N I N E

LOS ANGELES, CA

          When I wake up the following morning, I can't help but feel like I've been trampled by a group of elephants.

          The distant sound of banging, like what you hear when there's a construction site nearby—even though we're staying right by the sea and the relaxing background noise from the waves crashing against the shore—doesn't help me feel any better, and I'm once again reminded why I shouldn't have come here. At least in New York I have an apartment way up in a tall building, where people mind their business and aren't overly loud, so not even the blaring honks of the traffic bother me too much.

          My migraine pounded against the front part of my skull like a sledgehammer as I slowly prop myself up on my elbows, using muscles that aren't nearly as strong as I need them to be. The room spins around me, even while I'm lying down, and I'm sweating like a pig, my body having grown a stranger to hot, humid weather, and the morning sun is so blinding I decide against trying to keep my eyes open.

          The banging noises only get louder and, while I'm not naive enough to put it past Sadie to be this loud out of spite after I embarrassed us both last night, I know it's coming from outside the house. Everything is locked—I made sure of it, even during my drunken haze, even though I couldn't even walk straight—which might explain why it's so hot in this bedroom; not a single gust of wind, the sliver of a breeze can enter. In New York, the only city in the world I can allow myself to love, I wouldn't be having this issue.

          Giving up on sitting upright on the bed, I roll to the side to lie on my back, happy to have a queen sized mattress all at my disposal. It does nothing to make me feel better, a classic sign of a crippling hangover that is likely to last all day. I'm no stranger to those, after years and years of destroying my body under the guise of chasing numbness, but I'm tired. The warmth and the buzz are only fun and comforting at first; once you start getting used to it, once you start building up a tolerance, there's no going back.

          I'm so hot, even when I kick away my covers, that everything feels like a fever dream, including the voice echoing my name. No, not my name—Rebecca.

          There's this moment in time I'm suspended in the air, suspended between realities, and I almost accept the hand my past reaches out towards me. I almost do that, giving into the temptation of fooling myself into believing things will ever go back to how they used to be, with me living in blissful ignorance, but I force myself to draw back my hand. I force myself to turn around, turn my back on the girl I left behind.

          "Rebecca!" the voice calls, exasperated, and I groan, pressing the heels of my hands against my closed lids. I can't make it go away by ignoring it or pretending to be dead—it didn't work the first time, clearly, and I've ended up right back where I started—and I know I'll have to get up eventually, but I don't want to. It doesn't matter what I want or what I don't, after all, and it's about time I get that into my thick skull. "Rebecca, I've been standing outside for ten minutes. The least you can do is open the door."

          I've never asked her to come here, so I really can't care any less about Michelle standing outside my front door—it's not mine in theory, but still—under the scorching sun of late spring while she treats it like her own personal hell. She's here because she wants to be, whatever her reasoning is, and there's no way of convincing her to do something she doesn't want to do. Though I'm aware I can't send her away or call the police on her, both because I don't trust them and because she can argue she's hanging out at the beach, it doesn't mean I need to welcome her inside.

          I give myself five more minutes in bed to mentally brace myself for a conversation with Michelle Kane, then I stumble out of my bedroom as the entire house attempts to throw me out. I brush my teeth, tame my hair, put on a pair of sandals (Miu Miu) and a sundress (Johanna Ortiz), and head outside to face the music, eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses (Chanel). I'm still more exposed and bare than what I'm comfortable with, but all I need is to walk out of the front door and stay where Sadie can see me, as there's no way she wasn't woken up by Michelle's yelling.

          Michelle herself is still there, patiently waiting, lips twisted into a deep scowl. I almost point out that she has only subjected herself to the scorching sun outside my Airbnb because she wanted to, not because I invited her, so blaming me for all of this may be easier, but it's still not correct. All sense of morality gets thrown out of the window when the concerned party is me—and I wonder if I'll ever get through the day without being worried about something—so I've learned not to dwell too much on things like these.

          Strangely enough, she hasn't come here empty handed. On her hands, there are two generic cups of coffee—hot coffee, not iced coffee, the bane of my existence. I'm usually a fan of caffeine in whatever shape or form it chooses to bless my life with, but there are times when my poor stomach can't handle a cup of iced coffee, especially after a night of heavy drinking. The gurgling sounds coming out of my stomach whenever there's ice melting in there is disgusting and makes me even more sluggish; in a time when I have to stay alert at all times, distractions are dangerous.

          "You can take one, you know," she tells me, once she catches me eyeing the cups. Caffeine withdrawals make me crankier than usual, and I don't think anyone in the premises wants to deal with me when I'm suffering from a debilitating hangover and the effects of lack of proper nutrition and caffeine intake. "They're not poisoned."

          "I hadn't considered that possibility until you mentioned it, so thanks for that," I retort, but still reach out for one of them. They look identical, with no lid appearing to have been tampered with, and I can see the contents—they're light caramel in tone, a classic iced latte, and neither of them appear to be murky. Michelle sips from both of them and I can see the liquid going up the straws in both cases, much like I can see her swallow it, so I decide I can trust her. At least this once. "Thanks."

          "Don't mention it. I figured you might need it after all the drinking from last night." I grimace. "You must be wondering why I'm here."

          "No, not really."

          Michelle scowls.

          I'm amazed at how similar we look when her face is contorted like that, which, in turn, leaves me wondering who we take after. Mommy Dearest has gone through way too many rounds of botox and buccal fat removal to show any emotion on her face—and I doubt she has the range or the capacity for such trivially human things—and Daddy would never get angry, would never yell around us, retreating into his office to sulk instead of dealing with conflicts, so the question still hangs in the air.

          "There's no nice, simple way of telling you this, so I'm just gonna go right ahead and lay it on you," Michelle continues, kindly letting me know the iced coffee was more of an attempt to mellow me out than a peace offering. "Mom needs you at the house—"

          I choke on my iced latte, nearly spitting it all over myself and Michelle's top. "Absolutely not."

          "Listen—"

          "If I embarrassed you last night by trying to look out for you when you're hanging out with the literal devil"—her scowl deepens, like insulting her precious gemstone of an arm candy with sociopathic tendencies is the worst crime I have committed—"I truly am sorry for my behavior, but that doesn't mean I'll stop worrying about you. You're still my sister regardless of what happens or has happened between us."

          She bristles at this, like she's been assaulted by a memory from a distant past, from when everything was okay and we still liked each other. "You don't need to look out for me. I'm an adult. I can drink legally now."

          "There are many legal things that aren't morally correct."

          "Like ruining our grandmother's wake? Like turning your back on your entire family?" Her voice clogs then. "On me?"

          The shakiness in her voice tugs at my heartstrings, though I know better than to fall for the bait. I've seen this happen countless times before, courtesy of our mother; it's always a trap I'll inevitably find myself trapped in. She lures me in with the promise that she's changed, that she misses me, that we can fix things, but nothing ever works out in my favor.

          I want to believe Michelle, with every fiber of my being, and I'm conditioned to, but this is one of the times where it's nature versus nurture. It's one of those times I have to look out for myself for once, to protect myself when no one else will. Michelle already has enough protection and doesn't even believe she's in danger, but, back in the day, neither did I. I was a sheltered rich kid with a bright future ahead of her, firmly believing in the good in the world and that I was untouchable.

          I wasn't. I paid heavily for my mistakes.

          I clear my throat before I can give into my emotions—my raw, dirty emotions that make me do stupid things. "Why do I need to go there?"

          "Mom has this stupid seating chart, and she wants to go through it with you," she explains, through gritted teeth. When she thinks I'm not looking, I catch her wiping something away from her cheekbone with the heel of her hand. "I personally don't care whether you go or not, but you probably want to attend the funeral for Dad's sake, so you should go talk to her."

          I would sooner walk across ten miles of broken glass while barefoot before I willingly walked up to my mother for a chat about her precious seating chart—for a goddamn funeral—but I'm not heartless. Everything I do is for my father nowadays, the only thing I can do to trick my mind into not finding me nearly as insufferably selfish as I am, but there's a part of my heart that is always willing to bend, shatter, and break into a million little pieces for Michelle. In a way, I'll always love her—she's my sister, after all—but I don't like her that much anymore.

          Part of me wonders if she feels the same. Part of me wonders if things such as sisterly bonds can be simplified in such terms.

          I'm thinking there's not a thing in this world Michelle can do or say to wreck my heart any further, but, as soon as I turn back around to drag my emotional support publicist out of bed to convince her to play the part of my best friend, she just has to open her big, stupid mouth.

          "Look, if your issue here is that I'm seeing Adam, you really don't need to worry about me or be jealous," she says.

          My first instinct is, as always, to be consumed with fury, closing my hands into tight fists so my fingers won't reach out for something I can throw, but there's still something tightly woven inside of me, constricting and twisting, and I stop. The irony of one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure to meet having a biblical name isn't lost on me, but the fact that it's so much easier for Michelle to misplace my anger and resentment and blame it on jealousy would be infuriating a few years ago.

          Pitting women against each other? Bad! Pitting women against each other for the sake of a man? Terrible!

          Now, the only infuriating part about this is that she's choosing to defend him because she doesn't know any better, because she's been poisoned to believe I'm the villain, and, in a way, I suppose I am. Comments on my promiscuity don't really faze me anymore, now that I'm stable enough to not see myself as the culprit, the evil seductress who tempted good, defenseless men and made them give into their primal instincts, but I know what has been said about me. I know Michelle knows nothing about why I left—why I was forced out of Los Angeles, really—and it's not like Adam and I ever dated, but we were a part of each other's lives for years, so it's easy to assume jealousy is all this is about.

          She'll never, ever understand. I want her to; I want her to see where I'm coming from, to open her eyes and realize the danger she's in while being around Adam because no one ever prepared me for that. When it was me, I was alone in cold rooms, dignity ruined, trust in the world completely shattered, and there was no one to look out for me. Believing in the good in people and how they can change and surprise you is always a tightrope; if you stumble, if you dare to see the world through rose-colored glasses, you've already lost. No one protected me, and Michelle doesn't want me to protect her. She might not even think there's anything for me to protect her from.

          Even though I desperately want to tuck her in at night and keep the monsters at bay, they'll always be looming closer than she thinks. Most of the time, the monsters aren't strangers. Most times, the monsters are someone you know, someone you trust.

          "You're right," I reply, lying through my teeth. "You don't need me at all."

⊹˚. ♡

          Adam's car is parked outside my mother's house, because of course it is. I don't want him near her, either, though I strongly believe he would never do a damn thing to her; she's vile and vicious and intimidates everyone, not just me. Even if he thinks he could break her or even leave a dent in her armor, he's in for a tough surprise.

          Sadie shoots me a warning look immediately after Michelle disappears through the front door, leaving it open for us to follow her inside. I'm a dog on a leash, Hannibal Lecter with a muzzle, but I'm also Harley Kane with a crippling hangover and a bloody desire for revenge, so everything in me is urging me to do something. I'm also worried any more slip ups will make Sadie leave and, though she's a huge pain in the ass most of the time, I need her to be here with me because I can't face the consequences of my own actions all by myself.

          "Harley," she hisses, having me all figured out. The thing about sabotage is that it takes personal involvement, and I'm no stranger to self-sabotage. "If we get ourselves kicked out of here again . . ."

          "I didn't do anything," I point out, musing about how giving me a copy of the house keys was a fatal mistake, and make my way towards Adam's shiny, bright Volvo. It's so polished I can see my distorted reflection on it, but the windows are tinted, as he can't have anyone eavesdropping on anything that happens inside, no. What will people think? "I'm just checking out this sweet, sweet ride. Imagine if I had a golf club with me. I've always wanted to do that."

          "Well, you don't have a golf club, and you're not doing anything stupid."

          "Give a girl a break, will you?" I grin at my reflection after fixing my lipstick, all Mia Goth-esque, and it's one of the few times I fully believe in my acting skills. I look unbothered, unimpressed by my status as a cautionary tale and the family disappointment, and, if I squint, I can almost pretend that's my reality. "Sometimes you just have to slash a tire or two to make yourself feel better."

          "Harley—"

          "What the hell are you doing to my car?"

          Sadie and I both turn to face the front door, with a panicked Adam stumbling out into the sunlight. My stomach churns at the sight of him and at how looks can be so deceiving; he's all glowing from the heat and the way the sun hits his hair, but that's no angel.

          He steps forward, hands by his shoulders. "I don't know who you think you are, but you need to stay away from my car."

          "Harley fucking Kane," I spit out, dragging my house key across the door on the driver's side. The scratching screech doesn't even hurt me. "Write that down."

⊹˚. ♡

harley: does something dangerous and/or stupid

sadie: is disappointed but also doesn't try to stop her

and we love them for it. besties being besties. this is now a 20k word novella. LOL