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Chapter 24
“Amari is fucking my old boyfriend,” Ivy said to Griffin, who fresh from the shower was wearing Ivy’s bathrobe. In her bedroom. In her old house.
“Is that my bathrobe?” Ivy wondered.
“Sorry. I forgot to steal one from the hotel before I left,” Griffin said, his head in a suitcase of clothes looking for something to wear. He called out, “Mom, have you seen my Hobart T-shirt?”
Ivy was surprised that Griffin was calling LindaMomand even more surprised when her mother answered with: “It’s downstairs drying, honey.”
“Did you just call my mom—Mom?”
“It was her idea,” Griffin explained. He found his tightest jeans and slipped them on under the robe. This was the first time that Ivy had noticed that he looked nothing like Nick, but when she watched dailies, he was transformed. The camera loved him. She had always heard that stars become stars when the cameras start rolling. Griffin tousled his hair. “Let’s get back to your favorite subject: Amari.”
“Amari is not my favorite subject.”
“She’s all you talk about, Ivy.”
He was right. She did talk about Amari a lot. But only because she was stealing her life.
Griffin continued, “I don’t believe Amari is having sex with Nick. She might be flirting with him, to get into character and everything. But I don’t see her with Nick. Long term.”
“Then why was she all dressed to seduce at the hotel, with Nick hiding in the shower?” Ivy had explained what had happened.
“How do you know it was Nick if you didn’t see him?”
“I saw the top of his head. And I heard him!”
“Why do you care what he does, Ivy? You and Nick are not a couple.” He hit her with the truth. She and Nick were not a couple. They used to be. The movie business had pulled them apart, but the making of this Christmas movie, which was about them, about how Joseph met Mary—Damn! She needed a new title—had brought them closer together again.
All she could say was, “I don’t know anymore, Griffin. We used to be. Then we weren’t. And now I don’t know what we are. And Drew, poor Drew…”
“Do you know why actors hate playing Hamlet?” Griffin asked. He waited. Ivy wasn’t answering. “It’s because he’s too wishy-washy. Dead girlfriend. Slutty mom. Hamlet can’t kill someone. To be or not to be. Make a choice, dude.”
“You think I’m Hamlet?”
“To Nick or not to Nick. Isn’t that the question?”
Ivy sat at the edge of the bed. Looked up at pictures of herself from all the high school plays. At one of her and Nick at the prom that peeked out behind other pictures. She stared at it. “Before I was with Drew, it was Nick. It was always Nick. And then he dumped me. I was alone. I didn’t want to date. I stayed home and I wrote. I think I had to kill my demons by writingWhen Joseph Met Mary.It was my therapy script. It got me through the breakup.”
“And you killed Nick in it.”
“I did. I gave it to my agent. She sent it to a few places, and no one was interested. Five years in and I had nothing to show. That’s when I started looking for Nick on social media.”
“You stalker, you.”
Ivy offered a soft smile. “I found pictures on the Shepherd Winery website. They never had a website, and now they do. And Nick is all over it. I was thinking about calling him when Drew called me about that script. And that was that.”
Griffin was confused. “I thought you met Drew before he bought your script.”
“We met at a party in Sundance. He had heard about the script from my agent. Within a week, I had two offers: one to option the script and one to date Drew.”
“Did you like Drew before he green-lit your movie?”
“You sound like my sister.”
“I have been spending a lot of time with her. She interviewed me for her thesis paper. Then she interviewed me again. What started off as a paper is now a book proposal about me. About my crazy life. It’s been very therapeutic.”
A T-shirt was tossed into the room by Ivy’s smiling dad. “Here’s your shirt, G-man. The car keys are by the door. I gassed it up for you.” Ivy wasn’t sure her dad had noticed her.
