She could feel him smiling. “Your friend is a delinquent.”
She smiled slowly and faintly. “I know.”
They were quiet together, and even when he wasn’t saying anything it was just lovely to have him sitting there even though he was peculiarly the greatest source of happiness and the greatest source of pain she’d ever known, greater than a cigarette ground into her skin. She didn’t know why he’d come.
“Any more where that came from?” He pointed to her coffee.
She passed her cup to him.
He took a sip. Then winced mightily. “This is yesterday’s.”
“Yep.”
“Had any aspirin yet?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll go make more coffee. Don’t move.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.”
He was gone for what felt like quite a while, and then he returned with a cold rag and a pillow, which he punched to cloud-softness and folded neatly. He lifted her head as tenderly as if it were spun glass and slid it beneath.
He handed her a little glass of water and a pill. She took them with incriminating pen-stained fingers.
Then he went back inside and puttered about in the house, probably making the coffee. She heard him talking to Phillip like he was an old friend. She smiled. That was how her house was supposed to sound.
And then her heart hurt horribly because it was never going to sound like that again.
He returned.
“Feeling a little better?”
“Yes.”
But actually, no.
“Good. I came to tell you something.”
And all of a sudden she was rethinking the need to hurl, because her stomach violently knotted.
It would just be her luck if the last image he took away of her was her retching over the side of the deck.
“Britt... those photos on TMZ?... I take it you saw them...”
He took her absolute held-breath torturous silence as an affirmative.
“I know how this is going to sound...”
She kept her breath held.
“But it’s not what they look like.”
“Wow,” she managed. A scorn-laden whisper.
Several seconds later.
“There weren’t even supposed to be any photographstakenthere. Some asshole paparazzi managed to get in anyway. TMZ had it totally wrong. And Franco was way out of line to give them a quote. Rebecca and I arenotback together, and we never will be.”
