Beautiful People | wlw

Thirty-one: Intermission

After Venice, LA's smoggy skyline lost all its charm for Vera. She drew the heavy blackout curtains, plunging Jay's living room into ambiguous laptop-lit twilight, and lay curled on his sagging couch for a week straight. September hadn't faded the summer heat and the apartment was unbearably hot when the air conditioner was off but unbearably cold when it was on, so she cocooned herself in six blankets and set about covering them in a fur of chip crumbs.

"I regret saying you could crash here," Jay said when he came home from Venice to find his tiny kitchen buried under takeout containers. "When you said you were going home, I thought you meant home home. Like where you came from."

"Seattle?"

"Yeah, exactly. Not my couch."

"You're mad at me."

"I'm pissed. You left us all hanging, Vee."

She didn't want to meet his eyes. "I know. You did a great job, though."

"I did, it's true." He flipped his hair. "It was kinda fun to play dress up with Marina. Maybe I should get into styling." Then he seemed to remember he was supposed to be upset with her. "But that was your job. How long do you plan to stay here?"

"I just need some time to figure my shit out." She rubbed a dented fingernail.

She must have looked too pathetic to resist because he didn't kick her out. She took out her trash and nodded along as he hassled her to reach out to Sharise, or her clients, or literally anyone to apologize for walking out on them. In a few days, he left again, this time for Toronto.

As the quiet drew in, Vera pulled out her sketchbook and stared at a blank page as she tried to think about what the hell she was going to do. She didn't really believe Jay that she could just apologize and make it all go away, and she didn't know if she even wanted to. As much fun as she'd had the last few months before it fell apart, she couldn't help feeling like she'd spent all that time and effort going down the wrong path. Maybe she had spent her whole life going down the wrong path, always approaching things sideways and for the wrong reasons.

After a while she gave up and started reading the gossip again.

Neither Carmen nor Marina had departed the Venice Film Festival with any awards. The scandal had apparently made them too controversial for the judges. Still, they both gamely showed up at TIFF to promote their work. The show must go on.

Marina had officially announced her split from Troy, but despite fans bombarding them with desperate pleas to let us have this Carmen was still denying any romantic entanglement with her friend. And she hadn't changed her mind about letting go of Sharise, even if she'd scrubbed her socials of any mention of the decision after less than eight hours. She had already signed a whole new team, taking on a manager who had once worked with Jared Day, whose reputation for being difficult surpassed even Carmen's (although in his case being difficult meant he got called a genius a lot).

Vera watched all this happen from the spot she was wearing in Jay's couch. Caught between feeling like she should be there in Toronto working and feeling like she should be checking in on Sharise, she ended up just feeling stuck. Maybe Jay was right. She should have left LA. Hadn't she decided she never should have come here in the first place? But leaving LA felt like giving up hope that Sharise would ever call. And she knew that if Sharise just called her, everything would work out. So she continued to sit there, laptop lighting her face while the world moved on.

Despite spending her days scouring the gossip sites and social media feeds, she didn't want to read her own notifications. Her last post was photos of Carmen getting ready for the Venice premiere that she couldn't bring herself to take down, even though she was afraid to look at the comment section. She worried other people would blame her for the photo leak, like Carmen had, or ask her why she hadn't posted all the other Venice material she'd promised, or that her clients would be in her DMs, angry she had ghosted them. She didn't have answers for anyone. She didn't even have answers for herself.