Twice in a Blue Moon

by Christina Lauren

  “Because my father turned out to be such a dick.” Sam shrugs, crossing his ankle over his knee. “I only know how tender she was with me, but I can’t imagine she was like that with Michael and he still turned out the way he did. Even though I know she was—a good mom, I mean.”

  “Does he know you’ve written this?”

  “Probably not. Haven’t spoken to him in years.”

  I make a sympathetically mad face, and this makes him laugh. “I’m fine. Better off, trust me. Though I am in regular touch with my mom. Ironically, she lives in London now.”

  I let out a sharp laugh. “Do you visit her?”

  “A couple times a year.”

  I want to ask whether being there ever brings up old memories, but I’m sure I’m the only one of the two of us who is so fixated on our brief affair. It was the single most defining moment in my life; no doubt it’s just one of many in his. I need to move on.

  “What kinds of books did Roberta read?” I ask instead.

  “Mostly history,” he says. “Nonfiction. Luther loved crime novels—she’d tease him about those, but she loved reading together. She’d read these giant, boring nonfiction books about Napoleon or Catherine the Great.”

  I exhale a dreamy sigh. “She sounds wonderful.”

  “She was. She wasn’t perfect, but she was about as close as you can get. It’s why you’re the best person to play her.”

  This is such an inflated compliment, it makes me laugh. “I’m nothing like Ellen. Not really.”

  “Are you kidding?” he asks me. “The girl I knew was every bit as brave and brassy.”

  I wonder if Sam has any idea how much this compliment warms me from the inside out. I know it isn’t true; maybe it used to be—I like to think I was brave and brassy when I was younger, but I’m undeniably soft now. My life is made easy for me by a handful of people, and every time I’m required to be truly brave—letting new people into my life, for example—I flee.

  I think about everything I could learn from Roberta now. Just to have a day in her company would feel like a gift. It was such a waste, in a way, for me to have met Luther when I was eighteen and had no idea how to get to know him, how to ask him the questions that would unlock all of his stories. I feel like I missed an opportunity to talk to someone whose life had been hard and wonderful in equal measure, and who had a wisdom I can’t even fathom. But at least I laid eyes on him, can still remember his laugh, his teasing eyes, the way he could ask probing questions without ever sounding nosy. I never had the chance to meet her.

  “Why didn’t she like to travel?” I ask him, recalling parts of our conversations. “It seems so… out of character.”

  He nods, swallowing a sip of coffee. “Because she was so fearless otherwise?”

  “Exactly.”

  Sam sets his mug down and reaches up to scratch his jaw. It’s a small movement, such a casual gesture, but it sends a bolt of heat through me anyway. I’d forgotten how easy he is in his body.

  “She hated planes,” he tells me. “I think it was probably the one thing that scared her—the idea of flying across an ocean. I remember when Luther and I left, how she tried to look calm and put together, but she was a wreck.”

  “Do you think she would have had fun in London?” It’s amazing what context can do, like I can see my past through someone else’s eyes. What I’ve been holding on to was actually about something so much bigger than just me.

  The thought blows through me, unsettling: If Sam had asked me, would I have agreed to expose myself to help Luther? The truth is, I had loved Sam enough to say yes. I would have. And the fact that he didn’t even talk to me about it dampens the relieved, floaty feeling I’ve had since yesterday.

  I’ve missed half his answer and have to mentally shake myself to catch the rest of it.

  “… couple days. She liked to keep busy. She wasn’t really one for vacations.” He stops, and his gaze flickers all over my face. “What?” he asks warily.

  I’m not sure what he sees in my expression. “What what?”

  “Your cheeks are red.” He pauses again, narrowing his eyes, reading me perfectly. “Are you embarrassed about something, or mad at me?”

  His comfort with honesty, with gentle confrontation, makes my irritation boil over. “Track change, but I was wondering why you didn’t include me in the decision to go to the Guardian.”

  Now I know this question catches him by surprise. He takes in a sharp breath, leans back, and tilts his face up to the ceiling as he thinks about it. “You think you would have agreed?” he asks, finally.

  “I think there’s a good chance. I was pretty infatuated with you.”

  I see the way this word hits him sharply, that I said infatuated, not in love. Sam looks back at me. “I didn’t include you because I was panicking.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and staring at the area rug beneath his feet. “It wasn’t exactly a well-laid plan. I wasn’t even sure it was going to work.”

  “Tell me how it happened,” I say. “I never understood why there was a day between when you left and when the paparazzi showed up.” That piece of it always felt so calculated.

  He rubs a hand over his beard, squeezing his eyes closed. “Like I said, I was panicking after talking to Roberta. She told him we had to come home that instant. He fought her a bit, but finally agreed. We left, but couldn’t get a flight out until the following day.”

  “So you wanted to be clear of the country before blowing up my life?”

  “No, Tate.” He frowns at the floor. “No. Look, I booked us at a hotel near the airport, and was up all night again, thinking on it. While Luther was showering the next morning, that’s when I went to the lobby and called the paper.” His voice is so flat, it’s like he’s reading instructions. “I said I had information on Ian Butler’s daughter. They said they’d have a reporter call me back, and I thought it would take a while, but it was like two minutes. I told them they’d have to buy the story. They got some preliminary information from me so they knew I was credible—I think I told them where you lived and the name you went by, so they could look it up. When they wired money to my account, I called them back. I told them everything you’d told me.”

  Sam looks up, meeting my eyes. “Whatever you think—and I know it was a terrible thing to do—I don’t want you to think it was easy for me. I didn’t relish any of it.”

  “You didn’t even say goodbye.” I feel too exposed after saying this, so I look away. “Even if I didn’t know it was goodbye, there wasn’t a last, nice moment between us.”

  “I saw you in the lobby when I was checking us out. You and Jude were walking out for the day. You looked . . . sad. I almost went over to you then.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  He looks pale, like he’s not feeling well. “No, I didn’t.” He pushes the rest of the story out. “Anyway. We flew home and Luther got his treatment.”

  “And then it was just—what?” I ask. “Business as usual? Back to your regular life?”

  “I mean, there were a lot of doctor appointments and hospitalizations. It wasn’t exactly regular life, but yeah. I took on more at the farm. Luther was weak for a while, but then he was better.” He licks his lips and takes a deep breath. “I never told Roberta or Luther what I did.”

  I stare at him, shocked by this. I don’t know why I assumed they would have been in on it. “How did they think you got the money?”

  “I said Michael sent it from New York.”

  “And they believed you?”

  He shrugs. “I think at that point they didn’t want to look too closely. They just wanted Luther to get better. But that meant when I got home,” Sam says, turning to me, “I was the only one who knew what I did.” He quickly holds up his hands. “I’m not saying it was as hard on me as it was on you, okay, not even close. But I was relieved for Luther, and then at the same time I was being eaten alive by guilt.” He looks over my shoulder, remembering. “You had that interview
with Barbara Walters, and then pretty soon after that you were cast in Evil Darlings. When I got that news, I went out to the bar and got so drunk that my friend had to drive me home in his tractor.”

  “What?” I ask, confused. Was he upset that I went into the industry? “Why?”

  “Because I’d been crazy about you. Completely fucking obsessed. And for the first time it occurred to me how stupid I’d been,” he says. “How reckless with you. My life went on the way it always had, for the most part. I assumed you’d get a flash of attention and then your life would go back to the way it was before too—college, living in Northern California, whatever—it never occurred to me that it might not. That your life might have been totally ruined by what I did. How dumb was I? You turned the exposure into something good, but you could have just as easily gone the other way. How would I have felt if I’d heard about you using drugs, or—worse? What if what I did had caused real damage in your life?” He blinks into focus and looks back at me. “I really could have fucked things up.”

  I laugh dryly, sipping my coffee. “You did fuck things up.”

  “But look at you. You’re doing okay,” he says, and then very quietly adds, “right?”

  “I’m doing okay.” I chew my lip, debating how much to admit, and why the desire to tell him I’m not always thriving has risen to the surface. Is it because I want him to still feel a little bad? Or is it something else in me, something kinder that wants to tell him because I want him to know me better? “I’m still not great with relationships. I haven’t been since.”

  Sam’s brow pulls low, and he blinks down to his hands. “I read about lots of them.”

  “Most of them have been coordinated,” I say. “Publicity only.”

  “Chris?” he asks, and there’s a vibration in his voice, a layer beneath casual that feels darker, a little gravelly.

  “We were real for a while, but he was a mess.” Self-conscious now, I lift my thumb to my lips, chew my nail. “For a long time, we weren’t together anymore but we kept up the facade.”

  “I saw you with Nick,” he says. “That night.”

  The night we got drunk and kissed. Idiots. “I know.”

  “Are you two… ?”

  I shake my head, embarrassed all over again. “I was messy that night. Over all this.” I wave between us, but then widen it to include everything this set has contained—the pressure of a high-profile, character-driven role, the presence of a world-renowned director, and of course my dad.

  He makes a little sound, a tiny “Ah” in acknowledgment, but it makes me crazy, wanting to dig a little deeper to know what he’s thinking. I mean, how much can this really bother him? He’s with someone else, after all. He goes upstairs to call her almost every night after dinner. And he chose our current circumstances. It’s not like he gets to play jealous ex here.

  “Anyway,” I say, wishing I hadn’t brought up any of this now. “I hate sometimes that I haven’t fallen in love since London.” It feels like too much as soon as I’ve said it, and I quickly add, “But I know I will someday.”

  I feel exposed in a way that he isn’t—he’s settled, with children, healthy. But I don’t want to be the broken bird anymore. I’m tired of suffering from an emotional limp through every relationship I have, even this new friendship—is that what this is?—I’m trying to forge with Sam. Honesty, clarity, and closure. That’s what I need here.

  He smiles, and I can imagine the comma scar there beneath the beard. Just the thought of it pulls a band of nostalgia tight in my chest. “Well, I guess that’s why I had to write Milkweed,” he says.

  I narrow my eyes, trying to puzzle out his meaning. “I don’t follow.”

  “To remind myself that they were worth it.” He laughs. “They were pretty ornery at the end.”

  I’m still lost. “Worth what?”

  Sam looks at me as if I’m being exceptionally slow, and a half smile curves his mouth. “Worth losing you.”

  twenty-one

  “WHY AM I SO terrible with men?”

  The sun is dipping below the tree line, and Charlie’s dark hair is a wild halo in the breeze. “I don’t think you’re bad with men—”

  She stops when she catches my Come ON face. My You have got to be kidding face. Charlie knows my track record better than anyone: I am terrible with men.

  “I’m serious,” she says, eyes back across the field again, to where the set crew is putting the finishing touches on the barn for tonight’s shoot. “And even if you were, who could blame you? It’s not like you’ve had the best examples to follow. Your parents were a mess when they were together. Your mom’s never dated, and your dad needs to just… stop. Nana never remarried. My parents were a hot mess, too, so I’m not winning any awards in the romance department either. If you suck at this, it’s because you’ve never actually seen what a normal relationship is supposed to look like.”

  I consider this as I look out over the landscape. I’m nervous about tonight’s shoot because it’s going to be intense, even if things go exactly the way they should. The farm might be over two hundred acres, but with my dad around it feels entirely too small. With Sam there it feels even smaller. I thought settling into some kind of quasi-friendship would make things easier between us, but instead it’s only made things more confusing.

  Anger was easier, and it was definitely safer.

  The thought that I’ve played a woman in a healthy relationship more times than I’ve actually been one is depressing.

  “I’m thirty-two, Charlie. Thirty-two and eternally single, with crippling daddy and abandonment issues. I thought Dad and I would finally connect, and that’s all gone to shit. I thought I’d finally moved on from Sam, but now all of that is a lie, too. At least you were engaged.”

  “For six months,” she reminds me.

  “Yeah, but you got that far. The farthest I got was Chris saying ‘I love you,’ and me replying with ‘You’re the best.’ ”

  She laughs. “Maybe that’s what drove him to drink.”

  “Charlie Zhao, you are the fucking devil.”

  “Didn’t you get to the I-love-you’s with Pete?”

  “Nope.”

  “Evan?”

  Ah, Evan. Sweet Evan only bothered with me for five months. “Nope again. Well,” I correct, “he said it. And I think I tried to improve on my ‘You’re the best’ and came up with ‘That makes me so happy to hear.’ ”

  Charlie leans between her knees, cracking up.

  “I keep reading the script and thinking, ‘Wow, Sam wrote this.’ ” I draw a circle in the soil with a scraggly twig. “The terrible person I built up in my head wrote this beautiful thing. That has to mean something, right? That he understands women, or that he’s good enough inside to have done this? Or maybe it’s that Ellen”—I shake my head and correct myself—“Roberta was just that great? I think of everything she went through: pregnant at sixteen, put her husband through law school only to have him leave her and their son and run off with someone else. Her dad is sick. She falls in love with a man the whole town is against and yet she still puts the work in to build up their community and help the very same people who would have turned her away. She didn’t close herself off. She didn’t move from one pointless, meaningless relationship to another. She’s just this wonderful person who made mistakes and learned from them and kept going.”

  Charlie appraises me with a small tilt of her head. “You’re pretty great yourself, you know.”

  I try to laugh but it sounds hollow and cynical. “Do you remember those art projects we helped the kids with at YMCA camp? You fill in the entire paper with different colors, and then go over it with black crayon? You think it’s just a black picture, but when you scratch at the surface there’s all this… stuff underneath. That’s a terrible analogy, but it’s sort of how I feel about my love life right now. I thought it would be one thing, but it’s just been covered up with this boring black crayon and I don’t have the tools to scratch it.”r />
  Charlie gives me a sad smile and reaches over to squeeze my hand. “But what’s under there is still all bright and rainbow colored. I know it’s scary to learn how to scrape all of it off, but I think what’s under there could be pretty great too.”

  We look up as Devon stomps through the tall grass. His blue button-down Patagonia shirt seems to glow in the fading sunlight. “What are you two up to?”

  “Discussing why my love life is a mess,” I tell him, laughing.

  Devon pauses, surprised, and then gives us a knee-buckling smile. “Well, okay then.”

  Apparently we aren’t in a huge hurry, because he settles down on the grass at my side. “We’re getting ready to roll, Tate. How’re you feeling about tonight’s shoot?”

  I weigh my response. Admittedly, the most stressful part of the filming has come toward the end of our time here: the barn fire and the love scenes. I know why we had to put them later on the schedule—the barn fire shouldn’t be destructive, but in case it does cause some damage to the landscape, we needed to be done with all the other outdoor shots first, and the love scenes, well, Gwen is smart enough to know that those require a real depth of comfort between co-stars. But while I’m apprehensive about the love scenes, I’m downright afraid of the barn fire tonight. We’ve rehearsed it over and over again, but like—we are going to set the barn set on fire. It’s not being done with special effects; it’s a controlled burn and they’ll be shooting with a long lens to compress the distance between the actors and the flames, but it’s still being done with a newly constructed barn set, some fancy chemicals, and a lighter.

  “I’m nervous,” I admit.

  “I know you’ve been told this, but I want to reassure you,” Devon says. “We have—”

  “Over a hundred firefighters on location to put it out,” I finish for him. “Infrared viewers to find hot spots. I am never actually going to be in danger. I know.”

  He smiles again. Devon is so perfectly sweet, I experience a beat of disappointment that I’m not nearly as attracted to him as I should be. The Sam Brandis Proximity effect.