She was used to his deflection on the subject, but she had never considered it might have been more than a pride thing. The way he’d looked at the camera made her wonder if the truth was something he didn’t want to say, or something he didn’t want to say on record. An odd feeling settled in her chest as he let out a big sigh.
“Why is Mansi sending you pictures of puppies?” he asked. She’d forgotten he was still holding her phone and saw him thumbing the screen.
“Hey!” she blurted, and snatched it out of his hand. “Why are you scrolling through my phone?”
“You said it was a few screenshots! I was making sure I read it all.”
She scowled at him, knowing it was a flat lie. “No, you weren’t. You were snooping.”
He gave her his million-dollar grin that could get him out of jail anywhere. “But really, are you thinking of getting a dog?”
She hadn’t been, but the pictures Mansi sent were admittedly enticing. “Maybe.”
“You should. You’d make an excellent dog parent. You’d make an excellent human parent too.” He sweetly smiled at her in a way that said he’d like to coparent either of those scenarios someday. Then he pushed up off the chair and bounded for the pool in two giant steps before launching himself into it. The resulting splash arced higher than the roof and spritzed Olivia with drops.
She stared at him when he surfaced and flipped his soaked mop of hair out of his face. How he could go from making herwant to scream to making her ovaries burst in the same hour was truly a unique talent.
•••
Despite what Chuck said aboutletting online gossip go, she couldn’t. Throughout the rest of the morning, she found herself revisiting the screenshots. Of course, she couldn’t click any of the links in the photos, and an internet search would end in no-signal failure anyway. Her only option was rereading the short article over and over until it left her feeling raw and exhausted.
The line about sharing her mother’s taste for Hollywood men with bad reputations sank a particularly deep barb. Her father was, by all public accounts, not a good guy, a fact that Olivia had had to accept since public accounts were all she had to go off of. Chuck’s reputation had plummeted thanks to getting fired, but she knew him—perhaps better than any other man she’d known—and she knew he wasn’tbad. Sure, he had a way of finding her very last nerve and stomping it into oblivion, but that wasn’t worthy of an industry-wide reputation. She hated to think he could join ranks with her father in the public eye.
When it came time for the interview that afternoon, Chuck found her sitting at the kitchen island staring at her phone. The house had become a hub of commotion and preparation as the crew set up for filming in the backyard. Tyler had dropped off a deli tray and a giant bowl of fruit salad. Olivia managed three cubes of cheese and a grape between her despair over the article and her pending nerves about another interview.
“Unless you’re looking at more puppy pictures, you should put that down,” Chuck said.
She glanced up to see him looking dapper in another dreamy button-down. He nodded at her phone clutched in her grip.
“Oh, I’m…looking at puppy pictures. Right,” she said, and pressed it to her chest as a guilty flush filled her face.
He gave her an easy, crooked smile that popped out his dimple and simply said, “Liar.”
How he managed to look so good while accusing her of dishonesty, she didn’t know. She felt his eyes on her makeup and the green dress the stylists had picked out for her, and she swore she saw the ghost of a battle pass beneath the carefree look on his face. He swallowed and appeared like he might reach out to touch her but waved his arm in the air instead.
“I told you to let it go. I’ll take your phone away if you need me to,” he said.
She half smiled. “That won’t be necessary. Cutting off my only access to the outside world might make me go full Jack Torrance on you.”
“Better play it safe, then.”
“Probably in everyone’s best interest.”
“Well, this banter is a little friendlier than the last time I saw you,” TJ interrupted. He swanned into the kitchen and plucked a grape out of the fruit salad bowl.
“Yes, well, you don’t have us handcuffed together trying to build furniture this time,” Chuck said.
“I can always bring the cuffs back out to keep things interesting,” TJ said with a wink. “Come on. They’re ready for us out back.”
Olivia slid off the barstool and straightened her skirt. She’dput on strappy heels for no real reason other than that they went with her dress. They wouldn’t even be visible on camera. Either way, they made her a few inches taller and pinched her toes in a way that meant she’d only be wearing them to walk to the backyard and sit down before she took them off again.
When they entered the backyard, she saw that it had again been set up as a little studio with the patio chairs clustered around the table. An umbrella had been pulled over for shade, and the crew milled around in a jungle of tripods, monitors, cameras, and cords.
“What exactly are we talking about today?” Olivia asked as she sat in one of the chairs. She wasn’t sure if they’d watched the footage from last night and at least wanted to be prepared if they were going to make them talk about their fight on camera.
“You will find out shortly,” TJ said. Olivia lost sight of him while the mic tech stepped in front of her. The ever-present mischief in his voice had her on edge. She shook it off with a forced smile and once more silently repeated her refrain.
A million dollars a million dollars a million dollars.