Chapter Theo
Theo
We’ve just pulled up to Sky Lagoon, which is apparently where I’m going to have to interact with Rebecca…in swimwear. Rebecca, who loves talking about vibrators and fucking glass bottles and had no issue with the fact that I saw the underside of her breasts.
What could possibly go wrong?
Inside, I’m directed to a locker room that’s far more upscale than I’d expected—spotless slate floors and pale wood lockers that you operate using your wristband.
I shower as instructed, don my swim trunks, and walk out into a little cave that leads to the lagoon.
When I step down into the waist-high, piping-hot water, the crew is already there, attired in swimwear, equipment held aloft.
The day is so gray and foggy that it’s hard to tell where the steam ends and the fog begins, but I still get a too-thorough view of Rebecca when she emerges a moment later…in a tiny olive-green bikini that covers far too little skin.
I turn away, but Caden does not. If there are rules about drooling in the lagoon, he’s violating them.
“Theo, look a little more cheerful,” he calls. “Your wife is hot as hell.”
“Caden,” I growl in response, “look a little less cheerful. Fast.”
He doesn’t stop leering. I wonder how Lars would feel about me beating his intern to a bloody pulp, because I’m incredibly tempted.
“Okay,” says Lars. “My crew will let me know when they’re ready.
When you hear me say ‘action,’ it means you’re up.
At that point, Bex will come down the steps to Theo and then the two of you can walk through the spring together.
Go check out the waterfall to the right and then you can get a drink.
The sound quality won’t be great here, so this is mostly going to be B-roll. Don’t worry about what you say.”
The reminder seems unnecessary. Rebecca never worries about what she says.
“Rolling,” LJ says.
Jon nods, holding a huge microphone over the water. “Speed,” he says.
Lars looks from me to Bex. “Action.”
Bex walks down the steps as instructed. Instead of walking up to me, the way a normal wife would, she passes me entirely, moving through the small cliffs of volcanic rock toward the main part of the lagoon, which rests right against the sea wall.
I’m forced to follow, and the view is spectacular—the green moss-covered rock vivid against the smoke-gray Atlantic—but my gaze keeps returning to Rebecca and the flare of her hips, Rebecca and that drop of water sliding down her spine.
Rebecca, who fills out a bikini far better than I’d have imagined.
The gaze of millions of men will focus on her in that bikini if the show gets picked up, a fact that I hate. A fact that her father would have hated more.
I wish I’d walked ahead of her.
“It doesn’t matter what you say,” Lars calls to us. “But you do need to look as if you know each other.”
“You heard the man,” I say, stepping close behind her, “but let’s avoid talking about your vibrator this time.”
“Is this about your erection again?”
“Nothing I’ve ever said to you was about my erection, as it did not exist.”
“I could have seen that erection from space.” She tips her head toward the sky. “NASA has probably uploaded the footage. Let’s pull it up online.”
I smile before I can stop it and her eyes light up, their dark gray becoming something else entirely, like a hint of sunlight breaking through a storm cloud.
That’s another problem with women like her: they’re so lovely—even when weeping, even when angry, even when claiming you were erect when you certainly were not—that you find yourself waxing poetic about their every feature.
Kieran used to compare every ocean to his wife’s eyes.
He’d say her hair was the color of churned butter.
I ridiculed him for it—we all did—and he didn’t care until the day he realized she’d made a fool of him.
I will never claim Rebecca has lovely eyes, the loveliest eyes I’ve ever seen, even if it’s true.
“Get something, do a little toast, and we’re out of here,” says Lars. “We’ve still got a long drive out to the coast.”
Rebecca moves toward the swim-up bar, tucked into the side of a cave, and nods at the menu. “Champagne?”
I frown. Iceland is notoriously expensive. “I have no idea how much twenty-seven hundred krona is.”
She groans. “A real honeymoon with you would be the absolute worst.”
For one regrettable moment I let myself imagine a real honeymoon with her. It involves that glimpse I got of her breasts, her vibrator, some donut holes, an elevator blow job. Perhaps a glass bottle. Definitely a camera.
Fuck. This is nothing I should be thinking of here or anywhere else.
“It’s about twenty-four dollars,” she says. “Eighteen pounds.”
I go still. It’s one thing to be able to convert dollars to pounds. It’s another thing entirely to enter a country you’ve never been to and convert its currency twice, in seconds. “How do you know that?”
She blows out an exhausted breath. “One Icelandic krona is about point seven cents. One U.S. dollar is about point seventy-seven pounds sterling.” She says this as if it’s in no way astonishing that she knows it all offhand and could do the calculation so quickly.
“That just tripled the number of things I thought you knew.”
She stiffens before she steps up to the bar. “Believe me, you’ve witnessed all of them.”
I’m beginning to wonder if that’s true.
· · ·
Soon we are back in the van. The gloomy day and the post-lagoon relaxation all make it impossible to stay awake.
The next time I come to, our driver is laying on the horn and shouting something in Icelandic, which is probably “goddamned tourists” as he pulls into a parking lot. “This is Skógafoss,” he announces.
We climb from the van and Jon attaches mics and battery packs beneath our coats.
It’s a sunny morning but the breeze is blowing hard and immediately Rebecca is shivering and jumping up and down to get warm.
The fact that I’m worrying about her irritates me.
She isn’t really my wife. I shouldn’t be gnawed by anxiety wondering if her coat is warm enough.
The problem is that fragile thing in her face.
The problem is her soft eyes, those cheekbones, the full lips, which all make you want to protect her instead of steering clear.
I resent that she’s made me notice any of it, feel anything at all.
“Just get back in the van until they’re ready to go,” I bark at her.
“You’re not the boss of me, Dumbledore,” she replies.
Paula gives everyone their instructions while Lars turns to us. “Okay,” he says, “this is going to feel weird at first, but I just want you to talk. Don’t worry about what it is. We’ll gather a ton of stuff and pick the best of it. We just want the viewer to see you as a normal couple.”
“So she should complain that I’m not romantic enough,” I suggest, “and I should secretly wish she’d work out more?”
Rebecca throws out her arms. “Yes, viewing audience. I chose this man.”
Paula and a few crew members snicker. It’s already begun: they adore my wife but find me off-putting. Nothing about this situation is likely to improve.
Lars makes us hold hands and we begin walking down the path toward the waterfall with the cameras ahead of us. The microphone, clipped to my jacket, is unsettling. It’s as if all my words have abandoned me.
“Guys,” Lars calls, prodding us.
“Talk,” I whisper. I do realize this is unfair, the way I’m making her carry the burden of each conversation, but saying too much seems to come quite naturally to her.
“My period is late,” Rebecca says. “I thought you said you’d gotten a vasectomy.”
I choke on a laugh. “Rebecca.”
“This probably isn’t the time to tell you, but it might be your dad’s. You weren’t able to meet my needs, and he offered.”
“My father died over a decade ago. I believe you’d have been around twelve.”
“Did you know they can extract sperm from a corpse? They shock the penis. I mean, I imagine your dad is super dead and it wouldn’t work, but if you do it inside a few hours of passing, it’s possible.”
It seems too specific to be fabricated, but one never knows with Rebecca. “You appear to know about pretty much everything aside from full-time employment.”
“Ten points for Slytherin,” she says, “but our female audience is going to hate you for that one.”
“None of this is even usable. Remember a minute ago when you claimed to be fucking my father?”
Her gaze flickers to mine with a quiet gleam in her eyes that goes straight to my groin. “My,” she says, “what a potty mouth you have.”
Lars jogs to her side. “Let’s try this again. Maybe something slightly more normal? Talk about the waterfall, the trip as you’d package it for clients, your marriage. Let’s just avoid penises entirely.”
The camera moves behind us as we near the waterfall and Rebecca points at it. “That’s roughly how wet it makes me when I think about our divorce getting finalized. We should bring clients.”
She’s the worst. I have no idea why I’ve got this desire to laugh. Instead, I tell her to move out of the way so I can take a picture of the waterfall without her in it.
· · ·
Our next stop involves climbing a glacier, followed by yet another drive before we take a boat out into a lagoon, surrounded by chunks of melting icebergs.
Rebecca has not slept a wink since sometime yesterday, and when she removes her sunglasses, there are circles under her eyes and yet…
she’s glowing, pink-cheeked, delightful.
During our downtime, she engages the crew.
She grills Katrina about her childhood in Paris.
She video chats with LJ’s children and gets into a long conversation with Jon about how he should propose to his girlfriend.
She gets Sean to explain how he’ll organize the thousands of digital files that will result from each of these shoots.