Chapter Eleven
Milo
The thing about Jameson? He sleeps. He sleeps anywhere and everywhere.
Constant, never-setting sun? Freezing cold tent, dressed in five layers?
Potential polar bears? Yup. Jameson Merritt still sleeps.
I’m guessing everyone is sleeping right now.
Polly, Iris and Allie, on the other side of this plastic-sheeted wall.
Beefcake Lars won’t be – he’s outside with a gun and flares on bear watch, making tea after tea by the fire.
I keep hearing him clear his throat. I’m trying to join them in sleep, lying beside Jameson on a mattress, listening to nothing but his breathing and the waves outside, but this mattress is the same depth as a slice of bread and my eyes are like goddamn unblinking craters – to be expected, I guess, after a day of emotional boot camp.
We tried to talk it over, Jameson and I, when we came to bed, but we can’t really talk without being overheard. We resigned to talking in mimes and hand gestures, frantic eyes and scrawling in the air.
‘The chemistry!’ Jameson mimed earlier. Then held up his camera, did the OK sign with his hand. ‘Perfection naturelle.’
I’d rolled my eyes at him.
But I get it.
There’s a lot of . . . everything between Allie and me. Anger. Distrust. Shame. Especially since the dinghy. It’s killing me. Do we really actually blame each other? Could it actually be that Allie didn’t do it? And if she didn’t, then what really happened back then?
And I feel it too, despite it all. Something that’s warm.
Something big and alive that I feel in my body like an energy of its own.
An electrical charge. Something I could’ve sworn dissipated with the leak.
Lifeforce, cut. But – it’s still there. Like an old phone in a drawer you swear no longer works, but springs back into bright life when plugged in.
That’s how this feels. It was dormant until we came together again.
‘Do you still like her?’ Jameson whispered, and I shook my head.
‘We keep arguing.’
‘Oh, and that celebrity crush thing?’ He fell back into his sleeping bag, laughing. ‘Fuuuuck.’
I nudged him with my elbow. ‘Shhhh!’
The Human Knot was – a lot. It definitely melted away some proverbial ice, but I probably shouldn’t have said the reading thing.
It’s true though, and I think . . . I wanted her to know that.
I want her to know that to me, for a moment, it was real.
Regardless of what she chose to do with those moments, how real they were to her, I remember them – replay them in my mind sometimes, that night on the phone, like a favourite chorus.
Then there was the way those innocent blue eyes found mine, through the haze of woodsmoke, when she answered her question, said, shyly, ‘Well, that changes things.’ A second-long pulse between us, of a secret knowing.
I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back. And maybe this is me just being a jackass who always feels like things’ll work out, but I felt sure it might’ve been real to her too.
Jameson and I talked a little more – mostly about footage and tomorrow’s shots, and about how much he ‘bloody worships’ Iris, then Jameson being Jameson grabbed the back of my head, said, ‘Love you, bro’ and mashed a kiss on my forehead.
And that was that. Zipped-up sleeping bag, weighted eye mask: See ya.
Out of it. Two sardines in a can, one dead to the world, one still writhing around, mouth throbbing from the hook.
I can’t switch my brain off. It’s like a darkroom in there, with a movie reel of everything Allie and I have talked about in the last twenty-four hours, spinning and spinning, and a single light, projecting them all.
The snowmobile was hard.
The boat was really hard. But illuminating. The publicist and that call she told me she didn’t make. Allie blocking me for reasons that, if true, I totally understand.
And the human knot – holding her hand like that, and knowing it was hers I had in my grasp from the start . . .
And really, where do we go from here? I am totally crammed with questions.
Is it that she was responsible for the leak and she’ll die trying to cover her ass, even though I would never do anything.
Sue her. I decided way back then, I wouldn’t ever do anything like that.
For her. She was desperate. I was heartbroken, I was angry, but people do a lot when they’re desperate, and I did not externally suffer because of it, Allie is right.
Or is it that . . . she didn’t leak the messages? And for two years, we’ve each been consulting our own well-read but untrue lists of why each other is an asshole, crumpled and aged, but held onto, like goddamn evidence.
My crumpled list: the leaked screenshots were from her end.
She said herself that she could do it ‘for a much-needed few quid’.
I’m not sure why exactly she’d have gone on record saying that to Iris, but it sounded like a joke between friends, and many a true word said in jest, right?
Then there’s Bermuda. Going from unfunded, to fully funded, within the same twenty-four hours the leak happened.
An easy few grand for those messages, slid over like dirty money from some soulless gossip site.
Not to mention, she told me she wanted her sister to know everything.
The diaries saw to that. Then she blocked me.
Talked about me publicly after saying she was a private person.
And if you were to look at Allie’s list – let’s say she didn’t leak the messages and fully, ridiculously, suspects me, she’d say: I laughed about it on TV, even wore a meme T-shirt, and how goddamn callous.
Allie would also say I was worried about my image (I was) and that I wanted people to know I was a good guy.
(I did. Still do. Working on it.) She’d say the messages showed that.
That all the cover shoots and interviews after proved I was basking in it, as planned.
But I would never have done that to her. A showmance. A tell-all interview. There are other ways, if she really believes that I’m the type of guy to do that. I would never have hurt her. I was falling for her—
‘Milo?’ A whisper. ‘Milo, are you awake?’
‘Yeah?’ I whisper back.
It’s Allie.
There’s a tap on the sheet. It’s directly next to me. Is she literally on the other side of this sheet? Jeez, that’s close. Not even a half-inch of material separating us while we sleep. Aren’t we technically sleeping next to each other? The thought makes me swallow.
‘Tap back,’ she whispers.
Despite myself, I tap back with the knuckle of my index finger. What is this?
‘I’m here, Allie.’
‘Hold on.’
There’s silence.
Then – a weird rustling. And, under the sheet, through a tiny sliver of a gap, a note is slid through. Maybe it’s her crumpled evidence list. Title: Milo Ford is an Asshole by Allie Lake.
I take it, unfold it, quietly. I can hear nothing except the paper in my hand, and the angry, sheet-metal roar of waves.
‘I’ll pretend I don’t know you,’ it says in black ink. ‘Let’s keep this to work. Keep our relationship out of it? A.’ There’s a single ‘x’ too.
A smile spreads across my lips. Polly’s Human Knot story – she had to work with someone she used to date, she said, so wrote her ex a note.
I stare at the writing. Small, looping. ‘Our relationship.’ There it is again.
That something deep and low in my gut. That hot, electrical surge.
Is she feeling the same as me? Did that whack to the pinata have her thinking all the same things as me?
Is this where the pages of the story come apart at the spine?
And if it is, what’s the truth? What’s the real story?
I lean to Jameson’s backpack at our feet, unzip a pocket at the front, take out one of his sharpies. Blue.
‘At least you got the note to the right guy,’ I write. Then ‘Deal. M x’. And I’m sure it’s cool to send an ‘x’ back. It’s not like it’s meant as a real kiss, right? Brits love an ‘x’ as a sign-off.
I post it back.