The others

The price of love

"I can't believe you said that." Dianne mumbled angrily as she slammed the car door to a shut. Placing her bag down by her feet as she tugged at the seatbelt. The contraption getting stuck due to the ferocity at which she pulled at the item.

"Well what else was I meant to say then?" Joe questioned as he too slammed the door to a shut, giving the driver a subtle nod who was looking curiously at the pair of famous faces who had jumped into the back of his car through the reflection of his rear-view mirror.

"I don't know Joe, what about the things we had discussed that we were going to say last night." The redhead responded with bitter sarcasm. "Or were you too pissed to remember that conversation?"

"For fucks sake Dianne, I had two glasses of red wine I was not drunk, nor was I pissed or unstable, or any other adjective you can think of. Besides, he asked me a question... I responded in such a way which neither confirmed or denied what's going on and..."

"No Joe that's where the problem ends. You didn't deny it!" She retorted harshly. "You didn't do the one thing that we were asked to do yesterday, and now I can guarantee you that there are a handful of reporters putting our names in shameful articles as we speak."

Rolling his eyes at her outburst, Joe allowed his gaze to fall to his right. The sight of the clearly frustrated redhead, with her nostrils flaring and her gaze narrow and short on the passing consort of cars and of buildings out of the window beside her.

"You know that they were going to write about it anyway." Joe counteracted after a moments silence. A new found softness and reality to his voice which he hoped would lower the Australians level of anger. "Whether I did exactly as I was told or whether I went a little off script, they were always going to have a go at us for even going near the subject."

"That's not the issue though Joe." Dianne bit back instantly, refusing to let her gaze go anywhere near his in that very moment. "It's not just that you went a little off script, its the fact that you may have just said the worst possible thing to them with a camera and a global audience in your face, that's the issue." She repeated.

"Well I disagree with you there." The brunette responded frankly with a shrug of his shoulders. An exasperated notion to his voice which did nothing but infuriate the dancer a little more, prompting Dianne to finally draw her gaze off of the passing traffic, and onto the brunette. His own ocean blue stare doing the opposite and falling out of the window to his left.

"You do?" She questioned, her voice an octave higher as she pondered the audacity of the man beside her.

"Yeah... I do." Joe hit back, allowing himself to look back at her. Brown meeting blue in such a crewel and disenfranchised way that the two of them felt both powerless and in control at the same time. "If anything I think that the worst thing that I could have said was that the moment the cameras are turned off you and I are at each other like animals, but whatever."

Tutting in disgust, Dianne turned her gaze off of the young man before her. Her frustrations stopping her from enjoying his childish wit in the way that she usually thrived upon. "You clearly don't understand what's going on Joe." She scoffed back in return.

"I understand perfectly what's going on Dianne. What I said to them was the truth... I said to them that we don't have time to be thinking of all this stuff. That we don't have time for these petty arguments, or for these heated debates, because believe it or not I would still like to get to that final. And whether right now you like it or not I need you to help me... help US get there. So as I said to Philip Schofield, we don't have the time to be thinking about this kind of stuff, do we not?"

Dianne looked across at Joe. A brimace of a frustrated and powerful tear beginning to bubble up behind her stony façade.

"No, we don't." She agreed somewhat sternly. "But I also don't have the time or the inclination for some childish young man from the internet to ruin my career at a time where it's only just started taking off. I don't have the slightest wish for the past twenty five years of my life spent in hot, sweaty training rooms to be for nothing because some idiot with a camcorder doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut."