by Stacy Travis
“And… action.” Mark’s words spurred me into the next scene, and my brain was temporarily relieved of the obligation to analyze my own possible missteps and misguided ideas about commitment. I put it aside and worked.
I poured every bit of emotion and energy I had into the emotion of the scene, and by the end of the day, I was spent. We wrapped for the day at around nine at night. Twelve hours of filming—with a break for some kind of potato stew for lunch—had flown by. But I was drained.
The film’s emotion seemed to have dulled the spite and ire of the real world for Triss. She was the calmest I’d seen her at the end of our final scene. It was almost alarming to see her without icepicks poised to murder anyone within a mile, which was why it surprised the hell out of me when she suggested we go out for a drink after we wrapped for the night.
After the emotional toll of the day’s scenes, it sounded like heaven. Even with her.
Chapter Twelve
Chris
If I’d had to defend myself, I guess I would have said I was lonely.
I know that’s not a great excuse. Lots of people work out of town for weeks or months at a time, away from their homes or their routines or the people they love.
I used to be one of those people. Or I used to be a person who could do that—be on the road, shooting on location, and not feel lonely. It was just work, wherever the work happened to be. But something had changed within me, and I knew it had everything to do with Nikki. She’d pushed me to want to have a stronger connection to another person. To her. She hadn’t done it intentionally. She’d just been herself. It didn’t matter. Once I knew her and fell in love with her, I couldn’t go back.
Being on location in a foreign country and sleeping in hotel beds for months at a time had a way of making me feel unmoored from myself. I knew I couldn’t complain. Being put up in five-star hotels and having pretty much every meal catered—even though I did have a bit of a bone to pick about corned beef and cabbage at a few too many meals—was certainly not a hard life. It wasn’t that.
I was a homebody. I liked waking up in my own bed. I missed New York. I even missed LA. But mostly, I missed Nikki. She’d become an anchor, even when I was happy at home in New York. It was different being there without her once I’d been there with her.
I felt my life changing. I felt myself changing.
I’d always been self-sufficient, and I liked that I didn’t need anyone. My parents didn’t live close by, and I didn’t grow up with any siblings. So the peripatetic existence I’d kept for the past decade worked just fine for my psyche. But suddenly, it didn’t.
That was my semi–self-aware explanation for how I ended up where I did at the end of the night. I was not making exceptions to justify what happened but merely trying to offer an explanation. And like I said, I know it’s no excuse, but what happened happened.
It had been a long, emotional day—emotional because the scene required it, and we couldn’t finish until we got it right. The scene required long, emotional embraces and kisses, longing stares, and a heart-wrenching goodbye. Triss and I were tangled up in each other, emotionally and physically, all day and into the night.
But it was acting. It wasn’t real, and I knew the difference.
Nevertheless, it felt appropriate to head to the pub down the street from our hotel and treat ourselves to a pint or two to unwind from the intensity.
The pub was about half full of locals, most of them sitting and drinking at the long, polished wood bar. I took a slow look around the place to assess the vibe. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where armchair paparazzi would be looking for a chance to cash in on a stolen-moment photo of me with my costar. No one seemed at all aware of our celebrity. Or if they knew, they didn’t care.
We chose a table instead because it was easier to talk sitting across from each other. I ordered a pint of Harp, and Triss wanted a cider, so I brought both over to our table, along with a plate of fries.
It didn’t take more than five minutes before her attitude was back. “I don’t know why an entire country can’t make a decent fried potato.”
“Maybe this is how they like them. I don’t think the barrier to other french fry recipes is high.”
She threw a half-eaten fry back onto the plate. I made a mental note of which one it was and where it sat on the plate, in case I still wanted to eat some. Her transition from talented, level-headed actor to sour human was quick. If I’d known she was headed back there, I would have declined her drink offer and made a beeline for my hotel room.
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass. I’m just… life’s been a bit rough lately.”
“Well, you killed it today. You worked through it.”
“Thank you. And thank you for your help with the scene. I was really… flailing.” Her lips barely lifted into a smile, as if she was reluctant to smile all the way. She took a sip of her cider, and I braced myself for a likely diatribe about how the Irish had failed at cider making, but she put the glass down and didn’t say anything for a moment.
I sipped—no, gulped—my beer and thought that if I could just drink half of it, I could make my excuses and go back to the hotel. I was in no mood to spend extra time with someone who just wanted to complain.
“Anyway, I imagine you’ve heard the rumors…” She looked at the table and picked up another fry. She didn’t eat it, though.
Unsure what she was referring to but sort of assuming she meant her marriage, I decided to answer vaguely. “I don’t really listen to rumors.”
She huffed a laugh, and even though it sounded sarcastic and harsh, I still felt that her laughter was a good sign. “That’s a good one. I wish I could do that,” she said.
“Can’t you? I mean, why do you have to listen to what gossip rags or people who don’t know you have to say?”
She nodded but still wasn’t looking up from the table, and her expression was sad. “The problem is, it’s not gossip when it’s true.”
I could make a dismissive comment and try to keep the conversation light. Or I could get into it with her, whatever it was. She was still being too vague for me to know. The problem with being flippant in the face of her clear desire to talk about whatever was bothering her was that it would have made me a dick. Knowing she was hinting at a conversation and walking the other way was not cool.
On the other hand, I was already starting to feel guilty about sitting in a bar across from an attractive woman, even though I knew my intentions were aboveboard. It just didn’t look good. Nikki was still getting used to me coming and going—mostly going—and I’d promised I would call her before she left work. She had plans with a friend after work, so I needed to reach her before then. That meant I needed to call within the next two hours.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I offered. There was still a chance she would say no.
But she looked up from the table suddenly, and I saw the vulnerability in her eyes. She did want to talk about it. She nodded and put her hand over mine. “I could really use a male perspective.”
I told myself that it was okay for her hand to be there. We were colleagues, friends. A friend could touch another friend’s hand in a reassuring way and not have it mean anything. “Sure,” I said.
“It’s just… my husband… he recently left. And I probably should have seen it coming, because I’d pretty much left him behind, but I thought he was okay with that.”
“What do you mean, you left him behind?”
“My fame. My career. I outshone him, and I don’t think he could handle it. So he left me, and now he’s ‘figuring out what he wants.’” She put the last part in air quotes.
I didn’t know her, and I didn’t know her husband, so it was hard for me to analyze their relationship. I wasn’t sure she wanted me to do that, so I took another long swig of my beer.
“So what do you think? Do you believe him?”
“I… I don’t know him. I have no reason to think he’s lying. Do you? Is the
re something else going on?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. Could he be gay? Is figuring out what he wants code for that?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” But I understood. She was casting about, looking for anything she could latch onto that would explain why he’d left, anything that allowed her to avoid looking in the mirror and believing he might just not love her. I turned my hand to grasp hers.
Her fingers clung to mine like a lifeline.
“Listen, maybe you need to look at it differently. What was it like over the past year between the two of you? Was he jealous? Did you spend time together? What was the relationship like? The only way you’re really going to understand what happened is to be honest with yourself.”
She took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she took another sip of her cider, draining about half of it. “You’re totally right. I haven’t wanted to do that. I’ve just wanted to blame him because he hurt me by leaving. But it wasn’t all his fault.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s good. Seeing another side to it is good.”
“Yeah. I mean, I still don’t totally see his side, but I see why he got upset.”
“That’s still something.”
She took another swig. The glass was nearly empty, and she was looking longingly at the bartender.
He filled up a fresh pint glass for each of us and brought them over. “On the house,” he said. “I’m a fan.”
“Oh, thank you, sweetie. You’re lovely,” Triss said, suddenly morphing into a third person I hadn’t yet seen, one who was cooing and sweet and happy to have the attention of a fifty-year-old pub owner with a wispy gray beard and a gap between his teeth. I wondered how many other personae she had in her vault.
She took another large sip of the new pint and grinned at me. I wondered if she was already a little tipsy. “I’m gonna tell you the gory details…”
Unsure what details she meant and not wanting to derail the conversation into something even more uncomfortable, I just sat silently.
“I cheated on him,” she said, looking a little triumphant. “No one knows. Except him, obviously. And the guy I cheated with.”
“I’ll… I won’t tell anyone.”
She waved a hand at me like it didn’t matter. “It’ll all come out. In the divorce papers, in the rumor magazines. It’s fine.”
“You’re saying you cheated on your husband. So that’s why he left?”
“In theory, yes. But… I mean, he knew what he signed up for. So really… WTF?” she actually said the letters. I guess that was better than swearing like a sailor.
It was the night from hell with a woman who was getting drunker by the minute. She’d chugged down half the second glass of cider, and I was still finishing the dregs of my first beer. I was still tightly wound, having a hard time internalizing the fact that the emotional scene was behind us. I still felt overwrought.
I’d been so focused on getting the role right, I’d barely had a moment that wasn’t focused on work. I’d barely even spoken to Nikki because I was worried I would let off some of my emotional steam and not have any left for the scene.
So there I was, with the person I was least interested in spending time with, hearing about how she cheated on her husband. But I had to admit, she was entertaining. I was glad to be out. It was stupid. I could have grabbed a beer with any of the people on our crew. Or the director. Or even underaged Nigel.
The point was, I’d already passed the point where judgement should have reined me in and sent me back to my hotel room. The beer tasted good, and the second one was colder. So I drank it while Triss finished her second and asked for a third.
Good judgement would have been letting the conversation fade or changing the subject. But I was interested in her story. “So your husband… what are you saying he signed up for? An open relationship?”
She twirled her hair and leaned back against her chair, shaking her head. “It wasn’t like that. It was… look. I was the celebrity. I made more money than him. I worked hard. So there were certain… things… I thought I should have.”
“Things like… a piece of jewelry?”
She play-swatted me. “No. I mean, yes… Of course that. But more like extra perks…”
“So… affairs.”
“I deserved to be able to do that. I made more money than he did.”
“Is that the permission slip for having an affair?”
She leveled her eyes at mine. “Isn’t it? We’re celebrities. People want us. Are you telling me you’ve never thought it made you deserving of something extra?”
I thought about it, because she made me want to say no so desperately. I didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to be able to say I’d never felt deserving of anything special because of my celebrity. But I couldn’t say that for a fact. Not without thinking about it first.
She threw her hands up at my lack of response. “Anyway. That’s why he left. It made no sense. We could’ve gotten past it. We had in the past. I don’t know what crawled up his ass and died this time, but good riddance, I guess.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to come in second place to other men,” I said. I knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t imagine most guys would be okay with their wives stepping out on them, no matter their level of celebrity, but what did I know?
She laughed dismissively. “He didn’t mind it when it bought us our house in East Hampton.”
“You’re equating the money you earn from work to a carte blanche permission slip to do whatever—or whoever—you want?”
“It’s what he signed up for.”
“You told him this? At the outset of your marriage?” I wasn’t trying to be dense or belabor her points, but it didn’t make sense. She was saying he’d been okay with cheating at one point but then changed his mind. I wanted to know what changed. I couldn’t have explained why I wanted to know so badly, but it seemed important.
She took another long sip of her drink, nearly draining it. Then she threw up her hands. “Of course I didn’t tell him. Who comes out and says, ‘I make the money, I have the power, and I plan to do whatever the hell I want’? But it was implied.”
“And you think he always knew.”
“Why? You think it was news to him this time around? Please. He’s not stupid. But I’m starting to think you are.”
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was.
With some difficulty, she pushed herself out of her chair and tottered off. “I’m gonna find the loo. I don’t even need to pee that badly. But I love calling it the loo.” She looked up at the pub owner, who still had a smile for her. “Excuse me, where’s the loo?”
Yup, she was drunk. And I was pensive. She’d opened up something I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
When I did start to think about it, I didn’t love what I saw. Granted, most of my bad behavior was years before, when I was a young, dumb pretty boy in New York who was just getting used to the amount of money being thrown at me to make one superhero movie. There were girlfriends I cheated on and friends I didn’t call back. I thought I was better than them. I deserved better. I didn’t feel that way anymore—far from it. I went out of my way not to be that kind of asshole. But part of the reason I tried so hard was because I knew I’d been exactly the kind of asshole I’d grown to hate.
When she returned from the loo, Triss watched me as if she could see confirmation in my lack of a response. The thing was, I didn’t want to run through my list of past misdeeds with her. It had nothing to do with trusting her or not. It had nothing to do with worrying about what she would think of me.
I didn’t want to bond with her over the shitty way I’d treated people in the past. I didn’t want to talk to her about any of it. But I did want to talk about it with Nikki. I needed her to know. She’d asked about my darker secrets, and I’d hedged, letting her think that being a workaholic was the worst thing about me. She needed to know the rest.
I needed to get back to my hotel room to call her.
Triss was listing to the side in her chair, which meant I had to make sure she got back to her hotel room safely as well. I paid the tab and extended a hand to her, which she took gratefully. When I pulled her up from the chair, she kind of fell into me. The uncoordinated crash made her laugh, and she put her hands on my chest to ready herself.
It was reminiscent of a scene we’d shot earlier in the day, what would be our final on-screen scene together in the film, the end of our love story. Maybe it was the repetition of playing that moment throughout the workday, or maybe she was just tipsy and feeling sad about her broken marriage, but Triss looked up at me, suddenly vulnerable. She rose on her tiptoes, brought her face to mine, and pressed soft lips against my mouth. It wasn’t accidental, and she wasn’t falling or off balance. But I was, at least momentarily, because it was the last thing I was expecting. Which was why it took me a few seconds to get my wits about me and pull away.
“Hold on,” I said, aware of her vulnerability but also a little angry that she’d presumed I would be interested. “Let’s just take it easy.” I took a scan of the room, paranoid that someone had seen—or worse, snapped a picture or taken a goddamned video. That was the last thing either one of us needed. But no one seemed to be looking our way. Thankfully, we were in a tiny local joint, where people mostly sat at the bar and had their backs to the door.
I untangled her arms from my neck and swiftly nudged her toward the door with my hand on the small of her back, hating that the gesture seemed at all personal. She reached back and hung an arm around my neck as we walked out of the pub, and I glanced behind us once more for the sign of an errant phone camera. I saw nothing.
Her arm stayed there, and I did my best to guide her down the street, because she was having some trouble walking. She had on high heels for some reason, and that wasn’t helping. “Thank you for being you,” she cooed.
I was in no mood. “Listen, we both had an emotional day, and I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but I’m not in an open relationship.”
She turned her head and peeked at me through her bangs, which covered her eyes and part of her face. “When in Ireland…”