Wish You Were Here

Chapter 15

The rest of your trip to LA is uneventful. There are no earth-shattering declarations of love for one another, no grand romantic gestures. You try to convince yourself the song choice was nothing deliberate, that it was either that or Für Elise. But you're still thinking about it days later. You let him pick the songs every time the two of you go to listen to music, but he sticks to the usual bands in his On Repeat playlist. You, however, listen to Can't Help Falling In Love when you're on your own, deliberately only listen to the song on YouTube, with your browser in incognito mode, so it doesn't appear in your search history.

On Saturday night he comes home from the theater while you're lying face down on his bed with your laptop, resting your weight on your elbows. He dicks around taking off his shoes and changing into his pajamas before flopping down beside you. "Good show?" you ask.

"Mmm." He lifts up your skirt to see what underwear you're wearing. "Big crowd."

"I'm sure you killed it."

He wriggles closer to you. "You are blessed with a perfect arse," he tells you, resting his face in it.

"Thanks." You wish you could take full credit, but squats and lunges go a long way. "You want to talk about it?'

"About your arse?"

"The show."

"Oh." You feel him roll over onto his back, his soft hair tickling your upper thigh. "Nothing to talk about, I guess. I should be used to it by now. I'm just exhausted."

"Only a few more weeks," you say, turning to look at him over your shoulder. A few more weeks until the curtain closes on the play and on your relationship.

"Thank God it's almost over. And thank God tomorrow is Sunday." He holds his phone over his face, checks his calendar app. "You want to hang out tomorrow after the matinee showing?"

"I have plans with the girls." A pause, then, "Sober plans. I will be sticking to lemonade."

He doesn't answer for a moment, and you wonder if you've made a faux pas by bringing that conversation up again. But then he says, "You trust your friends, yeah? None of them would have said anything about this."

"Yeah, I trust them." Now you roll over to look at him and he adjusts his head to rest on your thigh. "Why do you ask?"

He looks back at his phone, taps away at the screen. "I wasn't going to show you," he says, "but my publicist got an email about you yesterday."

"Saying what?"

He finds it in his inbox and hands you his phone. It's a draft post for a gossip blog, one known for generally being pretty accurate because they fact check with the celebrity's team. The article says the two of you have been dating secretly for months, that it's so serious he flew you out to LA recently, and that you've talked about getting married. A "source" dishes some crap about how crazy you are about each other. You wonder if your publicist got the same email. "Anyone could have made that up," you say, giving him his phone back. "It's pretty generic."

"No, I agree," he says. "But the LA thing is interesting. No one from my team knows you came with me."

"Maybe one of the airline staff recognised us and didn't say anything."

"Maybe," he says. "Did you tell anyone you were going?"

You know, with you being the variable in his life, that statistically this has most likely come from your side – and he's not asking in a way that pins blame on you. But you hate the way you're always having this conversation, hate the way it makes you feel like you're supposed to be full of shame. "I told my friends, yeah. And I told my mom I was going for a writing thing."