by Brigid Coady
‘Okay,’ Jamie frowned and pointed to a photo of the bears wearing sunglasses and one posed with a headscarf. Both were wearing outfits with hearts on them. ‘This was taken at their concert in Denver on the 5th of November. As you know that is the same day that we tweeted from Ed’s account those cryptic Feckless Rogue lyrics.’
Of course, she remembered those lyrics, she was pretty proud of how she’d put that together. Alluding to deepest love.
If you can’t send me you, send back my heart
‘Yeah, well…’ Jamie zoomed in onto the tableau.
Oh… That really wasn’t good.
Yet another Barbie, or maybe it was the same one, was hanging onto the back of a toy jeep, as if trying to catch a ride, while the bears were sitting in the front and she realised they looked a lot like Thelma and Louise. It definitely undermined the lyric interpretation.
‘Maybe it’s a coincidence?’ It could be, couldn’t it?
In silence, Jamie flicked chronologically through the narrative schedule they had set up. All the tabloid stories about Ed or Will, sometimes Amit and then showed the corresponding tableau or tweet that the bears starred in.
Yeah, when she saw it like that, it was pretty damning. There was no way this was a coincidence. In every circumstance, the bears somehow undermined the story they’d been putting out there. If they said Ed and Frankie were having a private date, which they couldn’t be because they still hadn’t seen each other since the pumpkin patch, it showed the two bears doing the same thing together, with the Barbie doll somewhere in the picture looking desperate or as a support act.
‘Okay, do we know who is behind the bears? I mean this is a big production, the crew need to know who is doing this.’ Those orange stained fingers of Will were coming back to haunt her.
‘The boys say it’s the crew, the crew say it’s the boys. And there was a rumour that someone called Mike or Matt the sound guy was doing it, but as the sound guy is called Dave and doesn’t have the salary for gold Rolexes…’ Jamie trailed off.
Yeah, Mike or Matt the sound guy was probably a stretch, she thought. Probably because Mike the sound guy was the fake person they’d set up to spread any behind the scenes rumours. So that story could only come from someone who knew.
In fact, this had one person’s fingerprints all over it. Pumpkin stains and all.
‘Bring it on.’ She could hear Will’s raspy voice in her head.
This was not on, the little… She put all this effort into sorting out these PR relationships and they kept fucking it up. She needed to get control back. She had to stop wasting all her time and energy worrying about Gee and the discomfort at home. This was what was important. Her job. She couldn’t rely on someone else for her happiness, if she didn’t have her career, her plans then what did she have? Nothing that was what.
Nope, she wasn’t going to let Will and his childish silliness ruin it for her.
‘Okay, I think I know how we can sort this out,’ she said to Jamie. She wasn’t going to tell him who she thought it was, not yet. ‘Why don’t we distract them? The fans, I mean, with something different.’
She brought up her spreadsheet for Will’s fauxmance. So far, he’d got off lightly, most of the Will and Tina romance had been through articles in the press. With Don Warton at the Daily Planet running his traditional ‘Who is ‘insert relevant girlfriend’s name here’?’ article and then regurgitating Emma’s carefully crafted fauxmance, there was not a touch of truth in the whole thing from start to finish. But that was going to change, she thought. They needed a few new photos to go with the articles. Something that could be reblogged and retweeted across the internet. And keep Will too busy to muck around with toys.
Yes, here it was, she stopped scrolling through the spreadsheet. Tina was due to fly out and join them on tour for a long weekend. It wasn’t for another week but if she brought it forward by a few days, and maybe extended it by a few…
Excellent.
That should keep Will occupied with being dragged round numerous shopping trips smiling for the cameras. Maybe make sure there were no Build-A-Bear workshops anywhere in the malls. Wouldn’t want him to be tempted. She made a note to let Amanda and her team know.
And, of course, there was the band’s Thanksgiving dinner that week. Not that they usually celebrated it, but they were trying for the American market. With Frankie and Ed also cuddling up, that was pretty much a double date. The fandom would go wild.
Checkmate Will, she thought.
***
‘Emma, we need to talk.’ Gee was standing in the hallway his arms crossed when she pushed the door open at ten o’clock that night.
Her heart slammed to a stop and then after a breathless moment started again, racing hard. There was a lump in her throat. She tried to calm down but she could feel herself shaking.
This was why she and Gee wouldn’t work. He made her feel too much, there would be too many peaks, and that meant there would be troughs. Out of control and unplannable.
‘I’m really tired, can we do it another time?’ She put her bag down and stared at the floor. She didn’t want to look at him. Because if she did she would remember what it felt like to be with him. That feeling of completeness.
‘No, Ems. We can’t.’ He said it firmly.
He walked into the living room and sat on his sofa and stared at her.
Crap. She’d managed a whole two weeks, but her luck had run out. She followed him into the room and sank onto her own couch, kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet under her and grabbed a cushion holding it close to her chest.
‘Emma, about the party…’ he began. Not even Ems or Woodhouse but Emma.
They really were going to rehash the biggest mistake she’d ever made. Reliving the most perfect moment of her life, even though it had started to fade in the cold light of the day. Like everything that was good did.
‘Can we just make like it didn’t happen? Pretend that it was just a joke?’ She couldn’t help but look at him when she said it.
Did he flinch? It looked like he did.
‘Is that your go to action with anything difficult, Emma? Pretend it didn’t happen? And spin a story over it to cover up the truth? Making things up?’
No, didn’t he get it? It wasn’t about making things up, it was making sure things didn’t get broken further.
‘No, I just… This, us. We’re good the way we are. No ups and downs, no mess. Safe. You know… I don’t want to lose you.’
‘But, Ems, you won’t lose me if we…’ He pointed between the two of them, gesturing at what could be.
‘No.’ She had to stop this. It couldn’t happen. Didn’t he know that? ‘Look, Gee. This can’t happen. Please, you know this is silly. I need stability, you’ve met my parents. You know.’
She watched his face grimace, because he knew what they were like.
‘All I want is a life that doesn’t rollercoaster, one where I know that it isn’t going to disintegrate because the highs are too high, and the lows are too low.’ Why couldn’t he understand? It wasn’t him. It was her.
‘Em, you are being ridiculous.’ He sounded angry. ‘You know you can’t predict what is going to happen no matter how much you plan and regiment your life. Surely you can’t be that naive. All you’re doing is cutting yourself off from any kind of happiness by trying to make everything fit into the exact shape you believe it should be.’
And part of her knew he was right.
He reached out a hand as if to touch her.
How she wanted him to. She almost dropped the cushion and let her hands brush his, to feel him again.
But the swirling feeling in her stomach was too much like the panic she’d get as a child. When she didn’t know where she’d be next, when they were stuck at that airport with no place to stay. When she was the last one at the school gates because her parents had been thinking of something or someone else and forgotten about her. Because if the people who were biologically supposed to loo
k after her could leave her then…
She flinched back from him. She couldn’t help it.
‘Oh,’ he said, his hand dropping to his side, his brows furrowed and he took a step back.
No, but this wasn’t what she wanted either. She didn’t want him moving away from her.
‘Gee, can we just go back to before?’ she asked. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Her life to go how she’d always pictured it, and that meant the calm black and white of the strategy she’d made all those years ago.
Colour and excitement was good, but not for ever after. It couldn’t be.
‘Okay, fine.’ He thrust his fingers through his hair and tugged on it. She knew that gesture, he was pissed off. ‘But Ems, life is messy. You can’t get away from that.’
‘Gee…’ she said pleadingly.
‘Em, we’ll do it your way for the moment. Nothing happened. Nada. Zilch. Zero. You’ve got your way. But you know you can’t keep doing this, and I don’t just mean with me. At some point you’ve got to come out from behind all these stories you spin, this is no way to live.’ He sounded so sad.
Suddenly she wanted to rewind the last five minutes to when she could have touched him, and not flinch away this time.
‘I’ll leave you to get to bed,’ he said, his voice raspy, and his eyes not meeting hers.
He left the room, and she sat there hugging her cushion to her chest, feeling like her foundations had started to crumble.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
How the hell did it get to December? Emma could feel her heart starting to beat harder. One minute she’d been staring at pumpkins and Thanksgiving turkeys and now… there was a week to go till Christmas. A week? Really? Why hadn’t Gee reminded her? Not that he usually had to remind her as she was normally a Christmas elf type, but this year… Oh. Yes. That.
She and Gee were pretending almost too well; false cheeriness was a constant presence if they were both in the house. She had to second guess every time she went to touch him. Did they usually touch like that? Or was she getting clingy? It was exhausting. Because even though she wanted nothing to change, she really didn’t, she also didn’t want him kissing someone else like he’d kissed her. She wished she could have trapped their friendship in amber, the way they had been before Halloween.
And she was so tired, time was simultaneously dragging and moving too fast. The rainbow bear tableaus had eased off somewhat, which helped. It turned out that making sure Will and Ed were too busy to cook anything up directly coincided with it. She wasn’t saying they were obviously linked, but she was.
She clicked through to check what was in their schedules for this week. It was the week before Christmas so there was a lot to put in place before Frankie’s visit.
Was it too late to have them visiting tree farms, she pondered. Trees. The visuals would be good, if Ed actually smiled in any of the photos, they’d be amazing. But was buying a tree this close to Christmas a little late?
There was something that kept tickling at her, something she had forgotten. No, she had Ed going on a date, and Will was spotted looking grumpy in his fifth Starbucks visit with Tina in two days. Amit and Jessie had been photographed at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park last night. Admittedly Amit had looked like he was dozing in most of them, even in the TiltaWhirl, while Jessie screamed her head off and almost had a wardrobe malfunction.
No, it was something else.
Bugger.
Her own tree. How the hell had she forgotten? She grabbed her phone and scrolled back through the calendar. She knew she set a reminder, she always did. So how had she forgotten the tree?
Oh, now she remembered. It had been two weeks ago, she’d seen the reminder come up, but she’d dithered over whether Gee would go with her like usual. How many texts had she deleted, while she tried to compose the perfect one that was friendly enough but didn’t give away too much? Didn’t promise anything she couldn’t follow through with? And then that emergency came up, when it looked like Ed and Will were kissing on stage, everything online had gone wild. They’d spent the weekend planting little love stories about the fauxmances and it eventually settled down. But she’d forgotten to buy a tree.
And if she’d forgotten that what else had she forgotten? She scrolled back through the whole month of December.
Bloody hell, she’d forgotten everything. The food, the presents. How had this happened? She’d planned for it, had it all scheduled in as usual but those bloody boys and their bears.
It wasn’t that she spent too many hours trying not to look at her phone, at the lack of text messages from Gee. How empty her life was without those small vibrations to say that he was thinking of her throughout the day.
No, it was the Breach Of The Peace boys. They really did breach her peace. Was her career worth all this? It seemed as though the more she tried to wrangle the boys into the stories she had made for them, the more they pushed back and fucked it up. Hadn’t they agreed to play along? Wasn’t that what the whole LA business had been about?
And now she had no tree, no presents, no food for Christmas dinner and if this carried on, maybe no promotion come the new year.
She stopped scrolling through her calendar and put her phone down. There was no point in looking at it. The phone wasn’t going to magic anything out of thin air and solve all her problems. She held a hand to her chest to rub the choking feeling away. Where was all the structure she needed? It seemed to be crumbling. Was it because of what had happened between her and Gee? She needed him, she hated this second-guessing state they were in.
But this was the way it would have always ended up, them growing part. She wasn’t ready. She had always thought the mythical man would be there to lessen it. She needed to grow up and move on. She took a shuddering breath but he was still here now, he hadn’t left yet. And he’d said he would always be… Without trying to overthink it, she picked her phone back up and went to her favourites. His name was at the top, she pressed it.
‘Hey, you,’ his voice rumbled through her ear. It was as if nothing had happened between them, she felt her shoulders relax even as her heart ached.
‘Christmas,’ she gasped.
‘Yes, the major religious holiday at the end of the week, what about it?’
‘Plans, Christmas, tree.’ Emma couldn’t string a proper sentence together.
‘Oh, I had wondered why I hadn’t been dragged out to choose a Christmas tree, I thought we were going old school and decorating it on Christmas Eve. Are we having one delivered? Oh, and how many is it for dinner on Christmas Day? I’ve invited Johnnie so we need to think of a vegetarian option.’
‘Food?’ It was as if she whimpered.
‘Hell, did you forget?’ He said it in awe.
She might have sobbed in reply.
‘Emma. Don’t worry. You’ve got too much on at the moment. It’s my fault for not checking in. Leave it with me, I’ll sort it all out.’ Gee said. ‘Promise.’
Could he? Would he get the right tree? The right food? She didn’t know anymore, all she knew was that she wanted to weep with gratitude. And fall into his arms, her mind whispered. Or was it her heart?
‘Thanks,’ she whispered.
***
She opened the front door, and the smell of pine and resin puffed out on a pillow of cinnamon.
Christmas. It smelt like Christmas.
Emma took a huge breath in, letting the scents soothe away the tension of another day wrestling with Will undermining her stories. The latest she’d uncovered was the story that he had managed to somehow shoe horn into the fandom. Supposedly Tina was really one of a set of triplets and they took turns posing with Will which, to the fandom, proved that it was all fake. Which was plainly ridiculous. Fans online had way too much time on their hands. She would concede that Tina’s nose did seem to change shape in some photos. But the lengths some bloggers had gone to included deep analysis of angles and checking photos for photoshopping. Honestly, all they had to do was check the bi
rth registry and realise that Tina didn’t have sisters called Elinor or Gretchen. And the way she acted was purely due to the fact she was a spoilt only child.
Although Emma had to give Will kudos for throwing out these completely contradicting stories. It was making it hard for any of the fauxmances to look anything but fake. And if it wasn’t for the fact that it was directly affecting her, she’d have offered him a job.
On top of that there was Ed, who had been seen in another pap shoot with Frankie. If she hadn’t seen him quite happily holding hands properly with Sean as they had been mucking around on stage, she would have thought he had no idea what he was supposed to do with his fingers. His hand had hung there like a bunch of sausages, while Frankie clung to it.
Of course, the fans had gone crazy.
If she had to listen to another rant from Frankie’s team, with them threatening to sell outrageous sex stories about the two of them and have him photographed sneaking out of her hotel room, she’d quite happily lynch them. All of them.
She took another deep breath. Another hit of cinnamon and pine…
‘Hey,’ Gee came up from the kitchen wearing a festive green apron with a snowman.
‘You baked?’ she asked.
‘More like heated stuff up,’ he grimaced, coming past her. He smelt like sugar and spice and all things nice. Maybe not just little girls were made of it.
‘Look.’
He took her arm and pulled her into the front room. There in the bay window was the most prefect Christmas tree. It looked like it had been taken straight from someone’s Pinterest board for a perfect Christmas. Its branches spread from the ground and tapered to a point which almost brushed the ceiling.
It was wound around with fairy lights and there were ornaments weighing down the boughs. The lights were off. But when they were lit, it would be like a beacon shining for her when she was on her way home.
‘I was waiting till you got home before we put on the star and turned the lights on,’ he said from behind her.
