Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [70]
Adam smiles and holds up a hand as a gesture for me to stop. “Don’t worry. Come on, we all have nights like that.” He suddenly gestures toward the empty seat in front of him. “Can I join you? Would I be interrupting?”
“Not at all,” I say, sliding the seat over to him. “I’d love it.”
Adam looks at me as he sits and our eyes stay on each other long past when they should. “My God, you look amazing,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so good.” His green eyes peer into mine, and then he takes a breath. “What bothered me about the night we hooked up wasn’t the fact that you were high,” he says. “Or, I should say, what bothered me more than the fact that you were high was hearing after the fact that you’d also hooked up with Gus.” His eyes stay on me the entire time he talks.
“I know, but that didn’t mean anything,” I say.
His eyes flicker over me and he looks the slightest bit cruel. “You and Gus or you and me? After a while, isn’t it hard to tell the difference between which ones mean something and which ones don’t?”
“No, it’s not,” I say. I hadn’t planned to tell him about being sober, and feel wholly unprepared for some kind of “this is me now” speech but I can’t seem to stop myself. “I have to tell you something.”
“No, hear me out,” he says. “I really liked you, and that hurt me.”
“But I get it—”
“It’s just that…I don’t know, Amelia. You’re such a cool girl, but I don’t know…. You’re wild. And while I love that—it’s part of what attracted me to you from the beginning—being around you that night made me realize, I guess, that I’m not.”
There’s a pause, and I realize he’s done. “Can I talk now?” I ask.
He nods. “Yeah. Sorry about that rant.”
“It’s okay,” I say, subconsciously putting my hand on top of his before realizing what I’m doing and snatching it back. “It’s just that I’m now a reformed wild woman. I’m sober.” I glance down and then force myself to look him in the eye. “And, well, I’m not at the part of my recovery where I start apologizing to everyone yet, but can I just say that I’m sorry for the hurtful and silly things I did?”
He nods, looking extremely surprised.
“The fact is, I had a great time with you that night, and it wasn’t about the coke,” I continue. “The coke was actually the only thing wrong with that entire experience.” He’s about to say something but I keep talking. “And maybe it’s because I’m sober now or maybe I would have seen it anyway but what happened with you did mean something to me.” I find myself unable to look him in the eye when I say that.
He smiles. “So you’re sober?” He’s looking either stunned or confused, and since at least half of L.A. is sober, he surely couldn’t be confused. “You mean, you don’t drink or anything?”
I nod and then shake my head. “Yes—I mean, no I don’t.”
“You don’t even smoke pot?”
I smile. I’ve pretty much always hated pot. It would just make me more paranoid than usual that nobody could understand anything I was saying. Right when I was first getting into buying coke, it occurred to me that regularly buying pot would be far less expensive than getting coke so, in an effort to get myself hooked on a more economical drug, I bought an ounce and smoked it for three days straight. And that’s when I proved to myself once and for all that I hated it.
“No, not even pot,” is all I say.
“My God, that’s amazing,” he says. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” I say. “It feels great.”
Adam still seems to be in shock. “But I mean you…” He shakes his head, as if trying to clear up space in his brain for this information. “You were the ultimate party girl.”
Smiling, I opt not to tell him about my new column. I’m enjoying this interaction far too much to allow it to turn into a conversation about work. “Well, now I’m the ultimate ex–party girl,” I say.
He smiles as he looks at me with mock seriousness. “Do you think the bar at Jones will survive without your business?”
After we both laugh, I ask, “So what about you? How’s Norm’s?”
He grins. “Still standing, I assume. But not really my