Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
With his inconsistent, scattered schedule, we tumble through the next several days.
I barely see Alec on Saturday and spend the day hiking with Eden before meeting my mom for dinner at her favorite Ethiopian place.
She can finally vent to someone who understands all the ways that my dad was an uptight, overscheduling menace on their trip, and her need to unload lets me avoid the Alec conversation entirely.
Being with Mom is like recharging my battery; she’s the version of adult-me I hope to meet someday: responsible, loving, but not so responsible and loving that she won’t fuck shit up if the situation warrants.
I drop her off at home, kiss my dad, and then drive myself back to the Waldorf, greeting my new favorite valet, Julie, on my way in. Back in the suite, and long after midnight, I feel Alec’s long, warm body slide into bed behind me.
“I’m back.” He scoots up close against me, sliding a cool hand under my tank top. I try to drag my brain out of deep sleep. His hand is still slightly wet from having been washed, and his breath smells like toothpaste when he speaks into my shoulder. “You awake?”
I mumble a sleepy no into my pillow, rolling into the heat of his bare chest. He kisses my hairline, my forehead, my mouth. We talk in broken fragments about our days until he falls asleep midsentence. He’s gone again before sunrise.
Sunday I catch up on work, and get a surprise hour with Alec when he crashes into the room to quickly change for a dinner with some industry people.
I follow him around the suite while he undresses and throws his clothes everywhere while ranting in a hilarious stream of anecdotes about a music video cameo he filmed that sounded like a textbook example of bratty Hollywood shenanigans.
I don’t see Alec again until Monday, when he wakes to me straddling him with a toothbrush jammed in my cheek. “Why are you here?” I ask. “Are you late? Were you supposed to set an alarm?”
He rubs his face, squinting up at me. “I’m off until tonight.”
He tugs a pillow out from under his head and presses it to my face to muffle my happy scream.
Yes, we make love, but instead of spending the entire rest of the day in bed or having sex on every flat surface of the suite like I would have guessed, we sneak out in hats and sunglasses for doughnuts, and on our way back he impulsively stops in a local gaming store and buys a full Nintendo console.
We invite Eden (who accepts) and Yael (who flatly declines), and the three of us spend a solid block of the day in the suite, shit-talking and going cutthroat in Mario Kart with a bag of chips blown open on the table and bottles of beer scattered all over.
Around five, Alec drags his day-drunk body into the shower and then finds me out on the terrace, where Eden and I had moved to gossip and soak up some late-afternoon sun.
“I’m headed out now.” He bends, kissing my forehead.
“Don’t go.” Eden groans in protest. “Gigi sucks at video games.”
“Believe me,” he says, “I’d rather stay here on the terrace.”
When he straightens, I squint up at him, shading a hand over my eyes. He steps into the sun, shadowing me. “What is it tonight again?”
“Dinner with the cast and local Netflix team.” Backlit, he looks like a marble statue radiating sunlight.
“What time will you be back?”
I very intentionally did not say home, but the word rings out between the three of us anyway.
“Late,” he says. “You don’t have to wait up.”
“Wake me up?” I say quietly, and he nods, kissing me one more time.
Alec says goodbye to Eden and then disappears inside, and I hear the heavy click of the suite’s door a few seconds later.
Tilting my face to the sky, I keep my eyes closed but can feel my best friend’s attention on me in the following silence. “It’s been a week,” she says.
“I know.”
The but swings like a pendulum in the air, but thankfully she doesn’t say any of the rest of her thought aloud. I know all of the permutations already.
But watching the two of you, it seems like it’s been longer.
But he’s still going to leave next Sunday.
But this is all just pretend, Gigi. Get yourself together.
Instead, we lazily shuffle back inside, order room service, and talk about the sweet and banal non-Alec details of our lives. When she leaves, the room falls oddly silent.
I clean up the detritus from our gaming and junk-food binge.
I shower, make the bed, pack a bag of our clothes for laundry services.
I check my work email, but Ian took the day off, too, and there’s nothing new to read.
I’m not tired, but nothing draws my attention on social media, and there’s nothing I can think to watch on TV.
But I turn it on anyway and find myself on autopilot, navigating to Netflix, to The West Midlands, and pushing play on episode one.
By the time Alec walks into the suite, well after one in the morning, I’m six episodes in and already deeply invested in Dr. Minjoon Song’s first romance arc—one that clearly does not stick, because this woman is not played by Elodie.
Google tells me that this character—Eleanor DiMari—dies in a plane crash at the end of season one and I immediately resent my inability to live without spoilers because I am devastated.
“She dies?” I whine.
He drops his jacket over the back of the couch and braces his hands there, bending to kiss my temple. “What are you—oh. Yeah.”
I am delighted that he returned in the middle of a make-out scene where his costar—a woman Google also told me is named Mariana Rebollini—is topless.
“This is some real strategic filming,” I say. “Do you actually see boob when you’re filming this?”
“She has stickers,” he says, and when I look over my shoulder, he gestures to his chest and then glances at his watch. “God, what are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He walks over to the fridge in the small kitchen area and pulls out a bottle of sparkling water. “Wow, we killed a lot of beer today.” He cracks open the top and joins me on the couch. “No wonder I’m dragging.”
“On a scale of one to let-us-never-speak-of-this-off-set,” I say, lifting my chin to the TV, “how awkward are these sexy scenes to film?”
Alec slides his arm behind my neck, coaxing my head onto his shoulder. “Depends.” He tilts his water to his lips, takes a sip. “Sometimes they’re awkward if someone is new or very uncomfortable—”
“Are you ever uncomfortable?”
“Not really,” he says, amending, “not outwardly, I think. If it’s a body double you haven’t met until that day, then it can be.
But usually love scenes are perfunctory.
There’s minimal staff on set and there’s an unspoken agreement that everyone is a professional and it’s just part of the job.
The scenes are all so carefully blocked it’s almost anti-romantic for the actors.
” He leans his head against mine. “I’m always surprised how sexy they look when they’re edited. ”
“But this one.” I point to the screen. “Great or terrible?”
“This one was fine.” He drinks another sip. “I was bummed when her character was written off the show. Mariana was funny.”
“You say that like someone else is not funny.” He gives me a wry look and I lean over, kissing his cheek. “Did Elodie spill her drink on my man tonight?”
He turns and looks at me, eyes unguarded and surprised. My man.
I’d try to take it back or soften it into something meaningless, but it’s late and I’m feeling sparky. Alec sets his water bottle down and then coaxes me back so I’m lying along the length of the sofa and settles his hips between my legs. “No, she didn’t.” He rests his mouth on mine, humming.
“Good,” I say against his lips.
“I’m too tired to talk about it now.…” He drops individual words into my jaw, my neck, the hollow of my throat. “But tomorrow or Wednesday or whenever we have time… we should talk about what we’re going to do.”
“Do?”
“After Sunday.”
After Sunday.
These two words land like a slab of marble.
“You mean,” I say, as he sucks on my collarbone, “me and you?”
“Me and you.” He comes back up to my face and nods, staring down at me. “Okay?”
I nod and stretch to kiss him. “Okay.”
But we don’t get time to talk Tuesday—I have an early call with Ian, and Alec is gone before I’m done.
Wednesday he’s up before sunrise—this time for a livestream in Korea that he does from the living room of the suite and we have discussed that I am not even allowed to roll over in bed for fear of making a sound.
Yael picks him up barely five minutes after he finishes, so all I get is a quick peck goodbye.
Still, I remind myself, it’s more than I would get if I was staying at my place. At least here I see him. I imagine going this entire week without Alec and something vital inside seems to desiccate. I do everything I can to not think about life After Sunday.
It’s a lot of time alone in the suite, but I’m used to it now; it allows me to get a massive amount of work done with Ian on the follow-up story.
And in the end, Wednesday is the jackpot for investigative journalism.
After Alec leaves with Yael I learn that Ian managed to obtain a full transcript of the chat forum spanning the two months when the explicit videos were shared, giving us the usernames of everyone sharing and engaging with the videos.
These scumbags call the women in the videos “Bambis,” for fuck’s sake, and I have never in my life wanted to take someone down more than this. Even Spence.