Take What You Can Carry

Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice.” Somber. Everyone was somber.
“What?” she asked. “Someone die?”
Alan nodded, and when he spoke, his voice was loose with liquor. “The rabbit died. I knocked up Cass.”
There was a moment when no one spoke, so she reached for words, used to words making things better. “Okay,” she said. “I know it’ll be hard—”
Mason shook his head. “No. You of all people don’t get to give advice on this.”
Immediately she’d glanced at Delan, feeling angry and embarrassed. But Delan only refilled their glasses, the scent of scotch an iron fist in the air. Looking back to Mason, she felt fire in her words. “And what the hell does that mean?”
“Don’t get bent out of shape. Just means you’re a romantic. And romantics can’t give advice to someone with real shit going on.”
Alan interrupted, holding his hand up to command attention. “What he’s saying, in a not nice way, sorry about that, is I’m taking the night-manager job. The one they offered me last year.”
“But then you can’t do theater.”
Delan smiled at her in the checkered light. “You are a romantic. You’re my romantic. And that’s wonderful. But not everyone is as lucky to have choices. I hope you never have to understand that.”
Young. Naive. Not understanding life. You of all people. The way he saw her, the way everyone saw her—irritation rose within her. “I’ve done things that would surprise you,” she says now.
When she looks at him, he’s smiling, and even for a moment she’s glad to have lifted his mood. “Tell me.”
“I climbed a fence into the Hollywood Memorial Park and smoked at Harrison Gray Otis’s obelisk.” He raises his eyebrows in a question, and she explains. “One of the original Los Angeles Times’s publishers.”
“A passive-aggressive fuck-you to your industry. That’s cute.”
“There was one other time that wasn’t so passive-aggressive.” He watches her, and even as she says the words, she wills them back. “With an editor, one of my bosses.”
“You smoked grass with an editor.”
She touches a jasmine bloom. The smell is intoxicating. She could blame her words on that alone, though a need to shock him, to prove that there is more to her, threads right alongside. “No. I slept with him. In a supply closet.”
The regret is instant the second she sees his face.
He doesn’t look away. “When?”
“Before you and me. Of course.”
Now he turns, facing the city. “Then why tell me that?”
You of all people. She watches him, the brightness from the lights in his eyes. “Because maybe there’s more to me than you think.” The childishness of these words is evident the second she hears them.
“How do you think I see you? And why would it be bad?”
“Naive. You think I’m naive.”
“No. Innocent, yes. There’s a difference.”
“Innocent, naive. You said you shouldn’t have taken me here. You of all people, you said. Because what, I can’t handle it?”
He stares at her, angry. “Because you of all people, I cannot lose.”
The words twist with her misunderstanding. A pulsing, bright coil of regret.
“You thought I saw you as less?” he says. “You are here on this trip with me. No one else. The only one I wanted was you.” He turns away from her, facing the city. “Tomorrow, we’ll see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and then change your ticket so you can go home.”
Regret sits hot within her. His words, her words. What she’d shared about Ben, who was a past mistake, plain and simple. Everything on a replay the second she hits the bed, over and over in that loop of torturous memory.
It was only flirtation—eyes locked in meetings, Ben’s hand dragging on her desk when he passed by, once a Bit-O-Honey bar left by her phone—until one afternoon he’d whispered in her ear, Olivia with the olive-hued eyes, lower supply closet, three p.m. With those words, that one sentence, that directive without promise of anything beyond the day, she’d felt both elation and insult. Of course she would not go. She grew indignant and sharpened more than a dozen pencils.
But then the clock ticked, and she began to wish she was the kind of person who would do this. Who would take the edge of thrill she felt from flirting with a boss and let it consume her, let it swallow up worry and rationale and become her, even just for an afternoon. Instead she was skeptical and practical and always too aware of dangers, those possibilities that somehow only she tended to see, faint, like smudged-out paths in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Sometimes, she’d found, it was safer to do nothing.
And so nothing was what she did. But with every glance at the clock, she began to feel this person she could be, the same as if her arm were against another’s. This was what a man would do. This was what Rebecca would do. This was what so many single women who seized their sexuality and owned it and owned their desires would do. They’d take a man they wanted in a supply closet, then grind out a cigarette with their heel and dominate whatever room they walked into.
Hannity, passing by with Kyle Rudger, managed to mention that his uncle had just shot eighteen with Byron this weekend. Byron, their big boss. The editor in chief. Shot eighteen. Everything in her burned. And craved. And so at 2:57, she felt herself rise from her chair even before she stood, felt herself running down the hall even as she walked at a snail’s pace. It was as if there were two of her and with every step, she shed her own restrictive skin.
In the middle of the night, she surged awake with her mistake. She’d slept with a boss. She, who wanted to be taken seriously, had just done herself a massive disservice. Things like this happened to women she knew, but not of their choosing. They suffered and coped; they were tricked or forced. But here Olivia had caused. She was a part of her own