Day 5
I wake up before him, make coffee, and then sit on the veranda to drink it.
I have a splendid view of the ocean, but I keep looking over at Kai sleeping, his body hidden by a comforter, his head on a throw pillow.
He looks beautiful there, and I remember reading a comment saying that his interview with The New Yorker came across as “thin-skinned.” But really, isn’t that the truth of skin?
I want Kai to be an actor because I want Gods of Andromeda to happen, but I also want Kai to be an actor because he is brilliant at it, because he has natural gifts. You hear some singers and think, Well, she’s just got it, and Kai just has it.
But none of this is what Kai wants. It occurs to me I’ve never really asked Kai what he wants. For that matter, I haven’t spent much time in my life thinking about what I want, because I’ve always been so busy wanting what the world wants me to want.
When he finally wakes up, I tell him, “You don’t have to do Gods of Andromeda.”
“I know,” he says.
“I don’t care if you run from the Industry, but I care a lot if you run from me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, that part I’m really sorry for.”
“Like, being abandoned by people who say they love me is…it’s kind of, as the kids would say, triggering.”
“Right,” he says. “I know. I’m sorry. I panicked.”
We walk down to the ocean together and haul a two-person kayak into the water. We kayak through the lagoon. We see another sea turtle, and Kai keeps saying, “Wow,” as it swims beneath us in the transparent water.
We talk about acting, about how it felt on set and how it felt in the audition for Andromeda, and we talk about junketing, how it felt to be asked over and over how you survived something you haven’t yet survived.
When we make it back to the beach, I tell him, “You should call Ellen.” I hand him my phone and he says, “Yeah. Right. Good shout.”
_____
I can’t overhear most of their conversation as he paces along the beach, but he sounds meek. He keeps saying, “Yeah,” and “No, right, I get it,” and “I know.” I do hear how the conversation ends, though. “I love you, Ellen. I’m sorry…I know. I know.”
He walks back and sits next to me on the beach. “Did you fire Katie?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“She said what Matthew did was smart and that she would’ve done it if she’d known, so I fired her.”
“And you told her you don’t want to do a campaign with Matthew.”
“Yeah.”
“Even though it might cost you an Oscar nomination.”
I shrug. “I’m a long shot.”
“You really love me,” he says. He seems surprised by it.
“I really do.”
“It’s very easy to say ‘I love you,’ but very hard to hear it, to really hear it.”
“Kai, look at me,” I say as I stand up. He’s staring at me, his searching green eyes nervous and hopeful and above all real. “I love you, Kai. I loved you in Pittsburgh, and in LA, and in New York, and I love you in Jamaica, and I love you wherever you’re headed.”
“I don’t want them to fire you,” he says.
“There will be other movies.”
“But none where you can play Agrippah, Queen of the Realm.”
“True.”
“And none where I can play Gavinth, your occasionally cuckolded husband.”
“Also true.”
“You wanna run lines?” he asks.
“I do.”
_____________
At the villa, we’re standing together in the hardwood-floored living room, sparring again as Agrippah and Gavinth. “You dare disturb the lawful trial of Medivh?”
“I fear I must, for—”
“Strike this woman!” he shouts. He scares me when he says it. So much anger, verging on disgust, in his voice.
“The orcs,” I say. I’m more scared than I expected to be in the saying of it.
“The orcs, my lord. They have laid waste to Calenbath. What is not fire is ash. Our allies are gone. Our enemies are at the gate. The future is in doubt and the past is buried in the ground, my lord. There is only time, and that time is now.”
“Can it be—” He sounds so shocked, so scared.
“The time for questions has passed, Gavinth. The time of speaking has passed. We fight now, all of us. No trials. No tribes. No guilds. Only human and orc. We fight for the Realm that was.” I pause, letting the emotion well up in me. “And we fight for the Realm that shall be!”
_____
It takes a moment for the spell to break, for Gavinth to be Kai again, and for me to be Juniper.
“That was good,” he says. “That’s so fucking fun.”
“And I don’t even have to get coked up and bleed all over my shirt in this one,” I point out.
“And I don’t have to be heavily traumatized, just ravenous for power.”
_____
We watch a movie, one of the newer Bond films. Slicker, less corny, propulsive in its action sequences.
He doesn’t say much until it’s over. The credits are rolling over an Adele song when he leans across the couch and closes the distance between us, kissing me first softly—inquiringly—and then with real passion.
For the next little while, we make out like a couple of kids, which I guess we still sort of are.
_____
Later, down at the beach, we’re both reading when he says, “I think I want to go home.”
“Where is that exactly?”
“I’m not sure,” he says.