“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her. “I can’t imagine ever leaving you.”
A tear runs down Emily’s face, gleaming in the pale light from the flashlight. “I think that’s what scares me, though.That you won’t love me anymore, but you won’t leave. You’ll just stay with me out of duty and then we’ll end up like my parents, together out of habit, with nothing to say to each other anymore.”
Emily’s parents are exactly like she says. Her family is pretty silent, even when she and her sisters are there. I’m not capable of eating dinner without talking, so I tend to be the one to keep the conversation running. It’s probably annoying to them, but—“Em, you can’t really think we’re going to have nothing to say to each other. I can’t be quiet for more than five minutes.”
She blinks down at her knees. “You’re probably right. But that doesn’t mean you’ll always love me.”
“And I need to be better about showing you that I’ll always love you. By being more excited about moving in together, and about . . . hotel check-ins.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was always all in my head. I don’t know.” She sighs.
“Do you have any other examples?”
She thinks about that. “Things were weird when we were out in Maryland, when I met your dad. But I thought maybe that was more about seeing him than it was about us.”
I shrug. “I mean, my dad’s a dick. But whatever. I don’t care.”
Emily gives me a skeptical look, like I’m brushing it off too easily. I know she thinks I ought to be more affected by the way my dad walked out on me and my mom and my sisters and moved across the country to have a new family. And yeah, it’s obnoxious that his other kids go to private schools and go on vacation to Europe while we grew up on food stamps. Not exactly the child support system at its finest.
But it is what it is. It still drives my sisters crazy that my dad so obviously loves his two younger kids more than the rest of us, but I got used to it a long time ago.
“I don’t know, then,” she says.
I probably should have let her believe it was about my dad, because now I realize I have more unexplained weirdness to account for. “But we’ll work on this, right? We’re going to be okay.”
“Right.” She sounds like she means it, but there’s still a pit the size of the Grand Canyon in my stomach.
It scares her that I say I’ll never leave her, but it scares me that she won’t say it back.
“I’m going to go brush my teeth,” I say. “And then we can talk about this some more. Or just get some sleep and talk about it tomorrow. Whatever you want.”
“Okay.”
She’s clearly still upset, but I need a minute to breathe, and I think maybe she does, too. I grab my toothbrush, toothpaste, and the flashlight from the floor, unzip the tent flap, and step out.
There’s a scrambling noise over to my left, and I point my flashlight in that direction, expecting to see a deer that wandered into camp.
Instead what I see is Rich and one of the camera guys hastily escaping around one of the other tents, carrying an armful of sound equipment.
It takes me a moment to realize what this means.
Emily and I just had that conversation in the middle of a freaking tent city. My voice tends to travel, and a couple times there, we werebothraising our voices.
Which apparently attracted the attention of Rich.
Who then—
Oh,shit. I take off around the tent, catching up with Rich after a few strides.
“Hey!” I say in a loud whisper. “What the hell are you doing?”
The sound guy makes off with the equipment and no doubt with the recording of however much of that conversation they managed to get. I’m not technically supposed to be part of the drama on this show, but I know from experience that when you’re filming, you take everything you can get.
And then you use it.
I shine the light directly in Rich’s eyes, and he squints at me, shielding his face. “Jason!” he says, like he’s somehow surprised to see me here. “We were just doing some recording. I’m sure you know that in your contract it says—”
“I know what the contract says,” I snap at him.
