleep with him again?”
“I shagged him because I’m human and he was willing. And God forgive me, he’s a total Adonis.”
“What is he expecting? You know I’m not an advice giver. I’m not your…how did you refer to her?”
“Agony aunt.”
“Right. I love that way more than shag, snog, or spanner. Anyway. I’m not your agony aunt, but please hear me on this. Before you see him again, or sleep with him, or whatever, you’ve got to think about what you want from him, a causal affair that ends when your tile is installed, or something more.”
“I didn’t think men needed those kinds of guidelines. I thought they were just happy to get a leg over.”
“I’m not talking about him, Gemma. I’m talking about you. You’ve been hurt, you’ve been betrayed, you’ve been violated. In order for that not to happen again, you’ll need to decide what you want. It’s not up to anyone but you.”
“Well that’s easy,” she said, heaping her voice with tons of sarcasm.
“I told you when we started a few months ago, that none of this was going to be easy.”
“I’m not a good candidate for a relationship, anyway.”
“Why?” Giovanni’s face was genuinely perplexed. As if she weren’t a Pandora’s box of crazy better kept sealed tight than unleashed on the unsuspecting.
“For the reasons you said today. For the reasons you said in June. Because I don’t leave the house. Because I don’t trust anyone. Because he’s an alcoholic.”
“Whoa. Back up. He’s in recovery?”
“That’s what he says. I offered him a sherry. He turned me down.”
Giovanni rubbed his head like she made migraines to order. “How many years?”
“Ten. Twelve, maybe. He was in his twenties.”
“That’s young to already have given up alcohol. Did he say what the catalyst was?”
“I’m just going to say this. Because it’s quite horrible. Brace yourself.” Giovanni nodded, so she blurted it out as fast as she could, as if fast speech would lessen the impact. “He killed someone in a drunk-driving accident. Someone in his own car.”
Silence permeated the room for a good minute while they both absorbed the information, her for a second time, Giovanni for the first.
As if the silence were a person who stole into the room, Granger lifted his head and sniffed the air. His ID and rabies tags jingled like out-of-tune bells.
“And how do you feel about that?” Giovanni finally asked.
“Seriously? That’s the question you have?” She’d made fun of just that question during their first session. He’d promised then to try not to ask it.
“Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not an honest question.”
“He told me all of ten minutes ago. That’s a lot to process. I walked out of the door on that conversation and drove down here to see you.”
“You could have canceled, Gemma.”
“It was easier coming here and subjecting myself to your questions than talking to him. What in the hell was I going to say? I’d showed him the sex tape. I’d offered him sherry. That was all I was prepared to deal with today. But I went on about how O’Bryan’s sobriety was bullshit and Adonis started defending the guy.”
“Back up, Gemma. First things first. You showed him the tape?”
“After that first time, we, you know…Sylvester asked him if I was as good as the tape.”
“Jesus, Gemma. Sylvester said that?”
“He’s a guy. That’s how they act.”
“Not all guys act like that. Why show him the tape, though? Normally sexual history isn’t something partners discuss outright. We discussed that particular boundary if you remember.”
“He asked if I’d been honest about my sexual history. He didn’t outright call me a liar, but that was the implication. I wanted him to know it was more Bill Clinton and less Kim Kardashian.”
She bent down and petted the dog. She looked out the window. She wondered where Giovanni’s wife kept her awards. Flicking a glance at her therapist under her lashes, she watched as he fit together the puzzle pieces.
“Oh, Gemma.” It wasn’t so much him figuring out her most embarrassing secret, it was the sympathy and sorrow that laced his voice. As if she were a bigger freak than he’d ever thought.
“Please, not the one-man pity party. I’ve won two Oscars. Getting my SAG card was about a thousand times easier than getting a man interested in me for something other than what I could do for his career.”
“Here are your three questions,” he said, not addressing her admission. Instead, he moved on to their usual end-of-session wrap-up. “Your homework is to really dig deep and answer, okay?”
She nodded, pulling out the leather-bound journal she’d ordered online. The one with the brass comedy and tragedy masks affixed. The one that was supposed to help her fix all that had gone wrong in her life.
“Decide where you’re going to go. Enough with hiding out. Be safe, but go somewhere, anywhere. Decide if you want a relationship. Decide if you want any kind of relationship with Adonis, because what he’s laid out is the kind of thing that would be a deal breaker for a lot of people. You have to decide if it’s a deal breaker for you.”
Quickly, she scribbled down his three questions, which had morphed into an entire project that would make her brain nearly explode.
“Picking a good script would be easier than this,” she said, closing the leather and snicking the hook into the clasp.
“A good script is a temporary fix, Gemma. Living your best life is permanent.”