Read Online This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown - Free Book Online Page B

bedroom as she ejected an astonishing quantity of pus and blood and other vile secretions from her dying body. And there was a whole new social world for him to navigate, with long-neglected school friends like Daniel and Edgar. And then, only a few months after arriving home, there was Claudia. They’d met at the barbecue of a mutual friend, and he’d been struck by her immediately—not that she was the prettiest girl he’d met (though she was sexy in an endearing, guileless sort of way), but that she was so open, so free of artifice, in a way Aoki had never been. She didn’t try to command attention but gathered it slowly to herself with easy humor and an earnestness that was foreign to him. She was chronically insecure, there was no doubt about that. But underneath that nice-Midwestern-girl exterior was a stubborn streak and willful ambition. Bonus: she was creative, like Aoki, only without the exhausting chaos. Being with Claudia felt like being wrapped in a down duvet; it was comforting to be in a relationship of equals, one where he could sometimes—hell, often —even be at its center. During the endless months of Jillian’s dying, he cried in Claudia’s soft arms so many times that he eventually couldn’t imagine ever living without them again.
    He’d since lost touch with many of his friends from New York, including his bandmates, who had hired a new lead singer, renamed the band, released a second album that flopped, and finally disbanded when Anton died of a heroin overdose. Aoki’s star had risen since their breakup; she was genuinely famous now, and he saw her name and face in hip lifestyle magazines every once in a while. He’d look at these photographs intently, trying to connect the woman in the pictures, blazing intention and icy confidence, with the screaming hysteric he’d left in a heap on her paint-splattered concrete floor. He threw these magazines away at work, so Claudia wouldn’t run across them.
    Otherwise, the only reminder he kept of their years together—besides the annoying voice that lingered in his head, judging him—was the painting hanging in the living room, an image of his own twisted torso reaching out for something just off-canvas. She’d given him the painting for his thirtieth birthday, right before they broke up. It was so monstrously monumental, so desperately needy, and so intensely personal that getting rid of it would be like throwing away a chunk of his own flesh. Even after everything had changed, he couldn’t quite make that final break. So the painting hung there above the worn leather couch, a reminder of a Jeremy he no longer really recognized but sometimes missed, the way you get nostalgic for a long-lost college friend.
    The last time he’d heard from Aoki was a letter she sent him when she found out about his wedding, three years ago. The message was scrawled in crayon, on the back of an old pen-and-ink sketch she’d made of him, sleeping.
jeremy she will never love you the way you need to be loved. you have bled my heart dry leaving me as empty as a ghost. i know i’m supposed to wish you all the happiness in the world but that would be a lie so i’m just going to say that someday you will remember that the only true love is devastation and you will realize that i will be with you forever.
    She didn’t sign it, an egotist to the end. He had almost shared the letter with Claudia, as a way of showing her how ridiculous the whole melodramatic episode with Aoki had really been, how over it all he really was, but then he thought better of it. He tucked the note in the back of a drawer and wiped it from his mind.
    At least, that was the last time he’d heard from Aoki until two days ago, when he’d found an e-mail from her in his in-box. Just two sentences:
Coming to Los Angeles for a gallery retrospective this fall and would love to see you if for no other reason than to apologize in person. A lot has changed and I think I’m a much more pleasant