fic: GAG REEL (rpf) (3/3)

[falseeeyelashes]

She gets to her hotel and stumbles out of the car and up to her room. “Hold on,” she mutters, putting the phone on speaker and drops it onto the bed. She pulls her dress over her head, static making her hair stick to her face. She pushes her pair of spanx down past her hips and kicks them off.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking off my clothes,” she says, distracted, as she reaches for the phone and unsnaps her strapless bra one-handed behind her back. She sighs dramatically and falls to the bed naked.

“What?”

“What.”

“This going to be that kind of phone call?” His tone is amused, but too dark -- the sort of joke you make when you’re only half kidding and the other half of you is deadly, terribly serious, and perhaps in this case: hopeful. “What are you wearing?” he asks, comedically lecherous, and Kristen laughs and grabs at a pillow to put under her head.

“No,” she says, and even that single syllable sounds slurred to her, “it’s not that kind of call, ok.” She pauses for a beat. She left the TV on when she left for the ceremony earlier and it’s an old Bill Maher rerun on HBO. She squints at him but she’s too lazy to find the remote and turn it off. “And nothing,” she adds, unsure if that’s dangerous or stupid or just plain old transparently desperate.

“And nothing?” he repeats, but he sounds confused. His end of the line has gone silent, and it makes her wonder (more than she’d care to wonder) when exactly he turned the TV off: if it was earlier, when she was still in the car, if it was when he told her that she looked pretty, if it was after that, if it was when she told him she was taking off her clothes, and that was it, that was when he reached for the remote and either he hit mute or he hit OFF, but knowing him, and knowing his attention span (and knowing him because that’s a thing, that’s sort of the crux of this whole thing -- she knows him, and in that same breath, he knows her too: a shared breath, they know each other, they share in that knowledge, knowing each other, knowing each other for far too long) he would have hit OFF not mute, it would have been about her if he hit OFF not mute, and it’s like the same halfway joke he told her earlier the way she tells herself that she’s just kidding, just totally joking, with this line of inquiry.

She doesn’t say anything. She just lays sprawled across the white white comforter on her bed, staring at Bill Maher with glazed over eyes, telling herself that she’s not charting some intricate web of connection in her head with the name Bill holding at the center -- the Bill on the TV and the Bill on the phone and the Bill in her head. She can hear him breathing over the line, which means he can hear her breathing too (this logic, or lack thereof, holds for her too just as Bill, not just his name, but Bill holds at the center).

“Nothing,” he repeats, and that means he gets it.

“My dress,” she says, and her mouth is sticky, tastes like the cigarettes she snagged and then felt guilty for and the too-sweet aftertaste of champagne, “was trying to eat me,” she says with total seriousness. “I had to defend myself.”

“Death by couture,” he says.

“Couture,” she repeats. “You been watching Project Runway without me again?”

“It’s called research.”

“Yes, we would all hate for your Tim Gunn to start to slide since it’s apparently still 2008 for you.”

“Fuck you,” he says as he laughs. She laughs too, but barely.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” she says after a beat, her eyes closed.

“No you’re not,” but he says it kindly, warmly.

“No,” she says, “but that’s a thing people say when they call other people in the middle of the night.”

“Drunk,” he adds.

“That obvious?”

He doesn’t answer, but he laughs, quietly, the sound more breathy than anything.

“You going in tomorrow?” she asks.

“Probably not,” he says. “You?”

“Probably not,” she echoes. She swallows and shifts, drags that white white comforter over her body and settles back against the pillows. “See you Monday then?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, but he sounds really, really far away, and for some bizarre reason she’s really glad she has her eyes closed tight.

She should hang up. Retrospectively, when she remembers this conversation at her gate at LAX and is hit with an engulfing wave of embarrassment, she will know that she should have hung up then. But she doesn’t.

She doesn’t hang up.

Instead she hears herself say, small and incredibly, horribly, the worst kind of sincere, “I wanted you to be here.” She swallows. He breathes on the other end. “I wished you were, that you were here, and that’s why . . . that’s why I called, I guess.”

“Yeah,” he says again.

“I wish I was too,” he says.

She doesn’t hang up.

And if she fell asleep with him still on the phone, then she fell asleep with him still on the phone.

She thinks he said: I’m glad you called.

S P R I N G
2 0 1 2

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

One of their longest running jokes has always been Jason’s revolving door of Hollywood conquests and the odds of said conquest hosting the show during the “relationship.”

“Who is it this week?” Kristen asks. She bites into her popsicle and Bill winces and then shivers. She bites again just to get another reaction out of him.

“Olivia Wilde,” he finally says. He shakes his head, but looks mildly impressed all the same.

And sure enough, late April and Olivia Wilde has taken the stage at Studio 8H and telling everyone what a great show they have for them tonight.

That same show, Kristen joins Bill for a Weekend Update bit spoofing James Carville and his Republican wife.

The running gag is meant to be that they’re two crazy weirdos with crazy weirdo competing political ideologies and their marriage is achieved solely on the basis of all the crazy weirdo sex they have all the time.

At one point, the sketch calls for them to start making out while Seth tries to ask them a question. She swings her leg up over his shoulder, but the chairs are on wheels, and she almost falls over and out of her chair, which is when Bill starts to lose it. He kinda laughs into her mouth, and he grabs onto her, and she’s still all pretzeled around him, and he buries his mouth in the crook of her neck away from the camera and she can feel him shaking with repressed laughter.

“He’s a part-time vampire,” she improvs, and Bill’s fingers dig in that much tighter on her thigh and around her back as he laughs audibly, just the once.

He recovers and pushes at her face, arching her neck, and he starts dramatically biting at her exposed neck. He latches on and starts sucking and all she can think is how she is going to have the world’s biggest hickey on her neck, given to her on national live television.

Another sketch that spring: they revive Hollywood Dish.

Jennifer Lawrence is the host, and she does fine, she’s funny, the audience really likes her.

As befits the sketch, Bill spits a mouthful of milk in Kristen’s face, most of which gets in her mouth and most of that dribbles out down her chin, looking, she is sure, positively pornographic.

Immediately after he dumps a bowl of cheesy mac n’ cheese in her face.

Both of them manage to hold their laughter in until she reaches into her cleavage and pulls out a piece of elbow macaroni. His face crumples and a wide grin cracks and Kristen tries to collect herself. Before she can give her line, he reaches into her shirt and pulls out another noodle that was stuck to her boob.

“You missed one,” he wheezes, and she bites the inside of her cheek, her lips trembling.

When she finally manages to give her next line, he starts picking at her like a chimpanzee, plucking all the noodles off of her.

Once they get backstage and yank their wigs off, he can’t stop laughing at her, so she launches herself at him and rubs her milk-and-cheese covered face all over his exposed neck (those five-inch heels really come in handy for occasions such as this; she likes encroaching on his height advantage).

It’s the last sketch of the night and they’re both still sticky and gross when they step out on stage to say good night.

M A Y
2 0 1 2

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

The first time they fuck is the same night Jennifer Lawrence hosts the show.

The first time they finally fuck they’re at work. They’re in her dressing room, and it is so dumb and so obvious and so cliched and so fitting for the both of them.

Nothing in particular even happens. There’s no grand catalyst. He’s just there in her cramped dressing room, and so is she, and suddenly it all makes the most perfect kind of sense.

It was a good show. Jimmy came back for a brief stint in a sketch, and so had Timberlake, and Amy (but then Amy’s been coming back a lot lately, and Kristen’s not entirely sure what that’s all about, but she does know better than to ask Seth about it). In a way, it felt like the old days. It felt like the early days of the show, or her early days, his early days, at least, and it was as though they had been able to bottle all that fizzy nostalgia they all were feeling and funnel it into the show.

Bill comes by her dressing room after the show. They’re both cleaned up, more or less, but Kristen keeps finding macaroni in all sorts of unsavory places.

“Everyone heading out?” she asks him as she dabs some moisturizer on under her eyes.

“Yeah, pretty sure Andy’s taking anyone who doesn’t agree to hit the after party as a hostage, and he’s racking up bodies quick.”

“I’m hurrying,” she says and drags a comb through her hair quickly.

But Bill shuts the door behind him. There’s a beat where everything between them hangs in the air: Pennsylvania and Judy Garland and the kitchen in her apartment and that desert in New Mexico and that hotel lodge in Sundance and each and every random night they spent together in this building, in an office, on the stage, in this city, each and every moment they were apart and wanted more.

There’s a choice to be made here, and she thinks they both know that. There’s a punchline waiting for them on either side -- the first (they go to the after party and they get drunk and Bill inevitably busts out his Freddie Mercury impression during karaoke and Kristen more likely than not busts her kneecaps open when she teeters and falls in the too-high heels she’s wearing after ingesting too many of the too-strong Madam Mango Punches) changes nothing, but the second changes everything.

The second would be the winning punchline.

The second would be unexpected.

That unexpected slip of the banana peel underfoot. The unexpected cab in the intersection. The unannounced house guest. The eavesdropper in the doorway. The wrong telephone number dialed, a miscommunication, a Freudian slip.

The unexpected as the hilarious. The unexpected with the lasting impact.

Bill flips the lock. He chooses the second option, and later Kristen will think that the most unexpected part of all of this is how long it took to get here.

He stands by the door and he looks at her face in the mirror. She looks back, and carefully, deliberately, she places the comb down on the vanity and she stands up straight, she turns around to face him.

The banana peel, the cab, the surprise guest, the spy waiting in the wings; the wrong number, the wrong words, the unexpected employed for effect:

She kisses him first this time.

Bill laughs before he kisses her back.

The sound is warm and fond, his breath warm, lips and tongue and teeth barely touching her own, so she takes the initiative and she kisses him again.

Nothing has happened between them since earlier last spring when they made out in her kitchen, coming together and then breaking apart like shrapnel. She doesn’t think that makes them any less culpable though, not really. She doesn’t think it works that way.

Her fingers pull at the neckline of his t-shirt and she pulls her mouth away as she murmurs, “Why are we doing this.”

His face goes funny like he’s never before even considered that he’d have to justify this (whatever this is).

“Have we reached the one year mark to fool around?” she says, and he says, “Shut up,” suddenly forceful, his hand under her shirt and spanning the small of her back.

They’re kissing noisily now, the energy in the room charged, and he backs her up against the dressing table. The back of her legs bang hard against it and she can hear a whole lot of cosmetics clatter and go rolling to the ground.

He opens her legs to him, pushing his hips against her as she perches on the edge of the vanity, her hands twisted in his t-shirt, pushing it up and wanting to get at his skin. And she’s not thinking, she’s not thinking at all, not questioning this. His mouth drags over hers and he bites under her jaw as she tips her head back against the mirror, her skirt shoved up to her hips and his hand searching between her legs.

And god, it’s embarrassing how wet she gets just from him touching her -- just from the idea of him touching her. And while she might find it embarrassing, too telling of a whole lot of desperation she’s super unwilling to look into, he clearly loves it: his breath hitches when he drags her panties to the side and he says her name and his mouth goes that much sloppier against her own as he touches her, his fingers smearing wet against and then into her cunt.

She tries to be quick with his belt, but she keeps nipping at his throat, pulling at his t-shirt to expose more, and it’s like they both want and need too much and they’re all colliding limbs and curled fingers seeking out more skin to touch and mark and bite.

Kristen gasps, “please,” at some point after she has his jeans down around his knees and his cock slicking loosely in her fist, and that’s humiliating in a way, or it would be, except for the way he says, “Yeah,” like the word is stuck in his throat, and except for the way he looks at her, all dark and focused, as she opens her legs a little wider, balances one foot on the dressing table chair for better leverage.

She makes a strangled sound when he pushes into her. She’s wet, so fucking wet she’s practically dripping, and she can hear it, just how wet she is each time he moves against and inside of her.

Bill keeps saying, “oh god, oh god,” under his breath and the sound of his voice goes hollow and shaky when he’s all the way inside her, all choked when her spine arches, bow-like and involuntary, and he grabs too hard at her ass. He says, “oh god, oh god,” and it’s like he’s marveling at her, like he can’t believe that this is finally happening, amazed, as opposed to sounding like he’s gone and slipped and fallen off the side of a cliff.

Like she pushed him.

The mirror wobbles loudly each time he thrusts into her, each time he knocks her back against it, and the dressing table is just as noisy, shaking on uneven legs, too much of the their weight pressed against it.

But it’s just the two of them. It’s just the two of them right where they have always belonged, and when Bill starts to move -- his mouth dropping open in a small groan, her own hands clambering over his back and digging in as she bites her bottom lip -- she can her Samberg yelling out in the hall (“if we leave now I will not have to go all Donner Party on myself and eat my own arm -- my fucking arm, man, do you hear me?!”) and Timberlake is laughing all high and reedy sounding, and somewhere a door slams, and somewhere someone keeps saying “hello? hello? hello?” as though they’ve dropped a call, and it’s all so familiar, all as familiar as Bill -- his voice in his ear, the width and the strength of his body as compared to hers.

He comes before she does, his mouth against hers but they’re no longer kissing. He groans what sounds like yes when he comes, his hand bruising and tight wrapped around her hipbone, his other hand at her throat dropping down to her exposed collarbones.

“Don’t move,” she whispers, and she reaches between them and touches herself.

When she comes, she’s saying don’t move again. She’s saying it again and again, and he kisses the skin just under her ear, and he’s still holding her too tight. He’s still inside her.

They’re late to the after party, and if anyone notices, no one says a thing.

So they’ve gone off the deep end.

The show wraps for the summer, and the both of them stay in New York.

Without work to serve as pretext, without the salaried excuse to see each other each day, they see each other at random.

And each random occurrence ends the exact same way: her apartment, his clothes on her floor, his body in her bed (or on her couch or naked at her refrigerator or trying to convince her that fucking on that super tiny balcony overlooking Tribeca is the greatest idea ever), neither of them acknowledging just how serious things might have just become.

The first time he had come to her apartment had been strange, to say the least.

Maggie had gone to the Hamptons for the weekend and Bill had just gotten back from a stint of auditions out in Los Angeles. They grabbed lunch over at some deli Bill swears by in Midtown just as they had done a million trillion times before.

And then he went home with her.

And it was hilarious, and tragic, how hesitant they both were with each other after she shut her apartment door.

“This is so stupid,” she had laughed, so he kissed her.

And it was stupid and it was strange to not feel like they had to be quiet. There was no hurry, not really. No one was going to knock on her door and no one was potentially waiting, listening, even. It was as though they were indiscoverable here. It was as though what they were doing, and had been doing for so, so long, no longer needed be kept a secret.

He went down on her, his mouth hot as he tasted her and he bit her thigh when he told her to be loud.

That he wanted to hear her.

He stayed the weekend and she made him watch a documentary series about Area 51 and he made her watch that adaptation of The Road and it was depressing her so she sucked him off halfway through it and they never did see the rest of the movie (though she assumed everyone died or whatever) because he fucked her through the rest of it, first his mouth then his fingers then his cock, made her thighs shake and her throat go raw and used, and he went back to his own place on the Lower East Side Sunday afternoon.

They met up again that Thursday to catch some buzzed about stand-up act.

They left halfway through and fucked in her kitchen. He left before midnight and Kristen went to bed sore.

He called the next day. A new pattern was set.

O C T O B E R
2 0 1 2

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

For the first episode of Season 38, Jon Hamm hosts.

It’s Friday evening. Kristen’s picking at the remains of an avocado roll with the pointed end of a chopstick.

“You want the rest of this?” she asks Bill, and he frowns and shakes his head.

He leans back in his desk chair, the springs creaking under his weight. “So I have a question for you,” he says, but he says it like the lead in to a police interrogation or the prosecutor circling the weak-willed witness or like he’s the star in the climactic scene in one of those Poirot mysteries she sometimes catches late at night on PBS, so that’d make Bill the Poirot and that’d make her the maid or the nanny or the widowed heiress and he’s got a question for her which means he also has the answer, Points A and C but not B and no matter how this line of questioning goes she’s probably going to wind up in PBS Poirot jail or whatever. Kristen’s eyes narrow. She keeps the chopstick in her hand, brandished like an ineffective weapon, and takes a big sip of her iced tea to get rid of the wasabi taste still burning her mouth.

“Okay, you have a question,” she says, casual and unamused.

He smacks his lips together. “You and Hamm, you know . . . ?” He trails off with an inarticulate hand gesture and Kristen’s eyes narrow that much more, like she’s squinting at him in disbelief or something. Maybe he’s not Poirot after all because that might be the worst line of questioning she has ever heard.

She sets her jaw. “You know what,” she says.

“You know,” he says, but he says it still in that good-natured tone that makes it hard for her sometimes to discern when he’s kidding and when he’s not (and maybe that’s the point -- maybe he’s a terrible comedian and maybe he’s the punchline to his own fake jokes because the joke’s always on him: he’s never kidding, and he takes everything too seriously, but no one else does, everyone writes him off as just kidding).

“No I don’t,” she says, flat and without effect, “I think I’m going to make you say it.”

He grinds his back teeth together. She catches the way the muscle at the hinge of his jaw flutters, the way his bone structure goes that much sharper when everything friendly and kind about him slips away.

“You ever fuck him?”

She laughs. “You are such a fucking child.”

He’s still leaning back in his chair, his posture the portrait of calm cockiness, but his fingers grip the arm of the chair just a little too tight. She notices these things. She notices these things about him.

“What?”

“Fuck you,” she says, but her voice still sounds as tired and disconnected as it had before. Like she lacks the energy to fully engage in this. Like this is stupid and he’s stupid for even asking and she’s stupid for a whole lot of reasons she lacks the energy to enumerate, but fucking Jon Hamm isn’t one of them because that’s a thing that has never happened.

She’s never slept with Jon. Never. She’s never had any desire to do so, not really. She thinks she feels about Jon the way she’s supposed to feel about Bill: completely brotherly, their boundaries set and clean with no desire to cross any of them.

“Is that a yes?” Bill asks her.

“No that’s not a yes,” she says. “That’s me telling you that you can fucking suck it for even asking me that fucking question in the first place.”

He doesn’t say anything, he just rocks back in his chair, his face tight but his eyes are too bright. He doesn’t say anything, and that’s weird enough in itself, because this is Bill, and when has he ever been electively quiet.

She can feel something mean and ugly making itself known inside of her.

She hears herself saying: “I never ask you if you recently fucked your goddamn fucking wi -- ”

“Don’t you finish that sentence, don’t you finish that fucking sentence,” he says.

He says it like they’re joking around here, like it’s any other Friday evening and not this Friday evening, but his face reads cold and humorless.

“Then you don’t get to ask me about it either,” she says. She stands up and drops the remains of her dinner in his trashcan and braces her hands on her hips.

He stands up too, and he towers over her. His nostrils flare a little as he breathes heavily and he says, “It’s different.”

Kristen recoils a step back from him. “Oh please, dude. It is not. It is so not any different. You have a wife. I think I’m entitled to date around and fuck around and do my own thing during your domestic on-call hours.”

Bill drags a hand through his hair and takes a step towards her. “You know where I stand,” he says, serious now, his body taut, primed for a fight.

Kristen laughs nervously. She takes another step back and runs into the side of Bill’s desk. Bill closes the gap.

“What is that even supposed to mean?”

“You know Maggie,” he says slowly, like that somehow explains everything.

Kristen rolls her eyes.

“So I have the viable threat already in my crosshairs?” she says, bland irreverence easy to cling to. Bill doesn’t smile. Bill takes another step forward, and he’s thrown the balance off, ruined the pattern -- she takes a step back and he takes a step forward, she takes a step and then so does she; she has not made her move yet, but he has made his and in effect made hers -- his body almost pressed against her own.

“Don’t make me fucking say it,” he says, quiet, and the room is too small, his body is too close to hers, and he’s cupping her jaw, his fingers digging in to the back of her head.

“Say what?” she asks, just as quiet.

“You already know,” he says, his mouth right there, almost touching her mouth, and she curls her fingers along the edge of his desk. “And I don’t.”

“You’re not making any sense,” she says, gently, and she cracks a small smile. He swipes the pad of his thumb along the corner of her mouth, over the smile lines that briefly indent her skin.

“You don’t have to worry,” he says, and her smile disappears. She can feel her eyes go wide, and she thinks she knows, Jesus fucking Christ, she thinks she knows what he’s going to say and it makes her feel like her skin is too tight for her body, that there will never be enough time for the both of them and they’ll never be able to articulate all the things they need to say. Instead they’ll fight at the office and they’ll lob half-meant insults at each other followed by earnest apologies they mean too much, and she wants to kiss him and run away from him all at the same time. “You already know,” he says again, “and that I’m not . . . I’m not fucking going, but I -- I don’t know. I don’t know who might . . . if they . . . if someone else could . . . ”

“Bill.” It’s all she says, but his name is heavy in her mouth.

He kisses her, roughly, and she kisses him back, all too aware that they left the door unlocked.

D E C E M B E R
2 0 1 2

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

It leaks before the year is out that Kristen is planning to leave the show at the end of the season.

Bill corners her in the stairwell almost as soon as the news drops and every media outlet -- E! and TMZ and the local NBC affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- runs with the story.

“Were you planning on telling me? Or did you think that Billy Bush would make for a better messenger to fell?”

She shrugs, her face unreadable. “I figured I’d . . . bring it up. When things were a bit more . . . concrete.”

“That’s the excuse you’re running with? Really? Come on.”

He doesn’t so much as storm out of the stairwell (because it’s Bill, and she is almost totally positive that she has never seen him storm out anywhere, it’s like he’s physically incapable of it), but he leaves without another word.

They don’t talk much the rest of the day, not until she works up the nerve and knocks on his door and he opens it for her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, and I’m just, I’m sorry.”

He smiles ruefully. “I’m sorry too, dude. I was a dick, okay. It’s just -- it’s the end of an era, man!” he says and laughs. Her own smile is tight-lipped and kind of sad.

“You’re going to stay?” she asks, and he nods.

It makes sense. It makes sense for Bill to stick around with Andy, the whole arrangement more perfunctory than anything. His family is in New York now, his family is settled and they like it here.

She sits down next to him on the couch in his dressing room.

She leans heavy into him, her chin on his shoulder and her arm looped around her neck.

“I’ll miss you guys,” she says, her word choice safe and deliberate.

He wraps his arm around her waist and pulls her in closer.

“We’ll miss you too,” he says, and she starts to laugh. It’s like they’re speaking in code.

He squeezes her side and bumps his forehead against hers.

“I’ll miss you,” he whispers, and she draws her knees to her chest, her bare feet resting on his thigh. She presses her body even tighter against his, and it’s like she’s hoping for just a second, just that moment, she could climb inside of him.

S E P T E M B E R
2 0 1 3

L o s
A n g e l e s ;

Fast-forward again. Take two people. Take them from seeing each other every day and separate.

Fast-forward and watch them come together again.

The pattern of the previous summer is disrupted after Kristen leaves the show. She shoots back-to-back movies, hopping from New York to LA to Vancouver to Belfast on one super random occasion. When she sees him it is typically in public and it is typically brief. He doesn’t call her. They don’t meet at his favorite deli and he doesn’t come over and waste hours with her watching whatever weird shit their combined random interests lead them to.

She’s in Los Angeles that fall for more auditions. So is Bill. They keep saying that they are going to make the switch to drama yet somehow they both keep winding up in more comedy projects.

They haven’t made another movie together since Paul.

But they are both in LA, and Andy Samberg made another movie and neither of them are in it, but both of them go to the premiere.

She runs into him on the red carpet. Kristen has cut her hair short and dyed it blonde again; she’s wearing this super low cut sleeveless dress thing, all gold, sparkly, that ends in a lavender skirt just above her knee.

She thinks, when she spots him, that he should never be allowed to look at her that way.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” she says when he approaches, and she starts to laugh when he hugs her.

Later she lies to a reporter on the red carpet, says that the whole former SNL cast came together for Andy, but she’s only standing with Bill when she says it.

He jokes with her throughout the night, makes fun of the projects she’s been involved in since she left SNL, and she lobs it all back at him. Later in the night he gives her his jacket to wear, the fall weather crisp even in Los Angeles.

When she goes to leave the after party, he stops her with a hand on her arm. For a second -- the world’s longest and most impossible second -- she thinks of moving her mouth over his ear and asking him to come back to her hotel room with her. Something must show in her face because his hand tightens on her hip, his hand hidden under the jacket he gave her, and he inhales deeply before he speaks.

Some photographer at the party took a picture of them in that moment. It’s listed as a candid at the Double Mint premiere after party, and just seeing it, on the internet, in her email inbox, later in Us Weekly, makes her want to call the photographer up on the phone and tell him she hates him, that no one, not even Bill and certainly not her, needed to ever see that photograph.

“Call me when you get back to New York,” he said.

And then the photographer took their picture.

Maya’s filming a movie in Los Angeles, and after the premiere Kristen meets up with her for a quick lunch. They grab veggie burgers together, the weather that afternoon the constant southern California warm, and it is then that Kristen finally spills it all.

“I’m going to say something and you’re not going to say anything until I say, ‘Maya, say something.’ Are we understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, so I’m going to say it then. I am . . . saying it.” She exhales for what feels like a long time. “I’m having an affair . . . and I am apparently a woman who actually says things like ‘I am having an affair’? Gross. Redact that.” She takes a slurp from her milkshake. Maya is eating her french fries and watching Kristen, though looks completely unfazed.

“I’m fucking Bill,” she finally spits out. Maya blinks at her, no change in her expression.

“Maya. Say something.”

Maya pops another fry in her mouth and chews.

“Okay,” Maya chirps and shrugs and then takes a bite of her burger. And that’s it. That’s all she says.

“Okay? What? What do you mean okay?”

“I mean, okay,” Maya says and then she laughs. “Was this supposed to be revelatory or something? Because, my sweet tulip, just about everyone you know in a professional NBC-context is under the impression that he has been balls-deep in you from the moment he clapped eyes on your sunny little face and flat derriere.”

Kristen’s face twists into a grimace. “Really?”

Maya gives her a look of please. “Really.”

Kristen considers this. “My ass is not that terrible.”

“Nor that great either.”

Maya takes her sunglasses off and squints first up at the sky and then at Kristen.

“God, that show is just so freaking incestuous,” she says. “You know how many boners have been serviced on that set? By fellow cast members?”

Kristen shakes her head. “No,” she says. She cocks her head a little as she looks at Maya, like she’s just now considering all the potential insider dirt Maya might have, not just on Kristen or Bill but anyone or everyone who ever worked the halls of Studio 8H. “Do you?”

“No,” Maya says, “I was hoping you did.”

Kristen laughs, and Maya joins her.

“So what inspired you to let the proverbial cat out of the proverbial bag?”

“Proverbially speaking?” Kristen says, and Maya flips her off. “I don’t know. I was just thinking, I guess.”

“An always dangerous enterprise for you.”

“Ha ha ha,” Kristen says. “But I guess. I guess I was just thinking. Like. What if I’m supposed to care and I just don’t. What does that make me.”

Maya looks like she’s about to say the word what, but instead just arranges her face in an expression of intrigued and slight confusion.

“Am I really that deluded where I don’t even see myself as the other woman?” Kristen continues. “Because that’s crazy right. That means I’m one of those crazy people who are crazy in the sense that they don’t consider other people and their feelings or junk or whatever. That means I’m a sociopath, doesn’t it.”

Maya waves her hand, dismissing what Kristen just said. “Come on, Kristen, you know that’s halfway to a lie.” Kristen snickers.

“But he’s married. When you get down to it, he married her. He stayed with her. He chose her. And I feel like that should bother me more than it does.” Kristen frowns. “It bothers me that it doesn’t.”

“Maybe . . . he chose you too, in a way. He chooses to be with you. You’ve made, what, 82 movies together you'll have another 94 together headed down the pike. He doesn’t need to do that. Not with you.” Maya’s face goes suddenly mock serious. “Or maybe he’s going to go all Bill Paxton in Big Love on you and he’s priming you as a second Sister Wife. He is from Oklahoma after all.”

“I am not a Sister Wife.”

“Yet. Best check yourself before you’re living in the shed adjacent to the main house, kowtowing to your man and his first ladywife.”

“God, you’re just loving this aren’t you,” Kristen says. “Look at you acting like there’s a right and a wrong way to go about this dude business.”

Maya holds up a finger. “I am not saying that, my friend, no sir. I am saying you might find yourself in the bed of a bigamist with a dozen children wearing cloth aprons, that’s all.” Maya straightens the napkin in her lap. “Not everyone can achieve my bliss,” she says with mock modesty and smiles wickedly.”

“Oh please. You married the dude who made Boogie Nights and Marky-Mark’s faux junk a thing! He dated Fiona Apple! Fiona fucking Apple, who had been a bad bad girl and he broke her heart so bad she made an entire album where the title was as long and deep as Jerry Maguire’s sports manifesto.”

“Nuh, uh. You do not get to take all your Hader-shaped issues out on me and my lovelies, okay.” Maya takes another bite of her burger. “Besides, I don’t know what your damage is right now. You ever listen to this guy talk about you? I caught some segment on one of those E! fashion things or whatever and they were asking random-ass unqualified pseudo-celebs who they thought dressed the best and this dumbass said you. And, girl -- I’ve seen the things you wear.”

“Shut up,” Kristen says weakly.

Maya leans forward. “He doesn’t need to talk about you, but he does. He does all the time and it is so gross how fucking proud of you he is.” Maya takes a sip of her milkshake and Kristen spears one of Maya’s fries.

“But then he’s always been like that with you,” Maya says. “Don’t you remember your first show? God, he was so ridiculously excited for you. After that table read he kept telling everyone how great you were going to be, and then you were great, and -- ”

“Stop,” Kristen says.

Maya gets that devilish look to her that usually proceeds a Whitney Houston karaoke marathon or a round of those awful lemon drop shots she loves so much.

“You’re the same way, you know. You guys are disgusting.”

Kristen opens her mouth, horrified. “I am not. Take that back!”

“‘Oh, he’s just the greatest and the nicest,’” Maya says in a shockingly good imitation of Kristen’s voice. “‘I’d make a million billion movies with him and a million billion babies and then move into the Unabomber’s abandoned shack in the woods with him because he is that funny and that marvelous, he’d be all the company I need and we’d make love so passionate the woodland creatures would sob and sing in envy and ecstasy, and now that I am done metaphorically slobbering all over his wonderful and talented and majestic penis, I am going to go literally do that with my mouth parts.’”

“That is not me, I do not do that.”

“You totally suck his cock, don’t even try to deny it.”

Kristen starts laughing, hard, after a beat. Maya looks like she’s afraid milkshake will shoot out of her nose and coughs and chokes a little as she swallows.

Maya claps her hands together. “Okay, I am going to pour a couple mojitos down your pretty little throat and pump you for all the sordid details. I have waited well nigh on eight years for you to cave and fess up, so this is gonna be good.”

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Then we have all day. I want the details. All of them. The gorier the better, though I will most likely never be able to look at our Young Billiam the same.”

O C T O B E R
2 0 1 3

C h a r l e s t o n ;

Greg Mottola is heading up another picture. He calls Bill first. And then he calls Kristen.

“You think this will work?” Greg asks Kristen over the phone. “You think you two will be good?” and Kristen says yes.

And sure, Kristen has been off SNL for awhile, but she still sees Bill. Why wouldn’t she? They grab lunch some times and he gives her the dirt going on behind the scenes (the other week, no, the other month, he had told her about how completely awful [REDACTED] was hosting when he stopped mid-sentence and just looked at her kinda funny. Kristen had pawed at her face like maybe she had food stuck to her mouth or chin or something, but there had been nothing there. “What?” she asked. “You should come back,” and it’s all he said to her at first, his face way too serious, and then it was Kristen staring at him, her fork still held up midway to her mouth. “And host,” he finally added. “You should do that,” he said, and when he finally smiled, he looked sort of sheepish and caught out, and Kristen stuffed the cucumber on her fork in her mouth and didn’t press it) and sometimes he'll try and talk her into crashing one of the after parties.

They still frequent a lot of the same events. They’re both still in New York. They both still share that common ground.

(And sometimes they still share the same bed but that has been awhile, that has been a long time now, and she’s not entirely sure why that is except for sometimes it feels like he’s building himself his own life and she’s building her own too and everything that used to connect the both of them is gone now, everything that kept them together has eroded away without either of their notice).

But it’s been awhile when she sits down with him and Greg at some chophouse in SoHo. She gets there before he does and she orders herself a beer. Bill gets there, and he’s -- he’s Bill. He looks a little thinner than the last time she saw him, his face sharper and meaner, the cut of his jaw harsh and familiar, but his smile hasn’t changed. He still lights up and he still laughs too loud and too hard, always that beat just a touch too late.

Greg tells them that it’s going to be some sort of panoramic dramedy, pseudo-rom-com thing that takes place over one long holiday weekend at a beach house down in the Carolinas. He still needs to cast the leads, but Kristen and Bill would play the friends of the main couple: Kristen, a recently engaged writer, and Bill as a callous former stock broker who totally lost his job during the recession and now works as a CPA and hates it. Their characters are loaded down with all sorts of history and baggage and plot twists, but they never actually technically dated but rather used to fuck around and shit hit the fan the weekend before his wedding when she openly begged him not to get married and told him she loves him . . . and he got married the following weekend. Greg goes into great detail about these two characters, like they’ve become two of his nearest and dearest friends and he can’t wait for Kristen and Bill to meet them. He tells them that these characters, these made-up people, didn’t really make an effort to stay in touch and even though they live in the same city (New York, of course, always New York), they only see each other when the gang gets together -- which brings them to the plot of the movie. Bill’s character had been married a year, and now he’s in the middle of getting a divorce and wasn’t expected out at the beach house but he unexpectedly shows up. Their characters wind up fighting (of course) and banging (of course) and fighting some more (of course), all as a part of an ensemble cast about friends and love during the holidays.

“Like a really nihilistic Love Actually,” Kristen says.

“So not like Love Actually at all,” Bill says.

They both sign on to the film.

Greg is aiming to start shooting the film late that October and into the start of December down in North Carolina. They meet earlier in the month to get rehearsals and the table read going.

Kristen shows up wearing her big-framed glasses and a knit hat and Bill arrives in an old flannel shirt, his hair messy hair and about a week’s worth of stubble grown in dark along his jaw.

They sit side by side, and it’s a total blast from the past. He brings her a coffee with two Splendas just like he always did back in New York and he sits to her right and he leans his body in too close to hers just as he always did.

The context is different, the job is different, but so much of it is the same that she feels like she’s gotten lost in some weird deja vu loop, made all the worse by the script and the characters they are being paid to play.

But the weirdest thing about all of this, the movie, working with Bill, their roles, might be what Greg says, off-hand, about the both of them.

He says: “I couldn’t think of anyone but you two for these parts.”

He said the same thing about Adventureland. He said the same thing when he had them play a happily married couple, “the healthiest relationship out of the entire movie.” he called it.

She still has no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean, and she’s even less sure what he means this time around.

She only talks to Bill once about making the movie.

They have the conversation when they’re already on set. They’re together on the beach, high tide leaving tangled dark seaweed and foam in its wake, and despite the chill she walks barefoot down the beach until they stop at the seawall and they sit down together.

“Was this a really fucking bad idea?” he asks over the wind.

Kristen leans back, her feet buried in the wet sand.

“I’m pretending this is cathartic,” she says, and Bill laughs.

One of the first scenes she shoots is where her character is already at the beach house and she’s in the kitchen, doing her own thing as Elizabeth Banks’s character and John Cho’s character talk about Bill’s character and how he’s suddenly decided to come down for the weekend.

Kristen is supposed to fumble with the unopened bottle of wine she’s been trying to open, the conversation taking place behind her, and when Elizabeth’s character drops the bomb that Bill’s character is divorced and she’s supposed to freeze up, and the script notes just said ACT AWKWARD.

Greg likes a more muted, natural performance, so that’s what she goes for -- she keeps picking up and putting down the bottle of wine and holding the corkscrew in her hand kind of like a weapon, and she’s in the foreground of the shot, her back to the other two characters who aren’t even looking at her, and Kristen puts down both the bottle (still unopened) and the corkscrew and curls her fingers into fists and then spreads her fingers out, her hands rigid in front of her and she takes a deep breath and shakes her head slightly and then, successfully, opens the bottle of wine.

They only do one take.

Bill stays on set the entire time.

One of the last scenes they shoot, they are supposed to get in a fight in her small beachy guest bedroom. They’re both supposed to be kind of drunk and definitely more than kind of angry, and it’s so weird.

It’s like each line is coming from their alternate universe selves, people who still met, who still became friends, who fell in love (because why mince words, why bother, why at this point, so much water under that bridge there’s no longer a bridge to even cross), people who always get the timing just a little bit off.

Greg did say he couldn’t think of anyone else but the two of them for the part.

It takes far more than one take.

The cut they use, Kristen sighs just before Bill kisses her. Her character sighs before his character kisses her, however you’re supposed to delineate that.

She sighs, and it’s the most resigned and regretful sound in the world -- or at least that’s what one review off the internet said. Kristen doesn’t read her own press, but Greg sent her that link. No message in the body of the e-mail, just the link. So she read it and then immediately wished she had not.

“It should be hard to watch two people so conflicted and so in love, but the two of them make it impossible to look away -- natural and convincing and maybe a touch too real.”

She shut her laptop quickly and didn’t email Greg back.

She’s pretty sure Greg is either their biggest fan or the film director equivalent of the needling, nosy totally inappropriate and grandmotherly matchmaker.

She’s leaning toward the latter.

F E B R U A R Y
2 0 1 4

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

After the film wrapped and after they returned to New York they fell back into the old pattern:

Bill would come to her apartment and they’d fuck and they’d order takeout and he’d stay for too long and Kristen would refuse to ask what sort of pretext he devised for his absence and she’d pretend she wasn’t curious and she’d pretend a lot of things and that pretending was a bad thing.

The pattern of avoidance has held for too long between them, has gone too long unchallenged and unchanged.

She’s waiting for that other shoe to drop, waiting for the happiness she feels with him to be revealed as a mirage. She is waiting for that time when he comes to her apartment and that’s it -- that’s the last time.

She finds herself pretending that she’s not waiting for the end, and what she ultimately finds is that she cannot abide by that.

So when he comes over and when he starts kissing her, all needy and energetic right next to her front door, she pushes him away.

She looks up at him, her hair in her face, her hands still resting solid on his chest, and he looks confused, almost offended.

“I want to talk to you,” she says. “We need to . . . oh god, this is so cliched, this like the peak moment in a Rachel McAdams ‘movie.’” She starts laughing. “We need to talk,” she says, even though she’s laughing, and that plus the way he’s looking at her -- like she has gone totally and completely crazy -- makes her laugh even harder.

She walks into her apartment and he follows her, his eyes narrowed. She stops in the middle of the room, right next to the couch and crosses her arms. He crosses his arms too, and he’s still wearing his coat, his t-shirt rumpled underneath.

“So we’re talking,” he says, eyebrows raised, that sardonic tone way too rich.

She shoots him a look before she uncrosses her arms and braces her hands on her hips. “What are we doing?” she asks, and it’s hard to keep any of the exasperation she’s feeling from entering her voice. His eyes widen. She waves a hand in the air and shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean, that’s not how I want to start this. That’s not . . . ” She takes a steadying breath. “I don’t expect anything from you, Bill,” she says, and then she frowns. “That doesn’t sound right either.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “What I am saying, what I am trying to say, is that, um -- ”

“Just say it,” he spits out. He’s got this guarded look in his eyes, like he thinks he knows what’s coming and he’s already resigned himself to it.

“No one really wants what we have, you know?” she says, and she thinks Bill is starting to look angry. “I don’t mean that in, like, a mean way, just that. No one wants to be the crazy woman locked in the attic, or whatever, however that worked out for Jane Eyre and the gang.” He looks disgusted at this point, and Kristen holds up her hand again. “I’m not saying that I’m crazy, or that, you’ve, like, got me locked in an attic or whatever. Besides, I think that was Mr. Rochester’s wife anyway? Right? So the metaphor doesn’t really hold? Not really?” She swallows.

“That’s not my point.” She pauses. “My point is that no one thinks that this thing, what, whatever this is, is a thing you . . . aspire to, or whatever. But, um. I’m okay with that. I’m okay with us, I’m okay with the way we are, and and and and I’m not going to pull one of those . . . pick me things, or, or, expect anything from you. I mean,” and she’s getting kind of frantic now and she’s finding it hard to look at him, “I mean, like, Spencer Tracy never left his wife for Katharine Hepburn, but he loved her, he loved her so much, and they were happy, and they were together, or together as much as they could be, and I -- I’ve already done the whole married thing and I don’t want that, that’s not what I want, and what I’m saying, what my point is.” She takes a sobering breath, and this is the worst, this is not what she wanted to say, and she kind of wants to cry? And he’s looking at her almost tenderly, and that’s just the worst. She takes another breath.

“My point is that we’ve been . . . whatever for so long now. So. Long. And, it’s gotta break at some point, right? I mean, in theory? But what I am telling you and what just needs to be said for the sake of saying is that I’m okay with things. I know you’re married, and I know you love her and you have a family and you have an entire life and I’m a vaguely horrible . . . just, horrible, person for knowing that and not . . . caring about it.”

She looks up into his face, and she can’t read him. “Don’t make me say the rest,” she whispers.

They stand there for a beat in silence, like they’re facing off or about to enter the Thunderdome or something. He sighs.

“You’ve gone and Beetlejuiced it,” he says.

“What?”

“You said it out loud,” he says, and then he laughs. And sometimes she forgets just how totally immature and childish he can be.

“Yeah,” she says, and she rubs at her mouth. “I did.”

“You know the entire internet would set you on fire for even suggesting we are in any way the modern counterparts of Tracy and Hepburn.”

Her smile is shaky. “That was so not my point.”

“Turner Classic Movies’ spidey sense is probably tingling right now. They’re totally burning you in effigy as we speak for that blasphemy.”

“Cut the misdirection, Bill.”

His face falls a little and he rubs at the back of his neck. He takes off his coat and tosses it on her couch.

“I’m being unfair to Maggie,” he says quietly.

“Yeah,” she says, “but you have been for almost the last ten years.”

There’s a slight tic at the corner of his jaw as he grinds his teeth and then swallows. It’s funny how expressive his face can be, how much and how fast it can change from so kind and so friendly and so goofy to something so dangerous, something like the way he’s looking at her now.

“You can’t tell me,” she says, “that you think Maggie has no idea, you can’t be that deluded or that stubborn.”

“She doesn’t know,” he says.

“You are fucking unreal.” She takes a step toward him. “She has not spoken to me since our first season on the show. She won’t even look at me, and when she does it’s a nice friendly glare behind my back! Why do you think that is? Huh?”

He towers over her. “Then why would she stay with me?” he seethes. “Why? Tell me. Why?” When he asks again, his voice sounds like it might crack.

She shakes her head. She suddenly feels really tired and kind of sad. “I don’t know,” she says. “But I’ve stayed,” and she laughs ruefully, “and the crazy part is that it’s been worth it.

“Kristen . . . ”

“Am I making this too difficult? Because, come on, Bill -- you came here to fuck me not dump me, and sure, I’m the one who broke that ‘unspoken’ ‘arbitrary’ ‘fucking’ ‘rule’ that we never ever upon penalty of death talk about whatever this is,” she points back and forth between the two of them, “but I really don’t think that gives you the right to act all put-upon or or or the noble voice of reason or for you to go all sanctified and holier-than-thou on me just because you’re the one with the marriage still in tact.”

He glares at her. “I don’t know what happy ending you’re expecting here,” he says. She frowns, scrubs her hand over her face and pushes her hair off her forehead.

“Don’t patronize me,” she says.

“I don’t expect anything,” she says again.

He shakes his head. “That’s not true.”

“You love me.” She says it quietly, and it hits her that this is the first time either of them have given a name to this, have actually said the word out loud.

He doesn’t say anything, but he looks off to the side; he sighs, deflates a little.

“You love me.” She says it again, quieter, but more insistent. There’s no real question to it. She says it like a fact, like a thing someone could say about him and anyone who knew him even a little would be hard pressed to disagree.

Her heart is beating too hard and too loud. He looks at her again and she bites the inside of her bottom lip. She’s not sure what she’s waiting for: confirmation, dissent, something ugly like rejection.

He says her name. He says, “Kristen . . . ” like a warning.

“You love me,” she says for a third time, mean this time, way too close to desperate, and she takes a deep breath, “and that’s all I want. That’s all I except from you.”

He reaches out and his fingers brush over her wrist and hold loosely.

“Because you love me,” he says.

She can’t help herself from rolling her eyes, her smile closed and crooked.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

"Yeah."

J A N U A R Y
2 0 1 5

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

Their movie was released the weekend before Thanksgiving, November 2014.

In the new year, Greg calls the both of them.

“Oh my god,” Bill mutters as they walk into Greg’s office together, “we’re the collective Leo to his Marty.”

He wants to do a film where this time they are the stars: a Wiig-Hader vehicle he calls it, a thing, he claims, the movie-going public wants.

He hands them the script, entitled Paper, Cotton, Wood, and tells them that it’s about the first five years a couple is married.

“Like a happy Blue Valentine,” he says. “Two imperfect people growing together rather than growing apart.”

He tells them he wants a lot of things. He wants a lot of things. He wants them to rework the script. He says, he wants the script to be their own. He wants them to fit it rather than the other way around (whatever the hell that means). He wants to start filming that fall, early November.

He wants to start November 2015. He wants to start ten years after Kristen walked into 30 Rockefeller Center for the first time as an employee, ten years after Bill handed her a short script and said, “I wrote this for us.”

Bill looks at Kristen, but he’s the first to say yes.

And that’s how it ends, or that’s how it all starts:

Two imperfect people growing together rather than apart.

T h e
E N D

M A Y
2 0 1 4

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

We end with the past that is also the future:

She hosts the show she was once a part of; she comes back.

After dress but before the show Bill stops by the green room.

And it’s so bizarre. It’s strange not to have her own space here, it’s strange that everything she once built her life around has gone on without her. It’s sort of like coming home for Christmas after that first semester away at college and finding that everyone got a little older and still frequents all their old haunts without you.

In the mirror she catches Bill’s eye and smirks at his reflection. He steps into the room.

“Please don’t pull any of that Dylan Thomas, ‘you can’t come home again’ shit. I beg of you,” he says.

“Thomas Wolfe, you mean?” She laughs. She turns around to face him. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

She looks down at her hands then back up at him. “It’s weird though, right? This -- us -- is weird.”

He smiles wider.

“It’s always been weird. Part of the charm, I guess.”

He’s not wrong, but she’s thinks there’s more to it than that. She thinks this is it, it’s another start -- the first in what’s yet to come, the set-up for the next comic triple to follow.

And if she has learned anything, she has learned this: there is never anything quite like the start. You think you know where it is headed, and then.

And then.

And then she smiles at him, and when he smiles back she can detect just the faintest hint of possibility.

f i n .

P R E V I O U S :

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