Colder than Ice

by Jane Galaxy

  “They would’ve loved it,” Sophie said, tasting the blend of whatever grape varieties made up the liter-and-a-half of La Vie On Rosé that was their personal tradition. Even though it tasted awful and would never win any awards, it made her feel right at home in Ash’s open-plan kitchen right next to the great room and the huge rock fireplace that you could practically stand inside.

  Like a grand country manor.

  She pushed that thought away.

  “Well,” said Ash, setting down her empty cup and turning her wrist to check her fitness watch, “I better go make sure the bathtub doesn’t flood and go to bed myself, I’ve got an early team meeting before the pep rally. We’re playing the Cougars tomorrow night, and I need to come up with something to say that’ll inspire them to kick ass but not make fun of their name.” She paused. “As easy as that would be.”

  “Alright, goodnight.”

  “You stay up as late as you want—there’s towels in the guest bathroom, and extra blankets at the foot of the bed.”

  Ash turned back.

  “And, hey—” Her friend thought for a second. “Do whatever you need to do. Breakups suck, especially when they’re tied to a lot of other stuff in your life like this. Whatever happens and whatever your brain tells you at a time like this, you’re still my favorite Sophie, okay?” Ash wrapped her arm around Sophie’s shoulder and squeezed reassuringly.

  “Okay,” Sophie replied. “Thanks. Really.”

  “Of course,” Ash said.

  Sophie watched her friend disappear down the hall, still sipping on her own wine and feeling cozy, right up until the moment that she couldn’t hear Ash’s footsteps anymore. It was a huge house, with a lot of space to start thinking. Sophie decided to head for the relative safety of the guest bedroom, and after a hot shower spent putting her energy toward trying to get the shampoo to come out of the bottle before realizing that she didn’t even have it open, laid in bed.

  Wide awake. Her thoughts turned to the flurry of packing her things in Tristan’s flat, trying to decide if she needed to straighten up the mess she’d made of the sitting room, hesitating because it wasn’t a woman’s job to clean up when she’d just had her heart broken by a man who’d lied to her, and then for some reason suddenly being on the verge of tears about Tristan coming home alone to a dark and cold house only to find remnants of the time they’d spent together.

  It had been a weird 48 hours.

  Sophie tried to think of anything else. She’d once read that members of the military used a technique to make themselves fall asleep faster in unfamiliar or dangerous locations—just thinking the phrase “Don’t think of anything” in a monotone, over and over.

  It was like trying to switch tracks for her brain when there was only one set of tracks to begin with.

  How long was too long for living out of Ash’s guest bedroom?

  Her parents would probably appreciate a check-in, although that could probably wait. Her dad would more than likely tell her to get back into the game as quickly as she could, take her resume around to a few businesses and leave it at the front desk. He’d been in the same job for decades and couldn’t understand how the world had changed in the meantime—online application processes, and the inherent weirdness of handing a receptionist the list of reasons why you’d be better at the job than they would.

  Her mother was another story. Mom would just shrug her shoulders and say something like, “This wasn’t surprising, it is fun to have fun, but at the end of the day you just have to settle down and find a real job.”

  At least Ashley was sympathetic to her situation.

  Which brought her back to how long was an acceptable amount of time to stay in her best friend’s guest room. She’d offer to babysit the kids, for sure.

  Then again, Sophie definitely owed her artist Demetrius a note. She’d emailed him from London promising a new script draft soon, but things had kind of fallen by the wayside.

  That was another thing she’d need—a place to clear her head and work. The prospect of losing herself in a big project was appealing. Sophie could picture herself at a huge gleaming desk typing away, thinking up new worlds, new characters. She hadn’t officially cut ties with Card One, but the idea of going back to Morganna and Lucius was exhausting. A creator-owned project, maybe at Image or some other eclectic publisher like Black Mask, was just the thing she needed to crawl away from Card One in style.

  The most essential thing was to find an apartment, and soon. It would be unreasonable to expect Ash to accommodate her home office fantasies, and the triplets, while adorable and fun, would be the perfect thing to distract Sophie from work.

  Sophie rolled over to grab her phone from the night stand and turn on the screen. But when Sophie aimed for the browser to look for apartments, her phone went nuts and decided to open Twitter instead. She exited out as soon as she could, but the phone was old. She’d been planning to replace it when she got back to Los Angeles, but here it was, late at night and the thing was chugging away trying to pull new messages out of the ether.

  After several minutes of spinning balls and the phone getting hotter and hotter in her hand, her Twitter feed finally loaded.

  And the phone went ballistic.

  She had to mash the volume down button several times to get it to quit making so many new message notifications, of which there were hundreds. No, thousands. Sophie sat upright in bed, staring into the bluish-white glow.

  “Tristan Eccleston and Dark Magic writer Sophie Markes call it quits!”

  “Jesus, she’s gonna ruin this project before it’s even gone into post. Card One had better sue this girl before the entire franchise is ruined.”

  “Gabriella Zahn spotted in London—is a reunion with Tristan already on the horizon?”

  “Does anyone know if Eisner Awards are as rigged as the Oscars? Who did Sophie Markes bang to get that statue? I made a Change.org petition to take it away from her, I need 50,000 signatures to make this happen, guys.”

  “thank GOD, that bitch better stay away from my husbando”

  “Ugh, Tristan Eccleston is so over. Isn’t he like 35?”

  “HE IS 32 AND YOU WILL NOT SLANDER HIM LIKE THIS”

  “So has anyone seen this?”

  That last one was followed by a link to Oh My Gawwwd Girl, with the headline:

  Score one for the EcclesFans: Internet detectives unearth Sophie Markes’s misandrist bullshit

  Sophie felt her face do… something that resulted in a lot of squinting and forehead wrinkling, and all of it felt like it was somehow out of her control. Misandrist bullshit? What the hell were they talking about? She kept everything on her social media related to her career. It was all moodboard pictures, photos of Card One stars on the red carpet… it was so carefully curated sometimes that she wished she really did have the guts to give the kinds of big opinions that braver writers did. The closest Sophie had come was saying she thought Dominic Thompson would make an excellent Gideon, which had inspired a comment thread 300 replies deep.

  With great skepticism, and wondering if she should get in touch with her agent, Sophie clicked on the link inside the blog post to her supposed anti-man screed.

  The ugliest website in the world slowly managed to reveal itself in front of her eyes, and Sophie stared, a cold feeling working its way down the back of her neck. It was a familiar gut punch: purple, with pixelated black stars.

  Her old blog from college. The dark ages.

  “Life and Times of a Wannabe Writer,” by username makeurmarke90.

  “Holy shit,” said Sophie out loud to the quiet bedroom. The particular entry was the last one she’d made on the site, titled “WHY GUYS CAN KISS MY ASS”. She’d written it after Derek had stolen her webcomic and broken up with her. Sophie didn’t want to see what she’d written—it had been in the heat of the moment, nothing but an outlet for her frustration and raw grief over the betrayal. Sophie hadn’t thought about that blog in years. She hit the back button on the phone�
�s browser, and the Oh My Gawwwd Girl page reloaded, sending her down into the comments.

  “Woooow, someone’s a hypocrite,” someone had written, with a block quote from Sophie’s old blog entry about how guys were only concerned with style, not substance, how comic books were a dead-end medium anyway, and that if she broke into the industry, she would revolutionize the way female characters were treated and never let herself be guided by a man’s hand.

  “Coming from someone who’s been hanging off Tristan ‘Dior Homme’ Eccleston’s arm for the last few months in exchange for a little Q score bump, I’d say he broke up with her because nothing could get through to her on the style front. Card One is making bank, and they couldn’t hire a damn stylist for her?”

  “i kept mistaking her for a studio intern, that hair is pure sadness”

  “you are not wrong, tbh I’m not an ecclesfan but that whole thing never came off as anything but fake and we all knew it sis.”

  Sophie sank back against the pillow, phone still glowing in her hand and casting light up toward the ceiling, and began to cry.

  This was what it had all come to. After pouring herself into a long-forgotten storyline that she’d tried hard to make real and meaningful, and thinking she was finally breaking into the career of her dreams, she’d been lied to and betrayed yet again by a man she thought she could trust.

  And she was never going to be right in the Internet’s eyes. They were going to jump on her any way they could, find fault with everything about her. It was whatever story was the most interesting, regardless of whether or not it was true. That didn’t matter—the pleasure of getting to talk shit about her was all they wanted.

  How did anyone come back from something like this? It was like having tens of millions of strangers suddenly all rifling through her teenage diary and pointing at every dramatic complaint, laughing at all the times she’d felt sorry for herself. Everyone out there, judging her or hating her, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Sophie turned onto her stomach and sobbed into the pillow.

  Coming back to Omaha suddenly felt like the biggest mistake she’d made in a while, even bigger than letting the fake relationship with Tristan spin out of control.

  At least she’d been happy in London—even if he’d been lying to her, Tristan was nothing if not nice. Even with the same bad outcome and reveal of her personal details on social media, she would’ve had his shoulder to cry on instead of Ashley’s nice memory foam pillows that were probably going to stay damp for the rest of the night. His house to hole up in, and him and Prasad to talk to instead of the cold bluish-white glare of technology.

  Sophie turned back over, wiping her eyes and taking deep breaths.

  He had been apologetic. It didn’t erase all the lying, both passive and active, and it didn’t make her instantly and madly in love all over again, but it did make Sophie think about what Ashley had said.

  She did that to herself: put up walls, and when someone wasn’t perfect, she’d close up shop, shut down and run away, just like she had the first time with Derek.

  Maybe it wasn’t always worth it. Maybe it was getting to be a bit exhausting. The prospect of forgiving someone for betraying her made her feel sick. It wasn’t even something she could think about without getting angry again.

  But the thought of being alone with all of this going on… wasn’t great either.

  They were both bad endings.

  Sophie closed her eyes and just let herself feel awful.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He’d had to get out of the house.

  Gabriella had been perfectly civil since she’d shown up, kind, even, but she and his father were deep in the throes of planning—everything from the next theatrical production Tristan would be in, to how to coordinate their outfits for the first red carpet event after reuniting, something he’d overheard in the hallway. Deep cobalt, since Gabriella looked best in rich colors, and it would be early summer at best, so they’d go with something other than a boring black and white tuxedo, and—

  Never mind the fact that Tristan was an adult, had lived on his own and was more than capable of planning his own life.

  Rufus hadn’t wanted to hear that. The assumption was that Tristan was officially persona non grata in Hollywood and that a fresh start was required. And he and Gabriella would coordinate the whole thing, transforming Tristan into the son who’d regained his senses and come back to the fold just as everyone always knew he would.

  That was why Tristan was currently sitting in one corner of the Board and Footlight. The local pub in the little village of Alverton had been called the Crown and Bull when he was a child, but sometime while he was at school, Rufus had gotten it into his head to turn the village into a tourist attraction slash theater Mecca, like Stratford. He’d “encouraged” or “inspired” the gentrifying hipsters who came into the picturesque little place looking for a business to snap up to name the place in a way that would fit in with the future: a whole town centered around the Eccleston theatrical legacy.

  Their efforts at serving trendy dishes like deconstructed spaghetti bolognese—a pile of wet noodles, a small birdcage of meatballs, and a mason jar of tomato sauce, all presented on a shovel blade, for some reason—had not gone over well, according to Madeleine, and they’d relented and gone back to chicken tikka and fish and chip specials within the last year.

  It had seemed to work. As Tristan nursed his pint of bitter, three men sat at the bar with their arms crossed, looking up at the Arsenal game on the television—brisk business for a Saturday in Alverton.

  As always, it was strange to be back in the village proper. People knew him here—had known him as a very small child running to the tuck shop in the mostly-dead high street for sweets in the afternoons, but it was strange to be recognized in a manner so different from how he’d grown accustomed to as an adult.

  Recognized, but not as a celebrity. It was… refreshing? Something cold and sharp about it, but not in a bad way. He didn’t really want to be seen at the moment, certainly not photographed or bowed and scraped to. To be anonymous again: was he even sure he knew what that was? He’d never not been known, even as a child—the Eccleston boy, Rufus’s son, he’ll be an actor like his dad.

  Someone scored, one of the men near the television gave a bark of triumph, and the screen went to an advert for a sitcom that had run in the United States ten years ago. One of those office shows where everyone was silly and foolish and not great at their jobs, but somehow after a few years, they all fit together and got on well and were like each other’s family, all elevated to an optimistic greatness through each other’s support and sense of humor.

  Tristan had always loved those kinds of shows as a kid. He’d sit in front of the television with the volume turned far down, trying to watch so no one would find him, discover his secret taste for American television, and make fun of him.

  Picking your own family was a fascinating concept, and it came up so often in the American programs that young Tristan had wondered often whether people in the United States had found some miraculous way of being happy that the rest of the world hadn’t. Just leaving their families behind to go out and choose someone who’d fill a lost role happily and without complaint.

  Of course, that wasn’t so much an American trait as it was a television writer’s crutch, but he still gravitated toward the idea of it.

  Maybe that was why he liked superheroes so much. Of course, every child—and lots of adults—liked the idea of being special, of being chosen to have incredible powers, but beyond all of that was the fact that superheroes worked best in teams when they could group up with allies. Especially when their powers seemed to only highlight their flaws and inner brokenness even more: in a group, here were others who’d been cast out from society, or who weren’t understood, or who made the people around them afraid.

  And they helped people, helped the world. Or were supposed to, when they weren’t causing massive amounts of physica
l damage to major cities. Always a tradeoff.

  A unit of people who came together to do something good by choice in the face of terrible odds, who figured out a way to coordinate their skills and powers and work cohesively.

  Such a shame Lucius couldn’t be recognized as a hero—maybe an anti-hero. Something other than a villain.

  He could drift for a while, figure something else out.

  Maybe just do whatever Rufus and Gabriella had planned out for him.

  The thought rose up just as he took a last huge gulp of bitters, and the result was a sour coughing fit that caused the bartender to glance away from the telly for a moment. Tristan found his breath again, recovered his dignity, and waved the man back to the game.

  No. There was no way he was going to do what Rufus and—God preserve him—Gabriella had planned. He wasn’t going back down that road, he’d been that way and it had been dark and lonely. Tristan bolted back the rest of the bitter, and decided a walk might help him come up with the right words to tell them no.

  It was a cold, wet, gray day, which it had been for the entirety of his childhood. Tristan had his olive ptarmigan jacket on, and had found an ancient checked driving cap in a hall closet that was actually keeping his ears warm, even without an umbrella. He’d always liked tramping around outdoors in a good pair of wellies until it was nearly dark. He got a good pace going, even if it was chilly enough to make him yearn a little bit for the fireplace in the library. Or at least the wall heater in his bedroom.

  Tristan nearly wished he could retreat into the warmth of going online and seeing messages from fans who were getting excited about Dark Magic, but the Internet in the English countryside, even relatively close to London, was essentially nonexistent, and he couldn’t have checked anything on his phone even if he’d wanted to. And… well, maybe he didn’t really want to hear what people were saying about the film, even if he was proud of what they’d managed to do. A lot of hard work had gone into it.