Page 120 of Dirty Like Me
“What?”
She sighed. “Devi’s saying the same thing you are.”
I followed her to the bedroom where she started throwing her things in her suitcase, which made my guts clench in a really fucking awful way.
“What’re you doing?”
“Was it Elle?” she asked, voice shuddering as she fought back tears. “Did Elle tell them all those things about me?”
“None of that shit was even true, Katie,” I said in my best soothing voice. I was shit at soothing women, case in point, my sister, who I had no fucking clue how to get through to. I just started pulling things back out of the suitcase.
“No, it wasn’t true, was it?” she said, taking her clothes from my hands and stuffing them back in. “Except for one thing. You know, that thing about our relationship being fake. Oh, and that other thing about you hiring me.” She pulled off the flip flops she was wearing and crammed them into the suitcase too. “Someone must have told them about that.”
Damn. The article said all that? Maybe I should’ve actually read it.
Katie started tossing pillows and looking behind furniture.
“It wasn’t Elle,” I said.
“She knows about us. Someone must’ve told her. She said our relationship was fake.”
I watched her search beneath the table we ate our breakfast on. “Katie—”
“Itisfake,” she said. “Itisfucking fake and none of this is worth it. None of it is worththis.” She jabbed at the screen of her phone, then turned it to me, showing the photo of Zane’s hand on her ass.
“Did something happen last night? With Zane? Did you talk to Elle? What am I missing here?”
She got down on her hands and knees and started crawling around, looking under the beds.
“If someone told her about us, I don’t know who it was… What the fuck are you doing?”
“Where the hell is my sketchbook?” she cried, digging under the sheets.
“It’s over here.” I plucked it from the desk where she’d left it and handed it to her. I had no fucking idea why I did that, since the next thing she did was pack it, and that was the last thing I wanted her to do. But I couldn’t handle seeing her lose her shit.
She went into the bathroom and started grabbing up all her cherry-vanilla-cream smelling lotions and whatever and I just about lost it.
“Katie. Calm the fuck down.” I followed her back to the bed where she smushed all her toiletries in with her clothes and jammed the suitcase shut. I’d never seen her so irrational. This was the girl who usually sealed all her little bottles of shampoo and whatever in separate Ziploc bags in case they leaked.
“Look,” I said, but she wouldn’t even look at me as she zipped up the suitcase. “Since I took off on your birthday to deal with Jessa and made you worry, everything’s been fucked up. Things haven’t been right between us.”
“Things were neverrightbetween us, Jesse.”
“I rattled your trust in me, and for that, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not that. It’s notyou.” She looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. “I’m truly sorry for whatever is going on with your sister, Jesse. She’s so lovely. And what the two of you have been through makes my heart hurt.” She rubbed her nose, still fighting back tears. I almost wished she’d just go ahead and cry; maybe then she’d sit down and stop trying to get the hell out of here. “It’s not that I don’t care. Really. The problem is I won’t have anything left to give, to deal with anything, if I go down this road. Did you know I haven’t been drawing all this week? I’m not even eating much.”
“I didn’t know—”
“I feel like I’m totally losing myself, Jesse. Just like I did when I was with Josh. I tried to be what he wanted and I ended up totally forgetting who I am.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” I said, though I had no idea if that was true. I’d been so consumed with worrying about Jessa the last while I hadn’t even noticed if Katie wasn’t eating or feeling right about things. “You’re just using this as an excuse to run away,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true either.
“Thisis my family,” she said, finally turning to face me. “I would neverusethem for anything. These arechildren, being photographed by some creep with a telephoto lens while we didn’t even know they were there. This is the people I love being affected by what I’m doing.”
“That’s what happens when you’re in the spotlight, Katie. Sometimes it bleeds over onto people you care about. That’s the life.”
“Then it’s not a life for me.” She yanked her suitcase off the bed and put it on the floor at her feet. “I can’t hack it, Jesse. You said if I couldn’t hack it, you’d let me go.”
