Forever With Him

by Stacy Travis

  “She kissed me. She was wasted and sad about her marriage and an overall nightmare. I was trying to get her out of her chair, which was when she fell against me, and out the door, which is why I put my hand on her back. I know how it looks, but trust me, I couldn’t get away from her fast enough. The woman is relationship kryptonite.”

  “Uh huh. That may be, but you two had your hands all over each other. So we have a choice. We either say nothing and let this die with tomorrow’s news, or we comment and risk it turning into a bigger story. Denial tells people there’s something to deny, as you know.”

  “I do know. So say nothing. Ignore it like it was nothing. Because it was nothing.”

  “Fine by me. As long as you assure me you’re not going back for round two tonight.”

  “I don’t even want to see her on the set. There will be no tonight.”

  “Okay, then. Done. I’ve gotta run. Moving on to the next catastrophe. One of my other clients was caught soliciting a prostitute in a sting operation. Much harder to ignore or explain away.”

  “Jesus.” I could never have done her job, which made me think again of Nikki, who did a version of Natalie’s job, and I felt nauseous at the idea of her seeing the pictures before I talked to her.

  “It’s no biggie. I can handle it. That’s why I always tell you, you’re my easiest client. Now all you have to do is explain it to Nikki, and you’re golden.”

  “Shit,” I said for the third time in ten minutes.

  “Yes. You’re in deep shit. Work it out, because I don’t want to put out a press release saying you’ve decided to consciously uncouple. If you two can’t make it, I don’t know who can.”

  “On it. Thanks, Nat.”

  “No prob.”

  “Oh, hey. Any advice for what I can do for Nikki? Should I send flowers or something?”

  “Ugh. Please don’t be that guy. Be better. Do something better. Flowers have guilt written all over them. Like I said, I expect more from you because you’re one of the good guys. Just tell her the truth.”

  “Okay, will do. No flowers.”

  “Eh, but what the hell do I know? I’ve been divorced three times, and none of my ex-husbands ever sent me flowers.” Natalie had been my publicist for eight years, and in that time, she’d been with two of her three husbands. Oh, and she was younger than I was. She always had a good attitude about her relationships, even when they were ending. “Happy to see them come, happy to see them go,” was how she’d described her exes.

  “Thanks, Nat.”

  “See ya.”

  Nikki hadn’t returned the texts. I hadn’t expected that she would, but it felt like torture knowing that whatever the thing was—that piece of information, complete with damning photos—hung out there with nothing I could do to explain it to her first. Times like those made the difference in time zones particularly difficult.

  What am I saying? There shouldn’t be times like these.

  So far, there hadn’t been. I’d kept my head down and focused on my work during the times we couldn’t be together. It wasn’t ideal, but it was something. It made me feel like we were moving toward a future.

  But now…

  I tried calling her, but the call went to voicemail. Of course it did. It was the middle of the night in LA, Nikki was a sound sleeper, and she kept her cell on vibrate. There was no way to reach her, and I didn’t love the idea of waking her up to tell her I’d been caught kissing another woman.

  If I lived in the same city, I would have gone to see her in person. The distance was already hard on us, but Ireland was a ten-hour plane flight away, and I had to be back on the set in an hour. The photos and the gossip had the power to ignite into a firestorm before she even woke up.

  I called her again and left a long message on her voicemail. “Hey, it’s me. Hope you slept well. I’m really sorry I missed you last night. Things ran late,” I said, feeling even more like an asshole, because the only thing that had run late was my time at the pub. Not only had I missed our phone call, but I’d been with Triss instead of calling. I continued with my message. “Anyway, there are some pictures printed in one of the tabloids, and I wanted to explain before you saw them. They’re out of context, and you shouldn’t worry about them. I promise. They’re nothing. I love you.”

  Feeling like my rambling message had done nothing but make the situation sound even worse than it was, I went back to my texting app and fired off one more text. Hey. Just don’t look at the tabloids. I promise, there’s nothing to worry about. Okay? Please? ILY.

  I stared at my phone, willing the three thinking dots to appear, a sign that she was responding. But my message sat there like a fat turd on the green grass of my life. Or maybe I was the fat turd.

  I’d thought I could handle a relationship, work, and the long-distance thing. But I was blowing it big-time, just as I’d always feared I would.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Los Angeles

  Nikki

  From the time I saw the photos and heard Chris’s message that morning, I was certain of three things.

  First, I knew Chris was going to call me again. His schedule was more or less predictable when he was on location. They generally started at eight in the morning and finished at eight or nine at night. They aimed for eight because that gave them a twelve-hour turnaround, which was required by the unions for all the people who worked on the lighting, sound, hair and makeup, and the grips and gaffers, whose jobs I didn’t really understand. But I knew they couldn’t report back to the set before they’d been given a twelve-hour break.

  I also knew that there was ample standing-around time every day. For as much as Chris got into character and worked with the hair and makeup departments before his scenes, I’d witnessed firsthand when I was in New York that he had a lot of downtime in each day. That meant he had plenty of time to pick up the phone if he wanted to talk.

  The third thing I knew was that Chris respected my time at work and wouldn’t have wanted to put me in an awkward position on a call with him during my workday.

  But by four in the afternoon, I still hadn’t heard from him, and I was struck with a new feeling. In some ways, it was similar to the nausea I’d felt when I saw the photos, except that it was joined by a new emotion: certainty.

  He wasn’t waiting to call me because he cared about my workday or because he was composing his thoughts. He wasn’t waiting at all. He just wasn’t calling.

  He’d taken the time to leave a vague voicemail and some texts, but clearly since then, he’d copped to what everyone who’d seen the photos seemed to know—there was no explaining away the pictures because he was falling for his costar. And while he needed to apologize for the way I found out about it all, it didn’t change the fact that we were over. He wasn’t calling me because there was nothing left to say. Nothing that a photograph didn’t say a thousand times better or more clearly. We were done.

  I also was done. Even though I’d taken a lunch break and therefore probably owed the company a couple more hours of work time, I suddenly really needed to leave. I didn’t want to talk to anyone else. I didn’t want to feel anyone’s eyes on me or be aware of people tiptoeing around me, wondering if I was okay.

  I wasn’t okay. But I would be. I just needed to leave and clear my head.

  My desk was a mess of file folders and half-finished press releases, but I didn’t care. I walked away from the mess and out of the office. It wasn’t until I exited the elevator on the lobby level and started to walk toward the detached parking structure behind the building that I heard someone call my name. Crap. Maybe I should have told my boss I was leaving.

  I turned around, ready to throw myself at his mercy and tell him I needed the rest of the day for personal time but that I would be back in the morning, ready to give him one hundred and ten percent.

  But it wasn’t my boss.

  It was Chris.

  We looked at each other warily. In part, my shock came from the fact that he was in Irel
and—or he was supposed to be in Ireland.

  How is he standing in the lobby of my building?

  For his part, he looked a little afraid, like I might yell at him or throw something. Yelling wasn’t an option because I was stunned speechless, but I would have happily hurled a heavy object at his head if I’d had one handy.

  He came closer, and I froze, unsure I wanted him near me. He seemed to sense my hesitance and stopped about three feet away. “Hey,” he said. He didn’t flash me his pretty Hollywood smile. He looked exhausted, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him, especially if his lack of sleep came from staying up all night, banging his costar.

  He held his arms out to hug me.

  A hug? A breakup hug?

  “Just… no.” I crossed my arms and glared at him, because I had no additional words handy.

  “Can we… can we go somewhere and talk? Please?”

  It was the “please” that got me. Any time someone asked for something nicely, the acquiescent part of me wanted to oblige. At that moment, I hated that part of myself. She was the part who didn’t break up with Johnny because he looked cute and said cute things, and those two factors erased all the not-cute things he did and said.

  As much as I wanted to pound that side of myself into the ground and take off at a sprint, curiosity got the better of me. I did want to know how Chris planned to explain himself. I wasn’t planning on letting him off the hook with a cute explanation, but I was intrigued enough by what he might come up with that I nodded at him and gestured to the glass doors at the back of my building. He followed me out.

  In between the low-slung office and the parking structure was an outdoor patio with some grassy knolls between winding pathways, as if to give the impression of a tiny park-like oasis in which to escape the work environment. The reality was that people rarely enjoyed the oasis. There was too much work to do and not enough time for escaping. But the well-positioned small benches seemed designed to suit our particular needs perfectly.

  “Nik,” he said, reaching for my hand. Reluctantly, I put mine in his, but there was no warmth. “There’s absolutely nothing going on with my costar.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t want to meet his gaze. He’d caught me off guard, so I hadn’t organized my thoughts.

  “Nikki, look at me.” I turned. He looked wrecked. I felt bad for him, but I knew I had to stand up for myself. “I am so sorry. I never. Ever. Want to hurt you.”

  I nodded. I believed him. He wasn’t callous and I knew it.

  He gestured for us to sit, and I moved far to the edge of the bench.

  “I don’t have a disease,” he said, his smile entirely gone.

  “I know. I just want to be able to look at you while we talk. I can’t see you if I’m sitting closer.” As if to demonstrate my point, I turned my back against the armrest of the bench and leaned on it. He moved to his side and did the same, but he didn’t speak for a long time—so long, in fact, that I started to imagine that maybe I was the one who’d suggested we go somewhere and talk. Maybe I was the one who had something to say. So I said it. “You didn’t have to fly all the way here, you know. I get it. You feel bad about the pictures, and you didn’t intend to hurt me. I get it. Let’s just call it what it is. We’re far away from each other, and we’re living different lives. Maybe we can’t do the long-distance thing.”

  He shook his head. “Goddammit. See, I knew this. I knew it. This is why I had to come see you in person. I knew where your mind was.”

  “What, that after you kissed someone else—or slept with her, or whatever you two are doing—I wouldn’t want to date you across an ocean anymore? Gee, you’re a genius.”

  “No. I knew you’d see it as some kind of proof that we’re bound to fail. And I don’t want to see that happen, so I’m here, telling you I’m sorry and pleading with you to trust me.”

  I was so shocked by his nerve that an unintended laugh erupted. It came out sounding like a quack. “Wait, your issue is that I don’t trust you? Are you kidding me? You, who just proved why I never should have trusted in the first place, are faulting me for that?”

  “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  “Don’t get what? What is there to get?” I was feeling myself get angrier, effectively moving through another stage of grief, all in one day. At least I was efficient. “Why are we even doing this? Why are you here? Don’t you have a movie to make and a costar to make out with? They have phones, you know. Oh right, you forgot how to use them.” It felt good to be surly and mad. I tried so hard all the time to control my feelings and react rationally. I tried to be nice, and this was what I got for it.

  “Will you please stop? Just let me talk. Please.” He was raising his voice. I’d never heard him raise his voice. Maybe I’d never seen him angry.

  I’d made him angry. Good. That made two of us. “Fine. Talk.” I’d said my piece. So I sat back against the arm of the bench and looked at him. When he didn’t meet my gaze or start talking right away, I looked around that the park, wondering who came to mow the tiny mounds of grass. It seemed like a waste of resources to have a gardening crew come out just to mow six blades of grass.

  Chris got up and walked a few paces away from me. Then he came back and sat on the bench, closer to me that time. He didn’t look at me, and at that proximity, I could only see part of his face. He blinked heavily. “I’m going to tell you what happened last night. Which was nothing, by the way, despite what it looked like in the pictures, but then I’m going to address the elephant that’s destroying the goddamn room.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.” It was his story to tell.

  “My costar, Triss, and I went out for a beer after we finished yesterday. The scenes were hard and emotional, and it felt good to go out with a colleague who could relate.”

  “So that’s what you were doing? Relating? With your tongue?”

  “No. Oh my God, no. She’s… a piece of work. And not particularly kind. Good actor, but kind of a train wreck as soon as the cameras stop.” He ran a hand through his hair as though just thinking about her was stressful.

  I didn’t say anything. He hadn’t convinced me of anything yet.

  “She drank a lot, and when I went to help her up from her chair, she fell against me. That was the first picture. She’s going through a divorce, and her emotions are all over the place, so she tried to kiss me, which I quickly rejected. That was the second picture. And because she was drunk, I needed to halfway hold her up to get her out of the bar and back to the hotel. She grabbed my neck. The third picture.”

  I relented a little bit. His story made sense. And I felt a little bit bad that I hadn’t waited to hear all this from him before judging. But he hadn’t picked up the phone. “Chris…”

  He held up a hand. “Now, here’s the troubling part. You don’t trust me. And I don’t mean that you don’t trust me not to cheat on you. I think that despite the photos, a big part of you knew there was more to the story, and you know I wouldn’t do that.”

  I nodded. “I don’t think you’d do that.”

  “But it doesn’t matter. Because you’re waiting for something to end us. You’re trying to fast-forward to our breakup because you’re so certain that it will happen eventually that you want to get it over with now.”

  Hearing him say it out loud, I realized how messed up it was. “I know. I know, you’re right. I’m an insane person. It’s just that I’m feeling all these feelings for you, and the higher I go, the farther I have to fall, and I’m trying to stop myself before I get hurt.”

  He closed his eyes and didn’t say anything, but he shook his head slowly, sadly.

  “You know, Chris, it’s not even about the pictures. I know stuff gets misconstrued. It’s that you’re there and I’m here and it’s just… too much. I don’t want to have a long-distance relationship. I’m sick of missing you all the time. I hate it.”

  “I know. I hate it too. You’re right… we can’t do this.” His voice cracked when he
said it.

  And in that moment, I heard him say we were done. I heard it that way because he was right—I didn’t have faith. I didn’t believe in us. All I could hear was the other shoe falling hard and hurting me. I could see no other outcome even as I hated myself for being that way.

  “Did you really fly all the way here to break up with me?” I asked. I steeled myself for his answer. I wouldn’t be happy if we broke up—in fact, I’d be miserable—but I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “No,” he said, his voice riddled with such disbelief that the word sounded almost like a laugh. “No. Not at all. I wanted to make sure you knew that even though I have a job that’s forcing me to stay away, I’d rather be with you. I wanted to assure you—because I suspected you might be freaking out—that the only person I think about every day is you. And I’m sorry about all the long distance. It was not my plan.”

  I reached out and put my hand on his leg. He picked it up and brought it to his heart, where he held it for a moment, and I tipped my head to rest it on his shoulder.

  “This is all just… it’s harder than I thought it would be.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would be this way.” He tipped his head down and leaned it against mine before shifting and pulling me into his arms.

  When I looked into his dark eyes, I saw the kind, handsome guy I wanted so badly to trust with my heart. He covered my mouth with his. It wasn’t a tentative, searching kiss. It was a commanding, assuring, devouring kiss. He pushed one hand into the hair at my temple and wrapped the other around my back to pull me closer. His tongue sought mine, sweeping dreamily across the inside of my mouth until a tiny moan escaped from the back of my throat.

  It was a kiss that communicated feeling and connection. I needed it more than I realized, and my lips and my body melted into his with the force of all my emotional turmoil.

  He absorbed it. He met it with reassurance, and he calmed it.

  Even though my heart was pounding when we finally broke the kiss, I felt as if I’d been relieved of a burden. I felt better.