“The trip itself hasn’t changed. There are no promises in the contract about what your view on the bus ride in will be. But I imagine that OLE will be willing to work with you after Quarantine, training, and transportation fees have been subtracted from your total. I can’t say an amount with any surety, but my guess would be at least half.”
Edie, sneaking a sidelong look at Jesse, felt a surge of hope. He had removed his clutching hand from her forearm only to lock on to his own knee, and his complexion was grayish, as if he might be sick. They had been arguing already, which did not bode well for their ability to make it happily through three stressful, difficult weeks. OLE was already changing the terms on them, in a way that might not yet add up to much but could later, if the company was this willing to withhold information and play fast and loose with what they had implicitly, if not explicitly, promised. All signs pointed to leaving, and she remembered what Andy had told her that day in the weight room: You take off and let that dipshit have his little adventure, and maybe you’ll even still be together on the other side of this. If you go, I guarantee you won’t be.
She leaned over and whispered into Jesse’s ear, “Hey. Let’s just leave. OK? I don’t feel good about this.”
His eyebrows drew down in affront, but she could tell that she was saying what a part of him was yearning to hear. The trick would be to make him feel like he was quitting for her—acting out of a gentlemanly regard for her delicate feminine sensibility—and not out of his own fears. Frame it so he’d have a story to tell later on: You should have seen this mountain of garbage . . . Not what they told us to expect . . . Edie was a mess . . . I didn’t know if she’d be able to handle it.
“I’m really scared,” she said, and she was, but she hated herself a little. The calculated warble in her voice.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s a lot of money to lose.”
“We’re on a bus full of lawyers,” she said. “They wouldn’t dare not refund you most of it, maybe all of it. And you,” she added in a burst of inspiration, “have maybe the biggest profile of all of these people. If you threatened to publish something to your feed about how they treated us, what we saw out here . . .”
“It would be a big story.” He was nodding.
“Let’s just go,” she pleaded. “OK?”
“Well,” Jesse said. “If you’re—”
That was when Wes Feingold called out loudly, “I’m still in.”
“And your buddy?” Andy asked.
“Still in,” said Marta.
Jesse’s face contorted. He was almost ugly. Edie remembered his derision when Wes Feingold had run out of the gymnasium to throw up that first day, his subsequent dismissal of Pocketz. His mean song, she understood now, was a punishment for what Jesse perceived as Wes’s two greatest insults: his power and influence on the one hand, power and influence that exceeded his own; and Wes’s weakness on the other.
“Jesse,” she warned, but his hand had already shot up, and he said, before Andy could even call on him, “We’re going. Edie and I are going.”
Andy looked at her. “Edie,” he said. There was a pleading in his eyes. “Is that true?”
It had been easy these last ten months for her to deny, to herself and anyone else who insinuated it, that she was a groupie, that she had gone after Jesse Haggard, and stayed with him, because he was a well-known pop singer. She knew the truth of what they’d been through together, the ways he had supported her when another guy would have gone running. She knew something about his secret, kind heart, his vulnerability and longing to be loved. His fame, to her, was his greatest liability as a partner.
But even as she nodded her assent to Andy now, agreeing to see this through, she wondered. She had believed it love, but could it be love if Jesse was willing to disregard her own desires so completely?
She didn’t know.
But if she insisted now on going back, and either left Jesse to find another buddy or put him in a position that made it impossible to stay—either way, essentially initiating a breakup—what did she have to go home to? She had quit her job. She had broken her lease to live with Jesse. Worst of all—and God, how she hated to admit this to herself—she had gotten used to the lifestyle. She had gotten used to not pouring drinks and fending off the advances of drunken, middle-aged men, and she had gotten used to not having to count every credit she spent in the last week of the month, and she had gotten used to good wine, fresh fish, VIP access, chocolate, honey for her tea, the safety of living on a street where break-ins weren’t reported several times a week. She had come to depend on the variety and novelty of Jesse’s lifestyle; it dulled the ache of her loneliness, let her forget, sometimes for hours on end, that both her father and her mother were now lost to her forever. None of these things had gotten her into bed with Jesse, but she found now that they made it hard for her to leave it—at least without some kind of plan in place.
And she did love him, she thought.
“Are you sure?” Andy asked. “I’m going to need you to say yes out loud if that’s really your decision. And it is your decision—not anyone else’s.” He looked around. “That goes for everyone on this bus.”
“Yes,” Edie said. Jesse was trying to smile at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. “It’s my decision.”
—
In the end, they all decided to keep going.