Page 25 of Love Bitters

“I really should decline your invite right now because of the whole wearing out my welcome thing, but I really don’t want to,” she declares.

“Honestly, it’s cool,” I assure her. “It’ll be nice not having to eat alone tonight.”

“Awesome!” she exclaims, clenching her fists close to her body. “I’m just going to run to my apartment and grab us a bottle of wine.” Her body does a complete 360 as she realizes what she just said. “Shoot. I didn’t think that through. I’ve got some store-bought cheesecake in the fridge.”

Lifting a shoulder, I tell her, “Bring both. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll get started on dinner, and you can just let yourself back in.”

“Okay, great,” she says excitedly rushing out the door.

I stare in wonder after her. Not only did I just invite someone into my space after punishing myself for weeks, but it’s a mother-effing movie star. Things like this don’t happen in the lives of the mundane such as myself. Maybe I can start looking toward the positives of this situation for once instead of the negatives. I’ve got a fantastic job that I actually love, a quaint little apartment, and new friends who make the loneliness a little bit better. Not to even mention, enough money in the bank to splurge on my peanut butter addiction. Yeah, I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.

Turning back to the ingredients I’d left out on the counter, I get started making dinner. Poor Abilene would probably run for the hills if she came back to find me still staring at the spot she left behind, lost in thought. I know I would.

I’m popping the dish into the oven as a knock comes at the door a second before it cracks open.

“Hey, I’m back,” she announces, squeezing through and shutting it behind her. “Didn’t want to waltz back in. Just in case you forgot that you told me to.”

The remark is joking and hits me right in the funny bone. I’m still laughing when we meet at the dining room table.

“You know,” I tell her still grinning, “that hasn’t happened yet, but don’t put it past me at this point.”

As we sit, I ask a question that’s been sitting on my mind since she mentioned it. “Are you from around here?”

“Do you mind?” she replies, holding up her glass and bottle of wine. My quick head shake has her filling the glass three quarters of the way before she takes a sip and answers, “I was born and raised in this backwoods, nowhere town in South Georgia. Seriously, if you were to pull out a map right now, you wouldn’t even be able to find it. Driving through it, by the time you realize you just passed the welcome sign, you’re already passing the thanks, come again one.”

I’ve personally never been to a town that small, but the picture she paints of it makes me chuckle.

The sound spurs her to keep talking. “I think the biggest part of owned land in the county is nothing but a huge cow pasture. My aunt and mama still live there. God help ‘em. I got out as soon as I could. Thankfully, my mama insisted on entering me in almost every beauty pageant in the state. It was cool until I hit my teenage years, then I was over it. I just wanted to finish high school and move as far away from that town as I could go.”

Taking another sip of her white wine, she tells me, “It was a good thing I let her talk me into one last hoorah. That was where I got picked up for a modeling gig. Afterward, my agent suggested acting classes and so began my actress career.”

“Do you like it?” I ask, noting a hint of sadness to her words.

Shrugging, she admits, “I used to. Not so much anymore. Sure, the money is nice, but my life is always on display. I can’t go anywhere without someone snapping my picture or thinking they know anything about who I really am.”

“Or date whoever you’d like,” I say quietly. From the moment she said her name, I knew I’d recognized her from more than the movies. She was plastered across the front of several magazines I’d come across in the grocery store a couple months ago.

“Those tabloids will make up any story they can to get money,” she says into her quickly emptying glass of wine. This time, there’s no doubting the misery in her voice.

Feigning indifference, I ask, “So, there’s no truth to what they said at all?” Normally, I wouldn’t delve into the deep shit that people are obviously trying to hide, but I have to know the truth. Not for the sake of curiosity but possibly my own sanity.

As though her body is nothing more than a balloon being deflated, she sinks into her chair, bringing her glass to her lips and tilting it all the way back. Waiting until she’s filling her second glass, she answers my question with one of her own. “What would it matter if it was? There’s no truth to it now, so they can say what they want.”

“Having more than one boyfriend is hard enough as it is,” I throw out there. “Adding the pressure of the world into that, I couldn’t imagine how much more difficult that’d be.”

“You have no idea,” she mutters without lifting her eyes from her wine.

Taking a deep breath, I share my own love problems from start to finish, leaving her to gape at me like I’m the movie star not her.

“You’re not just telling me this because you think I need to hear it, are you?” she asks. Those same blue eyes that before refused to lift out of shame are now wide in amazement.

I decide to give her something easier to trust than my word. Getting up and going over to where I stashed my photos of me and the guys in a drawer within the television stand, I take them out, trying to avoid looking at them directly. The caution is pointless because my heart hurts from the moment my fingers close around the couple of frames. Handing them off to her as soon as I can, I go to check on dinner in the oven. It’s got a bit before it’s done, but I need to do something other than sit at that table and watch her face as she looks at those photos.

“I don’t see how you managed five of them,” she finally says, breaking the silence between us. “It was hard enough with three.”

My lips pull up at the corners, thinking about how easy being with all of them was. I’ve never been with anyone where everything just felt natural. Even when we had to split my time between them, there was never any fighting or making me feel guilty about spending time with one and not the other. When I tell her this, she smiles before it drops into a frown again.

“I wish our relationship would’ve been that easy,” she sighs. “One of them was ready to settle down away from the crazy celebrity life like me, but he didn’t want to leave the others behind. Those two weren’t ready for it at all. We’d fight sometimes over the stupid tabloid stories and sometimes over nothing at all. It was just too much. I told them that until we could start seeing eye to eye on things, we didn’t need to be together, fueling those ridiculous fires.”

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