I have him blocked, which is why I didn’t see until now that heposted a picture of me for Flashback Friday. I swipe over to his profile and grimace at a picture of us kissing, looking lovey-dovey. The next picture in the slide is an engagement ring, and he’s captioned it with a broken-heart emoji.Sometimes I think about what could’ve been.
I suck in a sharp breath, scrolling through the flood of sympathetic comments. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Everyone loves Lucas Dormer. A real boy-next-door type, despite his rebellious phase after he left the boy band The Right Now to go solo.
Lucas is the sort of person who seems like a dream come true at first.
He was so much more attentive, so much more in love, so much more committed than any guy I’d ever been involved with, which elevated our relationship status in record speed. We were using words likesoul mateand spending every single second of every single day together. If I had to leave him for a couple hours, he’d text me long, heartfelt messages. After two weeks, we were talking about having children together. Big romantic gestures were everyday occurrences: a wall of roses, pink diamonds, spur-of-the-moment vacations, surprise fireworks. You know that high you get when you sayI love youfor the first time to someone? It was like that, nonstop. Whenever I started to drift down from that high—after a while, it was exhausting being up there all the time—he would outdo himself. Bring us back up to that level again. It was, in a word, intense. To me, intense = good, because?? Right?? It had to be a positive thing.
Most of my friends were exuberant in their jealousy, their happiness for me; his friends told me he was “a keeper.” I didn’t introduce him to the rest of my family, but Kaia met him by chancewhen we were out getting dinner and didn’t like him because she thought that maybe he was like this with every girlfriend. I didn’t want to hear it. Something about him nagged at her, so she started nagging at me. Which I thought was ridiculous, becauseI’mthe older sister, which means I know better than she does. I defended him until I was blue in the face, even though my gut feeling was that she was right. Lucas told me that in previous relationships, he’d thought he was in love, but in retrospect, he actually hadn’t been. It was like... if he was in a relationship and it ended, he canceled out the whole experience and decided it had no value. Wasn’t real. This way, his next relationship going forward would be pure, and the new girlfriend would be the special, lucky girl to finally win his heart after a long string of users and fakers.
About a month in, paparazzi snapped pictures of him going to a private appointment at Cartier, and Kaia called me, freaking out. She was terrified he was shopping around for engagement rings and that I’d end up in his freezer. She said a lot of really bad things about Lucas that she’d been holding back, because she didn’t know how to put it and didn’t want to alienate me. I insisted we had the perfect relationship, that he was an outstanding boyfriend, more generous and complimentary than anyone else in existence. She asked one thing of me, one small request.
“Tell him you’re going away with me for my birthday weekend.”
I did, even though I felt sick with dread about how that would play out. Lucas did not want me to go. He volleyed back and forth between a few different manipulations:I’ll miss you too much. Can I come, too? If I can’t come, then that means Kaia doesn’t like me. And if Kaia doesn’t support our relationship, she’ll try to get you to break up with me. Kaia is against us being together. Kaia is a bad sister. Come to think of it, here’s a bullet list of X, Y, and Z reasons why you should cut her out of your life. Forstarters, I think she’s using you for attention because you’re more famous than she is, like everybody but me always tries to use you. She knows I see through her bullshit, which is why she’s trying to cut me out of the picture. Don’t let her do it, Bettie. Don’t let her manipulate you.
I assured him I wouldn’t be around any other men for the weekend. I assured him I wouldn’t drink. I would keep my phone on me at all times. I would text him every half hour—actually, even better, I would stay on the phone with him the whole time. Yeah, it sucked that we were apart, and I didn’t really want to go. I didn’t want to leave him behind. I loved him so much! More than anyone.
Anyone.
After all, he pointed out, Kaia was just my sister, not my soul mate, and blood isn’t everything. Kaia had her own life going on, we didn’t hang out often, so what did she care? He was my future. He was giving up all his free time to be with me, so shouldn’t I do the same? Why was he putting in more effort than I was? If I loved him as much as I claimed, then why would I want to be anywhere else but at his side? Kaia was against us. Soon, she’d turn the whole family against us.
Lucas and I held each other, crying, passionately swearing we’d never let anyone come between us. It was a lot. He needed constant reassurance that I wanted to grow old with him. I’d spend hours trying to convince him, until my voice was hoarse. Each session would end with us being “closer than ever” even though my nerves were frayed, and I’d think,okay he’s finally all right, we’re settled—but then he’d plummet right back to that low point, and I’d have to drop everything to reassure him all over again. I began to suspect he was faking it, just to siphon my energy. To watch me prove myself over and over. Emotions wererunning so high, all the time, and I was drained. Exhausted. I never had two minutes to myself to reflect on anything, to view this relationship from a distance.
Kaia dropped by my house (at the time, I was living in L.A.) on the pretense that she wanted to play a new track for me, and then Athena tumbled out of the passenger seat, grabbed my wrist, and stuffed me in the back. It was an intervention. Kaia held my phone hostage while we drove to Santa Cruz. We explored parks along the way, but I couldn’t enjoy any of the sights. Aside from calling them every horrible name I could think of, I refused to speak to them. I had thirty nervous breakdowns per hour over what Lucas was going to do, how he would react. I begged for my phone so that I could call him and let him know I was okay, that I missed him, that this wasn’t my idea, that I was forced. But not in a sinister way. I didn’t want him calling the police on my sisters.
Kaia instructed me to dictate all my messages onto a notepad. She’d text them to Lucas herself.
As I sat in my hotel bed, surrounded by crumpled papers, my pen ran out of ink before I could come up with the right words that would make Lucas forgive me for going on an impromptu trip with my sisters. It was such an awful few days that I can’t remember most of it. A trauma fog.
Do you know that feeling when out of nowhere, your ears pop and your equilibrium is shot, and you hear a high, thin ringing? That sensation knocked me over like an undertow. I couldn’t stop staring at all the ink I’d used, all the paper I’d scribbled on and then discarded. The crossed-out words, because if I didn’t use just the right words, he’d spiral. Or stop loving me. I couldn’t predict what he’d do. Suddenly, I was so scared by what was happening that I did a one-eighty from being desperate to run into his armsto never wanting to be in Southern California again. I wanted to go into hiding. I was worried he had a tracker in my phone, that he’d find me. I was worried that if I called him and broke it off, he’d talk me out of it. I didn’t have enough faith in myself to successfully break up with him in person, knowing that if I had to look into his eyes, I’d cave.
So I took what I thought was my only option: I broke up with him publicly, before I lost my nerve. I did it in a tweet.
I was slammed for that. Tactless! Vicious! Heartless! Poor Lucas Dormer dumped by “love of his life” Bettie Hughes via Twitter! Is she secretly hooking up with former flame Isaiah Redding?
Lucas’s fans, who hated me when we were dating and sent me a ceaseless flow of death threats, took things to the next level. I was too ugly for Lucas. I was a slut. He’s going to find a woman who deserves him, who’s pretty and talented enough to be with him, and I’ll regret what I did for the rest of my stupid, meaningless life. Emails and comments bombarded me until I locked my accounts (coward!), but they emailed my family members, friends I hadn’t spoken to in ages, my middle school teachers, my neighbors.
Lucas milked the breakup for all it was worth, crying to every media outlet. Turned the whole world against me. I’ve seen video clips of him wiping his eyes on a concert stage: “She’ll be sorry. I even pity her myself. Someday she’ll look back and see what she had and be sorry.” Waves of girls in the audience whooped in agreement, booing my name. I remember one of them held up a big white posterboard, covered in glitter, that had a picture of a Little Debbie Swiss Roll on it and the wordsblink if you want me to kill her.
In less than two months, he was professing his love for someone else, a soccer star named Dani. He rewrote our story, claimingthat now that he was in a perfect relationship and found his true soul mate, he could see that he never actually loved me at all. Dani was his first love. She’d be his love until his dying day. They lasted longer than I expected, breaking up only a few short weeks ago.
A slow, quivering exhale leaves my body as my stare burns through the picture of us kissing. I wish I could reach inside it and yank that Bettie out. There are a few comments mixed in with all the Bettie-bashing, about how fucking weird it is to ruminate over the marriage he might have had with an ex-girlfriend he’d never even been engaged to. Not to mention, the engagement ring he posted is the first picture that pops up when you Google “giant engagement ring.” Others have tagged Dani with #DodgedABullet.
Any time I’ve ever tried to defend myself against Lucas, his horde of fans come back swinging with a vengeance. I am the villain. Any claims to the contrary don’t fit their narrative.
Now that I’ve deprogrammed myself, I am able to identify this picture as staged. He took pictures of everything we did, planning activities around photo ops. Constantly grabbing me, pulling me to him, even when I was busy. Hugging me while I was on the phone, hugging me while I was typing up emails, hugging me when I was trying to get dressed, trying to eat. Holding his phone out, snapping pictures. He did it especially when I was in a bad mood, annoyed with him, because it forced me to put on a smile. Forced me to let him hold me, kiss me, for the camera, when I needed space. Love bombing.
In the time that I’ve been burning a furious hole through his latest story with my eyes, Lucas has added another post to his feed. It’s a picture of him on a stage, baring all of his teeth in a smile, armwrapped tightly around a pretty dark-haired woman wearing what looks like a tiny ice skater’s costume with more cutouts than Swiss cheese. He’s in a sharp black suit.Tune in tonight 8/7c for the season finale! Jenna and I have an amazing one in store for ya.@dancingabc @DorminatorsOfficialUpdates #DancingWithTheStars #DWTS #Lucas AndJenna #TeamLucas #LucasDormer #DormerFansUnite #DorminationNation #WeLoveLucasDormer #MCM #WCW #YouWannaWatchThis #Hot #Muscles #Singer #Sexy #SoloArtists #BachelorABC #TheNextBachelor #TellABCYouWantLucasDormerToBeTheNextBachelor
She didn’t deserve you, one of the top comments says. I’ve worried the hole in the window screen until it’s big enough for a golf ball to get through.
I think Bettie’s news is a publicity stunt, says another, curiously tagging Callista Orjean in the comment. The name jumps out at me because Callista, a D-list celebrity, is one of Felix’s ex-wives.
“What news?” I mutter.
I don’t have Callista blocked, only muted, as she’s such a wild card that I need to keep contained tabs on her movements. I click over to her profile and frown. No new posts for a week. The last one was a picture of her dog. Then I open her latest stories and almost drop my phone.
