Author: Amy Gentry
Category: Christian
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/amy-gentry/page,17,470216-last_woman_standing.html
“And I suppose that’s my fault too?” I stood up, suddenly enraged. “Because I wasn’t there to babysit you while you dated yet another girl who wasn’t me? I’m not your training wheels anymore, Jason. If you can’t handle an adult relationship without your little—”
“Without my best friend?”
“Your security blanket,” I finished. “That’s all I am to you. We were never really best friends. I was in love with you. You knew that, and you used me.”
“I—” He started to fire back, then stopped and abruptly sat down on the bed, as if his legs had given out. “Yeah. I knew.” He glanced up, shorter than me for once. “In my defense, it’s not easy to know what’s going on with you. You play everything pretty close to the chest.” I kept staring until he looked down again. “But, yeah, I guess I knew, deep down. I just wasn’t ready to do anything about it. I guess I thought—”
“That when you were done having fun, I’d be there?” I said. “Are you all done now, Jason?”
He shook his head and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Instead, his head kept shaking, back and forth. It took me a minute to realize he was crying, because I’d never seen him cry before. There were no actual tears, just a redness around his eyes and two red splotches on his temples, spreading.
“I don’t know what to say, Dana. I just need you, that’s all. I always have, but I didn’t know how much until the past year. I’m sorry that’s what it took.” He looked up briefly. “But I don’t feel done. I feel . . . ready.” He leaned his head into his hands.
I walked over to the bed and put my hands in his hair, pushed it away from his forehead. He dropped his hands to his thighs, and I moved forward until I was standing between his knees, letting his head fall against my chest. His hands curled around the backs of my thighs, under the jersey dress I was still wearing, warm on my bare skin. I rested my cheek on top of his head for a moment, like he used to do to me when we watched TV together, to see how it felt. Then I straightened up, put my hands on his cheeks, and turned his face up to mine.
“I’m ready too,” I said, and I leaned down toward him.
His hands tightened around the backs of my thighs as we kissed. Then one hand moved to my hip and pulled me closer while the other moved to my waist, then farther upward. The warmth enveloped me from every point of contact—his wet mouth, the bristle on his lip scratching mine, his inner thighs against my hips, his hands moving with a slow greed. He moved a thumb over my nipple and I gasped and closed my eyes. But at the center of the red, warm darkness behind my eyes there was a spot of icy cold that refused to melt away. A wave of dizziness, and I couldn’t feel Jason’s warm hands anymore, just the black hole opening to swallow me and a voice in my head that sounded exactly like Amanda whispering something.
I’m still here.
I opened my eyes and took a step back.
Jason opened his eyes too. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just—it’s late.” To have something to do with my hands, I gestured toward the clock. It was 4:17 a.m.
“Yeah.” His hands still rested lightly on my hips.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow.” I ran a hand through his hair. “I’m glad you came over.”
He stood and was suddenly much taller than me again. Remote, but warm. “Thanks for letting me in.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. “I’m not really kicking you out.”
“And I’m not really leaving.”
He leaned over to give me a kiss by the door. Just a light peck, but it felt like a promise. Then he was gone.
16
I awoke a few hours later to morning sun streaming in under the curtains. Outside, the sounds of a motel by daylight banished the specters of the night before; engines revved in the parking lot, car doors slammed. A woman passing my door hollered back to someone to be sure and look under the bed one more time, and for a moment I remembered the last family vacation before my dad left: Big Bend National Park, when I was six. On a canyon walk I’d grabbed a deceptively fuzzy-looking cactus and cried all the way back to the motel, where, to placate me, my parents ordered Matilda on pay-per-view. The three of us piled onto the bed to watch the movie, them leaning side by side up against the headboard, me on my stomach with my chin in my hands. I think it was one of the last times my parents were happy together. I wish I had turned around even once and looked at their faces, so I could be sure.
After a moment of equivocation, I leaned over the side of the bed and reached until my fingertips brushed the corner of my phone. Fumbling a little, I managed to hook the edge of the case and drag it out. I took a deep breath and turned it on.
For the first time in forty-eight hours, there were no new calls or texts from Amanda.
Could she finally be getting the message? Or, having located my motel room, was she just switching tactics? The thought was disturbing but, in the morning light, easy to brush off. I didn’t know how she’d found me—through some sophisticated hacking technology, I assumed—but the important part was that, after hearing my voice on the line once, she hadn’t tried again.
The superstitious part of me connected her sudden silence to Jason. The more Jason had come back into my life, the more Amanda’s presence had seemed to fade. His appearance in my room last night—our fight, the kiss—seemed to have banished her altogether. In daylight, the pact Amanda and I had made no longer felt like a dark secret; it was as flimsy and insubstantial as a slumber-party dare. After all, Jason and I had grown up together, loving the same TV shows, hating the same hometown, yearning for the same escape routes. No one but my mother had known me longer—not even my dad, who hadn’t sent me a birthday card since I turned twelve. Whereas Amanda had materialized out of thin air only a few short months ago with no connection to me at all. We had no mutual friends, no shared interests, nothing in common but a couple of failed stints in L.A.—and what was more common than that? Jason and I were going to share something much rarer, a magical combination of love and success.
As if on cue, a text appeared on my phone, not from Amanda but from my newly acquired agent, who’d managed to book me an audition today, on my third day in L.A.—in just a few hours, as a matter of fact.
I wanted to crow out loud. So Cynthia, who’d practically offered me a job on the spot yesterday, wasn’t even my only iron in the fire. I’d been in town three days and already I was doing better than I had in the four years I’d lived here. Maybe being the second-funniest person in Austin wasn’t as good as being the funniest, but it had opened doors. Or had someone seen me in the café with Cynthia and decided that my star was on the rise? In any case, if I wanted to retire the Betty character, letting all her disturbing associations fade permanently from my mind, there was no reason to think it would kill my career. I would survive, stronger than ever without her.
I took a look at the audition details. A pilot for a sitcom set in an advertising firm in the eighties, Mad Men by way of WKRP, according to the sketchy description. Which meant, I was sure, that I was being invited in to read for the nerdy brunette foil to a ditzy blond secretary. Fine. The producer was on a winning streak; I would play straight man to a dumb blonde any day of the week to be associated with his name. I rooted through my bag for my audition outfit, pulled it on, and added a pair of nonprescription glasses I carried around for just this type of occasion. Then I slipped the folder with my headshot and resumé into my purse. Ready to go.
On an impulse, I pulled out my phone and texted Jason my good news. If we were going to try to be together, I would need to get used to sharing things like this with him. It wasn’t exactly baring my heart, but it was a beginning.
On my way out the door, the hotel phone by the bed caught my eye, and for a moment I thought the red message light was flashing. I forced myself to stare at it until I’d satisfied myself that it was just a trick of the light. Then I left.
The moment I walked into the waiting room, I realized this was more of a catt
le call than an audition. I tried not to let the number of bodies in the room get me down. At least I was right about the casting balance of women on the show; the room was crowded with a dozen or so tall, skinny blondes that I imagined in the Loni Anderson role, some with hair teased up to suggest an eighties bouffant. The brunettes on offer were a little more varied, though not much. I was definitely the shortest and curviest of the bunch. Also the funniest, I told myself, to psych myself up, noting with relief that Jessie, the brunette junior ad exec I was auditioning to play, was no boring straight man but a comic-relief character. The waiting room might be wall-to-wall actresses, but I would lay bets I was the only comic.
The brunettes seemed to be going first. Still, by the time an assistant cradling an iPad pointed to me and waved me in, I’d read four back issues of People magazine and a dog-eared Entertainment Weekly cover to cover. I handed off my headshot and resumé to the assistant, and she passed them to the casting director, a redheaded woman with the weary, battle-glazed look of casting directors everywhere, seated at a folding table. She perked up a little when she saw my resumé. “Funny stuff, huh?” she said. “Okay, Dana, make me laugh.”
I tried my best, playing Jessie as broadly as I could muster opposite the casting director’s deadpan line readings. She cut me off halfway through the second page, and I tried to look attentive and pleased, as if I were about to get some invaluable notes or direction.
Never lifting her eyes from the script, as if she were reading the newspaper over breakfast, the casting director said, “I’m having trouble seeing her in the advertising department of a major firm.”
Were the glasses too much? I reached up and took them off nonchalantly, just to show that they were fake.
“I mean, this is supposed to be the eighties.” She looked up from her script, not at me, but at the assistant. “Get the other part?” As the assistant handed the new sides to me, the casting director finally threw a glance in my direction. “It’s funnier anyway.”
I glanced at the new sides, but I already knew. Office cleaner, complete with maid uniform and funny accent. The role I’d inadvertently played in Branchik’s apartment, after letting Amanda persuade me that there was no other way. The role I’d sworn never to play had come so naturally and so hilariously to me that we’d both laughed until we’d cried afterward.
I read it. I always read it once I was in the room. They said if you got ten TV casting directors on your side, you were going to make it as an actor. So I never burned any bridges. I just read the part. Even J. Lo had to play a maid.
The casting director and assistant couldn’t tell that I was phoning it in. They laughed the whole time, more than they had for my junior ad exec. Just as audiences had in the eighties, they loved seeing a Latina shriek and clutch her heart and say, “Dios mío, Meester Kendall!” Note to self, I thought, no more nostalgia sitcoms. I thanked them for their time and headed back into the waiting room.
The receptionist perked up when I came through the door.
“Dana Diaz?”
I nodded heavily, an old, sour thought appearing in my head. It was one that sometimes came to me after auditions like this one, but it repelled me so much I tried to forget it as quickly as possible. I was wondering whether I would have gotten the same treatment if I had kept my father’s last name.
“Something came for you.” She reached behind her, lifted a vase filled with sunflowers off the floor, and set it heavily on the desk.
I glanced at the card just long enough to see Jason’s name in the florist’s scrawling cursive, and a tiny flutter of excitement chased the bitterness off. Jason must have sent them when he saw my text. It was a little embarrassing to be singled out like this, as if it were my first audition, but then, after last night, everything felt like it was happening for the first time. The flowers were a reminder that even this audition, with its old disappointment, could become a fresh start. I could see the other women in the waiting room looking at me with a touch of envy and I grabbed the arrangement.
“Sorry I couldn’t get them to you before your audition,” the receptionist said. “The runner came just after you went inside.”
“Yeah, no worries,” I said.
I stepped out of the waiting room into the parking lot and tugged at the card as I walked toward my car, squinting at it for a closer look at the messy writing. Then the vase slipped to the ground and shattered, scattering the sunflowers, and I was left holding the card between thumb and forefinger, one heavy sunflower dangling and twisting from the string by its hairy neck.
Break a leg, Dana!
My third name is:
Jason Murphy
17
I tore the card off the twine loop, letting the garish flower with its bulging, black center like an insect eye drop to the ground, and stumbled to my car with Jason’s name crushed in my palm. Once in my car, I threw the hateful thing into the glove box and steadied my hands on the steering wheel, unable to start the engine.
The runner came just after you went inside. Was it Amanda in her stolen uniform? Was she here, tailing me, as she seemed to want me to believe?
The phone calls, the texts—even tracking down my motel room—none of it compared to the violation of using Jason’s name, dragging him into this shameful game she had concocted to entrap me. It was a veiled threat—obviously, she didn’t expect me to do anything just because she’d written Jason’s name down on a piece of card stock. Probably she wasn’t in town after all, just using the Runnr algorithms to torment me by remote control, threatening me with exposure as she had threatened Neely and Branchik. Spurned, ignored, she would want to ruin whatever happiness was in store for me. The fastest way to do that would be to tell Jason about the pact.
I recognized Amanda’s cold logic. I’d seen her tactics applied to others often enough. What had she said about Brenna Branchik—about getting back at women? Women learn to live with violence early on. Getting to a woman isn’t as simple as a tap on the nose. You have to find something she cares about. She’d found it, all right.
But how? I racked my brain for a time I might have mentioned Jason around Amanda. I hadn’t wanted to talk to her about him, a fact that now struck me as both notable and prescient, as if I hadn’t wanted to contaminate his memory. But even if I had at some point mentioned my ex–writing partner by name and she had looked up online records from my high school, tracked him to the University of Texas and from there to Los Angeles—how many Jason Murphys must there be in L.A.? How could she possibly have hunted down this Jason Murphy unless she was here, following me?
I started the car. I had to get out of this parking lot. Whether she was here or not, I felt her eyes on me. As soon as I made my way out to the freeway, my phone started ringing, and I snatched it up. “What do you want from me?”
“Dana?” The woman on the other end sounded as if she had been crying. “It’s Kim.”
“Kim!” I adjusted my tone, my face going red. “Sorry, I thought it was someone else. What’s wrong?” Judging from her voice, now didn’t seem like the moment for a snarky greeting.
“It’s Fash.”
I blinked in confusion and tried to tear my brain away from thoughts of Amanda. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was watching me. “Fash? What about him?”
Kim spoke in a monotone, as if struggling to keep control. “It started a couple weeks ago. He was acting really weird—not that he’s ever been normal.” She bit back a hysterical laugh. “But this was different. He was messaging people in the middle of the night—mostly women—begging forgiveness or else ranting at them. Making threats, even. He messaged me a couple times, and I just ignored him. I ignored him.” She choked. “And then last night he showed up at my house, late, pounding on the door.” She started crying again. “I wish I’d let him in.”
“Kim, what happened?”
“He did it early this morning, in his apartment,” she whispered.
“Did what?” I said stupidly, but I rememb
ered his mood swings in the bar, and some part of me already knew.
“There was so much blood.” She was still crying. “I found the body. Nobody knows where he got the gun.”
It dawned on me slowly: Fash, the website, the wicked L-shaped handguns in a grid. Amanda’s voice: Have I ever let you down? “Oh my God.”
“He was bipolar. I guess he went off his meds a few weeks ago.” Kim was pulling herself together, reciting the details mechanically, as if they kept her calm. “I think maybe he figured, after winning Funniest Person, he didn’t need them anymore.”
Or maybe someone else decided he didn’t need them anymore. The same someone who had decided Austin didn’t need Fash anymore. I coughed to keep from gagging.
“Dana, the awful thing is—I knew he needed help, I just didn’t care. I’ve never really forgiven him for what he did to me and all those other women. He never owned up to any of it. And when he won the contest, I thought, Now he’ll never have to. And I wished for something bad to happen to him. Just to even the score, you know?” Her flat tone chilled me more than her tears a moment before. “Dana, is it my fault? Did I make this happen?”
“No. Kim, I swear you didn’t.”
“There was blood everywhere.”
I closed my eyes and saw red: Fash in his red robe, against red walls at Chacha’s, a camera flash lighting up Kim’s and my frozen smiles on either side of him.
And then something occurred to me.
“I’m so sorry, Kim, but I have to go,” I said, choking on the hysterical giggles that were pushing their way up my throat like bile. It wasn’t funny, but I couldn’t stop. With Fash gone, I was officially the Funniest Person in Austin.
Back in the motel, I sat on my bed and stared at the closed curtains, a dark brownish-red color flecked with tiny teal flowers at six-inch intervals.
Just a few hours ago, I’d been prepared to start over. Everything had seemed possible. Los Angeles. Success. Jason once more my writing partner—but more than that, my partner partner.