“Pretty much,” I reply. “But the dead family doesn’t help.”
Our passports are stamped, and then we walk side by side down a long, hardwood-floored hall toward the exit. I mentallyprepare myself for the first moments of filming. Lars warned us that the crew will be waiting just inside the front doors and will be shooting as we approach.
“You saw the text from Lars?” he grunts.
A real couple talks and holds hands,Lars added in case it was unclear.
My shoulders sag. “I did.”
With the heaviest of sighs, his massive hand folds around mine, and we continue toward the exit.
I glance up. “What should we talk about?”
He shakes his head. “You’ve never been at a loss for words before, Rebecca.”
I can see the crew assembled, just in front of the glass doors. The cameraman is approaching with a lighting guy moving alongside him. The crowd parts and turns to see what all the fuss is about.
I force myself to smile. We aren’t wearing mics, so it doesn’t really matter what I say, as long as I manage to make him uncomfortable. “I think I’m about to explode from lack of sex. I never travel with a vibrator because I’m worried TSA will—”
“I swear to god, Rebecca, if you continue down this path, I’ll—”
“Refuse to perform your marital duties?” I ask. “You’re already doing that.”
“I couldstart,” he says, and for the briefest second as he glances down at me there’s a flash of something in his gaze. The same thing I saw after our wedding-day kiss.
That weird muscle at the base of my stomach, one I didn’t even know existed until a few weeks ago, squeezes tight.
“You wish,” I reply, but it’s pretty halfhearted.
The cameraman moves backward as we approach, and I wonder what that interaction just looked like. If we appeared to be bickering, or if we looked like a couple who were dying to fuck.
It kind of felt like it was both those things.
We push through the doors, and I blink at Iceland’s weak early April light. It’s surreal—daylight when my body still insists it’s the middle of the night. I’m not as tired as I was inside but I’m not entirely myself either. We are loaded into a van, where a driver has coffee and croissants waiting for us. I shove a croissant in my mouth pretty much whole, and then chug the coffee, dribbling some down the front of my jacket.
“You eat like someone in a contest,” Theo says with disdain, returning his coffee to the cupholder. I’m too fatigued to come up with a way to insult him in turn.
Lars pops his head in to introduce the people he’s brought with him in the van behind ours—an unusually small crew, as the situation demanded it: the fewer people who know this is fake, the better. “I’ll be directing, as you know, and Paula is the assistant director, so she handles all logistics. LJ is the cinematographer, Jon is on sound, and Sean is assistant camera, DIT, and grip when we need lighting.”
He doesn’t explain what a DIT is, nor does he specify roles for Katrina and Caden, but I assume that Katrina is the PA and Caden is simply here to annoyme.
“Oh,” he adds as the crew disperses, “and the volcano has changed some things, so we’re shooting at Sky Lagoon near Reykjavík instead of the Blue Lagoon.”
Which means that instead of going right around the fucking corner, we’re adding drive time to a trip that was already way, way too full. I know he said it was the volcano, but I still choose to blame Theo.
With that established, we hit the highway and Theo is once again sound asleep. I eat a second croissant, staring at the barren landscape aroundus.
Mygod,his sleep breathing annoys me. It’s too loud, too calm, too smugly pleased with itself for functioningautonomously. It’s salt in the wound, the way he sleeps so easily when I can’t sleep at all. It means he’ll be fresh as a daisy when we film, sounding all smart and British while I stumble around like a thick-footed toddler, yawning and weeping about the cold.
I lean my head against his chest. “Stop breathing,” I whisper.
“No,” he replies.
Alas. I tried.
There’s too much fog to see the mountains at all, and the ground is still covered in snow. It should be Bronwyn here instead of me, bored and a little depressed by the view. It should be Bronwyn wondering if it’s all volcanic rock under that snow, or mythically green in summer.
It’s appalling that it’snother. It’s equally appalling that I’m still capable of complaining about my fatigue and the view when I should be desperately grateful simply to be here to experience any ofit.
