by Lark O'Neal
Before the tears in my eyes can fall, I rush out of the room and downstairs. I’ll just sleep on the couch again.
In my heart, I guess I expect that she’ll apologize. What have I ever done to her, after all? I thought we were friends.
But she doesn’t come down. We are not friends. Kaleb is gone, and Tyler has been hiding things from me.
Why did I even agree to do these stupid commercials?
* * *
In the morning, I wake up early because unless you’re drunk, the couch isn’t that comfortable, and the sun is shining for the first time, pouring through all the big windows in a very obnoxious way. In another part of the house, I hear men’s voices talking about locations, so I guess we’re filming. With crankiness, I think it would be nice if they told us something now and then. I make a cup of strong tea and check my email while I drink it. There is a cryptic reply from Tyler.
No idea what yr talking about. On the way out the door, not trying to be rude. What’s up?
I can be cryptic, too. Check ur Facebook
It doesn’t exactly improve my mood, but, honestly, the filming is fun. We visit a spa and get mud treatments, sit in pedicure chairs and get our feet massaged, and have a “girl’s lunch” on a boat that travels over the lake. I’ve never been on a ferry before, and I love walking up and down the deck, feeling the motion of the water beneath us. We disembark at a ranch on the opposite shore, have some lunch, and then ride back. Darcy and I steer clear of each other, and that’s fine with me.
When we get back to the lodge I realize I have to get out of the room. If she wants to be a bitch, she can do it by herself. The woman who’s been running all the logistics is working on a laptop at a table in the corner of the great room. “Are there any rooms free now that half the crew is in Wanaka?”
“Yeah. Trouble?”
I shrug. “Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Just go find an empty room, lamb.”
Darcy is nowhere around, so I grab my stuff and find a room on the second floor, looking out toward the lake. It’s way nicer, and I prop myself up on the bed and open my iPad.
There’s a new note from Tyler.
Jess, she’s my coach, that’s all. Can we Skype? Are you there??
I’m in a bad mood for a thousand reasons, so maybe it would be better not to talk. But I need more information. I try Skyping, and he picks up on the second ring, coming into view on the screen. For a second my heart squeezes. He looks really good. Healthy and sunburned and more himself in some way I can’t quite pinpoint. The goatee is hot, much hotter than I would have expected, framing his very sexy mouth with soft, silky looking hair.
“Hey!” he says with a grin. “Two days in a row!”
I’m not going to be charmed and don’t smile. “What’s going on, Tyler?”
“Nothing, Jess. Alice is my coach.”
“For snowboarding.” I give him a frown. “You’re riding again.”
“That’s the surprise!” A grin breaks over his face, a big happy, almost goofy, expression. So not the Tyler I know. “I am! The judge ordered it, can you believe it? He rides, I guess, and watches the players, and he knew my name. He ordered me to make a bid for the Olympic team.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. That’s huge, actually.” I lean in. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know, Jess.” He ducks his head. “I was afraid I’d be totally humiliated. I wanted to see if I had anything left, maybe surprise you with it.”
I nod. “So this other person, your friend, has been sharing this huge, important moment with you. Right?”
“Well, not really. I just ran into her here. She was training some other people who were going home and offered to give me a hand, to see if she could help me get my groove back.”
“But still, you’ve been sharing this with her.”
He meets my eyes in the camera, across vast miles of ocean, but at least we’re in the same hemisphere now. “I wanted to surprise you, Jess. I wanted to be worthy of you.”
“I don’t need you to be worthy, Tyler, I need you to be real.” I shake my head. “Lena and all the people at the Musical Spoon knew about your history, that you were on parole, all that stuff you didn’t tell me. I was the only one who didn’t know, and I was supposedly your girlfriend.”
“I was ashamed, Jess.”
“You hid it from me, like, pretty dramatically.”
He reaches for me, toward the camera, and I have the impulse to duck away.
“Jess, please, let’s not fight, not when we’re so far away. Let me tell you about today, about everything. I had the best ride this afternoon. Like, it was totally there. I wasn’t sure it would come back.”
A part of me wants to drop my anger, my resentment, to go ahead and let him tell me about his progress, his joy in it, but that excitement is the very thing that makes me ache the most. “I feel really left out, Tyler. I told you about the commercials.”
“Let me show you everything.” He turns the camera to the room and walks to the window. “This is the apartment I’ve rented in Valle Navaro, which is outside Santiago, Chile.”
“Tyler,” I say, but he keeps going, ignoring me.
“This is my board, and my boots and—”
“Tyler, stop it.”
“And this is my little kitchen.”
“I’m going to hang up if you don’t talk to me properly.”
He stops and sits down. “Don’t, Jess. I love you.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You don’t trust me at all.”
“What? That’s not true.”
“You aren’t being real with me.” Tears are gathering in my eyes, because I am so not sure about what I’m doing here. “How can I ever trust you if you never tell me the truth?”
And yet I’m not being completely open, either, am I? Is this some weird double standard?
No. The thing that has to be true is what happens in Jess and Tyler world. He hasn’t even really let me into that world. I’m only allowed to sit right outside.
“It’s not lying to—”
“To what? Pretend you’re something else? Hide things? That’s what you’ve been doing. I’m embarrassed and mad and I feel like a fool. All these people know something really important about you that I don’t know. If I’m so important, how is it that you couldn’t tell me the most important thing going on in your life?”
“I gave you hints. I just wanted to find out if it was going to be real, and then I was going to tell you.”
I drop my eyes, unable to look at the entreaty showing in his face. In the middle of my chest is a knot of thudding emotion. “I can’t trust you to be real with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I forgave you for lying about the parole, but—” I shake my head. “A relationship is about intimacy, about sharing who you are with someone else. You haven’t been real with me at all. You want everything I have, but you’ll only give me those parts of you that you think look good.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. You know how it was in my family. I told you that. It’s hard to open up.”
“But, Tyler, going back to snowboarding isn’t like getting a new job. You went to a new city on a different continent and poured yourself into something that was very, very important to you, maybe even sacred, and you didn’t tell me about it.”
“When you put it like that, I get why you’re mad.” I see his fingers, and I know he’s touching my face on his screen. It’s piercing, and my tears overflow.
“I’m really sorry, Jess.”
“I need some time to think about this. I’m so tired I could fall over right now, and it’s hard to make good decisions when you don’t have a brain. I don’t want to give you my whole heart and have you only give me the left ventricle of yours.”
He laughs.
I smile, reluctantly.
“Can we just talk?” he asks.
“No.” My s
mile fades. “I’m in New Zealand because you kept something from me before. Now you’ve done it again, and I’m not sure we can keep going. I’m not sure you can reveal yourself with anybody, and if I stick with you, I’m going to be lonely all the time, waiting for you to be real with me.”
“Jess! I can’t believe you’re so upset. Can I please just tell you about today?”
“There’s no context, is there? I haven’t been in on the struggle. You’re just going to tell me about a good day. Well, hooray.” A tear drips from the corner of my eye. “I just need a little time.”
“This is about Kaleb, isn’t it?”
Here it is. I thought it would make me feel guilty, but what I actually feel is angry. My eyes narrow. “No, not really,” I say, and realize it’s true. “But if you want the truth, he’s pretty open. We share a lot, talk a lot, and it feels good. Maybe that’s part of why I’m so upset about this.”
“Jess,” he says quietly. “Please give me another chance. I’m sorry. Genuinely, deeply sorry.”
“A few days won’t make or break us, Tyler, and if they do, maybe we need to be broken.” I take a breath. “I do care about you, but I don’t want to wreck everything on a guy who can’t be real with me. I have to show up for myself, you know? And right now that means I need some time to think.”
He shakes his head, frowning. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Think about it in reverse, Tyler. What if I hadn’t told you I was cast in a commercial and was having this big adventure, and I was doing it with a friend of the opposite sex, and then you saw a picture of me with him?”
“You’re right!” He bursts out, hands in the air. “I was wrong. You’re right. Can we just start over?”
I’m shaking my head, and, although he can’t see it, my hands are shaking, too. I’ve never been able to set a boundary like this before, and it feels weirdly good. “I have to go. I’ll email you in a few days.”
“Jess!”
But I close the connection, then fall back on the bed and start to cry. It was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t make it easy.
My heart cries out, Tyler! But I am a stronger woman than I was.
I take off the necklace and look through the tiny hole. Blue and yellow, shards of green. Green and tiny spots of yellow. I curl up with a pillow to my belly and let the hot, sad, burning tears come.
Chapter NINETEEN
Wednesday is a blur of more filming around Queenstown and steering clear of Darcy. For the first time I’m working without Kaleb’s support and direction, and it means learning to stand on my own two feet. It gives me something to focus on, honestly, instead of Darcy’s meanness, Kaleb’s absence, and the tangle of Tyler. A lot of it is technical—where to stand, how to direct my expression, when to look at the camera and when to pretend it doesn’t exist. Rhonda has been teaching me some things, and Ian gives direction, too, so I feel like I’m getting better. I still make a billion mistakes every day, but not as many as before.
We’re going to finish shooting this week. There’s the trip to Milford Sound, which is also going to be a very simple crew, just me and Kaleb and the middle-aged pair, and then a shoot at a winery outside Queenstown, though I wonder what the heck they’re going to shoot in the wintertime. Whatev. I’ll show up where they want me.
Then we’ll be done. It makes me feel a little hollow to think about that, and I wonder in the back of my mind if this is something I want to keep doing and if it’s even possible. If not, maybe I want to work with my dad, learn the grapes and the wine.
Too much to think about.
* * *
The rest of the crew is due back on Wednesday night, but the production manager gets a text that there was an accident ahead of the crew and traffic’s backed up, so they’re not going to get in until much later. He curses colorfully, walking back and forth across the great room, ranting. “We’re over budget as it is, and we’ve got to get down to Milford to keep the ferry for Friday. Tell the Milford group we’re still leaving at 5 am.”
I exchange looks with Rhonda. We’re both slated to go in the morning. “We’d best get our things together,” she says quietly. “Does Kaleb have all his stuff?”
“I have no idea.”
“Maybe check. Get packed.” She heads upstairs, and I follow behind. I haven’t seen Darcy in a while, so I risk going to the room we were all sharing. It’s empty. Darcy’s stuff is scattered over her bed. Kaleb took his duffel, and I look around for anything else he might have left, but I don’t see anything.
Coming back down, I naturally run into Darcy coming up. She stands sideways to let me pass, and I keep my head level as I walk.
“Still not talking to me, eh?” she says.
I stop. “What?”
“You just going to give me the silent treatment forever? Over a ridiculous fight that didn’t mean anything?”
“Maybe it didn’t mean anything to you,” I say, and keep walking. “It did to me.”
Back in my room, I pack everything and then turn off the light so I can see the lake and the town strung around it like a necklace of yellow and blue. I feel something inside me changing, growing. I feel myself becoming someone else. New Zealand is changing me, or maybe it’s travel, or maybe it’s the filming, or Kaleb, or…all of it. All of it.
My birthday is next Tuesday. I’ll be twenty, starting a new decade, leaving my teens behind forever. Not that I mind. They’ve been pretty hard most of the time. Maybe my twenties will be easier.
All I really know is that everything is changing, and I feel it flinging me forward into a life I’m not sure I recognize, turning me into a me I don’t know very well.
* * *
I don’t know what time it is when I feel a body slide in beside me. “We don’t have much time,” Kaleb says, kissing my neck, his big hands settling over my belly. “I didn’t know where you were, and Darcy wouldn’t tell me, so I had to wait until somebody got up so I could ask.”
“What time is it?”
“Four-thirty. We didn’t get here until midnight.”
He smells so perfectly of himself, and his body behind me is a solid, comforting wall, making me feel anchored in my sea of change. I pull his hands closer around me. “You must be tired.”
“Better now. I’ll sleep on the bus.”
“You can sleep in my lap.”
He kisses my neck, my shoulder. “That’d be fantastic.”
Fentestic, I think with a smile. His accent is so appealing, so lilting, so full of surprises.
“What did you and Darcy fight about?”
I think about how to phrase it, but nothing works. “Never mind.”
“Not me?”
“In a way.”
“Let me guess. White girl shit?”
I shake my head, again feeling weirdly humiliated. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I turn in his embrace and slide my arms around his neck. “It was strange without you here.”
He smiles very slightly and brushes his nose over mine. “You can say you missed me.”
“I missed you. We’ve been together practically every second since I arrived in New Zealand.”
“I know. I missed you, too.” He bends and nestles his face into the curve between my neck and shoulder, his lips making soft patterns along my collarbone. His hips press closer to me. “I wish we had more time.”
“Me, too.”
But a flurry of steps outside the door is interruption enough. He slides away and gets to his feet. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
* * *
It’s a very small group of us heading for Milford. Just Kaleb and me, the older two actors, Damon, Ian, and a couple of tech people. It’s a relief to leave Darcy in Queenstown.
The drive is long—almost five hours—and Kaleb sleeps most of the way. In my lap, just as I said he could. It’s weirdly, extremely intimate, even more than a lot of the other things we’ve done. I can observe every detail of his face, the angle of his sharp jaw,
and his long, long lashes and blunt nose. Now that I’ve been here for a while, I can see that his is very much a Maori face, the angle of the cheekbones, the high forehead and heavy eyebrows, and even his lush, strong mouth. A scatter of black curls lies along his temple and down the line of his face to his ear, and I can feel the weight of his head against my belly.
So he sleeps in my lap, and I look out the window, listening to music on my headphones. New music, local music that’s like my old favorites at home. Lorde and Jupiter Project. Everybody is very proud of Lorde, only seventeen and her song Royals is exploding. She has a deep, bluesy voice I like, but the words are what’s so piercing. I also like this reggae-sounding guy called Tiki Taane, sort of reggae/soul/something unique to New Zealand.
The landscape is mountainous and empty, with only a farm here and there to break up the scenery. With every mile I feel something slipping away, something that was keeping me chained to that other life, the one where I was poor and struggling, the one where I was lonely and had so few people to call on.
After a long time, Kaleb stirs, turning over onto his back to look up at me. The light strikes his irises exactly right, turning them a coppery color that makes me think of pirate treasure and possibility.
“Oi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say, and bend over to kiss him, sideways kissing, my hand on his throat. “Feel better?”
“Yeah. Do that again.”
So I bend into him and we kiss, this time more slowly, more thoroughly. His hand touches the back of my head and, remembering how intensely he turned me on the other morning, I take a small, sharp nip of his lower lip.
His fingers flex on my head. “Careful now.” He sucks on my lip slightly and lets go. In a quiet voice, he says, “I want you so bad.”
“Me, too.” I push my fingers through his curls, touch the edge of his ear. “Soon.”
“Can we?”
My periods are short. “We’re good.”
He smiles in a slow, impossibly sexy way that sets my skin of fire. “Mmm. Kiss me.”
* * *
When we arrive at Milford our bags are taken to cabins scattered along the water, but we’re hustled out to a ferry. “The weather’s going to turn,” a grizzled older man says. “Need to get this done.”