Part Of The List Page 10

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Is it not public knowledge?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not? Embarrassed?”

  “Yes,” he quietly replies.

  Taken off guard by his answer, I direct my eyes to his, the beautiful hue paled in pain and smothering in gray overtones. “What?”

  Bailey’s grip on my hip tightens and he tries to let a smile slip through. “It’s been a long time, Kenny.” His eyes lick every inch of my bared flesh in the strapless floor length light blue gown I’m wearing. “You look even more amazing than your pictures.”

  Another look of bewilderment crosses my expression. “Pictures? What pictures?”

  “The ones you post online.”

  My mouth cracks in surprise.

  “Congrats, on the job promotion by the way. I’m sure it’s well deserved.”

  I push through the shock. “You’ve been keeping tabs on me? All these years?”

  “Sounds creepy when you put it like that,” he lightly chuckles.

  “Why?”

  “Because that sounds like a stalker-”

  “No. Why have you?”

  His mouth shuts tightly and he glances away as if he has no intention of answering.

  Refusing to accept his action, I snip, “Bailey.”

  He lets his eyes connect with mine again.

  “Answer me.”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Because I can’t let you go,” he practically whispers. “And I know how that sounds, Kenny. Four years is a long time to still be in love with someone, especially someone you probably don’t even know any more, but I am. I always have been. I always will be. And no matter what happens to the two of us or between the two of us I know we’re meant to be together. I know it the same way I know the sun will rise and the sun will set until the day it dies. I’ve always loved you just like that…Same consistency. Same intensity.”

  A sob threatens to arise. “Then how could you marry someone else?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  An annoyed scoff slaps him in the face. “It’s always complicated with you, Bailey Cooper. Would it kill you for once to be completely honest with me? To just tell me the truth?”

  He hesitates before retorting, “I wouldn’t care if it killed me, Kennedy Russell. I only care that it would kill you.”

  His vague reply only infuriates me more. “What the hell does that even mean?”

  The change in music causes his hands to drop from my body. “It means I’d rather die alone and miserable without you in my life than for you to ever have to endure the shit I shield us from.”

  Equal parts frustrated and devastated, I push my way past him, and whisper, “I hate you Bailey.”

  I lied. I didn’t hate him. I hated his lack of candor. I simply hated the way he never let me in. How he was this Fort Knox of secrets that even the woman he claimed he loved wasn’t privileged to. However, the next time we saw each other it was a different story. Under the worst circumstances possible. Apparently, there would be no need to try to crack the vault of Bailey Cooper. Just a couple years later, death would gleefully whisper the combination into my ear.

  The sound of my phone ringing shoots panic straight through my system. I scramble across the bed for my nightstand, instantly relieved when I notice the name on the caller ID.

  After letting out a deep sigh, I answer, “This is Kennedy.”

  “Hey boss, I’m sorry to bother you,” my assistant, Nikki, rushes to say. “I know what’s going on. I know not to call you in case it’s an emergency on top of your emergency but really can there be an emergency on top of an emergency like your husband being in the hospital potentially dying?!”

  And to think I hired her in spite of her inability to not ramble. “Get to the point, Nikki.”

  “Right! Okay, so Mike from the studio called and pushed up the timeline for the promotional graphics for the midseason, which wouldn’t be such a big deal, since you usually stay ahead of the game, but now that they’re keeping Camille on as a reoccurring character they’re adding her to the main credits and want her on the promotional material. Basically, they want you to scrap what you have and start fresh with the recent photos they took.”

  I let out a deep groan of irritation.

  “I suggested maybe we just Photoshop her in but-”

  “It’ll look tacky,” I finish, shutting my eyes as my back hits the headboard. “Which is why they shot promotional photos of all three of them together. How long do I have?”

  “Three weeks. Tops.”

  There’s a small throbbing in my temple.

  “And I know they know you’re on leave and I know they know why, but it’s totally one of those the show must go on things. That’s something people still say right? Like that’s not like old Hollywood talk or something is it? Because I don’t really know how to talk the talk in the business, which is probably why I’m an assistant and not the lead of projects-“

  “Nikki,” I interrupt sternly.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re going to need to take the lead on this for at least these first few days.”

  “But-”

  “Listen carefully.” When she proves her mouth is done moving, I continue, “Take the mock ups I made and mimic them to the best of your capability. Colors. Tones. Removals and additions. Copy as much as possible on your own. Once you’ve done that, you’ve laid enough ground work for me to go back in and filter the rest. And before you tell me you can’t, I know you can. That’s why I hired you. You may not be ready to spread your wings and fly with your own ideas, but you know exactly how to mock something when it’s presented. You enjoy the foraging of someone else’s creation. You like the idea that others can’t tell which is real and which is fake.”

  She snickers in concurrence.

  “I expect you to be finished in four days. By that point I should be back behind a keyboard.”

  “Did the doctor give you good news?” She asks hopeful.

  He hasn’t, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop believing that he will. It doesn’t mean I should stop bracing myself for returning to a normal life when Bailey wakes up. Sure, I’ll probably take a little more downtime, but once he’s awake, once we know he’s moving towards a full recovery, I can slave away while he sleeps rather than being suffocated by my own lack of solace.

  “Everything will be fine,” the attempt at reassurance falls short in my tone. “I need to go. Get to work.”

  “You got it.”

  The call ends and I rake my fingers through my tangled hair. I open my eyes, scan through the list of text updates from Tami and Thomas regarding Em, ignore the pending voicemail from a number I can’t deal with right now, and toss my phone back where it was.

  Slipping back underneath the covers, I curl back into a ball facing the direction Bailey always sleeps. We have a king sized bed but somehow manage to only occupy the direct middle. He prefers to sleep towards the center, and I sleep best when I’m pressed up against his side like a cat in desperate need of warmth. Yet there’s been no warmth in this bed for days. What if it becomes weeks? What if….

  A tear burns in the corner of my vision. Rather than allow myself to complete the melancholy train of thought, I reach over, grab his pillow, and put it in his place. Like it were actually him, I wedge myself tightly against it and shut my eyes again.

  Emma dangles a bottle of tequila from the doorway of her apartment kitchen. “You wanna?”

  I tilt my head at her in disapproval. “It’s 9 in the morning.”

  “So?”

  “So most people don’t start shots this early in the day.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” I cautiously correct.

  Her face freezes as if contemplating the truth of my statement.

  Leaning forward, I kindly ask, “You okay, Emma? Something going on?”

  She quickly shakes her
head, brushes off whatever was swimming to the surface, and sasses, “Saturday, Tuesday, who cares? It’s your day off and you can start drinking whenever you like.”

  “I’m actually not off,” I sigh, crossing my leg. “I just get to work from home and sort of make my own schedule.”

  “Same, same,” she mutters while I watch her pour some tequila into a glass. Emma slides the bottle to the side and turns to grab the orange juice from the fridge. After pouring what appears to be just a splash, she offers, “Want anything to drink? Perhaps OJ with no pick me up?”

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  But she’s obviously not. No one starts drinking at 9 am in the middle of the week when life is going exactly according to plan. And let’s pretend everything was all happy go lucky and she just happened to feel like day drinking, you don’t typically forget what day of the week it is unless something else is plaguing your mind.

  Emma bounces into the orange painted living room of her one bedroom apartment. It’s the first time I’ve been here since she moved nine months ago. The outrageous colors of the walls don’t surprise me any more than the revamped pieces of thrift store decorations do. It’s the size that worries me. It’s one mini step above a studio apartment. She’s always loved ridiculous amounts of space. She’s given me numerous lectures insisting birds can’t spread their wings far enough in tiny cages, which always proceeds comparing her notion that people are just flightless birds in so many ways.

  “So…Friend I haven’t seen since the dark ages, besides being your own boss-”

  “Not my own boss-”

  “What’s been going on?” She flops down into the oversized chair across from me and has a drink. I notice the new nose piercing and falling feathers tattoo on the right side of her neck. “It feels like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  I’d love to pretend it’s not my fault and blame everything else, but I’d be full of shit. Meekly I apologize, “Sorry about that, Emma. Things have just been really busy. Between getting the job with the T.V. show and doing independent contracting for some films, time just seems to rush by without waiting for me to catch up. I’ve barely even been home to see my parents in these past few months.”

  “Do you at least answer when they call?”

  Her choice of words spreads the guilt further. “It’s not that I don’t wanna answer. I’m just busy and can’t answer then I forget to call back and….”

  Emma slowly lifts her glass, eyes still glued to mine.

  With a deep breath, I shrug, and accept the shame I deserve. “And I’ve been a shitty friend. I get it. I’m sorry.”

  She lets a small smile cross her lips before offering me the glass. Once I take it and have a sip she says, “See. Being a better one already.”

  I try not to gag on the OJ to tequila ratio. “You know what’s going on in my life, more or less. What’s new in yours?”

  After taking the glass back, she sits it in her lap, and runs her finger along the rim. “Let’s see…My landlord is threatening to kick me out because I can’t make rent on time. My girlfriend was cheating on me with her roommates’ sister. My job let me go after we had a difference of opinion on how to handle a customer groping me against my will on my break….” There’s a small hum proceeded with, “That should pretty much cover the shit storm of suck that has become the life of Emma McCaw.”

  Floored by the overwhelming amount of awful she’s spewing, I let my jaw hit the ground.

  I should’ve spotted it sooner that her life had hit some sort of crisis. Whenever her world spirals out of control, so does her hair and choice of clothing. I noticed her shaved pixie haircut with deep red and blonde highlights, yet thought nothing of it. Even her odd choice of a panda bathrobe to barely conceal her boy-short underwear and tank top didn’t even register as strange when they should have. Just the alcohol stood out to me and that wasn’t even because I know my oldest friend any more so much as normal adults don’t roll out of bed and start drinking.

  Disgust over the friend I’ve become digs deeper.

  “On a happier note, Thomas and Tami are trying for a baby and swore I could pick out the middle name. So there’s that.”

  A small chuckle comes out and I try to beam brightly. It seems like they just got married a couple months ago. At the very least it damn sure doesn’t feel long enough for them to be ready to have kids yet. “They’re trying already? They’ve only been married…what a year?”

  “Two and a half.”

  The answer knocks me back against the couch cushion.

  “And you know, Bailey’s divorced, right?”

  My heart thumps heavily inside my chest. His name has become an unspoken, Harry Potter villain curse to me. After I fled from Thomas’ wedding in a fit of tears, I made a promise to myself to do everything I could to forget everything about Bailey Brian Cooper. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. Deemed it a damn near impossible one. I mean, how does someone simply forget the one person in the entire world they just know they belong with despite every logical conclusion that they don’t? How do you just tuck away undying, unconditional, unmoving love like it’s a fitted sheet you’re too frustrated to keep trying to fold? And that’s exactly what our relationship was. Nothing more than something that no matter how many times we tried, it would never work. Could never work. It was like a sick cosmic joke for Cupid to laugh over during cocktail hour.

  “I um…I didn’t,” I quiet confess. “He reached out about six month ago, but I ignored him.”

  And it wasn’t because I knew he was married. No, I denied the Facebook message because I knew, I knew one glance was all it would take to throw me back into the endless cycle of stolen moments and whispered complications. The fact he had a wife never played a factor even though I know it should’ve. It should’ve been the major block for the situation. But it didn’t even make the list until a couple months later when I was tempted to finally return contact. I constantly had to remind myself what a shitty person I would be to try to break up their marriage just because my chest seemed to echo at the emptiness from being without him.

  She lets out a puzzled hum.

  Suspicious of the sound, I quickly ask, “What? What are you humming about?”

  “Bailey got divorced about a year ago. Kinda surprised he waited that long to try to fix what was broken between you.”

  Broken. That felt too mild for the ups and downs I continuously suffered seconds after having him profess a timeless love. Severed. Things between us were irreversibly butchered.

  “Then again, maybe he didn’t.” Emma’s words pull my attention back to the conversation. “He’d asked me a couple months after they split if your number had changed. I figured he probably already knew he had no chance of running into you since you don’t live in this city anymore and was going to try to reconnect.”

  I side step the bitterness in her voice at my decision to not come back here after college. “Did you give it to him?”

  She smirks. “Of course I did.”

  My face falls in confusion. “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? Because the two of you belong together. Because the two of you are literally made for one another. Because the two of you are every 80s romance movie and 90s boyband pop love ballad to ever be created. Because if I couldn’t pull you away from your laptop career woman quest long enough to realize all the shit around you’re missing, maybe he could.”

  “Em-”

  “I get it, Kennedy. You have a life. You’re ‘building a future’ but building a future doesn’t mean tossing everything from your past aside. You can love and appreciate both. And more importantly some of us…some of us still need you, even if you don’t need us.”

  On a sharp breath, I sit up straight in our bed, sweat pouring from every pore possible.

  Emma did need me. She needed me to answer my phone. She needed me to be there when she felt like she had no one. She needed me to see all the warning signs that were right in front of me like a st
robe light of suicide. She needed me and I wasn’t there.

  The sound of the air conditioner kicks on at the same time my cell phone starts to ring.

  Swiftly, I swipe it off my nightstand, and answer, “This is Kennedy.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Cooper. This is Nurse Janet Hannagan with Saints of Mercy Hospital. I’m calling in regards to your husband, Bailey Cooper.”

  I try to prevent my voice from quivering. “Yes?”

  “We’re going to need you to come in at your earliest convenience.”

  Dread dribbles down the back of my throat. “Is something…Is something wrong?”