You Belong With Me

chapter016

They were examining the Airbnb stack of tattered Monopoly and Connect 4 boxes after dinner when Edie’s phone rattled in her pocket and she pulled it out to see:

Elliot

Edie, can I call you? It’s quite time sensitive so now, if you’ve got a minute? X

She excused herself, found her big-knit cardigan and stepped out into the frigid night-time air, for privacy and better reception. Elliot rang within seconds of her pulling the door closed behind her.

‘There’s a stupid story about me I need to warn you about. I don’t know if it’s up yet, but it will be soon, I think.’

Edie went cold-hot. ‘OK …’

‘They asked Lillian for a quote, and she told them it was all bollocks, so naturally they’re running it anyway with the denial.’

‘What is it?’ Edie said, not really appreciating Elliot burying the lede.

‘We went out for dinner in New York the other night as a cast get to know each other thing. We didn’t realise we could be seen through the window. Lillian thinks they’ve cropped the photos so it looks as if it’s only me and Ines there. There were about nine of us.’

‘Right,’ Edie said dully. She wondered if it was worth this agitated and detailed primer; it might be worse than Elliot was advertising, though group dinner didn’t sound too dire.

‘I’m so sorry. I hate that people close to me have to pay this shitty tax for my choice of career.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Edie said stoically. ‘I remember they did this with your co-star Greta back during Gun City. Par for the course.’

It was far from Edie’s first rodeo when it came to witnessing that things in print didn’t correspond with Elliot Owen’s lived reality.

‘Yeah, but it wasn’t personally insulting to you then. If we went public somehow, then they’d do fewer of these. But it also brings trouble to your door and all past jokes aside, I know why you’re not keen. I don’t want people taking photos of you going to Caffè Nero on the way to work.’

‘True, thank you,’ Edie said, though there was an honourable futility to this sentiment. They’d do it at some point.

She thanked Elliot for the heads up and tried to sound mature and unbothered. They were on a one-bar phone signal that kept cutting out, which eventually made them politely agree to give up.

Edie sat at the picnic table, wishing she smoked, and hit refresh on the relevant website. Nothing and nothing and nothing. After ten minutes that felt like an era, teeth chattering, she was thinking she’d have to go back inside and pretend to concentrate on the board game. Edie could check again in an hour. She didn’t want to see it for the first time, with company.

Then with a jolt, on a final check, there it was on the right-hand side:

New Couple Alert:

Elliot Owen and co-star Ines Herrera pack on the PDA at a candlelit intimate date in NYC

It was one thing to know it was imminent and be reassured it was false. It was another to see this statement glowing black and white back at her as a clickbait announcement. New couple.

Edie steeled herself. Right, deep breath: it’s not true. You can read this and be just fine, maybe even laugh, because you have superior insight and know it’s not true.

As she opened it, she thought: hang on – pack on the what, now? Have they got on set photos already? Elliot had told her they were a way off filming?

She scanned. Her stomach lurched. This story wasn’t about words; it was told in pictures.

There were six of them total, the story padded out with photos of Elliot and Ines on screen and one of their leaving the venue, some trendy looking place in the West Village.

In the first image, Ines had her hand on the back of Elliot’s head, proprietorially ruffling his hair as he leaned forward, speaking to someone unseen. It was a casual ownership gesture – one of the type that, in Edie’s experience, only people who were very physically knowledgeable about each other would ever make.

In the second, Ines rested her head on his chest as Elliot laughed at someone or something out of frame. Again, it said: we are a unit, a team of two. With more than a hint of: and we are boffing up an absolute storm.

In the third, Ines had her arms looped round him protectively. In the fourth, she was whispering in his ear, a palm cupped to her face, as he leaned towards her to hear, with a look of concentration.

In the fifth, someone out of shot was taking a photograph of them, Ines leaning up to pose-kiss Elliot’s cheekbone.

And in the sixth, which made Edie audibly and sharply suck in air with a yelp, Elliot’s hand was on the table, Ines’s over it. She stared and stared. It was clearly reciprocal. Holding hands. At dinner. Which platonic co-workers sat there holding hands, after dinner? Let alone two people this physically superlative, who everyone would be looking at?

Ines was wearing large gold hoop earrings, a black silk top and dark brick-red lipstick, hair gathered onto her head in a bun. She looked, with her almond eyes and pointed chin, like the flesh incarnation of a Disney princess.

This was the woman he’d be fake falling in love with all day, every day, for months? This was them at the start? It was nothing less than the photo set a private detective would bring you to definitively prove your spouse was playing away.

She had a light-headed moment of trying to recall a single time where they’d in so many words agreed: we don’t sleep with other people when we’re on different continents, right? Was covert flexibility A Thing, something she should’ve known about, in the endless sexual options of a famous person existence? He’s not faithful-faithful, obviously. Don’t ask, don’t tell. He’s still Elliot Owen – what did you expect, for God’s sake?

If that was the case, they were over before they’d begun. She stared into the nocturnal middle distance.

Edie had recently seen Ines on the cover of a magazine, overflowing from a satin basque, strapline: INEScapable. Your Next Obsession.

She was INEScapable all right. What if I’m Stalybridge not Manchester? had a major revision: what if I’m Stalybridge, and she’s Las Vegas?

She returned to her phone, stabbing at the keypad to bring the article back up on her screen. She didn’t know she was crying until a large tear rolled down her cheek. Reading the text felt like driving a penknife into the flesh of her palm.

Elliot Owen and Ines Herrera appear to have confirmed rumours of a romance after a VERY touchy-feely display in New York last night.

The pair are set to star in new HBO show Your Table is Ready as sparring front of house love interests, and it looks like they may have stolen the march on their fictional counterparts.

They held hands, whispered, kissed, and cuddled over a candlelit meal at West Village hot spot Padrona – and they didn’t care who saw.

Yeah, we’ll come back to that fact, Edie thought, a molten lava of rage surging up inside her, to match the ragged pain.

‘She was practically on his lap,’ said another diner. ‘They didn’t seem very interested in the food … or in anyone else.’

The dragon-slaying Blood Gold heartthrob hasn’t been linked to anyone since separating last year from model-actress Heather Lily, who publicly begged Owen to reconcile. Herrera, 28, has been single since splitting from her American football player ex last spring.

‘They make a stunning couple, and everyone involved in the production is buzzing about the immediate connection between them,’ said a perfectly placed source. ‘Their characters are always at each other’s throats and have a sizzling chemistry – they won’t have to do much acting to portray it.’

Reps for Owen denied they were involved when we contacted them for a comment, saying: ‘Their relationship is purely professional.’

Somehow, the worst word in it was ‘immediate’ – perhaps as it was the only one that offered an explanation for the complete cognitive dissonance of the man recently in her bed being the man in these images.

Edie read the story again, from the top, opened her mouth and said: ‘Fuck you all,’ through a sob.

Fuck the tabloids who tormented people with these inventions, fuck the paparazzi who were enriched by long-lens shots through windows, and the picture editors who cropped the image to misinform. Fuck the television networks who got free publicity for their shows, fuck actresses who didn’t care if they were manhandling another woman’s boyfriend. Most of all, fuck the man who had made her heartfelt promises, who whispered sweet nothings and typed ‘be mine forever’ and then went off to another country to LARP being someone else’s, with the world watching.