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"Hm, well, I'll just have to have a spy on the set to keep an eye on Kline and make sure he behaves. Especially now that it appears he's about to be single again."
Jill rolled her eyes at him, thumbing through the magazine. "Oh hell! They've got that picture from my birthday party. That is the worst picture of me!" She skimmed."That's just all made up," she declared. "Anyone who knows us knows that. They didn’t get our ages right, or the dates, or anything.”
"It sounds pretty convincing, though, doesn't it?" August said, turning the computer towards her so she could see the screen. "Everyone's certainly buying into the mythology. Look at these pictures and notes from the Oscars."
"Oh, August," she gasped, and he smiled knowingly, "that dress is amazing!You don't notice as much when you're wearing it but, oh!"
He laughed, "Not the dress, silly!You and Kline.Look how you look."
"Posed.And damn sexy.You should dress me all the time."
August clicked through several pages of photographs and read bits of articles. With the exception of one photo of Jill alone with August cropped in half in the background, nearly every picture was of her with Kline. All the references made were about the two of them, their past romance, and the apparent rekindling of that romance. A few mentions were made about Devil's Party, but most of the press was about the two of them. "I don't see any pictures of Rhiannon at all. Not even with Kline," he said, skimming through again. "It's all about you, baby."
"That doesn't mean I'm sleeping with him," Jill defended."It just means the press would like for us to be.So why does she believe this over me?"
"How would you feel if the roles were reversed?"
Jill sat back and tried to imagine."I think I'd feel like you.I know the business.It is what it is.Kline and I are about to be naked together in front of a crew of at least thirty.It's a little hard for me to get worked up and worried over pictures of us with clothes on."
"You didn't feel that way when he was ready to drop everything and come back here when those pictures hit the papers, Jill, or when he chose her over you at the end of his visit to New York. That would have hurt, regardless, but it was worse because Rhiannon's your friend. If she was the one sharing the spotlight with him now while you were being forced into the background, or painted as an obstacle to true love, you would consider it a rather big deal, wouldn't you?"
"Be quiet," Jill said, looking stricken.
August sighed and went over to slip his arms around her. "I'm playing devil's advocate. It's just in my nature. I'm not saying that you've done anything wrong, just that your perception and hers are very different. I don't want to see you lose a friend over this."
"Too late.And I think you mean you don’t want to miss a chance to vent your own spleen on the back of Rhiannon’s gripes.” She shook her head. “Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about what we're going to do when you get home from Paris."
"We're going to buy a house and decorate it and throw fabulous parties and make love as often as physically possible."
"And have lots of babies?"
"We can get as many cats as you'd like."
"No, baby babies.I really want children, August. A lot.I always have.I don't know if I can have them, but if not, I want to adopt."
August sighed. "Well, it's a sure thing that we can't have them. We just talked about that this morning. As for adopting--we'll see," he said, hedging slightly. "Maybe after your five-year plan."
August wandered off upstairs, leaving Jill to peruse her press. She moved from news page to entertainment page, then tripped through several sites that claimed to have pictures and gossip about her. This was something her NYC publicist had always done for her. Along with the divorce had come a sudden parting of ways with both her old management and publicist. They hadn't protected her from the glare of the media spotlight, and she'd intended to find people who would. Honestly, the stories she read about her and Kline didn't bother her simply for the fact that they were not true. It was when the press printed the truth about her life that she felt nervous. Still, after scouring the web for herself, she started feeling a bit more sympathy for Rhiannon and after seeing what Sharon Osbourne had said, she picked up the phone.
Of course, she got voice mail, so she tried to cram as much into sixty seconds as she could, "Okay," she said, "August just made me read all my press. I had no idea what all was out there, but having seen it, I can tell why you're upset. You have to believe that it was absolutely nothing more than what you saw with your own eyes. I couldn't warn you that I would be with Kline in New York because I didn't know he would be there. If Roland had sent Adolf Hitler to pick me up, I would have been happy to see him. It happened to be someone I knew and trusted to a degree. He stayed with me all day and most of the evening because I was a complete mess. I went with him to his Colbert taping because I didn't want to be alone, and I needed to show up in public. Then he got slammed with your pictures, so I stayed with him so he'd have some support. I didn't call you that day because he was calling you--I was there with him. He was using my phone. He was completely worried about you to the point that--" The voicemail cut her off, so she dialed again.
"Me again," she told the beep. "He was going to leave town and go straight to you. That's something he never would have done for me. We did talk about whether or not we could date again. We—we, the two of us—decided no. Mainly because of you, but also because he would never even think to drop everything for me. I knew all that. I assumed he would tell you that. Well, no I didn't. I didn't even think that you might need to know it. Please try to understand that while you were being humiliated by your pictures, I was being humiliated by my husband, who had just given several interviews about our marriage, including the miscarriages I had—yes, I've had two. And he cited the miscarriages as reasons our marriage fell apart. Then he paraded his pregnant girlfriend in front of me. I wasn't thinking about you or anyone else. I think I'm justified in that." She was cut off again and dialed once more.
"I hope you're bothering to listen to these. I did try to call you twice, but you weren't willing to talk. Maybe I didn't make enough of an effort to draw you out, but I didn't know what was wrong and frankly, I was doing all I could to keep my own head above water, so I didn't think to bother with it. I'm sorry you were hurt by the press. I'm sorry that you got left out of the publicity loop. I honestly don't know why Kline would say I was trying to seduce him or being aggressive with him. That's just not true. So, whatever you think happened, here's what did: Nothing. I don't know what else to say."
This time Jill hung up before the voice mail and then opened her contacts to dial Kline's number. He answered on the third ring, and she said hello. Once they'd exchanged greetings, she asked, "Why does Rhiannon think I tried to seduce you in New York?"
"What?"
"Rhiannon came over this morning and left after a screaming fight. She's got it in her head that we're having an affair, or we have had an affair, or we want to have one. Why?"
Kline thought for a minute then said, "Oh--I might have given her that impression."
"What?!"
"Well, not that we did anything, but that you wanted to."
"Why would you do that?"
