Chapter 16
Bex
I leave for my seven-hour flight to Amsterdam clad in a ridiculous outfit: skin-tight white jeans, Chanel ballet flats, a white blouse, and a cashmere pashmina in the palest beige. Someone needs to tell Mindy how much I eat and how poorly I do it.
I restrict myself mostly to candy and Sprite simply because it won’t stain. Conveniently, I was going to consume mostly candy and Sprite anyhow.
They’ve forewarned me that my ecstatic reunion with Theo will be caught on camera.
His flight landed only twenty minutes before my own, so he’ll be waiting in baggage claim.
The pressure to make this look legit is intense, but harder on him, given that he undoubtedly hasn’t forgiven me for the interview debacle and for being such a dick to him at my home last week.
I’m still mad at him too, though I’m not sure why, and I’m weirdly eager to see him in spite of that.
I hope he hasn’t shaved. I like when that hint of savagery has been allowed to see the light of day.
No, wait. I hope he has shaved. I don’t need to be any more attracted to him than I already am.
Lars: Okay, guys: you’re newlyweds and you’ve been separated for a week so please act like it. Bex, Theo is standing toward the back of the luggage carousel. It would be nice if you could sort of run toward him?
Me: You clearly aren’t aware how tight these pants are.
Lars: Fast walk then. Smile on your face. Theo, you might want to pick her up off the ground when you hug her.
Theo: I’d have to put down my coffee for that. Though Rebecca’s probably already spilled coffee on herself so perhaps it’s not an issue.
Me: Go fuck yourself, Theo.
It’s not my best work, but I’m busy getting through customs.
The camera crew makes it easy to spy my handsome husband amidst the people and bags and shouting. He’s wearing khaki pants and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up.
His smile is irritatingly, intoxicatingly smug.
He has not shaved.
I force my mouth to mimic his. His smile grows even more mocking, alerting me to the fact that I’ve failed, and the camera is memorializing this horrifying rictus grin I now wear.
He’s trying not to laugh. My irritation grows.
I didn’t want to hug him before but now I can barely stand the idea.
What I’d like to do is yank him down by the collar so hard he chokes.
I want to watch fear and desire fight in his expression.
And then I will push him into that closet to his left and hate-fuck him until he’s got no energy left for disdain.
I will hate-fuck him until he’s a useless shell who simply laughs when I suggest he jerk off to eighteenth-century poets or that his mother’s Instagram handle is @cumslut69.
I will force him into a chair, climb in his lap, and bite his lip while I ride him until his perfect scruff has abraded my skin and we’ve both come so hard that our bones ache.
And when that happens, I want him to laugh at every joke I’ve ever made, all the jokes he’s heretofore rolled his eyes at, and beg me to really marry him.
All so I can tell him no.
He steps forward when I get close. We collide rather than connect and maybe it appears passionate but more likely we just look like two dorks who’ve never engaged with the opposite sex in any way.
I wrap my arms around his neck, his go around my waist, and when I look up at him, his eyes mirror the same dark realization I’ve just arrived at myself: we have to kiss, even if it’s brief.
We have to. What newlywed couple reunites at the airport after being separated for a week and doesn’t kiss?
My dread as I go on my toes and he leans down is oddly like eagerness, warm and raw in my belly, bleeding heat into my veins.
His lips press to mine. He tastes like coffee, which should be gross except I love coffee, and his lips are lovely and soft and warm, and I’m suddenly a bottomless pit of need, a girl who hasn’t been kissed by anyone but him in months and hasn’t been kissed sober in a year at least. For a half second my eyes fall closed, and I would like to stay… but I definitely cannot.
“You could have just picked me up and spared us this indignity,” I say as my heels touch the ground.
“Please. They will not spare us any indignity. If we hadn’t done this, they’d have made me take you in that closet to the right and bend you over a chair.”
I blink, feeling seen. I don’t think he reads minds, though he is British and he’s basically admitted Hogwarts is real.
Maybe he just wants to hate-fuck me too.
· · ·
I’m given an hour to myself at the hotel before it’s time to get ready. A woman named Yara then arrives to blow out my hair. She shows me pictures of her beautiful baby and teaches me how to say “Theo, it’s okay if you can’t perform” in Dutch.
When she departs, I open the garment bag and pull out an envelope from Mindy specifying the outfits for each part of the trip.
Today I’m expected to wear a linen skirt, with a white tank and sandals. I wonder if she realizes that Amsterdam in May is not exactly tropical.
Theo is typing furiously on his phone, handsome face in a frown, when I reach the hotel lobby. I want to think he looks annoyingly adult there, frowning and being responsible, but there’s a tiny flip of a muscle in my stomach.
This morning’s kiss might have broken me. Weirdly, more than the wedding kiss did. Though there was no tongue, though it was brief, he just kisses like a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and really wants to be doing it.
He’s in a T-shirt, too, which doesn’t help. Granted, the T-shirt appears to be ironed and expensive but again…those biceps. They’re the sort you make an excuse to slide your palm over.
He looks up, his gaze suddenly sharp on my face before it lowers, and I force my lecherous thoughts to cease lest they somehow make themselves known to him.
“How very respectable my child bride looks this afternoon,” he says, slipping the phone into his pocket.
“You know if this were real, you probably wouldn’t be outing yourself as a sicko who marries someone way too young for him.”
“If this were real,” he counters, as a bellman holds the door for us, “I’d come up with a better way to occupy that smart mouth of yours.”
Oh. Damn. Well played, Theo.
Outside, the air is cool and the skies are gray.
I’m the only person out here dressed in white linen, which makes sense as it’s barely seventy degrees, if that.
I take a deep breath—I’d read that the air sometimes smells like chocolate cake thanks to the Zaan cocoa factories, but all I get is the earthy, damp smell of the canal.
Theo starts to pull out his phone again, no doubt to check the map, and I wave him down. “I know where we’re going.”
“How?” he asks.
I turn in the direction of the Keizersgracht and am nearly run over by a bike. His arm shoots out to stop me. His bicep brushes my breast in the process. Is he as aware of it as I am? Doubtful.
I start walking up the street. “I looked it up. You know, one of those days I spent just lying on the couch.”
His mouth curves into a smug smile. “Is that why you’re still so testy? I thought it was some endless monthly thing.”
It takes me a second. “Are you suggesting that I’ve been having my period for two weeks straight? You know, not every variation in a female’s mood is hormonal. Sometimes it’s because her husband invades her space, then proceeds to comment on how little she’s doing.”
“I said that once.”
“You thought it. Constantly.”
He raises a brow. “Who wouldn’t have thought it, Rebecca?” The afternoon light graces his arrogant profile, reminding me of how much I want to punch it.
“If this were our actual honeymoon, you wouldn’t be getting laid once,” I say, turning right onto Westermarkt.
“If this were our actual honeymoon,” he replies, “you’d be too busy begging for another round to start these arguments in the first place.”
Ugh. I should find his cockiness repulsive, but instead there’s that muscle spasming again, low in my belly, agreeing with every word he says.
We reach the first shoot location, where the crew is already set up outside a coffee shop to film us placing stroopwafels over lattes.
I’m not clear on why this scene couldn’t be filmed indoors, next to a roaring fire.
Or why Mindy couldn’t have sent along a fur coat or whatever it is rich people wear when cold.
I demolish my stroopwafel—two paper-thin, crunchy waffles with a layer of caramel between—the second the inside turns gooey from the heat of the latte. Theo watches with disdain, and then Lars asks if we can shoot the scene again with “Bex eating at a more civilized pace this time.”
We then head to a canal dock to film the boat-ride scene I’m pretty sure is mandated by some governing authority when in Amsterdam.
While they’re setting up, I give LJ facts about the Enigma machine for his daughter’s paper, jumping in place to stay warm, and help Jon figure out what style engagement ring his girlfriend would like.
At some point, Theo briefly disappears, then returns to dump a sweatshirt in my lap that has “Amsterdam” splayed across the front in big block letters.
“You’re freezing,” he barks. “Put it on when we’re not filming. ”
I normally wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this sweatshirt, but…it was unusually sweet of Theo. And I’m really freaking cold.
At long last, the boat leaves the dock, heading down the wide canal of Keizersgracht toward Prinsengracht.
Theo waves a hand in my direction. “I suppose you have a thousand bizarre facts in your head about Amsterdam that you’re dying to share.”
I scowl at him. I did have facts, but I’m not going to tell him now. I’m going to keep them all for myself.
He laughs. “Tell me your facts, Rebecca. It was a joke.”
I give in only because he got me the sweatshirt.
“These were all warehouses,” I tell him, pointing at the houses up and down the canal.