Chapter Eleven #2
I turn my phone on loud so I don’t miss his reply, but I needn’t have bothered. He doesn’t text back until Wednesday night after I’ve come home and fallen onto my bed in exhaustion after a long day of recording: I’m glad you liked the rolls.
I wait to see if he’ll write more, but when no text bubbles appear, I throw my phone to the side and run my hand over and over the texture of my bedspread.
He’s busy, I tell myself. He told you he’d be busy.
With the exception of a few scenes she feels would “have more oomph” if James and I recorded them together in the studio, Catarina and I finished the first two Meadow books on Thursday, right on schedule.
We celebrate by taking a break to clean out the Keurig and down some coffee before promptly returning to my booth to begin book three, which Catarina hopes to have finished by next Thursday to give us a week and a half to record the fourth and longest book, and half a week for any cleanups and co-recordings James and I need to complete.
Four weeks left. We’re halfway through the project and Catarina says I’m doing a “wonderful job,” halfway through our required follower count to get the 25 percent bonus, and I sent out seven more applications just this week for jobs in the big five publishing houses.
I should be happy. I should be thrilled.
But instead I’m drunk on a cocktail of aimlessness and exhaustion that my body confusingly generates into a restless energy that demands to be spent.
I’m not sure where to go when I get in the car.
I keep thinking about James’s rental property with its babbling brook and charming house and achingly perfect vibes since he took me there, but I don’t want to drive that terrible road by myself and I’m not entirely sure I could find it if I wanted to.
But the thing is, I do kind of want to find it.
“I won’t find it,” I say aloud as I make my way out of town, doing my best to trace the route from my geographically poor memory. “It’s just somewhere to go. A direction.”
I make it as far as the empty stretch of road where I know the private drive should be, which is impressive for someone who has no sense of direction, but it’s the end of my pointless venture.
The sun has set below the mountains and cast my surroundings in shadows so deep, it would be difficult to make out a wide, well-marked drive, to say nothing of one covered by trees and brambles.
Admitting defeat, I’m about to make a U-turn to head back home, but I’m stopped by the all-too-common sight of a lifeless deer on the side of the road…
And the far less familiar tableau of James Freakin’ Neely in sweatpants and a T-shirt crouching beside it.
I can tell the way he stands and squints into the headlights as I pull into the brush to park that he doesn’t realize it’s me until he hears my voice.
“Um, is this some sort of really disturbing Method acting?” I ask, closing the door behind me. “I know the Meadow vampires eat deer or whatever, but this is a stretch.”
“Juniper,” he says in acknowledgment, crouching again. “Why are you here?”
“Joyride,” I say to his curved back. I come to stand beside him, trying my best not to show how gross and sad I find the roadkill before us. “And you? Aren’t you supposed to be off having important actor person meetings instead of…whatever it is you’re doing?”
“I came back a day early,” James says, voice clipped. And then, softening, “There’s a fawn.”
“What?”
James pulls me down by the hand so we’re crouching together, our shadows long and ghoulish on the asphalt in my car’s headlights. He points into the brush just beyond the body of the doe.
“A baby,” he says.
In the growing darkness, I can see the shadowy silhouette of a fawn, long-legged and wobbly and staring at James and me.
“I heard it bleating,” James adds.
“You heard it…” I trail off, not comprehending. “How did you hear it ? And from where ? Do you have superhuman ears, because so help me god if you’re actually a vampire and this is how you’re going to tell me, I’ve got some notes on how to do it without a mangled animal present.”
James rolls his eyes.
“Juniper, we’re just below the house. My rental. I heard the car hit the deer from the back porch. I came down to see if the people needed help and they had already driven off, but the fawn made a ruckus and so here we are.”
“Here we are,” I echo. “Because this is a totally normal activity for a fake-dating boyfriend and girlfriend to do. Deer hunting, but make it terribly sad and kinda disgusting.”
James is either too tired or too occupied with his fawn staring contest to play into my sarcasm.
“It lost its mother,” he says, his voice slightly reedy. “I had to…”
The silence stretches for a while and neither James nor the fawn appears to be making any move to leave the area, so I inch back a bit farther from the dead deer and sit on the asphalt.
“Where’s your car?” I ask.
“In the driveway,” he says, pointing above us, still not looking away from the fawn.
“You walked down that god-awful road on foot ?”
“It was an impulse,” James says. “A reaction. I thought maybe someone was hurt and I didn’t want to waste time looking for my keys.”
“Someone was hurt,” I say. My eyes keep hopping to and then away from the deer in front of us. “What do we do about the baby? Aren’t you not supposed to touch them?”
“Yeah, but that’s only so the mother doesn’t abandon it or lose it. This one needs to be taken to a wildlife rescue. I’ve already called. Somebody should be here shortly. I thought it was them, actually, when you pulled up.”
The fawn lies down in the grass just beyond the headlight beams, as close as it can get to its mother without touching the light.
The way it folds its legs beneath it and settles its head in the grass makes my heart hurt.
“How did your meetings go?” I ask, desperate to fill my mind with something other than the sad scene.
James cuts his eyes to me.
“Anything but that,” he says. “Ask me something else.”
“We’re fake-dating, right?” I say. “So make up a fake answer.”
His mouth twitches.
“They went swell,” he says. “My manager of a father takes my wants and needs into consideration and my career feels entirely my own. No complaints.”
“When I said fake answer, I was thinking more along the lines of, Yes, Juniper. I have acquired the world’s largest manufacturer of Henley shirts, thus securing my wardrobe into perpetuity. Thank you for your interest in my business meeting endeavors, but okay.”
James pity-snorts.
“What about you?” he asks after a while, turning his head to look me up and down once. “I see you managed not to get any obvious third-degree beverage burns in my absence.”
“Iced coffee is a beautiful invention,” I say, matching his tone. “We’ve started Ember. Catarina wants to polish it off early next week so we have plenty of time for First Light and the recordings she wants us to do together.”
“I saw that on my scheduler.” James’s mouth tightens.
“Which reminds me, I think it would behoove us to have a day of social media recording. We should knock out as many of your posts as we can at once. Change clothes throughout so it looks like it was done across multiple days, that kind of thing. Sooner rather than later if you’re able. ”
A car passes in the opposite lane, and both of us pause to see if it’s the wildlife rescue, but it goes on by, uncaring of the two people sitting beside a dead deer on the road. The fawn doesn’t budge from her nest of tall grass.
“All at once?” I ask.
James nods.
“Better that way. In case I get called away again.”
There’s something about the way he says it that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
Something’s up, and if my legs weren’t burning and my nose wasn’t filled with the smell of asphalt and the tinge of something beneath that I truly don’t care to analyze given my proximity to deer of varying degrees of alive…I might find a clever way to say it.
Instead I say exactly what I’m thinking.
“It’s different again,” I say. “Between us.”
James doesn’t insult me by pretending he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“It has to be,” he says, and I’ve never wanted him to watch me more than I do right now as he refuses to make eye contact. “It has to stay pretend, doesn’t it?”
I hesitate.
“Because of your meetings?”
One sharp nod from James.
I rise to my feet, and this time James doesn’t pull me downward.
“You can go,” James says. “You don’t have to stay.”
And it’s like he’s talking about more than now with the car and the deer and the waiting for the wildlife rehabber.
“I know,” I tell him. “But I’m going to anyway.”
—
The whiplash, I decide, is not worth it.
I think it as I sit in my car and watch the van with the fawn pull away and James disappear into the trees to return to his rental. I think it as I walk by the kitchen table back home and see the clean plastic Tupperware empty of cinnamon and sugar and waiting to go back to its owner.
And I most definitely think it when I see a text message with a photo of a fancily plated meal and the caption Coq au Vin.
I can’t help myself. I text back even though I know I shouldn’t.
I thought we had to stay pretend , I type. Is this pretend?
James’s text bubbles appear and disappear three times before his message appears.
Hard to tell. We’re so good at pretending.
I give a non-answer for a non-answer: Too good.
His next message is too long to have been typed in the three seconds it takes to arrive. He must have had it already written elsewhere and pasted it as a text.
It appears I’ll be going through with the contract to reprise my role as Max.
It was made very clear that other avenues of employment I was considering are shuttered to me.
This is the best way forward for my career.
The contracts will be in order and signed shortly after we conclude our audio work.
I think it’s best for both of us if we make it clear to our social media audience that we are going our separate ways so that you aren’t exposed to media scrutiny any more than necessary.
Another text appears before I’ve finished reading the first.
You remember what I told you. About the marketing strategy to smooth the transition for the superhero diehards who will balk at Max’s inclusion.
Of course I do. He’s going to date one of his fellow heroes. He’s going to launch from “known by the theater community and indie movie goers” to “known by the world” with a camera-trained, media-trained athletic goddess who is paid to look good at his side.
When do you get to stop playing pretend? I ask. When do you get to just be James?
He doesn’t answer until morning: Maybe never.