Free Party Girl: A Novel by Anna David

someone—anyone—I know, Adam walks by.
    “Hey!” I scream excitedly, grabbing his leather jacket.
    “What’s going on here?” he asks as he gives me a hug.
    “Cops are breaking it up, I’ve lost everyone I know and it’s been invaded by agents’ assistants,” I explain, gesturing toward the mayhem at the front of the house. “Why are you so late?”
    “I just got off my shift,” he says, and I’m reminded that he’s an out of-work actor, someone who deals with things like shifts and punch cards and tips. But I’m so grateful to see someone I know—even if it is someone who abandoned me by the fire and then didn’t say good-bye to me in the morning the last time I saw him—that I force my judgmental side to relax.
    Adam takes a look at the people milling around and suddenly says, “This looks a little like what Sartre might have created if he was crafting my own personal version of hell. Want to get out of here?”
     
    I bring him back to my place because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to go at two on a Saturday night-slash-Sunday morning, feeling optimistic again because the possibility still exists that tonight can be salvaged.
    “Be right back,” I trill, leaving him petting one of my cats in the living room, and make my way to my bedroom. I hope he’s sort of out of it and just thinks I went to the bathroom , I think as I remove a framed print of Gretna Green—procured during a trip to England with my family like a decade ago—off the wall and pour some Alex onto its glass surface. I snort four lines quickly, then slide a bit onto my index finger and over my top gums for what my friend Lisa used to call “Numb-y Gummy” when we’d find her dad’s coke in high school. I light a cigarette and feel the coke flow through me as I make my way back to the living room, where Adam is continuing to pet my cat.
    “I’m mad at you, you know,” I say, as I make my way over to where he’s sitting and join him.
    “Mad at me?” he asks. He motions for my cigarette and sits up. “Why?”
    “Why? Well, after telling me you wanted to take me away from our sordid Hollywood scene, you left me alone, without a pillow and blanket, by the fire, and then never even said good-bye to me when I left,” I say, amazing myself at how casually these details are rolling off my tongue. I don’t tend to be a fan of making myself vulnerable but then again, Alex has a way of making me forget about things like that.
    “Oh, Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” he says, leaning back on the couch and suddenly wearing a sweet smile. I notice that his ears are bright red. I wonder if I’ve made him incredibly uncomfortable.
    But then he looks at me confidently, right in the eye. “I held you as you fell asleep but then you pulled away from me and onto the floor,” he says. “I tried to tuck a pillow under your head and a blanket over you but you pushed them away. And then”—he takes another drag off my cigarette—“I watched you sleep, and thought about how it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.”
    It’s such a genuine and sweet thing to hear from a typically sarcastic person that I literally don’t know what to say. I wonder for a second if I ought to mention the whole making-out-with-Gus incident, but I love the feeling flowing through me so much that I don’t want to do anything that might make it go away.
    So I just move closer to him and he puts his thick hand on my knee and we start talking—about nothing in particular but at the same time pretty personal stuff. It feels a little like how postcoital pillow talk is supposed to feel but never does—complete with the passing of the cigarette back and forth. I notice for the first time that he has one of the deepest, sexiest voices I’ve ever heard as he tells me how much he hates working at Norm’s Deli and how much it sucks to see this completely talentless but attractive guy he knows get called into auditions he’d kill for. We