Sinner

“You weren’t picking up your phone,” Leon replied. “And I thought you might be in trouble. . . . I saw the episode.”

“It’s up already?”

He gave me a funny look. “It’s been up two days.”

I blew out my breath. It smelled pretty bad. “Oh.”

Leon retrieved a disposable coffee cup from the other room.

He handed it to me, watching me closely to make sure I wasn’t going to drop it. I sipped it as he dropped another towel onto the tile and began to push it around with his feet to mop up some of the water and blood.

“This is sweet,” I said. It wasn’t even coffee. It was sugar marinated in coffee. “Just how I like it.”

Leon shrugged. “Kids these days.”

Suddenly, I saw him in sharp focus, either because the phrase reminded me of when he’d brought me the energy drink in the studio, or because my system was prodded to life by the water in my dry mouth or the sugar in the coffee. Leon was dressed for work in his neat suit and clean black shoes. Morning sun through the bathroom window lit his impeccable form as he used a foot to push a towel around this filthy floor.

I was so grossly ashamed.

“Don’t —” I said. “Don’t do that. I’ll get it. God.”

Leon stopped. He put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.

“This is disgusting,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the floor or me or Leon seeing me like this. “This is not — not the side of me I wanted you to see, friend. This is not the grand future I had planned for our relationship.”

He shrugged his shoulders, hands still in pockets. “Things don’t always go like planned.”

“They do for me.”

“So you must have planned this, then.” He said it gently.

I gulped the last of the coffee. Both my stomach and my heart stung. “I’ve lost all my credibility. I’ll never be able to convince you to quit your job now.”

Leon’s eyes smiled, even though his mouth didn’t. “Was that the idea?”

“That was the idea. Joy and happiness for you, Leon, in this sunlit paradise.”

He took his phone from his pocket and stepped over the towel on the floor. Crouching beside me, he held his hand out for the empty coffee cup. He traded me for his phone.

“What am I doing?” I asked him.

“Looking.”

I looked. He’d opened it to his photo gallery. At the top was a photo of me, carefree and joyful, flipping arrogant devil horns at him. There was the photo we took at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the sky blazing behind crooked palm trees.

The photo of us on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, the night I’d gone out with him after Isabel had left my apartment.

Those photos I’d expected. I didn’t expect the others. There were photos of surfers running out to the water. People knotted in front of clubs. A crazy, camel-shaped planter with palm trees jutting from it. A fiery sky behind the L.A. skyline. A neon sign that said frolic room. A peacock peering from behind a wall.

A man in blue underwear running down the sidewalk. David Bowie’s star on the Walk of Fame. A pagoda in Koreatown.

Bubbly, amiable graffiti on the side of an old van. A self-portrait of himself reflected in the side of his car, smiling, even though you could see that he was alone.

He’d done what I’d said. He’d become a tourist in his own city.

“It wasn’t about the job,” he told me. “It was just about me.”

After a pause, he asked, “Why did you run away from your parents?”

I closed my eyes. I could so clearly remember the pair of them in front of the Mustang, and it still killed me. “Because I can’t look at them.” There was a long pause, and he didn’t fill it.

“I thought I was going to end up like them, back when I lived in New York. I thought that was what a grown-up looked like.

I can’t take that.”

“Couldn’t.”

I opened my eyes. “What?”

“Couldn’t, not can’t. Because you’re not like them, right? You aren’t afraid of becoming that now.”

But I sort of was. It wasn’t that I was afraid of becoming them — it was more that I was afraid of becoming the Cole that I had been when I’d lived with them. The Cole who was so tired of the world. The me who realized there was no point to being here, where here meant life.

My stomach rumbled loud enough that we both heard it.

“I’m starving,” I said.

Leon said, “You should get breakfast with your parents.”

“I don’t know how to talk to them.”

He took his phone from me and straightened. “Like you’re talking to me. But maybe with some pants on.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

· isabel ·

I went to .blush. I did my job. I sold a lot of leggings. Sierra reminded me of her upcoming party.

I went to class. I did my clinicals. I rolled over a lot of old people and cleaned up a lot of soiled beds.

I went home. My mother made an appointment for my SUV to go to the body shop. My aunt gifted me a bouquet of therapist business cards. I had been in therapy for years, though.

Talk was cheap. I wanted both of them to scream at me for my SUV — my father would have. But he wasn’t there.

Wouldn’t ever be there.

Cole texted me. Talk?

I texted back. No.

He texted back. Sex?

I texted back. No.

He texted. Anything?

I didn’t reply. He didn’t text again.

Rinse and repeat. Job. Class. Home. Job. Class. Home.

I didn’t text Cole, but I kept updating Virtual Cole. I’d have to see him in order to give his phone back, and I didn’t think I could survive that. And I didn’t have it in me to screw him over by holding his Internet presence hostage. And anyway, updating Virtual Cole was the only thing that I had to remind me that life had ever changed at all.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

· cole ·

I called Grace right before I went into the diner. Actually, I called Sam, but Grace answered his phone.

“It’s the end,” I said. “I’m going to breakfast with my parents.”

“I had the worst dream about you last night,” Grace mused.

“Did I go around L.A. biting people? Because that already happened.”

“No,” she replied. “You came home.”

I hadn’t noticed until just that moment that my friendly neighborhood camera crew was sitting on the curb right around the corner. That meant my parents were already here.