I marshalled my resolve and continued. I don’t know why I did, maybe I thought I could still convince him? “Charlie Hunnam walked away from Fifty Shades of Grey and they did just fine without him.”
“He had Sons of Anarchy. I don’t.”
“You have me.” I felt a tear slip from my eye and I slashed my hand angrily across my face, wiping it and its traitorous companions away. I didn’t want to become overly emotional during this exchange, but with each passing second I felt my control slipping. I wanted to remain strong when I felt anything but.
Cameron stared at me, and the silence wrapped around us like a shroud. His face had gone blank and I couldn’t read what he was thinking. His completely unreadable expression reminded me he made his living hiding himself under masks. He frequently slipped into the skin of other people, people who didn’t exist in real life so he didn’t either when he became them. In that moment I wondered who was standing across the room from me because it wasn’t a Cameron I’d ever been introduced to before.
Staring at me unblinking, I waited with baited breath for him to speak. “I already have you,” he finally said and then calmly, as if he hadn’t just broken my heart into a thousand tiny pieces, climbed back in bed and turned off the bedside lamp. When he rolled over and gave me his back, I knew he was done talking for the night.
I stood in the dark for several more seconds, shocked he could be so dismissive. This could have been the conversation that rescued our relationship but instead he’d shut me out. Again, I was shocked. But then, I was learning a number of shocking things about Cameron today, wasn’t I? Seeing a whole other side of him I’d never known existed. Finding out that even though he loved me, maybe he loved his career just a little bit more.
It was only then that I realized I’d been standing there naked the whole time, the wetness of Cameron’s semen coating my inner thighs. Grabbing my pink robe, I wrapped it around me and padded out of the room on silent feet. I showered in the guest bathroom and then spent the next several hours painting pictures of sad things.
The next few weeks went by in a whirlwind of activity with Cameron and I spending very little time together. On Sunday when he’d taken his laundry to Mike’s place instead of washing it at home where he would have been trapped in the house with me, I realized he was avoiding me. At work I saw him often enough, but it was like I’d seen other actors and actresses before – they were the talent, I was the help, and they were off limits. Meanwhile, I got to watch him and Jillian act like lovesick teenagers whenever anyone was around – which was always – and try not to vomit.
Once the dust had settled after our epic fight, I’d been mildly hopeful that we could have some semblance of a normal relationship. I’d managed to convince myself that with having to be secretive in public, our time in private would make up for those lost hours. Unfortunately, the reality was our private time was non-existent. We worked long hours – me taking on the expanded responsibilities of my new job while he learning his lines and went through costume prep and gun training – so neither of us spent many hours at home to begin with.
I’d usually get home around 9 p.m. and for the first several nights I’d wait up for Cameron, only to fall asleep on the couch before he’d roll in sometime after midnight. Once I’d realized there was no use waiting up for him, I’d gave up the couch for my bed with Duke as my nighttime companion. Just like it’d been before.
Shortly after that I learned a number of his late nights weren’t taken up by rehearsals or other prep, but instead were spent squiring Jillian around town to parties, movie and TV show premiers, new restaurants, concerts … basically, all the places we could have been going but weren’t. What was worse, he wasn’t even telling me about these “dates.” Instead I had to learn about these nights out the way the rest of the world did – in the tabloids.
When he’d asked me to be with him, he’d promised to never hurt me again but now I figured he’d forgotten that vow because I was in pain. Alas, I didn’t bother trying to explain to him just how bad his callous disregard hurt me because I’d come to the sad conclusion he didn’t care one way or the other. I didn’t have a fiancé anymore; I had an absentee roommate.
Our closest friends knew about the deal we’d made with the proverbial devil in the name of Cameron’s career, and while they’d been shocked – and in a few cases disgusted – most had supported me. Broderick would have preferred it had no one known about mine and Cameron’s relationship, but with our engagement party having taken place the day before the studio’s PR plan went into effect, that cat was way out of the bag. The sad task of begging those closest to us not to give Cameron away had fallen to me. You can imagine how humiliating the large majority of those conversations had been. Now though, I appreciated having fewer people to worry about blowing up my phone, wanting to know what was going on with Cameron and me when the first images of him with Jillian hit the Internet.
It was when she posted a selfie of them at a basketball game to her Twitter account and it was added to several communities on LiveJournal devoted to the book and movie that I begrudgingly admitted the PR team had known what they were doing. When each post received several hundred comments each, I knew Cameron had officially made it. So what if I smirked when several people said Jillian was too thin and remarked, mistakenly, on what they thought was Cameron’s bald spot (it’d been a smudge on her phone’s lens).
While I’d brought our closest friends up to speed on what was happening, I still hadn’t told my mom because I just couldn’t bring myself to deal with her disappointment and commentary about what I could improve about myself. Truthfully, dealing with her was more than I could handle in my fragile emotional state. I knew I would have to fill her in at some point, but I was avoiding it like I avoided a root canal. In the end, she approached me and made me confess.
During an uncharacteristically cool Friday evening, my phone rang as I ate dinner alone, the voices on the TV keeping me company from across the room. When I saw it was my mother calling from New York at 10 p.m. I became nervous. It was an uncharacteristically late call for her and the lateness actually worried me. We had a regularly scheduled twice-monthly Sunday call lined up for the day after next and it wasn’t like her to deviate from her schedule. Jane Travers was a busy woman with a very tight schedule, something she never tired of telling me.
“What’s wrong?” I answered, panic in my voice.
“Hello darling,” she replied smoothly. “I’d ask you the same.”
Ignoring her comment, I asked after my father, her health. When she assured me everyone was in fine form, she launched into her own volley of questions.
“Do you want to tell me why my daughter’s fiancé is in Us Weekly magazine holding hands with a woman who is not my daughter?” Her tone indicated she was pissed that she’d been made to look the fool, not that I’d been made to look one. Any other mother might have recognized the photos would be painful for their daughter and been circumspect in their inquiry but not my mom. She thought only of herself.
I liked to think if someday in the far off future I spied a photo of my daughter’s betrothed holding hands with a woman who I hadn’t given birth to, my first question would not be why I hadn’t been warned but rather how my child fared. Alas, that was not my mother’s way. She was only interested in how she’d go about explaining to her friends that the man her daughter was engaged to was stepping out on her. The most likely scenario, of course, being I couldn’t keep him happy and devoted so I braced for the coming lecture about what I could do to make myself more desirable to a famous Hollywood actor.
“Which picture did you see?”
I heard her flipping through the pages of the magazine, and it surprised me she didn’t have it bookmarked. “That would be in the ‘Stars – They’re Just Like Us’ section. Cameron seen leading his, and I quote, ‘beautiful new co-star Jillian Templeton’ down Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.”
All things considered, that was one o
f the tamer photos. At least she hadn’t seen the one where they held hands across the table in a quiet, out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant in Topanga Canyon that wasn’t at all the type of place you’d go on a PR-arranged date. That it wasn’t very well known and Cameron and I had discovered it a couple of years ago made the photo that much more painful.
Before she could say anything else, I decided to fill her in on my increasingly terrible secret. “Okay mom, I’m going to tell you something but you absolutely cannot breathe a word of it to anyone but dad. That means Aunt Sue, any of the ladies you play tennis with, your hair stylist, your manicurist. No one.”
She huffed out an offended snort, as if that wasn’t exactly what she did with any secret – no matter how big or small – if you didn’t make her swear on penalty of life to keep.
“Promise me you’ll take this to your grave.”
“Fine, fine. Of course. I don’t know why you have to be so dramatic. You know I don’t gossip.”
I had to stifle my laugh. My mother lived for exactly three things: shopping, gossip, and lunchtime martinis. That she tried to pretend she could do without any one of them was hilarious. There was a reason she’d seen the picture in Us Weekly before I knew about them. She was a long-time subscriber. Star and Life & Style as well. It was a huge point of contention between us that during our Sunday calls I wouldn’t fill her in on what she referred to as all my “juicy Hollywood gossip.” She couldn’t accept that (up to now) my job was actually far removed from anything even remotely scandal-worthy. She regularly accused me of holding out on her.
I took a deep breath and let the secret spill from my lips. “It’s for the movie.”
“What is, dear?”
“Cameron and Jillian. The pictures.”
“I don’t know what you mean. These aren’t pictures from the movie darling. This looks like a date.”
“I know that mom. It’s a PR date, to help sell the movie.”
“But the movie doesn’t come out for months yet. They haven’t even started principle filming yet.”
Yes, she followed the production schedule of Broderick’s movies. She assumed it was easier for her to track gossip I might have extra insight into if she knew specific filming dates and locations. Never mind that her theory had never panned out, she continued monitoring The Hollywood Reporter and Variety on a semi-regular basis.
I sighed and tried to keep the frustration from my voice. Of course she’d pretend to be so obtuse that I’d have to spell it out for her. “So, here’s the deal. Cameron and Jillian are both unknowns. The studio thinks it’s a good idea if people think they fell in love in real life to help boost the romance in the movie.”
“That’s just absurd Sarah. Cameron already has a fiancé. How can he fall in love with someone else when you’re together?”
I gritted my teeth. “It’s not real Mom. It’s fake. These are staged photo ops.”
“Fine, I get that, but how does the studio explain away pictures of you two? Surely now that Cameron is a huge star there are paparazzi following you when you go out. Why haven’t I seen those pictures?”
The truth was Cameron wasn’t a huge star yet so generally speaking the paparazzi hadn’t started following him. Sure, he was giant star among a certain subset of fans but until the movie premiered next year, he probably wouldn’t have to worry about that. Without any major scandal attached to his name or the movie, he and Jillian still had a small measure of anonymity. I didn’t bother explaining this to her though because it’d be the third time doing so. She didn’t want to know it so she didn’t hear me. The other reality was even if Cameron had been as big a star as my mom clearly thought, there were no pictures of us because we’d stopped leaving the house together. For all intents and purposes, there wasn’t an “us” to photograph. Rather than saying any of that though, I counted to ten in my head while I tried to get my anger under control.
Jane Travers could be many infuriating things but stupid was not one of them, despite the games she played that said otherwise. When I’d only counted to six, she knew something was up. “Sarah Anne Travers, what are you not telling me?!”
Time to put on my big girl pants. “Do you promise not to judge me?”
“How can you even ask me that?” That she sounded surprised by my question –
very nearly offended by it – would have been funny if things weren’t quite so dire.
“Right. Okay, no judging.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes to deliver the news I knew she would freak out over. “There are no pictures of me because … because … I’m a secret.” I exhaled. “I’m Cameron’s secret fiancé and only a few people know about us.”
One second, two, then three seconds passed as she absorbed my words. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say and you’ve shared some doozies over the years. Secret fiancé!” She scoffed out loud. “What the hell kind of a thing is that?”
For once in my life I actually agreed with my mother. What the hell kind of damn thing is that indeed? It damn near killed me.
When your best friend and your mom both told you to stop acting like an asshole and apologize to your girlfriend for behaving so poorly, that was usually when a smart man would heed their advice and beg for forgiveness. No one ever said I was all that smart. I’d tried to forgive Sarah for what I still believed was a major betrayal, but every time I felt my resolve softening, one of us would say or do something that snapped me right back to Bitter Land, population one. The worst was when she looked at me with such disappointment in her eyes, as if the situation had been my doing. Sure, it was all in service to my career, but she’d been if not the architect of this farce, then at least its lead engineer. I hoped with time I’d be able to look at her and not feel my anger rise, but I wasn’t there yet. In the meantime, I kept myself away from her and as busy as possible by throwing myself into work.
When I’d agreed to the revised plan and escalated timeline for mine and Jillian’s “romance” I hadn’t understood how all encompassing it would be. I’d only thought about the few hours a week I’d have to go on fake dates with her and pretend not to see the paparazzi who were only ten feet away from us. What I hadn’t counted on was having to act like I was in love with her all the goddamn time. Since there were people coming and going from the set at all hours of the day who could rat us out if they suspected our relationship had been fabricated, I’d taken to hiding in my trailer. A week ago, Jillian had been photographed “sneaking” in and now she spent more time in mine than her own. Frankly I thought she was a little too invested in our fake relationship, but with Murray in London I figured maybe she was just lonely. When I knew Sarah was going to be on set, I toned it down, but if she wasn’t, I played my role to perfection.
I’d never been a huge flirt so when it came time to turn on the charm, I channeled Mike, borrowing certain phrases, lines and banter I knew he employed when he was trying to get a girl to go home with him. Jillian would laugh hysterically when I’d jokingly try one out on her and those were the times the paps loved the most – me smiling down at her while her head was thrown back in a throaty laugh, her hand resting on my forearm or bicep. We looked very comfortable with one another, very tactile. Soon gossip spread beyond the set that I couldn’t take my eyes off her or keep my hands to myself. I never once touched her inappropriately or crossed a line I wouldn’t be able to come back from, but that didn’t stop people from seeing what they wanted to. After a few weeks of this, blogs and magazines had started sharing “eyewitness accounts” from “on-set sources” that corroborated what the photos showed. Of course, these sources always wished to remain anonymous. If I’d known who it was, I might have cornered them and told them to keep their trap shut, but all I could do was grin and bear it.
The other day I inadvertently overheard two costume assistants talking to each other about mine and Jillian’s romance. One of them told the other that one of the sources feeding information to a particular blogger that always
seemed to get the scoop first was none other than Broderick’s assistant. The second those words settled, my gut clenched and I felt like throwing up. Instead I retreated to the on-set gym and knocked around the punching bag until I thought my arms would fall off.
It wasn’t enough that Sarah had pushed me into this, but now she was acting the part of gossip pimp as well? Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever be able to forgive her. And the more that thought echoed in my head, the easier it became to distance myself from her until our relationship had dwindled into one of polite indifference. At the few meals we shared, I’d listen to her talk about her day and I’d share snippets of my own, all the while wondering how I could have been so wrong about us. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her anymore. That would have been easy, a definitive respite. The gut churning reality was despite those nagging thoughts on trust and betrayal, I still loved her to distraction. And so she continued wearing my ring.
***
Jillian and I clocked a group of paparazzi on our tail minutes after leaving the studio. Since we were on our way to one of our scheduled “dates” anyhow, we didn’t try to lose them. Shrugging her shoulders as if to ask “why not?” she put the top down on her convertible, and we pasted smiles on our faces and let them take as many pictures as they liked as we drove out of Los Angeles toward Malibu.
Before we’d left for the night, a member of Aerin’s PR team had taken us aside to tell us we needed to shift tactics with our public outings because some of the press was starting to question why we spent so much time at locations notorious for being paparazzi friendly. The latest addendum to the plan was to make it seem like we were avoiding the paparazzi by picking small, quiet, out of the way places. Meanwhile, Aerin would reach out to some photographers who were on her payroll to make sure these “dates” didn’t go completely unnoticed. After all, the studio only wanted the appearance of privacy, not for us to actually be left alone.
Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story Page 19
