It was hard to rejoice at these words. Let alone believe them.
The photos had been branded on her soul since yesterday.
“If you’re wondering how it looked tome,” she managed to coat her languid hungover voice in irony, “it looked like Rebecca had her head dreamily on your shoulder and it looked like you liked it. And it looked like you’d just been kissing in some kind of dark alley.”
It was the longest sentence she’d managed today. Each word of it felt she was calling up ground glass from her very depths.
He went still.
He took a long breath. “Okay... I know you don’t want to hear this but just try...tryto imagine all the split seconds of your life you would hate to have freeze-framed. Imagine, for instance, a photo of Truck’s hand on your ass while you’re smiling. BecauseIsaw that moment at the Misty Cat, and I saw the moment after that. Imagine everything you’ve ever done, your entire life as a whole, broken down into split-second fragments of time, each of them photographable. Now imagine them without context. Imagine a photographer watching you like afucking hawklooking for a moment that means a payday for him. I basically shrugged Rebecca off my shoulder, but you didn’t seethatphoto. Becks was drunk and she asked me to walk her back to her room. It was dark. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was, Britt, I wouldn’t have let her walk there on her own. Maybe I should have looked for someone else to walk her, but she is who she is now, for better or worse. There aren’t a whole lot of people she can trust. I am who I am, and I couldn’t just let her go alone. I did not kiss her. She did try to kiss me.”
A little murderous spike of jealousy pierced her hangover over that last sentence.
God. For better or worse, she knew this was true: he wasn’t going to let Rebecca Corday wobble drunkenly off to her room alone.
He wouldn’t be J. T. if he’d done that, no matter how she loathed thinking about it.
It allsoundedtrue.
But it didn’t make the photos any less painful.
“Where is she now?” Britt managed.
“I just dropped her off at the Truth and Beauty to get a blow-out.”
Britt froze.
And then she tried to sit up. “Oh, God. Oh God, no.”
Rebecca was going to walk into the Truth and Beauty and see that Casey had abunny face.
It was the funniest, most horrifying thing she could imagine.
“Britt, honey, you need something to hurl into?” J. T. was on his feet and poised to grab a flowerpot.
“No... I’m... just... thinking about bunny faces.”
Casey, Britt was pretty sure, could handle herself.
And then what he’d just said about Rebecca fully penetrated.
“J. T....” she said slowly. “Whyis Rebecca still here with you?”
He pushed his hair back in both hands, a wholly frustrated, resigned gesture. He knew she wasn’t going to like what he said.
“We were both approached at the wedding and asked to do a promotional spot for the Placer County Children’s Hospital. How could I say no to that? It’s in Black Oak. We’re going to fly to Los Angeles from the airfield here. It seemed childish to tell her to rent her own car to get there. Especially since, last I heard, you didn’t care what I did or who I did it with.”
Shehadsaid that.
That shut her up.
“You got something to tell me, Britt? Want to reverse your position on that?” His voice was a little harder now. “I notice you didn’t decorate any other advertisements around town. Just the Rebecca Corday ones.”
Just a few short days ago that suggestion that she reverse position would have resulted in the two of them riffing on the types of positions she was best at, reverse as in cowgirl being one of them, and then giving a few of them a shot.
It seemed an eternity ago. Time ought to be measured in emotion rather than hours or days, Britt thought. Two happies ago. A misery and a half from now. Like that.
She didn’t speak.
