Chapter Two
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I know I’m late.”
Hannah burst into the small diner and darted over to the table in the corner where her friends were already chatting happily over mimosas. The flashes of the paparazzo’s camera that had stalked her steps since she left her apartment was blissfully shut out thanks to the diner’s “no photographers” policy.
“No baby today?”
she asked Liv as she shrugged out of her jacket and took a seat at their usual table tucked in the back away from the large windows, though she could still see a photographer lingering on the sidewalk.
No doubt to take more unflattering photos of me when I leave.
“Daemon’s on dad duty today,” Liv said.
Liv and Daemon had met a few years back when they’d co-starred in a limited run of Chess. They’d been madly in love ever since, living a life Hannah could only dream of, complete with a cute townhouse and an even cuter pair of Broadway babies while they both still managed to keep performing. Hannah couldn’t even keep a houseplant alive while maintaining her performance and audition schedule.
“How did the concert go?”
Jennifer asked.
“It felt really good.”
“Howard wasn’t a total ass?”
Liv asked. She’d had her own difficulties with the legendary director.
"No more than usual, and he said he might want me for another concert in the fall, but then he said something about waiting to see how the public reacts to the pro shot of Bridget Jones’ Musical before they make a final decision, so who the hell knows,”
Hannah said.
Why did it seem like so much of her life was hinging on the release of a filmed version of the Broadway show she’d closed six months ago? How was a girl supposed to get on with her life when everyone around her was waiting to judge something from her past?
“Let him wait. He’ll see how incredible you are and by then, he’ll be competing with every other director in town to book you,” Liv said.
“We’ll see. I’ve been called in for the same parts so many times, I’m starting to think I’m stuck in a Groundhog Day-style loop,”
Hannah sighed.
“You’d be great in Groundhog Day,”
Jennifer said.
“They’ll never cast me as Nancy,”
Hannah said. She had no illusions about the realities of being a plus sized woman on Broadway—though the fact a size twelve was considered plus size was some serious bullshit.
The server approached, dropping plates full of the most delicious smelling breakfast in front of each of them. “We ordered your usual,”
Liv said by way of explanation when the mushroom and Swiss omelet was placed in front of Hannah.
“Enough about short-sighted directors. How was Ethan?”
Jennifer asked, shimmying her shoulders in excitement.
Hannah’s face flamed red. “I never should have told you guys about him.”
“Come on. I’m an old married woman now. Let me live vicariously through you,” Liv said.
Hannah snorted. “Who are you kidding? You and Daemon probably still have more sex than I do, even with kids in the house.”
Liv smirked and shrugged in a way that completely confirmed the accusation.
“Give up the details, Han. I haven’t had sex in weeks,”
Jennifer complained. “Though those audiobooks you recommended have definitely been helping to take the edge off.”
“Clearly you had a good time.”
Liv gestured vaguely to the spot at the edge of the neckline to Hannah’s shirt where a bright red patch of beard burn was visible.
“Shit.”
Hannah tugged her shirt over to cover the offending mark.
Jennifer laughed and swiped a roasted potato from Hannah’s plate, popping it into her mouth as though it didn’t require a twenty-minute internal argument to decide to eat a starch. “God, I miss carbs,”
she groaned.
“We shouldn’t even be talking about this in public,”
Hannah said, turning her plate so the potatoes were closer to Jennifer. “If someone overheard and word got back to Jackson and his team—”
“No one cares about your fake boyfriend’s little publicity stunt,”
Jennifer said as Hannah shushed her.
“Someone cares,”
Liv said, gesturing towards the growing number of photographers lingering at the front window.
“It’s only until after the release of the pro shot. We’ve managed to fool everyone for the last six months,”
she said, tilting her chin towards the paparazzi. “So I need you both to keep this to yourselves for the next few weeks. Then Jackson and I will issue a joint statement about an amicable split and we can get on with our lives.”
“Does that mean you’ll be going to the premiere with Jackson?”
Liv asked.
“You should totally take Ethan,”
Jennifer said.
Hannah frowned and poked at her potatoes, willing the noise in her brain to calm enough to let her eat one. “Ethan doesn’t even know I’m an actress. We don’t really tell each other much of anything.”
“Except ‘harder’ and ‘faster,’”
Jennifer said with a snort.
“Could you not?”
Hannah hissed, glancing over her shoulder at the older couple at the next table who were a little too close for her friends’ style of postmortem.
Jennifer stole another potato, gesturing with it still speared on the tines of her fork. “Shouldn’t you be more relaxed? If some guy banged my brains out—”
“Jennifer!”
“—I sure as hell wouldn’t still be strung this tight. Unless it wasn’t as good as you remembered.”
“It was better,”
Hannah sighed, squeezing her thighs together to feel the pulse of soreness there.
“Then what’s the problem?”
Liv asked.
“You mean aside from the fact that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, I’m in a relationship with Jackson Hayes? There’s no problem.”
Her friends exchanged an incredulous look. “I’m not really supposed to be doing the casual sex thing,”
she whispered.
“Says who?”
Jennifer asked.
“Says me.”
Hannah pushed her eggs around with her fork. “I haven’t always made the best decisions about how to take care of my body. Putting a moratorium on casual sex is part of my recovery.”
“But sex is more like self-care than self-destruction, at least the way you two did it,”
Jennifer said.
Liv considered for a moment. “Is it really casual sex if you bang the same guy in the same hotel every couple months? That’s more of a sex tradition.”
“Nothing casual about traditions,”
Jennifer chimed in.
“That’s not how recovery works,”
Hannah reminded them.
Jennifer set her fork down and leaned towards Hannah, finally lowering her voice to an acceptable level. “Did you sleep with him to avoid binging?”
Hannah shook her head.
“To avoid eating?”
Liv asked.
Another shake.
“Did you relapse in your recovery in any way while you were in Boston?”
Jennifer asked.
“No.”
It had been six months since her last binge—since closing night of Bridget Jones’ Musical to be exact—after the intense restriction she’d imposed on herself during the run of the show. Six months of therapy and tiny milestones that put her on more solid footing every day, and yet… It all still felt so tenuous, like she was one misplaced bag of M&Ms away from relapsing into the depths of her eating disorder.
Or one night of casual sex.
But being with Ethan felt different. With him, she didn’t feel out of control like she did in so many other situations. Instead she felt powerful, confident, capable, like somehow being with him didn’t numb the feelings swirling inside her—it amplified them. There was no hiding from Ethan when he looked at her like he could see all the things she didn’t say, and the truth was, she didn’t want to hide from him. But if she was honest with herself, that kind of intensity scared her more than any calorie count.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You deserve to have fun too. Even the sexy naked kind,” Liv said.
“Especially the sexy naked kind,”
Jennifer added. “Audiobooks can only keep you warm for so long before you need the real thing, Han.”
Heat crawled up Hannah’s throat, her cheeks burning. “He wanted to see me again. Like for real. Like a date.”
“I’m still not seeing the problem here,”
Liv said. “I thought you liked this guy.”
“I do. But we don’t even know each other.”
“I don’t think I’d say that. You know some things about each other,”
Jennifer said. At Hannah’s glare, she continued, “Then get to know each other. That’s what dating is for.”
“It’s too hard. It’s a miracle he hasn’t recognized me. Going to see him this weekend was careless enough as it is. If we’d been seen together… Until this thing with Jackson is over, I need to focus on auditioning and my recovery.”
“That’s what you’ve been saying for months. When are you allowed to focus on being happy?”
Liv asked.
“I’ll be happy when I book my next show.”
“Will you?”
Jennifer asked.
Hannah picked up her fork, despite the way her stomach gave a warning jolt in response to the mere idea of eating when she was this on edge. Eating was easier than looking too closely at the answer to that question, however.
She cut off a bite of her omelet with the side of her fork and popped it in her mouth before she could think too hard about it, forcing herself to chew, to swallow, to do it again. She refused to be defeated by a breakfast special. Not today, Satan.
“Where does Ethan live?”
Liv asked, tapping away distractedly on her phone.
“Why?”
Hannah asked.
“If the issue is that you don’t know enough about him, then let’s find out about him. We are millennial women with Instagram accounts. Give me his name and a rough idea of how old he is, and I’ll find him within the hour,”
Liv promised.
“I highly doubt Ethan has an Instagram.”
“But someone who knows him does,”
Jennifer said, swiping another potato.
“Why don’t you order your own home fries?”
Hannah asked.
“I can’t do that. I don’t eat carbs,”
Jennifer said around the mouthful of potato.
“Oh, shit,”
Liv whispered, her eyes glued to her phone screen.
“What? Did your brother accidentally send his dirty texts to you instead of his wife again?”
Jennifer asked.
“Worse.”
Liv lowered the phone, setting it on the table and sliding it towards Hannah. “Han…”
“What?”
Hannah looked between her friends, her stomach sinking with dread at the concern in Liv’s eyes as she reached for the phone. “What is it?”
There it was on Superfan’s homepage. Jackson Hayes kissing a woman in a bikini on a beach in Bora Bora. Her fake boyfriend with a tall blonde woman who looked like she hadn’t eaten a potato in a decade.
Hannah clicked into the story, posted only an hour ago, to find a series of photographs. In one, Jackson gave the woman a piggyback ride in the waves. In another, he was practically on top of her, making out on an expensive looking lounge chair.
“What the fuck?”
Jennifer snarled, leaning over Hannah’s shoulder to get a better look.
Hannah slammed the phone face down on the table. “It’s fine. It’s not like we were actually together.”
When had her voice gotten so high?
“Yeah, but they don’t know that,”
Jennifer said, pointing to the growing crowd of photographers outside the diner.
Someone opened the door and a flurry of flashes went off, her name called by at least ten different paparazzi as the unsuspecting patron tried to leave the restaurant.
This can’t be happening.
“We had a deal,”
Hannah said, dazed. “We weren’t supposed to break up until after the pro-shot premiered. It was his idea.”
“Once a bad boy, always a bad boy,”
Jennifer said.
“But that’s just it. He’s not—”
Hannah broke off at her friends’ skeptical looks. “He’s been famous since he was a teenager. He made stupid mistakes people make when they’re young, but he did it in the spotlight.”
“You aren’t seriously defending him right now,”
Jennifer said. “Poor little rich boy. He was part of the biggest boy band of our generation.”
“And the press ate him alive when he broke up the band.”
Hannah glanced at the phone. It was taunting her, even though it was face down. “I don’t understand what happened. It was only a few more weeks. His publicist said it was working. Dating me was helping to win back good will from the band’s fans.”
“So much for that,”
Liv said, taking back her phone as Hannah’s began ringing.
Hannah answered as Liv said, “Don’t answer that.”
“Hannah! This is Johnny Blue with Encores.com—”
She hung up and dropped her phone on the table as if it were hot. It immediately began ringing again.
“You need to call your manager,”
Jennifer said, silencing the ringing.
“It’ll be fine,”
Hannah said, more to convince herself than anything, her voice a little too shrill to be calm. “No one could possibly care about this. I’m a nobody.”
“You may be a nobody but Jackson Hayes is a capital S somebody,”
Liv said as she scrolled through the stories on her phone again. “They’re saying he cheated on you with a Brazilian swimsuit model.”
Hannah’s stomach lurched and her mouth went dry. “Why would he do this?”
she whispered. “I was helping him.”
Liv reached across the table and took her hand. “You’re going to have to ask him that. But right now, we need to figure out how to get you out of here.”