Page 29 of The Best Worst Thing

Rock Bottom

Open the fucking door, Gabe!” Nicole was pounding her fists on the sleek wood door of some Beverly Hills hotel room, still in that dress, still in those sandals.

Her knuckles, burning. Her voice, ablaze.

She’d found the charges from this place plastered all over his credit card statement. “You want to talk? Let’s fucking talk!”

The door cracked open.

“Nicole?” Gabe’s rounded eyes squinted at the light that filled the hallway. He looked like shit. “Wh-what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“What’s wrong? Are you kidding me? Everything is wrong! I fucking hate you!”

Gabe winced, then eyed a half-full luggage cart poking out from beyond the elevator bay. “Keep your voice down, okay? There’s—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” She clutched her keys. “You screwed a twenty-three-year-old in our own home! While I was across the country, trying to have a baby! You’d fuck her, and I’d Venmo her! So forgive me if I don’t give a shit what that bellhop thinks about you or me or our marriage!”

Gabe’s eyes scrunched closed again. “Will you please just come inside? I’m begging you, just get in here.”

Nicole barged past him, smashed her palm onto the wall switch, and hurled her keys against the lacquered headboard of his unmade bed. A few beams of recessed light cast a too-stylish glow on the mess he’d made. Wrinkled clothes and empty bottles and loose credit cards and—

“Are you doing coke?” Nicole said.

“It’s …”

“No! You don’t get to do that, ever! Party’s over! I talked to Valerie! She’s throwing up! It’s really happening! It’s—”

“She is? You really think that?”

“Yep! You’re going to be a dad! A shitty one, I’m sure, but I’m stuck with you, so if you could try not to die for the next eighteen years, that’d be great!”

“Stuck with me? What does that even mean?”

“Exactly what you think it means! How fucking high are you!?”

Gabe didn’t answer. He was too busy studying Nicole, head to toe. The waves in her hair, the shimmer on her eyelids, the mascara running down her cheeks. The splotches on her shoulders. The creases in her dress. The tension in her fists.

“Where’s your ring, Nicole?”

She laughed in his face. “In the safe. Don’t worry, I didn’t flush it down the toilet. Wouldn’t want some judge in Virginia to think I’m unfit to be a mother.”

“What judge? What the hell are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.”

“Holy shit! You don’t even know, do you?

You didn’t even call a lawyer. That’s how great you think you are.

You thought I’d stay! What did you think was going to happen when you decided to start screwing people who weren’t me?

Does everyone else in your world actually get away with this shit?

Am I really the first crazy wife to tell you to get the hell out?

Because I never gave a shit about your money or your family or your weird fucking town? Which, by the way, is—”

“You don’t like LA?”

Nicole howled, taking three steps toward him as Gabe took four back.

“No! I hate it! I’ve always hated it! And it’s not even LA!

It’s Pleasantville-by-the-sea and your mother stops by whenever she wants and I’m so small and I’m so bored and I did it for you!

I did it all for you, and you repaid me by fucking literally anything you wanted for god knows how long, and I will never, ever forgive you! ”

Gabe, standing near the foot of the bed, grimaced. Behind him, the television lulled. Mouths moved, stocks ticked.

“Please, baby,” he said. “Just let me explain, okay?”

“Go right ahead! Help me understand how the guy I fell in love with in New York became whatever the hell it is you are now. Please, explain away!”

“Nicole, I’m still him, I swear!”

“You’re not! I don’t even know you! I was twenty-two!

You whisked me away and you promised me forever and I believed you.

I built my life around you. Now I’ve got nothing!

No career. I can’t have kids. I’ve got one friend.

I can’t even tell my parents what you did because they’ll just tell me to forgive you.

And that’s it, that’s my whole life. So nice work, Gabe! You sure put some spell on me!”

Gabe shuddered. He was backed into a corner now. All six feet, three inches of him, retreating into the rippled silk of the floor-to-ceiling curtains he’d drawn closed. Nicole took a step closer anyway.

“Why’d it have to be me?” she said.

“Colie, stop it.”

“Why didn’t you just fuck me and ghost me? You could’ve had any girl you wanted. I had my own plans! I had my own life! Why’d it have to be me?”

Gabe gulped, pushing his palms against the wall, searching for an escape. His sweat clung to the stucco. Blood roared through Nicole’s veins.

“Answer the question! Make my stupid life mean something! Make me love you again! Fix what you broke, you fucking asshole! Fix it now!”

“Colie, I still love you! I still—”

“No! Something real! Tell me why you ruined my life! Tell me why it had to be me!”

Gabe took a deep breath, then floated his hand toward her. “Come to Colorado,” he said. “Come with me, okay? I’m leaving tomorrow, first thing. I bought that place for us—for you. We can spend the rest of the summer fixing this. We can drive out. We can—”

“No!” She threw her hands onto his chest. “You bought that place for Kyle! For your fucking job! So you could play ball at your stupid finance bro summer camp! None of that was ever about me! Nothing we’ve done, since the day we moved here, has been about me!

So for once, stop lying, and tell me the truth!

Tell me why you did it! Tell me why you broke us! Make it good!”

Gabe slammed his fists together. “Fine! You want the truth? I never thought it was going to stop! How’s that? You happy now? There’s your fucking answer! You were gone! You didn’t give a shit about me! All you wanted was a baby! You were my best friend! I lost you! It was hard for me too!”

Nicole took a step back.

Blood rushed to her ears.

The whole room blurred.

Her sight was a tunnel.

There was only him. The man she could never rid herself of now.

“Hard for you? It was hard for you?”

“Colie, I didn’t mean—”

“Tell me how fucking hard it was for you, Gabe. Did it hurt? When our babies died inside of me? When they fell out of my body? Blood and guts and tissue—four fucking times? Was that so hard? Did you stand up from your desk and feel it happen? Did you clutch your stomach while your body heaved out your dreams like an infection? Like a mistake? While you were at work? While you were trying to do your job? I couldn’t even reach you!

I called you a hundred times! Where were you? ”

“Nicole—”

“Was it so hard? When I did every single thing the doctors said and nothing changed? When they just kept dying? When the surgeries only made it worse? When I drove to the Westside every day so they could inject crap into my veins and shut down my immune system, just in case? While you were in Hong Kong or Vegas or Osaka with Kyle, doing god knows what? Was that so hard for you? When I became a science experiment, and you missed half a day of work?”

Gabe’s eyes were closed. He was crumbling.

“Was it hard for you, when the doctors finally told us I’d never carry, and I turned to you to comfort me, and all you could do was scream that they’d fucked up?

That it was the surgeries that did this to me?

What, you couldn’t wrap your pretty little brain around the fact that inside, I was damaged goods?

That I’d been this way since the day you met me, and you just didn’t know it yet?

What, did you think I tricked you? Do you think I knew? ”

“No, baby, I—”

“You promised!” she said, hands back on his chest. “You told me you would’ve chosen me no matter what! That we could try forever! Now it’s your excuse?”

“Everything changed, Nicole. I don’t know what to say. I don’t—”

“What changed for you? Other than I wasn’t perfect anymore? Other than I couldn’t give you the three kids you needed to impress your boss? Other than I wasn’t just some thing you could mold into a trophy wife, or whatever the hell you had planned for me! What changed? Tell me!”

He threw his hands over his mouth. “You, Nicole! You changed!”

“Me?” She pulled her fists off him and flung them in the air.

Somehow, she was halfway across the room.

“All I ever wanted was to be enough for you! Nobody ever understood it, how you ended up with someone like me. And then, finally, I had this chance to give you the one thing you needed me for, and I couldn’t do it!

I gave up everything and it still wasn’t enough! I was never, ever going to be enough!”

“Colie, you are! You really are!”

She stared at him. She studied his beady eyes and his sniffling nose and his trembling hands. She opened her mouth to keep going—to hurl whatever else was left at his perfect, pitiful face, but nothing came out.

She was empty.

The whole room, empty.

Their whole story, gutted.

They slumped onto the floor like children.

Gabe tipped his head back. He opened his mouth, then closed his eyes and changed his mind. Nicole didn’t bother to move. They just sat there with their backs against the wall and their heads in their hands and their dumb, young hearts, cold and old and broken.

A few minutes passed. And then, when the silence was too much, Gabe reached out and pulled Nicole into his arms. She fell into him like a rag doll—her hot, wet face so ready to collapse into that perfect nook between his shoulder and his chest. The one that used to feel like forever.

The one where, those first few years, she’d fallen asleep every night she could.

But before her head could meet the creases of his T-shirt, before she could listen to his racing heart begin to calm, before he could anchor her drifting body with his careless hands, she recoiled.

“Nicole,” he said, his half-opened eyes watching her stand up and begin to slip away. “Please don’t go.”

She found her keys, crossed the room, and turned to him.

“I’m already gone,” she said.

And then she walked out the door.