noticed there was a bunch of cat hair on her dress, which meant Freddy had rubbed his approval all over her, and his scent. Marking her like he already wanted her to belong to us.
She looked me in the eye as she spoke to me, but she didn’t smile too much. And she looked so at ease on my couch, as if she’d sat there a thousand times with her turquoise eyes like the ancient abysses of every truth, just there for the taking.
I wondered if she’d fuck me if I asked her to.
I wondered if she’d get down on her knees.
But then I stopped thinking about that, because you didn’t fuck girls like her and expect it to mean nothing. Girls like her were too easy to get hung up on, and I didn’t get hung up on people anymore. I just wanted to bury myself in producing this album, then the next album, and the next. My work would hold me together.
That girl with the ocean-bottom eyes would only tear everything I’d so carefully built apart.
In my world, you were in or you were out. And these days, it was a very small world.
Black. White.
I stayed behind my line. In the dark. Alone. Where I belonged.
I couldn’t risk getting attached to someone like her. Needing someone like her. I’d gotten over needing people long ago. Eventually. Sometime long after the one person I’d always needed most died.
I wasn’t going to need this girl, or any assistant she sent my way, or even my sister.
But I wondered when Taylor would be talking to Courteney. I wanted to know what she’d say about me. What she thought about me.
I didn’t like it.
I picked up my phone. Among the notifications, there was a text from my sister—from this morning—that I hadn’t seen.
Courteney: Just a reminder, Taylor is coming today at ten.
I swiped it away and opened Instagram. I pulled up my sister’s profile and clicked on Following. I searched “Taylor.” And there she was. I recognized the hair and the lips in the tiny photo, even though the name on the profile was a generic TaylorInAMood.
I clicked on it and read her profile.
Taylor Lawson (Lawczynski)
Executive assistant. Earthling. Animal lover. No flex. Love not war.
I scrolled through the posts. Looked like she posted pretty regularly, maybe a few times a week. There were some photos of her with friends. And some of her with guys. Most of them pretty, clean-cut boys who looked like they spent more time styling their hair than she did.
Boys who didn’t look like they belonged with her.
The popular boys who wouldn’t admit they wanted her in school, but now hit on her at the bar and sent her selfies with their dicks out and ate up her attention, if they could get it.
Boys who probably treated her like shit because they secretly thought she was beneath them and hated themselves for wanting her approval.
She was smiling too brightly in most of those images. Mostly, I scrolled right past them.
Then I stopped on one of her and Ashley Player. It was from a few months ago. It was just the two of them, and the caption said: Happy Birthday you fuck.
They were both looking at the camera, their heads touching, her arm slung around his neck. They were in a dark bar or something, the camera lighting them up with a stark flash. Taylor looked happy and possibly drunk. Actually, they both did. Her eyes were narrowed in those pretty, curved slits, and she had that bright smile on her face. He had an unlit joint dangling from his mouth, and no one could miss who he was. The post had way more likes and comments on it than her other ones.
But the photo didn’t scream, Look who I know. More like, I love this guy and you should too.
I stared at it. How easily they were hanging out like friends, possibly in public. And how easily, how publicly she called him you fuck, when she was so polite with me, even in private, no matter how fucking weird I probably seemed to her.
Polite, because I wasn’t her friend. I was a stranger.
I kept scrolling. Travel images. Pictures of dogs. A couple of beaches.
A few selfies, but not many. And no other pictures of her with famous people.
The vast majority of her posts, though, were just words. Short sayings. Stark black words on white, like that tattoo on her skin. And as I scrolled through, I noticed they