Choices

by Tessa Vidal

I didn't pick a club from the list Heather Heath texted to my phone. On some rebellious impulse, I headed for a blue-collar dive where women in cheap jeans hustled pool to classic country music― the kind of place where you're fancy if you drink beer from a bottle instead of the cheap draft. I sat at the bar and dropped quarters into a suspicious table-top poker machine that lied about what it really paid. Why was I here?

  Heather was playing a delaying game. Grimes hadn't called back, and she thought he might have decided to back down. Maybe she was hoping our little problem would just go away. Or that I would just go away. My background was no secret, and I might be filming a new reality TV show in a few months. At that point, it was only a matter of time before some energetic gossip reporter snooped into my hometown and found out Caro and I were once high school sweethearts.

  The clock was ticking down with or without Ryder, Devos Grimes, or Heather Heath herself. The childhood sweetheart angle was a story no red-blooded gossip reporter could resist.

  “Haven't seen you around before.” A perky brunette, maybe all of twenty-two, sat down next to me. She had a blue stripe in her hair and a winged dragon tat on her right bicep. “New in town?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  She pointed her sharp chin at the nearest pool table. “Want to play a game?”

  “I don't play games I can't win.”

  “You better stop dropping quarters in that one-armed bandit then.”

  “Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” ended. “For the Good Times” started. I decided I'd had all the fun I could stand, so I pushed away from the counter and out the door. It was dark in the dive but still afternoon out here. Somebody down the sidewalk was walking a string of dogs in my direction.

  A simple, uncomplicated life, walking dogs. Or so it had seemed when I first started in the business. Apparently, there was no such thing as a simple, uncomplicated life.

  Back at the hotel, I hesitated in the piano bar. No women in there. I could drink alone. But the lemon drop martini was too sour, and the piano player liked irritating pop music from the 1970s. This drink too was pushed away unfinished.

  One thing went right. The batteries in the little egg-shaped vibrator were fresh. The buzz was agreeable. It did the job. Yeah, right. Isn't that the saddest thing you can say about an orgasm? That it's agreeable, that it did the job?

  The handful of moments we'd had together over the last few days weren't enough. I needed more than memories of Caro's open legs inviting me to swim up between her thighs.

  My agent called. We were getting close to a deal on the TV thing. She'd been doing my publicity, but now she wanted to hire somebody to help out. “I got a call from Heather Heath. She does a lot of big stars from the south like Caro Ballad. How about her?”

  CARO AND I SAT AT A small round table by the pool, Dickens at our feet. The housekeeper brought out coffee, cream, and brown sugar. A far cry from the white powders our moms used in their coffee.

  “I'm not comfortable with the way Heather is insinuating her way into every part of my life,” I said. “I'm concerned with her motives.”

  “She's pissed off that I wasn't really who she thought. Now she's concerned there's more stuff we're not telling her.” Caro stirred the cream slowly into her cup.

  “She already knows what we're not telling her. She's snooping around in my business, so she already knows about Ryder.”

  “It's a lot to take in all at once.” Caro sighed. “She'll get over it.”

  “Wait. You already knew she knew.”

  “She had a few things to say about trust.”

  I might have a few things to say myself. “You should have told me.”

  “It didn't seem important. Is it important?”

  Maybe not. Maybe Heather needed to know everything if she was going to handle Caro's publicity. Still... “She's talking to my agent. She wants to be my publicist too. Is that appropriate, both of us having the same publicist?”

  Caro shook her head. She wasn't saying no, she was saying she didn't know. “This is hard.”

  Uh oh. “What now?”

  “She went to see Devos Grimes at his office.”

  “And?” This was like pulling teeth.

  “She told him if he contacted me again, she'd make sure he never worked another day in Los Angeles.”

  How could she make sure of that? “And he believed her?”

  Caro laughed. “Well, not exactly.”

  Then I too laughed. Why hadn't I seen it? “She promised him a part in a movie.”

  “Close enough. There's a fortune out there to be made consulting on crime movies. But not if you piss off one of Hollywood's best-connected publicists.” We should have been sharing a moment of understanding, but her smile had already vanished. A tiny, near-invisible dent formed between her eyes.

  “But this is good,” I said. Wasn't it? Why did it seem as if Caro needed to be reassured? “So she's bought him off, and Grimes is out of the picture. We can move forward anytime you're ready.”

  “It is good. But.”

  But. The worst three-letter word in the world.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Shell

  Caro ran down, and there was another awkward silence. Her eyes skittered away from mine.

  “Whatever it is you have to tell me, you'll have to tell me,” I finally said.

  She took a breath from deep in her diaphragm, an actor's trick for calming herself. “My people don't want us to come forward as a couple until after the lawyers finalize the contract for the new movie deal. Even if Grimes doesn't talk, reporters sometimes actually do investigate, and if they look into your background, it won't be long before they learn the truth about mine. So my people think...”

  People. What a word. By people, I was ninety-nine percent sure she meant Heather Heath. “I know all that. We've both been knowing all that.”

  At last, she did raise her beautiful eyes to mine. We looked at each other for a long moment. “I need to pose as a princess a little while longer.” The production company for the new movie was famous for their girl-friendly films about princesses. “You know I've seen the script.”

  That was Caro trying to give me something, because I also knew she'd signed a non-disclosure agreement not to talk about the script.

  She's not making this shit up for no reason. Hear her out.

  Still, I was struggling to maintain my own composure. “You can't say, but let me guess. There's some unintended irony.” Thinking like a producer didn't come as naturally to me as it did to Caro, but I was learning. “Maybe it's another movie about another pretty pink princess. Maybe the princess is in hiding. Maybe she's pretending to be something she's not.”

  Caro exhaled slowly. “I knew you'd understand. If my people time the big reveal just right, the publicity will be priceless. They feel like that's money in the bank. Not just for me, but for the investors, for the producers, for my staff... for everybody.”

  For fuck's sake. We were no longer hiding our relationship to protect Caro. Now we were hiding it to help her people build a publicity circus.

  “Six weeks, that's it,” she said. “Six weeks at the longest.”

  “Six. Weeks.” I let her hear the incredulity in my voice. “You're asking me to pretend to be nothing more than your dog consultant for six more fucking weeks.”

  “Does it really matter what people think? What matters is what we are to each other in private.” Her large hazel eyes were begging me to understand. Her voice was shaky.

  She didn't even believe what she was saying herself. She'd been told to say this, and so she was saying it. Had she really come any distance at all from the high school girl who moved across the country on her family's orders? She'd given me up once. Apparently, if anybody had a plausible argument, she was ready to give me up again.

  I stood. “I'm sorry, Caro, but obviously it does matter very much what people think. It may not matter to you, but it matters to people who matter to you. And it's obvious you're heavily inve
sted in trying to please those people.”

  She swallowed hard but didn't deny it. “I have a lot of balls in the air. A lot of people I have to keep happy. There's no such thing as a self-made star. It takes a team.”

  And every team has its captain. “So it's back to what I said before. Maybe I'm right to be uncomfortable with how much influence your publicist has over you. Over us.”

  “Heather's a challenge sometimes. But she was there for me when nobody else was. She believed in me when my own aunt thought the best I could do was get a job dealing poker at Commerce. There's a lot of money at stake, not just money in my pocket, but money in her pocket too, money in the investors' pockets. It's a big responsibility.” She swallowed a second time. “I'm not even twenty-nine, and I'm an industry with millions of dollars changing hands because of my brand. It's a lot sometimes. I don't feel qualified to make these decisions.”

  How could a woman with so much physical and social power feel so powerless? I was three weeks younger, and suddenly I was sick and tired of being the only adult in the room. “I'm sorry, but I don't agree. Nobody is better qualified than you to say how long you're going to continue to deny me in public. That isn't up to me, and it isn't up to your people. That's on you, Caro.”

  My temper was starting to get away from me. Was I mad at Caro or at Heather Heath or at myself? I'd always known Caro was out of my league.

  “Please, Shell. There's a lot of pressure on me right now.”

  Deep breaths. Calm. Think.

  But I wasn't breathing or thinking. I was shouting. “Or is it for just a few more weeks? Is there going to be another excuse for a delay a few weeks later?”

  She looked stunned.

  “Are you ever going to acknowledge me? What's the real truth? That you and Heather plan to keep me as your dirty little secret from the wrong side of the tracks forever?”

  “I just... we need time... we need to craft the story. Set up the right interviews.”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake. The right fucking interviews. As if there's ever going to be the right fucking time to tease and reveal your dog trainer girlfriend who was brought up in a single wide.”

  Her mouth flapped open and closed. No words came out.

  “Am I good enough for you to claim in public, Caro? Or is it more important for you to pretend to be a princess forever?”

  “I... I...” She lifted a hand and then fluttered it back down. Her lack of an answer was all the answer I needed. She wasn't ready. Maybe she'd never be ready.

  “You need time. I get it.” I bit back the cruel words that sprung to my lips. Some words, once said, couldn't be unsaid. Fighting through the hurt, I managed to choke out something that seemed reasonably adult, although it was very far from the primitive feelings of rejection churning through my heart. “We both moved too fast. We both need time. You're right. We need to move more slowly. Make sure it's real. It would be stupid to make a big old splash in the gossip columns and then end up splitting up ten minutes later.”

  “We did move fast. I can hardly catch my breath sometimes.” If she too was faking the role of a reasonable adult, it was indistinguishable from the real thing. How could she be so calm about it?

  My heart split in two. Couldn't she see that? I breathed deeply. In and out. “I think it's a good idea for us to be apart for a while. A temporary separation while we both figure out where we stand. Besides, it will be easier to keep our relationship quiet if we're apart for a while.”

  She nodded a tiny nod.

  This time, when I got up and walked away, she didn't signal Dickens to hold me back.

  AUGUST 15, 2019. THE day before Caroline's almost-thirty birthday. The date had somehow added itself quietly to my phone's calendar app, which must have a way of digging those dates out of my contacts. A useful feature intended to remind you to send flowers or wine to your best clients. As if I needed a reminder.

  Caro deserved more than a card, but flowers or a bottle of wine felt too... dutiful, somehow. Like I was giving her a gift to thank her for her business.

  Impossible to choose a gift. I didn't even know if we were going to choose to continue our relationship. Perfume seemed too intimate, and the fancy bath bombs seemed too cheap.

  In desperation, I downloaded an app to recommend gifts based on the recipient's online profile. The app suggested Belgian chocolate, but I never sent chocolate to homes with dogs, in case the owners forgot it was bad for the canine heart. The app next suggested a seventy-five-dollar bottle of fancy hand-pressed olive oil. How did it differ from the thirty-five-dollar bottle of hand-pressed olive oil from the grocery store? Next it suggested the fancy bath bombs.

  I uninstalled the app.

  Some of my better clients seemed to like silk scarves. A square of butter-soft fabric had endless uses, so it wouldn't end up bunched and forgotten in the back of a drawer. But Caro's silk scarves cost hundreds of dollars, maybe over a thousand dollars. An inappropriate gift if we weren't really going to be serious about each other.

  Shit.

  Why was I even allowing myself to think about silk scarves in the first place? Why was I allowing myself to flash back to the memory of Caro moving on top of me, her silken thighs squeezing my thighs, her quick fingers using one of those designer scarves to tie my hand to the post?

  In the end, I texted my virtual assistant with instructions to take over the job of finding and shipping an appropriate gift for a famous movie-star client. The VA arranged for somebody to deliver a gift basket full of hipster vegan chocolate, a choice that couldn't be more wrong, but I was too tired to tell her to pick out something else. It was done. Anyway, Caro would probably never even see the gift. Her assistant would send a thank-you note to my assistant in Fort Greene.

  We could go on like that for years, never seeing each other, our assistants swapping gift baskets and thank-you notes on the appropriate occasions marked on our calendars.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Caro

  “This fucking dog.” The photographer had arranged for a pre-dawn shoot at Griffith Park.

  Dickens didn't mind the early hour. He liked getting up to walk in the cool of the morning. I was in less of a cheerful mood. Gulping my double shot of espresso, I adjusted a smile I'd already adjusted several times in the last ten minutes. “What about the quote-unquote fucking dog?”

  “That thing got any fucking eyes?”

  I identified with Dickens's way of looking out at people through endless tangles of red fluff. He kept his dark eyes, the windows to his soul, mostly hidden. Just as my eyes were so often hidden behind my sunglasses.

  The world wasn't entitled to my soul. They could buy my image, buy my movie, but they weren't entitled to buy the secrets inside of me.

  Why didn't Shell understand that? Why was it so much easier for her to be who she was? She was a celebrity too, but it didn't seem to weigh on her when Twitter spread little stories about her past. Heather wasted no time in bringing me the latest social media report. Shell, then Rayna Taylor, had worked for Gerta Anderson at a dog grooming salon after high school. When childless Ms. Anderson passed, she left the salon to Shell. Well, we all know what Twitter made of that. Once she signed the TV deal, the trashy rumors would only get trashier.

  No state in the union was more proud of its ability to create a good story out of thin air than the state of Mississippi.

  “We need fucking eyes to make a good photo,” the photographer said.

  “He's looking right at you.” I folded my arms across my chest, realized my stance was too aggressive, unfolded them again. “Look, Diesel, I don't know what else I can tell you.”

  “Maybe somebody can blow out his hair a little?” He squinted at the stylist.

  “Fuck me,” the stylist said. “I don't do dogs.”

  Morale on the set was not high. Those Instagram selfies might have bad lighting, but at least they didn't have all the associated angst of a professional shoot.

  The rising sun tinted the sky pi
nk in the east. It was going to be another cloudless day. Only the haze on the horizon gave the light character. The photographer had been right. The pictures wouldn't be any good if they were taken much later. Dickens and I posed, and the camera flashed, and the actual photography was done in less than half an hour. Eyes or no eyes. Windows into the soul or no soul.

  After, Dickens and I hiked down slowly to end up at a dog-friendly cafe with outdoor seating. My sunglasses were firmly on my face, and my baseball cap had all my hair tucked up underneath to hide it. Still, a few people did a double-take when they saw me eating a grapefruit on a sidewalk, a regal, almost royal dog at my side.

  One guy, bolder than the rest, came forward with his phone out. “Caro Ballad?”

  I faked a chuckle. “I get that a lot.”

  “You really do look like her.” He smiled and took off, but not before he sneaked a photo anyway. It would be on Instagram in three, two, one... right about now.

  I smiled and smiled. People took their pictures. That was my life. I was an empty doll walking around for people to photograph. If not for Dickens, I'd have no one real at all. It was August 16, 2019, my birthday. Ugh. Birthdays were something no actor likes to think about, but for me they seemed to be especially unlucky.

  I wanted to call Shell, and sometimes I did, but our conversations were brief and more than a little awkward. Had we broken up? We'd argued, and then she was gone. Work, she said, and I knew it was true. She did have work, and it did have to be done in New Mexico. A temporary separation while we figured out our feelings.

  If we talked too long, then we'd argue again, so we always kept it short and sweet.

  Did we even still have a relationship? Wasn't it her idea first to keep the relationship secret until the time was right? Yet somehow I was in the wrong.

  Six more weeks. Five. Then four. Was it really so long to wait? I didn't like the enforced separation any more than she did, but Heather, the agent, and the lawyers all insisted we needed a little more time to get our ducks in a row. The movie was a big deal, not just for me, but for everyone involved. An eighty-million dollar budget meant a lot of other people got hurt if I fucked up our publicity.