This makes him laugh. “And you’re an asshole.”
“Why did you get a roommate?” I ask, but looking around, I’m beginning to think I get it. “Is everything okay?”
“Are we about to have a big brother–baby brother talk?” he asks.
“I would surely get some Mom points for it. I guarantee she’s in New York right now telling the neighbors you’ve been sold into some sort of sex ring because you aren’t answering the phone. Are you going to let her know you’re okay?”
He shrugs, and I push my hands between my knees to keep from smacking the back of his head.
“Are you in trouble? Like . . . you bought a fucking mansion in Malibu. Money can’t be the issue.”
“Do you have any idea how much it costs to live here?”
“I can barely afford my apartment, so, yeah”—I gesture broadly—“the scope of this is beyond me.”
“I probably couldn’t afford your apartment, either, right now.” He takes off his sunglasses and tosses them on the table. “Dude, it’s fucking expensive to be me. I live up here and have parties and have to be seen with the right people and wear the right things. I’d get in a little over my head, but it was always okay because I’d just do another layout or magazine cover, you know? It was fine because there was always more work.”
“?‘Was’?”
Jonah leans his head against the back of his chair and exhales a long, tired breath. “I did a job for this designer—high fashion—and he wasn’t happy. I mean, normally I’m cool with some people not liking my work, it’s art and open to interpretation, but this . . . I sort of lost my cool. There was another shoot, but I couldn’t seem to get the lighting right. I did some touch-up work to correct the shadows and it made the rounds of every women’s magazine and gossip site, all talking about how I’d doctored the photos to slim down the model and done a shit job of it. Some fashion bloggers tore the shoot and me to pieces and . . . let’s just say things have been a little tight.”
“So you did a less-than-stellar shoot and your shitty diva attitude got you into trouble,” I clarify.
With a dead-eyed look he grabs his sunglasses and puts them back on. “It’ll be fine.”
I pull out my phone and for the first time Google my brother. It takes a little scrolling, but he’s right: on some of the trashier gossip sites there are archived articles with phrases like has-been and washed up and fashion feature poison. In this moment I’m eternally grateful my mom wouldn’t know how to Google if her life depended on it.
“It doesn’t look fine,” I say.
Jonah stands to walk into the house.
“How much debt are we talking here?” I ask, following him through the door.
He stops at a trash can, drops the empty bottle, and moves to the fridge to get another beer, which is about the only thing I see inside. Walking around a corner to make sure we’re alone, he closes a tall set of double doors, enclosing us in his massive white kitchen. “The credit cards alone?” he says, pulling at the label on his bottle. “I’m guessing about a hundred.”
“Thousand?” My pulse takes off with a lurch.
“Then there’s the house,” he continues, “and the Rover. I already got rid of the other cars.”
“Jesus Christ.” I sink onto a kitchen stool. “Mom is—”
“Not going to find out.” His voice is deep with warning. “It’s none of your business and it sure as hell isn’t hers.”
“She’ll want to help,” I start to say, but I can already read the answer in his expression. She can’t help. Mom and Dad live a simple life on a small budget. The scale of this is beyond their comprehension, too. If I didn’t routinely see the money floating around California and my industry, it would be well beyond mine as well.
I sit back and think for a moment. Jonah has made a name for himself for a reason, and even though I think he should go back to the kind of photos he used to do—hell, our mom has had one of his earlier photographs, a black-and-white shot of a fence silhouetted by the setting sun, hanging over her fireplace since he was seventeen—it’s clearly not what he’s built a career on.
“We’ll figure something out,” I tell him.
He nods but doesn’t look up from the floor, and inexplicably, my heart twists with protectiveness.
People fucking love a comeback story. I can do this.
“Bring me your portfolio. I’ve got some calls to make.”
? ? ?
It takes a few hours and a lot of arguing from Jonah, but I think I’ve come up with a solution.
“What are you doing the seventeenth?” I ask him. I have no idea how I’ll get Evie to agree to something like this, but I’ll have to figure that out later.
“Working on my tan,” he says with a shrug. “Just like yesterday and the day before that.”
“In your leather jacket?”
He rocks back on the rear legs of one of his massive dining room chairs, staring at the ceiling.
I lean over and kick him to redirect his attention. “Evie and I have a shoot next week, and—”
“Evie?” he asks, grinning.
“Dude. Shut up. Listen. I have a really good friend from New York who’s a creative director at Vanity Fair. He owes me a favor, so I’m pretty sure he’ll do this for me. I hope.”
“For a feature film?” Jonah asks, and I nod. He considers it before wrinkling his nose like he’s smelled something bad. “Who is it?”
“Jamie Huang and Seamus—” I stop. “Are you seriously asking this? I’m trying to help you by putting my own ass on the line and—” I suddenly realize I have no idea what time it is. “Shit, where’s my phone?” I find it under a stack of photographs and let out a tight “Fuck!” when I see the time. “I’ve got to go.”
Jonah has the nerve to look upset. “What? Where?”
“I have a meeting I moved so I could come out and look for your dead body, and now I’m going to be late.” I shove my phone in my pocket and find my keys on the dining room table, beneath another giant portfolio. “Get whatever you need ready and be there by nine on Friday the seventeenth. I’ll have my assistant text you the address.”
? ? ?
After a somewhat late night Saturday spent Uncle-Carter-trick-or-treating with Morgan and a Sunday recovering and researching, I get an email from Evie asking for some time in the morning to talk about the retreat. The mere idea sends a sharp spike of dread through my chest, not to mention the change to the photo shoot I have to tell her about now. There’s no way she’ll easily agree to it. Hell, I’m not even sure I would if the tables were turned. I’d ask myself what I was thinking setting the whole thing up in the first place, but the truth is, I wasn’t. Never in my life have I been so frazzled.
We exchange a few short emails and agree on a time, and though it would be easier—not to mention quicker—for her to just text me, I get the feeling that after the odd intimacy-retreat of our dinner on Friday, she’s trying to put some walls back up.