She’s the worst. I have no idea why I’ve got this desire to laugh. Instead, I tell her to move out of the way so I can take a picture of the waterfall without her init.
• • •
Our next stop involves climbing a glacier, followed by yet another drive before we take a boat out into a lagoon, surrounded by chunks of melting icebergs.
Rebecca has not slept a wink since sometime yesterday, and when she removes her sunglasses, there are circles under her eyes and yet…she’s glowing, pink-cheeked, delightful. Duringour downtime, she engages the crew. She grills Katrina about her childhood in Paris. She video chats with LJ’s children and gets into a long conversation with Jon about how he should propose to his girlfriend. She gets Sean to explain how he’ll organize the thousands of digital files that will result from each of these shoots.
She’s just as open and uninhibited on camera. That should worry me, although now that she’s given us a false pregnancy scare, implied she’s cheating, and discussed shocking a corpse’s penis to extract its sperm, I doubt she could get worse.
She asks the boat captain about melting patterns and how the volcano impacts the water temperature. She has what appears to be an intelligent conversation with the guide about the land sinking near the divide between tectonic plates and with the driver about the close relationship between Icelandic and Old Norse. She asks him how to say various things, though it’s mostly profanity.
It’s surprising that she’s so good at this, so capable, but…shouldit be? Jessie always made Bex sound a trifle slow and more than a trifle lazy, but she single-handedly convinced Emil to do this show, after all, armed with nothing but a phone, she hasn’t missed a single meeting, and she wasn’t late for the flight. She hasn’t actually been late for anything aside from our wedding, and even I’m not such a monster that I’d hold five minutes against her.
I no longer believe she’s incompetent, but I think she’s extremely good atpretendingto be incompetent. And I’m starting to wonder why.
We arrive at our hotel and are given exactly thirty minutes to rinse off, change clothes, and be back downstairs to eat.
A buffet has been set up for us in the hotel restaurant—fish and potatoes and rye bread, plus a red meat I avoid because there’s a strong possibility that it’s horse. I load a plate whileCaden loudly tells some pretentious story about going on a yacht with “Leonardo and the boys.” Given the way he keeps looking at Rebecca as he says it, it’s pretty clear who he’s hoping to impress.
She’s sitting by the fireplace, ignoring him as she rubs her hands over her arms trying to get warm. That she’s cold again doesn’t bode well for the hours we’re about to spend outside tracking the northern lights. That Caden keeps trying so hard to winmy wife’sattention doesn’t bode well for his longevity. Even if our marriage is fake, it’s just…disrespectful.
He crosses the room and takes the seat beside her, at which point I’ve bloody well hadit.
I carry my plate to where they sit and loom in front of them. “Excuse me, Caden, I need to speak to my wife.”
“You remember it’s all fake, yeah?” asks Caden quietly as he rises.
“You remember it’s not supposed to look fake to everyone else,yeah?” I snarl, letting my shoulder knock into him as I take a seat.
“Settle down, bro,” he mutters as he walks away, his indifference entirely feigned. I could snap his neck like a twig if I wanted.
Well, I already want to. If Ichoseto.
“That took more testosterone than I thought you possessed,” Rebecca says.
I scowl at her. “I’m not going through all this just to have that little prick blow it.” I put the plate between us. “Eat. We still have hours of filming ahead.”
She shakes her head. “I’m just trying to get warm.”
There it is again…my worry, the irritation that follows it. Except some of that irritation is actually guilt.I’mthe one who insisted on our insane shooting schedule.I’mthe one who said that if we absolutely had to get to Iceland before May, we’d needto do it in under two days. And now, because of me, she’s freezing cold, exhausted, not eating.
When the crew gets up to start heading to the van, I pull Lars aside. “I was wrong about the schedule. It’s too much for Rebecca. She’s going to get sick if this keeps up.”
He glances over. “She seems to be hanging in there.”
“By a thread, at best. She’s had no sleep, she’s not eating, she’s freezing cold. So however you want to space out the other shoots is fine. I’ll work around it. Let’s just make sure it’s…reasonable.”
He glances from me to her. “You’re acting like an actual husband.”
“No,” I say, pulling up my hood as we walk through the door, “I’m just trying to act like a decent human being.”
“Maybe that’s how it starts,” he replies.
We climb into the van and spend the next few hours bouncing through a pitch-black night over bumpy roads, stopping, swerving, speeding up. Rebecca, beside me, is sitting closer and closer to me as her teeth start to chatter.
After a long day of travel she should smell like sweat, or coffee, but instead I can only smell her shampoo as she pulls that thick, dark hair out of the topknot it’s been in all evening. She’s got the kind of hair you’d bury your face in during sex, which is exactly the sort of rubbish I’ve got no business thinking.
Nothing is going to happen, of course. She’s Rick’s daughter, first of all, but she’s also too compelling, too dangerous. She’s the kind of woman you make a fool of yourself over, if you let her get that close.
