The Other Traitor by Sharon Potts Read Free Book Online Page A

see her?
    She finished the cappuccino. Maybe it would be better to just show up. Bill always joked about how hard it was to say no to Annette in person. And if Mariasha still refused, well, how hard could it be to wrestle down a ninety-five-year old?

CHAPTER 6
    Julian’s head felt like it was being squashed under the arm of an angry linebacker as he buried it beneath his pillow. Too much to drink. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. At least that’s what Nietzsche said, but Julian wasn’t so sure.
    After leaving his mother’s house last night, he had decided to celebrate his birthday by heading over to a seedy bar in the East Village. Sephora kept texting him, Where the hell r u? but he didn’t answer. Finally she wrote, U r a giant asshole , at which point he turned his phone off.
    The bar was frequented mostly by NYU students and a few derelicts and he ended up downing shots with a bunch of communications majors until he was feeling no pain. He vaguely remembered giving his wool hat to a blonde with a Lauren-Bacall sneer, then somehow getting home, saying hi to his doorman and collapsing on his bed.
    A hell of a way to celebrate his thirtieth birthday.
    But now he was thirty and a day. He opened his eyes, blinking against the late morning light that came in through the balcony sliding doors, cursing himself for not closing the blinds the night before. At least the door was shut, so it wasn’t freezing inside. He checked the other side of the bed. No Sephora. Was she sleeping out in the living room? That wasn’t exactly her style.
    He brought his legs over to the side of the bed trying not to set off an explosive chain reaction in his head. Slowly, he stood up, then went to the kitchen to grab some Advil, bracing himself for a mega-confrontation with his girlfriend. But Sephora wasn’t stretched out on the sofa, sipping coffee and thumbing through one of her fashion magazines. Thank you, God. Of course, this was simply a postponement of the inevitable. Sephora wasn’t one to pass up an opportunity to fight.
    He took three Advils, ate a couple of bananas, then went to shower. The steam and pounding water cleared his head. Last night, his mother had said she wasn’t feeling well shortly after her emotional remarks about Nana, and had asked him to leave. He had been peeved by her abrupt dismissal, but now he processed what she had told him. He had a great-uncle who had painted. That made two family members who had been artists—Nana and Saul—so maybe his plan to pursue painting wasn’t all that far-fetched. If that’s what he really wanted, because on some level he wondered if he had latched onto painting in order to spite his mother. And then, what was really going on between his mother and Nana? He hadn’t realized how hurt she’d been by Nana and how much it resembled his own pain. Were he and his mother more alike than he wanted to admit? No way. He and Essie were about as different as two people could be.
    He turned off the water and dried himself with a towel as he returned to his bedroom. He opened the closet door. What the hell? There was a pile of clothes on the floor. His clothes. Sephora’s shoes, bags, dresses, pants and shirts were all gone, but she’d scrawled a note on the closet wall. GO TO HELL. He stepped closer. She had used red nail polish.
    He sat down on the bed. Sephora had left him. Shouldn’t he be sad or angry or disappointed? Some reaction to show that his relationship with this woman over the last two years had meant something to him? But whatever love or attraction he once felt for her had faded a long time ago. And then he started to laugh. Nail polish. Sephora had said goodbye to him with red nail polish. Probably last season’s shade. He fell back against the bed and laughed until his stomach hurt. His head started pounding again. He caught his breath, wiped away the tears of laughter, and sat back up.
    She was gone. But that was okay. He no longer had to put on an act