The Happy Ever After Playlist - Abby Jimenez Page 0,37
empty bottle and tumbler, stepping around piles of her dead fiancé’s personal effects. I got a bucket from the garage and a glass of water for her and left them by the bed. I collected her phone from the bathroom floor to plug into the charger on her nightstand, dropping a few pills next to her water for the morning. She’d need them.
Afterward I went out to my truck and got the parts for her sink. I went about fixing it so I could wash the dishes, checking back in on her when it was done. She slept peacefully.
A large photograph of Sloan hung over her bed. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was a portrait of her from the side, naked and balancing on the balls of her feet, with her tattooed arm covering her breasts. It looked like a professional photo, one from a tattoo magazine. Maybe she’d done modeling before. God knows she was good-looking enough. It was a fantastic shot.
Pictures lined her dresser. Mostly her and another woman, who I assumed was Kristen. Sloan looked like the colorful one of the two, even though I knew she was more conservative than her friend. One frame showed them at Disneyland wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Another was them outside the Pantages Theatre with a Wicked poster behind them.
There were photos of Brandon too. I recognized him from the picture on The Huntsman’s Wife. He’d been a good-looking guy. He and Sloan had matched.
He had a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm. In one picture he wore a T-shirt that read BURBANK FIRE DEPARTMENT on it. There was a photo of him with Sloan on a beach, standing in the surf. Another one in a Tough Mudder frame showed him with Sloan, racing bibs pinned to their shirts. She wore knee-high socks and pigtails, smiling, covered in mud.
It was ridiculous to feel jealous of a man who’d been dead for two years, but I did. I wondered how I measured up. I was a very different person than he was. Just from these photos, I could see we had lived very different lives.
I went back out to the living room and lay down on the couch to spend the night in case she needed my help.
Who was I kidding? I was staying because I wanted to stay.
Something must have really affected her today, and I wondered if I had anything to do with it. She’d said she’d been thinking about me. I thought about what she said earlier on the phone, that she was in an in-between. I didn’t care where she was.
I wanted to be there with her.
Chapter 14
Sloan
♪ Maybe You’re the Reason | The Japanese House
I woke up wishing I had died in my sleep. My head felt like a tomato that had been dropped from a second-story building.
I felt blindly along my nightstand for my phone to check the time. My eyes were puffy from crying, and my fingers knocked into a glass of water. I cracked an eye open.
Two Advils sat on the nightstand. My phone was on the charger at 100 percent. A bucket was on the floor next to the bed.
I prayed it had been Kristen. I scoured my blank, foggy, hungover memory for a drunken call to Kristen. Hell, I’d even settle for Josh. But then I saw Tucker curled up on the other side of the bed and I groaned. I looked at my last call, squinting at the impossibly bright screen. I’d drunk dialed Jason.
I. Drunk. Dialed. Jason.
I leaned back onto my pillow and put an arm over my face.
He wouldn’t have left his dog here. At least I didn’t think he would have since he’d just gotten him back, so I was pretty sure Jason was somewhere in the house.
I sat up gingerly, trying not to jostle my head. I downed the water and the pills, holding the glass with both hands. Then I stumbled to the bathroom and took the longest pee of my life. I brushed my teeth three times, practically drank mouthwash, and turned on the shower. When I went to pull my hair from its ponytail, I realized with horror that it was damp.
Someone had washed my hair.
Jason had washed my hair.
Sweet Jesus, just let me die.
After I’d showered, just to prolong the inevitable awkward first encounter with Jason since the hair washing, I turned on the faucet and ran a bubble bath.