I made mine bigger.
But we were both acting, and not particularly well.
He wasn’t ok, I could tell.
Westill weren’t.
Not completely.
There was still this lurking reticence between us, and I hated it.
The filming at least has continued to go well all week.Magically,asThe Screen’s source has said. Really, that part of things no longer worries me at all. It feels absurd, actually, that I ever struggled to believe I’d be able to make myself into Iris, when every day I’ve found myself morphing into her more completely than the one before. It’s being here that’s made that happen, I have no doubt about that. Back in rehearsals, Iris was purely a character to me: an elusive, ungraspable character; lines on a page, and nowhere to be found in that soulless LA room.
She was here.
All along, she was here: in her cottage; out in the woods.
Up in her bedroom.
‘I don’t want you to keep sleeping there,’ Nick said to me on Saturday morning, after our first night apart. ‘I’m afraid of what it’s doing to you. Where it might take us … ’
‘This isn’t about us,’ I told him. ‘It’s about the movie. This is a job. I want to get it right.’
‘You aregetting it right. There’s something else going on. Something else taking you up there … ’
‘No … ’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Then stay down here tonight. Please.’
I planned to.
But that night, after he fell asleep, I lay beside him, full of frustration that he’d once again called his lawyers, and sadness, so much sadness, over our kiss in Bettys Bar, and all the incredible moments we’ve now shared as Iris and Robbie, so effortlessly, when it just keeps being so bloodyhardto be us.
I became sadder yet thinking about how great he was withall the kids in Heaton, then, those women he was photographed with in those bars, who maybe he reallydidn’t so much as look at, not even that one who kept cropping up. Maybe she was just a fan.
But what if he had looked?
What if I set him free to do that in the future, and give her, or someone like her, a chance?
Might he end up happier than I can ever make him?
Restlessly, I kicked off my covers, and stared at the ceiling, picturing the attic above.
I glanced sideways at Nick, then – wide awake and fearing I was on course to spend the rest of the night that way – caved to temptation, slipping from our bed, and creeping back upstairs.
He didn’t say anything about it the next day when I returned to our room to shower.
Already dressed, he told me he’d leave me to it, and went to breakfast.
Watching him go, absorbing the anger in his set shoulders, thedisappointment, I resolved that I wouldn’t leave him again that night.
But I did leave him.
I haven’t spent a night with him since.
