Niko woke up to Merrittstraddling him.
He’d passed out on the couch while waiting for her to come home, and even though it was clearly more playful than sexy, his body stirred in response before he was fully awake yet.
“Hi,” he said blearily, running his hands up her thighs, and she leaned down to kiss him.
“Sorry I got back so late.”
She’d texted him to give him a heads-up that he was on his own for dinner and she wasn’t sure how long the session would run. He glanced at his phone to see it was almost ten, a few missed texts from her waiting on his lock screen.
He rubbed his eyes, trying to clear the sleep out of them. “How was it?”
“Weird,” she said on a weary exhale. “But overall good, I think.” She looked down at him, her brow crinkling. “What’s up?”
“What?” he asked, suddenly alert.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Niko froze.
When he’d gotten home from his day out, he’d been unsure what to do with himself in the face of several more unoccupied hours alone in an unfamiliar city. So, he’d done the one thing he’d been able to restrain himself from the entire time he’d known Merritt.
Maybe it was because she’d seemed so restless and uneasy ever since they’d entered the city limits. Maybe it was because she was taking a tentative step back into the life she’d left behind, one he still knew almost nothing about. Maybe it was because, for once, he didn’t have anything better to do.
He’d Googled her.
The flood of information was overwhelming, the pit in his stomach growing larger the longer he looked.
He saw her on the cover ofRolling Stoneat eighteen, the wordsWho’s Afraid of Merritt Valentine?next to her face, her lips painted as red as the cherry she held between her teeth, stem pulled taut.
He saw her pouring herself into a car after a night at the club, eyes glazed and laughing hysterically, leaning on a woman it took him a moment to realize was her friend Nora, unrecognizable with buzzed hair and dark eye makeup.
He saw her flipping off the paparazzi with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other, not even looking at the camera, which Niko learned he could get printed on a variety of T-shirt colors if he wanted.
He saw the mug shot from when she was arrested at her twenty-first birthday party in New Orleans, for public intoxication: smirking, eyebrow arched, staring down the cameraconfrontationally, almost flirtatiously. He could get that one on a T-shirt, too.
There was a multi-paragraph section labeled “Controversies” on her Wikipedia page, though none of them seemed that bad to him. She’d performed on variety sketch showLate Night Livein a translucent shirt and no bra, earning herself a lifetime ban and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine from the FCC. When she’d won her Oscar, she’d used her speech to call out one of the nominees for Best Actor, who’d been accused of abusing his costar on set. Then there were the shows she’d shown up to hours late, or too fucked-up to perform, or not at all. Once he got to the lurid details of her overdose, he had to close that window completely.
In the past few years, though, there were only a couple of hits. She’d shown up at the Sundance Film Festival with someone named Alan Hardwicke, an older man whom she’d been seen with on the red carpet and in a blurry photo of the two of them kissing on a couch at a party.
Those photos were the ones that rattled Niko the most, unfamiliar jealousy burning through him like battery acid in his veins. The dates were after she’d arrived in Crested Peak, but before he’d started work on her house. Had she been lying about not dating anyone for two years?
Then, of course, there was some coverage of the auction. But the most recent mention, to Niko’s surprise, involved him. He felt an unexpected jolt seeing his own dopily smiling face staring back at him as the chef from the THC pop-up restaurant leaned over their table, Merritt on his other side, also looking extremely stoned.
He had zero memory of posing for that picture in the first place, but apparently the chef had posted it on social media and it had gotten some traction. Niko allowed himself to look at thecomments for that one, which seemed about evenly divided between “glad she’s looking so happy and healthy” and “I thought this bitch was dead already,” with just a sprinkling of “who’s that hot guy with her???”
By the time he forced himself to stop, he felt as sick as when he’d gorged himself on Costco sheet cake at his first birthday back in the States.
He didn’t know what to do with any of this information. Mostly, he felt deep empathy for how publicly she’d struggled, horrified by how little anyone had done about it until it was almost too late. But as he gazed up at her now, sitting on top of him, warm and solid and real, the slight physical differences—the silver in her hair, the lines around her mouth, the softness of her body—only underscored how vastly different she was on the inside, the biggest changes invisible to the eye. It was hard to mesh the two images together in his mind, which was probably what she was seeing on his face.
“Just tired,” he said, pulling her down so she was resting on top of him, chest to chest. He stroked her hair. “Did you eat yet?”
She nodded. “Yeah, we ordered in. I remember when I was younger, I would sometimes get so into it that I would forget to eat all day. I amnotlike that now.”
When he tried to talk about how her day had gone, she brushed it off, asking about his instead. He obliged, even though it wasn’t very interesting, but she listened as intently as if he were recounting his journey home from the Trojan War.
She pushed herself up onto her elbow to get a better view of him. “Oh, I almost forgot, we got invited to Sadie’s birthday party on Saturday. Do you want to go?”
He nodded. “Sure, sounds fun. Like, at her house?”
