Gal Pals

by Lily Craig

  Who would hack Christopher? Why him and not Dean?

  Steph must have anticipated my thoughts because she continued.

  “Guess it’s been happening to a few stars in relationships with non-famous people. Dean, you, possibly Melissa McLeod, too. Think the trolls are looking for nudes but they’ll leak anything that gets gossip mags talking.”

  “Oh my god,” I whispered.

  “So check up on your passwords just to be safe, change them and make sure you’ve got two-factor authentication set on everything. And make sure anyone you date does the same.”

  Didn’t Steph remember I was single now?

  My gut ached at the thought.

  Worse still was the realization that I’d blamed Tara for something much, much larger than her. I’d jumped to a devious conclusion about her motives without exploring alternative explanations. And I’d lost her because of it.

  Could she forgive me? I had to find out. Nausea overcame me and I cut the conversation short, promising Steph I’d check back in about cybersecurity some other time.

  While I hyperventilated and tried desperately to calm down, my fingers dialled Tara’s number. I stared at the phone as it rang, willing myself to breathe more evenly, to stop the rumbling in my guts at this new revelation.

  Unsurprisingly, Tara didn’t pick up. If I were her, I’d be angry at me, too. Hell, I wasn’t her and I was angry at myself. Underneath that vivid pain was the feeling of violation.

  Someone had targeted me. And they’d used Tara, the most lovely and loving girlfriend I’d ever had, to get to me. It was despicable. Though I didn’t understand technology, I wanted to reverse engineer the hack somehow, find out who the person was, and bring them to justice.

  Fantasies of hiring tech heads and vicious lawyers danced in my mind while the car dropped me off at my house, and I even researched a few options from my living room.

  But what I wanted most of all was to talk to Tara.

  It was then that I concocted my most ridiculous plan ever.

  The studio lights were making me sweat, not that I needed any help. Anxiety was already doing plenty of work on its own. Wardrobe had been by to ask if I wanted to change because they’d seen the growing sweat stains on the edges of the dress’s armholes, but it didn’t matter.

  The outfit was merely superficial. What I needed to focus on was my lines.

  I felt small in the chair, as if I’d been dreaming one of those nightmares where you’re still a kid and can’t accomplish anything you want to do. The furniture dwarfed me as readily as if I were still 6 years old. Or maybe it seemed larger in my mind because of the fear rumbling in my belly.

  Whatever it was, I had to get through it. The purpose drove me, not the process.

  “Ok Vanessa, we’re lit and ready for you whenever you want to roll,” said the producer. She was looking at a clipboard so I waited until she glanced up again and then signaled that I wanted to start.

  The cameras rolled, the moment began, and I was ready for it. As ready as I could ever expect to be.

  “Hello America,” I said. My voice wavered slightly so I paused, breathing carefully to calm myself. “My name is Vanessa Corrington and you might know me as the star of Dream Time, where I fought a corrupt post-apocalyptic government. It was a scary threat, to be sure. But the scariest thing I’ve experienced in years was the breach of my privacy in the recent celebrity photo hack. If you saw those pictures, you saw the happiness I shared in an intimate way with someone I was extremely lucky to know. Maybe you saw what I looked like on an off day, with no makeup on, and thought ‘wow, she gets paid the big bucks to appear on camera? I could do that!’ Or maybe you didn’t care about this celebrity nonsense and didn’t pay any attention. Whatever your actions, my privacy, and the privacy of my dear ex girlfriend, was breached.”

  “You might not care about that, but I’m not here about the hack. What’s done is done, and all the lawyers in Hollywood know better what to do about that than I do. I’m here for a different reason. I’m lucky enough in this life to have a platform, to be able to make a difference because I’ve been given a voice. I want to use that voice to speak for people who aren’t as lucky as I am.”

  “It’s ok to be whoever you feel you need to be, whatever the circumstances. I hope that you can be your truest self, the one you might not always be proud of, but the one that will make you happiest if you listen to your inner voice. I haven’t been honest with myself for a long time, and it hurt me and someone I cared deeply about.”

  “I’m here to confirm what I’ve said elsewhere and to clarify. Yes, I’m a lesbian. Yes, I was dating a girl named Tara who you saw in those photos. And yes,” I said, gathering every last ounce of courage I could muster, “I love her.”

  I continued speaking broadly about the power of love and the importance of being true to yourself, of having the courage to live openly and with joy. The words spilled out of me as if I’d been holding back a waterfall of commentary. Maybe I had been.

  The most important thing had been said, and that left my palms damp and my heartbeat gradually slowing down. It was the most popular late night show in the country. If that didn’t somehow get to Tara’s news feed, my hope of reconnecting with her was lost.

  I sure as hell couldn’t seem to get her on the phone. I was beginning to suspect she’d changed her number.

  That was crazy, right? She wouldn’t be that upset with me.

  I didn’t know, though, what level of betrayal she’d thought she felt. All I could expect was that my one last grand attempt at expressing the things I should have said all along would reach her.

  My interview with Jim Galloway went about as well as I expected it to, typical Hollywood talk show stuff about Dream Time 2 and my personal life. When I went to bed that night, I fell asleep within minutes. I’d exorcised something that had needed saying all along.

  Not that I was gay; that seemed immaterial now. It was the fact I loved Tara.

  I loved her face, her smile, her essence. I loved the way she’d taken me out of my comfort zone, and how she’d shown me her private life, even the parts she was ashamed to show someone like me. I loved every minute we’d spent together, right up until the end.

  I loved Tara, and I’d finally, openly said it. I just hoped, somehow, she’d hear.

  Chapter Eight

  “If anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace,” said the priest. He looked out into the congregation, earnestly searching for any last-minute shrieks from protesting ex-girlfriends, or for dramatic entrances on the part of a long-lost cousin.

  The seconds elapsed, and I sat there, waiting for my moment. When he pronounced the couple married, I kneeled in close and snapped several shots focused on their first kiss as husband and wife. They were both crying, smiles shining through the tears, and when they parted the looks they exchanged were perfect.

  I caught them on camera, too.

  That was what love looked like.

  It wasn’t the sultry gaze exchanged in, say, an abandoned beach changing room. It wasn’t someone who would suspect you of working against them despite your professed love. It was calm, steady, dependable.

  I found my eyes welling up with tears along with the couple’s, though I wasn’t sure if it was happiness or self-pity that fuelled the waterworks.

  No matter how I felt, I was lucky to have this job. Weddings paid well, even if they were a lot of work, and my friend Amanda had linked me up with the couple. Their other photographer had been chosen to star in a reality television show and bailed on them at the last minute.

  While they walked back down the aisle to leave the church, I shot a ton of pictures. Faces of the congregation smiling, wiping tears, the backs of the newlyweds retreating into the distance. People’s voices started to murmur along with the organ music and I felt some part of me reverberate with hope about love, after all.

  Except it
wasn’t hope; my phone was vibrating.

  It could wait. Not every day you get to work your first professional photography gig, however small and last minute it was. I let the call go to voicemail.

  Twenty minutes later, shooting the couple on the location of the rehearsal, nestled in between birds of paradise flowers and several elegant palm trees, I felt my phone ring again. If they heard it, they didn’t mention the noise, so I kept shooting as if it weren’t happening.

  Someone’s being awfully persistent.

  My mind went to Vanessa, the dozens of missed calls I’d been pretending hadn’t filled my phone’s notifications. If she needed something, she could wait, just like anyone else would have to. I finished the portrait session with the couple and excused myself to the washroom. The reception would take many, many more hours into the night and my curiosity was beginning to take over.

  I hadn’t been missing calls from Vanessa, but from my mother. I immediately dialled her back.

  “Mom? What’s wrong? Did someone die?”

  I heard laughter on the other end and my stomach unclenched. Phew.

  “Oh heavens no, honey, sorry to scare you like that. I was just on Facebook and saw that you were in a picture with Vanessa Corrington. She went on Jim Galloway last night and was talking about her love life and how she loved her ex. Was that you?”

  Good lord, I didn’t need this now. Still, she piqued my curiosity.

  “What’s that about Jim Galloway?”

  “Vanessa Corrington was on his show last night and did a monolog thingy about her being a lesbian and how she was still in love with her ex. But it was partly about the whole hackers leaking pictures too.”

  “Hackers?”

  Had my mother gone insane? It seemed possible. Still, even if some of her commentary made little sense, she’d linked Vanessa and me coherently. I was sure she’d have seen the pictures by now.

  “Yes, honey, the hackers who stole that picture of the two of you at the beach. Rotten people, who does that to someone? I know I wouldn’t want them stealing pictures of me and Winnie.”

  Winnie was my mother’s dog, a fluffy terrier mix no hacker in their right mind would ever want pictures of.

  But buried beneath my mild frustration with my mother’s comments, my mind was whirling.

  That was how the picture got out into the press.

  I was struck by the sudden, intense need to change my passwords. Maybe to shower for an excessive amount of time and scrub off the sensation of having been used.

  And if Vanessa was going on talk shows to ramble about our relationship and how much it meant to her, then she must have found out about the photo leak, too. She would have learned it wasn’t my fault.

  I just wished she’d seen that all along. My guts still ached at the thought of her accusatory gaze the morning she found out the picture had been published. I murmured a few more sentences to my mother, barely absorbing the rest of her conversation.

  “Yeah, Vanessa and I were dating,” I said.

  “You know, dear, I wasn’t sure about your last few girls, but Vanessa seems like a catch. You should put a ring on it!”

  She laughed, giggling like she’d made the joke of the century. Mom was often over the top in her acceptance of my sexuality, enthused as if she’d been drinking tequila.

  “Thanks Mom, I should get back to the wedding if I want to have any chance of booking more jobs in the future. But Mom…”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “Anytime, Tara. Love you!”

  For the rest of the day, it was as if my eyes had been cleared of some persistent foggy lens. The darkness and pain I’d felt witnessing the couple’s love vanished, and I truly enjoyed taking the pictures as a tipsy friend gave the toast to the bride, tearing up before she even started to speak. I kneeled close to the bride and groom as they mashed cake into each other’s faces, and I even found myself misty eyed at their grand exit through a corridor of friends holding sparklers bidding them good night.

  I could see the romance in life again. I just wasn’t sure about my life in particular. That might take some more digestion.

  Editing the wedding pictures took me days of endless hunching over my laptop, software crashing more than I’d care to admit. I flipped between tutorials for how to achieve the effects I wanted on the pictures, second-guessing every move I made in the edits. My diet consisted almost solely of take-out food eaten directly from the container. But I was happy.

  This was the work I wanted to do all along, and though it was painful to try so hard and see the results fall short of my goals, at least I was trying. At least I was working towards where I wanted to be, rather than accepting my steady pay and near-chronic hand pain at the data entry center.

  The doorbell rang, and I eagerly, though creakily, got up to answer. I was expecting pad thai delivery, but when I opened the door Vanessa was standing in front of me. Shock paralyzed me, though I started to thaw when I noticed she was holding my pad thai order.

  “Ran into the delivery person on the way up here,” she said. “So then at least if you don’t want to talk to me I have an excuse.”

  The sound that escaped me was a cross between a huff and a laugh. To be honest, if you’d asked me which I’d intended I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I felt a tornado of emotions at seeing her standing there.

  The purple side of her hair had faded, perhaps because shooting would have ended recently for Dream Time 2. Her eyes were vivid, searching my face for some sort of sign that I wanted her there.

  But I didn’t know.

  How could you figure it out? What signs were you supposed to see?

  “Why did you come here?”

  Did I want her to have come? If I wanted her to leave, I could have said so.

  “I was getting pretty tired of the noise your voicemail makes when I tried to call and leave a message,” Vanessa said. “Even if you don’t listen to the messages you really ought to delete them.”

  She smiled, the earnestness of her expression sending a twinge of affection down my spine.

  “I…Why don’t you come in?”

  I had no idea what I wanted from her. An apology? A ritual shaming in the public eye? Nothing at all? But somewhere deep inside, I was certain that I wanted her to be close as I figured it out.

  Or maybe I was just dazzled by her presence, yet again. Her eyelashes were impossibly long and soft, fluttering against her cheeks when she blinked. She put the food down on the kitchen counter and turned to me.

  “Tara, I know you don’t have to listen to me. And you owe me nothing, nothing at all. Just know that I’m aware I treated you poorly. I should have listened to you, shouldn’t have assumed you’d sell out our relationship like that.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” I echoed. The anger from the past few weeks hissed inside me, eager for a venue to perform. To be heard, especially by the person whose actions had most hurt me.

  “I’m here to say I’m sorry, as deeply and meaningfully sorry as I can possibly be. You meant everything to me. I even did this stupid late-night ramble that I hoped you’d see…”

  She tilted her head, eyes locked on my face to gauge my reaction.

  “You didn’t see it, did you?”

  “My mom told me about it,” I admitted, shrugging. “She thought it was sweet.”

  Vanessa was leaning against the kitchen counter with a false appearance of nonchalance. Though she was an actress, I could tell she was anxiously anticipating my every word.

  “What did you think?”

  I inhaled slowly, my skin tingling from the intensity of the way Vanessa looked at me. Her eyes felt like they were drawing me in closer to her, creating an intimacy I wasn’t sure I wanted. She’d hurt me, believed things about me I couldn’t have done. Not if she really knew me.

  And yet…

  There was something there, I knew it. My body reacted to her presence like it was being awakened from a deep
sleep. Fire seemed to have reignited in my belly, my every nerve ending practically screaming at me that I should reconcile so we could be close again.

  Not that it was just physical. I was touched she’d tried so hard to reconcile with me. Public television announcements would have meant the opposite of Vanessa’s normally closed-mouth approach to her personal life. To do that, for me, must have taken incredible courage.

  “Again, since I didn’t see it, I’m going off my mom’s comments here. But it…intrigued me.”

  “That so?”

  Vanessa’s eyelids were half open, languid with a combination of desperate hope and some sultry kind of lust I had forgotten she could feel around me. It made me wish I’d worn nicer clothing, done my hair a bit, or put on some makeup. Something to deserve the way she looked at me.

  “It was vindicating, I guess.”

  “Please tell me you changed your passwords. I can’t bear the idea your accounts had someone in them other than you.”

  “Of course I did,” I said. And she was right, the thought of someone creeping around in my pictures, maybe even my messages and emails, was repulsive. Maybe that stranger became the enemy I needed to move past my frustration and disappointment with Vanessa.

  Whatever it was, I felt affection swell towards her, the concern in her voice and longing on her face so obvious.

  “Did your mother tell you everything I said?” she asked. In this light, in the dingy interior of my studio apartment, standing by the kitchen sink with her least glamorous hairstyle in months, Vanessa looked almost like a regular person. Just a girl standing in front of her ex, delivering her pad thai in order to have a few minutes’ conversation.

  The moment made me smile, a welcome expression. I kept smiling, making eye contact with Vanessa that felt like it made my heart beat twice as fast.

  “What specifically were you thinking of?”

  “I said that I love you,” she said. She paused briefly, biting the pillowy softness of her lower lip in a moment of …was it shyness? I was stunned. “I love you, Tara.”