“Nellie,” Rob whispers in between kisses, whispering her name reverently against her skin. She simply holds herself against him and kisses a point under his ear, making him let out a strangled cry.
“Jason is an idiot if he doesn’t see you like I do,” he mumbles into her skin, as subtitled for the audience; his hands trail down the sides of her arms, looping in around her waist. His hand finds the small of her back and traces under the curve of her bottom to wrap her leg around his waist, and Nellie couldn’t hold back her breathy little gasp of surprise.
“We didn’t agree to this,” she reminds him gently, placing her hands on his face as she brushes her fingers across the freckles on his nose. She needs him against her, to feel the weight of him against her, whatever that meant. Nellie wraps her leg tighter around Rob’s waist.
“Standard part of every My Fair Lady story.” Rob barely manages to speak, his chest rumbling as he laughs. Nellie spreads her hands across his chest under his shirt, smiling in satisfaction when he stops laughing. Rob kisses the top of her head in a surprisingly sincere gesture. In the middle of all of this, he still manages to take care of her. “I feel like I’ve been waiting for you, Nellie. I just didn’t want to see it.”
Nellie is about to say something when his hands on her waist pushes her back, and she has to sit on the table behind her legs, wriggling a little when something landed under her butt. She laughs in between his kisses, fumbling in the dark to remove the intrusion. She frowns, pulling away for a moment to glance at the item in her hand. She gasps.
A strange, cold numbness spreads through her body, snuffing out the heat she’d felt earlier. She turns the familiar black planner in her hands, the pages falling naturally open with the number of times it had been read and reread. There are notes in his handwriting on neon orange sticky notes, listing possible scenarios to use the information. He’d used up the last week of December on the planner to write down his plans to use the information on Nellie’s planner.
Nellie looks to the door and she sees the cameras on them. She looks up at him, betrayal burning in her cheeks, her eyes shimmering with white-hot anger. Nellie’s mind is racing, going a mile a minute as her moonlit romantic world shatters into pieces.
“Where did you get this?” she asks, looking up at Rob’s shocked face. He’d stepped back, running his hands through his hair, trying to rub his brain cells into action. “Rob, where did you get this?” Nellie asks again, fighting the urge to scream the question. Now she is crying, hot tears spilling from her cheeks. “Did . . . did the show people give it to you?”
He says nothing, his eyes poring deep into hers while his mouth remains unmoving. Nellie rises up to her full height, still a bit short of him.
But still Robert is quiet. If he is in pain, his eyes don’t show it.
“Say something,” she says, hating that her words came out in a choked sob. She fights it all back with a deep breath.
But Rob remains quiet. Nellie took this as her cue to walk to the door, wiping her eyes and clutching her planner into her arms.
**
“I am never going to forget that look on Nellie’s face,” Rob says, rubbing his hands over his face. He was standing near his car, at the end of the evening. His shoulders are hunched. “Never.”
Then he asks the crew to turn off the cameras before getting into his car.
**
“Jason asked me out today,” she informs him, using the coldest voice she could muster. She makes sure she has her back to the cameras, hiding the tears in her eyes from their view. “And I said yes. He may be an idiot, but at least he didn’t lie to me, or stand there like it didn’t matter. We’re done.”
As the door closed behind her, Robert placed both his hands on the table, taking a deep breath before slamming his hands down with a loud bang.
“Shit,” he growls before kicking the table for extra measure. He looks up at the cameras, his eyes blazing with anger. “Are you happy now?” he asks them.
Then he walks forward, slamming the door shut, making the camera shake slightly before fizzling out into darkness.
Episode Five
“I have a sixth sense when it comes to food trucks,” Donna promptly informs the cameras as she stands on the street. “I swear I never check their Twitter pages, I just know where they’re going to be. And today, I just know that Señor Sisig is going to be at the Yard.”
**
The cameras zoom in on Donna and Nellie sitting in the middle of the Yard at Mission Rock. Made up of emptied-out container vans, the small but cool space has a coffee shop, a sports gear store, a small bar, and a lot of food trucks. But every resident of San Francisco knows that Señor Sisig is the best in the Bay area. It’s fusion Filipino sisig with Mexican food, and Donna can’t get enough of the stuff.
“They say Filipino food is, like, the in cuisine,” she shrugs as she and Nellie sit together on the picnic tables in front of the food trucks. She eats her sisig tacos gingerly, licking off the cilantro cream sauce with her fingers. Nellie, however, simply pokes at her burrito. She’s frowning and is huffing long-suffering sighs that make Donna roll her eyes.
“You know, if you weren’t hungry, we shouldn’t have bothered to come all the way here,” Donna points out. Nellie ignores her. “Hello, earth to Nellie?”
She looks up at Donna, still frowning. It has been three days since Ellie’s wedding (as noted on the time stamp at the opening exterior shot), and two days until Renée and Ewan’s big royal affair.
**
“In the wake of her emotional problems, Nellie has chosen to throw herself into her work, going to far as to march over to the San Francisco Flower Mart herself to buy all the yellow dahlias she can find,” Donna said, shaking her head in disapproval at the cameras. “We have interns for that. Charlotte was so worried, she asked me to shadow Nellie’s every move. We spent the next few days coordinating with decorators, fielding RSVPs, arranging and rearranging the table settings according to the almost hourly specifications of Renée, Renée’s mother, and Ewan’s political advisor. There wasn’t any time for her to think about things like boys.”
**
“You know, normally I wouldn’t care for all of this,” Donna says, holding up a hand and moving it up and down to indicate the general direction of her friend. “But seeing you so down is literally sickening and I have to intervene.”
“I’ve had enough with people intervening,” Nellie says flatly, sipping her soda. She is back to her drab cardigans, but she was still wearing her booties. “Ever since all of that,” she says, pointing right at the cameras, “started, my life has been one big dramatic mess. Everything good Rob’s done for me wasn’t real. He didn’t want to help me, his mommy made him. Who’s to say that this whole thing with Jason wasn’t a setup too? I mean, I just put on a tiny dress and suddenly he’s almost sick with love for me?” she says, taking a gigantic bite of her burrito. “I’m not exactly you!”
Donna throws a napkin at her friend’s face, just to stop her from talking. “As much as I love you calling me a goddess and throwing shade at yourself,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I can’t let this whole thing go on.
“You are fucking beautiful, do you hear me?” she practically screeches. “You are dedicated and creative, and Jason tells me he would have asked you out anyway, even if the show people didn’t tell him to—”
“What?” Nellie exclaims, nearly dropping her burrito. “So he’s a setup, too?”
Even Donna seems surprised at her own revelation. She sighs and knows her goose is cooked anyway, so she might as well spill the truth. “The producers told him to ask you out after our makeover. But he really does like you, Nellie! Please don’t throw this away because I’ve got a big fat mouth!”
“Oh my God!” Nellie groans, more frustrated than angry at this point. She looks right into the cameras. “Seriously? Seriously? This is Charlotte Bertram’s show, not . . . God, I am not witty enough to think of anything right now!”
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Then she marches off, leaving the perfectly good burrito on the table. Donna buries her face in her hands in frustration.
**
“So that didn’t go exactly as I planned,” Donna says to the cameras after Nellie walks off. “Sorry, sweetie.”
**
Nellie is marching down the sidewalk, about to get a cab, when a dark limousine with tinted windows pulls up in front of her. The windows roll down to reveal Renée with sunglasses so large that you can’t see her forehead anymore. Nellie’s fists are clenched like she wants to take a swing at her client, but she manages to hold her rage in.
“How did you even—” Nellie begins, before giving the cameras a glare when she realizes exactly how Renée knows where she would be. “No, no, no! Not today, Satan!” she yells, stomping away on her new booties, wobbling a bit when she steps on a stony path. Nellie is halfway to the bus stop when the limousine pulls up beside her again.
“Renée, please,” Nellie begs, clasping her hands together. She is unraveling on reality TV, but Nellie pays the cameras no mind anymore. “If I say more than fifty words to you, I will start crying, so please, please, just tell me what to do so I can do it.”
In one swift motion, Renée takes off her sunglasses and reveals that she has been crying too. Her eyes are swollen, still red. The tip of her nose is also quite blotchy. Nellie bites her lip.
“The wedding’s off,” Renée declares, her voice hitching as she tries to keep herself together. “Ewan and I aren’t going to get married, I’m going to die alone. Famous, but alone.”
**
After Nellie refused to be interviewed by the camera crew, they play some stock footage by Charlotte instead.
“It’s really common for a bride to get cold feet before the wedding,” she says in a sage tone, expert as she is. “Sometimes we wedding planners also act as psychologists, just to remind them that they’ve already paid quite a lot of money for this and to not do it would just be a waste, wouldn’t it?”
**
Renée and Nellie go up to the top of Twin Peaks to talk. Renée isn’t kidding when she says she needs privacy. The limousine twisted and turned up the hill, and parked right at the crest of a cliff with a viewing deck.
The cameras follow the two as they walk to the edge of a viewing platform complete with a safety rail and a telescope. One glare from Nellie and they edge backward, shooting the two from a distance. The view behind them is absolutely breathtaking. The city below is just a massive lump of buildings, with the streets rising and falling in between. Alcatraz was a blip in the distance, like the Bay Bridge. The outline of the fog rolling into the city is clear from this vantage point.
“What happened?” Nellie asks as the wind whips her hair across her face. Renée looks like she is in the middle of a dramatic scene in a movie, her eyes downcast and her body slightly slumped. In the two weeks that she’d been their client, Nellie had never seen Renée look so defeated. Angry, sure, but defeated?
“His office sent over a document,” she says, picking at a loose thread on her coat. It’s one of those fabulous coats that has a fur collar, the kind that anyone else would never have just picked on.
“It’s a prenup. Standard procedure, they said, but there is a whole list about the ‘kind of career’ I should have,” Renée says, saying the words like they left a bitter taste in her mouth. “No music video, work, or event may expose me in ways that may be deemed classless and unsophisticated, no nudity of any kind, no sex scenes, and he wants to approve of my roles before I accept them,” she lists them down like she could see the offending document in her mind. “It is legally binding and everything,” she laughs bitterly, shaking her head.
“I don’t care about the money, really. God knows I have more than he does, and let’s face it, he’s twice my age, so it’s more to my advantage that we keep our money split.”
**
“This is the first time Renée ever mentioned the gaping difference between her and Ewan’s age,” Nellie says to the cameras, a bit more comfortable now that she is talking about the bride again. “It isn’t really obvious; Ewan still has the looks of a thirty-something male despite being in his late forties, but it is there between them.”
**
Back at Twin Peaks, Nellie knows that it wasn’t her turn to say anything yet. “I just hate that he’s using this to control me. I thought that he understood my work is just my work. It’s just what I do. I’m starting to wonder if he ever really loved me, because my career is all I have, and all I’ll ever be. How could he love me if he hated Renée Winters?”
The last sentence was too much for Renée, and she leans forward, burying her face in her arms as she hunches over the railing. Nellie reaches out and places a tentative hand on her back, rubbing small, soothing circles on it.
**
“I wish I knew the magic words to make Renée feel better. For all her diva attitude and bitchy personality, she is still just a bride, confused and hurt.” Nellie has finally consented to an interview, but has refused to talk about Rob. “I’m not looking to do this for the gratification, or the stardom. After Ellie’s wedding, I remembered what this was all about.”
**
“Did you try talking to Ewan about this?” Nellie asks, withdrawing her hand and bending forward so she is level to Renée’s pretty face.
“Why should I?” Renée asks in a breathy sob, starting to tear up. Funnily enough, despite her angst, her mascara stays perfectly waterproof. “His office wouldn’t have sent that vile document without his approval first.”
“You’re assuming a lot against a man who I thought was crazy in love with you,” Nellie points out, resting her chin on top of her palms. “I remember seeing you guys the first day in the office. Truth be told, I wasn’t too convinced that it was serious when I heard the stories.”
Renée stands up and looks sharply at her, as if remembering that she is pouring her heart out to someone who had only known her for all of two weeks. “What—”
“But then I sat in the room with the two of you,” Nellie says, her eyes trained on the horizon in front of them. Her voice eventually turns into a voice-over, the montage of clips showing Renée and Ewan together, kissing when they chose their wedding venue, holding hands and giggling though their cake tasting, catching each other’s glances as Charlotte walks them through the reception venue.
“There’s something about the congressman when he’s with you, Renée. Like you’re the only girl in the room. I’d give anything for someone to look at me that way.” Nellie sighs, her mind obviously going somewhere else entirely. Renée looks at her, something pained but sympathetic in her eyes. She reaches forward and squeezes Nellie’s hand.
“Call Charlotte,” she says, smiling at Nellie. “I may have told her to cancel the wedding already. You’re right. I have to talk to him about this. We can work this out. I owe it to him and me to fix this.”
The cameras cut to the reception area of Charleston Weddings, where Donna is absent from her desk. Then the cameras move in on Charlotte, who is in her office with Rob. She looks up at him with her fingers laced and her elbows perched on the arms of her chair. Her face is stern but slightly amused. Rob is frowning, like a kid trapped in the principal’s office with nowhere to go.
**
“We usually have a post-wedding evaluation with each of the planners,” Charlotte spoke to the cameras, as she is shot sitting behind her desk before Rob came in. “I’ve been made aware of . . . certain events that transpired between my son and my assistant,” she says, as the cameras showed that they were in fact, at Ellie and Basti’s wedding, capturing Nellie and Rob making out in the back office through a crack in the door. It had pulled back just in time for Nellie to storm out in a huff.
“While I usually never interfere with things like that,” Charlotte says as the camera pulls back to her, “Robert is still my son. I’m nothing if not a meddling old mum.”
**
“So,” Charlo
tte says, opening a drawer under her desk to place something on the table. “I found this on your desk.”
It’s a hand-painted card with burgundy peonies, magenta tulips, and white garden roses on the side. The background is an illustration of the inside of San Francisco City Hall. It’s the illustration for the invitation to the wedding of Eleanor Canlas and Sebastian Stave. Robert knows his mother had every right to look at his desk, so he says nothing.
“And—?” he prompts, waiting for her to just skip the dramatics and say her piece.
“And I asked you to coordinate this wedding, not make invitations,” she says, placing the card on the desk. She looks annoyed, her lips flattened to a thin line. “I also saw the photos you took for the wedding. I’m all about going above and beyond what the client needs, but you’re doing things that they didn’t pay you for, and that is such a waste, bébé! I know Nellie has been asking quite a lot from you . . .” Charlotte begins.
“She didn’t ask me to do any of that, I volunteered,” Rob spits, crossing one leg over the other. “And I didn’t do it to get paid. I did it because I wanted to do something nice for Ellie and Basti. I did it because it’s what I’m actually good at. I can’t plan weddings, and I am nowhere as good as you or Nellie. Let’s face facts, Maman, Donna would be a better wedding planner than I ever would be.”
“Because she’s a woman?” Charlotte asks, raising her eyebrow.
“No,” Rob says in frustration. “Because she actually cares about this business,” he sighs, running a hand across his face. “I know the divorce was hard on you. And I’ve been happy spending all this time with you, on the show and everything. But I can’t do it anymore.” Robert leaned forward, holding his mother’s hand in what he hopes is a kind, warm gesture. She looks slightly stunned. “I need to find my own way in the world.”
Marry Me, Charlotte B! Page 7
