is stupid. Just drop it, okay?” he said, trying to end our conversation.
For a moment, I regretted saying anything. He was angry and it was my fault. I had let my imagination get the better of me. This had probably ruined our first time together in three weeks. Really, it was no big deal.
I sat silent, staring out the window at grid-locked traffic, thinking about the time Craig and I were camping in the Sierras on my 29th birthday and he surprised me with a brand new Burton snowboard and told me I was “the one.” Then another time over dinner, he saw a pretty, pregnant woman and rubbed my belly, insisting, “That’ll be you soon.”
He loves me. He’s just scattered sometimes. Love’s supposed to be complicated.
The sun had disappeared as we pulled up to a large gray five-story apartment building. There was nowhere to park. This I expected near the beach, not on the streets of quaint, charming, and oh-so far-away Pasadena.
“What time is it?” I asked Craig. It was my attempt to break the silence as he grabbed the wine from the back seat, three blocks from our disappointingly humdrum destination.
“Dunno.”
“Must be 8:30, huh? Too early for the sun to set. It’s summer. You know, back home, it’s still light out.”
I waited for his response. He nodded.
“Until, like 10, or maybe only 9:30 now that it’s August, but still. . .” I began to think I missed Vancouver, and the clean sunsets where the sun beams a frothy yellow before settling into a clear blue ocean. “Hey, Craig, do you want to live in LA forever? Or do you love it here?”
“Not forever.”
I waited for him to say more, hoping he had a plan for us, perhaps a ranch in the Rockies, near a ski hill, with kayaks and bikes and horses and maybe even a goat for fresh milk. Like some pitiable wallflower, I pictured him sweeping me into his arms, professing that life had no meaning without me. It was unlike me to be needy. The pre-Craig me had a few simple rules: Let them call you; play it cool; and most important, never say the L-word first. But there was something about him that had melted me, turned me into a child quietly calling out for reassurance, praying for that Cinderella ending.
“I’d probably live in the mountains, maybe the Tetons. Some day, yeah.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me down the sidewalk, set on his destination.
“Craig?” I said, rather pathetically. “Alone?”
“No,” he squeezed my hand. “Course not. With you.”
Craig ended up in the kitchen, talking to some engineer about streaming real-time video of Craig via satellite as he attempted the Antarctic crossing. They lost me at bandwidth, so I saddled up next to the girls at the food table and plucked out a cheese popper, hoping for lighter conversation. Three glasses of wine were helping me forget Craig’s cold front.
The minute the girls discovered I was a reality TV producer, it all started. The bombardment. Everyone wanted to know: real or not?
“You guys are too smart to watch reality TV,” I said, wondering if they were just being polite.
“I’m addicted to Top Model!” one freakishly smart girl said.
She had just finished telling me about her doctorate in algorithms and complex system analysis—something I could barely pronounce, let alone comprehend.
“What about Dagmar, that break-out celebrity heiress on all the talk shows? Is someone coaching her? She seems so shallow. Is that for real? I heard she’s getting her own TV show, Hollywood Heiress.”
“According to my sources, Dagmar is a bit of a pain,” I said with a wink, stressing the word “pain” for effect.
Toni had worked with Dagmar for a day on a press junket. This made her, and me, an expert on all things Dagmar.
“And yes, her reality show was greenlit yesterday. But nobody knows who it’s with or the subject matter. It’s all hush-hush.”
The great thing about having friends in “the biz” was all the trade gossip we so eagerly shared. Their stories became your stories, until you’d heard so many yarns about reality show vixens you could no longer remember whether you were there, or just heard about it. The other bonus was the factual accuracy, a sort of ethical gossip grapevine. And Toni, thanks to PA connections on just about every show in the works, was my vine.
“Do tell!” the brainiac purred.
“Well,” I said, leaning in, “my close friend, who’s worked with her, said Dagmar won’t speak to set crew directly,