Chapter Bex
Bex
Lars: I’ve got some bad news.
Me: Theo was right. You really do begin a lot of conversations that way.
Lars: Someone has leaked our shoot schedule to Kylie and Jasper. They’re here.
Theo: In Paris?
Lars: At our hotel. Katrina saw Kylie at the spa.
Theo: It could be a coincidence. Paris is a popular destination and that’s a popular hotel.
Lars: That they haven’t even mentioned it on their channel suggests to me that it’s got less to do with travel than it does catching you guys not acting married, so I’m putting you in the same room. It’s a suite…one of you can take the couch. I’ll let you fight it out.
Theo: Bex’s life is more tragic so she gets the bed.
· · ·
I arrive in Paris early in the morning and take a cab to the hotel, my face pressed to the window as I take it all in.
I was too young to really appreciate it the last time we were here, but the city sparkles in the early morning light, the tall windows and wrought-iron balconies gracing each building like something out of a Victor Hugo novel.
At one intersection, a quick glance to the right reveals such a perfect, unimpeded view of the Eiffel Tower that I gasp, “Oh my god, that’s the Eiffel Tower!
” I’m sure my driver is rolling his eyes, but I refuse to take my gaze off the view long enough to check.
Only minutes later, we pass the Arc de Triomphe—I manage to remain silent this time—then veer off the Champs-élysées onto the more subdued but lovely Avenue George V.
We stop in front of the hotel and a bellman lifts my bag from the trunk. I dutifully follow him through the luscious marble lobby and get my keycard, ignoring the impulse to blow all this off and rush outside to see more of the city, before I head to the room reserved for me and Theo.
Our suite is palatial—Lars definitely was not trying to rom-com one-bed us. The primary bedroom is huge, there’s a pull-out couch, and we even have two bathrooms, so it will be very difficult, realistically, to play the “oh, I didn’t know you were in here” card when he’s showering.
A loud rap on the door interrupts me just as I’m kicking off my shoes to face-plant into bed. I know it’s not Theo—he won’t be in Paris until this afternoon, and he’ll have a key anyway.
I reluctantly trudge back across the suite to find Caden waiting with a wardrobe rack of clothes. “Hey,” he says. “This is all the stuff Mindy sent for you and Theo.”
“I’ll take it,” I say, but instead of pushing the rack my way, he shuffles, glancing from me to the carpet beneath his feet. “Look…I’m sorry about what I said the last time I saw you.”
My arms fold across my chest. “When you said my family died to get away from me?”
He winces. “It was a low blow. No hard feelings?”
There are still hard feelings. There’s also him coming to my room in Amsterdam, and generally being gross several other times too, but I just need to get through this. “Yeah, whatever,” I say.
He nods toward the room. “Let me just wheel this in.”
I reach for the handle. I don’t need Caden in my room, refusing to leave. “I can get it.”
“Bex, I’m not a rapist,” he says with an exasperated laugh. “Just let me wheel this in for you. It’s heavy, and it’s hard to steer. That’s why they didn’t send Katrina up with it.”
I give in with a shrug, stepping out of his way. He pushes the rack into the living room and leaves it beside the polished mahogany dining table. “Man, they really set you guys up, didn’t they?” he asks, looking around.
“Yeah.” I shove my hands in my pockets, waiting. We’ve made up, but I’m not about to pretend we’re friends.
“Okay, cool,” he says, looking around one last time. “I’ll see you downstairs this afternoon.”
I lock the door after him and return to the big bed, stripping down to my T-shirt before I slide between the soft sheets.
When I fall asleep, every dream is about Theo.
Some of the dreams are distressing—in one of them he tells me a marathon is twice the distance I believed it was, and we have to swim to reach the starting line—but most are incredibly pleasant.
Theo’s looking at me in that way of his, as if he’s considering what he could do to me.
Paula’s telling us to kiss and Theo growls, “I can do a lot better than that…” as if he’s going to do a lot, lot better.
And then I wake to noise in the room beside mine and shoot upright.
He’s here. And while I did really like the version of Theo who was growling in my dream, I like the real version who won’t admit he’s attracted to me even more.
I pad to the living room, where he is currently shrugging off his jacket. It’s only been a week, but I’ve missed that face. I’ve missed those serious eyes and that lovely mouth and the way he’s almost always frowning but has to fight a smile when he sees me.
He’s not even fighting it now.
He takes me in, head to toe, and raises a brow. “We’ll need to set some ground rules.”
“Sex but no kissing on the mouth?”
He rubs a hand over his face. “Rebecca.”
I’ve even missed the way he scolds me.
“Sorry,” I chirp without even a hint of remorse. “What ground rules?”
“No jokes like the one you just made, first of all,” he says. “And no wandering around in your underwear.”
I look down at my bare legs and throw my hands in the air. “Fine! Get a good look! You’ll never see my panties again!”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he says. “We’re supposed to be downstairs in ninety minutes. Don’t you need to get ready?”
I turn for the bedroom. “I like the dream version of you better.”
“You’re dreaming about me now?” he asks. “Do I want to know?”
“You were just as boring in my dreams as you are in real life,” I toss over my shoulder.
I shower quickly, then look over the outfit Mindy has chosen for tonight: a gauzy white maxi dress that will be filthy halfway up the long flight of steps near Sacré-Coeur.
A woman arrives to blow out my hair before I have time to put it on.
“You’re an American TV star?” she asks as I take a seat in front of the mirror, tightening my robe.
I shake my head. “No, not at all.”
“You must be someone important to be in this room and married to him,” she says with another smile, nodding in the living room’s direction.
I don’t tell her it’s all fake, obviously, since I can’t, but it suddenly hits me that these things aren’t wholly untrue.
Through some bizarre combination of terrible luck and good luck and laziness and persistence, I’ve managed to position myself as a potential TV star and Theo’s wife.
And, at least temporarily, I’m someone who stays in an expensive suite in Paris and has a stylist do her hair.
I have fallen into this situation, but not entirely. There’s something inside me that contributed, too.
My hair is blown out, the coarse strands transforming to silk before my eyes, and when it’s done, I return to the garment bag.
Theo was right, in Italy. Mindy is not all-knowing. And while I might only be playing the role of a woman competent enough to co-own a large company and star in a show and be married to Theo…
I also am every one of those things.
I push the white maxi dress to the back of the closet and pull on a skirt of my own, along with the Hermès sandals and a linen tank Mindy sent “just in case.”
When I look in the bedroom mirror, a new version of Bex stares back at me. She isn’t the prissy sophisticate Mindy created in Sorrento, but she’s also not the cut-off T-shirt and torn leggings Bex of old. She isn’t a girl who’s fighting back against something.
She’s…growing into something, I think.
I’m still not sure what.
Theo is waiting in the living room. “Much better,” he says.
“I know how much you hate seeing my panties.”
“Despise it,” he agrees. “You ready? Once we step outside this room, we’ve got to act like a real couple.”
I nod and turn for the door. “I’d claim that if I were part of a real couple I’d be more sexually satisfied, but then I remembered the other half of the couple was you.”
He grins. “There’s the Bex I know and…occasionally like.”
We hold hands as we walk down the hall. I contemplate suggesting a kiss in the elevator but I suppose I can’t reasonably claim Kylie is hiding in the walls.
The crew is set up in the lobby and films us walking to the car. Mics are attached as we are taken first to the Rodin Museum’s sculpture garden—where Theo checks his phone so often that Lars threatens to take it away from him—and then Montmartre.
We are unloaded next to a sidewalk café at the base of the steps leading to Sacré-Coeur. Once the guys are ready, we begin climbing—slow going when every third step has a tourist posing for a selfie.
It’s nearly sunset—an ideal time to be at Sacré-Coeur, the highest point in the city—but a less ideal time to film.
I can’t imagine who will be enticed to visit by watching Theo huff in irritation every time a woman is blocking our path while she blows a kiss or flashes a peace sign at some distant audience.
“We should offer more interesting trips,” I announce when we finally reach Square Louise-Michel, the long grassy slope that leads to the basilica.
He raises a brow. “Perhaps you should leave the criticisms of our company for when we’re not being recorded.”
“It’s not a criticism,” I reply, reluctantly climbing the final set of stairs. “But Paris is an easy trip to arrange and so is Sorrento. Families don’t really need help planning things like this.”
Theo’s on his phone, typing. I doubt he even heard me.
We finally finish climbing and turn to take in the view, as instructed by Lars.
From here, we can see half of Paris, cast in dreamy, golden light.
Church spires, more palaces than you can count, the Eiffel Tower.
I’ll admit it’s worth the climb, but I’m too irked by the way Theo’s not listening to appreciate it.