chapter thirteen: it always leads to you
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Previously: Tally goes to a party in LA and gets a call from her agent who tells her she got the role and she’s about to become a star.
She hears Eve shout Sam’s name, then sees the flare of her ginger hair storming into the bathroom.
“I think Sam heard that,” Eve says, contrite for all of one second before pulling Tally to her feet and clutching her shoulders into her signature iron embrace. “Tally, darling, babe, I always knew you’d be a star.”
She pecks Tally squarely on the lips. Tally is too stunned to move. Her mind has gone blank. The music roars senselessly in her eardrums, and Benjamin keeps cursing in a high-pitched voice and tries to call Tally’s mother, then his own, and all the sounds blur into one huge ocean wave rush until all thoughts are replaced by its image, open and still under the frosted sky.
“Let’s go to the beach,” Tally breathes out.
No one hears her.
She taps Benjamin’s shoulder, but his mom has picked up and he just brushes Tally’s arm vigorously to let her know he cares, while he screams the good news to another party in the Palisades.
“Really?” he says, his gaze stopping its excited flitting. He puts the phone’s mic against his chest to say to Eve: “Chrishell’s there.”
“Stause?” Eve fans herself with Tally’s purse like she’s minutes away from a seizure. “Shut up.”
Tally pulls on her hand. “I want to go to the beach,” she says.
“Of course darling-babe,” Eve says, patient and happy like a mother with strong positive-parenting beliefs. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
“No, come on.” Tally tugs on Eve’s elbow but she doesn’t yield. “Let’s go to the beach. It’ll be fun.”
Benjamin has ended his call and pries Tally’s fingers from Eve’s slender bones. “Babe we’re having fun here,” he kisses her. “This is amazing. You’re amazing. Let’s toast to you.”
“Oh yeah,” Sam says on her way out of the bathroom. It’s clear she’s been crying, but she’s not anymore. “Let’s.”
Tally recoils from Benjamin’s touch like a wild animal. “I’m not having fun,” she says icily.
Realising his mistake, his smile melts from his handsome face. “Okay, you wanna go home?”
She ignores his question:
“Did you realise I wasn’t?” she asks. She feels very sober now. “Having fun?”
“You said you were.”
“Yeah Ben, I say a lot of things. But can you tell when I don’t mean them? That’s what I wanna know.” She crosses her arms over her chest, partly to shield her heart from the annoyance she sees crossing his features, partly to hold herself together.
Benjamin scratches the side of his jaw wearily. “Tally.”
“Let’s try something shall we? I’ll smile, and you tell me if I’m faking it.”
Tally blinks, lets the muscles around her mouth relax, and a radiant grin lights up her face. A confused glance passes between him and Eve, and Tally feels her whole self clamp into a fist inside of her as her smile wanes. “You never could.”
What she doesn’t say: if she can’t be with the one person who does see when her heart is broken, she can’t be with anyone at all.
“Come on,” Benjamin protests. “Of course I can.” He reaches for her shoulder and she backs away against the wall.
“It’s fine,” she says, feeling light and crazed with sadness. “It’s not your fault.”
Someone reenters the room from a cigarette break and a flush of cold air rushes in. Ben lunges for her wrist but she swerves out of reach, grabs her purse from Eve’s hands, and escapes upstream through the gust.
***
Though the shock of the call has sobered her up, she doesn’t feel cold at all as she runs across the road to the parking lot. She gets hotter still when the huge Range Rover comes barreling out of the night, straight at Tally’s golden and defenseless frame, honking continuously for her to get out of its bonnet’s murderous track. She throws herself out of the way to evade it, scraping her knees and palms, but gets up instantly to find Ben’s car, whose keys are still in her purse.
She almost calls Nil, but remembers his words.
I need to move on.
And does he not deserve at least this?
She stabs the key in the ignition and drives off, her peeled hands screaming on the steering wheel, Nil’s last request echoing in her head.
On the Pacific Highway, the ocean is sparkling in the distance under the vast moon. Speeding up, the breeze from the open windows whipping up into a storm, she throws her phone into the black winds.
To Corral Beach, then.
The others won’t come after her, she is sure of it, and where else in the world can she go now?
The sand is so cold it makes her toes ache. With her stilettos hooked over her index fingers she sits down behind the curving line of water lapping the shore. She might be ruining her entire life, she thinks. The thought is strangely comforting. The ocean-kissed rocks glisten silver next to her, under the full moon’s dense, reassuring presence. She watches its beams break themselves apart on the gentle waves.
The thin veil mists her vision and lifts to reveal her future: Tally isn’t made for fame. And if she stays here, if she stays, she’ll become the person Benjamin thinks she is. A projection, an Instagram avatar, a dream. A nightmare.
There are only so many chances in life.
She pushes the straps of her dress off her shoulders, slips out of the satin. The crumpled dress falls on the hard sand and looks like the sloughed skin of some legendary snake. As she steps out of it she sheds the dreams too. Red carpets, Marvel contracts, designer gowns. They detach from her skin in big painless flakes and freed from their weight she feels light and new.
In her underwear, she steps towards the ocean, shivers when it touches her feet. The water rolls over her hips and she gasps just as the first trace of pink dust bleeds a new morning into the sky. What would Nil have said if she’d told him all of this? She is crying as she lowers herself under the waves. Though she loves him she cannot go back. LA may be wrong for her, but so is their small town.
It’s still too dark underwater for her to see, but she opens her eyes anyway and swims out into the open water, feeling lighter and lighter with each stroke, the invisible stones weighing her limbs dropping to the retreating sea bottom. All around her the ocean feels alive. Though she can’t see anything – no fish whose name she’s never learned, not a single weed – she can hear the crackling sand meters below and feels less alone. Swimming towards the bottom now, a current pushes through her legs and makes her roll around herself. That’s when she feels it again, the pond’s wind-polished clarity. The veil clouds her unseeing eyes and she sees, finally, the road she should have taken from the start. Another beach on the same coast, a small team, a tiny budget – Seattle.
Can she do it? Will they take her?
She remembers Luke’s mask – the gold and midnight blue, the empty gaze. How beautiful, how enticing. How heavy a thing to wear for the rest of one’s life.
She would try without one.
Kicking now, she breaks through the surface and faces the empty beach, on which daylight pours a warm, golden light – the almost empty beach.
From the shore, Nil watches her without moving. Her dress dangles from his fingertips. The glass-melting heat of his gaze thaws her sea-soaked face.
THE END
Acknowledgements:
This short story was made infinitely better by the generous and incredibly astute feedback I received from my beta reading group. Thank you to David, Iman, JV, and Michelle for these sessions, and to two of my very best friends in the world, Jessie and Lucy, for giving the final go-ahead on each chapter. I love you all so much!
Thank you to my boyfriend Alex for letting me believe Taylor and I might be friends one day, and for being very handsome. Thank you to my family, especially my aunt, my cousin and my mother for reading every single chapter even though they’re not in French and I like to use very long and confusing sentences! Thank you to my son, Lumi, during whose naps I wrote and edited most of this – you are the light of my days.
Thank you for reading <3
It’s the end of an era! If you have any thoughts on the story or the characters, write them in the comments, I’d love to chat about it with you.
beautiful
An amazing end to an amazing story! I love how succinctly you tied everything up while still leaving open doors! I’m a little sad to see the end of this tale, it’s been such a pleasure to read, an easy story to tumble into and find oneself a little blinded by the Hollywood glitz, a little calmed by the lingering scent of pine.