All At Once

The next time Joe really sees Bryn is when Dan dies, four years later. It hits him like a punch to the gut, so hard and unexpected, and right when he really feels like he's getting somewhere too. So he does what he does when something devastating happens: shuts out the world and retreats into an apartment with movies, music, and alcohol.

The apartment this time is Luke's in NYC; he can't deal with his own house in Los Angeles, not with his neighbours, who'll try not to give him that pitying look or all his friends there or the computers that run HitRECord in his house. So, yeah, he's in Luke's apartment in New York while Luke is on tour for his band, The Raves.

Joe's almost forgotten completely about Bryn. That's not true, of course. It's not like he can just forget about the person his best friend spends 90% of his time with, and he certainly can't forget about the person whose face gets plastered across posters and billboards and the back of magazines everywhere, but he doesn't see her much at all. After the first few months of their acquaintance, she had stopped flitting through his mind like a particularly annoying puzzle, so now it's just a, Oh, here you are again. I still can't figure you out. He's gotten used to that. But he hasn't seen in a while, certainly not one-on-one, which is why it takes a moment for him to make sure he's not dreaming when she walks into the apartment in search for him.

She's not dressed like she normally is, is what he thinks first. Black trench coat; Burberry, he knows, from the shoot he did at GQ; and sharp heels that click on the wooden floor. He looks up at her, questioning, and also too drunk to really do anything else, as Pulp Fiction plays in the background. Bryn hesitates. Can I join you? she asks. Joe nods, and when he thinks about this moment in the future, he'll never understand why he didn't just ask her to get the hell out of there and leave him to wallow in peace by himself. But inexplicably, he nods, motions towards the couch, and hands her a glass of Absolut because somehow, he knows that that's her favourite vodka. She takes off her jacket, revealing a slouchy black t-shirt and flared grey pants that sweep to the floor. Both look incredibly expensive.

She kicks off her heels and collapses in next to him and they don't talk, just stare at the TV and drink, drink, drink.

Later, maybe a night later, when Joe's vomiting into Luke's toilet, he'll think about that moment and feel a little queasy. It won't just be his body protesting at the steady diet of alcohol and New York pizza, it'll be something else. In those sober moments between, he'll think about Bryn, and maybe how she felt when she got the news. Luke would have told her on their tour bus at night because he's got tact. Joe knows this because he knows Luke. He would have said it slowly, gently, how Joe's mother called and told him because Luke's practically better friends with his own mother than Joe himself, and Bryn would have- what? Broke down immediately, sobbing hard enough to wake up anyone sleeping in a twenty-five mile radius? Or kept a straight face, just nodding, okay, and left to go sleep in her own bunk? Neither of them fit.

And those sober moments and the thoughts that punctuate them lead him to his drunk moments, when the same thoughts go barreling on, uninhibited without Joe's rational mind to tell him to stop before he gets too far. It's a chink, a tiny crack in the image he's built up for her, and it's the first crack that sets the rest crumbling down. She's gone from overly pretentious, asshole, nice girl for the cameras, singer, to- Nothing. A blank slate. An enigma, a mystery, at that. He can't figure out what it would mean for a girl to become best friends with the man her dog attacked or to spend her life singing on stage and grinning fake smiles (or real?) for the camera or to just sometimes sit down at a party and start scribbling away on a napkin with a smile and a there's a song here and for that same song, a month later, to be at the top of the charts.

He doesn’t know what to do about it, this girl shifting so quickly before his eyes, and he can’t figure out what’s real and what isn’t, so he stops thinking and takes another swig of scotch.