by Kaye, Nikky
I would protect her as best I could as long as I didn’t have to let her go. “At least it’s only pictures.”
She grimaced at the reminder that people were constantly touching me—photographers, stylists, makeup and hair people, even strangers. It was just part of the business. I understood that. I thought she understood that.
Apparently, though, my fiancée had a territorial streak in her.
I’d been half-horrified and half-amused when she elbowed a street extra aside during a commercial shoot. The dude had groped the sleeve of the designer suit I was modeling when I strutted past him. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. But they still had to call “cut!” because he grabbed my arm long enough to hold me up, not to mention screw up the line of the jacket.
It was Audrey who went after him, not security. She stood in front of me and glared at everyone within a ten-foot radius, like a guard dog.
I glanced over her head to see the stylist and the commercial director trotting toward us from further down the street. Close behind was a PR person with a grim look on his face.
No matter how charming Mr. Sharma found Audrey, she would find herself stuck in the hotel for the rest of the trip if she didn’t cool it.
“Audrey, you can’t just butt in like that, baby.”
“Why do people think they can just grab you?” she growled.
“It’s okay.”
I waved at the posse heading our way and gave them a big thumbs-up. Everything’s okay, folks! Move on, nothing to see here! With numerous people in the crowd lifting their phones and taking pictures, I didn’t have much time for damage control.
“I’m doing my job, here. Your job is to be my fiancée, remember? That’s it.”
She threw up her hands. “So I’m supposed to just stand back and let people—”
“Do their jobs, yes.” I shrugged off the wrinkled jacket and handed it to the stylist who was standing beside us but pretending not to listen.
The director and the handler had no compunction about that, both glaring at my girl. I threw them an apologetic look before pulling her aside.
“I know you want to be here,” I said in a low voice, “and I love that. I love having you here.”
I love having you.
Maybe this was her way of feeling useful or something, like it was her job to protect me. I was tornbetween scolding her and kissing her senseless.
Then again, she was already acting like she’d lost some common sense.
She looked stricken. “I’m embarrassing you, aren’t I?”
“Little bit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Her possessiveness touched me. Never before had someone stuck up for me like that, even when my ex-girlfriend Tanya was shooting me for a spread.
There were still cameras pointed at us. Shit! Soon there would be pictures floating around the Internet with captions like “#MrsDevSharpe ruins shoot over jealousy!” It was bad enough that half of my followers hated her guts.
I grabbed Audrey around the waist and bent her back in a picture-worthy embrace. I kissed her hard but chastely—no tongue, of course—until people got some good shots on their phones and I heard clapping.
Crisis averted, hopefully—at least then.
Now, a few days later, we were on the last public photo op in the mall and she was getting clingy again. This time, though, I could tell that she was worried about her own notoriety as much as mine. She’d made the mistake of going on Twitter that morning. As much as Sharma believed that our “engagement” was a great thing, there were at least a hundred crazy stalkers who disagreed.
I hugged her, hiding her as best I could. “Baby, please don’t get lip gloss on the thousand-dollar shirt.”
“Oh my god.” She jerked back in horror and swiped roughly at the fabric.
Suffice it to say, Audrey and the stylist had become mortal enemies. It was time to get my fiancée out of the vicinity before they ended up in a catfight.
I shoved my hand into my pocket to pull out my phone.
“Go text Dierks and see if he’s meeting us for dinner.” I kissed her, lip gloss be damned, then pushed her away as an excuse to swat her ass. “And take some pictures for me.”
Audrey had been taking hundreds of pictures every day and sharing them on her Google Drive with my crazy German photographer friend. With his encouragement, she’d started using her Instagram account for something other than following me.
The next day the three of us would leave for a twenty-four-hour beach shoot in Goa, and then Audrey and I were only stopping back in Delhi long enough to collect our stuff for our flight back to the States.
I smiled in anticipation, already making mental plans for our last night.
Goa, from what I understood, was romantic as fuck.
* * *
“Fucking Goa!”
I plopped down on the sand and dug my bare toes in deep to find a cool spot. The sun was down and while the sand still retained the heat, this part of the beach had mostly emptied.
Further along, the lights and sounds of bars and hotels attracted most tourists like they were moths. Some of our small crew had already flitted over there after we broke down the shoot and everything was packed up.
With my arms folded over my knees and my chin resting on both, I stared out at the ocean. And sulked.
When she joined me, I let out a huff. I’d had just about enough bullshit for the day.
“Do you mind?” I snapped when she touched my shoulder. “I’d like to be alone right now.”
“You can talk to me, you know.”
I looked away from her, down the beach to where I imagined a little table and chairs could have gone, its white cloth weighed down by flickering lanterns and a bottle of wine. A path of tea light candles, or more likely some battery-operated versions, would have led her down to this secluded little spot where I would have been waiting for her.
Only the wrong woman was with me on the beach.
“I thought we were friends, if nothing else, Dev.”
The sound of the surf rolling filled my ears like white noise as I tried to ignore her.
“Thanks for letting me be here,” she said.
“It wasn’t my choice, Tanya.”
Somehow, in less than forty-eight hours, my love life had gone into the toilet.
Dierks met Audrey and I for dinner the night before. They ate, but I was more or less cutting for the beach shoot. Had to make those muscles pop for the camera, right?
Before we went to bed, I made Audrey model the swimsuit she brought with her and helped her decide on what to wear the next day while traveling. Then I peeled it off her and buried my head between her thighs until she screamed my name.
We were a tired group that met early the next morning at the airport. It wasn’t a bad flight, or a long one, but everything seemed harder in India.
More work. More time. More trouble. More turbulence.
And a lot more puking.
My fiancée and photographer were almost the color of concrete when we landed, and they’d both proceeded to throw up in the airport.
Well, technically Dierks was still on the jetway when he lost the contents of his stomach. Mohan, our grip who handled all the lights and shit, unfortunately had a sympathetic response to nausea. In other words, he also started gagging as he stumbled into the terminal.
Thank god a driver and a local handler were waiting for us, but their welcoming smiles faded as they took us in.
There weren’t many of us—myself, Audrey, Dierks, Mohan, and one freelance stylist slash wardrobe slash hair slash makeup slash PA named Gurdeep. For all the money Hessa wanted to invest, they didn’t seem that interested in having a producer on set.
The plan was to be there in time to set up for a late afternoon shoot and then get up early the next morning for a sunrise series before heading back to the airport. In and out.
Within a few hours, though, it was clear that the only thing being s
hot that day would be blood vessels in Dierks’ eyes from violent vomiting.
Just the drive to the hotel took a lot longer than expected, with at least forty percent of our party pale, sweating, and requiring regular stops to heave at the side of the road.
Hessa had booked all of us into separate rooms, but I managed to convince the desk clerk to give Audrey and me something with a connecting door. Mohan and Gurdeep were further down the hall, but Dierks was on another floor. After we got into our rooms, he began texting me poop emojis, which was a bad sign.
Time was money, and both were easy enough to waste. Our stay was lengthened and our flights moved, including the one Audrey and I were taking back to the States. Thankfully Dierks knew of another photographer who had just finished up a fashion spread nearby, so the handler did some quick hustling and rustling.
Gurdeep delivered a bunch of bottled water and some anti-nausea meds to my room and told me we could shoot the next day. That left me time to undo the romantic plans I’d made, and for holding Audrey’s hair back.
Thankfully, once Audrey had gotten rid of most of her stomach lining she was mostly just feverish and shaky. Ultimately, it wasn’t much worse than a bad hangover might have been. Okay, a really bad hangover, but mostly she just needed meds and a lot of sleep.
At least one of us got lots of sleep. I found myself half-awake all night long, in case she needed anything.
“I’m dying,” she moaned at one point when I made her sip a little tepid water. I reassured her she wasn’t and before she fell asleep again she mumbled, “Love you.”
Naturally, I dropped the open water bottle on the bed. So, yeah, maybe all that accounted for some of my restlessness.
At call time I headed down to the beach where Gurdeep told me they were setting up. It was still dark. I was exhaustedand ruminative, and couldn’t wait for this fucking shoot to be done.
“Hi Dev!”
Holy motherfuck. Now I wanted to throw up, too. “Tanya.”
“Oh god, are you sick too?”
I waved my ex-girlfriend off and stomped over to Gurdeep’s station. The feel of this spread better be emo, I thought, because I was going to have a hard time coming up with other moods.
Thankfully Tanya was efficient at her job even if she’d been a lying bitch in the past. We got through the sunrise series then broke for a few hours midday before shooting in the afternoon. Tanya asked about lunch, but I ignored her and went back to the room for a nap and a shower.
Audrey was still sleeping, but the water bottle beside her bed was empty and another anti-nausea pill gone from the blister pack. I refreshed the water bottles and fell into bed beside her.
Wrapping myself around her, I noticed that her fever had broken, and she was sleeping peacefully. The tension in my body eased, the warmth of her body loosening my muscles until it was time to go back. It was only a brief nap, but getting out of that bed was so hard you’d think I’d been in a coma.
Finally, we were done.
What a fucking romantic way to end our trip, I thought as I brooded on the beach.
“We’re not friends, Tanya.” Clearly Ihad to point this out to her, since she wasn’t getting up and leaving me alone. “I’m not about to spill my heart to you and ask you to braid my hair.”
She laughed and reached out to run her hand through my hair, which only pissed me off more.
“Jesus Christ,” I groused, levering myself up to escape her. “What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”
If I couldn’t sit here by myself and be grumpy, I was going back to Audrey. Technically, this was our last night in India, and I had a feeling it wouldn’t be all that romantic.
Partly that could be my fault.
To be honest, I was probably lingering on the beach because I was afraid she wanted to have the “I love you” conversation. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Maybe she was just talking in her sleep, the ramblings of a fever.
“I hope your fiancée is feeling better,” Tanya called out.
I halted, my toes flexing in the sand and my hands curling into fists. Her tone was casual and sincere, but I’d fallen for that before. “Thanks.”
“I gotta say,” she added, “I was surprised. I didn’t think you were the marrying kind.”
“I’m not. I mean—I wasn’t.” Still wasn’t. Mostly.
Audrey and I hadn’t really spent a lot of time talking about where we stood. We had decided on trying some kind of relationship, right? But we hadn’t hashed out our wants and expectations. Maybe we’d been avoiding it.
Okay, maybe I’d been avoiding it.
I knew that I wanted more than a fling, but I didn’t have the first fucking clue how to do that when we lived a thousand miles apart. It would be hard to keep up appearances together on social media if were in different cities.
“Well, congratulations, I guess. She’s a lucky girl.”
Was she? What had I promised her? What did I want?
This “engagement” benefited both of us, but for how long? I’d been so excited about the contract and she about the travel gift, but three years was a long time to keep up this act.
“I never meant to hurt you, you know.” Tanya’s voice was quiet as it drifted across the sand. “I just wanted… you. What I did was wrong, so wrong.”
“You think?”
The little laugh that came out of her mouth sounded strangled. “God, I can’t believe what I… anyway, I’m sorry. More sorry than you’ll ever know.”
I crossed my arms and stared at the sand between my toes, realizing something. “You know, now I’ve had time to think about it, I don’t think it was the lying about being pregnant that bothered me the most.”
“No?” She sounded relieved.
If dishonesty were the deal-breaker, I’d surely be a hypocrite now. Deep down, though… I scrubbed my hand over my face before turning to face Tanya. Behind her, the ocean roared softly, like the constant whooshing of a heartbeat.
“It was the disappointment.”
20
Audrey
I waited for Dev at the bottom of the stairs at home, anxiously chewing my bottom lip. I didn’t really know what to expect when he arrived.
It had been seventeen days and four hours since my “fiancé” and I had parted. It was weird leaving him even though the process of disentangling ourselves had begun somewhere over the Pacific.
The flight home felt a lot longer than the flight over even though I slept for a lot of it. To our mutual frustration, Dev and I were seated on opposite sides of the First Class section, and nobody wanted to swap pods. He came and cuddled with me in my seat, but I felt so gross and weak from throwing up for two days that I was about as much fun as a rubber chicken.
Going through Customs at LAX took forever. Dev had some Fast Pass thing but insisted on staying with me in the regular line. By the time we were through, I needed to get to my connecting flight home to Minneapolis and Dev was going home to his apartment.
So we stood there like a speed bump in the middle of the terminal. It appeared that neither of us knew how to say goodbye.
Stepping closer, he took my hands in his and looked deep into my eyes.
My heart skipped a beat. This was it. This was going tobe our big, romantic scene, our epic movie moment that I would replay in my head while lying in bed at night.
“You look like shit,” he said.
Or maybe not.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
My bag was heavy on my back, and I felt like the only thing keeping me balanced was Dev tugging me toward him.
“So what now?” I asked him.
“I’ll be home for Thanksgiving. I’ll see you then, I guess.”
“Is there anything you want me to post on social media? About us?” A picture of my ring had already been shared a gazillion times, apparently.
“I’ll talk to my agent and let you know.” His jaw tightened beneath a shadow of beard.
It re
ally wasn’t fair. Even after a long flight he looked rakishly handsome whereas I felt like a soft pretzel dropped in between terminals.
He rubbed his thumb against my ring finger, toying with the bling there.
“I guess I can take that off now,” I said as I glanced down at our joined hands. So shiny. Was it weird that I constantly polished it on my shirt?
“No, don’t.” He raised my fist to his chest, over his heart.
When I looked up our faces were only inches apart. “Why not?”
“Even now,” he said conspiratorially, “people are taking pictures of us. No, don’t look.”
Like I could see anything but him at that moment? He kissed my knuckles. A shiver ran up my spine as he leaned in to nuzzle my cheek.
“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a little?” I whispered. “It’s a fake engagement, remember?”
“No.”
“No?” Something inside me squeezed a little.
“I mean yes, it’s fake, but…” He looked away, gathering his thoughts. “I know this isn’t the time or the place—”
“Coming through!”
The urgent beeping of an oncoming people-mover pushed us apart. From eight feet away Dev tried to tell me something, but a sudden announcement over the speaker drowned him out.
“What?” I shook my head, unable to hear him as he spoke again.
We had to ford a steady stream of travelers to come together again before nearly being clothes-lined by a family with two toddlers on safety harnesses. The surrounding flow reminded me I still had to get to my gate at Terminal 8—which, naturally, was the furthest away.
“I have to go, Dev.” I hiked up my backpack. “What were you saying?”
“You know what? It can wait.”
“You sure?”
He exhaled heavily, giving me a short nod. “This really isn’t the time and place.”
For what?
I hesitated, waiting to see if he’d say anything else. “Guess I’ll see you in a few weeks, then.”
