So, you’re probably asking yourself, How does a girl, even a shallow, disaster-actress girl like me whose long-term love just died, forget she has a fiancé?
And also, I’m sure, if she does have a fiancé, even one she forgets she has sometimes, what was she doing on that plane with Connor? What was she thinking?
The easy question first.
I don’t have a fiancé. Not really.
Okay, maybe technically, but not really really.
Because I live in fantasyland, right? And this is how it works in fantasyland.
You’re with a guy. I mean with with. Love-of-your-life, your-heart-beats-faster-every-time-you-see-him, you-act-like-a different-person-around-him love. But he keeps breaking your heart. You keep breaking his. You break each other’s hearts. You don’t know how to be together. You don’t know how to be apart. You don’t know how to be.
I mean, how do you be in love when the whole world’s watching? When every fight, every drama, every moment of your togetherness is on display for the world to see? Is there a way? If there is, I never figured it out. I only succeeded in divorcing myself from reality for long enough that I mostly didn’t notice that everyone was watching. But that was a temporary solution, which ended badly. Obviously.
So, I went to rehab. He went to rehab. We got back together, we left rehab, we broke up.
We continued this dance for the next year and a half. A Jane Austeny, Regency dance where we’d float together and almost touch but never quite make it. Well, of course we touched, but you know what I mean.
My heart was broken. My heart stayed broken.
Six months ago when he went on the bender to end all benders, I nearly threw my hard-won sobriety out the window to go along with him, but I was strong enough to end things instead. Taylor Swift style. We were never going to get back together, I told myself. Like, never.
And my heart didn’t matter anymore.
So there you are with your broken heart, and you’ve separated from the LOYL for what you tell yourself is the last time. The world is watching, and you’re filming this (you’re pretty sure) terrible movie with a boy/man, the boy/man of the moment, who’s starring opposite you because the role calls for a super charming guy.
They’ve typecast him.
He is super charming.
You flirt on set. When he makes excuses to come see you in your trailer between takes, it makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you used to feel when you were with the LOYL, or when you took the drugs and alcohol you used to forget about him.
You flirt back. You touch his arm when you talk. You laugh harder at his jokes than might be called for, not because you’re acting, but because it’s easy to give in and laugh. It feels good. Nothing happens, not yet, but you both know it’s only a matter of time.
Rumours escape from set. There’s a photo taken of the LOYL surreptitiously checking out a tabloid that has a picture of you laughing with Super Charming Guy. Looking at the photo of the LOYL also makes you feel good. Sad too, and, if you’re being completely honest, a little maybe-this-will-bring-him-back.
But mostly, just good.
Then it’s the wrap party. Everybody’s drunk except for you and Super Charming Guy, who isn’t drinking, in “conspiracy” with you—that’s what he says, and then he says, “All for one, and one for all,” and you wonder if he knows what he’s quoting from or what the word “conspiracy” means. When he suggests that you “get the hell out of here,” you nod and follow him out the back entrance, even though you know it’s sure to be the lead story on PerezHilton tomorrow.
You think he’s going to take you to his place, but he doesn’t. Instead, because he’s still in character, or maybe because he really is just a super charming guy, he drives you to the top of the hill that overlooks this crazy city you live in some of the time. You sit and watch the lights, the constant blurry traffic that never goes away no matter what time of night, and he confides in you. He tells you about his struggles to make it, how he was nervous to meet you, how he isn’t nervous now, but he still kind of is, you know? And you nod and put your hand on his arm. You kiss, and it feels nice. You kiss again, and a flashbulb goes off.
An emergency summit is called.
After much debate, your respective publicists decide that you have two weeks to date “privately.” Two weeks where you’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re “just good friends,” where you’ll never be seen arriving anywhere together. During those two weeks he’s still charming, he still makes you laugh, and when he kisses you and touches you and makes love to you, you can almost forget the LOYL.
Then the reprieve is up. It’s time to go out into the light.
At the very first public event you attend together the questions start.
“Is it true you’re moving in together?”
“Are you in love?”
“What’s kissing Amber Sheppard like?”
And what can you say to these questions, but:
“That’s a ways off yet.”
“We’re very happy.”
“A gentleman doesn’t tell.”
“We’re very happy,” you repeat as you smile at one another on the red carpet. “It’s too soon to talk about anything else.”
It might be too soon for you, too soon for anyone normal or real, but you don’t exist anywhere normal or real, and the questions keep coming. It doesn’t take long before you’re being referred to as an established item. “Long-term couple Amber Sheppard and Danny Garcia” starts to be the introduction to any story about you, like, a month after that first kiss on the hilltop. They say you’re living together, even though you aren’t. That he’s shopping for rings, though that can’t possibly be true.
They stop talking about “Camber” and start calling you “Damber.”
You’re expected to answer to this name with a cutesy laugh.
You have to practise to get it right.
Another month later it’s awards season, and time speeds up. Neither of you have been nominated for anything, but you have a movie to promote, so you act like you have been. You attend every awards show there is and laugh like bells when the plasticized hosts say you’re sure to be nominated next year.
Between the dieting and the working out and the trying on of dresses, you end up seeing him only at the events themselves and the after-parties you should be skipping. At the Golden Globes, he gets asked for the first time when he’s going to propose while you’re standing right next to him, worried you’ll faint from the juice fast that got you into the dress that was made for someone with the figure of an eleven-year-old girl.
He laughs it off, but by the Oscars he’s started answering “Soon,” and now it’s your turn to laugh. That bell-ringing laugh you practised but never got quite right.
That night, when you’re sober again among the sea of drunken be-Oscared people, and he’s tipsy because “You wouldn’t mind, babe, right, if I had just one?” he pulls you out of the Vanity Fair party. He gets down on one knee right there among the topiaries and tells you that you’ve changed his life, asks you to be his wife.
You ignore the fact that this proposal came out in rhyme.
You don’t say yes, but you don’t say no, either.
You do, however, let him put a ridiculously large yellow diamond on your finger.
And when you work it out a couple of days later, you figure out that that night was just your twentieth date.
Two hours later, Olivia ushers Danny into my apartment as if she’s brokering a treaty between two warring nations.
I’ve showered and blow-dried and changed into a new lululemon outfit that looks exactly like the one I was wearing before only less rumpled. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t give a crap about what I was wearing or how I smelled. Okay, that’s not true. I can remember, and I’ve spent years making sure I’d never be back there again, but here I am.
Olivia’s cleaned up the traces of my meltdown. Fresh sheets are on the bed, blankets have been removed from the couch and folded, three Kleenex boxes and their former contents have been collected and thrown into the trash. The lights are on and the curtains are closed and there’s music playing—Norah Jones, I think—just loudly enough that the thawp of the helicopter blades and the calls of the press are blurred, almost imperceptible.
Danny’s wearing jeans that looked pressed, an Oxford shirt that plays up his greyish eyes, and—this is the part I have trouble forgiving him for—enough product in his hair to make it look like he’s been running his fingers through it with worry.
“Amberina,” he says as he pulls me against his chest.
Danny smells good and clean, and his arms are strong around me. I feel the tears start again, and I don’t know what to do.
“It’s okay, babe,” he says, running his hand over my hair.
Babe, renkonti min . . .
Renkonti min . . .
Renkonti min . . .