Page 48 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

“Eh, don’t bother,” Rebecca says, nibbling on a long stalk of asparagus. “I’m too hungry to wait for them to come and switch the food and blah, blah, blah. Let’s just eat these.”

“Okay,” Thalia says. “I’m so sorry for the confusion.”

“It’s not your fault,” Rebecca says.

We eat in the living room, and there’s so little food that I feel hungrier after dinner than before it, but there’s plenty to drink, and by the time we’re done, I’m too woozy to think about eating. The chat resumes—just how many authors can these people bash?—then we finally, finally retire for the night. By the time I get back into the bedroom, I’ve drunk so much wine that whenever I roll over in bed, the entire bed rolls with me. I’m not even aware of Thalia’s presence. At times I think she’s there, but when I call out her name, there’s no answer, and I can’t tell if I actually did call out her name. The last thing I remember thinking before I fall into oblivion is: I shouldn’t have drunk so much.

Morning comes abruptly. When I open my eyes, it’s bright, blindingly, painfully so. Neither of us had thought to close the curtains. I turn my head gingerly and wince at the way the slight movement makes it throb. Thalia is sound asleep in the bed next to me, and god, what a sight it is, to wake up and be staring at her. Even this early in the morning, after a whole day of drinking, she looks gorgeous. I take in all of her, noticing little details I’d missed before, like the tiny freckle on her right eyelid, and the way that the roots of her hair are surprisingly dark in color. I forget my headache, just for a bit. I could stay here all day and gaze at her, I really could.

A frantic knock pounds on the door one second before it bursts open. Siobhan stands there, a horrified look on her face.

“Wake up,” she cries. “Thalia, get up!”

Thalia mumbles something and blinks slowly. “Mmh?”

“Shit, get up! The cops are here.”

“What?” Thalia and I say it at the same time.

Siobhan’s face is deathfully pale as she says, “There’s been an accident. Kurt was—uh.” Her voice catches and tears fill her eyes. “He was walking out on the cliffs and he—he fell and—” She starts crying then. “He’s dead. Kurt’s dead.”

What?

I’m looking at Thalia when Siobhan says this, because of course I am; I am always watching, too afraid to miss even one second of her beauty. And that’s how I catch the flicker going across her face. It’s not shock, or horror, or anything that would’ve been appropriate in that moment.

It’s relief.

And in that moment, something cold ripples over my bones. I know Thalia, I know all of her facial expressions, all of her quirks. I know what I saw.

I think back to that night in Oxford, when she’d called me to her room and I’d come rushing up to see Antoine bathed in blood and Thalia shaking with fear. He’d attacked her, she’d said. It was self-defense, she’d said. And I’d simply believed her even though none of it felt right. So many pieces not fitting in. But I’d wanted to believe her. I’d loved her—I still do, and I would’ve believed anything she told me.

And now Kurt is dead, and for the first time, I wonder if maybe I don’t know Thalia that well afterall.

Part Three

21

Thalia

Jane knows. She knows that I have something to do with Kurt’s little accident.

She’s not saying anything, of course, but she knows, and that’s a bit of a shame. Rather spoils the surprise a bit. She’s always been like that, so hopeless with the social cues, which I found amusing when we first met. There were so many things about Jane that amused me at first. Like the way she was so obviously obsessed with me from that moment I saved her at the bus station. My god, the way she’d gazed at me, like a leper being allowed to touch Jesus’s robes, or a fan at a BTS concert. It was exhilarating. It was the whole reason why I started flirting with her, asking her to come to my room and try on dresses. I thought she was going to have a heart attack when I started undressing in front of her. I suppose that was somewhat cruel of me, teasing her like that. But I adore the feeling of being adored, don’t you?

And before I could get bored of it, she told me, in a drunkenstupor, that she’s a sociopath, which piqued my interest, because you see, when I was fifteen, Aunt Claudette finally convinced my idiot mother to take me to a clinical psychologist, where I was actually properly diagnosed with APD—antisocial personality disorder. So can you blame me for being curious when I came across Jane? What are the odds of two people with APD coming across each other in this vast world? And oof, that little essay she wrote about wanting to strangle a beautiful woman. That was so clearly a love letter written for me. Very romantic, isn’t it? She really shouldn’t call people like us sociopaths, though.

Terms like “sociopath” and “psychopath” are very nineties and not politically correct anymore. I’m very careful to be politically correct at all times. On social media, my political views lean left (BLM! No TERFs!) because I have learned that this is what’s currently acceptable. Don’t worry, you can still like me; I’m not secretly a Republican.

I just don’t give a shit.

The psychologist referred me to some specialist or another, who tried their best with interventions—I have always hated that word “intervention” because it is a lie, and what they were doing was more of an interruption, a distraction. I went along with it anyway, just to get them off my back, and plus it was quite fun toying with them and seeing if they bought my act. If anything, the treatment they put me on taught me how to become a better actress, how to guess what the other person is thinking and wrap that knowledge around my finger, so that when I crooked it, they would do my bidding. I’m not sure if I ever fooled them completely, but no matter, because your average person isn’t quite as intuitive as a professional psychologist, even though they’d like to think they are.

Take Kurt, for example. Oh, Kurt. Named after Vonnegut, which should tell you something about his fucked-up parents. Kurt writes love stories—he’d get so riled up if you called them romances—about dying people. His characters are always suffering from some form of cancer that’s terminal but not the kind that turns them ugly and unmarketable. Because of this, Kurt thinks he knows love, and he resents that his wife doesn’t love him the way that his characters do, the kind of love that only exists when both people know that their time is limited. He thinks she doesn’t deserve him (he’s right; she deserves someone better). Enter me.

I do not want sex; I mean, I do, but not from Kurt, for god’s sake, with his pale, skinny-fat author’s body. I have plenty of lovers, one in every city, in fact, and all I wanted from Kurt was his agent. Most writers love to recommend their agents, as though the fact that they were fortunate enough to land a good agent is somehow a reflection of them, but not Kurt. Kurt was represented by the legendary Beatrice McHale, an agent whose smallest deals are at the very least “significant” (this is Publishers Marketplace speak for “$250,000 to $499,000”). Rumor has it that the clients whose books do not sell for at least $250,000 get dropped. It might sound heartless, but to me it speaks of efficiency and, well, probably someone who also has APD. Imagine me being represented by a fellow psychopath. Unfortunately, Beatrice only takes clients by referrals, so I figured I’d schmooze up to Kurt until he referred me to her.

But it turned out that Kurt, fed on a steady diet of his own clichéd love stories, believed in True Love, just not with his own wife. So I pretended to be attracted to him, smiling as he droned on and on about his latest project, telling him how beautiful his shit-brown eyes were, how gentle his limp fingers were, howmuch I longed for his flaccid touch. I have done more, and would do more. Anything it takes to advance my career. You’re wondering why. You’re thinking: Why not just write better?

Anyone who thinks that publishing is a meritocracy is not in publishing.

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