Chapter Eleven
He doesn’t come to the barbecue, and I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. He’s made it very clear he’s antisocial and perfectly happy with that. Except he doesn’t seem happy, not to me. Maybe I’m just nitpicking him because I’m in a state of anticipatory dread over tonight’s meeting about A Very Desert Christmas and all I can think about is ... if there will be more details about Christopher and his impending invasion on the town.
I’m fizzing with adrenaline by the time I pull into the little community meeting hall parking lot.
I take my seat next to Sylvia and smile. I’m still trying to look completely unaffected, even if I’m only marginally unaffected.
Right. You’re definitely completely fine and not spiraling.
I feel this should not be deemed a spiral, since I’m at the meeting, I got my word count today, and I saw to my duties at the motel.
I’m functioning. So how can I be spiraling?
The truth is, I was fine before I got here. Really. I’ve been distracted.
The first portion of the meeting is dedicated to schematics. The schematics of everything being laid out in our venue. I planned this, so I’m more than familiar, and everything looks great, with every stall spoken for, and presales of tickets are still going at a brisk pace.
“The children’s choir is doing a fantastical job,” Reigna says when she gets up and it’s her time to speak. “But that’s not my surprise for you tonight.”
She spreads her arms wide, the caftan she’s wearing billowing around her like wings.
As if by the magic of her theatrics, a screen begins to lower from the ceiling behind her. There’s a presentation, clearly.
Her theatrics really are wasted on a town this size.
They are a spectacle far too large to be contained in this room.
“We have a Zoom call scheduled,” she says.
My heart scurries into my throat.
“With Christopher Weaver.” There’s a smattering of applause in the room, and I’m frozen. I haven’t seen Chris in any capacity where he could also see me for three years. Yes, I have seen him on national commercials, and in promos for Christmas movies. But his twinkling blue eyes can’t see me in those situations.
As Reigna begins to open her computer, as she clicks the link, my heart goes into a free fall.
What if he thinks I’m the reason he got the job?
I am undone by this.
I don’t know what to do. I want to run; I want to hide.
I’m hoping Chris’s vision is based on movement and if I freeze, he won’t see me. If I run, I’ll only create a bigger commotion, that I’m sure about. I barely breathe.
He won’t see me.
He spent months looking through me when we lived in the same house.
I hope he’ll look through me now.
Reigna clicks the link, and I curl my hands underneath my chair.
Sylvia looks at me. “Amelia. Are you okay?”
“Starstruck,” I say, the word getting stuck halfway up my throat.
In this instance, the lie feels a little bit more painful than the truth. At least to my pride.
“I don’t blame you,” she says. “He’s very handsome.”
“Just ... so handsome,” I say.
I wish I were anywhere else. I wish a hole in the floor would open up and swallow me. This is an extremely dramatic reaction considering I was thinking I was somehow just going to get to the end of the month without dealing with this. Without talking to anyone about it, without admitting what the situation was.
But this is unexpected. I had no time to prepare for it. I was prepared for the fact his name might be brought up tonight, but I was not prepared to see him.
Even with hundreds of miles between us.
The camera flashes on the screen, and there he is, sitting at his desk, thankfully in a house that isn’t familiar.
I’m so grateful we decided to sell.
If I had to see him sitting back in our place, it might have tossed me into an uncanny valley I couldn’t scrape myself out of.
“Hi, everybody,” he says, his smile wide, a Seacrest grin that’s nearly painful to look at directly.
Everyone says hi, and I don’t know how to react in a way that isn’t self-conscious. I feel like a small burrowing animal that’s been wrenched mercilessly out of its hole. I don’t know what to do. Pull the fire alarm. Play dead. Try to blend in.
I opt for trying to blend in.
“Thank you so much, Christopher,” Reigna says in her booming theatrical voice. “We are so appreciative that you have agreed to do a reading of the Christmas story for our event. Ever since we put your face and name up on the website, our ticket sales have skyrocketed.”
I would love to see the demographic information on that. I’m quite certain that there are a lot of women from the ages of twenty to eighty-five who love clean, romantic Christmas movies and who are very excited to see him. I can’t blame them. Looking at him now, I’m reminded of his appeal.
Honestly, seeing him in movies doesn’t do him justice.
He’s not a great actor. He’s charismatic.
When he gets into casting rooms, he puts people under a spell. He’s better in rooms than he is on sets, and in all the time since I’ve seen him, I’d forgotten.
“I’m really excited to get to come out and help,” he says, sounding down to earth and accessible.
“Maybe you should tell us a little bit about yourself,” Reigna says.
“Well,” he says. “I live part-time in LA and part-time in Vancouver. Most of the movies I make are shot in Canada. I have two dogs.”
He hates dogs. Or he did when we were together. This makes me angrier than it should.
“And I live with my fiancée, Natalie.”
Natalie is not the woman he cheated on me with. For some reason, I thought his life had only gone on in terms of his career. I saw him taking off in Christmas films, and I actually haven’t thought about his personal life even a little. I don’t want to be with Christopher. At all.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m prepared to sit here and hear about Natalie.
“We’re expecting a baby in a couple of months.”
Something inside me breaks and drifts away. Like a piece of iceberg falling into the sea. Emotional climate change brought on by his presence that I can’t fight.
I knew he was out there living. I didn’t think about it. I was focused on myself and my new life. It never occurred to me he might get married. It never occurred to me he would be having a baby. He’s been building a career. He’s so much more successful than he was when we were together—why isn’t that all of it?
Why is there this too?
I can’t breathe past it.
Like magnets drawn to the pain he causes me, right in that moment, his eyes connect with mine.
Absurdly, I feel it, I know that he sees me. Even though I know we are just a small bubble to him on this outward-facing laptop, I know he sees me.
I willed him to look at me with the force of my reaction, even though it was entirely nonverbal, even though I was motionless.
We were together for so many years, and right now those years are larger than all the years since.
He clears his throat, and his eyes get a faraway look, and I can tell he’s focusing on the bigger picture now and pretending he didn’t see me.
“Wonderful!” Reigna says.
They continue to have light banter, and maybe I’m on another planet.
Maybe I’m dead.
I’m not certain.
I just know that my hands are sweaty, and my lips feel cold. As soon as the Zoom call ends, the meeting adjourns, and I stand up quickly, ready to leave. Needing to leave.
“Do you need to go now?” Sylvia asks. “I wanted to ask you about—”
“I have to go check on something back at the motel. There was a ... an electrical problem. In one of the rooms. Room thirty-two,” I say, because all I can think of right now is Nathan and the power strip. And that he almost kissed me. While Christopher has a whole baby on the way. I have nearly kissed Nathan once. At least in my mind.
I’m not sure what hurts about this. I just know that it does. It isn’t regret. I don’t want Christopher. I don’t want his life.
But it’s something. The feeling that I missed a step somewhere and I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to find it.
“Oh. Did you have the electrical redone when you did your remodel?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t really have the money for that. Anyway. I need to go back.”
I walk out to the parking lot quickly, and I block greetings like a champion, waving but not inviting further conversation. I’m shaking when I start the engine. By the time I’m halfway to the Pink Flamingo I realize I have no music on. I didn’t plug my phone in. I’m just driving in the silence, letting the sound of my tires on the road and the wind whipping past the vehicle fill the car with a monotonous hum and rattle through my body.
I pull into my parking spot and get out. I’m walking into the courtyard when my phone rings. I look down at the screen.
Chris.
It still says his name just like that. Not Christopher Weaver. Or That Asshole You Used to Date, or Don’t Answer, which would have been helpful.
Chris.
Like he calls me all the time. Like he’s the only Chris it could possibly be.
“ Fuck. Fucking. Fuck. ”
“Are you okay?”
I whirl around, and there’s Nathan. Standing there in front of the pool gate, looking genuinely concerned, but I realize I just screamed obscenities right in the open in my own motel, which is a family establishment.
I can’t even be cool. I can’t keep up my mystique. I can’t lie.
“My ex is calling me,” I say.
“Are you going to answer it?” he asks, crossing his arms over his broad chest.
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to talk to him so much that I moved to the desert. So there you go.”
“Why is he calling you?”
“You know, I’m not even sure you would believe the story if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“Why?”
“Are you going to tell anybody else?”
It kills me that he knows I won’t. “No,” I say. “I don’t want to tell anyone else. I’m not even really sure I want to tell you.”
He stands there, looking at me, knowing, clearly, that I’m going to give in. I’m going to tell him.
“You know we’re doing this Christmas thing.”
“You mentioned that.”
“He is going to be a featured speaker.”
“Why?”
The logical question. Nathan is very good with logical questions.
“Because,” I say. “He is the prince of cheesy Christmas movies. In fact, quite literally. He played a prince in one.”
I’ve succeeded in shocking him. His face, normally either a scowl or carefully blank, actually shifts.
“Oh no,” he says.
“Yes.”
“He’s an actor,” Nathan says. I can’t tell if that’s an accusation or a statement of understanding.
“Yes,” I say. “He’s an actor. That’s ... how I know him. I used to ... I was a writer. I mean, for TV. Sometimes I did adaptations. Mostly romance novels into movies.”
Now he knows not just my name but all these other things about me.
I feel like I’ve lost whatever game we’ve been playing. If it was a game. Though, I can’t really be upset about it, because I was about to lose my mind, and I really needed to tell someone.
I don’t need to tell someone everything. In fact, I actively do not want people to know everything. But I needed to tell someone this, because clearly, I’m not handling it.
“Okay,” he says.
“It was a very bad breakup. He was cheating, and I caught him. In our house. You know, it’s so much more common for people to catch their partner cheating because of technology. Sloppy texting. Tracking someone’s phone. Dick pics, even,” I say. “It felt so analog to actually walk into my own bedroom and find him with another woman.”
“Holy shit,” he says. I’m gratified by his response. “Why would he do something that stupid?”
“In total fairness, he thought I was on a plane. My flight got canceled. Like right before I was supposed to get on it. I didn’t text him. I just went home. Because I thought ... I don’t know, I actually thought he was going to an audition. I wasn’t trying to catch him. I wasn’t suspicious. At all.”
In truth, I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time. I wasn’t thinking about him. That was another problem with the relationship, but it didn’t justify his cheating.
“And you didn’t tell anybody here that he was your ex-boyfriend.”
“No. Because when I decided to be done with it, I really wanted to leave it behind. Really, really badly. I didn’t want it to follow me. I didn’t want him to follow me, you know? Only now he is. He was on a Zoom call tonight in the meeting. He saw me. ”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Which is why he’s now calling me. Likely because he wants to know if I’m responsible for him coming here. Do you know what—that is actually the most embarrassing thing. The most embarrassing thing is that he’s going to think I wanted him to come here. It’s too big of a coincidence to just be a coincidence.”
“Why don’t you call him back? Tell him you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“That’s even more embarrassing.”
“How?”
“That lets him know I’m obsessing about it.”
“You are obsessing about it,” he points out.
“What would you do in this situation?” I realize this is an absurd question. I doubt this man has ever had his heart broken. I bet he has broken hearts multiple times, but I bet he isn’t the one sitting around feeling sad. Or, even if he were, I bet the people he’s been with wouldn’t assume he was sitting around alone. He doesn’t look like the kind of man who would ever be alone at night unless he wanted to be.
Granted, I have a front-row view to the fact he does seem to want to be. Often enough.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t have any relationships that ended like that.”
“Lucky you,” I say.
He huffs a laugh. A reluctant smile pulls at the corner of his mouth. “I know a little bit about pride, though.”
“Okay then. Understand it from that perspective. This is possibly fatally damaging to my pride.”
“Who is he? I want to look him up.”
“No,” I say.
“He isn’t going to know,” he says.
“But I’ll know. I’ll know that we stood here and googled him.” I have kept myself from doing that for all these years because it’s just too sad. He might never know, but I’d know.
“And you haven’t done that?”
“No.” I flash back to the things Chris revealed during the Zoom meeting.
Had I googled him, maybe I would’ve known all of that.
I keep myself on restriction with things like that. It’s respectful. Or maybe it’s just protective.
“Come on, I can figure it out by looking at the website for the event.”
“I didn’t know that you are evil,” I tell him. He’s already got his phone out of his pocket, and he’s looking up the A Very Desert Christmas event. I don’t even know what’s happening right now. He is willingly engaging in conversation, and he is pushing for information.
“I’m appalled,” I say.
“Are you?”
“Yes. I believe in digital boundaries.”
“Is that right?” He looks up at me. “Amelia.”
He says my name, and it hits me like an arrow.
“That is true,” I say, suddenly feeling warm. I clear my throat and look away. “I have ... I have an idea.”
“Oh?”
I decide I have to stop standing in the courtyard talking to him where he can just leave. I have to stop doing this here. Here, we talk, he retreats. Here, we have a well-worn thing. I need to change the script slightly.
“I want to tell you more about this. I want to ... Let’s go out.”
“What?”
“Desierto Encanto is less than a quarter mile down the road, and it’s a good bar. We can walk there. We can ... have a conversation. I need a drink.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t really expect him to agree. Now he has, and I realize I have myself a date.
Kind of.