I feel bad for her parents. I feel terrible for all the guys who genuinely offered their hearts. Mostly, I feel terrible for her. I picture Harvey showing someone Delilah’s apartment full of her things and I sit. This one hurt. It did. LA consumes people. Able-bodied, intelligent people like Henderson and Delilah move here and turn into oversexed monsters and it didn’t have to be this way. They both could have been a little kinder. I don’t feel so bad anymore. My body count in LA: one star and one star fucker.
I slide into the Marina at the thirty-degree angle. I don’t turn too early or too late. I learned so much this summer. I am a boater, a writer. The Donzi is in the slip. And then I hear someone calling my name.
Love.
She is wrapped up in her hooded bathrobe. I am in last night’s clothes and it’s a good thing I’m already parked because now my adrenaline is going and my body is shaking. She is not smiling and I have no idea how long she’s been here, if she saw me go out to sea with my bag, and return with nothing.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she demands. “You bail on me and go out on my fucking boat?”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. “I just went for a ride,” I say.
“Alone?” she asks. And fuck. My eyes scan the floor for blood but I’m good; no mug of piss here, nothing to see, folks.
“Obviously,” I answer. “Do you see anyone else here?”
I can tell by her demeanor that the answer is no, she does not see anyone now; she did not see anyone when there was someone to see. She doesn’t know what I did, that I cheated, that I let Delilah into my bed, onto my body, that I put her out to sea. More secrets, more bad things, but I am safe.
“I’m kind of surprised to see you,” I say, and turn the tables.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I wrote to you. I didn’t hear back.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I didn’t write back to you because I don’t write back to people who treat me like shit. I’m not a doormat, Joe.”
“Me neither,” I snap. “Did you have fun with your little friend Milo?”
“You mean my director?” she asks. “Because that’s what he is, Joe. My director. He’s not my boyfriend and he’s not the enemy and we’re in business together. Business that matters to me, goddamn it. Business you walked out on. Business that is mine.”
She trembles and I know. She didn’t fuck him and she didn’t dump me and fuck I overreacted. I fucked up. The Donzi shimmies and what I wouldn’t give to be on land. Instead I’m on this boat, this vessel that belongs to her family. She gets to be the steady one, on the dock, entitled, land ho, and fuck me.
Love folds her arms. “Just throw me the fucking line,” she says, my teacher, my boss. I toss it to her and she ties a knot fast, so smooth, such a rich girl. I climb off the boat, clumsy as all fuck. She stomps along the dock and onto the beach and I follow her onto the sand. Me, the follower.
“Love,” I say. “Let me just say I’m sorry. I know I have no excuse.”
“Joe, when something good happens to me and you shit on it . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I proclaim. I reach for her. She backs away. I say it again. “I’m sorry, Love.”
“It’s not enough,” she says. “You were such a dick, Joe. The second we got the green light, you turned into one of those dickhead guys who doesn’t like it when his girlfriend gets attention.”
She continues to blast me. She says I let her down. I should have been a man and I should have congratulated her and I should have meant it. I should have expressed interest in the script and I should have been up front about my obvious jealousy issues. I should have called her instead of texting her because that was a bitch move and I should have hung around the neighborhood and waited for her after the show. All the things I should have done and we can’t go back in time.
“I know,” she says. “But do you get it? Do you get that it’s not going to be like this?”
“Yes,” I say, and I’ve never loved her as much as I do right now and I want the chance to be the good guy, the best guy, the talking guy. I want to clean my dick and scrub my skin and start over. I love her too much to let this be the end.
“Love,” I say. “I am so sorry. You have to understand. You are right. I acted like a fucking douche.”
She looks at me. I beg her with my eyes and my hands and I am as strong as she is. I apologize again and again and something transforms inside of her and my hands and my eyes did the work that I was unable to do with my dirty mouth. Love nods.
“Okay,” she says. “We’re okay.”
And somehow we are hugging and we kiss, just one kiss, a make-up kiss, a no-sex-yet kiss, and then we flop into lounge chairs. The fight is over and she tells me about Seth Rogen’s weed and her costume fitting and that she has news.
“More news?” I ask.
“Forty and Monica broke up,” she says. “This was almost a record for him though. I mean, girls are like shoes for him, you know?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She shrugs. “I know this will sound dumb but I really thought it was gonna stick. Because of the stupid Friends thing.”
“It’s not stupid,” I say. “It’s sweet. You want the best for him.”
She nods and checks her watch. “We should go get packed. The jet leaves at noon.”
I look at her. “We have to pack?”
She rolls her eyes. “Joe, come on. What do you mean? You think you’re not going?”
“You didn’t invite me.”
“Didn’t invite you?” She balks. “We’ve been seeing each other the whole summer and we practically live together. I don’t have to invite you. You should know you’re invited.”
“Well, Monica said that Forty invited her.”
She rolls her eyes. “So? We have our own way of talking and our own thing. Why don’t you get that, Joe?”
I don’t know and Love says it’s going to be intense in Palm Springs. We won’t last unless I communicate.
So I try. “Okay. I guess I also wasn’t sure because of Milo.”
She sighs and now she explains her dynamic with Milo. They are best friends, to an extent. She uses the phrase third twin and she says it’s hard to talk about because it’s friendship steeped in guilt. “I’m closer with him than I am with Forty,” she whispers. “I mean, do you know how wrong that is?”
“You can’t help who you love.”
“Milo and I both want the best for Forty. So when you see us together or whatever, I mean, no guy I ever dated liked it. I get it. It sucks. But we’re just friends.”
Love is essentially asking me to tolerate her bond with another man, a good-looking fucker she’s known for longer than she’s known me. It’s impossible, like snow in Malibu. Absurd. But what can I do?
She takes my hand. “I wish we could stay here all day,” she says.
I want to fuck her in the sand but she says we have to pack. She stretches and pulls her robe tighter and I know her well enough to know that she is closing a door on this fight, that the war between us was transitional.
Love blows a kiss to the sea. “Good-bye, ocean,” she says.
I stay for a moment longer, staring at Delilah’s giant blue grave. It would be impossible to find my bag in there and the permanence of decisions made at sea is bigger than all of us. The wind whips, waves crash, and I head inside.
Summer is over.
32
BOOTS and Puppies is already on IMBD: Best friends and former lovers Harmony and Oren are both engaged to other people. They spend forty-eight hours together trying to learn from the past, live for the present, and decide on their future. But Boots and Puppies isn’t a movie—it’s a FUCK YOU to me and Love, a ninety-five-page torture chamber of increasingly graphic love scenes between Oren (Milo) and Harmony (Love). Spoiler alert: Harmony and Oren—the only characters in the whole fucking movie—finally decide to get married when Harmony realizes that she needs to let go of the white puppy she rescued who keeps chewing on all her boots. FUCK YOU, MILO. Harmony runs to Oren, who knew she would come to her senses. FUCK YOU, MILO.