Chapter 10
Bex
A few days before the Iceland trip, I’m in a vacant room in Lars’s suite of offices, being told to undress.
Sadly, this edict is not coming from the new husband who kisses incredibly well—I’d refuse, but it’d be nice to be asked. Instead, it comes from a female stylist named Mindy who has been tasked with getting me outfitted for Iceland and has no time for my concerns about modesty.
“Like…everything?” I ask.
“You can leave the panties on,” she replies.
Theo was here yesterday. I have the strangest twinge of jealousy imagining Mindy asking the same thing of him. That we haven’t even been wed for a full week and I’m already jealous and bitter about our lack of a sex life does not bode well.
Mindy glances over at me, now shivering and mostly nude, and holds out a cashmere sweater and a really cute jacket with a faux-fur hood.
“You’ve got the perfect frame for TV,” she says.
Before I can allow myself to feel flattered, she continues.
“It’s terrible to say but underweight looks so much better on camera. ”
So…not especially flattering after all.
Does Theo’s complication look good on camera? Probably not. But that just means she looks good in real life, which is ultimately more important. I hate that I care. That fucking kiss has ruined me.
That fucking kiss makes me want to know what else he does well.
· · ·
It takes about six hours to get from Newark to Reykjavík, and they’re basically the worst six hours: a red-eye that leaves at eight thirty at night and lands at two thirty in the morning, except because of the time change it’s not two thirty there…
it’s six thirty. Daytime. And thanks to the genius planning of one Theodore Roger Porter, we’ll be jumping right into filming from the moment we land.
I’m already resentful of this as I walk up to him at our departure gate. And I resent how good he looks in jeans and a quarter-zip sweatshirt when I’m trying to stay mad at him. I’d convinced myself his hotness was suit specific, and I was incorrect.
God, how sexually deprived must I be that the hint of his T-shirt is making my stomach flutter?
“I didn’t know you owned jeans,” I say.
“I didn’t know you were capable of making it to the airport on time,” he replies.
I raise my eyebrows. “Wow.”
The color drains from his face. “Rebecca, god, I wasn’t thinking…I didn’t mean that. I just meant, you know…fuck.”
Theo is usually so smugly self-assured and disdainful. It’s absolutely delicious watching him helplessly fumble, guilt ridden.
“Some Starbucks would make me feel better,” I whisper. “Venti strawberry acaí, light ice. A scone if they have them, but not vanilla bean.”
For one panicked moment he’s considering it before he rolls his eyes. “You’re fucking with me.”
I crack my first smile. “It was so easy.”
When we get onto the plane, he hoists my bag into the overhead compartment without being asked and carefully folds my coat before he stashes that too. I tell myself not to get accustomed to these niceties.
“Are you going to try to sleep?” he asks as he buckles in.
I shake my head. “I can’t sleep on planes. You?”
He raises a shoulder. “I’ve basically been making this trip weekly, one direction or another, for a while now. You learn to sleep where you can.”
He’s been taking a long flight back and forth from the UK to the U.S., missing out on his actual life, on his friends and the complication, in order to step into my father’s role while I’ve been eating donut holes and shouting, “Don’t marry Jax!” at this girl on Vanderpump Rules.
No wonder he was trying to condense this trip into a day and a half.
“We should hire someone to manage the U.S. office,” I tell him.
He runs a hand over his face. “I’m interviewing candidates. With all the travel for the show, managing both offices is going to be impossible.”
I guess I could offer to help, but since I already know exactly the sort of caustic response I’ll get in return, I don’t.
Besides, I still have several seasons of Vanderpump Rules to get through.
“Speaking of travel,” I add, “if we get to the hotel tomorrow and there’s some kind of fucked-up one-bed situation, you’re sleeping on the floor.”
He raises a brow. “I’m not entirely clear on what a ‘one-bed situation’ is.”
“It’s a staple of romance novels. You know. ‘Oh, this hotel only has one twin bed left, so you two attractive strangers will have to share.’ ”
“Why wouldn’t the attractive strangers just go to another hotel?”
I shrug. “Loads of reasons. Maybe it’s the only hotel—”
“What kind of town only has one hotel? And has a room with one twin bed? That’s ridiculous.”
“Or all the hotels are sold out.”
“If the first hotel you’ve checked has an available room, are you really going to assume there isn’t another hotel with a room available? You can’t expect me to believe that two reasonable people with no connection to each other aren’t going to investigate before they agree.”
“God, you’re so tiresome,” I sigh. “Anyhow, my point is that if it somehow happens, you’re taking the floor. It isn’t going to turn into some deal where we’re both sharing a small bed and nude.”
“Why would we be nude?” he asks. “This can’t really be a plot point.”
“Maybe it seems weird to you because the British all sleep in nightshirts.”
He nods. “Well, that or wizarding attire. But I’m not sure why you think I’d give you the bed. I imagine you’ve discerned by now that I’m not much of a gentleman.”
There’s a hint of a growl to his voice as he says “not much of a gentleman.” I’d have thought nothing of it before that kiss. Now it’s got my thighs clenching. “Well, obviously I’m the star of the show.”
He raises a brow. “How do you figure?”
“I lost three people, so my story is more tragic.”
“My mother has skin cancer,” he says. “I mean, it’s the common kind and entirely curable, but you never know.”
“Ah. Well, if she dies, your story would be more tragic than it currently is, but still not as tragic as mine.”
He laughs as he closes his eyes and leans his head back against the seat. “I’m glad we’ve found a way to make even our grief competitive.”
· · ·
He sleeps soundly for most of the flight. I know this because I spend several hours staring at him.
He has tiny flecks of silver along his jawline, which of course leads me to examine his dark brown hair, where I also note the occasional gray. It occurs to me for the first time that while I’m far too young to be married in real life…he’s the perfect age.
Is he just not interested in marriage? Or is he waiting on that girl, the “complicated” one?
When we land, he’s adorably sleepy, unfolding his long frame and rising to get our bags. I’m cranky, swaying with exhaustion and bitterly cold. My teeth are chattering by the time we get in line for customs, and we’re not even outside yet.
“You’re cold?” he asks. “It’s seventy degrees in here.”
I shrug. “It’s just a thing that happens when I’m tired. It’s called downregulation. Under stress, your body starts shutting down to prioritize the most necessary functions.”
He sighs heavily, as if exasperated by the way my body is doing exactly what it’s meant to. “If only all that useless trivia you know could have helped you back when you were in school,” he says. “You might have finished your degree.”
“Ouch. Jessie? Is that you?” I ask, poking him. “Are you controlling Theo’s body? Make him punch himself in the junk so I know for sure.”
He laughs. “Were you always this strange?”
“Pretty much,” I reply. “But the dead family doesn’t help.”
Our passports are stamped, and then we walk side by side down a long, hardwood-floored hall toward the exit. I mentally prepare myself for the first moments of filming. Lars warned us that the crew will be waiting just inside the front doors and will be shooting as we approach.
“You saw the text from Lars?” he grunts.
A real couple talks and holds hands, Lars added in case it was unclear.
My shoulders sag. “I did.”
With the heaviest of sighs, his massive hand folds around mine, and we continue toward the exit.
I glance up. “What should we talk about?”
He shakes his head. “You’ve never been at a loss for words before, Rebecca.”
I can see the crew assembled, just in front of the glass doors. The cameraman is approaching with a lighting guy moving alongside him. The crowd parts and turns to see what all the fuss is about.
I force myself to smile. We aren’t wearing mics, so it doesn’t really matter what I say, as long as I manage to make him uncomfortable. “I think I’m about to explode from lack of sex. I never travel with a vibrator because I’m worried TSA will—”
“I swear to god, Rebecca, if you continue down this path, I’ll—”
“Refuse to perform your marital duties?” I ask. “You’re already doing that.”
“I could start,” he says, and for the briefest second as he glances down at me there’s a flash of something in his gaze. The same thing I saw after our wedding-day kiss.
That weird muscle at the base of my stomach, one I didn’t even know existed until a few weeks ago, squeezes tight.
“You wish,” I reply, but it’s pretty halfhearted.
The cameraman moves backward as we approach, and I wonder what that interaction just looked like. If we appeared to be bickering, or if we looked like a couple who were dying to fuck.
It kind of felt like it was both those things.
We push through the doors, and I blink at Iceland’s weak early April light.
It’s surreal—daylight when my body still insists it’s the middle of the night.
I’m not as tired as I was inside but I’m not entirely myself either.
We are loaded into a van, where a driver has coffee and croissants waiting for us.
I shove a croissant in my mouth pretty much whole, and then chug the coffee, dribbling some down the front of my jacket.
“You eat like someone in a contest,” Theo says with disdain, returning his coffee to the cupholder. I’m too fatigued to come up with a way to insult him in turn.
Lars pops his head in to introduce the people he’s brought with him in the van behind ours—an unusually small crew, as the situation demanded it: the fewer people who know this is fake, the better.
“I’ll be directing, as you know, and Paula is the assistant director, so she handles all logistics.
LJ is the cinematographer, Jon is on sound, and Sean is assistant camera, DIT, and grip when we need lighting. ”
He doesn’t explain what a DIT is, nor does he specify roles for Katrina and Caden, but I assume that Katrina is the PA and Caden is simply here to annoy me.
“Oh,” he adds as the crew disperses, “and the volcano has changed some things, so we’re shooting at Sky Lagoon near Reykjavík instead of the Blue Lagoon.”
Which means that instead of going right around the fucking corner, we’re adding drive time to a trip that was already way, way too full. I know he said it was the volcano, but I still choose to blame Theo.
With that established, we hit the highway and Theo is once again sound asleep. I eat a second croissant, staring at the barren landscape around us.
My god, his sleep breathing annoys me. It’s too loud, too calm, too smugly pleased with itself for functioning autonomously.
It’s salt in the wound, the way he sleeps so easily when I can’t sleep at all.
It means he’ll be fresh as a daisy when we film, sounding all smart and British while I stumble around like a thick-footed toddler, yawning and weeping about the cold.
I lean my head against his chest. “Stop breathing,” I whisper.
“No,” he replies.
Alas. I tried.
There’s too much fog to see the mountains at all, and the ground is still covered in snow. It should be Bronwyn here instead of me, bored and a little depressed by the view. It should be Bronwyn wondering if it’s all volcanic rock under that snow, or mythically green in summer.
It’s appalling that it’s not her. It’s equally appalling that I’m still capable of complaining about my fatigue and the view when I should be desperately grateful simply to be here to experience any of it.
I miss my father, but it’s the way I miss Bronwyn that bothers me most. Perhaps because I didn’t expect it.
She was the favorite, and it was wearying, watching that play out again and again.
So wearying that I never admitted something: she was my favorite too.
And now I’ll never get a chance to tell her.