He rubs his face, squinting up at me. “I’m off until tonight.”
He tugs a pillow out from under his head and presses it to my face to muffle my happy scream.
Yes, we make love, but instead of spending the entire rest of the day in bed or having sex on every flat surface of the suite like I would have guessed, we sneak out in hats and sunglasses for doughnuts, and on our way back he impulsively stops in a local gaming store and buys a full Nintendo console. We invite Eden (who accepts) and Yael (who flatly declines), and the three of us spend a solid block of the day in the suite, shit-talking and going cutthroat in Mario Kart with a bag of chips blown open on the table and bottles of beer scattered all over. Around five, Alec drags his day-drunk body into the shower and then finds me out on the terrace, where Eden and I had moved to gossip and soak up some late-afternoon sun.
“I’m headed out now.” He bends, kissing my forehead.
“Don’t go.” Eden groans in protest. “Gigi sucks at video games.”
“Believe me,” he says, “I’d rather stay here on the terrace.”
When he straightens, I squint up at him, shading a hand over my eyes. He steps into the sun, shadowing me. “What is it tonight again?”
“Dinner with the cast and local Netflix team.” Backlit, he looks like a marble statue radiating sunlight.
“What time will you be back?”
I very intentionally did not say home, but the word rings out between the three of us anyway.
“Late,” he says. “You don’t have to wait up.”
“Wake me up?” I say quietly, and he nods, kissing me one more time.
Alec says goodbye to Eden and then disappears inside, and I hear the heavy click of the suite’s door a few seconds later.
Tilting my face to the sky, I keep my eyes closed but can feel my best friend’s attention on me in the following silence. “It’s been a week,” she says.
“I know.”
The but swings like a pendulum in the air, but thankfully she doesn’t say any of the rest of her thought aloud. I know all of the permutations already.
But watching the two of you, it seems like it’s been longer.
But he’s still going to leave next Sunday.
But this is all just pretend, Gigi. Get yourself together.
Instead, we lazily shuffle back inside, order room service, and talk about the sweet and banal non-Alec details of our lives. When she leaves, the room falls oddly silent.
I clean up the detritus from our gaming and junk-food binge. I shower, make the bed, pack a bag of our clothes for laundry services. I check my work email, but Ian took the day off, too, and there’s nothing new to read. I’m not tired, but nothing draws my attention on social media, and there’s nothing I can think to watch on TV. But I turn it on anyway and find myself on autopilot, navigating to Netflix, to The West Midlands, and pushing play on episode one.
By the time Alec walks into the suite, well after one in the morning, I’m six episodes in and already deeply invested in Dr. Minjoon Song’s first romance arc—one that clearly does not stick, because this woman is not played by Elodie. Google tells me that this character—Eleanor DiMari—dies in a plane crash at the end of season one and I immediately resent my inability to live without spoilers because I am devastated.
“She dies?” I whine.
He drops his jacket over the back of the couch and braces his hands there, bending to kiss my temple. “What are you—oh. Yeah.”
I am delighted that he returned in the middle of a make-out scene where his costar—a woman Google also told me is named Mariana Rebollini—is topless.
“This is some real strategic filming,” I say. “Do you actually see boob when you’re filming this?”
“She has stickers,” he says, and when I look over my shoulder, he gestures to his chest and then glances at his watch. “God, what are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He walks over to the fridge in the small kitchen area and pulls out a bottle of sparkling water. “Wow, we killed a lot of beer today.” He cracks open the top and joins me on the couch. “No wonder I’m dragging.”
“On a scale of one to let-us-never-speak-of-this-off-set,” I say, lifting my chin to the TV, “how awkward are these sexy scenes to film?”