Brit Flick Sweethearts: A Rom-Com With Spanking

by Samantha Hyde

  Curt begged to differ. Everyone was replaceable, he was under no illusions about that. Even the fabulous Dahlia Dean.

  But not to him. He loved her fiercely. Fair enough, she wanted a career, who was he to take that away from her?

  It just would’ve been so nice, to disappear with her off into the sunset…

  But who was he kidding? Real life wasn’t like that. He smiled grimly to himself.

  I am a hopeless romantic. Who’d have thought it….

  “What are you smiling at?”

  “The irony of life.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Come here, beautiful.”

  He pulled her back into his arms, kissing her hard on the mouth.

  Then he broke off the kiss, frowning in confusion.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” Dahlia purred in that same, irritating voice.

  The truth was, Curt didn’t know. Her mouth felt inexplicably different. She smelled different, she even tasted different… It just didn’t make any sense.

  “Have you changed the perfume you usually wear?”

  Dahlia giggled girlishly. “Maybe.”

  Curt was confused. For some unknown reason, the woman to whom he had just proposed, he did not have the urge to kiss.

  “Do you mind leaving? I have a migraine coming on,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t that be my line?”

  “I’m sorry Doris, but would you mind leaving?”

  Dahlia shrugged and exited the trailer, blowing him a theatrical kiss as she left. “Later, baby. I’m going now to tell everyone the news. I just wish you’d thought to buy me a huge diamond ring.”

  There was that God-awful giggle that made him wince, and then she was gone.

  Curt slumped on a plastic chair, elbows on the table and his head in his hands. What the hell was wrong with him, he wondered? He had just proposed to the only woman he had ever fallen in love with, but instead of elation, he just felt sadness.

  It doesn’t make sense. I love Doris, I really, really do.

  So then why do you feel like you’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life?

  He groaned aloud and clawed his cheeks so that the reds under his eyes showed. Then he stood up.

  “I’m being a prick. I love her,” he said to the empty trailer.

  He was going to go and see her right now, sort this out once and for all. Maybe he was just getting cold feet or something, and looking for problems that weren’t there.

  “Where’s Dahlia?” he asked the nearest crew member when he stepped out of the trailer onto the set.

  “In her trailer. Getting ready for the first shoot.”

  Curt hurried over, desperate to hold her in his arms and tell her how much he loved her.

  “Doris,” he said, bursting into her trailer without knocking. “I’m sorry, I love…”

  Dahlia looked up at him wide eyed from the cocaine she was snorting, crouched over the little table. A rolled up twenty pound note dangled from her fingers and white powder decorated her nostrils. Hastily, she wiped it away.

  “Curt, I can explain…”

  “Save it, Dahlia.” He turned to leave, then paused for a second. “Oh, and I retract my offer of marriage. I am done with this shit.”

  “Curt! Baby, please wait, let me explain…”

  Curt hurried out the trailer. For the first time in his life, tears stung his eyes. Incredulously, he wiped them away. He had meant what he had said in there, and not just about calling off the engagement. He realised in that moment how much he hated acting. The whole scene was a load of bollocks. It was all so fake, so narcissistic, so pathetic.

  “Hey, Curt,” a young guy he didn’t recognise called over to him. “I think you need to see this, mate.”

  The young man with Camera Crew scrawled on the back of his jumper waved a copy of a British daily under Curt’s nose.

  ‘Double Trouble!’ blared the headline on the front cover, followed by the sub-heading: ‘Dahlia Dean in drug-overdose scandal. Identical twin, Doris Dean takes her sister’s place to attend the film premiere for ‘Brick Face’ while Dahlia was holed up in rehab…’

  Curt snatched the paper to read the article, his heart thumping painfully hard…

  ‘Whoever would have guessed that model and actress, Dahlia Dean had an identical twin? After a particular nasty incident involving another man and a woman, a nightclub toilet and a lot of cocaine, Dahlia Dean was rushed to hospital with a near fatal overdose. She went straight into rehab while her identical twin, Doris, stepped in to take her place, to attend the film premiere of her sister’s break-through film.

  The question is, was her leading man, Curt Gunner, in on the conspiracy too? When he announced to the world that he and Dahlia were an item, was it Dahlia he meant, or Doris?...’

  Curt couldn’t read anymore because he felt sick. With trembling fingers, he folded up the paper and tucked it under the crook of his arm.

  “Hey man, are you OK?” the young guy asked. “I just thought you might want to see it…”

  Curt completely blanked him and walked away. He reached the perimeter of the film set and carried on walking. As he walked he switched off his mobile phone and discarded it in the nearest litter bin.

  Doris didn’t hear the news until Dahlia phoned her on her landline in Cornwall later that day.

  “Have you seen the god-damn papers?” Dahlia spat, her voice nearing hysteria.

  “Hello Dahlia, how are you? I’m fine, thanks.”

  “So you’re holed up in your shitty little cottage, writing your romantic crap and ignoring the rest of the world as usual then?”

  “What’s happened? Why are you so ratty?” she asked, ignoring her sister’s entirely accurate accusation.

  “It’s all out. My overdose, you standing in for me, everything.”

  Doris’s blood ran cold and she almost dropped the phone. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “It’s pretty fucking obvious what I mean, wouldn’t you say?”

  “OK, Dahlia, you need to calm down…”

  “Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. This is all a fucking mess. And it was all going so well too. I hope it wasn’t you that leaked it to the papers.”

  “No! God, why would I do such a thing?”

  “Because you’ve always been jealous of me. Because when you were fucking my boyfriend, you went and fell for him and now you’re doing your best to fuck it all up for me.”

  “Dahlia, you sound wired, have you been taking drugs?”

  “He finished with me, you know,” she said in the same, high-pitched, manic voice.

  “What?”

  Now the phone was so slippery in her trembling, sweaty palm, she had to cling onto it with both hands. She didn’t know if Dahlia’s bombshell came as a relief, or had her heart sinking down to her comfortable, thick, house-socks.

  It should be neither, she silently reprimanded herself.

  “He said I’d been acting weird lately, ever since filming for Brick Face ended. He said he didn’t know who I was anymore and he didn’t like the drip I’d turned into. He said he wanted to keep up the pretence of us being an item for the sake of our careers but he had no feelings for me whatsoever.”

  “You’re lying,” Doris whispered, but already half believing her twin.

  “Why would I lie? After he dumped me, he must have seen our little story in the news. I doubt his male proud could take everyone laughing at him so he did one.”

  “What do you mean, ‘he did one?’”

  “He’s gone, dear sister. Curt Gunner has deserted the fucking film and left us all in the lurch.”

  It took a moment for Doris to digest the words being spoken to her. There was a lump in her throat that made it impossible to speak.

  “Well, thank-you so much for your support, Doris. I’ll just get back to my job. If I’ve still fucking got one. Goodbye.”

  The hum of the dead line in her phone-ear seemed to be the trigger for her pent
-up tears. Doris threw herself onto her tatty sofa, burying her face in a cushion. He hated her and now he was gone. She would never see him again and she would never get to explain why she had lied to him.

  But he dumped you anyway, remember? He dumped you because you’re a stupid, fat drip.

  The rational part of her mind didn’t believe it. But it was hard to be rational when you were sobbing out your broken heart.

  This wouldn’t do. She was a grown woman, not a lovesick teenager.

  It suddenly hit her how horribly in love with him she was. So much so in fact, she wasn’t about to let him go without a fight. Surely he wouldn’t have said such a thing about her? She ignored the self-doubt eating away at her sanity, and reached for her mobile phone, which was switched off and charging on the coffee table.

  Curt’s phone when straight to voicemail and she ended the call without leaving a message. Jeremy, however, picked up after the second ring.

  “Doris. I was about to call you. I gather you’ve heard?”

  “Yeah. Dahlia called.”

  “Oh dear, she said she was going to.”

  “Where is he?”

  As if the ‘he’ needed to be elaborated on.

  “I don’t know sweetheart, he just walked off the film set without a word.”

  “Surely someone knows where is? Can’t you give me his agent’s number, or something?”

  “What good would that do? He’s not home and his mobile is switched off. No one knows where he is.”

  Doris let out a shaky sight. “So that’s it, then? Am I supposed to just forget about him and never get the chance to make him understand why I lied to him?”

  “You really do love him, don’t you?”

  Doris didn’t want to lie anymore. Not to anybody. “Yes.”

  Jeremy made a funny little choking sound that was half sigh of despair, half groan. “I wasn’t going to tell you this.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s not like me to be a shameless romantic, but to hell with it, the damage is already done. I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re a nice kid. And do you know what? I think Curt probably is too.”

  “Tell me what? Come on Jeremy, spit it out, for God’s sake.”

  “Curt proposed to Dahlia this morning. Must have been in the seconds before he saw the newspaper.”

  Doris’s heart started hammering painfully hard. Why hadn’t her sister told her this?

  Because the proposal was meant for me, and she knows it.

  “How do you know this?” she asked shakily.

  “Darling, I know everything. You think I don’t have friends on the film set of ‘Death Car?’ As soon as he had got down on bended knee, your sister shared the good news with my good friend Jeff, one of the camera guys.”

  “And then he saw the paper and walked out,” she finished, suddenly lightheaded and shaky.

  “There’s more. Dahlia told Jeff that he asked her to give it all up.”

  “Give it all up? I’m not with you.”

  “Give up acting, darling. Run off with him into the sunset and disappear out of the public eye forever. I’d heard on the grapevine he was of those reluctant actor types, but I had no idea he was that serious. It’s the only reason I’ve told you darling, I suppose a proposal like that really does deserve to reach the ears of the person it was intended for.”

  The tears were threatening to stage a comeback. “But it’s too late. He’s gone now, he hates me.”

  “He thinks you don’t love him. He thinks you’ve been playing him. And I think I know a way I might be able to help you. I owe you that much, right?”

  “Go on,” she said warily.

  She could almost hear the smile in his voice when he spoke; “Well, here’s what I’m thinking….”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Oh my God, this is never going to work…

  It has to work.

  Doris hopped nervously from foot to foot, shivering slightly in the October wind that whipped up the surrounding sea into a frenzy. Although the fact she was trembling had little to do with the encroaching winter weather and the freezing cold, salt water spray that sliced her face and stung her eyes.

  He’s late, he’s not going to come, I’m making a fool of myself. Why, oh why did I let Jeremy convince me this was a good idea?

  Tucked under her armpit was a copy of the newspaper with the article in it. She didn’t need to read it again. She knew every damn word by heart.

  She leaned on the railing at the end of Brighton Pier and gazed out to the choppy sea, the words of the article bright in her mind:

  A Letter To Curt, From Doris Dean.

  Dearest Curt. I am sorry I lied to you. I was never meant to fall in love with you. I was only meant to step into my sister’s shoes while she was recovering.

  But I did fall in love with you, and before I knew it I was in way over my head. I mean, why would a film star with Hollywood and the world at his feet want with an introverted, lowly, romance writer that lives in a tiny, rural village? Our lives could not be more different.

  Even though my sister’s life is most definitely not for me, a small part of me, that is, the part that had fallen in love with a film star, was so swept up in the moment and didn’t want the fantasy to end. Had I of told you the truth, I would’ve broken my sister’s trust, and I believed you would have wanted nothing more to do with me.

  Why have I announced this to the world, you may well be asking? Is this some kind of publicity stunt on behalf of my sister? No, it isn’t. I don’t want you to read the story of us in the press where it might become twisted out of all proportion. I don’t want you to read about how you were played, how you were caught up in a game which existed for the sole purpose of furthering my sister’s career. What I am saying to you now is straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

  Because I love you, Curt Gunner. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want you to turn your back on this ol’ thing called showbiz, and live a long, boring life with me away from the public glare…

  But the question is, will you still have me? If your offer still stands, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me, I will be waiting for you at the end of the place where the sea meets the sky. The place I mentioned in our most intimate moment when I said what I said and you didn’t say it back….

  Forgive me, my darling. I love you. Meet me at that place at noon on the last day of the month if you want to be with me.

  Doris xx

  “Hello Doris.”

  The voice was familiar and close to her heart, but not the one she was expecting to hear. She spun round in confusion.

  “Dahlia? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Doris was in turn mortified and deeply uneasy that her twin had turned up.

  “Oh, I just thought I would pop along and say hi. Nice article. Jeremy must have pulled a lot of strings to get you that slot. Funny, I always thought he was my agent.”

  “He still is. How did you even know I was here?”

  “Oh, please. Where the sea meets the sky? It’s what we used to call the end of Brighton Pier when we were kids, remember? What the fuck else could it possibly mean? Why did you do that to me, Doris?”

  “Do what?”

  “Write that article. Must you insist in continuing to humiliate me this way?”

  “How am I humiliating you? I tried to help you, remember?”

  “He was supposed to be mine, you stole him from me.”

  “You can’t lose what you never had in the first place.” She knew that was bitchy, but damn it, she was so mad at her sister right now. “Why aren’t you filming ‘Death Car,’” she asked, as if that would somehow soften her last statement.

  It was then she noticed that she wasn’t looking her usual glamorous, polished self, either. She wore a cosy, dark jumper and a pair of faded levis.

  She never normally dresses like that. In fact, she’s dressed like me… Her blood ran cold. Oh God, what if she’s pu
rposely dressed like me and has already intercepted Curt?

  “Filming has been postponed until they can find a new leading man. It would appear that Curt really isn’t coming back. You managed to ruin that for me as well. So after I read your article, I figured he might show up here.” She smiled wryly. “And would you believe I ran into him just now?”

  Nonchalantly she studied her nails and Doris fought down a sudden rise of nausea.

  “Oh my God, Dahlia, what have you done?” she whispered.

  “I told him thank you very much for turning up, and that you wrote the article just so you could persuade him to get back to filming. Because you love your twin and you would do anything to make it right with her again.”

  “And he believed that?”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Because it’s nonsense. Because it makes no sense.”

  “He seemed to believe me. He just turned around and walked away.”

  “I love him, Dahlia.”

  “You stole him. He was mine.”

  Why am I still standing here?

  Her paralysis broke and her feet no longer felt welded to the slatted, wooden floor of the pier.

  “Where are you going?” Dahlia called out to her, but Doris had already run past the helter-skelter and was weaving her way through the wooden huts that housed fortune tellers and the like that had shut down for the winter.

  When she got to the arcade that was still open, a voice called out to her.

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world… Hello baby.”

  She screeched to a halt and spun round so fast she almost gave herself whiplash.

  “Curt!”

  She was too out of breath to elaborate, and tears felt dangerously close. It just felt so good seeing him. It felt like coming home.

  “Not for a second did I mistake Dahlia for you. Now I know you’re twins, I can spot the difference a mile off.”

  “You came,” she said stupidly, trying to catch her breath.

  “Yeah. I did. I thought perhaps that you and your sister might need a little alone time, though. Seems she read the article too.”

  “Yeah, seems she did.”