by Max Monroe
There isn’t even a demon’s breath in hell chance that I would have gotten them down my legs in time if I’d had them on.
Oh my Godddd, that feels good. Sweet Jesus, I’ve never felt that kind of urgency to relieve myself in my entire life, and I honestly don’t care if Helena had to set fire to the whole fucking place to excuse why I ran off from her in such a rush. I’m just glad I can now continue living a life outside of this bathroom.
Business finished, I take a deep sigh, do my thang with the toilet paper, and then try to straighten myself into some kind of respectable state before exiting the stall.
When I do, another woman I don’t recognize is applying makeup touch-ups in front of one sink, so I head to the other to wash my hands.
I’d give almost anything to take a big scoop of cold water and splash it on my burning cheeks and forehead right now, but with the three hours of work Alejo put into making my face look the way it does—a sliver of what it looks like normally thanks to loads of contouring—that’s not an acceptable option.
I settle for letting my hands stay under the stream for an extra fifteen seconds and then, finally, towel off and head back outside where everyone but the one person I want to be is waiting for me.
“What in the hell happened there?” Heidi says sternly as I scan the crowd for Harrison.
Heidi notices my lack of attention and snatches it back with a cold snap of her voice. “He’s inside. He was drawing attention, lingering outside the ladies’ room like he was.”
I frown and heave a deep sigh.
“Now, I asked you a question.”
“I had to pee!” I whisper-yell with annoyance. “Not just a little bit either. My life freaking depended on it. So, sorry, but it was either take off for the solace of this bathroom or lift my leg and piss all over Ben Huddleson.”
“Raquel!”
“Well…don’t yell at me. I’m a person, for freak’s sake, and there is a whole other person living on top of my bladder. I make no apologies for things I can’t control.”
Heidi’s eyes narrow with aggravation, but she leaves the argument there. I have a feeling she’d like to take it further, but I also don’t give a shit. As long as she stops badgering me about it, she can be as mad as she wants internally.
“Come on,” she says, putting a hand to my back to get me moving again. “Ben is waiting for you to go inside and last call to be in your seat is in five minutes because they go to air in six. Your table is in the front row, so we can hardly sneak you in afterward.”
I nod and jerk my head forward.
“Let’s go, then.”
I pick my steps carefully, but now that I don’t feel like the lower half of my body is going to explode, navigating the hall seems a lot easier.
Entourages shuffle their stars all around us, moving them with much the same haste Heidi is using on me, and ushers hold doors open gallantly.
Ben paces in front of the doors up ahead and scowls when he sees me approaching. As a star, maybe I’m just used to getting my ass kissed, but on the off chance that it’s not that, I’d like to muse that Ben Huddleson maybe hates me just as much as I hate him.
Like, maybe, just maybe, I’m nothing but a means to an end to him, and he’s constantly rethinking the decision to bank on a pregnant woman for his chance to up his image.
I don’t know, could be wrong, but I don’t exactly feel warm and fuzzy inside any time he looks at me.
With effort, he replaces his scowl with a smile as I come to a stop next to him.
“You get lost or something?” he asks snidely before finishing with a laugh he clearly doesn’t believe in. He’s trying to prove that I shouldn’t take him too seriously, but I can guarantee if my answer doesn’t satisfy him, his anger will be serious enough for the both of us.
“I needed a minute in the ladies’ room,” I say as delicately as I can with an audience of about a dozen people thanks to the congregation of our teams. “I’m ready to go inside now if you are. In fact,” I push, “I’d love to get off my feet, so…” I jerk my head to the door.
“Come on,” Heidi says, stepping into the swirl of shit she can smell coming. Hollywood egos are afoot, and left to our own devices much longer, this might actually start to get ugly. “You’ve got a minute and a half to get to your seats, and I hardly think you’re in the mood to run. Right, Raquel?”
I nod and Ben jerks his head, opening the door and stepping inside without holding it open for me. I make a mental note to order a voodoo doll off Etsy before I go to sleep tonight, and I scan the area to see if I can find Harrison.
Did they lock him up in the dungeon downstairs or something?
Heidi notices my scanning and dawdling and takes me by the elbow to force me to walk toward my seat. Luckily, she talks as she does or there might have been a very impressive reenactment of Silence of the Lambs for all of the Shrine Auditorium to see.
“He’s in the very back with Toby, but I need your word that you’re not going to spend your time looking around for him, Raquel. You’re in the front row of tables, seated next to your fiancé, and you will be on camera a lot. You need to remember who you are and the purpose of all of this, and you need to play the part. You’re an actress, so I know you can do it.”
I just nod, and she jerks my elbow pointedly. “Your word, Raquel, not a nod.”
“I got it, okay? I understand. No looking around, no acting like a human. Only cyborg, Ben Huddleson-loving behavior from here on in. Check, check,” I say mockingly, making a tick mark motion in the air.
The lights flash just as she leans in to give me a stern lesson in being an adult, and I smile as she realizes she has less than thirty seconds to scram if she doesn’t want to mess up all of her perfect imaging work herself.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she warns, and I snort.
“Oh, I have no doubt.”
I turn and head for my seat, careful to avoid stepping on the train of my dress and tripping. Ben does nothing to help me, and I have to grit my teeth to stop myself from looking toward the back of the room to see if I can find Harrison. Just one little look into his comforting green eyes. That’s all I need.
Still, I resist. I know that if I don’t keep my word, Heidi would probably try to make it impossible for him to come to one of these things again, and I selfishly like being able to know he’s close, even if I can’t talk to him. I don’t know what I’d be like if he wasn’t here and I had no idea what he was doing.
I don’t know what that says about me—probably not good things—but I’m not accepting psychoanalysis at this time.
I finally settle into my seat, the bounce it gives under my weight a rude reminder of how big I’m getting these days, and scooch my elbow atop the table in an effort to find some much-needed chill space. Ben’s arm already occupies the spot in front of me, though—indicating very clearly that he’s sitting way too fucking close for no reason—and he steadies the muscles in resistance to my efforts. The man has miles of arm space already at this stupid table, but obviously I’m coming at this from a different angle than him—the one where I have a brain and am not a pompous, entitled, self-serving asshole with stereotypical misogyny as my baseline.
Dear God, please make this night end soon.
Harrison
If lasagna is layers of noodles, Hollywood is made up of layers of liars.
Innocent, vindictive, calculating, and pathological, this city’s got them all, and they don’t even have the good manners to mix in a little ricotta.
In fact, there’s no dairy to soften the blow. They’re all on strict diets that prohibit they consume it in any way.
I look down toward the front of the room, through the people between us, to the back of Raquel’s head, her perfect hair sweeping down and over her bare, silky shoulder. She keeps her arms tight to her body as Ben leans into her space aggressively, and I look harder, trying to see the expression on her face through the matter of her head—an impossible feat alread
y—when the lights go down, making the sight of anything in the audience possible only for superheroes.
After a segment where a few of the actors in attendance introduce themselves, Gwendolyn Myer, one of the most successful female comedians in showbiz, takes the stage to emcee. I wouldn’t have known anything about who she was—I’m not exactly a huge follower of the celebrity scene—but she declared herself as such in the first sentence.
“I’d like to thank all of the important people here for taking time out of their busy schedules to be here to get a pat on the back tonight. It really is a hardship, as I’m sure the working class of America that’s watching from home will attest, to spend several hours in a chair getting done up by several professionals to come all the way out to the Shrine Auditorium, sit in a seat for hours on end, just to be told how amazing you are. Really, we thank you.”
I have to bite my lip to stifle a laugh as the crowd gives a halfhearted chuckle. Okay, so maybe I didn’t know who Gwendolyn was, but I obviously should have. She’s ruthlessly hilarious.
“Now that you’re here, though, let’s talk frankly. I mean, how much money did you spend to be here tonight? Could you have possibly donated it to a cause more worthy?”
The crowd titters again, this time with something that doesn’t seem a whole lot like laughter, and all the bodies around me scowl. Not one person in the studio audience is finding this quite as amusing as I am, but I can almost guarantee the people at home are.
Meanwhile, a decision comes down from an authority as music starts to play, cueing Gwen off the stage in a hurry.
The crowd claps as she goes, and man, this is a whole lot more interesting than it was watching the Golden Globes from my couch. There’s way more drama.
Music plays again and the lights do a dramatic show as another set of decked-out stars step on the stage and up to the microphone. I look down to Raquel as they go through their spiel and see a camera dancing in her face. Ben puts a hand to her knee for show, and my hands tighten into fists on reflex.
God, I fucking hate watching him touch her, real or not.
The screen at the back of the stage projects an image of Rocky, smiling for the camera and doing a little wave as the woman at the microphone leans in.
“And the nominees for Female Actor in a Leading Role are…”
Her male counterpart leans in at her pause. “Helen Wang, Gilded Bedrooms. Lori Hersh, Ballet Badlands. Raquel Weaver, Gray River Falls. Sharon Wright, Bella Baby. Bridget Sawyer, Where the River Runs.”
A thick envelope in hand, the woman leans forward again as she pops it open, and I hold my breath. “And the Actor goes to…Raquel Weaver, Gray River Falls!”
“Oh my God,” I say to myself, putting my hands together in a violent clap. I whistle so loud that Toby turns to me with a scornful look, but I don’t care. Way to go, Rocky!
The camera pans to her immediately, capturing her smile and tears, and the sweet, magical way she sets her face in her hands in surprise. Ben grabs her wrists and puts his forehead to hers before pressing a quick kiss to her lips.
Chaste, meaningless kiss or not, my stomach immediately turns, all the jubilation I just felt taking a swift dive into nothingness.
I hate that I hate watching that so much. It’s supposed to be simple between us. Simple and clean and easy so I know, without a doubt, that I’ll get to be involved in my child’s life. No drama between his or her parents to derail it.
Rocky climbs the steps and up and onto the stage gracefully, kicking the long train of her dress behind her when she reaches the top and accepting the award with graciousness and a smile.
I can see hints of her real smile under a layer of the one she plays up for the people.
I watch avidly as she steps up to the microphone to make her speech, and it’s like watching a transformation, right before my eyes.
Even with her protruding baby bump, she positions her hips in the sexiest, staged pose, the slit of her dress allowing the full length of her leg to show, all the way to her bikini line. She pouts her overdrawn lips and giggles in a way I know doesn’t come naturally to the woman I’ve heard laugh for real.
In fact, I’ve heard of multiple personalities before, but I’ve never in my life seen a person display a more distinct set of two.
“Thank you,” she says, her voice a watered-down version of its normal full body as she makes it raspy and sexy to play to the crowd. “I can’t say what it means to me to be receiving this award for one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on. I know it was a collective effort, and I know I’ll remember my time with my castmates for as long as I’m alive. Thank you—thank you to…the father of my child,” she says, moving her eyes down to Ben pointedly. I have to hold my breath to stop myself from jumping up right then, yelling for everyone in the room to hear that Ben didn’t have a fucking thing to do with making that baby.
And quite frankly, the Raquel on stage didn’t either.
The woman from the bar—my Rocky—and the woman of the world when it comes to Raquel Weaver are two entirely different people. I could spot the difference in her laughs from a mile and a half away in dense fog while blindfolded. I swear, there isn’t even a hint of genuine happiness in the rolling curl of her Hollywood laugh, and yet, everyone sinks to their knees in front of it with roses and gifts.
I have to imagine that if they ever heard the real thing, they’d be lost to her charms forever. It wouldn’t matter if she were a virgin or a prostitute. It wouldn’t matter if she were married or divorced or pregnant with the child of an expatriate with ties to terrorism. They’d be taken with her completely, without a chance in hell of changing their minds.
It’s how I’ve felt about her since the moment I heard her laugh so hard she couldn’t stand up straight as we ran toward my apartment in the rain. I tried to forget it—and yet, now here I am, chasing her all over the goddamn world just for a few precious moments of her time.
And I guess that’s maybe why she guards her real personality so well. Maybe, deep down, she’s scared of what will happen if someone falls in love with her without condition. The last time she let people in—her mom, dad, and brother—they all took off and left her without a second thought.
And she’s scared to laugh and live and love. Because the last time she did that, she got pregnant.
The very, very early morning of August 16th, 2:00 a.m.
Harrison
At this point in the night, Semisonic would probably be singing “Closing Time,” but truthfully, I’m not even close to being ready for this night to end.
We fall out the door of the bar like two kids who’ve been drinking a whole lot more than water for the last few hours.
But laughter will sometimes do that to you.
Bend you over at the waist and hold you down like you’ve got an upset stomach.
I help Rocky by holding her at the elbow as she almost stumbles into the street. Her laugh echoes in the empty alley as rain once again falls upon us unchecked.
“Where are you headed?” I ask. “If it’s uptown, we can share a cab.”
Her eyes go wide as she smiles and then bursts out in laughter once again. “Which way is uptown exactly?”
I point to the right, and she laughs again. “Great. If only I could remember the direction I came from.”
“Don’t do a lot of exploring when you’re in New York, huh?” I ask cheekily.
She snorts. “You could definitely say that. I’ll just take the subway. Just point me in the direction of the nearest stop.”
“You don’t even know what direction you came from, and you expect me to let you get on the subway by yourself?” I scoff. “Fat chance.”
“Hey, I’m a capable woman. I can totally handle it.”
“I’m sure you can. Consider this an act for my peace of mind, then.”
“Come on. I’m sure you’ve got other places to be.”
“I don’t. The only place I’m headed is home, and I think we established I
don’t have anyone there waiting for me.”
Rocky puts a cheeky hand to her hip. “Harrison, are you trying to get me to come back to your apartment?”
I laugh. “I wasn’t. But I certainly wouldn’t say no if you decided to come back to my place on your own.”
She wavers a little, biting at her lip before shaking her head and wiping some water from her face. “No, no. I better not.”
“Then let me help you get in a cab, at least.”
As the rain starts to come down harder, she looks up at the sky, smiles, and shrugs helplessly. “Okay. I guess that’s not the worst option in the world.”
My smile grows as I take her by the hand. “Come on. We’ll go up by the park. There’ll be a lot more traffic and a hell of a lot better chance at actually getting one in this weather.”
She nods as I walk us forward, her hand in mine.
The rain picks up its pace steadily as we near the end of the block, and with every increase in intensity, the volume of her laugh grows.
By the time we make it to the end of the block, she’s damn near hysterical.
“Is this kind of weather normal for New York?” she yells to be heard over the roar of the downpour.
I smile as best as I can and pretended to wipe my eyes with little finger windshield wipers. “Oh yeah. Happens every day. This is the rainy season, don’t you know?”
“Don’t mock me!” she shouts with a cackle. “I live in California. I pay for perfect weather.”
Perched on the corner at the apex of Columbus Circle, we watch as occupied cab after cab flies by while we drown in the rain. Fed up, I grab Rocky’s hand again and lead us up the street a little more and in between a set of parked cars to flag one down.
She follows dutifully until we get there, but when two more pass me by, she shoves me behind her and steps up to try to hail one on her own.