“Marcus probably likes you because you are different than Shailene. That’s what happens when runners-up become leads. They’re desperate for something new. I guess it’s like breakups in real life. Shailene was a God-fearing sorority girl from a small town in the Midwest without much bigger aspirations. You’re a hot intellectual who says rude things to be funny.”
“You don’t like Shailene?” I ask.
“You think I don’t like her because she’s not a mean intellectual?” he asks with a laugh. “What kind of New York stereotyping is that? I love Shailene.”
I bristle slightly at the way he says “love,” jealous a woman I don’t even know is so easy to love. I wish I was easy to love, have wished that for a long time. But I am what I am, Henry’s got me pegged there.
“I wasn’t much of a New Yorker,” I confess to him. “Maybe that’s the romantic in me.”
“Really?” he asks, and I see his dark eyebrows go up. “You have the vibe.”
I chuckle darkly. “I thought so, too.”
He sits up, suddenly more interested. “So, what’s the story then?”
Our eyes meet, and I offer him my shot glass again; he refills without fanfare, and I down the whiskey. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“Fair enough,” he says, chasing down his shot.
“Why do you hate this job so much?” I ask him.
He glances at the door back to the inside of the house, whatever else is buried there. “Can’t really talk about that here, and it’s complicated. My past—” He shakes his head, batting the thought away. “Some things are better left buried so they don’t eat you alive.” He pours himself another shot without prompting. “I don’t really hate it, though. The job. I don’t know. I like the ending.”
“Because you feel like everything you did to get there might suck, but you got there eventually. You helped two people fall in love.”
He stares at me, blinking as if moving in slow motion. “Because when it’s over, I get to sleep for three days straight.”
I laugh, shifting my body around, leaning on my side to stare over at him, draped across the chair. “I moved to New York when I sold my book. I sold it for a lot of money. Like, a lot of money.”
“So, it was literally a big deal.”
I point finger guns at him. “Good one. I guess I had this image of myself as this, like, cosmopolitan artist, right? Like I was this creative, independent-thinking girl from the South, and I didn’t belong there. Clearly my destiny was leading me to New York, to bigger things, where I’d be fucking bohemian but also maybe preppy and spend long summers in the Hamptons or whatever. I didn’t just want to be rich and beautiful, I wanted to be important, too, like I was always promised, and I was, I would be, this book deal signaled that I was on my way, so I’d stop feeling so out of place.”
“Careful what you wish for?” Henry guesses.
“Yes, and no.” I think about it for a minute. “I’ve always had this thing, this desire to fit in while also standing out, and I’ve contorted myself into what I thought that would be. What a person other people wanted to be would look like. Shot,” I say, holding my glass out to him. He obliges. “I thought it was, like, making a name for myself somewhere new, somewhere where making a name for yourself mattered. But once I got there, I had this realization. No matter how many times I reinvented myself to impress everyone else, I wasn’t special, and I’d never been special.”
“Been there,” he says, a whisper, unexpected in its intimacy and vulnerability. I curl closer in my chair in his direction.
The truth is, even before New York, I drank too much and slept with too many guys, but it was different there, with the emptiness so much more pronounced. I spent all the money I made, trying to become the me I wanted to be—lived alone in a one-bedroom, went to all the best restaurants, took taxis three blocks. Lived like an idiot because I thought that’s how I’d become a real New Yorker. My books tanked and then the void started to feed on my very soul, until I had to run home to escape it, to escape my empty bank account, to escape everything I had become and always was.
“I remember,” I tell Henry, “I was leaving a bar alone one night—I think it was a Wednesday—and it was the most humid summer day, probably had been raining earlier. I was in heels because I wanted to be the type of woman who wears heels to get hammered on a Wednesday night in the city. I walked the whole way anyway with the skin of my ankle being ground away step by bloody step, and instead of going up to my apartment, I just folded up on the ground right outside of it, and I had a panic attack. I couldn’t even make it inside because there was nothing left. I was lonely and depressed and I knew there was something wrong with me. That was months after my book series was canceled and I’d never even cried, never even let it show, but a single night in New York tore me to pieces.”
“You don’t need to tell me this,” Henry says then, like he is protecting me from me, or maybe him.
My head lolls to the side. “Don’t you want me to tell you things?” I ask. I like saying it to him. I never say it.
Our eyes lock for too long, and he speaks to me in that low voice again, an affirmation—an oath. “Yes,” he says.
“So, I moved home,” I tell him. “I moved home and I applied to be on the 1 for what I only can assume are deeply psychotic reasons rooted around change and instability.” I close my eyes for a minute, savoring the complete feeling of drunkenness, of nothing mattering. “Remember when we met, Henry?”
We teeter on the edge of a knife, both wondering if the other one will say it, but we don’t, and it’s our secret, forever and ever amen.
“Yes,” he says, speaking in the cryptic language only the two of us know.
I don’t say anything. Instead, I sit up in my chair again, both feet planted and facing toward Henry’s chair, teeter close to him, reaching an arm out. I think I’ll touch him, the way I’ve seen him so easily touch everyone else. He leans closer to me, puts a hand up, stopping me just short, and gets out of his own chair, rises to his feet. He offers a hand to pull me up, and we are so close. My skin aches for it, for someone to touch me, and up close, his eyes are like heat on me.
“Don’t,” he says, his lips barely moving. “There’s a cameraman sitting directly in those bushes across the pool.”
Face burning, I glance over and see the telltale red light glowing from the bush.
“Is that you?” I ask, trying to keep my voice as low as his, fighting to keep my anger under wraps.
“No, I swear,” he tells me. “I just noticed him five minutes ago.”
I let the thought roll through me like a wave. The hand he pulled me up with still hovers inches from my skin—he could just reach out and touch me if either of us was either stupid enough or drunk enough. (With the little footage they use from this moment, the sound is barely audible but the team helpfully added subtitles to make my words clear.)
I flip the cameraman off, take a big step away from Henry, and go inside.
Exclusive Interview with Guy Danson
Steveisthe1.com: We have with us today a very juicy interview with an ex of Jacqueline Matthis who reached out to me a couple of weeks ago. Thanks for agreeing to the interview, Guy.
Guy: No problem, Steve.
Steveisthe1.com: So, tell us a little bit about how you know Jac.
Guy: Jac and I went to high school together and we dated a couple of months. We sort of lost touch once we left for college.
