“So, you just expect me to suck it up and deal with this?”
“I’d appreciate it.” He put a palm against my cheek, holding my head against his chest. “Have a little faith, sweetheart.”
Faith wasn’t an easy thing to come by, and not a concept with which I was too familiar. It was too scary. Too… unpredictable. I wasn’t used to throwing caution to the wind, just leaving my fate in the hands of another person.
Then again, the person in question was Trip.
I was still kind of seething about it, but what could I do? It was just work, like he said. After the numerous stories he’d told me about the technicality behind all those steamy love scenes in his movies, I knew all that chemistry was just make-believe.
But shit. Jenna?
I suddenly understood why he’d been so edgy the past days. He was all stressed at the thought that I’d actually leave him just because her name was being thrown around as a possible choice for a possible project. I supposed he could’ve had a bit more faith in me than that.
But if he thought it was going to freak me out so badly, why was he even considering it?
I needed to just chill the hell out. I trusted Trip to do the right thing, make the right decision in regards to his career. Sure, I was hoping he wouldn’t even take the part, but if he did… well, if he did, I knew it would be for the right reasons. He was right when he said I wasn’t normally a jealous girl. I realized I was just lashing out due to fear. Fear of knowing how easily we’d been torn apart in the past.
We weren’t those same stupid kids anymore. We’d gone through a lot to get to this point, and this wasn’t going to just slip away like it had the last time. Or the time before that.
When it came to our relationship, this was all that mattered now.
I hoped I wasn’t being na?ve when I chose to believe him.
Chapter 24
SUNSET STORY
I’d felt bad about all the ridiculous fighting we’d been engaging in. It wasn’t really our style.
Well, it didn’t used to be.
I blamed it on the smoggy air out there. It messed with a person’s brain.
Not that I’m making excuses for our behavior.
But even if we still had some major communication skills to hone, at least we were making it a point to actually talk about stuff. In the old days, we’d just bottle everything away and assume the worst. Fighting was an improvement over silence, right?
I knew Trip had only lashed out at me because he was under stress. Plus, he’d gotten too used to the idea of being sold out. That didn’t make it okay, and his outbursts were something we’d have to work on. I didn’t sign on to be his punching bag.
He didn’t sign on to be mine, either.
I went into that Jenna conversation determined to be calm. Zen. Rational. Instead, I’d freaked out at him because… well, because I obviously didn’t like the idea of Trip’s name being thrown around with hers again. Or any of those other women.
I’d dealt with that enough while we were separated.
In the weeks after The Lunchbox, I kinda went a little nutty. I holed up in my old bedroom and watched E! religiously, torturing myself with every report about Trip’s new movie, every mention of his engagement. The only times I left the house were to buy up all the movie magazines and rag mags that had his picture on the cover. There were a lot of them.
As usual, Lisa was my saving grace.
She came over every day, made me shower, put on clean clothes. She brought over mindless romantic comedies and snacks to pig out on while we watched them. She took me shopping. She bought me that membership to the gym so I could use the pool. Eventually, she dragged me to her Lamaze classes. She tried to keep me focused on life.
She even tried to get me to swear off the tabloids, but those things were addictive. It took quite a while before I could wean myself out of their grasp. But even though I stopped buying them, I couldn’t ignore the covers. So, it was hard to avoid Trip altogether. With so many entertainment magazines, his face was everywhere, all the time. Normally, not alone.
During those years after rehab, he went back to his playboy ways. I couldn’t go more than a week without seeing him on some magazine, some new girl on his arm, living it up with some random woman or another.
A few months back, he was even named as People’s Sexiest Man Alive.
For the second year in a row.
So, in my defense, you need to understand that I was acting out because of more than just plain old jealousy. Any reminder of that period of his life inevitably reminded me of mine, and that wasn’t really the greatest time for either of us.
He’d spent our years apart with a fake smile plastered to his face, concentrating on nothing more than his career and turning fully into him.
The newfound stardom forced Trip’s alter ego to appear more often than usual, and he hid behind that persona for so long that there were times I was sure he didn’t even realize he was slipping into it.