Beautiful People - Chapter 31: Chapter 31

After Venice, LA's smoggy skyline lost all its charm for Vera. She drew the heavy blackout curtains, plunging Jay's living room into ambiguous laptop-lit twilight, and lay curled on his sagging couch for a week straight. September hadn't faded the summer heat and the apartment was unbearably hot when the air conditioner was off but unbearably cold when it was on, so she cocooned herself in six blankets and set about covering them in a fur of chip crumbs.
"I regret saying you could crash here," Jay said when he came home from Venice to find his tiny kitchen buried under takeout containers. "When you said you were going home, I thought you meant home home. Like where you came from."
"Seattle?"
"Yeah, exactly. Not my couch."
"You're mad at me."
"I'm pissed. You left us all hanging, Vee."
She didn't want to meet his eyes. "I know. You did a great job, though."
"I did, it's true." He flipped his hair. "It was kinda fun to play dress up with Marina. Maybe I should get into styling." Then he seemed to remember he was supposed to be upset with her. "But that was your job. How long do you plan to stay here?"
"I just need some time to figure my shit out." She rubbed a dented fingernail.
She must have looked too pathetic to resist because he didn't kick her out. She took out her trash and nodded along as he hassled her to reach out to Sharise, or her clients, or literally anyone to apologize for walking out on them. In a few days, he left again, this time for Toronto.
As the quiet drew in, Vera pulled out her sketchbook and stared at a blank page as she tried to think about what the hell she was going to do. She didn't really believe Jay that she could just apologize and make it all go away, and she didn't know if she even wanted to. As much fun as she'd had the last few months before it fell apart, she couldn't help feeling like she'd spent all that time and effort going down the wrong path. Maybe she had spent her whole life going down the wrong path, always approaching things sideways and for the wrong reasons.
After a while she gave up and started reading the gossip again.
Neither Carmen nor Marina had departed the Venice Film Festival with any awards. The scandal had apparently made them too controversial for the judges. Still, they both gamely showed up at TIFF to promote their work. The show must go on.
Marina had officially announced her split from Troy, but despite fans bombarding them with desperate pleas to let us have this Carmen was still denying any romantic entanglement with her friend. And she hadn't changed her mind about letting go of Sharise, even if she'd scrubbed her socials of any mention of the decision after less than eight hours. She had already signed a whole new team, taking on a manager who had once worked with Jared Day, whose reputation for being difficult surpassed even Carmen's (although in his case being difficult meant he got called a genius a lot).
Vera watched all this happen from the spot she was wearing in Jay's couch. Caught between feeling like she should be there in Toronto working and feeling like she should be checking in on Sharise, she ended up just feeling stuck. Maybe Jay was right. She should have left LA. Hadn't she decided she never should have come here in the first place? But leaving LA felt like giving up hope that Sharise would ever call. And she knew that if Sharise just called her, everything would work out. So she continued to sit there, laptop lighting her face while the world moved on.
Despite spending her days scouring the gossip sites and social media feeds, she didn't want to read her own notifications. Her last post was photos of Carmen getting ready for the Venice premiere that she couldn't bring herself to take down, even though she was afraid to look at the comment section. She worried other people would blame her for the photo leak, like Carmen had, or ask her why she hadn't posted all the other Venice material she'd promised, or that her clients would be in her DMs, angry she had ghosted them. She didn't have answers for anyone. She didn't even have answers for herself.
Worst of all, her sister Ivy kept calling. Every time her phone rang, Vera's heart fluttered like silk in a stiff breeze until she looked at the screen and realized it wasn't Sharise. She sent the calls to voicemail and then deleted the messages without listening to them. Ivy had predicted she would fuck up her Hollywood career just like she had fucked up everything else she had ever attempted. The last thing she needed was to hear a smug I told you so from her infuriatingly successful older sister.
Jay was less sympathetic the next time he came home. He strolled into the living room one morning with a bowl of cereal and stood there looking at her as he ate. Blinking at him over the top of her laptop screen, Vera rubbed her sweater sleeve across her greasy face self-consciously.
"You're putting a crimp in my dating life," he said. "Real awkward to invite someone over to chill when you're living on my couch."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not. You're wallowing. It's not cute. If you were sorry you would do something to fix things with your clients. You would call Sharise."
She picked at a dry spot of skin on her neck. "She doesn't want me to call. She said she would let me know when she wanted to talk again."
"Sure." He pointed his spoon at her, milk dribbling from its tip to splash onto the toes of his giant fluffy bunny slippers. "But that was before you moved out without telling her. If I came home and found my girlfriend had taken all her shit and left, I would assume she didn't want to be with me anymore."
Vera looked at her three sad boxes and two suitcases in the corner, all the life she had accumulated in the months she'd been in LA. She'd thought it would make things easier for Sharise to not have to look at her stuff until she'd sorted through her feelings. Plus it would save time when Sharise decided to dump her for good.
"We're on a break," she said, because she couldn't admit that she didn't know how to do anything in this situation except run. "Besides, you don't have a girlfriend."
He pouted at her. "You don't have to be mean about it. That's a choice."
"Sharise was only letting me stay there until I found another place, anyway. And did I even look for another apartment like I promised I would? No. I'm a shitty girlfriend. She deserves better."
"Maybe," Jay said with a twist of smile to let her know it was mostly a joke. "But she chose you. So are you gonna step up or not?"
She wanted to. Losing Carmen must have been awful for Sharise, and Vera desperately wanted to check that she was okay, to give her a soft place to rest while she processed. But she knew she couldn't be that soft place right now. She was terrified that reaching out before Sharise was ready would ruin any possibility that they could work this out.
With a groan, she shoved her laptop aside and flopped onto her back. "I don't even know what that means right now, Jay."
He wrinkled his nose, then tipped up his bowl to drink the last of the milk. "At least have a little mercy on me and take a shower."
She took a shower. When she emerged, he had tossed open the curtains, thrown her blankets in the wash, and taken the vacuum to every corner of the living room. Squinting against the bright sunlight, she caught the wet cloth he threw her.
"You've left a mess on the coffee table."
Watching him clean up her clutter was enough to make her feel guilty for imposing on his hospitality. She took the cloth to one of the many coffee cup rings on the glass table. It wobbled furiously under her attack, and she thought about her heel that had cracked when Lily pushed her off the bridge in Venice.
"Hey, did Lily ever show up to help that day with Marina?" she asked.
Shoving the vacuum as deep under the couch as it would go, Jay shook his head. "She ghosted me. But this week she posted a photo from some Housewife's Beverly Hills mansion, so. She's thriving, I guess."
"Since when was Lily friends with reality TV stars?"
"I had the exact same question."
Vera frowned. "So, wait. She never showed up again after Carmen's party?"
"Sure didn't."
"Huh."
A suspicious feeling prickled across her back like her shoulders were a pincushion. Although she had spent a lot of time thinking about the photo leak, she hadn't spent much time worrying about who had done it; someone had wanted to get paid and she had suffered the consequences and that was all there was to it. But what if it wasn't just about how much that story was worth?
"It's quite a coincidence, isn't it?" she said slowly. "Because Carmen kicked Lily out when we were dressing her."
Jay arched both of eyebrows.
"And it was super weird that my name came up in the coverage, right?"
"Really weird. Why would anyone care about a stylist when there's a scandal like that involving two megastars?"
"Okay, we don't have to go quite as far as saying no one would care," Vera protested. "But it does feel a little personal. And you know, Lily was upset that you were hanging out with me that night–"
"You were kind of a bitch after the whole canal thing, too."
"She almost murdered my phone!" She tugged at her ear. "But yeah, okay, maybe I was a little mean."
"Maybe I wasn't the kindest to her either," Jay said, with a grimace like it physically hurt him to admit. He clicked the vacuum off. "But Carmen didn't even know her name. She called her Lilah or something."
"Oh, shit, she did call her the wrong name, didn't she?" Vera held up her hands like she was framing a movie scene. "So, Lily is grumpy with all of us. She comes to the afterparty. None of us see her again after we arrive. At that party, someone takes photos of Carmen and Marina which are then leaked to the press. Troy wasn't there, so no one considers it might have been about revenge. But then Lily totally ghosts you, after spending months trying to elevate your casual thing into a serious thing." Dropping her hands, she gave Jay a meaningful look. "It's hella suspicious."
"I've wondered if it might've been her," he admitted, leaning his elbows on the vacuum.
"She crossed a line with those photos."
"Sure, yeah. She did. But I doubt there's anything we can do about it."
"I took the fall for her! If we could tell Carmen it was her-"
"She'd take you back? I thought you didn't want a career as a stylist."
Vera shrugged uncomfortably.
"She's replaced everyone, anyway. She's got some old queen doing her makeup now. I don't think she's interested in getting the team back together." He waved a hand, glossy manicure catching the light. "Even if we could prove it, what would that accomplish? It's not like I can fire Lily when she's already left. And gossip is the lifeblood of Hollywood. She didn't exactly commit a crime by participating in that."
It felt like a lifetime ago that Vera had tried to convince Carmen that any talk about her was good talk. She could barely remember what it felt like to be so naive.
"Remember when Carmen called us the baddest bitches in town?" Vera laughed with a sudden unexpected surge of wistfulness. "Shit. I don't know. It just feels wrong for it all to end this way. Carmen considered me a friend. It would be nice for her to at least know it wasn't me, I guess."
"Well, if you think of a way to do that, let me know."
With a sigh, she wiped the last sticky traces of gochujang sauce from the corner of the table.
Jay bundled the vacuum away into the closet. Vera's phone trilled. She grabbed for it so fast she almost knocked it off the table instead. But it wasn't Sharise. She sent her sister to voicemail again.
When Jay came back, he asked, "Have you seen my Speedo?"
"No." Vera had retreated to her corner of the couch where the sunlight couldn't reach her.
"I'm meeting some friends at their pool this afternoon."
"Cool," she said morosely, thumbing through her phone. "Have fun."
He propped his fists on his hips and studied her. "You'll have to leave the house eventually."
"I'm not ready for humans yet."
"It's gonna be embarrassing for us both if I have to evict you so I can get some ass."
"Probably."
He snorted and went to find his Speedo.
Jay came home well after midnight smelling like someone else's cologne and flopped onto the couch beside Vera. She quickly minimized the browser window, but he caught a glimpse before it closed. He laughed so hard she began to worry his lungs would collapse.
"Are you really sitting here in the dark watching your girlfriend's old movies?"
"No." Vera tugged tight the strings on her hoodie, shrinking the room so she didn't feel so small in comparison. "Definitely not."
"Just fucking call her, bitch." He slapped her back, slightly too hard to be friendly, and wandered off to bed.
She slept badly. A soft, cozy dream about her and Sharise and vast mountains of pillows faded into a nightmare where she got fired by an endless series of terrifying faceless bosses before melting into another dream with Sharise, this one involving a lot of leather and rope.
Her phone's delicate musical ringtone blasting in her ear woke her to a horrific amount of sunlight splashing across her face. It was Sharise. Her sleepy brain was so sure of it that she didn't even look at the screen as she turned her back to the daylight and answered, heart thumping. "Hi."
"I was beginning to think you were going to ignore me for the rest of your life."
"Oh, god," Vera groaned, pulling her pillow over her face. "Ivy."
"Yes, Ivy. Your concerned sister." Her tone was so dry that listening to it made Vera need a glass of water. "Have you forgotten about me now that you're a fancy LA hotshot?"
"You don't need to be concerned. I'm fine."
"I'm not concerned about you. I'm concerned about the fact that I'm at LAX but I don't know how to find you."
Vera sat bolt upright. "Excuse me?"
"Surprise!" She giggled. "I'm here to visit you."