Batman calls as I am dressing for dinner, wanting to know what my plans are. I tell him there are fourteen of us going to a restaurant in Beverly Hills for dinner. I've already dressed, put my hair up with half a dozen pins thanks to the length instead of my historical two and stepped into my shoes. Then I stepped back out. Dangerous ones. I'll put them on when Ben gets back or when Lochlan knocks on the door to get me as soon as the driver is here.
Batman asks about Ben's frame of mind and I shake my head. He can't see me and so he continues to wait for me to find some words for him or a lie or something, anything in response.
Nothing comes. Eventually even the most patient men stop waiting. Patience is something that is lost so easily once found. It's a fickle friend. A curse.
Like me.
He wants me to come and see him instead. We could meet. He could maybe make some calls. At the very least I am to call him when I collect Ben. They can get Ben some help here. He likes it here.
California has always given Ben all of the ingredients to make and keep secrets. She is like a lover to him. He knows people. He has favorite places and he is probably at one of those instead of in the meetings he should be in right now. Dinner is another meeting. More collaborations, bigger deals, everyone working together and pulling in more talent and reaching further and counting more money and adding more clients and artists and producers and handlers and it's exhausting but it's been amazingly successful right out of the gate and the reason for that success right now is probably in some seedy bar down on the strip getting shitfaced because he can't deal with life.
I can feel my heart break when I listen to Ben plead for exclusivity in all things. I feel it break when he asks for time to get to know me, the way the others know me. I feel it break when I answer him because I can't change the past. And I feel it break when he walks out the door and says he can't deal with this. You say it's not my fault that he drinks? That it has nothing to do with me?
I say you're all fucking liars.
I find Ben and I don't call Batman back when I do. I had no intentions of calling him.
