Hold Me in Contempt (31 page)

Embarrassed as we knocked heads, I said quickly, “I'm so sorry!” before I even looked at the person I'd collided with. I stepped back as a woman's voice accepted my apology.

“It's okay—” she started but stopped when she looked at me.

“Kim!” we said together.

“Oh, hell no!” Kim 2 tried to push past me like the other woman had.

“No wait! Wait!” I said, remembering my dream. “I need to talk to you.” I tried to grab her arm, but she was already out of reach.

“There's nothing for us to talk about. You're crazy and I don't want to have anything to do with you!” she shouted so loudly that people around us started slowing down to get an earful. “You stay away from me and stay away from Ronald, too!”

She started to walk away again, but that time I caught her sleeve. “What do you mean, stay away? I haven't been around you or Ronald.”

“You call phone calls at all hours of the night staying away? Talking about killing us? That's staying away?” she asked.

“Wh-wha-what are you talking about?” I stuttered, considering what she was saying. “I never called you. I haven't spoken to you since I saw you that morning at breakfast.”

“No. You're lying!”

“No I'm not. You're lying!”

Kim 2 reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone, then handed it to me with her call log on the screen.

“See!” she said.

I looked through three calls with “Kiki” listed. All were from between three o'clock and five that morning.

“How do I know this is really me?” I said in a low voice but feeling somewhere that it had been me. Some kind of choppy and slow-moving memory floated into my mind.

“Well, you probably wouldn't remember calling me because you were so fucking drunk. Blabbering on about me selling my pussy to the highest bidder and being a dick digger and that I was really a fat ass and that's how I lost my modeling contract,” she said softly with pain in her eyes. She snatched the phone back and stashed it in her hoodie pocket. “I don't need your shit. Things are hard enough for me.”

“I didn't say those things,” I said, but I remembered it. I could hear myself saying them. Sitting up in my bed and saying those things into the phone. Kim 2 screaming back, “
I'm calling the police if you keep calling me!”

I started feeling sick to my stomach, light on my feet, and like my head was floating up and up. I felt myself stagger toward Kim 2.

“I don't feel so well,” I said breathily, trying to stay on my feet. “I think I need to sit down.”

Kim 2 held me up.

I placed my arm over her shoulder, and she propped me up.

She walked me to a little coffee shop a few feet away and sat me in one of the chairs out front.

“Wait out here,” she said. “I'll be right back.”

She returned with a cup of water and handed it to me.

“Sip some of that,” she said, sitting across from me at the table.

One of the waiters from inside the shop came to the door and looked at me.

“She's fine,” Kim 2 said to him. “Just a little dizzy.”

“I don't remember calling you. I really don't.”

“You didn't call last night. And there was nothing for, like, two nights a few days ago. But you do most nights,” Kim 2 explained, her anger now dissolved and her voice sympathetic, while motioning for me to finish the water.

“I don't understand. Why would I do that?”

“I don't know. I know you're angry with—I guess you should be, but I just wanted you to know that”—she looked away—“we were doing the best we could. We tried to stop it, but you kept doing—”

“Doing what?” I asked.

She bit her lip before speaking. “The drinking. It started with the drinking. You were so fucked up. And Ron just wanted to help you. That's how it started—us talking to each other. We were just trying to help you.”

I put the water down and stared at her. “I didn't need any help. Yes, I was drinking, but we all were. You were doing drugs. We were all partying. It wasn't just me. You're trying to make it sound like it was just me.”

“Do you remember the first time the police came to the loft? When you came in drunk?”

“I'd had a few with coworkers. We lost that case. So what?”

She looked at me and took in a deep breath, released it. “I kept telling Ronald you'd get better and that it was just the work. We could help you. He came over that night before you got home—”

“I don't want to hear this shit!” I said.

“No, you need to, Kim. I've been trying to tell you this, and you need to hear it,” Kim 2 replied. “He came over because we were talking about trying to get you some help. Getting you into rehab.”

“Rehab? Fuck you!” I was about to get up, but Kim 2 placed her hand over mine.

“You were so drunk that night. He took you into your room and tried to talk to you.”

“Yes. He did. I lost a case and that dickhead proceeds to tell me it was time to leave my fucking job. Really? That's helping me? That's rehab? Saying I could be his fucking secretary?”

“That job was killing you,” Kim 2 said. “I saw it every day. You couldn't get through the day without drinking. Ron just wanted you to see that. He was scared, Kiki. We both were.”

“No, you both were jealous of me,” I shot back. “I was more successful than both of you, and you were jealous, because I'm stronger than you. So you wanted to make me look weak!”

“I never said you were weak. I know you're strong. Trust me, I know that, but how can you keep being so strong, Kim? Always? With all the shit in your past? How can you keep it all up?”

“Right. I'm so strong but I can't keep it together, so you two decided to fuck each other? That's was going to save us all? Give me a break.”

“You hit him! What was he supposed to do? It was bad enough he had to lie to the cops and pretend he'd fallen down. His eye was swollen for days. He had to take off work so no one would see it.”

“He told me to be his secretary! I'm not a secretary. Do you know what I've been through?” I said. “All of it? I didn't do all of that to be put in my place because he can't handle my success.”

“So, what about me? I can't handle your success either?” she asked. “Is that why you tried to kill me? To kill both of us?”

Those questions tore open a scab that bled out a past I was reliving in dreams. The memories that were just echoes and shadows came back at me like a boomerang upside my skull.

“You shouldn't have let me drive,” I said in a voice that I didn't recognize as my own. “Not the way things were. You knew I knew. And I was fucked up. Why would you let me drive?”

Kim 2 told her version of events. That we'd left Diddy's party. We were drunk. And tired and it was so dark. I was more messed up than she was, and she begged to drive. I agreed. Gave her the keys and then she started driving. There was the Taylor Swift song. We were laughing. Traffic started to thin. The highway got darker. Kim 2 needed to go to the bathroom, so she pulled over at a gas station.

“When I got back to the car, you were behind the wheel,” she recalled. “I kept saying you were too drunk to drive, but you said you were fine and just wanted to get home. I tried to pull you out of the seat, but you insisted. We stood in front of that gas station for ten minutes and you wouldn't get out of the car, so I got into the passenger's seat.”

She said once she was in the car, I got really quiet. I turned off the music, rolled up the windows, and held both hands on the wheel so tightly, she could see the tips of my nude thumbnails turning red. Something was wrong. She saw tears rolling down my cheeks.

“You started driving so fast. I told you to slow down, but you wouldn't. You said you knew everything. That I was sleeping with Ron and that we were planning to leave you all alone,” she said. “I told you that wasn't it. That we were just friends and I could explain. But it was too late. You pressed your foot on the gas and said you were going to kill both of us, so he'd be the one alone. I tried to stop you. I reached over you for the wheel, but it was too late. The car started rolling.”

I felt the pain ticking up my back.

“We went right off the side of the highway, over the fence, and into some field.” Kim 2 looked like she was remembering something so bad it probably gave her the same nightmares I'd been having. “I was awake the entire time, spinning and spinning, but when the car stopped and I was getting out, afraid it was going to blow up, I saw that you weren't moving. You were knocked out. Then I heard the sirens. I wanted them to help us, but I started panicking.” She looked at me. “Kim, you were behind the wheel and so drunk. I knew what that would mean for your career. You'd be disbarred. I couldn't let that happen. I pulled you out of the car and laid you out on the grass. When the cops and ambulance got there, I told them I was driving.”

“I was driving,” I said.

“I don't know what happened. Why you were so pissed. What would make you snap like that,” she said. “I'd never seen you so angry, so split in half.”

My mind continued to gather the echoes, and I could see Kim 2 walking toward the gas station building. She was laughing. Waving at me from the bumper and doing some stupid drunken dance. “Hurry up,” I yelled. “I need to get home.” She giggled a little more and staggered into the building. I sang along with Taylor Swift. Then Kim 2's phone clattered in the console between the rental car seats. I looked at it and “Ronald” was on the screen. My heart started pounding. My mind bounced to every single time I'd suspected something was happening between them. I looked up at the gas station to see if Kim 2 had come out of the bathroom. I picked up the phone and put in Kim's pass code: 1908.

RONALD: We have to tell her about our plan really soon. I can't live this lie anymore. I just want it to be over, so we can move on. Let's do it in the morning when you get back from the Hamptons.

“He was talking about the intervention,” Kim 2 said when I told her about the text message I'd read and erased before she'd gotten back into the car.

“No he wasn't. You're lying to me!” I cried. “If it was all about me, why would he leave me at the hospital? Hunh? Leave me in a hospital bed all by myself to go and be with you?”

“I was in jail. He had to bail me out,” Kim 2 whispered sharply. “There was no one else. I didn't have any money. Who else was I supposed to call? I'd just saved your ass, and I was sitting in a jail cell because of it.”

“No one ever told me that.”

“You wouldn't talk to us. You never answered the phone. You'd never hear me out. I know you don't believe me,” Kim 2 said with tears coming to her eyes and her nose turning red, “but that was all really hard for me. I know I was some bullshit. I fucking know that. The shit I did back then, sleeping with you two. I know it was bad, but I saw you like my sister and I only did that because in my fucked-up way I thought it was what you wanted because you asked me to do it. Ron was the only person there for me when you cut me off. That's when it happened. Okay? That's when we got together. But only then—after.”

I started crying too. I knew she was telling the truth, but I wasn't ready yet to admit it.

She got up and stood over me. “I want you to forgive me someday. I know it might not be right now. But maybe someday. Because I really miss you, Kim,” she said, tears streaming. “You remember all the bad times, but I remember the good.” She wiped her face dry with her sleeve and smiled thinly. “Call me when you have something nicer to say. I'll pick up every time.”

“You're late!” Paul said, standing at the elevator.

I walked around him and kept on my path to my office.

I felt him following me, but at some point he stopped.

I found Carol in my office, sitting at my desk when I walked in.

“What are you doing at my desk?” I asked as she got up.

“Uploading some audio files Paul just gave me.” She looked into my eyes as we passed each other, trading places at the desk. “Your eyes are swollen. You've been crying?”

I ignored her and moved the computer mouse with my index figure to clear the screen saver and see what was on the desktop. There was an icon showing that audio files were uploading.

“What? You didn't believe me?” she said, laughing nervously.

“No. I do. I'm just having a horrible morning.”

“I understand. We all have those days. Right?” She smiled encouragingly before walking toward the door. “Don't you fret. All is well. You'll be fine in no time. How about I order one of those macchiatos you like from Bluebird? I'll have a messenger bring it over.”

“I don't want that. I'm okay,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” She frowned.

Carol walked out, but I called her back when the audio files had finished loading.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Not sure. Didn't listen. Paul gave the memory stick to me earlier. Oh yeah”—she gritted her teeth in embarrassment—“good thing you stopped me. He wanted me to tell you to make sure you didn't lose the memory stick. I think it's the only copy or something. That's why I loaded it onto your computer for safekeeping.” She grinned and slapped her head. “Jesus, I must be getting old. I also almost forget to tell you about lunch. He told me to put him down for two p.m.”

“No,” I said.

“What? No, I'm not getting old?”

“E-mail Paul and tell him I can't make it.”

“But there's nothing on your calendar.”

“Well, make something up. Okay?” I glared at Carol. “And close the door, please.” I smiled and sat in the chair. I waited for the door to click closed and pressed Play on the file on my desktop.

There was just static at first. Then there was one of those long recording beeps. Next was King's voice: