Page 106 of Good at Being Alive
I smile. “It’s just kind of sad, having it end.”
She raises a brow. “Really? I thought you hated filming.”
I don’t know what to say because yeah…Idon’tlike filming. I don’t like having pretend conversations with my pretend husband about places I’m mostly pretending to visit. But I liked having Theo by my side. I liked it enough to put up with almost anything, even the pain of loving him when I suspected he wouldn’t love me back.
Lars appears just as the sun is setting to announce he’s taken a crack at the show’s first trailer if we want to watch. We follow him into the living room. Everyone is enthusiastic as he connects his laptop to the TV. I would be, too, under other circumstances.
The lights lower, and the chatter stops as the first images appear.
There’s some handheld video of our wedding, the two of us kissing at the Eiffel Tower. It’s sort of amazing how much a few seconds of footage can tell a piece of a story—each of them is a chapter.
I’m in a bikini at Sky Lagoon and Theo walking behind me—with something in his face I’d never guessed was there at the time. Helikedme. Even when I was generally awful to him. So why the hell is he rushing off to London and treating me like an afterthoughtnow?
He’s carrying me over the rocks on the way to the boat in Sorrento, growling, “Not everything is a performance,” thenlaughing in bed with me in Capri. He asks me in Amsterdam about kids, and I tell him I hadn’t even thought about it. In Norway we’re arguing about where we’ll live while I look up at him with starry eyes, so ridiculously besotted a child could have seen it. And then there’s a glimpse of the fight—Theo lunging at Caden, though you can’t quite make out who he was lunging at, and then me today, telling them to stop filming as I walk away in tears.
It gives the impression that our marriage is imploding, and it ends with Theo’s interview, the one he just did yesterday, after what I’dthoughtwas a perfect afternoon together.
“Most marriages don’t last,” he says to the camera. “I suppose it was stupid to hope ours would. We have nothing in common.”
My stomach drops to the floor.
He said those words after our run, after we’d floated beside each other in Porto Moniz. He said those words and then came back here and fucked me like a man whohadn’trun twenty miles earlier in the day. Even I was surprised by how insatiable he was.
Insatiable, after telling Lars we have nothing in common. That our marriage won’t last.
Maybe he was so insatiable because he knew it was the final time.
I slip out the door while they’re all congratulating one another. I don’t even know where I’m headed until I discover myself at the beach, my feet sinking into the sand. I take a few steps forward and then just…crumple, face pressed to my knees. I’m not sure why, after everything I’ve been through in the past year, this is the thing that’s simply too much.
“What’s going on, Bex?” Katrina asks, appearing out of nowhere and dropping into the sand beside me. “Did you guys break up?”
I dig my toes into the sand. “We’d have to be together to have broken up.”
“Oh, please,” she says with an exasperated exhale. “You think you’re fooling anyone at this point? You’ve been into each other for months.”
“No, we weren’t,” I whisper.
“Oh? Then who filmed you pressing the champagne button in London?”
“That doesn’t mean we were together.”
“I suppose you’ll try to tell me that hickey on your neck the last day of the Paris trip was a curling iron burn now?”
I stare at her. “I had a hickey?”
She shrugs. “We’ll edit it out. Just tell me what’s wrong.”
I exhale heavily. “If Lars was so certain we were together, why’d he go out of his way to make sure we weren’t alone in Norway?”
She grins. “Because he’s incredibly evil. He thought Theo might be more irritable on camera if you weren’t able to sleep together. So you broke the sink instead.”
In spite of everything, I laugh. I’d suspected we weren’t fooling him with that one.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I admit. “Theo got a call this morning and was all weird about it. He said it was work but it wasn’t.”
“What do you think it was?”
What I’m thinking it was sounds too crazy to admit, because I know Theo and she does too and he just wouldn’t,couldn’t,be with someone else.
