I couldn’t say the words. How could I say it? I began to cry—the silent kind, where the tears just slip away, but still sting your eyes long after they’ve gone.
How had an ill-advised lark got so out of control? How was it that I was a…B- or C-list movie star? What was my life?
And what kind of stupid, moronic woman chooses the one man she can’t take to a public premiere unless she wants the FBI tip line to go nuts? I wiped the tears from my face with my robe in a pathetic effort to feel less pathetic.
He slid to the end of the bed and leaned to grab my hands. My face jerked up to find him searching my eyes. “I could let you go and say it’s the right thing to do and be noble, but fuck that. I’m not noble, and I love you. I want you more than I’ve wanted anything, and I will fight to make this work.”
“How?” I shook my head and turned my gaze from his eyes to his chest. But I couldn’t look at him there, either. Every last piece of him would undo me, dissolve my resolve and turn it into lust or love or some highly magnetic combination of the two. Lord a mercy, he was human quicksand.
He wants me more than he’s wanted anything, but I don’t hear from him for weeks on end.
Suuuucccckkkk.
He doesn’t want to put me in jeopardy, but
oops lol
kidnappers.
Ssssuuuuuucccccckkkkkk!
His jaw worked as he set my hands on my lap in a way that was a wrenching combination of loving and angry. He whipped on his pants, his back to me. I didn’t want to be thinking goodbye when I watched his butt disappear. We’d had so many swell times, me and his firm posterior. So many well-fitting pairs of jeans.
“I’m going to find out what the hell happened last night.” His shirt and shoes on, he paused at the door of the bedroom, his face puffy from sleep and hard from worry.
“Yes, wonderful, the solution to our problems is for you to leave.” I stood to try and reach the moral high ground. “How long will you be gone this time, ‘figuring things out’? A week? Two? When will I hear from you? Will it be an actual call so I can hear your voice and pretend we’re in the same room, or will a dirty text suffice for the all-clear?”
He grimaced in an obvious effort to not hurl expletives at me and sagged against the door jamb. Shaking his head, he said, solemnly, “I’m sorry. And I don’t know. I’m not an accountant, and I didn’t know you resented me so much for it.”
“It’s not that fucking hard, Sam! You pick up the phone. You can even track me with mine! Isn’t that what you wanted? I guess I should be keeping tabs on you. At least then I wouldn’t go to sleep at night and pray for a ghost.” I clutched my hands to stop them from reaching out.
“So what is this? Are you dumping me?”
There they went again—the tears, sliding down, like my stomach, like my heart. “I don’t know. I’m heartsick from wondering about you. Every. Day. It’s not cute anymore.”
“I was going to take you sightseeing today, so…” He laughed, the dimple giving a little bow. “Sorry. Again.” Standing there for another moment, he waited for me to speak, to beg him to come back and give me kitchen scraps. But I had a stubborn streak as wide as the Mississippi, and I merely nodded.
I’d spent a year ignoring the reality of my relationship with Sam, ignoring that it wasn’t a relationship. Or maybe that it was. Ignoring that I wrote ‘Mrs Sam the Thief’ on my mental Trapper Keeper every day in glitter pen. Now was the time to face things, and to hold fast to myself, and my needs. I’d made lemonade from Picasso, and damn it, I would drink up.
You have to take care of yourself before you take care of anyone else
, Oprah told me in my brain.
My every nerve ending screamed for him as he walked out the apartment door. I sat, frozen in place, for quite a while—not crying, barely thinking. I’d rarely in my life ever felt so alone, adrift on a strange continent.
Nothing to do but sob in the shower then watch
Law & Order
on Netflix until I was numb, like every successful Hollywood player.
Chapter Four
When the Cat’s Away, the Mouse Will Be Very Confused
Ext. Hyde Park—day
Angle On: Our heroine
Samantha Lytton
walks along the banks of the Thames.
Music Score Plays: The new, hit single from the group
Whiny Boy Band Popular With Your Twelve-Year-Old.
Samantha takes stock of her life in a touching montage.
Samantha Lytton: I thought we’d be together forever.
Nearby Rollerblader: Are you talking to me?
Samantha Lytton: I’m talking to the romantic comedy gods.
Angle On: Samantha continues her slow walk, past the picturesque trees filtering a dappled sunlight, past the cafe where she buys a seriously large ice cream cone, past the garbage can she runs into accidentally while trying to take a bite of her ice cream, past the laughing group of twenty-somethings who capture her every move on their cell phones.
Angle On: A wet, spreading chocolate stain on Samantha’s white T-shirt.
Samantha Lytton: Oh, my tit! Fucking seriously?
Twenty-Something: Keep filming! It’s Michelle Williams.
Other Twenty-Something: Damn, she’s short.
Samantha Lytton: I’m not Michelle Williams! Why does everyone say that?
Twenty-Something: Beige American actresses all look the same, innit?
That actually makes Samantha feel better, as she’s usually cast in a role labelled ‘ugly friend’ or ‘goofy sister’.
Angle On: She ditches her disintegrating ice cream cone in favour of a drink at a nearby pub. It seems a more suitable spot in which to pause and consider her life choices. After knocking back a couple—FYI, when you ask a blunt-nosed English bartender for a dirty martini, he may give you the stink eye and just pour you a beer—she weaves into the street at three in the afternoon.
Angle On: A police horse Samantha befriends, his magnificent brown hair the same colour as the deuce he leaves in the street.
Samantha Lytton: If this were a movie, I’d clumsily step in a pile of horse shit. I’d probably
be
the pile of horse shit.
Pile of Horse Shit: There are worse things, Samantha Lytton.
Samantha Lytton: You can talk!
Pile of Horse Shit: We of the horse shit have many secrets.
Samantha Lytton: Tell me what to do, oh wise, yet stinky one.
Angle On: Samantha lets out a very ladylike burp.
Pile of Horse Shit: Perhaps that smell is the mess you’ve made of your romantic life. You must decide if you’re going to trust Sam. Trust or trust not, there is no try.
Samantha Lytton: You’re cribbing advice from Yoda?
Pile of Horse Shit: You’re the one talking to a pile of crap in the dirt.
Samantha Lytton: Fair enough.
Pile of Horse Shit: You’ve fought thus far for your one, true love. Await his call this evening tide and work things out together. Communication is the key.
Samantha Lytton: Thanks, Mr, um, Shit.
Angle On: A copper joining his horse.
Police Officer: Do you require assistance, Miss?
Samantha Lytton: Nope! I wasn’t talking to—I mean, I don’t like crap. I mean cops. I mean, have a nice day. I’m sure you’re very nice. Taxi!
Angle On: Samantha takes a cab back to her apartment. She presses her face to the glass as the city rolls by, reflected in the window. The music swells. Samantha then considers that the window of a cab is probably filthy, and jerks away. Gross.
It took a full minute after waking in my London flat to realise that I’d fallen asleep at seven p.m. the evening before, and that it was now six a.m. the next morning—and Sam had not called. I gripped my cell phone, heart tripping to and fro in my chest, and pressed button after button to check texts, emails and received calls. Nothing. I took a deep breath and hit my first speed dial. It went straight to his voice mail—do not pass go, do not collect the shattered pieces of your love life. Had the men who’d jumped us succeeded in tracking him? I tossed the phone on the bed and squeezed my eyes shut. He’d done this before. Not answered for days and days. “To hell with it.”
I shoved every bad notion out of my head and lumbered to the shower. Today at ten a.m. I had my table read for
What Could Go Wrong
? and I intended to look dazzling, perform majestically and be the star I was pretending to be. The star who definitely did not get depressed-drunk by herself and have imaginary conversations with faeces. No, that woman was gone, as was her impossibly stained shirt. It was time to woman up.
Shit! Where was the plug converter for my hair dryer?
I collapsed on the floor of my bathroom and cried for five minutes, which might have been an inappropriate response. My insides jumped around even faster than my thoughts, and it took me a while to compose myself, with the help of a crumbled, leftover muffin from my flight the day before.
Luckily, one of my neighbours had a locally-sourced hair dryer, so two hours and a borrowed bag of frozen peas on my puffy eyes later, I hit the streets of London in a fabulous vintage brown tweed dress and red knee-high boots. I looked so damn cosmopolitan I should have been stopped by a style blog.
A woman who looks like this would never be left by her lover. No, indeed, she’d dash into the studio offices, totally on the guest list, and breeze into the large conference room where the table read would take place. And there it was—my name on a tented card dead centre along one side of the table. Jayde Loving, Samantha Lytton. Oh, how I loved her silly name. For every ridiculous ‘y’ added to a character name, she gains ten per cent more sexy.
I’d shown up early, which is not a thing the stars of a film tend to do, I’d discovered. But better early than late. I was one of the two major leads of this film, and I could not fuck it up. Just the thought of making an ass of myself and costing the studio fifty million dollars gave me a wave of such anxiety I actually had to sit in the folding chair. I played it off by diving into my bag to search for nothing. Soon, folks were introducing themselves—some of the other actors, the Director of Photography, other technical wizards who would be paid to stare at my face in close-up for many, many hours. I apologised for this to some of them, and they laughed. Yes! I was a functioning adult! I was a fabulous starlet! I was…drooling.
Oh, baby.
He walked in the room. Daniel Zhang, the man
People
magazine had placed third in their most recent Sexiest Man Alive issue. When asked later, I would tell my best friend Ellen that I heard slow-mo saxophone music timed to his long, lean strides. He smiled before he took off his aviator sunglasses, which he twisted off in the hottest move since hip-thrusting was invented. He was so handsome up close that he didn’t seem real—warm brown eyes that crinkled at the corners, tanned skin smooth and perfect, his hair black and brushed forward gorgeously in the way that only comes from four-hundred-dollar haircuts.
Recently, he’d ended a Tony-winning run in
Hamlet
on Broadway. As Hamlet—the first actor of Asian descent to do so. I sighed. Yes, sighed when he came straight for me and extended his hand down, down, down. At six feet tall, he had me beat by an entire foot.
We’d emailed a little, but he’d been so busy we hadn’t got a chance to talk. We hadn’t even read together, the producers figuring he was so golden that he’d create enough chemistry for six romantic sub-plots and innumerable fanfictions.
With a smile I hoped would mean big box office for us, he said, “I’m so delighted to finally meet you, Samantha.”
And at that moment, the first verified case of ‘death by unbelievably sexy British accent’ occurred.
Almost. I shook his hand, mine cold and clammy, and managed to stutter, “Hi. Yes. Me, too. Mister Zh—Dan—Daniel. Zhangiel.”
He laughed. “My friends call me Danny.”
I giggled, but in a very professional manner. I collapsed back into my seat while he worked the room, which parted lovingly for him like a pair of overeager female thighs. When he circled around, his ass was so perfectly formed in his brown pinstripe pants that I had to literally think
close your mouth, Samantha
. My disloyalty to the main ass in my life slapped me, and I vowed to not gaze adoringly at strange butts anymore. Well, not overly much. I wasn’t dead.
I checked my phone—nothing from Sam, not even in response to the texts I’d sent earlier. I decided to be angry rather than fearful about it. I functioned on angry, but scared just turned my mind into a wad of stale cotton candy. I needed all the brain power possible to perform fantastically at the read. The producers were getting their first real taste of how this film might turn out, and I could be replaced. It would cost them, because yay contracts, but it could happen.
Fortunately, as the next few hours unfolded, the laughs were many and happened in all the correct spots. Danny, as his friends call him, was easy to riff off of, and the chemistry was natural and zinging around the room.
During a break, he came over to me at the snack table. “I’m a big fan,” he said.
I looked around. “Of me? Be real—you’d never heard of me before you saw my audition.” He was one of the producers, so he would have had to sign off on me. Remembering that flattered me anew.