by Natasha West
Emily nodded. ‘No arguments here.’
Ruby smiled for the assist. ‘So anyway, I’m tired, coming down with a cold. Sneezing, coughing, generally acting like I’ve got the plague.’
Barry laughed. Denise laughed. Emily laughed. Mara went, ‘Gross.’
Ruby ignored Mara, continuing. ‘So I’m generally feeling very sorry for myself when someone says…’ Here Ruby went into a perfect English accent, ‘Do you need a tissue?’ And I look up…’ Ruby stopped as though remembering the moment. Emily found she was on a knife edge, waiting to see how Ruby described this fabricated moment of their meeting. ‘I look up and there she is’ Ruby said, breaking into a beautiful smile, directing it right at Emily. Emily was overwhelmed by it. Ruby held out a hand and Emily realised she was supposed to take it and she did. The touch was soft. Emily expected it to end quickly, but Ruby held on tight. ‘She was beautiful. And I was coughing a lung up. But the second I see her, I just… Stop. Like she cured me.’
Emily blushed, deep. Beautiful, that was Ruby’s word. It astonished her.
‘So I take the tissue and I say thanks… And then I’ve got nothing.’ Ruby shook her head, as though remembering her own exasperation. ‘But I have to talk to her, right? She’s got a look that can stop a cold in its tracks. Magical. But she’s gone and I don’t know what the hell to do. What am I gonna do, run up and say, ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘That usually works’ Barry interjected.
‘Yeah, but I just felt like this girl, she wasn’t gonna go for any Yank player bullshit. She’s something else, you know what I’m talking about?’ Ruby asked Barry.
‘Yeah. I think so’ Barry nodded, as though remembering some long-ago magical girl from his own life. Emily could see she had him. Denise saw it too.
‘So I’m trying to figure out how to start a conversation and then the goddamn flight is announced. We’re boarding. Now, I have no clue where she’s seated but I can’t leave it to chance that it’ll be anywhere near her. So…’ Ruby almost blushed at this point and Emily wondered how she didn’t have an Oscar already. ‘My first thought is to go up to the desk and, you know, just straight up ask where Emily’s sitting. But I don’t know her name and the airport security are not gonna tell me that, never mind where she’s sitting.’
‘Do that at JFK, it’s a one-way ticket to a rubber glove up your ass’ Barry quipped.
‘Exactly. And I don’t wanna take the chance Heathrow has a similar policy’ Ruby agreed with a small laugh. ‘So my group is boarding. But Emily doesn’t get in line. So I wait. Evenutally, after half the lounge is boarded, I see Emily get in line and I get behind her, but a few people back. I follow her to check in and I hear her say she’s in economy.’
Emily gave an embarrassed little shrug. ‘It’s what I can afford.’
‘No shame in flying economy’ Barry winked. Emily appreciated his kindness.’
‘But I’m in first’ Ruby said. ‘Booked by the production. Which is nice but also screwing me with getting anywhere near Emily. So… This is where I kinda got… OK, the next part is... Like I’m kind of a creepy stalker’ she says with a glance to Emily.
Emily looked back at her and mouthed the word, ‘Never’. It just came naturally. But then she happened to chance a look at Denise. She saw a facial expression she didn’t understand or like. Intense scrutiny, only there a moment and then gone. Emily thought she must have imagined it.
But Ruby didn’t notice Denise, she was still in full flow. ‘So I ask to downgrade my ticket. The woman’s like, ‘Madam, I can’t give you a refund.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t need one. I just wanna sit in coach.’ She looks at me like I’m fucking nuts.’
The table laughed harder now. Emily was entranced. She’d forgotten two things about this story. One, she was in it. Two, it didn’t happen. But Ruby had her spellbound.
‘So the woman’s iffy and I think I’m about to be put on the no-fly list, but in the end, she has a few seats open in coach so she switches me.’
‘But coach is big, how did you know you’d be put near her?’ Barry asked.
‘I didn’t think I would be. And I wasn’t. I was like eight rows away. But after the flight takes off, I’m in a position to spot where she actually is. So I wait until I see her get up to use the bathroom and then I go up to her seat mate and… I offer him three hundred and fifty-eight bucks to swap.’
‘Why that number?’ Barry asked.
‘It was all I had in cash. I’d have paid more, but I was pretty sure this guy was not about to take a check from a stranger. Luckily, the cash was enough.’
‘So you were waiting for her when she came back?’
‘Yep’ Ruby grinned.
‘How did you explain it?’ Barry asked, amused.
‘I told her I’d been sitting near the door and her old seat mate had a fear of flying and asked if I’d swap with him. He wanted to be first down the ramp if we crashed.’
Barry laughed and slapped his knee. ‘Christ! Did she buy it?’
‘Of course I did’ Emily said without thinking. ‘She was gorgeous. I didn’t think for a minute she’d do any of that for me. I just thanked my lucky stars she was sitting next to me.’
‘You noticed her too?’ Barry asked Emily.
‘How do you not notice this person’ Emily said honestly, with a nod toward Ruby. ‘I noticed her in the lounge. That’s why I was ready with a tissue. The trouble was, after she’d taken it, I really didn’t know what to say. Plus, she looked so sickly, I didn’t want to bother her.’
Ruby gave a small grin that anyone else at the table would take as a reaction to Emily’s statement. But Emily had a feeling that she’d just pleasantly surprised Ruby. As well as herself.
‘So you guys just hit it off?’ Barry pressed.
‘Yeah. We talked basically the entire eight-hour flight. It was insane’ Ruby said. And by the time we landed…’ She gripped Emily’s hand a little tighter. ‘…I was in love.’
Emily added, ‘Me too’ and as she said it, she knew what had fascinated her so much about Ruby’s story. She wished it was true.
She wished she had genuinely captivated Ruby, not just caught her attention when she was bored. She wished it had lasted, for a lot more than a few hours. She wished she had lived this romantic story, not just listened to it.
She knew right then that she wished she and Ruby really were in love. She wished their wedding was the beginning of their story, and not the end.
But then she looked at Denise, stealing little glances at Barry, so happy with how it was all going, her schemes and plans coming to fruition beautifully. It was a stark reminder of just what a lie all this was. The story Ruby told wasn’t just a lovely piece of fiction, it was a con job, intended to prize a contract out of this man who sat lapping it up, this clearly cynical studio head who had a trophy girlfriend, selected not for love, but for sex. And that man had begun to believe again, for one small moment, in true love.
The thought made Emily sick to her stomach. Sick with the lie, sick with the truth, sick with herself. There was no love here.
‘Excuse me’ Emily said suddenly, dropping Ruby’s hand and standing up. She didn’t wait to see reactions to her abrupt departure, she was almost running.
In the bathroom, which was nicer - not to mention bigger - than her flat at home, she found an attendant waiting. ‘Umm… I have diarrhoea!’ she explained as she ran past the woman, into the toilet. She needed to be alone. She needed to figure out what the hell she was doing with Ruby. Because she didn’t feel like she was playing anymore.
Sixteen
Ruby didn’t understand what had happened. She just knew that Emily had gotten up from the table, upset. No one else appeared to notice. Not Barry, not her mother, certainly not Mara, who was probably about ten minutes from passing out from self-inflicted starvation.
It was funny, the problem seemed to come right off the back of Ruby finishing her little concocted tale of love-at-first-sneeze. Ru
by hadn’t meant to get so involved with it. As soon as Barry had showed up, she’d sworn to herself she wasn’t going to play this dumb-ass game her mother was trying to rig.
But then Denise had tossed the mic to Emily and Ruby had known right away what Denise would never understand. Lying did not come naturally to Emily. She couldn’t just generate bullshit on demand. She was flailing, scared. So Ruby had overturned her initial policy and thrown Emily the only life raft she had to hand, an improvised performance. Luckily, it had always been a strength. She’d once saved a high-school play after one of her co-stars fell off the stage, incorporating it into the story so skilfully that people thought it was intended. So she told Barry the story that she’d had the seeds of, adding colour as she went along, finding new details to embroider.
And then something so fucking stupid happened. She started buying her own crap.
Her mistake was that rather than simply telling a tale, she’d begun to dig out some silly romantic daydream, which felt more real with every word, truer with each sentence. And once she’d started, she felt unable to stop, speeding toward the conclusion like a burning car wreck, brakes off, rolling down a hill toward traffic, disaster inevitable.
Taking Emily’s hand had been the awful turning point. She knew when she held Emily’s hand that when the story was over, the night, the scheme, she would never get to hold that hand again. And she wanted to hold it. She wanted to hold it for a long time.
That last line, ‘And by the time we landed, I knew I was in love’ was the moment of impact. Because it was true, in essence. It was new to her, yet somehow, she knew what this feeling was. She was under Emily’s thrall, was falling. Headfirst. She looked at her sort-of fake bride and Emily looked back at her and she knew one thing. She was fucked.
And now she was sat alone with her monstrous mother and the man she was working and the only person who should have been next to her had run off.
‘So…’ Barry said, and Ruby’s attention was pulled back to the table, away from the direction Emily had run. ‘I was thinking, maybe we could talk about the movie?’
Ruby said, ‘What movie?’ and she really didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But then her mother gave a shrieking laugh. ‘Oh, she’s such a joker. She knows what movie, don’t you?’
Ruby blinked. ‘Of course. Kidding.’
Barry smiled. ‘We’re obviously still deliberating but say we were to go with you... It’s a big movie, physically demanding. And you’d be in a lot of demand, from the studio, from the press, from fans. It’s another level. How do you feel about that?’
‘She’s ready for the challenge’ Denise said quickly.
‘That’s great’ Barry said to Denise. ‘But maybe I could hear it from her?’
‘Of course’ Denise said. Barry looked to Ruby expectantly. ‘Tell him, honey’ Denise prompted.
Ruby knew she was ninety percent of the way through this tortuous evening. All she had to do now was walk it home, give Barry the selling spiel. He was willing to be talked round, she could see it.
Ruby’s mouth opened but instead of a list of reasons why she was the woman for the job, she said, ‘I gotta check on Emily. Sorry’ and she stood and left the table. She didn’t dare look at Denise as she left.
In the toilet, she found an attendant and a bunch of locked doors. ‘Emily, you in here?’ The toilet attendant gave Ruby a look that she ignored.
She started knocking on doors. ‘Hey, occupied!’ said the first one irritably, a very not-Emily American.
A couple more rejections came before Ruby knocked on a locked door to get no reply. She knew that she had the right door. ‘Emily?’ she asked.
‘What?’ came the eventual disgruntled, British accented reply.
‘You… You OK?’
‘Fine’ said the door.
Ruby didn’t know what to say then. Because she wasn’t the dynamic problem-solver she’d depicted herself to be in her story, not by a long sight. That smooth-talking romance wizard wasn’t here. This was who she was really, a woman waiting outside a toilet, feeling awkward, out of her depth.
The door suddenly opened, and Emily stood expectantly. ‘Where’s the fire?’
‘No fire. You just…’
‘I just what?’
Ruby couldn’t say how she felt, nor could she ask Emily what was really wrong with her. She didn’t have the right to do so either. So she fell back on what was comfortable. Defensiveness and sarcasm.
Ruby glanced at the toilet attendant, watching them carefully and she rolled her eyes, pushing into the cubicle. ‘Look’ she said in a low tone. ‘You’re being weird.’
‘How so?’ Emily asked in surprised irritation as Ruby locked the door behind her.
‘I was nailing it out there’ Ruby said, feeling like an asshole. This wasn’t what she wanted to say. She wanted to say, ‘Let’s stop this. I don’t want to fake it. I want you. For real.’
But what she said instead was, ‘I had Barry in the palm of my hand, and you made it weird by running off like that. What’s the matter, did you get your period or something?’
Emily’s mouth fell open. She was livid. ‘You don’t have the right to talk to me like that.’
‘I don’t?’ Ruby asked insolently.
‘No. You don’t own me, you know’ Emily spat.
‘No. But I am renting you’ Ruby’s dumb mouth said before she could stop it. She always did this. A smart remark could never be held off. No matter the price. She did this with her mother all the time and now she was doing it with Emily. All she wanted to do was kiss Emily and she was pushing her further away.
‘Oh, is that right?’ Emily asked in shocked anger.
‘Yes. You made an agreement. We both did.’
‘Right. I’m your ‘Wife’. You get to hold my hand, touch my waist, kiss my cheek and you get three kisses on the mouth’ Emily recited furiously.
‘R… Right’ Ruby stuttered. She was suddenly scared. Emily, always quite demure, looked ready for a fight. Her pale skin was flush, her eyes blazing. It nearly made Ruby turn-tale and run.
‘So take what you bought’ Emily spat, and grabbed ahold of Ruby’s face, pushing her lips up against Ruby’s, an angry, forceful kiss. Ruby felt herself being shoved up against the cubicle wall, which was lucky because her knees about buckled from the kiss, which didn’t feel like anything they’d discussed. It was something else altogether, passionate, crazy, erotic. Ruby’s hands grabbed Emily’s waist and she pulled her body close. As Emily’s tongue pushed deep into her mouth, she moaned, falling headfirst into the kiss…
And then, as quick as it started, Emily suddenly pulled back. ‘That’s one’ she said, straightened her dress and walked out of the toilet. Ruby was left looking at the empty space where Emily had been, her body thrumming, her legs weak, her lips ablaze. ‘What the fuck?’ she muttered to herself, baffled, angry and so very turned on.
Seventeen
Emily walked out of the toilet with the stride of a queen. She didn’t know what had possessed her to do what she’d just done. But whatever part of herself it had been, she couldn’t say she hated it.
As she walked past the toilet attendant, who had definitely seen Ruby go into the toilet with her and maybe even heard a thing or two from inside the paper-thin cubicles, she gave her a wink. The woman winked back.
Emily headed out and sat back at the table. Ruby had still not appeared. She wondered what was keeping her. The smacker she’d just laid on her could not have been so powerful as to make her pass out. Probably.
Denise and Barry looked at her expectantly. ‘What happened to Ruby?’ Denise asked.
‘What?’ Emily asked.
‘She went to check on you.’
‘Oh. Yes. I think she’s just freshening up.’
Ruby sat down a moment later, but Emily didn’t look at her. She just went back to her chicken.
‘Everything OK?’ Barry asked.
‘Great’ Ruby replied.
Emily chanced a look at her. She was very flushed in the face.
‘So, Barry, you wanted to talk about the movie?’ Ruby asked with a touch of wild desperation.
Barry coughed. ‘You know what, it can wait.’
Emily looked at Denise and saw her jaw tighten. ‘You sure, Barry? I think now’s probably as good a time as any.’
‘Me and Mara need to go’ Barry explained. ‘We’ve got plans.’
‘I see’ Denise said. ‘Well, perhaps we can come in and talk to you at the studio.’
‘Sure. Call my assistant, we’ll set something up.’ With that he was up, saying, ‘Great to see you and congrats again to the newlyweds.’ Poof, he was gone.