Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF Page A

easier—and safer—for you, if I came out here, to L.A.”
    “You flew all the way to L.A. to talk to me,” I repeat, because I can’t quite believe it.
    “What the hell are you doing, Joe?” he asks me, leaning forward slightly. “Getting
married
to this girl …?”
    I lean closer, too, and I lower my voice to tell him something that no one else knows, not even Richie West. “She knows.”
    He’s surprised. “You told her?”
    I wish I could say yes, that I’d manned up and told her, but … “She knew. She guessed. My manager set it up for us to fly to Las Vegas and get married and … We were on the way to the airport, and she raised the privacy shield in the car and …”
    Tommy looks almost as surprised as I’m sure I looked that day.
    I lean even closer, speak even more quietly. “She doesn’t love me. She’s not gonna get hurt. This is all about her career. It’s a business arrangement. We signed an agreement attached to the prenup. No sex. No lies. And no … one else over to the house. Ever. In fact, I need to leave the state if I want to, you know.”
    Tommy laughs, but it’s not because he’s amused. “Well, that must be a challenge for you.”
    “It is,” I admit, running my hand through my hair because I suddenly have the worst fucking headache. I can feel the tension in my neck, radiating up my skull. “She’s actually really great, Tom. In just a short time, she’s become a really good friend.”
    “Well, okay,” he says. “That’s good. I’m glad. I was losing sleep at the idea of you ruining yet another life.”
    I can’t believe he said that. For years, he’s pretended that I don’t mean shit to him, that I never mattered
.
    “I ruined your life?” I ask. He’s the one who walked away. Of course, to be fair, I’m the one who locked myself here, in my pathetic closet.
    Tommy sits back in his seat as he gazes at me. “No,” he finally says. “I’m good. I was talking about you. Your life.”
    I laugh, because what else can I do? “I have more money than God,” I remind him. “I get paid in shitloads to do something I love to do.”
    “Do you?” he asked. “Still love it? Honestly?”
    I don’t answer him. I can’t. Because I can’t tell anyone, not even Irene, that the best I come up with to describe the work I used to love is
un-awful
. Which is still pretty fucking bad.
    Irene comes back to the table then, and the conversation is over. Or at least I think it is.
    Tommy stands to give her back her seat, and I stand, too, because I know he’s going to leave, and part of me wants to throw myself at him, to stop him from going.
    He holds out a hand for me to shake, and I touch him, and touching him makes me want him, viscerally, achingly, desperately. And I’m sure that he knows it. How could he not know?
    “Your past three movies were uninspiring,” he tells me. “This last one … I had to leave the theater, walk out early. It was that bad.”
    “Fuck you,” I say, and he laughs and pulls me in for a pseudo-het embrace, bodies not quite touching, complete with a slap on the back. But it’s really just a chance for him to take the parting shot.
    “In your dreams,” he whispers in my ear.
    And then he’s gone.
    My hands are shaking as I sit back down.
    “Are you okay?” Irene asks quietly.
    “No,” I tell her, and I look almost frantically around for the waiter.
    I fucking need a drink
.

Chapter Five
     
    From
Shadowland
, Episode 66, “Dead Man Talking”
    Starring Robin Chadwick Cassidy as Joe Laughlin
    Los Angeles, present day
    The silence is different when I wake up
.
    It’s accompanied by sunlight and a gentle breeze through the open window, the movement of the curtains, the slow spin of the ceiling fan above me
.
    I’m hung over. My head is pounding and my mouth is dry, yet I’m also somehow lighter, somehow more free
.
    Irene is curled up beside me on top of the covers of my bed in her ridiculous bright pink pajamas, her