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“Then maybe don’t marry the kind of girl you take to Vegas for a quickie wedding.”
If he’d been interested in how the news and the retraction of the news had affected her, he hadn’t said, but he was caught up in his custody battle with Nina, and had said more than once that if he could get Jill to just marry him for a little while, he could have that sorted out in a week.
“Smashing proposal,” she’d told him the last time he’d mentioned it. “I’m going to give it exactly the amount of consideration it deserves.”
By the end of the first week back at work, Jill had managed to pull herself through the worst of what she recognized as heartbreak. Heartbreak and disappointment, she corrected herself. She had thought better of Thad. Still, better to find out now, she told herself.
Her therapist had congratulated her on dating someone she hadn’t known since she was in leading strings, and suggested that on her next at-bat, she try dating someone even further outside of her inner circle, but Jill thought that had to wait until after the Oscars, when she could stop being so visible with Kline.
“Five-year plan,” Kim had reminded her, as they talked through what she’d be wearing for the next couple of paparazzi strolls.
Somehow, Jack’s nanny had become a dear friend. She hadn’t wanted to tell Kline about the voice mail, and she wasn’t going to call Rhiannon about it while she was away at work. So, she’d told Kim and let the other woman be the voice of reason. “Keep your eye on the prize. Five years and you’re out, and then you can find a nice construction worker, or coal miner, or oil baron. But you stick to your plan, and you won’t need an oil baron.”
“They’re all the same though, aren’t they?”
“I’m a lesbian. If I weren’t a lesbian, I’d be alone forever because, yes, they are all the same.”
“Did Cooper call you? About the job?” Jill changed the subject before she could start to cry again. “I want our conversations to pass the Bechdel test.”
Kim laughed, “Yeah. I’ve got kind of a styling audition next week.”
“Oh good! I’m so glad.”
“Thanks for doing that. I really appreciate it.”
“My pleasure. It’s all about who you know, right? It’s only half talent. The rest is just getting to meet the right people. But I have dibs on you because you have one hundred percent talent that I need desperately.”
After Jill had approved the rack of outfits, Kim had gone on her way. Jill had turned off her phones, landline ringer and mobile, and tried to read for a while. Unable to focus, she’d gotten in her car and driven to Kline’s for dinner, rejecting another of his silly advances before going home to sleep in her own bed.
Now, mid-morning and mostly alone, save for the housekeeper and the PA, who had actual work to do, she took a deep breath and wondered what it was going to take for her to feel true fulfillment. She called up her therapist’s office in New York and asked for an additional appointment.
In the past, she’d spent all her time with him talking about her mother, or why she wasn’t enough to hold a man. Maybe she’d been asking all the wrong questions, though. Maybe, instead of how to hold a man, she needed to work on why she felt like she needed one.
She could have held Gus, she realized. He and the life he offered just hadn’t been enough for her. So, as he’d said, she was giving up a solid reality to chase a fantasy.
What if she never met anyone? What if she never had any children? What if her life didn’t make it possible to adopt and parent the way she wanted?
What if, she asked herself, this is all there is. What if it’s just work, simple friendships, and a view from Beverly Hills?
“I have to be happy in the here and now,” she said aloud. “I have to find a way to be satisfied in the present, so I’ve got a hope in hell of enjoying the future. And it can’t be because I’m pinning my hopes on a man. Oh–that’s healthy. I need to write that down.”
Healthy carried her into the next day and through the next week. Healthy carried her all the way into the makeup chair on Tuesday, where it promptly abandoned her with a lapful of magazines that the hair girl had brought in.
Thad and Rhiannon, together at last, her brain captioned the photos of the two of them dirty dancing in some kind of bar. The two of them looked more comfortable together than she’d ever felt with anyone in her life.
The story that accompanied the exclusive photos was a nasty little piece about how Kline Scott’s former flame had started a fire with his best friend only weeks after Scott had set her aside for the love of his life. Eyewitnesses to the kiss captioned with, “Simon Says kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, said that the two had been inseparable on the set of Circle Sky in Prague, and wondered what the future held for the writer and sitcom star.
While she worked that day, all she could hear was the last line of Thad’s voice mail ringing in her ears. “Oh, hey, Beauty. Want to dance with a movie star?” He’d been talking to Rhiannon, she supposed. At least she didn’t have to draw on old wounds to bring up the tears Devon needed to cry as she decided to murder her lover. The fresh ones would do just fine.
When they were released, she found herself walking toward Kline’s trailer instead of her own and swallowed hard. She knew what she was going to do, and if he rejected her, it was going to be brutal. Hell, if he accepted her invitation, it would be brutal in an entirely different way. But, at least it would hurt less than this.
She knocked and felt her stomach flip when he opened the door smiling quizzically. It wasn’t too late. She could just ask him to dinner and see what happened. She could just tell him how much she had appreciated his friendship through the shoot so far. What she did was walk up the steep steps, close the door behind her and ask, “Do you want to have sex?”
And then it was Ugg boots, and sneakers, and hoodies and shirts, and jeans, and underwear flying like a tornado had exploded in the small space, and lips, and teeth, and hands, and nails, climbing each other until he was finally inside of her. It was fast and filthy, and then the next time was slower–almost like both of them were making sure they had actually just survived the last bout, until they were recovering on their backs, holding hands in the middle of his trailer’s bed.
“You’ve learned some things,” he finally said appreciatively.
“You have too.”
