Chapter 23
Bex
Theo’s on edge. It started long before the argument with Caden…
probably from the moment I stepped off the elevator.
And sure, the weather could be warmer, and I’d prefer not to be filmed as we approach Capri, but this is a pretty sweet gig.
So why does he appear to hate it a bit more with every moment that passes?
“What’s wrong?” I ask. We’re basically alone, as the crew is getting footage of the rocks jutting from the water rather than us.
“Just tired,” he grunts. “It’s going to be a long day.”
The wind whips my hair across my face and I push it back. “We have a lot of long days. What’s going on?”
He glances at me with a frown. “My brother got married here. In Capri. Seven years together, two full years of it spent planning this fucking wedding, and she was probably sleeping with Kieran’s best friend even then.”
Oh. No wonder he’s been in such a foul mood.
“Do you still…speak to them?”
He shakes his head. “I bought Kieran’s half of the business just to make sure his wife wouldn’t ever get to succeed with it and take the credit. I’ll never say a word to her again.”
It’s probably why he was so livid the night of the interview: because I was unable to hold it together while he’s had to offer benign responses for years about Penelope’s role in his brother’s death.
I lower my sunglasses. “Did you even want to run the business?”
He shrugs. “Not especially. I thought I was saving his company and creating a legacy for his son…I’m not sure how well that’s panning out at this point.”
“His son?” I whisper. “They had a child?”
“He didn’t know she was pregnant when he jumped. He never would have done it if she’d told him.”
I can’t believe in all this time Theo has never mentioned a nephew. “Are you close?”
He stares straight ahead, his jaw locked. “I’ve never met him. My mother says he looks like Kieran and he’s very clever, but I imagine she’d say that of any grandchild.”
I shift toward him. “Dude, you’ve never met your only nephew?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Am I really about to be counseled on my failings by a woman who sits on the couch all day watching reality TV?”
I could argue that there’s a big difference between having no purpose and having a fatherless nephew you’ve intentionally avoided, but I sense that this isn’t the time for argument. I elbow him. “Don’t forget that I also fucked a bottle.”
He laughs, begrudgingly. “I’m unlikely to ever forget that.” He glances at the crew before he looks back at me. “Please don’t discuss this with anyone. It makes Kieran sound unbearably selfish, leaving a child behind, and he really wasn’t.”
I nod, rubbing at a happy/sad thing that resides just below my clavicle, a feeling I don’t yet have a name for.
If, in all this time, I never heard about the kid from Theo and in all the preceding years I never heard about a son from my dad—and my father would definitely have reached out to Kieran’s kid if he’d known—then this isn’t something Theo tells many people, yet he just told me.
It means more to me than it probably should.
· · ·
The therapist I was forced to see as a kid, once I started getting in trouble, thought expressing what you feel was a cure in and of itself.
Even as a small child, I knew this was crap—expressing a thing didn’t cure me of it, it only cemented my anger: what was vague and uncertain in my head would take form once I’d said it aloud, growing into something fiercer. Situations that merely bothered me before were suddenly enraging instead.
I wonder if this is what I’ve done to Theo, in forcing him to tell me what’s wrong. Because his mood has gone straight downhill ever since that conversation on the boat.
We’re given an hour to get checked in to the hotel and change, and then we’re filming again: cappuccinos and chocolate croissants at a café, wandering through the bright yellow shops and white-tented stalls of Anacapri.
The shopping is less fun than it should be—it’s hot now, the streets are packed, and the stalls are selling the exact same combination of limoncello, wood carvings, and leather bags that we already saw in Sorrento and Positano.
It’s mostly not fun because I’m stuck doing all this with Theo, and it’s not the crowd or the heat or the merchandise irritating him… it’s me.
He rolls his eyes at every conversation I get into with a merchant.
I tell one shop owner I’m excited about tomorrow’s chairlift to Monte Solaro, and Theo barks at me to stop giving out my itinerary.
A waiter asks where we’re staying, I answer, and Theo—predictably—acts as if I’ve just given him my bank routing number.
“Bex,” he hisses, pulling me past gelato-eating tourists clogging our narrow stone street before turning off my mic and his own, “I’m sure this will be a novel concept, but we have an expression in my homeland with which you are clearly unfamiliar—don’t talk to strangers.”
A child in front of us loses half his gelato and bursts into tears. I turn away as his mother starts to yell at him. “We use that expression too, but I’m not Lady Gaga, Theo. No one gives a shit. They’re just being friendly.”
“They’re just being friendly until one of them isn’t,” he snaps. “You need to be more goddamn careful in public. Right now, it’s just a random waiter or a vendor you’re flirting with—”
“I wasn’t flirting.”
“Believe me, you’re flirting,” he groans, running a hand over his face. “And once the show airs, that waiter or vendor isn’t going to be quite so innocent. It could easily be some nutter polishing his guns and listening to the voices in his head.”
I lean against the limestone wall behind me. “But then I miss out on the pleasant stalkers who just send flowers and weird messages on Instagram. You’ve got to take some bad with the good.”
“Rebecca, I’m serious,” he says, with narrowed eyes. He looms over me, which is annoying but at least provides some shade.
Reluctantly, I give up trying to turn this into a joke, since he clearly won’t accept anything less than the truth.
“How much worse could it get?” I ask. Regrettably, my voice cracks on that final word.
Just when I’ve convinced myself I might be okay, a moment like this occurs to remind me that what I really am is deeply sad, so sad that I’m still somewhat ambivalent about how things turn out.
And I guess I wasn’t all that convinced I was okay anyhow…
I cried myself to sleep last night, thinking about Bronwyn sneaking me the code to the deep freezer, and I spent the entire ride to Capri thinking about the fact that it’s something she’ll never get to see.
“I’ve lost my entire family. I’m not getting a new one. So how much worse could it get?”
His scowl softens and his hand gently cups my elbow. “Just because you don’t care what happens to you doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t. If you can’t think about yourself, consider that it might be hard on other people if you weren’t around.”
“The show would be fine,” I reply. “Lars would find you a new wife. A better one.”
“Oddly enough,” he says with a sigh as the crew approaches, “I don’t want a new and better wife. I’m sort of used to the one I have.”
· · ·
Just before sunset we take a cab to a lavish home on the quieter side of the island, a home the show will pretend we stayed in.
Again. Maybe there’s a quota for how many lies are required to make a reality TV show a hit.
I’d think we’d already hit it with our entirely fake relationship, but apparently not.
They’re working on the lighting when we get inside the house. Troublingly, they aren’t setting up on the expansive terrace or in the adorable living area…but in the bedroom.
And it’s a nice bedroom—huge wood canopy bed, French doors wide open and facing the sea—but it’s still a bedroom.
“We’re going to be filming another waking scene,” says Lars. It seems a little excessive after the whole hug-on-the-balcony bit.
“Haven’t we covered this already?” Theo asks.
Lars and Paula exchange a glance. “We went over the existing footage, and while the travel scenes are great, the most engaging moments are of you two alone, on the balcony and at dinner. That’s what’s really going to sell this series—the love story.
Basically, we are pretending to be a travel show, and while some people certainly want to see what Capri is like by day, all people want to watch a really attractive couple in love. ”
Lars seems to have conveniently forgotten that we are not in love. Not even a little bit.
“So…is this another hug on the balcony?” I ask.
Lars tugs his lower lip between his teeth. “No. We need to mix it up a little. Today you’ll be waking up together.”
My heart begins galloping in my chest. “Together? You mean in the same bed?”
“It would definitely feed Kylie and Jasper’s theories about this being fake if we showed one of you sleeping on the couch, don’t you think?”
I know he’s trying to manipulate me with the reminder of Kylie and Jasper, but it’s working. I’m not willingly giving those assholes a second of footage to use in their dumb reels.
“Okay,” Theo says, walking up beside me, “so what do we do? Just pull the covers to our shoulders and pretend we’re waking?”
“Pretty much,” Lars says, “except with a lot more skin. I need both of you naked from the waist up.”
“Naked,” we repeat in unison. I’m not sure which of us sounds more horrified.
“You’re newlyweds, remember?” Lars asks. “Bex, you can have the sheet covering your cleavage. Nothing will actually be exposed.”
Theo and I fall to the couch, equally disturbed, while they finish setting up.
He forces a smile. “This is the closest we’ll ever come to sleeping together, Rebecca. Cherish it.”
“Cherish it?” I ask, examining my pedicure, doing my level best to appear unconcerned. “I can imagine nothing worse than sleeping with you. There’d be so much nervous fumbling.”
There would be none. He’d be heavy and certain above me, all muscle. He’d be demanding. He’d growl. I’d probably come while he was still trying to undress me.
He raises a brow. “Nervous fumbling?”
“Like Mr. Bean. You’d be all British and reserved about it. Would you entirely mind if I inserted my manhood now? Only if it’s convenient. Oh, blimey, bloody ’ell, I just came. I guess we’re done before we started. Right, then. Cheerio.”
“When have you ever heard me say ‘blimey’ or ‘cheerio’?”
“It’s telling that what you object to is the vocabulary I used and not my presumption that you come too fast.”
There’s something indefinably smug in that smirk he attempts to fight. “I think we both know that was ridiculous,” he says, his voice low and full of delicious promise.
Fuck.
I scoot as far from him as I can and curl up in the couch’s corner. “Fine, then you’d just be all chatty, but in the least sexy way. I do hope you’re finding this pleasant. I’m quite near the end. Oh, oh, Avada Kedavra!”
“Wasn’t that the death curse? Are you seriously suggesting I’d shout a Harry Potter death curse when I come?”
“ ‘God save the queen’?”
“I’m unlikely to shout that either, for several reasons. And I’d probably be too busy thinking, Oh, fuck, what have I just done? to shout anything in the first place.”
I laugh, and he laughs along with me. It’s not so much about what he said or what I said, but the release of some tension between us. Tension that returns the minute Lars waves us in. “We’re ready. If you want to undress beneath the sheet, Bex, that might be easiest.”
My amusement dies so hard and fast it’s as if it was never there at all. I’m about to be semi-naked in bed with Theo, who I’m confident would be demanding and certain and filthy, and while this is entirely pretend, the fact that I’m wishing it were real makes this awkward.
I climb into the bed and slip off my shirt beneath the covers. It’s a struggle to get out of the bra without flashing the whole crew and I’m sweating and cursing by the time I finally fling it across the room…into Theo’s now bare chest.
He examines it for a moment too long before setting it on a chair behind him and climbing in.
Lars starts issuing orders to the crew. We both lie on our backs while we wait.
“This feels like the morning after a really unfulfilling one-night stand,” I tell him.
“I’d be wondering if I could sneak out without waking you.”
I fight a smile as I turn my head his way. “Fortunately for you, I’d probably still be under the influence of the drugs you’d have had to ply me with to make it happen. I’d sleep for a week straight if I wasn’t already dead.”
“Okay,” Lars says. “I want the two of you to be facing each other with your eyes closed. Then slowly blink open as if you’re only just waking and say good morning.”
We do as we’re told, but when my eyes flutter open, Theo starts to laugh. “What are you doing right now? You look like you’re in a trance or having a seizure.”
“Theo doesn’t know what a human female looks like when she wakes,” I call to the crew. “I’m sure no one is surprised by that.”
Everyone but Theo laughs.
There are two more takes, a whispered conversation between Lars and Paula, and then Lars asks if we can do it again…but kiss.
“On the lips?” I ask with the disgust of a kid who’s just learned how babies are made.
“For fuck’s sake, Rebecca,” Theo sighs. “You’ve had to kiss me several times now. I’d think you’d have mastered your revulsion to some extent.”
He seems genuinely offended. He wouldn’t be if he had a clue what I really thought. “It wasn’t about my revulsion. It was about the fact that we’d have morning breath. You wouldn’t kiss me. You’d just act like you wanted to snuggle until I let you fuck me from behind.”
Theo exhales as if he’s been punched.
“Fine, forget the kiss,” says Lars. “Just snuggle.”
I turn toward the other wall, but Theo doesn’t move an inch. “I need a minute,” he whispers.
“I know you love being in bed with me—all men do—but stop dragging it out.”
I scoot back and press to his chest and…oh fuck, that’s why he needed a minute.
Based on the size and firmness of the appendage pressing into the base of my spine, I’d say he needs an hour. Or several blow jobs.
Gentle, sympathetic soul that I am, I begin to laugh.
“I warned you,” he growls, his breath against my ear.
“That thing should come with multiple warnings,” I whisper. “And its own bottle of lube.”
“Rebecca,” he hisses, “for once in your life, just shut the fuck up.”