“What do you want me to say?” I asked.
“Say how horrible she is. I mean, she can’t cook worth shit. And Valeria…she does this annoying throat-clearing thing when she’s nervous. Drives me nuts. And she never cleans up after her messes. How hard is it to put gum wrappers in the trash? And she’s so loud when she walks—she walks like a giant, like there’s lead inside her shoes.…”
Summer stopped speaking, tears back in her throat with a realization that all the little things that annoyed her about her wife would become things she’d miss. The spaces that were obnoxiously loud and messy would become even worse: quiet and empty.
“I’m a failure,” Summer whispered. “I’m thirty-five, and I’m getting divorced.”
She said “divorced” like it was a dirty word.
“You’re not a failure. You met Valeria, and you learned how to love someone with your whole heart. I had never seen you love someone before her. You might have a divorce to show for it, but I think…I think you’re going to make someone else so happy one day with all the love you learned how to give and take. And it’ll be the right person, who wants the kind of life you want, because now you know who you are. We can’t be bashed for growing up and changing. Summer, most importantly, you love yourself enough not to sacrifice your future just to hold on to someone else. We see divorce as a failure, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we have to wave a white flag in order to save ourselves, or be ourselves. You love Valeria too much to hold her back from a life she deserves, and you love yourself too much to fold into a life you don’t want.”
I thought of my own mother, who filed for divorce from my father when I was just learning how to form words. I had grown up clinging to the fantasy that they would find their way back to each other, but as I got older, I couldn’t comprehend how they even withstood existing in the same room together. My mother knew that there would be success in letting go of my father. She knew that tethering herself to him would end in wild disappointment. He would only ever let her down. I knew this to be true because I was his daughter, and he let me down every time I thought he would prove my mother wrong.
I felt a newfound heaviness tug at my heart. Guilt. I felt the urge to vomit and call my mother. Summer thankfully put a stop to both.
“I just wish I could be like everyone else. I wish I could want what most people want, and hold on to the person I love,” Summer said.
I slung my arm back around her.
“Summer Groves, you know what? This is probably the first time in your entire life where you’re just like everyone else. You’ve always known exactly who you are, unapologetically. And this time, it took you a moment to figure out that something you thought was for you, isn’t. Don’t apologize for being human. And don’t you dare apologize for not wanting to be a mother. Ever. If you had decided to disappoint yourself in order to make someone else happy, then you’d have something to be sorry about—then you can apologize.”
Flashes of Garrett entered my brain—the man who folded into other people’s vision of what his life should be, just so he could pacify them, all the while failing himself.
A spark of wild energy shot through my veins, and I sat up straighter. All at once, I realized why Summer and I were so close. She was authentically herself, in every way. It was why I loved her. It was why our relationship felt more like a soulmate connection than a friendship. Summer was a rock and I was a kite, but most importantly, we were both unabashedly ourselves. Maybe, when it came to love, I had it all wrong. I thought I would end up with a kite—with a creative who was a wild dreamer, who could light up my nights. Really, it wasn’t about who was practical and whose head lived in the clouds. It was about finding another soul who was unapologetically himself. I needed a man who was confident enough to play his own music, regardless of what the critics threw at him.
I stared directly into Summer’s teary eyes. “You’re my kite, and my rock,” I said to my best friend.
“You’re a fucking weirdo.”
She glared at me, and then Summer turned her eyes away from mine. I watched her chin quiver—emotions coming back like a boomerang. She shook her head, tears falling down with ease. Suddenly, Summer turned around toward me and tugged my body into hers, holding on tighter than she ever had.
Success doesn’t come easily for women who dare to be themselves. It’s a painful road, and Summer and I had already let down a few people along our chosen paths, and we’d let down more. But if we were lucky, at the end of our roads, we’d look back and smile, realizing that we’d made ourselves proud.
42
THIRTY-FIVE
AFTER I PACKED SUMMER’S LIFE up into a few suitcases and got her off to the airport, I came back to Asher’s loft with a hurried realization: I had just thirty minutes to get ready. Normally, I could go from a braless mess to “not so bad” in twenty minutes, but tonight, Asher and I were venturing out into the real world for the first time since our photo had been snapped at Marea. I needed to go from a braless mess to “fucking hot” in thirty minutes. It was a stretch, but I had spent my entire life preparing for this moment. Or at least I had spent the last few years YouTubing too many beauty tutorials to prepare for this moment.
Asher and I had made a deal to keep our relationship—or whatever we were—under wraps until I could turn in every track on the movie. I had stayed in a few nights when Asher went out over the last few weeks, not because I didn’t want to be by his side, but because I wanted to give the utmost respect to the thing I’d nearly killed myself for: my career. My manager had her point of view—she didn’t want to see us together until my work was finished. It was a bad idea to piss off my representation at the start of my career. I wanted her to trust me. Meanwhile, Asher wasn’t the type to flaunt a relationship, so he didn’t push it.
Asher was already in the shower when I got home, a sudsy mohawk on his head, and I disrobed as I opened the steam shower doors, the cool outside elements barreling in and completely disrupting the entire steam situation going on.
He turned to me with raised eyebrows as I grabbed the bottle of Le Labo mandarin shower gel.
“Well hello there,” Asher said.
He pulled me in to his wet, naked body, and I could feel him harden against me.
“I will totally make this up to you later, but I only have thirty minutes to become a person.”
“I pushed the dinner to eight thirty.”
I put my hand on my chest and batted my eyes at him.
“For me?”
He tugged me back to him with his wet hand on my waist, the hot rain shower now pouring over us both. He leaned in and kissed a slow, warm, wet trail from my neck, down to my clavicle, in between words.
“You texted me saying you might be cutting it close…and that you wanted to stay to get your friend into a car…and that you wouldn’t be back until seven.” My heart beat faster as he turned his head, kissing the other side of my neck. “What’s the use of having fame if I can’t use it to secure a later table at Carbone?”
He stepped back and raised his eyebrows at me as the steam clouded my vision of a perfect, beautiful man. I wrapped my arms around his neck. The thick body wash on his chest sent the smell of crisp geranium into my lungs, and he lifted me with one strong hand, pressing my back against the cool Carrara marble tiles with my legs wrapped around him. I clung onto his shoulder blades, arching my neck to the sky as he guided himself inside me.
I clenched my hands behind his head.
“Touch me,” I whispered into his ear.