ELEVEN
Finn
“Haven’t I shown you I care?” I hiss at Maeve. We’re sitting in the studio waiting for Renee to arrive. “I have done everything I could think of. Not call. Call. Not talk about what’s off-limits. Try to apologize. But Maeve, I do love you! I care! Just look at me.”
Since coming in today Maeve has completely iced me. She’ll only answer me when I speak directly to her, and won’t make eye contact. Everything felt so normal at the gala, and then when we left, somehow me getting her her favorite bagels set her off? I don’t get her. She is so much harder to understand than other women, and usually I love that about her, but right now it’s killing me. Can’t she do the bare minimum and communicate? For god’s sake, she’s a therapist and I’m literally begging her to tell me what to do to make things right between us.
“No. We need to keep things professional.”
“Was that what we were doing when you fell asleep in my lap at the after-party?”
My tone is harsh, and I regret it as soon as I say it. But Maeve’s eyes flash, and she actually engages with me, so maybe it’s better that I said it. I’d rather her be screaming at me than ignoring me. “That was a momentary lapse of judgement. My sincere apologies. Next time I’ll make sure to vacate the position for Cassidy, or some model.”
I triple check my mic pack to make sure that we’re not recording. “ How can you discard our entire friendship just because I fucking dated Cassidy?”
“ I am not the one who discarded our friendship. And I told you I’m not talking about this. And you know what? Fuck you, Finn. Fuck. You. I know not getting exactly what you want is a new experience for you. But you can’t just have me and discard me like I’m nothing. Go fuck yourself. Or fuck literally anyone else. Whatever, I don’t care anymore.”
I shake my head. “I can’t believe you.” That’s how all our friends saw me. As some sort of fuckboy, because I took a lot of different girls out on dates. They assumed because I’m me I couldn’t actually be interested in finding someone I connect with, and that I must be sleeping with all of them. I wasn’t, and it hurts to hear Maeve make me out to be a horrible guy when she actually knows me. I was just trying to navigate a complicated situation and be fucking happy. Being a rich celeb doesn’t magically make you feel fulfilled. I needed something more, and I thought that something was the show. But, as it turns out, it’s not the show, although it is better than my finance job, so what made me happy for those two years must have been Maeve. Maeve, who has always seen me for who I actually am and now thinks I’m trash. I open my mouth, ready to say who knows what, because this just pisses me off, but I slam my jaw shut when the door opens.
Renee walks into the studio in a rush of fruity perfume, with a tray of iced coffees labeled with our names. “I grabbed these from your helper! I’m so excited to be doing this.” She sets the tray on the table. I met her briefly at the gala and at the after-party, but spent last night watching her show and YouTube videos of her Bachelorette highlights to try to familiarize myself with her. “I feel like I’m basically your first guest, since Evangeline is family.”
“Ah, I buy that.” I sound tense. Maeve, on the other hand, is smiling angelically like she doesn’t have a care in the world. She’s the one accusing me of not caring, but she turns feelings on and off like a switch whenever something is work related.
Maeve gets up and hugs Renee, helps her put on the lav mic under her shirt while I avert my eyes, and instructs her on where to sit. By the time we’ve all settled in and I’m getting up to hit Record on the cameras, I’m still reeling from our conversation. Maeve removed the duo shot from last week, and so now we just have four cameras, three for our close-ups and one wide shot of all of us. She also got us even more upgraded lav mics, ones that attach to our shirts with a tiny pin instead of a clip and are virtually invisible.
I launch into the intro this week, since we typically rotate. “We are back again with another episode of Tell Me How You Really Feel , and we have our next guest, Renee Jones. Renee here is a pro at telling people how she actually feels, whether it’s men she’s axing from The Bachelorette , or her fiancé, whom she proposed to just this past month.”
“Oooh, are you introducing me or roasting me?” she teases. “Thank you both so much for having me. When I say I screamed when I saw Maeve in the bathroom at the Met Gala …”
Maeve jumps in. “I can confirm. I had the words ‘oral sex’ ringing in my ears all night.”
“How do I get into the ladies’ bathrooms? Sounds like a party! We are not having those types of convos at the urinals.”
“That’s for sure,” Maeve snarks. “Renee, let’s dive right into it. In the Met Gala bathroom you told me that I would be getting a fruit basket from your fiancé because of our viral third episode, which dives into oral sex. And I have to admit, Finn might be the one who’s actually due the Edible Arrangements in this case.”
I pretend to dust off my shoulders. “I’m doing the good work, what can I say.”
“No, actually,” Renee interjects gleefully. “His tips in episode three were great, don’t get me wrong. That position shift to go at her clit sideways? Game-changing. But it wasn’t game-changing until after I listened to episode seventy-one, where Maeve talks about the O face.”
“Tell me more.” We’ve gotten a lot of compliments on that third episode. It went viral for a reason, because no one ever breaks down exactly how to go down on someone, and a lot of people are left fumbling in the dark. But this I’ve never heard before.
“Well, basically, I couldn’t come. My girlfriend is amazing in bed, but I was too self-conscious about how I looked to actually get there. As everyone and their mother knows, I was a virgin when I was on The Bachelorette . I was saving the goods for marriage, and my parents, bless their hearts in Alabama, believe that because I’m with Candice, I am still a virgin. They haven’t gotten the memo that there’s more types of sex than penetrative. But basically, even though it felt good, I just couldn’t relax because I was so worried about looking cute. Like Maeve said, my whole life I was expected to look good for men. Somehow that transferred over, and so even though Candice is a woman, I still was trying to perform, rather than be in my own pleasure. And I didn’t even realize it until Maeve talked about it in that episode.”
“I remember that one. Vividly. I changed what I do because of it, that’s for sure,” I comment.
Maeve nods. “For anyone who hasn’t listened to that episode yet, I basically begged men not to stare us down while they go down on us. I want their eyes shut or glued to my nether regions so I can come without worrying about having the perfect cute O face. I only feel comfortable enough to look completely gross and not feel self-conscious about it with like six people, and a new partner is not one of them. I want to look cute for them and don’t want to be in my head about it!”
“Who are the six?” Renee pipes up.
Maeve blushes. “My parents, two, my three sisters, makes five …” She hesitates, the pause loaded. She never said who the six were during the episode, and I hadn’t thought to ask if it was a literal number. My heart rate spikes as I wait to see who it is. Her high school boyfriend? Some guy from college? “And the sixth is Finn. I tend to look my most grimy around him, when we’re editing or just hanging.”
This isn’t true anymore. The only time I’ve seen her without makeup these past six months was during the Met Gala prep. And she’s been wearing nice clothes like armor around me, instead of her usual Tell Me How You Really Feel sweat sets.
Renee cocks an eyebrow, so I jump in before she can pop a question we don’t want to answer. “Wait. So, Renee, why is your fiancé the one sending the fruit basket here?”
Renee tilts her head theatrically and smirks. “Because now she doesn’t have to have a complex over not making me come. Don’t worry, world; she’s great. No orgasm gap here.”
“That’s what we like to hear!” Maeve claps lightly. “Now, Renee, you mentioned that your family has some views on sex and sexuality that are different from yours. What was it like to go from being the bachelorette and looking for a husband to proposing to your wife?”
Renee takes a long sip of her coffee. “You all should drink up too. This is going to take a while to unpack.”
I laugh, and Maeve nods encouragingly. “We’re all ears.”
“It made falling for Candice really confusing. It took me months to realize what I felt for her was something more than wanting to be her best friend. That maybe I’ve had a few crushes that I thought were just wanting to be best friends with people, because my upbringing raised me to think that being gay was for other people. Or that because I genuinely liked guys, I couldn’t also have the same intensity of feelings for a woman.”
Maeve spends a while unpacking feelings with Renee, and while I jump in here and there, I can’t help but be distracted by the situation between Maeve and me. She doesn’t feel comfortable around me anymore. At the gala I thought I should just jump on any chance I got to progress things with her: holding hands, dancing, cuddling. But I broke her trust, and it seems like doing those things makes her more overwhelmed and pissed at me later. I want to convince her that I really do care. But maybe the only way to do that is by taking a step back and showing her that we don’t have to be the same as we were before, so intimate, for us to be close. I’ll respect her space and try to take things slower, rebuild the friendship, instead of trying to race ahead and pick up where I fucked up.
We record with Renee for over two hours, but the time flies by. “Can I come over to edit it with you?” I ask Maeve as we’re packing up.
She shoots me a withering glance. “No. I’ll get Leo to drop a hard drive off at your place after I cut it together. Send me a timecode if there’s something you want to change.”
Streamify is way too paranoid and doesn’t want us upload the footage to Frame.io, which is what we would usually use to share episodes if one of us was out of town or something. But leave it to Maeve to find a way to still make sure we can edit separately. I take a deep breath. I want to fix things, but she’s being so dismissive of me, and it really pisses me off. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just edit together?”
“Um, no. It’s actually faster for me to do it solo. Find a hobby, Finn, that’s not watching me edit.” She walks out without a backward glance, and for the second time today I feel like I got punched in the gut.
On my drive home her words are echoing through my head. Ever since the podcast stopped being something we really did together , I’ve felt untethered. Getting to do something more creative like that was a relief after trying to make the finance world work, but it’s not truly fun when I can’t be collaborative with Maeve. Maeve has been my direction the past two years. But I can’t be carried along by her momentum if she won’t let me into the boat with her, and I miss having a creative outlet that feels safe.
My parents are constantly trying to pull me over to their next project. But I can’t do acting. I read the scripts Cassidy has been sending me in secret, and before our relationship blew up in my face, I used to be her scene partner on FaceTime. And I loved it. Ever since that first movie when I was little, I have loved acting. It makes me feel lit up all over; it’s an adrenaline rush. The only thing I’ve felt that parallels it is the spark I have when I’m with Maeve. But I can’t handle getting stalked by paparazzi twenty-four hours a day again. Having men banging on my car windshield and chasing my car. That experience as a child was excruciating, and just thinking about it makes my palms sweat and my throat close up. Acting isn’t worth everything that comes with it.
I need to fix things with Maeve because being with her, doing the show with her for real … I know it can be enough. It has to be.