Shit, I must have slept longer than I’d intended. The house was all activity, people scurrying back and forth, shoving things into bags. The kitchen was a mess and Ana was in there doing dishes.
“You don’t have to—” I called over to her as I headed into the bedroom. “Someone’ll come by to clean up after us.”
She scowled, didn’t look up at me and didn’t stop scrubbing. It looked like she was still in the bad mood from last night. Right then, though, I needed to pack.
Giant SUVs waited for us outside the cabin and taxied us over to the small, private airport.
“What about our rental car?” Ana asked.
“Someone’ll take care of it.” I hadn’t thought of it until she mentioned it, but I knew what I said was true. Probably the caretaker for the cabin. He’d find it sitting there, keys in the kitchen, and make sure it got returned to the rental agency. I had people to clean up all my messes. She just hadn’t realized that yet.
All of us wore dark sunglasses except Ana. None of us said much during the flight, including Ana. I tried to pull her over with me into my lap on the couch, but she pulled away saying she had to use the bathroom. When she came back she tucked into a seat by herself and closed her eyes.
“Arf,” Connor barked in my ear.
“Fuck off.” I swatted him, pushing him away.
“Looks like you’re in the doghouse, mate. She’s pissed at you.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. I was sure I’d done something, and almost equally sure that I deserved her ire. But there wasn’t a damn I could do about it on a small private plane with a bunch of people around us. Plus, I still felt like shit. There had been a time when I’d bounced right back from a heavy night. Now was not one of those times.
At the airstrip in S.F., things took a turn for the worse. Ana gathered up her bags and headed on her own to a car.
“Where are you going?” I caught up to her, pulling at her elbow. “Don’t you want to head back with me?”
“I’ve got a massive headache,” she apologized, not meeting my eye. “I think I’ll just go check into a hotel.”
“A hotel?” What was she talking about? She needed to come back to my place so we could sort things out and get back into our groove.
But just then, Connor called out to me, “Remember, we’ve got that thing tonight. With those guys.”
Fuck, I knew what he was talking about. He and Johnny and I were supposed to meet with Lola, Joel and a couple of people from the Super Bowl halftime gig. Most of the arrangements would all get handled by other people, but they wanted to talk us through some of it and discuss the short list of possible guest appearances. Apparently for the biggest televised event of the year, The Blacklist wasn’t enough on its own. We needed some padding with other pop stars.
“Yeah, forgot about that. Listen.” I tried to pull Ana into my arms and she didn’t exactly wriggle away. Nor did she melt into my embrace. “Why don’t you go relax. Take a nap. And we can hang out after I do this meeting?”
“Sure.” Her agreement inspired absolutely no assurance.
“I’ll call you,” I lamely called after her as she climbed into a car. She didn’t look up.
What was she so pissed about? Was it how drunk I’d gotten last night? Was she still mad that the other guys had come up and crashed our party?
I didn’t understand what was going on, and in the past with women I hadn’t ever really tried. Now in a situation where I wanted to unlock the secrets of the female brain, I found myself completely unequipped.
“Woof,” Conner barked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. He was right. She was pissed at me. I was in the doghouse and like countless men before me, I didn’t know why. Resigned, I climbed into a massive limo with tinted windows. I didn’t have energy just then for anything other than the path of least resistance.
My phone about had an epileptic fit on the drive, erupting with texts and messages and voicemails. Lola and Joel and a shit-ton of other people who’d been wanting to get in touch with me the past couple of days all clamored for my attention. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the seat. It had felt so good to unplug. I didn’t want to be back on the grid, not yet.
But the Super Bowl halftime show would not be denied. Even Connor spruced himself up a bit for our meeting late that afternoon, with one of his pimped-out jackets. His preferred look most resembled that of a Vegas brothel owner circa 1979. Stylists had never been able to talk him out of it, and it had become his trademark look with long, open-shirted polyester collars and chains. I wondered, not for the first time, if he ever tired of it. I would have by now. Black T-shirts and jeans took a lot less effort.
But if he tired of it, he never showed it. Connor was on all the time and before I knew it, shots were flowing. Again. Turned out we all agreed on who’d be the best special guests performing with us. Or, at least they all agreed and I didn’t care.
Ana wasn’t responding to any of my texts. I didn’t know if she had her phone turned off or if she just didn’t want to talk to me. I wanted to go show up at her hotel, but that was the problem. I didn’t know where she was staying.
“You know where Ana is tonight?” I resorted to asking Lola, there with us at dinner.
She shook her head, no. “You’d better go home solo tonight. You’ve got until this weekend. That’s five more days until she breaks up with you. Keep it in your pants until then. Remember, you’ve got to look devastated.”
I nodded, feeling kind of devastated. But there, Lola had given me a good out.
“Think I’ll head home.” I stood up, excusing myself. Johnny nodded affably as always, but Connor balled up his napkin and threw it at me.
“Old man!” he called after me.
“Yup.” I nodded and headed toward the door. Paparazzi swarmed me as I made my way to a car. I could see the headlines, “Ash heads home early!” How sad, it was news that I wasn’t doing anything newsworthy.
Back at my place, I lay awake in bed for a long time. I knew it was time to make some changes, big ones in my life. I just wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing it. It felt a little like trying to get off a train while it was still hurtling ahead full speed. The most prudent way to go about things was talking to the conductor about the path ahead, negotiating a rest stop, and checking in with your traveling companions to figure out how they felt about slowing down as well.
But there was always the other option. Hit the
eject button and hurl yourself right off. I knew there’d be a lot more fallout, pun intended. But I had to admit, at three a.m. lying in bed awake alone in the moonlight it seemed like the right thing to do.
I heard nothing from Ana until the next morning. Early, I got a text message:
Let’s meet at noon at Crissy Field. The warming hut?
I remembered taking her there, had it just been a couple of weeks ago? It felt like we’d known each other far longer. I texted her back right away, letting her know I’d see her then. Earlier if she wanted. But noon it was since I didn’t hear anything back from her.
She stood outside looking so classically beautiful in jeans and a Fisherman’s knit sweater, her natural curls tumbling down her shoulders. I wrapped her in my arms with sheer relief at seeing her again. She let me hug her more than hugged me back.
On her hand, I noticed she was wearing the engagement ring I’d given her. I guess that should have seemed like a good thing. But she hadn’t worn it a single day in Mammoth. When had she put it back on? And why did it give me a strange pit in my stomach?
“Thanks for meeting me, Ash.” She greeted me with the gravitas of a nightly news reporter. “We need to talk.”
That pit in my stomach widened up into a black hole. In my experience, prefacing talking with the introduction ‘we need to’ always meant something bad. If it was good, the person would just launch straight into talking. ‘Hey, let’s head to that party’ or ‘How about pizza?’ never needed a ‘we need to talk’ before it.
“OK,” I managed.
“Here, I need to give you this.” She slid off the engagement ring and held it up, giving it back to me. I took it from her, dumb and wooden. Flashes went off, exploding around us from behind every tree, even up in some limbs. Paparazzi had clearly been waiting for this moment. But I still didn’t understand what was happening.