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“Back… to my life…” I repeated dully. “Right.”
“I’ll keep paying you, of course.”
I scoffed. “For what? The cat will be out of the bag. Everyone will know we were faking it.”
He glanced down at the picture again. “Looks real enough to me…” he teased, winking, but it sounded forced.
And that was the root of the problem right there. According to my heart, nothing about this had been fake, not since the first moment I laid eyes on Max Shepherd.
“I’d better go,” I whispered, because I couldn’t trust my voice not to crack. It took every ounce of willpower to keep the tears at bay. My traitorous body tried to lock down, my muscles seizing, joints stiffening, but somehow, I managed to push back my chair.
With each step toward the door, all I could think about was this widening chasm between us. I paused with my hand on the knob. “Could you… send me a copy of that photo?” I asked, risking one last look at him over my shoulder. I was a bit embarrassed by the request, but likewise, it was a pretty damn good souvenir of our time together.
He smirked like he was thinking the same thing. “Absolutely.”
And just like that, it was over.
I must’ve been a better actor than I thought I was. I walked down the hall to the elevator like I didn’t have a care in the world, stood stoic as I rode down to the lobby with a few hotel guests, I even smiled at the desk staff. I made it all the way through the grand lobby and out the front door, held open by the doorman.
But when the door closed behind me and I found myself standing on the sidewalk, with an entire city of witnesses, I finally fell apart. A jagged sob tore out of me, and the dam broke, tears flooding down my cheeks. “Oh shit,” I moaned, clutching at my chest.
A gloved hand appeared, blurry through my tears, holding out a red handkerchief. “It’ll be all right,” a kind voice said.
I turned to see Gerald, the elderly doorman who often worked the evening shift. I took the hankie from him and dabbed at my face, but fresh tears replaced them just as quickly. “How do you know?” I asked, my voice nasally from my snotty nose. “You don’t even know what’s wrong.”
He gave me a grandfatherly smile. “Oh, trust me. After working here as long as I have, I recognize heartbreak when I see it. And I promise… it will be all right. One way or the other, the heart will mend.” His expression turned pensive, lips pursed. “If I had to bet on it, though, I would say you and Max will find your way back to each other. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. That’s true love right there.”
Gerald was practically a stranger. What did he know about our relationship beyond what the tabloids had reported? And yet… I clung to his claim with both hands. True love? A man could dream.
As Gerald turned to head back to his station, I held out the hankie to him. “Sorry, it’s a little damp and… snotty.”
He laughed. “Keep it. You need it more than I do.”
And he was right. By the end of the night, the handkerchief was soaked through.
16
Max
“This might be your chance to show the world what you can really do.”
Arlo’s words were the first thing I heard when I opened my eyes every morning, and it was pretty much the only thing that got me out of bed today. I’d never been so depressed in my life. My limbs felt too heavy to move, so I figured, why bother? I had room service ordered in for every meal and didn’t leave the room for days. There was nothing left. No career, and no Arlo. What else did I have to look forward to?
For an entire week after Carson’s threat, I held my breath, hoping he’d decided not to go through with it. Had I given Arlo up for no reason? Was it too late to get him back? Every day, it was like walking on eggshells. I showed up on set, read my lines, and I waited.
It wasn’t until the final day of filming that everything exploded.
I’d known the second my phone rang that the article had dropped. The caller ID said it was my agent, Dane Barteau. No matter how much I wished I could simply ignore the call and it would all go away, I knew that was impossible.
“How bad is it?” I’d asked instead of saying hello.
“It’s bad,” he’d admitted. And it was.
ACTOR MAX SHEPHERD CAUGHT WITH PROSTITUTE. And there, front and center, was a photo of me and Arlo, with promises of more pics and the full story if you turned to page 5. It didn’t matter that it was a bunch of bullshit, the damage was done.
Chatter may have come first, but they weren’t the last. Suddenly, I had all kinds of magazines and gossip sites digging into my past, looking for dirt. Anything that looked even remotely unsavory was dug up. Bad grades in school, accusations of drug use from past boyfriends. Anything I’d ever done wrong, real or imagined, was out there for the world to see.
That was when I called my parents to apologize for any hassle they were given. We might not have been close, but the idea of those vipers camping out on my parents’ lawn and trampling my mom’s rose garden made me see red.
