Page 9 of How to Say I Do
“Why?”
“I’m a senior public relations associate at an exclusive, invite-only firm. We rep and manage all the big A-list names: celebrities, sports stars, supermodels, fashion executives, broadcast personalities, recording artists, luxury brands, and top-tier influencers. If you’re someone, you know you’ve made it when you get an invite to be represented by us.”
Wyatt frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Mostly it means high-end event management, but the media management side of everything is so huge now. Is itreallyan event if people don’t talk about it online after? Did anything happen if it wasn’t Instagrammed, or if it doesn’t trend on Twitter or Snapchat?”
That was a line from one of my pitches to my A-list clientele.Don’t worry about a thing, we’ll have you breaking the internet with these hashtags. Everyone will see your Snaps all night long. Nothing really happens unless it’s all everywhere, and youwillbe, I promise.
Usually, people who heard that line were eagerly nodding along like I’d dropped Tao Te Ching wisdom on them, or delivered the newConfucianism for Celebrity Living. No, nothing existed without Insta and Snapchat and Buzzfeed and Vox andGlamourand TMZ, and, oh, God, what aboutElite? IfElitesaid you existed inside the pages of their magazine, then you could enshrine yourself in the vault of celebrity gods themselves.
Wyatt looked confused. “So you throw parties for famous people?”
That was one way to put it. Yes, I threw parties—if product launches for luxury lines, post-Grammy soirees, A-list Super Bowl bashes, and putting on the Met Gala counted. More than that, though, I threw parties that were perfectly managed for maximum impact, with the right celebrities attending at the right time with the right media coverage. When someone out there thought, “The coolest, most beautiful people are doingthat, and I need to be doing it, too,” then my job was a success. It was a shallow world I moved in, measured in depths of Likes and Views.
“Anything an A-lister needs, we can do. We managed Rihanna’s birthday party last year. The Super Bowl afterparty, too.”
Wyatt nodded, looking less than fantastically impressed. In New York, if I ever mentioned what I did for a living, people squawked and shrieked and shouted “shut up” and “no fucking way” and then “tell me everything,ohmigod.”
“Jenna and I met through my job.”
Wyatt, in the middle of popping a mango slice into his mouth, froze.
I ran my finger around the rim of my champagne glass. “We met at Emily Ratajkowski’s book-launch party.” Did Wyatt know who Emily Ratajkowski was? “It was such a classic story. Jenna was a model new to the city and I was the PR rep who worked with all the biggest names in the industry. We spent the whole night talking. Then we met for coffee, and we kept meeting for coffee, and…”
And it had made sense. We moved in the same circles. It was easy to bring her to all my events as my girlfriend and to introduce her to all the right people. Jenna was smart, and fun, and—obviously—gorgeous. One year passed in a blur.
She was career-driven, but her career ladder became more of a rocket launch. She moved from being one of a hundred beautiful faces on a call sheet to being The Name on a call sheet—the model a whole shoot was organized around. She was seizing her dream, and I’d been happy for her.
I proposed before Jenna was featured inGQ. Before she was photographed in St. Barts with the Hadids, and before she attended that red-carpet premiere alone. I had to work that premiere. In fact, I’d put it on. She got the invite, but I still had a job to do, so she ended up walking the carpet and posing for a hundred photographers while I worked, routing requests for extra security at the limo arrival and a frantic call for another ten servers because the original crew we’d hired had gotten stuck on Mars or something.
I proposed when we were still Jenna and Noël, back when I thought we’d always be Jenna and Noël.
Jenna took to our wedding planning like it was her personal coming-out party to cement her fame. She secured photo rights fromHarper’s,People,InTouch, and TMZ, butElitehad declined to feature our wedding. Sure, they said, Jenna was a name ascendent, but her groom?“We simply don’t believe the profile of your marriage is significant enough to appeal to our readers.”After that, she doubled, no, tripled, her efforts, as if she could shameElite’s editors into realizing that snubbing her was a mistake.
So our guest list hadn’t just been six hundred people—it had been six hundred people that included the biggest names in our industries. I hadn’t merely escaped down that long aisle in front of my friends. No, I’d fled while Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Anderson Cooper watched my every humiliated step.
My eyes flicked to the notepad I’d abandoned scribbling in before Wyatt found me. Wyatt followed my gaze. “What’s that?”
“My letter to Jenna.” That vertical line between Wyatt’s eyebrows grew deeper. “It’s my emotional process. I write letters to get through things.”
Frustrated letters, most times. Venting, typing furiously on my phone in the back of an SUV slow-rolling away from a hip-and-happening spot. Every night out, I invariably had to screw on my smile and nod politely as yet another influencer-of-the-year or trust-fund socialite or Hamptons jet-setter bellowed in my face about how unfair life was to them. Raging thumb-tapping was my process to exorcise that frustration. “Usually I write on my phone, but…”
Wyatt looked a little sheepish, like he should have done more to stop me from tossing my iPhone into a trash bag.
“When I write, I get what’s swirling around up here”—I waved my hand by my head—”down in an email, or on paper, and then it’sout. It’s gone, and I’m over it. When I get to the end, when I say goodbye, I know that I’m done. I’ve worked it out of my system.”
He eyed the notepad. I was fourteen pages deep into my vivisection of Jenna and me. “You’ve put down a lot.”
“I’ve had all morning to think.” I’d started reflecting butt naked on the deck, watching the sunrise shift from amber to gold, and then I’d had more time to chew through my past while shuffling across the resort in nothing but a bathrobe. Time, again, sitting alone beneath this lanai, picking forlornly at my french toast and papaya.
“How’s it going?” Wyatt hadn’t finished his mango slice. Instead, he was focused on me. All of him, laser focused, like the words I was saying were going to define his day.
I pulled my pages together, flipped them over, and set my pen on top. “I’m done for now.” It was my turn to shift to him, turn all my attention to my unexpected white knight. “Enough about me. I want to know more about the man I’m honeymooning with. You’re from a place I need a magnifying glass to find?”
“You remember.” The joy that lit up his face. It made him look like a delighted little boy, if little boys could be six-foot-three and built of solid muscle.
“My memories from yesterday are mostly a blur, but I remember all the parts with you.”
