I was curling into Joel’s arms, chasing sleep when he whispered into the darkness, “Everything okay?”
I wasn’t surprised he asked. I’d passed on sex when I got home from the restaurant, claiming I needed a hot shower before going straight to bed. He hadn’t seemed offended, but now that he was questioning me, I had to wonder.
“Yeah.” I lifted my head to kiss him. “Sorry about earlier. It’s not that I didn’t want to. I was just tired and a little stressed. But now I’m too wired to sleep.”
He smirked. “We don’t need to have sex every night, G. Sometimes we can just talk.”
Another reason why I loved this man. He got me. “Talking to Deanna and Briar tonight just got me thinking about everything. What if I’m making a huge mistake? What if this show will turn my life into something I thought I wanted… only to realize I was wrong?”
“So, you can say you tried. You’re not married to the show, babe.” He massaged my scalp. “Now me, on the other hand… you couldn’t cut me loose with a machete.”
“As if I would want to.” He made it sound so simple, but it wasn’t. There were contracts, and legal obligations and a business I’d spent years building. It was my livelihood, and all my skills wrapped up in one saleable package. Without it, I had nothing left.
“Talk to me.”
I didn’t realize I’d gone silent, lost in my thoughts, but apparently I had. “I don’t know who I am without all that. I think somewhere along the way I may have lost the real me and that scares me, especially now. I’m going to become this TV persona and this brand will eat up even more of my life.”
Since when hadbrandbecome a dirty word to me? Since I stopped posting private moments of my life online because they were private moments I wanted to share with my husband, without a camera in sight. I made him dinner I thought he would like, without worrying about how easy the recipe was or whether the ingredients would be easily accessible for the average working mom who needed a quick meal. Now that I had Joel, I just wanted a real life with him, not the fake life I’d been promoting online.
“Gia, what are you saying? You don’t want to do the show?”
I felt a tear creep down my cheek, hoping he couldn’t feel it land on his chest. “I don’t have a choice. I’ve signed the contracts. Announced it on social media. The crews are coming here tomorrow. It’s too late for me to get cold feet.” I sighed. “Briar’s right, I’m only committed for this season. I can do anything for twelve weeks, right?” Twelve potentially grueling weeks, where I barely saw my husband, much less had the time or energy to make love with him. Ugh! That sounded like the worst kind of torture.
“Sweetheart, if you really want to get out of this, let me call my lawyer—”
“No!” I sat up in bed, looking down at him. “I love you for wanting to bail me out, but I got myself into this mess and I have to work my way out of it.” I couldn’t believe I was referring to the biggest break of my career as a mess. Who was I?
When I calmed down and was settled on his chest again, he asked, “How long have you been feeling this way?”
I swallowed, wondering if it was wise to tell him the truth. I didn’t want him to feel responsible for my change of heart regarding my career, but I knew it could be easily mis-construed, given the time my doubts started to creep in.
“When I moved in here and things started to get more real between us, I realized I’d been using my career to build this fake life, when all I’d ever really wanted was the real thing with someone like you.”
“Someonelikeme?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You.” I curled my hand around his face. “It could only have been you.”
“Good answer,” he mumbled, wrapping me up in his arms. “Go on.”
It was hard to put it into words, but my heart understood it perfectly. It longed for real after too many years of pretending. “I would make these perfect meals and desserts to showcase on my socials, wind up knee deep in seasonal décor and craft supplies, share my shopping hauls…” I shook my head, feeling ashamed to admit the truth. “And I had to rent a storage unit to keep all of the stuff that wouldn’t fit into my real life. None of it was real.” I tried to tamp down the embarrassment and shame, even though I knew Joel would never judge me for being vulnerable with him. “I was trying to be an example of this perfect life when nothing about my life was the way I wanted it to be. I hate that I was so fake—”
“Hey.” He kissed me gently. “Don’t say that. Everyone on social media is fake, posting the best parts of their lives to make all of their so-called friends and followers jealous. You’re not the only one afraid to post the reality. That’s because people don’t watch your videos or consume your content because they want boring or mundane. They have enough of that in their own lives. They want the fantasy and that’s what you’ve given them.”
He made it sound like I was playing a role. I knew Joel was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t. I’d never meant to deceive anyone. And now people who saw the show would see the real-life fairy-tale I was living, thanks to Joel, and maybe think their lives didn’t measure up. I hated that. I wanted to lift other women up, not make them feel bad because they couldn’t cook for shit or maintain a ‘perfect home’. Perfection was over-rated and I sucked for peddling it.
ChapterFourteen
Joel
I walked into my kitchen to sneak a cup of coffee before heading out to the barn and my stomach bottomed out when I saw the woman talking to my wife. Holy shit! What wasshedoing in our house?
Gia’s eyes sparkled when she saw me, but Kaitlyn shot daggers at me. Not that I could blame her, given the way we’d left things.
I looked around for other crew members, but one glance outside told me they had scattered to scout the property. No one to save me from the worst moment of my life. I wanted to plead for a moment alone with Gia… to tell her everything before it was too late but before I could my fate was sealed.
“Well, Joel… we meet again.” Kaitlyn bared her teeth in more of a snarl than a smile.
“You two know each other?” Gia asked.
