It would never be over. This bill. That fine. One job and then the next. Nothing changed unless it slowly chipped into something worse.
Grinding her cigarette into the seashell she used as an ashtray, she took another from the pack beside her and lit it.
Cancer. Burnt out lungs. Sagging skin. Sickness.
She shouldn’t be smoking. She spent too much money on retinol and hyaluronic acid to do something so blatantly unhealthy, but when she needed a circuit breaker—or a respite, or a reward—cigarettes were always there. Besides, what was the point of being healthy? Of being anything?
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I’ll do better. There’s always tomorrow. Always tomorrow. Always tomorrow…
She thought of Patrick’s face in the motel room, his gaze piercing her as he pushed her dildo into her pussy, faster, slower, making her scream. Had he been like that with Pastizzis? All authoritative and mean? Had he been like that with every girl who wasn’t her?
She tapped ash into the seashell and spotted a pink Mustang coming up the hill. She knew that car. Sure enough, Eden’s blonde head became visible behind the wheel. She was alone. This couldn’t mean anything good. Cheryl crushed out her smoke and rushed to her bedroom for her lace dressing gown. She was just pulling it on as the doorbell rang, Eden having clearly booked it up the stairs. She opened the door to find her friend in a leather jacket, jeans, and a white t-shirt.
“Female James Dean,” Cheryl said, trying for lightness. “Did I invite you over and forget?”
“No, but I knew you were awake.” Eden looked her up and down. “Damn, you’re a hot mess. Can I come in?”
“You know it’s four in the morning?”
“Closer to five,” Eden said, swaggering into the apartment. “Can I grab a beer?”
“I don’t have any. Do you want wine?”
“Sure.”
Cheryl went to her fridge with a vague feeling of déjà vu. In the old days, Eden had always showed up at her place at random hours. They’d stay up dissecting the world until the sun rose, then pile into her bed to sleep side-by-side. But that was before Willow and Jupiter, back when Eden was a DJ by night and a smoothie bitch by day. They’d needed each other so much, been the only real friends in each other’s lives. As Cheryl poured a chardonnay, she felt a tiny heartbreak that those days were gone.
“Is something wrong?” she said, handing Eden her wine. “Are Willow and Jupiter—”
“Totally fine.” Eden wandered over to the broken couch. “This is fucked.”
“I’m trying to replace it.”
“Ah well. At least I don’t have to take off my boots.” Eden lay on the busted couch like it was a therapist’s lounge. “You’ve been avoiding me, Bernie.”
Cheryl tried not to look at the cigarettes on the windowsill. “A little bit. Sorry.”
“What happened?”
Fuck it. Cheryl collected her Marlboros and lit one.
“Back on the darts?” Eden asked.
Cheryl blew out a thin stream of smoke. “I hate darts.”
“So quit.”
“Really? You think I should?”
Eden grinned, refusing to take the bait. “You could vape?”
“Then I’d do it all day and not just when I’m stressed.”
“Fair.”
Eden stretched her arms so her t-shirt rose up. Her stomach was flat and there was no sign that she’d had a baby. But then she was only twenty-eight. Cheryl hated to think of the war chest she’d need to rebuild her body if she—
But why did that matter? She wasn’t going to have kids.
