me. You love blondes.
Until I come across an image that isn’t me at all. It’s another woman, posing suggestively on a bed, sheets wrapped around herself. She’s looking at the camera like it’s all she’s ever wanted.
Like she’s seeing the man behind the lens.
Exactly like I’d done.
The sick feeling rising up doesn’t stop me from scrolling quicker and quicker through images of a few other models. Other places. No clothing. Nothing is lurid, I’ll admit, and perhaps I could appreciate the beauty of these nude portraits if I wasn’t being choked by my own furious humiliation.
I’ve never felt cheaper than I do right then.
He never could resist a model.
I highlight all of the pictures of me sans clothing, every stupid one, and hit the delete button on his computer. Then I empty the trash for good measure. All my old fears combine with this new evidence, the images of other models swimming in front of me. His honest response to the last time he’d slept with someone. The way he’d described his casual entanglements.
It’s like a house of cards toppling, the image I’d built in my mind of who I could be around him, the carefree, effortless woman who took what she wanted. Who slept with a man without expecting to catch feelings. Who just wanted to explore.
Because I’m still the girl who would have hated Rhys in school. Who plans and plots and writes to-do-lists. Who wants a man who loves her, who wants a relationship, who wants to be more than just a sexual partner.
And the worst part of it all is that he’s never promised me anything, never been anything but honest about the whole thing, and I still feel like he’s lied.
Like he’s made me feel more special than I am.
But I’m the one who’s inferred that—it’s myself I’ve been lying to.
I’m still sitting by the table with a pounding heart and a constricted throat when Rhys comes home. He’s carrying a paper bag and coffee, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. A damp curl of his dark hair hangs over his forehead.
He stills when he sees me. “Ivy?”
“Ben was at the Hamptons party, where you and I… where we met. Was that why he chose me for Rieler’s travel campaign?”
Rhys sets down the food on the coffee table with an exaggerated stillness that sets off hairline fractures along my heart. “He did, yes.”
“I didn’t recognize him in the meeting. I didn’t… I thought…” I push away from the table and tie the bathrobe tighter around my waist. “So what was I, to the two of you? A joke? A prank? Something to prove a point to the other?”
His eyes look miserable. That, if anything, makes my chest ache. “It started out that way, Ivy, at least from his part. I’m sorry you were dragged into it.”
“How could you not tell me about it?” I step back in response to his step forward, his throat bobbing as he swallows. “In his text, he mentions a bet. What bet?”
He runs a hand through his hair.
“Tell me, Rhys.”
“I complained about his traveling campaigns one time too many. The cheesiness of it. How staged they were. He made me a bet, then. To see if I could shoot a campaign that was better than one he paid a professional marketing firm to do. He’ll compare the two of them when they’re finished and choose one.”
I laugh. It sounds shrill. “Right. So this entire trip has been some weird, masculine contest? Who has the money to do something like that?”
“It started out that way. It started out silly, and wasteful, a bet between us to see whose word was true. You were never meant to be caught in the middle of it.”
“But I was,” I reply. “Which means you knew, the whole time, why we were traveling without a single designated stylist or assistant?”
“Yes.” His admission is simple, plain. It’s there in his face, too, completely devoid of a smirk or his raised eyebrow.
“How could you not tell me, Rhys? How?”
“There’s no excuse for it,” he replies, voice hoarse. “I know there isn’t.”
“So much for brutal honesty.”
“I can’t be brutal with you, Ivy. It’s the one thing I can’t be.”
“But you can lie to me.” I gesture to his laptop, now closed again on the dining-room table. Tears of anger threaten to overflow. “I saw a ton of other pictures there, by the way. And as Ben so charmingly put it, you can’t resist a model and you love blondes.