The Girlfriend Stage

by Janci Patterson

  Then I turn and lead Josh upstairs, where I can change out of my bait-store clothing and maybe, just maybe, get some sort of grip on my life.

  Twenty-one

  Josh

  I want to think that the day can’t get any worse, but somehow it does. By noon, Anna-Marie’s mother has her on the phone, pacing up and down her dad’s patio. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but from the look on Anna-Marie’s face, I gather it isn’t good. More than anything, she just looks tired.

  I can’t blame her. I feel it, too. It felt good to yell at Brent, but in the end, even if Ryan prints a retraction, it won’t change what’s been done. Even if this doesn’t reach national awareness, everyone in her part of the industry is going to read it. It’s going to change the way they think about her, irrevocably. Possibly forever.

  It has to hurt that her family believes these things, too. I want to fix it, partly as her agent, and partly as her boyfriend. I can’t shield her from this, and it eats at me.

  And then Ben calls.

  “Dude,” he says. “Wyatt found something on TMZ you need to see. He’s sending you a link.”

  I want to say that I’ve seen quite enough, but if there’s something else, I clearly do need to know about it. “Something worse than an accusation of a sex addiction?”

  “Possibly,” Ben says. My phone alerts me to a text message, probably from Wyatt. “It’s her ex, Shane.”

  My stomach drops. Shane. “What did he do?”

  “He called the press with some sob story about how they’ve been in love since they were kids, and how they’ve been doing the long distance thing while she was in LA, and he had no idea she was cheating on him with you.”

  I swear. Loudly. In the next room, I hear Patrice clear her throat with equal force, but I can’t bring myself to care. “That’s not true.”

  “I know. But he claims he doesn’t care that she cheated. He just wants her back, and apparently he’s working on a song to prove it.”

  I swear again, and this time Patrice comes out into the hall. “Joe’s W—” she starts, and then flushes. “Josh. There are children in this house.”

  I appreciate her effort with my name enough that I manage not to snap at her and instead nod in acknowledgement and turn my back on her. “He’s just doing this for the attention. He’s trying to get press for his band.”

  “Probably,” Ben says. “Gabby confirms that Anna-Marie hasn’t been with Shane for years. But if that’s what he’s doing, it’s working. Well. The story is spreading, and the views on that video are shooting through the roof.”

  Damn it. I knew Shane was an asshole. I thought it was brave (or naive) of Anna-Marie to tell him off when he had a phone full of naked pictures of her, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the news was that those had hit the web. But no. Instead of just humiliating her, he’s decided to use her as a stepping stone, like Ryan did.

  This time, there’s no agent for me to call. Even if Shane has one, no one in music gives a damn about me.

  “Okay,” I say. “Thanks for keeping tabs on this.”

  “Yeah, of course. But dude, are you okay? This is a really big mess you’re caught up in.”

  I sigh. “Honestly? I’m just worried about her.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ben says. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  I lean against the hallway wall. Patrice has retreated, but I’m sure she’s lurking, waiting to pounce if I use another epithet. “We’ll be back in LA in a few days,” I say. “Then you can meet her.”

  “I’d better. I’m tempted to drive to Wyoming and do it right now.”

  In his position, I’d probably already have done it. “Stay put. I need you on media duty. Cell service between here and there is spotty at best.”

  “Fine,” Ben says. “But you be careful. I really don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I take a deep breath. I don’t want to get hurt either. But. “The person getting hurt here is her.”

  Ben grunts, but he doesn’t agree. When we get off the phone, I hear the back door slamming, and head down to the kitchen as Anna-Marie stalks through.

  “How’d that go?” I ask.

  She waves a hand at me dismissively. “Oh, you know. She may not trust men in the slightest, but she sure is thrilled I’m dating you. She thinks it’ll be good for my career.”

  I wince. “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. Don’t screw this up, Anna-Marie. Thanks, Mom.” Her voice is pure bitterness.

  “It isn’t like that.”

  She nods. “Tell that to her.”

  I glance down at my phone. There’s the text from Wyatt, with the link I don’t want to click on. “There’s something else.”

  She gives me an exhausted look. “What now?”

  “Apparently Shane talked. To TMZ.”

  Her mouth drops open. “What?”

  We stand in the kitchen and read the article, Anna-Marie making a series of strangled noises that sound like tortured cats. The article is pretty much as Ben said, though he glossed over Shane’s effusive descriptions of how Anna-Marie is the light of his life, and he’s always known they’re soul mates. There’s an updated link to a song, “I’ll Take You Back,” which he’s apparently posted on YouTube just minutes ago. Anna-Marie clicks the link, and there he is, sitting on a stool with his electric guitar in front of a poster for his band.

  Shane’s hair is tousled and he’s barefoot and shirtless, wearing only a pair of tight jeans. He looks like he’s been up all night, and no doubt he has been, as he’s apparently found time to contact the press and write the nightmare that begins to play, a hard rock song about how Anna-Marie has wounded him. He doesn’t name me, but both my job and my car make an appearance. As he sings the chorus—I’ll take you back, baby, I’ll take you back, you’re the dawn to my darkness, the sun to my sky, you’re the lightning to my thunder, baby, I’ll take you back—his face scrunches like he’s passing a kidney stone. He’s clearly not a singer, but his voice is raw and gets the message across, and from my limited knowledge, he seems to be pretty good with a guitar.

  I wish I could say people were going to listen to this and laugh, but I know the truth.

  Girls across the country are going to eat this up.

  “Oh, god,” Anna-Marie says when it finishes. “I can’t believe he would . . . No, of course he would.” She buries her face in her hands. “I’m in hell.”

  I shove my phone in my pocket and put my arms around her. Her body is limp, and I can only imagine what she’s feeling. Shane might be a dick, but he’s been in her life a long time. To be used by someone you once loved—it’s everything she’s so afraid I’m going to do to her, and none of the men in her past are helping me convince her otherwise.

  There’s only one thing I can think of to do.

  “Hey, look,” I say. “This is clearly getting out of control. When it was just the tape, I think it was good to ignore it. But this time, we could strike back. Make a statement, you know?”

  Anna-Marie turns her head to look at me. “What would I even say?”

  I shrug. “That Shane is full of shit, and you’ve been broken up for years. If you want to respond to the tape, you could take a look at the statement Jennifer Lawrence made when her phone was hacked. She killed it addressing what was wrong with everyone looking at pictures she didn’t give them permission to see. Or . . .” A plan is forming in my head, a way I can help, even if I can’t stop any of this from happening. “Or we make a statement and say we’re together, that we’re in a relationship, and Shane isn’t part of the picture. When we get back to LA, I can get us on some daytime talk show and we laugh and we tell the whole story—the parts we’re comfortable telling, at least. And then you’re with me, and we’re stable, and people will realize you’re not careening down some path to celebrity implosion. The story will probably st
ill roll for a while, but then it’ll die down and it’ll be over.”

  Anna-Marie bites her lower lip. “Are we?”

  I freeze for a second. “In a relationship?”

  She shakes her head. “Stable.”

  I laugh, mostly from relief. “It doesn’t feel like a lie on my end.”

  She looks relieved too, but then she frowns. “If we did that, then you’d be caught up in this. I don’t want to do that to you.”

  “People know we were dating. I’m in it regardless.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “But you shouldn’t have to leverage your career to save mine. I can’t ask that of you.”

  “You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”

  Her eyes squeeze shut. “Yeah, well. Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  I hold my breath for a moment. Her response bothers me, but it takes me a minute to figure out why. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to spare me.”

  She grimaces. “I love you. Of course I want to spare you.”

  I shake my head. “You’re telling me I shouldn’t want to be with you, shouldn’t want to accept the consequences of whatever that means. And I get that you’re scared, but really it’s just an excuse to pull away, isn’t it?”

  She looks wounded, and I worry I’m being unfair. But then she nods. “Yeah, okay. I can see that.”

  “And regardless,” I say, “it’s my career, and my call what I do with it.”

  Anna-Marie closes her eyes. “Or,” she says, “we can get completely wasted and deal with what to do tomorrow.”

  The agent side of me wants to say that we need to get on top of the situation immediately, but the boyfriend side wins out. And honestly, getting wasted sounds pretty great right now. “I assume the store in town has beer?”

  Anna-Marie rolls her eyes. “There are three things we will never be short on in Everett. Cows, guns, and beer.”

  Twenty-two

  Josh

  By late afternoon, Anna-Marie and I are lying in the hammock beneath the trees on the far side of her father’s backyard, her head at one end and mine at the other, both with the other’s legs tucked up under one arm. We’re each on our second bottle of a local Wyoming brand called Steer Beer. I’m trying to balance the half-full bottle on my forehead and Anna-Marie has installed Tinder on my phone and is giggling adorably while trying to set me up with random girls in Wyoming.

  “Okay, here’s one,” she says, holding out a picture of a blond woman with a boa constrictor draped around her shoulders. “She’s a herpetologist.”

  My beer bottle slips. “A what?”

  Anna-Marie gives me a wicked look. “A person who studies reptiles. What did you think?”

  “I think using the word herpetologist as a come-on has the opposite effect.”

  “Fine.” Anna-Marie swipes left. “You’re picky, Rios.”

  I get the bottle balanced for a second, and then have to grab it to keep it from falling in the dirt. “I used to be good at this in college.”

  Anna-Marie gives me a skeptical look, and twists a lock of her long auburn hair around her finger. Neither of us is what I would call wasted, but her cheeks have turned slightly pink, and she seems much more relaxed than she was. “Were you? Did you ever do this when you weren’t drunk?”

  I laugh. “Maybe not.” I down the rest of the beer, and then wave at my phone. “Give me that back. I’m taken.”

  “I don’t know,” Anna-Marie says, holding up the phone again. “Hannah makes a living selling cat sweaters on Etsy. That’s never going to get old.”

  I don’t even look at the picture. “Left.”

  Anna-Marie shrugs. “All right, Rios. Your loss.” She finishes her beer and I open another one for each of us.

  I’m starting to feel warm all over, and generally happy to be right where I am with no desire ever to move. Of course, much of this is probably just being with Anna-Marie while nothing and no one appears to be trying to kill us. And even though we said we were going to deal with the press issues tomorrow, I can’t help but bring it up again. “You should let me tell the whole world we’re together. Forget the PR stuff. I just want to show you off.”

  She smiles. “I don’t hate that.”

  “See? I’m right. I’m always right.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but her face grows serious.

  “What if we break up? What then?” She takes a long drink of her beer, as if she wants to forget she said that.

  “You mean if you decide I’m not worth it?”

  Anna-Marie looks startled, and it’s my turn to swig my drink. Maybe I’m a little more buzzed than I thought I was. Though Anna-Marie influences me to say things I shouldn’t more than alcohol ever has.

  “If you break up with me,” I say. “I’ll still be your agent.” I’m not sure if this is what she’s asking, but it’s true, and I probably should have been clear about it before.

  Anna-Marie shakes her head. “You may not want to.”

  “At least I’d still get to see you. If you decide you can’t make this work, it’s not like I want you out of my life.”

  She rubs my shoulder with her bare foot. “You might end it, though. You might find someone else, or decide you’re not in love with me, or—” She takes a shuddering breath, and I run my hand up and down her calf.

  “You’re worried I’m going to cheat on you, right? Because of your dad. But I’m not going to do that, so I don’t know what would happen if I did.”

  Anna-Marie swirls her beer around and around. “No one goes into a relationship thinking they’re going to do that,” she says. Her voice is angry, but I don’t think it’s directed at me. “But what if you’re unhappy, or you decide you’ve made a mistake? What are you going to do then?”

  “I’m going to talk to you about it,” I say. “We’ll figure out why I’m not happy and work on it. And if that doesn’t work then we’ll get counseling, we’ll take a trip, we’ll talk it out until it does.” I shrug. “My parents have been married for thirty-six years. And they don’t always like each other, but they do always work it out.”

  Anna-Marie looks up at me, but I can tell she doesn’t quite believe me. “But if you’re not in love with me anymore, why would you want to do any of that?”

  I smile. “Because I know if I loved you once, I can love you again. We’d just need to figure out what went wrong. And that might mean we have to make changes in our lives, but I’d want to do that.” It’s at that moment that I realize how much I mean this. I’ve never been with a girl I wanted to change my life for, but even before I left for Wyoming, I was starting to think of Anna-Marie as a person who might be worth giving up my basement evenings for, even the basement itself. The fact that I don’t have to feels fantastic; I can’t imagine not being willing to make other changes for her, if I need to.

  “I’m still scared I’ll mess it all up somehow,” she says quietly.

  I want to brush this aside, but she’s said it before, and I know she means it. “I’m not so easy to scare off,” I say. “If I’m still here after dealing with Patrice, and that moose, and Lily’s sausage—which I’m kind of pleased made her sick, by the way, because maybe she’ll never do that again—and not to mention that god-awful t-shirt they all had me wearing—”

  “Oh, god.” She covers her eyes. “Why aren’t you gone already?”

  I smile at her. “Because there’s only one Anna-Marie Halsey. You can’t be replaced.”

  She holds up my phone again. “Are you sure? Because Tracy enjoys sharing long bubble baths with her two standard poodles.”

  I snatch the phone and tuck it under my arm. “Do you know how long I spent looking for you? I almost went home early from that party where we met, you know. I was this close to not meeting the girl of my dreams, and instead going home to my basement and doing whatever it is I do down there—”

  “
Which you still haven’t told me,” Anna-Marie says, poking me with her toe.

  “Yeah, well. I’ve already quoted you the entrance fee.”

  I’m worried this will scare her, but she just smiles and finishes her beer, and then tosses the bottle beneath the hammock and settles in.

  “So why did you stay?” she asks.

  “Because I figured I needed to at least make the rounds once, see if there was anyone I needed to talk to. I set my phone to vibrate after fifteen minutes, and told myself I’d give it that long, and then I could head out. I was crossing the room, and then I see this girl at the bar, and she’s beautiful, and then she says something to the bartender and they both laugh, and I wished it was me making her smile like that.” My own bottle clinks as it joins Anna-Marie’s beneath the hammock. “And I’ve never wanted to stop.”

  Her blue eyes crinkle at the sides as she smiles. “I may have seen you noticing me and said something to the bartender just to get your attention.”

  I like this idea, that we both noticed each other before we even spoke. “But you didn’t know who I was, because I remember the shock on your face when I told you my name.”

  “And you said you recognized me from somewhere, but it was just a line. You had no idea who I was.”

  “I always use that line at parties,” I say. “Because the worst thing you can do when you’re hitting on an actress is to never have seen her before.”

  The buzz is settling in now, though I still think half of it comes from being with her. Or maybe it’s that the alcohol gives me an excuse to say all the things I want to say but know I shouldn’t.

  “You should marry me,” I say. “Then I can show you the basement.”

  Anna-Marie laughs. “I thought only a ring was required. We have to be married?”

  “Fine, don’t marry me. Move in with me and never move out. We can have kids and own a house together and everything but never be married.”

  She squints. “Wouldn’t that make it a commonwealth marriage?”