"We ought to get into the habit," I say. "Besides, you never know when some bloke on the street is going to photograph us and sell it to TMZ."
It's true but it's not why I took her hand. I just wanted to.
"Good point," she says.
"Plus, you're not terribly stable in those shoes."
"I didn't think I'd be trekking cross-country."
"You're the one who suggested this," I point out.
"Hours after I picked my outfit," she protests.
"This might go faster if I carried you," I tease.
Marisol just sticks her tongue out at me.
Eventually we make it to the shack itself, where the veranda is packed with gray-haired bikers, surfer types, hippies, and regular people out on a Friday. The inside is small, sweaty, and hot, the menu consists of faded handwriting on a chalkboard.
I can already tell it's going to be good.
We read the menu, still holding hands. I grab a bottle of water from a refrigerator and see that Marisol's glancing at their beer selection.
"D'you want one?" I ask, my hand on the door's handle.
"I'm all right, thanks," she says.
"You've certainly earned it," I say. "And just because I don't drink doesn't mean you shouldn't."
She eyes the selection again, and I laugh.
"Go on, have one," I say, opening the door for her. She grabs a Negro Modelo.
I get the fish and chips, obviously, she gets fried shrimp, and we sit on the veranda at one end of a picnic table, overlooking the highway, the row of expensive houses, and the ocean. A few people give me a second look, the don't I know you from somewhere that I'm used to, but no one shouts my name. No one so much as snaps my picture.
"I think this is better," Marisol says, dunking a chip in ketchup.
"This is certainly better," I agree. "I can't say I feel particularly at home in high society, even the version that California offers."
Marisol narrows her eyes.
"What's that mean?" she says.
I laugh and dip a chip in her ketchup.
"It means that I saw a bloke in flip-flops at the restaurant," I say. "I'm sure they were gold-plated designer flip-flops that cost a thousand dollars or something, but they were still flip-flops."
She laughs.
"I didn't even notice," she admits.
"And I'd wager that not a single person in there carried a hereditary title," I say. "Nor had a family crest, or had a suffix larger than junior after their name."
"There's a Robert Hampton the Third in one of my classes," she says.
"I used to be mates with Cornelius Archibald Fairfax the Seventh when I lived in London," I say. "Raging coke fiend. Piles of family money."
"All right, you win," she says.
I look at her beer. It's sweating on the table but she hasn't touched it.
"You're welcome to drink that," I say.
She picks it up, takes a sip, and then looks at it in her hand.
"It feels weird," she finally says.
"The beer?"
"Drinking around someone sober," she says. "Everything I've read about recovery says that people are most likely to relapse if they're in the conditions where they used in the first place, like being around alcohol and drugs, and I know beer isn't, you know, hard drugs, but it still feels weird."
"It's true, that's half the point of going to rehab. You break out of old habits," I say, eating another chip. "But I'm on the beach in California, out under the stars with an aging biker gang and a pretty girl who happens to be drinking a beer. It's is a pretty far cry from the moldering basement flats and backrooms of dirty clubs where I used to get high."
"Point taken," Marisol says, and drinks more beer.
I'm a bit jealous. I miss drinking. I miss beer and whiskey and even gin, sometimes, the fantastic way your head feels when you've had just a few and everything is funny and you're on top of the world.
Stop, I tell myself. This is how you talk yourself into drinking again.
There's a long pause, and we both look out over the water.
"It was Liam, huh?" Marisol finally asks. "Who got you... started?"
"My addiction was no one's doing and no one's responsibility but my own," I say.
"They taught you that in rehab."
"They did," I admit. "But Liam also never got me to do a single thing I didn't want to do all by myself."
She watches me, taking another drink.
"Not that Liam was ever a good influence," I say. "He certainly never talked me out of bad decisions. But if it hadn't been him I'd have found someone else. The problem was always me."
We haven't spoken in a week, though I know he posted bail for himself last Saturday morning so at least he's out of jail. I imagine someone will be pressing charges against him as well, possibly several someones.
And I don't think there's a single damn thing I can do to help him. Not before he wants to help himself, at least.
Marisol's bottle is nearly empty and she's spinning it back and forth between her palms, looking at it with great concentration, like she's trying to put something together.
"If you've got more questions you can ask them," I offer. "I've been to so much therapy in the past five months that I'm an open book."
"They're not really first date questions."
"This isn't really a first date," I say. "Speaking of which, you've already put in overtime tonight if you want to leave."
"Do you?" she asks, the bottle still rolling between her palms.
"I don't," I say. "It's nice here, and I'm renting a big empty house in the hills that's gray and white and sterile as fuck."
"Where you knit and drink tea."
"Right," I say, grinning.
"We could go down to the beach," she suggests.
"It's private here, there's houses."
Marisol finishes the last sip of her beer, then smiles at me, raising one eyebrow.
"We're in California," she points out. "The beach isn't private anywhere."
14
Marisol
"Hurry up," Gavin says, pulling on my hand.
I'm tottering as fast as I can in these stupid shoes. I'm pretty sure I've already got blisters from them, and now I'm crossing four lanes of fast traffic, trying to be as quick as I can.
"I'm trying!" I say, but I'm already on the sandy, grassy shoulder of the coastal highway, my heels sinking in precipitously.
"For a moment I thought I was gonna have a flat fake girlfriend," he says, taking my hand again.
It's because he can tell you're having trouble balancing, I tell myself.
"Can you imagine the headlines?" he asks.
"Probably something like, 'Megastar's girlfriend dies tragically. Sex tape to blame?'" I guess.
Gavin looks at me, one eyebrow raised as we make our way along the shoulder of the road.
"Sex tape?" he asks.
That was the beer talking.
"It seems like every other headline on those tabloids is about a sex tape," I say. "I figured they'd work it in somehow."
"Have you got one?"
I just laugh.
"Please," I say. "I wouldn't even let my last boyfriend-"
I stop myself before I say put an enormous mirror in his bedroom, but my face is already hot.
"You can't just stop there," Gavin says. "How am I to know what false salacious details to give to the press?"
"I wouldn't let him record us having sex is all," I say lamely. "So, the beach is public and it's mandatory that there be access points every half mile, so look for a passageway between the houses to the beach. They're usually marked by a County of Los Angeles trash can."
Gavin points in the dark.
"Like that one?" he asks.
"Right."
"Does the sex tape have a title?" he asks.
"I don't have a sex tape."
It's true. Obviously.
"What about 'Legal Action,'" he says. "Since you're in law school, and there's sexy action in it."
"There's really no sex tape," I say.
"'The Jury's In My Box,'" he guesses.
We get to a set of concrete stairs down to the beach. He goes first, holding up his hand behind himself, helping me balance.
"That doesn't even make sense, and it's gross," I point out.
We go down the rest of the stairs silently as I try to keep my balance, and then I stand on the bottom stair and take my shoes off before hopping onto the sand, the cool grains between my toes.
There's a half-moon just about directly overhead, so the ocean is dark with occasional ripples, the white of the surf the only thing we can really see.
Gavin takes his shoes off as well and we walk toward the ocean, hand-in-hand, equally slowed by the sand, and we stare into the water for a long moment, neither of us speaking.
"I know you don't have a sex tape, by the way," he says. "I was just having a go."
"I got that," I say.
"But I do want to know what you wouldn't let your boyfriend do," he says, grinning.
My stomach flips over, and I look away, into the surf, feeling like a huge loser. Gavin's not one of those rockstars who's bragged about banging hundreds of women or anything, but I'm not an idiot. I've seen the way women look at him while I'm standing right next to him.