Easy Virtue (29 page)

“It’s going to be fine,” I say pulling away from her and wiping my wet cheeks.

“It is. It is. Wyatt wouldn’t want us to break down over a house.”

“No, he would definitely think we’re dumb for mourning a structure,” I say with a small laugh. If it were up to Wyatt, people would live in tents and bathe in rainwater. I loved that about him.

“Yeah, and he would have cut the electricity on this place two months ago since you’ve been eating takeout anyway,” she adds.

We shake our heads, new tears forming as our laughter dies and the silence weighs down on us.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with us?” she asks, as we walk from room to room, making sure nothing is left behind.

“No, Victor would be highly offended if I didn’t take him up on his offer. He would probably start bringing up my not wanting to go to the same college as him, not liking the same football team, and the fact that I never paid up and did his laundry for a year that time in high school. I think that’s why he’s so eager to have me move in with him, actually.”

Felicia’s shoulders shake as she laughs. “Well, tell him I said hello and invite him to dinner with us on Sunday! We’d love to have him over.”

“Sure,” I say, my smile disappearing as my eyes meet the sandals on the floor.

“You want me to take those or do you want to keep them?”

“I…” I take a breath. “Can I keep them?”

I feel kind of bad because I’m already keeping all of Wyatt’s T-shirts, and it’s not like the sandals fit me—they’re like five sizes too big for my feet—but they’re his favorite. Were. They were his favorite. That’s something my therapist is having me work on, speaking of Wyatt in the past tense. I still cringe when I do it, but I’m getting better. For a while, I was living this false reality where Wyatt was away on a business trip or something. He loved to travel alone and let the different cultures inspire his paintings. After a month I started accepting that he wasn’t coming back. After three, at the request of my therapist, I started putting his things in boxes so that I wouldn’t have the constant reminder.

Putting them away didn’t do much. The house was a reminder, and our art studio couldn’t be packed up either. It was something I had to learn to live with… being without him. After six months, I was able to walk in and out of both places without having my heart squeeze in my chest every time. And now, well now, a year later, I think I’m ready to move on from it. If Wyatt’s sudden death taught me something, it was that life is short, and we need to live it to the fullest. It’s something I understand now, but still struggle to follow through with.

“Honey, everything he left behind is yours, you know that,” Felicia says. Her words bring a new wave of tears that I don’t even realize are cascading down my face until I taste the salt on my lips. I try to thank her, but the words are stuck in my mouth.

We hug, and I promise to see her on Sunday before looking around one last time. I call my friend Mia and fill her in on everything as I drive to my brother’s house.

“Are we still going out tomorrow night?” she asks before we hang up.

“As long as we stick to one bar, I’ll go. I’m not in the mood for bar hopping and doing the college girl thing you like to do.”

Mia never shed her wild side persona when we graduated and started living our “grown up lives.” As much as I love to hang out with her, the whole replenishing my liver with an insane amount of water after drowning it in alcohol the night before isn’t something I can do every week, like she does.

“Okay, no bar hopping. I have a brunch date on Saturday morning anyway and can’t afford to look like crap, so we’ll take it easy.”

“A date with whom?” I ask with a frown, as I push the little button on the control for the garage to my brother’s apartment building.

“Blind date. His name is Todd; he’s a curator at The Pelican. Maria seems to think we’d be perrrfect together,” she says, rolling her R’s exaggeratedly to imitate her Italian author friend.

“Hmm… I don’t think I’ve heard of a Todd,” I say.

Mia and I have known each other for as long as I can remember. Our mothers were best friends growing up, and married men who were also best friends. Much to our mothers’ dismay, we realized early on that history wouldn’t repeat itself when Mia kept going for the bad boys, while I stuck to the quiet types. We both went to USC. Mia wanted to become a curator, and I wanted to be a psychologist. Early on, we both switched our majors to art. She found her love for photography, and I found mine for painting. Mia has a popular photography studio, and I went on to open Paint it Back, a studio slash gallery. It was Wyatt’s dream, sprinkled with some of my visions.

“Damn. I was hoping you had. Todd Stern?” she says, a hopeful note on her voice.

“Nope. Rob doesn’t know him?”

“I’m not going to ask Rob!”

“Well, I’ve never heard of the guy.”

“Anyway, Maria says he just moved here from San Francisco, so I guess that’s why. Shit. Stefano is here for his shoot. Let me know if you need me to come by Vic’s later. Love you!”

She hangs up in the midst of my goodbye, so I put my phone away and pick up my keys from the cup holder. Taking a long breath, I run my hands over my face and pull down the mirror to make sure my mascara isn’t running. I run my hands through my wavy brown hair and decide not to bother trying to tame it, so I pick it up into a ponytail instead. Finally, I grab the carry-on bag from the backseat and walk up the path to the house. The only sound is that of the gravel crunching below my flats and the waves from the beach just steps away. Even though it’s my brother’s house, anticipation buzzes through me. Being three years apart, we’ve always been pretty close, but we haven’t lived together since we were at home with our parents, so this is new.

I crouch down and flip the welcome mat to get the spare key out and open the door. As I walk through the large living room, I call out his name, but get no response. I walk past it, through the kitchen, and head up the stairs toward one of the spare bedrooms. It’s a three-bedroom house, and the two spare rooms are on the second floor. Vic says he uses the master bedroom on the first floor because it’s the biggest one, but I have a feeling his laziness and the fact that the kitchen is adjacent has a lot to do with it. When I step into the room, I’m taken aback by what I see. Not only did he make my bed with the new sheets I bought, but he painted my room a soft shade of gray. Dorian Gray, I think to myself, smiling.

I leave my bag on the bed and head to the balcony right outside the room. The balconies are one of my favorite features of this house, and what I went crazy over when he was thinking of buying it. There’s one in each upstairs bedroom, and they’re big, too. My phone chimes with a text message from him, telling me he’ll be here in a couple of minutes. I’m responding as I step away from the balcony and into an easel. Walking around it, I read the huge letters in Vic’s handwriting that say: Welcome Home, Chicken and below, a drawing of a chicken that a five-year-old would be proud of. I erupt in laughter and snap a picture of it, sending it to Mia and my mom before sliding my phone into my back pocket.

Looking up from the easel, I can see straight out into the ocean in front of me. I take long, deep breaths, and can practically taste the salt in the water. I don’t know how long I stand there with my eyes closed in quiet meditation, but I jump when I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Holy shit, Vic,” I say, pressing both hands to my heart.

“You like your present?” he laughs, as he pulls me into a hug and squeezes my frame before setting me down.

“Yeah, you asshole,” I laugh, as I slap his chest.

“Asshole? I get you the best gift ever and you call me an asshole? It was the terrible drawing of the chicken, wasn’t it?”

“Stop calling me that,” I groan, stepping back in the house and heading downstairs with him trailing behind me. “Where’s the food?”

“It should be here soon. Let me go change,” he says. “I have to go back to work soon.”

“You’re going back?”

“The case I’m working on is a fucking mess. The guy’s wife is trying to take everything he has in the divorce. I don’t know when these athletes will learn that they need a goddamn pre-nup.”

“Oh,” I cringe slightly. It’s something Wyatt and I discussed when we got engaged and had huge disagreements over every time it was brought up. You would never think an artist would care about that, but Wyatt was very successful and wealthy. He’d gotten to that point before turning thirty. He’d been selling to a very wealthy group of people and only painting because he absolutely loved it, not because he needed the money.

A knock on the door has me pivoting on my heel and, as I walk over to it in a daze, I think about how stupid the disagreement was, in hindsight. We weren’t even married when Wyatt died, and his parents want me to keep everything anyway. He was all about pre-nups and having things out in the open before we got married. I was all about being in love and wanting to get married without a care about who would take what if we ever got a divorce, because in my mind marriage is forever. But alas, that’s in the past—this is my fresh start. The thought brings a smile to my face, which stays there as I swing the door open. My smile quickly transforms into a full gape when I find a tall guy in a pair of green scrubs and a white doctor’s coat. He’s looking down at his feet as I open the door, his sandy brown hair making a curtain over his face, and when he looks up, the slow, uneven grin he gives me stops my breath short.

“Bean,” I say in a whisper. His lips twist higher, revealing twin dimples.

“Chicken,” he says in response as his green eyes soak me in. “Food’s here.”

My eyes drop to the bags in his hands. “Oh! Yeah. I wasn’t expecting you,” I reply, stepping aside for him.

“It’s been a while,” he says, stopping in front of me and leaning his face into mine. I clutch the doorknob for dear life as his lips brush against my cheek, trying to do everything in my power not to breathe in the familiar scent of him that used to make my head swim. “It’s good to see you again,” he says in a low voice as he pulls away. The way he says it and the twinkle in his eyes make my heart drop to my stomach. How is it possible that he still manages to do that to me? Even after Wyatt. I hate him for it.

“It’s good to see you too,” I whisper as we head toward the dining room. It is so not good to see him, though. I’ve learned a lot about Oliver Hart through the years, but the only thing worth remembering, is that he’s bad for my health.

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Diamonds

All That Glitters, #1

By: K.A. Linde

listen, i am not someone who

is easy to love. i am not

someone who is to be taken lightly

and most of all, i am not someone

to burn.

for i am the fire, my soul is on

fire and everything i live to

touch becomes one with the fire.

—r.m. drake

Chapter 1

Broken—mind, body, and soul.

Begging to forget her meaningless existence, to be commanded and molded and remade into someone else. She needed the embrace of the nightlife, the pounding of the music, the sweat, the intoxication just to feel again.

If even for one night.

Allure wasn’t Bryna’s usual scene. She preferred exclusive nightclubs in Beverly Hills and house parties that catered to her and her uber wealthy friends at Harmony Prep. She favored places where everyone knew her name, and she could rule as Queen B. But tonight she didn’t want to rule her throne.

She wanted to forget her own reality and get lost in the imagined one that Allure provided. The room full to the brim with bodies grinding to the music, drinking top shelf liquor, and indulging in the dark secret desires of her heart.

She swirled the gin martini in her hand and pursed her lips as she surveyed the room. It was easier here.

Easier to forget about her Hollywood parents and their pathetic divorce. Easier to forget that her high-profile director father had remarried this summer to some valley trash he’d been having an affair with while he’d been with her mom. Easier to forget that she had three new step-siblings and that the oldest, Pace, was only a year younger than her and the new starting quarterback at school.

Easier to forget about everything.

At least everything that was cluttering up her picture perfect life. Despite the heinous drama that was consuming her, she needed to remember who she was and what she stood for.

She was fucking Bryna Turner.

A goddess at Harmony. Queen B. Head cheerleader.

She had started dating Gates Hartman before his break out role, and now he was the hottest up-and-coming actor that had hit Hollywood since Ryan Gosling.

She refused to give two shits what anyone thought of her. Especially not her parents. Her world might have shifted with the upheaval of their marriage, but she had remained strong for all the eyes that were always watching her.

But tonight was different.

Tonight no one else was watching.

Tonight she could lose herself, lose control.

And maybe that’s what brought him closer.