Page 4 of Don't Date Your Nemesis

But I didn’t.

Instead, I closed the article and tossed my phone aside.

The water was calling me back. The only honest thing in my life and the only place where I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone except exactly who I was.

A guy who was only good at swimming and increasingly bad at everything else.

I dove back in, and for twenty-five meters, I almost felt like myself again.

Almost.

2

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME WITH BETTER ABS

DEEPIKA

“Yash, that was incredible. Truly moving.”

Then the director walked right past me as if I were part of the set.

I stayed in character for five full seconds, long enough for the camera to stop rolling, before my left eye twitched. It wasn’t the cute, delicate twitch. No, it was the I-might-set-something-on-fire twitch.

“Brilliant, Yash! Just brilliant!” Director Rajesh clapped his hands together as if Yash had just discovered fire instead of remembering his lines for once. “The way you held that pause? Chef’s kiss.”

Yash turned around and flashed me his infuriatingly perfect smile. “You were great too, Dee.”

Dee?

Don’t punch him, Deepika. Your knuckles are far too perfect to touch the likes of him. Plus, who knows where that face has been. Erugh.

I gave him a saccharine smile. “Don’t call me that.”

I stood a few feet away, mascara tracking down my cheeks from the scene we had just wrapped. My chest was still tight from the emotional breakdown I had just performed. The one where my character finally confronts her dying mother. The one I had been preparing for since four in the morning, listening to my own mother’s voicemails on repeat until the grief felt genuine enough to bleed on camera.

She was very much alive. But I missed her and her aloo parathas.

“Deepika, that was... adequate. Let’s move on,” Rajesh said, already walking away, shouting about lighting setups.

Adequate. As if it meant nothing.

“He’s an idiot,” Yash muttered, squeezing my shoulder as he passed. “You were phenomenal.”

I forced a smile once again. Probably the umpteenth time in the presence of Yash Malhotra. Why? Because Yash was nice. He was always nice. That was his whole thing, his charade. The nice, handsome leading man who would inevitably get the Oscar nomination while I would get a throwaway mention in the trades, ‘Oh, and Deepika Sharma was also there.’

This is my life now.

My ‘breakout role’ had everyone talking, sure, but they were talking about how I was the ‘surprisingly good’ best friend, the ‘scene-stealing’ sidekick and most importantly the emotional glue holding the lead together while he got the glory.

I wanted to be the one whose name came first on the poster. Be the reason people buy tickets. And I wanted to stop feeling like I was auditioning for a seat at a table that was supposedly already mine.

I retreated to my trailer and peeled off my costume. It was a frumpy cardigan that Wardrobe had insisted made me look ‘approachable’. I reached for my phone. Five missed calls from Blake, my publicist.

Ugh.

Blake: Have you seen the new article?

If it says I’m difficult again, I’m suing the English language.