by Max Monroe
It’s right. It’s gratifying. It’s the sustenance I’ve been missing since the moment I set foot in California.
I don’t pay attention to anything other than the arm connected to mine and the ground beneath my feet as we come to the end of the back hall and stop at the studio door.
I’m all but certain Heidi is noticing the hold I have on Rocky’s hand now, but I won’t even give her the pleasure of a place to put her anger. If my eyes don’t meet hers, I keep my own power—my own happiness—to myself.
I hear a deep sigh as I look to the side of Rocky’s glowing face and smile. God, she really is gorgeous. Dolled up, dressed down, soaked to the bone from a freakishly torrential rainstorm on an August New York day…
She’s the woman I never knew I was looking for. The one to tick all the goddamn boxes.
A burst of flashing lights and yells overwhelms the silence and closes it out as Heidi shoves open the door and clears a path for us to the waiting black SUV. The door swings open courtesy of Rocky’s driver, and Freddie Bones brings up the rear behind us to keep the jostling crowd from closing in on us.
All sorts of questions come from every direction, but I tune them out and focus on helping Rocky into the car. I take her hand and weight in my own and lift with the other, placing light pressure at her hip. As she scoots across the seat, I follow, and the door closes with a dramatic bang as soon as I clear the threshold.
The crowd still rages outside, like a tornado above a storm shelter, but I don’t let it confuse my objective.
With a gentle hand, I reach out and squeeze Rocky’s knee. When she meets my gaze, I slide my fingers down to interlace with hers once again.
I want her to know it’s a conscious move—not one made of convenience. I want to hold her hand. Truthfully, I want to do so goddamn much more. And I’m tired of hiding it.
The ride to our apartment building is quiet but bold. It stands out with a vibrancy none of the days before have stood out because today, no matter the consequences, I made a gesture and stood by it.
And Rocky accepted.
Together in that quiet ride from Point A to B, we hold hands like two people who have more to offer than civility and co-parenting.
We hold hands like people with hope.
When the door to the apartment closes behind us, and the rest of Rocky’s entourage excuses themselves to get to impending tasks, Heidi stands pointedly at the front of the coffee table, her arms crossed over her chest.
Rocky takes a seat on one end of the sofa, exhausted, but I keep to my feet and meet my opponent head on—ready for battle.
“Jesus Christ, I knew we’d have to worry about you going rogue all the time,” Heidi finally declares, a steely, menacing whisper making far more noise than a yell ever could.
I laugh in Heidi’s face. “Go rogue? What is this, special ops? A government agency? I didn’t do anything Rocky didn’t want me to do, and I didn’t say anything you should be this upset about.”
“That’s what you think!” Heidi yells. “But you have no idea the ways they can twist these things around.”
“Yes, I do. So, let them twist them. It’s not like any of this has lessened Rocky’s clout. If anything, she’s more popular than ever.”
She fucking sneers. “How in the hell would you, of all fucking people, know?”
“Because I’m not blind,” I answer without hesitation. “The people love her. They can tell, despite the seventy-five layers of makeup you insist on burying her under, that she’s a genuine and lovable person. Especially now that she’s not living behind some fake, insane life you’ve concocted. She gets to live the truth, and people can tell the difference.”
“Oh, you have no fucking idea—” Heidi starts to shout, but she’s cut off before she can finish whatever vile words were on the tip of her tongue.
“Stop! Just stop!” Rocky yells, shoving herself to standing from the couch. “God, I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to listen to this argument for another second! It’s like I’m in fucking Groundhog Day, but the casting department didn’t even have the decency to hire Bill Murray.”
Heidi’s glare is powerful and oppressive, but me…well, I’m actually smiling. Rocky looks a little like she’s not sure which one scares her more, but I don’t care. I’m so fucking proud that she’s finally, finally standing up for herself.
She can yell at anyone she wants. Me included.
“Just…stop, okay? We all get it. You don’t want him involved, but he’s here. And more than that—”
Heidi walks out of the room before she can finish, and Rocky’s face turns a horribly bright shade of red. She looks like she’ll explode at any second, but instead of spewing her guts everywhere, she storms out of the room in a rush, her hand at her stomach.
I go after her.
I may be a source of her upset, but by God, I’m sure as hell also going to be a source of comfort.
Raquel
Where’s Calgon when you need it? For the love of God, someone take me away.
Light-headed and with the weight of an elephant on my chest, I sink down onto the edge of the bed and take a deep breath.
My emotions feel like they’re pulsing through me, an actual electric shock sending waves throughout my entire body. I’ve never felt this before—this staggering, unsettling lack of control over every fiber of my being.
It’s not like Harrison and Heidi haven’t argued before. It’s not like it was unexpected. But I feel inexplicably overwhelmed. If my baby were a cannonball, I’d be ready to fire it as heavy artillery any second now.
The door opens with a whoosh and then closes with a tight click behind Harrison as soon as he gets a look at my face.
Not wasting any time, he does something reminiscent of a slide into home plate to settle between my knees and look up at me.
“Rock, breathe, okay?”
I shake my head sharply, and he reaches up to put his hands to the sides of my face to steady it. I bat them away like a lunatic, but the feel of them there makes me feel like I’m going to explode.
A small smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he raises them both like a criminal under arrest. “Okay, okay,” he soothes. “Touching does not bring you joy right now, and Marie Kondo says to get rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy, so consider the touching dunzo.” He rakes a dramatic hand across his throat, and even under duress, I can’t help but smile. He’s gone from the guy who doesn’t know shit about showbusiness-y type stuff to the guy who is quoting Marie Kondo in his everyday life. And he’s done it for me. “What can I do?”
I shake my head because I don’t know the answer. I don’t know why I feel the way I do—I can hardly explain it at all—and that in and of itself makes it nearly impossible to know the antidote.
“All right. What has you upset? What are you feeling right now? Are you mad at me for the thing with Heidi? Wanna throw some raw pasta in my face?”
“It’s not that!” I snap. “I mean, it’s partially that, I guess, but not really. I just… I feel crazy! Like I can’t control myself or my emotions.” I pull at my face with one hand while putting the other to my ever-tightening chest. “The anxiety feels crippling, Harrison. I mean, what if the baby isn’t okay? Or the baby is okay but I’m a terrible mother who knows nothing about mothering whatsoever?”
His face melts into another position, one I’m way too self-involved to understand at the moment.
I shove to standing and pace back and forth before turning to face him again. “I don’t know anything about taking care of another human. I’ve barely even taken care of myself. I’ve been in this business since my sixth birthday, and there’s always, always been someone there telling me where to be and what to do and what’s expected of me. Motherhood doesn’t come with a manual, you know? It’s, like, a giant, horseshitty mess of trial and error where you hope you don’t raise a murderer or psychopath or whatever. How do I know I’m not going to raise the world’s next terrorist, Harrison?
How? I just feel like I need to scream for an hour and a half or so. Run through the streets or something.”
By the time I’m done with my rambling tirade, my breaths are coming out in erratic pants, and I still don’t feel better. If anything, I feel worse. More anxious, more amped up. My body is a bottle, and there isn’t a fucking genie inside. Just enough boiling crazy to create an actual explosive.
“All right, all right,” Harrison says, taking me by the arms and walking me out onto the balcony and into the rain. It’s cool, despite the hot weather, and feels remarkably cathartic on my raging skin.
Still, it’s not exactly normal practice to walk a pregnant woman out onto a balcony in the rain, so I put a voice to my curiosity.
“Um, what are we doing out here? It’s raining…”
“You said you want to scream, right?”
I laugh. “Well, yeah. Of course, I do. I’m coming out of my freaking skin in this ginormous body I don’t seem to be able to control anymore. I can no longer see my shoes. I don’t even know if they match or not. Honestly, I don’t think they do because they feel different on my feet, but fuck, I can’t freaking see them to confirm.”
“Then scream,” Harrison says like it’s a completely normal thing to do. “Scream your head off. Hell, I’ll do it with you. We’ll both scream until you feel better, until some of the weight is off your chest. Until you don’t feel like screaming anymore.”
“Have you lost your mind too? I can’t just scream into the night like a crazy person, Harrison.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it’s crazy!” I shout and stomp one foot to punctuate. “Insane, actually!”
“It’s not either of those things, baby,” he says, and his voice is so tender it almost makes me want to cry. “If it makes you feel better, it has a purpose—an important one.”
“But I’m not just anyone. Someone could get a picture or a video or a—”
“Will that picture or that video or anything else that may come of this make you worse off than you already are?”
“Maybe?” I say with a slightly unhinged laugh.
He rolls his eyes. “Physically, I mean. Will it make you sick or hurt the baby?”
“No. It might kill a career, but I’ve never heard of a paparazzi photo killing a baby,” I admit morbidly.
“Will screaming, right now, make you feel physically better?” he challenges. “Lower your stress, your blood pressure, the presumed strain on you and the baby and everything your body is doing right now?”
“Yes…but—”
“But nothing, then. Let’s scream. We’ll do it together.”
I feel just on the verge of an actual meltdown, and the release that would come with a scream is so dang tempting. Maybe if I just do it for a second…
I open my mouth and let one fly. “Ahh!”
Harrison scowls at my beyond pitiful attempt at unleashing myself. “Oh, come on. That wouldn’t even pass in a mediocre high school horror film. Show me what you’ve got! Open up your lungs!”
I shake my head but try again. “Ahhhh!”
“AHHHHHH!” Harrison adds, absolutely destroying my wimpy scream in every capacity while banging on his chest like a wild gorilla.
I try again, using my diaphragm like I would if I were singing for a role. “Ahhhhh!”
“Yes, yes!” Harrison encourages. “That’s so much better! Go again!”
High off his praise, I put my arms out to my sides on the railing and lean all the way into it until my lungs burn a little with my effort. “AHHHHHHH!”
“AHHHHH!” he answers in a fiercely wild call.
I scream again until I’ve expended all the air in my lungs, and when the silence finally rings out afterward, it is remarkable just how much better I feel.
Seriously. All the weight on my chest is just gone.
Blind with relief, I lose myself to the moment. A cackle starts up at the bottom of my throat and crawls all the way to the top until I’m doubled over—as much as I can be over my huge stomach anyway—and look up at the man in front of me from under my veil of tacky, wet, mascara-coated lashes.
Harrison’s hair sticks to his forehead, dripping little rivulets the same way it did that night in August when he first walked into the bar and turned my world upside down.
His eyes are alight, and his heart is on his sleeve as he nods at me as if watching me act like the world’s biggest mental case is the best thing he’s ever seen in his life.
And I could swear, it’s like time stops. Right here in this perfect moment, with just him and me and the baby we made and unadulterated joy.
Maybe it’s the hormones. Maybe it’s the memory of his hand in mine, strong and warm and resilient as he walked me out of Gary Bull’s studio tonight.
Whatever it is, it makes resisting impossible.
I will not survive this moment—not physically, not spiritually—if I do not feel the weight of his lips on mine.
Emboldened by spontaneity, I unbend at the waist and take his face into my hands. His laughter stops abruptly at the look in my eyes, but I don’t wait out the moment at all—I don’t want to have time to second-guess.
Instead, I push up onto my toes and into his space entirely and put my lips to his.
Flesh to flesh with absolutely no room to misconstrue the gesture as something other than it is. Immediately, his hands find my hips and squeeze, smashing my oversized body to his so entirely, it’s almost as if there isn’t a watermelon jammed between us.
With swift precision, he walks us back into my room, sweeping the balcony doors closed with a kick of his foot. His tongue forges into my mouth and plunders my tongue, and for the first time in my life, I’m honestly wondering why I’ve never taken a vacation on a pirate ship.
Sweet merciful mother of Jesus. Has he always been this good of a kisser? I mean, did I black it out? I had to have. Because if I’d remembered…
I shake off my overly complicated thoughts and focus in the moment—on the absolute nirvana of his tongue against mine. They dance together in perfect rhythm to the most perfect song, and his hands skate deliciously down—
“Raquel!” Heidi yells through the door, her heavy fist making the wood shake enough that I startle at the sound of it and accidentally snag my tooth on the tender flesh of Harrison’s lip.
I jump back as he puts a quick hand to it.
“Oh my God,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head and waves his hand, but when he opens his mouth to speak, Heidi’s voice on the other side of the door fills the silence for him.
“I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing in there, but I just got phone calls from everyone I know in your building. What the hell are you thinking?”
I slink toward the door, but before I can get there, Harrison grabs me by the wrist with a gentle hand. “Rocky, you don’t have to answer to her.”
I shake my head. “It’s just easier.”
Harrison clamps his mouth shut, but his eyes say something different altogether. Something loud and unbelievably foul. Still, I know enough from experience that if I don’t talk to her now, Heidi won’t be going away. It’s much easier to nip it in the bud.
I pull open the bedroom door with a sigh, and Heidi steps out of the way to let me through into the hallway and I make my way into the living room. I walk to the couch so that I can sit down, but in an unorthodox move, Heidi heads for the front door. I’m surprised—so much so that I glance at Harrison, leaning in the mouth of the hallway with his arms crossed over his chest. He shrugs.
“You’re going?” I say to Heidi as she pulls open the door.
She looks over her shoulder, the short, crisp length of her bob swinging back as she meets my eye.
“I’m tired, Raquel. I’m tired of being a parent to an entitled child who can’t seem to understand how to behave in a way that doesn’t flush her career down the toilet. I’m tired of battling the will of some man—who doesn’t
know shit about the business—like he’s got any sort of a damn clue, and I’m tired of acting like you’d make it a minute in the real world without me.”
“Heidi—”
She holds up a hand to stop me.
“For tonight, I’m done. Tomorrow, I’ll be back to cleaning up your messes. The car and Freddie will be here at nine to take you to set.”
With her parting blow executed, she opens the door the rest of the way and steps through it to leave.
The door hasn’t even fully closed behind her when I sink to the couch, and against my will, tears start to fall.
Harrison shoves off from the wall and comes to me immediately, squatting down between my knees and lifting my chin with just one finger.
I shove him away softly and try to get my shit together. God, it’s so embarrassing that I cannot stop myself from freaking crying these days.
“Why are you so upset?” he asks softly.
I pull my lips inside my mouth and shake my head.
“She’s not right,” he says quietly. “She’s just saying all of that shit to get inside your head. To manipulate you.”
“No,” I challenge with a sniffle. “She knows how this business works. If she says I’m messing up, I’m probably messing up.”
A heavy sigh escapes his lungs. “Rocky, come on. I don’t get it. Months I’ve been watching you. Months I’ve stood by your side and watched them. They treat you like you don’t have a brain, and even worse than that, you let them.”
He shoves to standing, spins, pulls at his hair, and then turns back to face me, softening his face just slightly.
“And, baby, you do. You don’t need a fucking wizard to give you one, okay? You’ve got a big brain and the platform to go with it. It’s time you start treating yourself like the boss you are and stop letting them push you around.”
The truth in his words slices my chest right open, and I have to stifle a breath to hold back a sob.
“It’s just easier this way,” I say, my breath stuttered. “They know the right moves to get me where I want to go. They got me here—”