Chapter Thirty-Eight The Heart You’re Dealt
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Heart You’re Dealt
And that was how I found out he got the part he’d auditioned for. I went into the subway bathroom and sobbed for half an hour. I never went to St. George again. I caught the subway from Museum instead.
The second time I saw him was on the cover of Entertainment Canada with the headline “Sexy Ugly Is Back!”
Fuck whoever wrote that.
Yeah, I bought a copy. I wanted to see what else the dumbass who wrote the article said.
Plus, it had a photo of Eddie on the cover.
He looked as sweet as he had in his honey commercial.
So what if he was posing with two people I didn’t know: a dark-haired, bearded guy who looked too cool for school and a blonde woman who looked like she should be teaching at one. I cut both of them out of the picture.
The article was stupid. It kept making a big thing out of Eddie being bi, then it called him “cagey” and “prickly” because he refused to say who he was dating.
Which gave me hope that maybe he was single.
I read the article, searching for clues about his personal life, but he didn’t give anything away.
His show started airing on TV. I knew they were filming it on campus. I even knew where they were filming, because they’d give us a notice when it would be anywhere near my lab building. Once, when they did, I looked out the window, but I couldn’t see him. There were too many people.
And, yeah, I watched the show. Bex told me it was a bad idea, but I needed to see him, to see he was okay.
At first, it was...I couldn’t describe it.
I’d been looking at old photos of him, and I didn’t have that many, but this was him moving and talking.
I knew he was acting. He didn’t quite sound or look the same, but it was still him.
Sometimes I’d catch little glimpses of the real him, the way he blinked when he was processing something, the way he put his hand in his pocket or ducked his head to look at someone.
He was still there. He was okay. I could relax and stop worrying about him.
I didn’t need to keep watching. But, yeah, I did anyway.
The show was about a first-year student, played by him, dating two other students at the same time, a man and a woman.
Not just dating them. Fucking them. The show was pretty explicit.
This was worse than watching Wanton Town because there were multiple sex scenes, and he was obviously in love with his costars.
I kept reminding myself he was acting. But I’d forgotten what a good actor he was, and watching him was torture.
It was even worse watching him having sex with his male costar, because that guy treated him badly, hurt him on purpose, and Eddie’s character kept coming back for more.
Because he was in a major TV show, there were articles about him everywhere online, which I read obsessively. Then one day, I saw the photo.
The caption read “Costars Eddie McCreevy and Joel Pettifer share an intimate moment off the set of The Heart You’re Dealt.”
The photo was of him with the dark-haired man from the subway poster—Joel, apparently—standing outside a restaurant.
Joel was leaning down and saying something to Eddie, because of course he was tall, and Eddie was laughing, and Joel’s arm was around him, familiar and relaxed.
It was acting. Except when it wasn’t. I remembered what he’d told me about his costar in Wanton Town—Edgar.
How he’d done whatever the hell Eddie’s kink was and gotten him off.
Eddie banged his costars sometimes. I guess this was one of those times.
Whatever he told me about his preferences, I’d seen Joel with his shirt off on TV, and he was ripped.
I took off my engagement ring and strung it on a necklace with his wooden ring, and I wore them under my shirt so no one could see. I should have put them away or got rid of them. I couldn’t.
I kept watching the show after I saw that photo.
I guess maybe to hammer it home that he’d moved on.
Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t know I still spent every day wanting him, regretting that I’d betrayed him.
Even if he did know, why would he care? I told myself I was lucky I’d had him for as long as I did.
And then episode 8 aired. They put a content warning at the beginning, but I watched it anyway.
And in that episode, someone slipped something into Joel’s drink, and he had some kind of drug-induced psychosis, and he sexually assaulted Eddie’s character.
Watching that fucked me up. I had to turn it off.
I went to the bathroom and retched and lay on the bathroom floor crying and shaking.
I kept telling myself it wasn’t real. That he was okay. But it had looked so real.
I still had his number. I wanted to call him and make sure he was okay. But I stopped myself, and I called my therapist instead and had an emergency session the next morning.
And I never watched his show again.
But even though I stopped watching, people talked about it at work.
People talked about it at the subway station, on the street, everywhere.
Royce talked about it constantly. I’d never told them Eddie’s last name, so he didn’t know what he was doing to me.
It seemed like everyone was just discovering how amazing he was. I always knew.