Chapter 9 #4
This kitchen was haunted by casual cruelty.
For whatever reason the topic of marriage was rehashed between us in the car driving up, and what was supposed to be a fun getaway turned into a week of passive aggression and fighting.
Nick once again was insistent that marriage was a sham and the life and love we shared together should have been more than sufficient.
I didn’t care about a wedding at that point.
I wanted to make the symbolic commitment to Nick because of how much I loved him.
I posed the idea of a Vegas elopement, courthouse ceremony, whatever he wanted, but at the end of the day what he wanted was to not marry. At all.
One night after a particularly tense dinner we blew up at each other, my hands braced on the counter as I tried to fight the waves of nausea that coursed over me.
My dinner had been churning in my stomach as I claimed that I saw no reason to keep acting like a wife if Nick wasn’t going to ever make me one.
He berated me for everything I hadn’t been for him.
It was the worst fight we’d had, and definitely heard by everyone in the surrounding cabins.
I emptied each bullet in my holster. I brought up the apartment, we had lived together over two years and he hadn’t once paid rent or even so much as offered.
He said it was because I was the “financially secure” one.
I recalled how most I made most of our dinners, to which he claimed it was because he knew I “loved to cook.” I’d drained myself multiple times, drying out my insides to give him all I could.
Despite all of it, I had no intention of ever leaving him, I’d clung to his empty words and half-assed compliments, as though it was the best I could ever get.
Maybe this was how it was supposed to be.
He was my person and I loved him more than anything, at least I thought so.
Nick’s mind was made up.
He nearly took his car and drove out of camp that night, but before he could even think to look for his keys I was pounding on Sue and Randy’s door, and I slept there for the rest of the week.
Two years removed from the conflict I couldn’t remember now how we even made up. Or why, truthfully. There were probably bits of myself that settled into the cracks in the floorboards here after I shed off another part of me to appease him.
In hindsight it all made sense. He’d started talking to Kaitlyn then and was planning his exit strategy. Too bad it took him only two years to find one.
I rinsed out the now empty bowl and headed back to the beach, and to Evan. He was engrossed in his book, offering me little more than a smile and glance when I sat back down. I took a moment to gaze out at the placid lake before returning to the dark narrative I was in the middle of.
I settled into my seat and noticed Evan grinning lazily at me, now ignoring the book on his lap.
“Hey, you have a little something,” Evan reached his thumb towards my jaw.
As I started to sense the heat from his skin, I jerked back, furiously rubbing the heel of my hand on my chin to wipe off a few droplets of sticky strawberry juice.
“Did I get it?”
Evan lowered his hand, “you did.”
I sunk deeper into my chair and before I could open my book, Evan closed his, keeping his place with his index finger sandwiched between the pages.
“I have to know, do you actively enjoy things this dark?” he mused curiously.
The knife on the book cover glinted in the sunlight. “I do, but I swear I’m not a sadist,” I said defensively.
“No, but,” he stammered a bit, “I just—I didn’t think that this would be someone’s idea of a relaxing beach read.”
“Is the book freaking you out?” I teased.
“Honestly? A little bit.”
I didn’t remember exactly which killer the book covered, I had grabbed it on impulse off the sale shelf months ago when I was browsing a small local bookstore and felt bad that I wasn’t buying anything.
“I’m surprised, you give off the impression that you’re—
Evan sighed. “A bit of a hero type? I’m definitely not.” He drew circles with his fingernail on the arm of the Adirondack chair. “I had something that felt like a close call a few years back,” he continued, focusing his gaze to the water.
This snapped my attention right back towards him. “Oh?”
“Sorry,” he scrubbed his hand down the side of his face. “That is an absurdly heavy thing to drop on someone out of the blue.”
Against my better judgment, against all the walls I’d been trying to build up, I wanted to be a safe person for Evan. Even for a few minutes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I expected a gentle rejection. He’d string words together that implied “no, of course not, we don’t know each other.”
Evan looked at me. Studied me, actually, like he was looking for any doubt in my expression.
“Is there something in the air here? A truth serum coursing through the water? I don’t know what it is about this place that I have the urge to spill my guts to you over and over again. You must already be sick of me.”
“I’m not,” I said quickly. “If you want to tell me, tell me.”
I nodded at him gently, dog-eared the page of my book I’d been stuck on and shut it.
“Since you’re a fan and all,” he started, I rolled my eyes, “I’m sure you know I used to date one of my costars.”
Melinda Brass, dazzling blonde actress who played Lady Juperitus Premble. The two of them had intense on and off-screen chemistry that served as gossip page fodder on a near daily basis. I nodded at him again.
“She stayed on the west coast, while I lived in New York. We finished shooting part of the season and I was flying back to my apartment, where she’d meet me a few days later.
My life was a little more…public then. I didn’t want it to be, but it’s hard when you’re linked to someone like her, you know?
And I loved her back then, I really, really did, so I let myself be in the tabloids because that’s what it took. ”
So Evan was also familiar with losing parts of his true self to a partner. Celebrities, they’re just like us.
He cleared his throat and scratched at his beard.
“I didn’t notice the cab following us until we were a few blocks from my old apartment.
I thought I was going crazy, like the whole celebrity thing finally caught up with me.
It was New York, there were cabs everywhere and they all looked roughly the same.
Then I caught a glance of my driver in the rearview.
You know how there are moments when it hits you that you’re about to experience something that’s going to shift your reality, ever so slightly?
That was this. Someone wiser would probably call it intuition or primal fear.
But in the moment this driver and I both came to the realization we were about to go through some shit.
The driver made a sudden right turn without saying a word, throwing me across the back seat.
The cab still followed us. It was like a full on action movie chase now.
He asked if he should call the police and continue circling the block.
I didn’t know. I had never been in a situation like this.
I panicked. My building was secure, it had to be, obviously.
The rough location had been more or less leaked thanks to a few poorly angled paparazzi photos, but only a handful of friends had my address.
When the driver had stopped at a light, the back door of the cab behind us opened and this woman ran out towards the car. ”
My blood ran cold.
I know this story. I’d heard it discussed in fan forums in a digital game of telephone.
His hands gripped onto the arm of his chair, his foot was tapping anxiously, as though this all was unfolding before him again.
I wanted to apologize. I wanted to hug him.
And then I wanted to apologize for hugging him.
“I’m not a judgemental person,” he released his grip on the chair and waved his hands in front of him.
“I was raised to be better than to make assumptions about someone’s character based on their appearance.
But the moment this woman approached my car the very first thing that jumped into my head was that she looked like a typical Thorndown obsessed fan.
I’d taken photos with hundreds of her clones at the few conventions I’d attended.
She had a purse that I immediately recognized, the emblem of the Rospice clan.
She pounded on the back window and for a few seconds I was relieved that she couldn’t see in.
Her phone was pressed against the glass and her background was a collage of shirtless pictures of Sir Erwyn. ”
“Jesus Christ,” I replied, a knot formed in my stomach. He looked so upset, so uncomfortable with fandom.
So uncomfortable with something that was only a few degrees of separation from me.
“The poor driver began to panic, the light had changed but traffic wasn’t moving.
I was totally frozen. I didn’t think. I rolled down the window enough so I could speak to her.
It’s like she wanted a real life interaction, proof that we had some sort of cosmic connection.
Maybe I was giving her more fuel to her fire, but there was nothing I could do.