“Bul shit! Friends don’t fuck each other over. Or fuck each other and then fuck each other over!”
“I know, I know, but he’s a messed-up little bugger and he made a terrible mistake.”
I took a step closer to her and wagged my finger in her face. “Are you defending him? Did you think you could come here, to my house, to my life, and start defending him? Fuck you, too.”
She reached for my hand but I snatched it out of her way and glared at her. She gave me a steady look.
“I am not defending him,” she said with forced calm.
“Dex is an idiot and he has his issues. I just thought you‘d like to know that he lost the most out of this.”
My mouth dropped open and I let out a gasp.
“Let me finish!” she raised her hands. “Let me finish before you kick my bottom. I didn’t come here to tel you about Dex or try to make you feel sorry for him. I’m just tel ing you the truth, even if it’s the truth you don’t want to hear or want to believe. What happened, even though it was his fault, destroyed him total y. He was so far gone-”
“Rebecca!” I howled at her, the madness fil ing my face with heat. “I said I don’t care! I know Dex is stil your friend and that’s fine, but it’s al over. The show. Whatever thing we had going on. Even you and me. I have a new life now. I have a new job, I have new friends and I have new dreams.
You say you were worried about me; wel al I can say is that I’m fine. I wasn’t fine for a while there, but I am now. It’s over. OK?”
She looked down at her immaculately manicured nails. I was breathing hard and starting to feel faint again. I felt bad for blowing up at her but she should have known just what she was walking into when she showed up here.
“OK,” she said, then sighed. She looked around the room again, avoiding my eyes. “I’l get going.”
She got up and made her way for the door. A smal part of me wanted her to stay, to tel me more about how miserable Dex was and about how far he’d fal en. But that was the part of me that stil cried over love songs sung by a bug-eyed pianist and I was pretty good at burying her needs and wants.
She opened the door and was about to step out when I cal ed out after her. Something had been bugging me for the past few months, something I had no way of finding out.
She paused, her hand on the door, and looked at me with hopeful, glittering eyes.
“What?”
“Did Dex ever say anything to you about the EVP
tapes?”
“EVP tapes?” She shook her head, her bob swinging back and forth. “No. What are those?”
I sighed, disappointed. “We record sounds of what’s going on around us when we do our shoots. I…I had listened to one of the tapes and there was some pretty important stuff on it. But Dex wouldn’t have had a chance to listen to it until after I…left.”
“Oh. Sorry. Dex hasn’t mentioned anything about it to me.”