CHAPTER SIX
Crash Into Me – Dave Matthews Band
It was Stella’s birthday.
I had been working on her birthday for months. It was a big one. Not because she was entering the final year of her twenties, but because it was the year that her mother first started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. The disease that haunted my delightful, kind, vulnerable friend. The disease that stole her mother away from her. That stalked her like a ghost. She barely talked about it. Only on one night, the great confession, as I liked to think of it.
We’d all been extremely wasted and shared our darkest secrets. Traumas. Fears. Each burden my precious friends carried was heavy. Impossibly so. Looking at each of them, you would never guess it. They were successful, stunning, shiny. You never knew the weight people carried, no matter how perfect their lives looked on the outside.
So Stella was not worrying about her looming thirties because of wrinkles or her biological clock ticking. She was terrified of having her life stolen from her. Of having everything she ever was taken away, warped by a disease that had caused her mother to try to kill her.
I could not do a thing about that. I was not a doctor, though I had met with some of the foremost specialists on paranoid schizophrenia and researched all of the emerging and experimental treatments for the disease so we could be prepared for the worst. So if needed, Stella could live the life she deserved with the proper treatment. I didn’t tell her about that, of course. Law of Attraction and all… What you think and believe will manifest. She did not need to know about that, but I needed to be prepared to help my friend in any way that I could.
I didn’t really have anything else to offer.
Except that I could throw her one hell of a party. Which, if I did say so myself, was what I did.
The bitch loved Lord of the Rings, fantasy and faeries. Which made sense. With her delicate features, her strawberry blonde hair and iridescent, pale skin, she looked like a fairy princess.
So it only made sense to have my parents’ estate transformed into a fairy land and have everyone don custom made wings for the party.
Okay, for most people, that would not make sense. But it was my way of making magic for her. Guiding her out of her dark thoughts and reminding her of the little girl who had believed in all sorts of wonderful things.
Her relationship with Jay existed in darkness, I knew that. Understood that. And I didn’t hate it. She needed to feel comfortable with those dark parts of her. Embrace them. But I didn’t want them—him—to become her whole world.
Hence the party.
Hence me sending Jay a personal invitation.
It was a test. To see if he would come into the light. For Stella. And in case he didn’t, I invited every eligible bachelor in the city. Ones with normal jobs and normal approaches to relationships. Even though I was pretty sure Stella was already in too deep for that.
I knew I was. I mean, there was a future presidential hopeful in attendance with a square jawline and the JFK look, yet I barely gave him a second glance.
Karson had broken me somehow.
The flame was not petering out between us. Far from it. We were burning hotter than ever. I was at his house as often as I could be. And if I was out partying late, he’d be at my place when I got home. I did not yell at him about breaking in. Which I should’ve. I should’ve done a lot of things, should’ve set all sorts of boundaries to protect myself, but I got caught up.
One of the most important things I should’ve done was tell my girlfriends about Karson. It was becoming clear that this thing wasn’t going to end anytime soon, and the continued deception was weighing heavier on me every fucking day.
But tonight was Stella’s night. I would not steal her thunder. They’d make it into a big deal... Karson and me. A bigger deal because I’d been hiding it.
Which was why the plan was to not tell them about everything that had been happening. I’d say this was new.
I’d lie.
To my closest fucking friends.
Karson had broken me.
But it wasn’t just that.
It was the memory of that cottage in Romania.
But I was not in Romania. I was in fairy princess land, staring at my best friend, clad in white and looking like an ethereal creature lost in thought.
“I invited Jay,” I informed her.
That piece of information had its intended effect. She almost choked on her martini.