This is part one of a series of excerpts from Meredith Turits’ second novel, which is still in-progress. Check back with us next week for part two.

ANAÏS

WHEN WE STARTED fucking, since that’s all it was, he was up front.

“I have a girlfriend. She’s still in school. Lives in the suburbs.”

I really, really didn’t give a shit. “We’re fucking,” I told him.

Nate shrugged and put his head between my legs.

I ended up in L.A. because there was nowhere else to go. I quit school, left my brother and Boston behind, and went back to Montreal. Montreal, the place that was supposed to be home. But it was cold in every sense of the word. Stale. I’d been back for three days, mostly asleep for two of them, and had already realized that the city was full of people who meant nothing to the new version of me. I started to detach myself. Convince myself there was no reason for me to be there. (Empty mansion. Snow. Rooms I couldn’t bring myself to step into. Ce n’est pas my maison. It didn’t take much convincing.) My parents came home for a couple of days, asked me how I was, absorbed my lies and ignored the trash can full of empty plastic vodka handles and the still-packed boxes the movers had dumped in the foyer. Then they asked about my brother, told me he wasn’t picking up his phone, but that the money in the bank was still moving, so he couldn’t have died. My father laughed. My mother picked at a nail. I booked a one-way ticket to LAX. I was glad I never unpacked the boxes. Sort of wanted to drink bleach for a second.

Los Angeles is repulsive, even to a pretty girl like me to whom nothing much matters. Every vapid, gross stereotype materialized. Every expected sentence uttered. Every thing that’s not actually something, that people think is everything. So that’s why it makes sense to be here, or at least made sense to come here. Because being pretty matters, because little else does, because it’s not so fucking cold. It’s another kind of cold, I guess.

I took an apartment by the pier in Santa Monica for no other reason than that envelopes there said something other than “Los Angeles,” and because it was expensive, so I was pretty sure that meant it had to be nice. That people might think of me in a certain way when I gave my address. That the right judgments would fall into puzzle-piece place. Il est parfait. I drank a lot and smoked a lot and slept with about a billion men who didn’t know my name whose names I didn’t care to know, either. It’s really easy to do all of that when you’re a shell of yourself and there’s no identity laid down for you to compete with. Nothing to live up to. No desire to even make something to live up to. I was a body that night on my bed that night in Boston and I’m a body now and after sitting and thinking about it I am a body to my parents and at some point it’ll expire, either by my hand or someone else’s. I’ll figure out who gets the honor of the final blow. Probably won’t be me. I am probably okay with that.

Nate was one of the guys who I met in all of the million places that I met the men whose names I didn’t care to know. I guess I started talking to him because he never asked my name. We were on the same page. It was a good sign. I hadn’t been on the same page with anyone for a while. It was a Wednesday. People in LA can’t count and don’t know the names of days. He took me back to his place, a shitty one-bedroom in Silver Lake. There were girls’ things in the corner of the bedroom and all over the bathroom.

“I have a girlfriend. She’s still in school. Lives in the suburbs.”

“We’re fucking,” I told him.

And we did. I’m not going to sit here and talk about the sex or whether it was any good or whether I was even attracted to him. (I wasn’t, really.) But he told me his name and we kept fucking for a couple of weeks and then this thing happened. He started getting kind of obsessed with me. Like, saying my name constantly, loudly. Touching my hair all the time. Spending hours in bed with me even if I couldn’t honestly have given a shit and didn’t even feel like hiding it. But then another thing happened. Something went off, like this ridiculous metaphoric lightbulb and all of a sudden something familiar happened as he doted more and more, and would do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Girlfriend or no girlfriend. They get infatuated with me. Nate was infatuated with me.

When Nate’s girlfriend moved in with him nine months after we started the whole thing, after I started fucking him, I didn’t care. The only thing it meant was that he came to Santa Monica to have sex with me, which was a relief, really, because who wants to spend time in Silver Lake? Who wants to spend time anywhere? A coffee shop is a coffee shop is nothing. I didn’t stop wearing perfume because I was afraid the girlfriend would find out or something. (I never asked her name.) I didn’t change anything. A shell is a shell is nothing, too. But then one more thing happened. She was around. A lot. So much that he wasn’t coming over. That part I didn’t mind. But his obsession with me got the wind knocked out of it. And that knocked the wind out of me and I ran my hands along the insides of my thighs and decided I wasn’t okay with that.

“I want to be with you. Really, Nate. Like, with you.”

“Nate. Leave her.”

“You already know you don’t want her as much as you want me. Just leave.”

Two days later he did.

Five days later I was on a plane back to Montreal.

NATE

We went to dinner for the first time ever in the almost two years we’d been sleeping together. We’d only been having sex, that’s it, first in my bed always, but then Paige moved in, and that made it impossible to be there. Anaïs and I never left whatever house we were at together because we didn’t want to get caught. We’d definitely never been out to dinner so when she asked me to dinner, I was happy. Like, out in public with the rest of the world. I’ll be honest here — she was fascinating. But we sort of left it at that. She was fascinating and exotic and wild and mumbled to herself in French and was something I’d never had and never expected out of Paige or anyone I’d ever seen or been with or whatever because I didn’t think that people like her actually existed. So when I met her by the pier one night and saw her drinking, just out in the open like it was nothing, I figured I’d just talk to her, sort of get my rocks off just by seeing if she’d acknowledge me, you know? I figured it’d be fun or something and she was a coked-out model. She wasn’t either. She was just sort of like that. Like, just sort of pretty because she had good genes and probably drank more than she ate, not because she tried or anything like that, and just sort of coked out and detached because that’s how she sort of felt about the world.

Let me at least say this before I get policed as the total bad guy here — I’d never cheated on anyone. It was never supposed to be that. Just to get my rocks off, you know? She never asked my name and I didn’t ask hers until a while later and I only did it because the whole thing did sort of become something that wasn’t meant to be any more than that little something. If that makes any sense.

So after all of this nothing becoming something and staying like that for a couple of years, even after Paige moved in, which made it hard and made me want to just fucking die over and over again because I really did love her and had since I started taking care of her from her first day of school, for Anaïs to ask me outside of this little sex lair thing was a really big deal.

So she meets me at this place that I suggest so it’s not too close to where I live and like, everything comes at once. She tells me to leave Paige. She just says the words “leave her” like it’s nothing. And after I stopped thinking about the wad of cash hidden in this book I have that I set aside for Paige’s ring, I stopped thinking about that long enough to just think about how freeing and sexy and sort of sinful I guess the whole way she just said “leave her” was. Like she’d never even asked Paige’s name in two years or known a thing about her except like maybe the kind of shit she liked to use in the bathroom but she just knew she was better than Paige. Anaïs just knew. So then she tells me, “Just think about the last few months, I mean really think about them,” and I do and I’m realizing shit, she’s right. Because the thing that was happening was that she was telling me all of these things about her that she’d never told me and the light went off and it was like, well, yeah this is like her coked-out version of telling me she loves me, too. So we’re sitting in that diner thing and I’m like, shit, yeah, maybe I can do this. And so we’re getting ready to leave and she’s barely eaten because what girl actually does? The ones that don’t are the hottest ones anyway and so like, she picks up her stuff and then she fucking kisses my cheek for the first time ever.

So of course because this all makes tons of sense I get in my car and go back home and Paige isn’t there and I take a shower. And then Paige walks through the door because she lives there too, and she walks in while I’m still in a towel and she kisses the same cheek. So I’m like, “Nate, what are you doing?” So I obviously do the thing that makes the most sense in this situation, which is drop to my knee and propose to her.

Images by Jacob Van Loon.