Chapter Thirteen: “The Break”
Chapter Thirteen
“The Break”
IT WAS 3:15 A.M. AND SEWANEE LOOKED AT THE CLOCK ONCE AGAIN
. She was sure it had been at least forty-five minutes since the last time she’d looked.
It had been twelve.
Thoughts moved in and out of her mind like hummingbirds at a feeder.
He didn’t pity her. Did he? No, he didn’t. The way he had been with her, his touch, his care, his determination. None of it had felt like pity. She knew the difference.
But she hadn’t been his first choice. He’d wanted Adaku. She’d been a consolation prize.
And what about their goodbye in Vegas? Why didn’t he give her his number? Why didn’t he ask for hers?
She flipped over. Pulled her pillow tight. Closed her eye.
Images of the two of them, together, rushed in.
Sitting opposite him in the soaking tub, afterward.
The texture of his skin made slick by the water.
Her fingers tracing the hollow of his throat.
She flopped over, hoping to leave her mind on the other side. But the words they’d exchanged came through like taunting ghosts.
He’d said,
I’d love to continue this, but . . .
She’d said,
no of course
.
He’d said,
it’s probably better to leave it
.
She, crushed under the weight of her lies, could only agree.
Then he’d touched her scar. Simple, unencumbered, natural.
Then Blah screamed, Monster.
She opened her eye. 3:18
A.M
. Unbelievable.
She flipped once more, reached compulsively for her phone, but there was no message since the one Carlos had sent hours ago: Blah had stabilized, she hadn’t needed to go to the hospital. But they’d keep the Ativan in her for a few more days. Probably best if Sewanee gave her some space.
No message from “Brock,” either.
How would she get over being someone’s–God, she’d hated the term since the first time she’d heard it from some walking jockstrap in junior high–sloppy seconds?
But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t even the right terminology. What was she trying to . . .
She’d been used. That was it, that’s what had happened. Plain and simple. She’d been used by a man who knew exactly what he was doing. He was Brock McFuckingNight. He’d appeared to her like a hero out of a Romance novel because that was precisely what he was. That’s all he was. But she? She was all too real.
Except for the lying.
“You have got to get some sleep,” she groaned out loud, parenting herself. She flipped one more time, squeezed her eye shut, and refused to open it.
3:19
A.M
.
Dammit.
WHEN SEWANEE FIRST
heard the knocking, it presented as church bells in the dream she was having. A foreign city, springtime sun, the vague sense of unease, as if she were late for something
she couldn’t remember. But church bells shouldn’t sound so deadened, so inelegant.
She opened her eye into silence. Waited. The knocking came again. This time more of a banging.
Adaku! The ride to the airport!
She sprang out of bed, tripping over her purse from the night before, and flung herself toward the door.
The sun was full behind Adaku’s new military-short afro. “Morning!”
Sewanee brought a hand up to shield her eye. “What’s going on?” she croaked.
Adaku misinterpreted her unwelcoming tone. She grinned and stage-whispered, “Am I interrupting?”
“What?” The night rushed through her like an express train through a station stop. “Oh. No. Not at all.”
Adaku deflated. “Boo. Why?”
Sewanee tried to form words, but she couldn’t. She just stood there. Speechless. Motionless.
“Oh, babe,” Adaku murmured. “Okay, okay! Inside!”
Adaku set her on the couch, buzzed around the kitchen for a minute, and then there was a glass of water in front of Swan and a command to drink it. She did and another minute later there was a cup of coffee in front of her and her feet were in Adaku’s lap on the love seat and Adaku said, “What happened?” and Sewanee told her. Everything.
They were on their second cup of coffee by the time she was done. It was sad, and still surreal, but not quite so dire as it had seemed when Adaku arrived.
“I’m so sorry about BlahBlah,” Adaku said.
“At least she won’t remember it.”
Adaku huffed a bittersweet chuckle. “True. Now Brock on the other hand, or should I say Nick–”
Sewanee held up a hand. “I don’t want to talk about him. Them.”
Adaku persisted. “Okay, but, I mean, from where I’m sitting, it seems . . . insane.” The last word came out in a giddy laugh. “One night stand turns to unwitting correspondence! That’s Fated Mates stuff–”
“More like bad Fantasy,” Sewanee interrupted, stood, and wandered into the kitchen. “Don’t romanticize it. It’s awful. Humiliating. It’s–” She saw a white paper bag on the counter. “Did you bring me a breakfast burrito from Beachwood?”
“I did,” Adaku responded from the living room.
“Aww, thank you.” She tore into the bag. “Where’s yours?”
“No can do. The only part of a burrito I can eat right now is the paper it’s wrapped in.”
Sewanee put the burrito in the microwave, shook her head, and continued talking from the kitchen. “I probably shouldn’t eat this, either, huh? Oh, you’d be proud of me, I started doing push-ups last week. I mean, I figure they’ll give me a trainer, but thank God I’m not doing the boot camp with you right now, I would not survive–” She gasped, covered her mouth. “Oh my God, A, I’m such an idiot. I left my car at Seasons last night. Shit! I’ll order us a ride, I’m so sorry–”
She spun around and Adaku, who’d come to stand at the entrance of the kitchen, said, “You didn’t get the part.”
The microwave beeped, but Sewanee didn’t move. As if she had been shot but the surprise of the impact preceded the pain of the bullet.
“I’m so sorry, Swan. I still can’t believe it.” Adaku looked wretched, as if she had pulled the trigger.
Sewanee turned back to the microwave. Opened the door. Removed the burrito. Took a huge bite. She continued to eat until Adaku said, “Talk to me.”
Sewanee swallowed, preemptively steadied her voice. “When did you–”
“Yesterday. I didn’t want to tell you before your big night. But I’m leaving and I wanted to tell you face to face and . . .” She drifted off.
After one more suspended moment, Sewanee took another bite. “It’s fine. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll go get ready.”
“No, Swan, you’re not riding with me to the airport, that’s ridiculous.”
“Yes, I am!” She took an aggressive bite. “I told you I’d take you and I will.” She brought the rest of the burrito with her when she left the kitchen.
Adaku followed her into the living room. “I saw your audition. It was so good, Swan! It was more than good.” Sewanee chuckled. “It was. They just decided to–”
“Go a different way?” Sewanee did not try to hide the sarcastic bitterness in her voice. The classic
it’s not you, it’s me
brush-off of Hollywood.
“Colin wanted you,” Adaku soothed, “but the studio–everyone thought you were incredible. Truly brilliant, they said.”
She searched for her phone, took another bite, and asked, “Who got it?”
“Swan.”
“What? Someone famous who they’ll ugly-up instead of someone unknown who already is?”
“Sewanee–”
“I can see the Oscar campaign for best makeup already–”
“It had nothing to do with–”
“Who got the part, A?”
Adaku sighed. “They found this, this girl, Amber Something. She’s a YouTube celebrity, influencer, TikTok personality, whatever. When she was seventeen, her arm was bitten off by a shark.”
Sewanee choked down the last of the burrito. “Missing arm beats out missing eye.” She snapped her fingers sardonically. “Every time.”
Adaku shook her head. “You gotta stop. It’s about followers. She has like forty million followers. You think talent
used
to take a backseat? Now it’s in the trunk. She has a meditation app and cookbooks and shit. But they wanted you!”
Sewanee couldn’t contain it anymore. “So what happened to ‘I can do this’? What happened to ‘star power, babe’?”
Adaku put her hand out, like a crossing guard trying to slow Sewanee down. “I tried, I really did. I was as pissed as you, believe me. But their loss! We’ll find something else. Something better! You’re back in the saddle now! It was just one audition. This happened for a reason, okay? Everything’s meant to be! You’ll see.”
There was a moment in every argument where it could end. Nothing irreparable had been said, no major boundary had been crossed. There was a natural point of no return.
Sewanee blew past that moment.
She flailed her arms like one of those inflatable tube-men outside a car dealership. “Stop it! Just shut up! Everything happens for a reason?! You know the last time I thought everything happened for a reason? When I had two fucking eyes! Everything’s meant to be?! Was
this
meant to be?” She jabbed her finger at her eye so fast, so hard, she didn’t have time to recall that she wasn’t wearing her eye patch. She hit her scarred eye socket and the wave of pain bent her in half, raised her gorge.
“Swan!”
She felt Adaku race toward her, and she pushed her back, one solid shot to what she thought must have been her hip. “Back off!” She touched her face gently. Saw blood on her fingertip.
“You’re bleeding,” Adaku gasped.
It wasn’t gushing. The scar was long-healed, it wouldn’t have
opened. She must have caught her fingernail on it. There was a rational part of her brain still working, that could process all of this logically. But the other part kept looping through the unfairness of all the shitty things that had happened and her inability to accept them because they never should have happened in the first place. Not to her. She had never thought, not once, poor me; but she could never escape thinking, why me?
She lunged back into the kitchen, to the freezer, whipped the door open, grabbed a handful of ice, and slapped it to her face, muttering the whole time, “This is all on you.
You
want me to act again.
You
need me to be whole again.
You
need me to win. Because for you, if it doesn’t all work out in the end, then you’d have to admit that everything doesn’t happen for a fucking reason.”
“Swan . . .”
Great, Adaku was crying. Well, so was Sewanee. It took her a moment to realize it with the ice starting to drip down her cheek, but that tightness in her chest, Adaku’s blurriness, her inability to draw a full breath? That was tears. And they made her furious.
“You can’t fix this. You will not make this better. No matter how much positive-thinking horseshit you sling at me.”
Adaku stepped toward her. “Tell me what to do.”
Sewanee met her toe-to-toe and screamed, “Let me hate the world and what it’s done to me!” At Adaku’s stricken face, she spun away and sobbed, “And leave! Please!”
She was crying too hard to hear Adaku’s own sobs, her footsteps walking away. All she knew was within a minute, she heard the front door close softly. She made it to the sink just in time to throw up.
SHE DIDN’T KNOW
how long she stood there at the counter, looking out at the view of the city, slowly coming back to herself. She just knew she had no idea what to do next.
She turned on the faucet and washed her torment down the drain. It nearly made her throw up again.
Tea. She should hydrate. A manageable first step.
She opened a cabinet and reached for the Tea-For-One gift from her mom.
The moment it slipped from her hands and onto the tile floor, shattering into, conservatively, a billion pieces she knew she would be finding months later, felt, in hindsight, preordained.
She continued to stand there.
What do you want to do, Swan? she thought. Should she pick up the larger pieces, at least? Should she get a broom? Should she try crying again? Should she scream her throat bloody?
In the end, she did none of those things. Instead, she left. She walked out of the kitchen. She stepped on a few pieces, their crunch having no noticeable effect. She walked into her bedroom, grabbed a duffel bag out of the closet, snatched up arbitrary pieces of clothing, and threw them inside, zipped it up, walked back into the living room, picked up her phone, ordered a ride, took one last look at the shattered pieces, and said, aloud, “I want my mom.”
AS THE CAR
made its way to LAX, Sewanee sat in the back gazing out the window. She felt good about her spontaneous decision. There was even a sense of righteous relief. She wasn’t exactly sure from what, but it convinced her she was doing the right thing. This was necessary.
It was also exciting. She’d never done something like this, just gone on her phone and booked the cheapest seat on the next flight out while in the backseat of a car already heading to the airport. The destination hadn’t mattered, but when she’d texted her mom to find out where she would be for the next few
days and her mother had replied, “Venice” . . . well. Maybe some things
were
meant to be.
Her phone dinged but she didn’t want to deal with it. “Brock” had texted now, a few times, but she hadn’t read them. What difference did it make? She was going to Italy now. But, she’d also texted Amanda to tell her she’d be unreachable for a while, to call Henry if Blah needed anything. What if this was her reply?
Sewanee looked at her phone.
Shit. Jason.
She scanned the e-mail:
Hey Sarah! Two more episodes to go, scripts attached! As these are the consummation scenes, I think they should be performed in duet, sharing lines back and forth. So I’d like to schedule a time to have you and Brock patch in to record together.
Absofuckinglutely not.
The driver had pulled up to the curb and was getting out to retrieve her bag. She quickly typed:
Not available. Ask Nick.
She sent it, turned off her phone, got out, thanked the driver, grabbed her bag, and walked into the terminal.
Next stop, Venice. For real this time.