AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She learned on a moonless night who else was sleeping in her bed.
Hot guilt pumps through her, so loud she can hear it in her ears.
“Fuck.” Ash doubles over, gasping at the gray sidewalk cracks of LA. “Fuck.”
Later that night, flopped in bed after devouring a carton of chicken lo mein and wrapped in a soft southwestern-pattern cardigan, she picks up her phone to respond to a text from her cousin.
Tessie: Well? How’d it go? Did you burn up upon entry?
She feels like she did.
With a sigh, Ash rereads the message, then tosses her phone on the nightstand beside her gory true crime novel.
Suddenly, she isn’t so eager to reply to Tessie. Today was nothing to laugh or brag about. Not like the time she interrupted a serial-cheater’s wedding. The job where the drunk uncle in the back of the pew shot up, threw the keys to his Thunderbird into the aisle and screamedTake the money and run, son!thereby cementing her all-around good faith in her career choice.
It’s haunted her all night.
The sight of Nathaniel Whitford’s face as she bolted for the door of the church.
It wasn’t what she expected at all. Not from a man who’d been brazenly caught on camera in a strip club. It was the complete opposite of guilt.
It was pain.
Staring at the ceiling, Ash chews her lip, her nervous tic. A hot shower feels necessary. Along with a Brillo pad to scrub the slime from her skin. Today, she was a bad person. And not just in the oops-I-fucked-up-and-accidentally-dropped-a-baby kind of way. Bad in the I’m-taking-a-magnifying-glass-to-a-jar-full-of-bugs-and-I-fucking-love-it kind of way.
Is she really helping?
Or is she the girl who breaks hearts to make her own feel better?
Who knows? Right now, Ash doesn’t feel anything.
Least of all good.
Three Years Later
Hollywood Forever is hopping. Tourists stroll the lush grounds. The scent of honeysuckle floats in the light breeze. Sparkling June sunlight ripples across the Garden of Legends Lake. Ash wishes for clouds. She’s burning alive in her boots.
Still, she smiles and waves goodbye to her tour. The last of the day. As she walks toward her favorite bench, she inhales. LA. It’s where she comes from. Deep in her blood, endless sunshine and summers and smog. Hook it to her veins.
Nearby, a couple snaps a photo of the grave of Johnny Ramone. She could fill a library with her love for Los Angeles, and particularly the cemeteries.
Not only is Hollywood Forever Cemetery the resting place for many of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s golden age, but it’s Ash’s favorite place for peace and quiet. For many, a walk among the dead is macabre, but to her, it’s peaceful.
Wiping sweat from her brow, she stops over a grave, her black combat boots dusty from her trek outside. She looks down at her new acquaintance. Jayne Mansfield.
Celebrities at their most human. She could take a lesson.
At the ping of her phone, Ash retrieves it from her pocket and smiles.
Tessie: Poop disaster averted. Call incoming.
As promised, the FaceTime call comes through. Like clockwork. Ash never misses a call with her cousin. No matter how many blowouts or babies or deaths. No matter thedaily drudge. It’s their commitment to each other. Ash would never survive this life without Tessie.
She’s the most important thing in her universe.
Tessie, sparkling-eyed and fresh-faced and definitely not sweating, blinks at her from the screen.
“Lay it on me, preggo,” Ash says.
