Beautiful Disaster (Page 131)
Right now I’m happy to leave it at soaping up her tits while I stand behind her and kiss her slowly and tenderly.
Chapter 32
Ever since Thanksgiving I’ve been dreading Christmas, but it turns out that all the advance worrying and cringing is for naught.
For the first time in ages my parents have decided not to celebrate at home, but jet to Hawaii instead. I can see my mother’s hand in that, but don’t feel like complaining. In the card attached to the envelope she’s left for us, she snidely comments that she’s also ‘giving us peace and quiet’
together with plane tickets and a hotel suite reservation for three for the week of the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, California, the first week of August.
The rest of our collective family members we avoid like the plague, feeling childish about it, but Thanksgiving has left us uniformly weary. We’ve decided not to tell anyone yet that our happy threesome living arrangement feels like it’s bound to stay permanent. Due to distance and busy schedules, Jazz drops out of seeing his folks, and Bella takes the drive to see Charlie and Sue alone, combining it with meeting someone for an interview in northern Oregon.
The week before Christmas, we are obliged to attend the various Christmas parties for our respective workplaces, but somehow the three of us always avoid showing up together. The fondue evening at Rose and Emmett’s hardly counts as a social minefield, although some altercations ensue over dropped and supposedly stolen meat and vegetables. I call or email most of our other friends, and in the end there’s only one glaring omission on that list – Alice.
The days around Christmas and New Years are spent in fear of the next phone call from one enraged relative or another, as Alice knows them all and is bound to talk to them. Her behavior at Thanksgiving dinner has shown that she’s fully capable of planting the seeds of potential future disasters, but when the second week of January rolls around without Charlie knocking on our door, a sawed-off shotgun at the ready, I slowly start to relax.
Life is busy enough as it is, with extra shifts at the hospital, new coworkers, a second permanent assignment for Bella and plenty of projects for Jazz’s budding business. Even if I had the time I wouldn’t be able to meet with anyone, but as the weeks go by, I realize that the dissension with my closest friend of so many years is eating me up.
And it’s not just me, or rather, my own grumpiness is slowly beginning to weigh on the others, too. Bella is starting to snap at me in every other conversation we have, few as they are because of my crazy work hours, and Jazz is acting weirdly at times. Only when we f**k do things seem to even out and return to a harmonic state, but even a horndog like me eventually realizes that this is not a good state to be in. Even less so when things are emotionally complicated to begin with.
And complicated they are. Although I’m trying to fight it, I find myself prone to being jealous of all the time Bella and Jazz get to spend together while I’m not around. I know that they don’t f**k – not only because it should be obvious as their behavior towards each other hasn’t changed at all, but also because Bella screams it in my face when I behave like an ass one evening and hint at them getting it on behind my back. She doesn’t talk to me for three days afterwards – the first deliberately, and the next two because of a forty-hour shift – and then ignores my attempts to apologize.
Jazz tries to stay out of it but is obviously on her side. He only responds to my questions with short answers; his own disapproval is so plain in every word and every look that I feel even worse.
Somehow living together turns out to be a lot more work than any of us seemed to have expected.
But it’s not only me who causes dissent. Bella and Jazz also do their own damage, keeping things less than harmonious between us as the weeks pass by. While not an issue at first, the severe lack of privacy is driving Bella mad, used as she is to spending her days on her own, and since we’ve been together, some of her nights, too. More than once I’ve come home to find them fuming at each other. Bella goes ballistic when Jazz spends a night at one of his business partners after working long past their sketchy business hours. Instead of being able to savor an evening together with just the two of us, she glares at me whenever I try to touch her. The moment Jazz returns in the morning, she’s in his face. Stupid as I am, I try to pacify her even though I myself can’t help but be a little suspicious of what he has been up to. When my patience finally snaps and I order her to shut up and go upstairs, I’m the one she ends up being mad at. I have to run to work so I try to ignore her baleful stares, and the merry tip-toeing around each other starts anew.
Rose is the only one I feel I can talk to about this, seeing as she’s also hungering for attention and someone to talk to who has the intellectual capacity to at least carry on a conversation. She’s mostly amused but doesn’t laugh at me, but she does give me the only piece of sane advice that she can – hang in and work it out.
Of course that’s a lot easier said than done, but eventually I reach a point where I decide that I’m not doing anyone a favor by ignoring the one thing I can get resolved without either Bella or Jazz sabotaging me – my friendship with Alice.
I have to admit, I’m not sure I want to mend things with her when I ring her doorbell and wait for her to buzz me in. The things she said in the past are enough to make me want to cut her out of my life completely without a second chance, if she really believes them. It would be so easy to ignore that ‘if’ and mentally replace it with an ‘as’, like Bella does, or try to get over her without wanting to see her ever again, like Jazz, but that’s not my way.
The more I think about it, the more my mother’s words make sense to me.
As things aren’t entirely awesome between me and the other two, I decide I might as well give Alice one chance to explain. Knowing her, I don’t even expect an apology, and I don’t dare to hope that, even if everything resolves itself miraculously, our friendship will be as it was before, but I just need to know.
She doesn’t answer the door and my heart sinks, but I’m too set on this to give up now, so I get my phone out and call her. A wise decision as it turns out, minutes into our phone call. At first she’s wary and sounds cold, but still agrees to meet me later at her place, when she returns from the photo shoot she’s at right now. By the time I hang up, we both sound almost civil, so I try not to panic until I get back to her door three hours later.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but when I see her standing at the door, holding it open for me, my first reaction is concern. It’s been over two months since I last saw her, and the woman standing there neither resembles the vibrant, immature girl I’ve known for more than half of my life, nor the self-righteous bitch I learned to hate over Thanksgiving. She has gained weight – at least ten pounds – and it actually looks good on her, but her eyes are sunken and surrounded by dark rings, speaking of lack of sleep and other things. I’ve never seen her wear so little make-up or almost ordinary clothes.
"Hi," I offer as I stop at the door, not knowing what else to say.
"Hi," she echoes. "Do you want to come in? I’m only blocking the door to keep Mr. Fibbins from escaping into the wild freedom of the stairwell."
"Mr. Fibbins?"
Before she can answer, a black furry head appears at her ankle, bright green eyes staring at me before the cat gives a demanding yowl. Alice smiles and picks him up, rubbing her face in his fur as she steps aside to let me in. I follow, even more bewildered. Alice and a cat? Unlike many women I know, she’s never liked pets, and I can only imagine what the shedding fur and the claws will do to her design projects.