The Asset by Shane Kuhn

talk himself out of it, he was in the hotel car service, on his way to Venice Beach.

T his is a bad idea.
    It was 9:00 P.M. and the freeway was inexplicably jammed. Kennedy had been in the car for forty-five minutes and they still had a long way to go. The whiskey buzz was starting to wear off and he was getting queasy from the driver stopping and lurching, fighting for every mile.
    â€œMaybe we should just head back to the hotel,” Kennedy said.
    â€œAt this point, it may take you twice as long to get back as it would to get to your destination, but I can turn around if you like,” the driver said, eyeing Kennedy in the rearview.
    â€œFuck it. Let’s stay the course.”
    â€œOf course. Would you like a mint?”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œA mint. Or a stick of gum?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œMaybe you’re meeting a lady tonight?”
    â€œWhat makes you say that?”
    â€œNo reason, sir. How about some music?”
    Kennedy stared at the parking lot of cars ahead of them on the freeway. He was nervous—but not in the way the driver had implied. He had to admit he’d been avoiding Belle’s best friend ever since his sister died. She reminded him too much of something he could never get back. A monthafter Belle’s funeral, Sierra had been distraught, unable to sleep or eat, battling severe depression. She had come to Kennedy, driving all the way from Santa Monica to Stanford, saying she needed to talk to someone who felt like she did.
    The problem was, Kennedy had wanted to weld himself shut in his iron grief and had no desire to share feelings. When she arrived at his dorm, looking for a shoulder to cry on, he managed to put on a convincing act that he was there for her, but all of her reminiscing made him want to retreat even further into himself. After that, their communications became less frequent. She’d tried to stay in touch, but Kennedy always made excuses. Until he’d run out, and she stopped calling. And now here he was, at The Sink, wringing his hands like a freshman prom date.
    The show had started by the time Kennedy arrived. It was sold out and the club was full to capacity, so the velvet-rope jockey told him to get lost. Kennedy remembered the kitchen entrance Sierra had shown him and his friends how to break into with a credit card when they were in high school. He crept around back and was blown away to see they hadn’t fixed the lock after all those years. He used one of his many frequent-flier cards to slip in the door and found the last square foot of standing room.
    When the pot haze cleared, he saw her on the stage. He barely recognized her at first. When she was younger, she’d always been a tomboy, an effortless star at every sport she played and quick to eschew the fashion rag trappings of teenhood. But now, with her dark bronze skin covered in exotic tattoos and platinum blond dreadlocks artfully tangled on her head like Medusa’s snakes, she was an otherworldly beauty, radiating cool all over the room. Kennedy was captivated, and “Love” seemed a far more appropriate name for her now. Most of what he’d remembered about Sierra had been consumed by her stage persona. And even more fitting, her music pulled emotional strings in him to the point of breaking.
    By the end of the last encore, he was at a loss as to what to do. Watching the adoring fans who knew every word to her songs made him feel like an imposter and punctuated the fact that he had thrown away what could have been a great friendship over the years. What was he going to say to her, if they could even get five minutes alone? He felt compelled to apologize for his behavior but knew that would only make things more awkward, because then he would be admitting he had avoided her on purpose. The last thing she needed coming off the high of a great show was a pedestrianwalk down memory lane. He was an idiot to have thought they could pick up where