original fiction: the groundhog show
The Groundhog Show
Juliet is a TV star. Allen is her scriptwriter. Jimmy is a rock star (but Jimmy doesn't matter at all).
3150 words. pg-13. for decolletages at inrevelations.
*
I need you, you want me
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect.
The Cardingans - Communication
This happens in a country that doesn't exist, in a smallish town that is nowhere. No roads ever lead here because nobody cares to come.
Juliet is not even her real name. That is also part of the script Allen writes for her.
Everything is fiction.
Every. Single. Day.
Juliet likes to pretend she is stupid because that is what TV stars are supposed to do. In the dusk of what her supposedly glamorous life has become, it isn’t that hard to act like somebody else. She does it every day. She isn’t a TV star-not really. She only says she is because it makes her mother feel proud. She is just the stupid hot girl in some local network daily show. She reads somebody else’s lines and has a pretty face and a crazy smile and there is not much more to it-not really.
Allen is different, though. Allen is real, and he is a genius. He is her genius. He writes her lines and watches her dusk from the shadows in awe, overwhelmed by the beauty ashy halo that surrounds her lively black eyes. He is the tragedy their daily show will never tell-both of them are. He has the talent and the guts to make it Off Off Broadway but he never will, because he stayed.
Allen is in love with Juliet.
He has never said and he never will but he knows like she knows.
He is in love with her.
Shining stars are not supposed to fall in love with nobodies.
(This is years later: they don't pretend like they don't know this is the story of their life.)
Allen encouraged her when she met Jimmy and this is how the story goes. His words, as always, were half sarcastic, half heart-broken. It didn't matter because she didn’t care back then. Her own pain was much closer to her heart than his pain. His silent rejection burned her skin like the bitter cold of the desert night. She was full of spite and boredom.
Rock stars are a much better match.
Half-sarcastic. Half-heartbroken.
Jimmy was a rock star. Allen wasn’t. There’s little else about Jimmy worth saying because little else about him matters.
“He’s bad for me,” she remembers saying.
It had been a deliberate defiance. Allen knew, and didn’t back away. (He never did.) Instead he nodded. “I know.” Didn’t really mean he cared.
Jimmy was really bad for her. This is why she broke up with him, a couple of years later. This is also why she started their kind of off-again-on-again-but-mostly-off relationship. It was simple enough. Jimmy was either away on tour or too stoned to do nothing but mumble and puke. The rare days when he was sober he used to visit the set with a bouquet of expensive flowers and a fleeting erection and an endless string of apologies she didn’t care to hear about. She knew it was wrong what she did with Jimmy in her dressing room, knowing Allen was at the other side of the wall; but her actions-he was, after all, her scriptwriter-mirrored his spiteful words.
Half-sarcastic. Half-heartbroken.
Juliet is in love with Allen, too.
For her, he’s an inspiration, a ray of bright light among the ashen dust of their little town. He is a genius. He is her genius. He’s got real talent, going waste for her, and she can’t help but love him for that.
She loves him.
She loves him enough to vow she will never tell him. She doesn’t love him enough to let him go.
Sometimes Juliet feels like every day is Groundhog Day. It isn’t just the cold. It isn’t just that her life sometimes is misty and gray like a February day.
Allen hands her the script (he has been promoted: he’s a producer now) as he does every other day and she reads the lines, welcome to Groundhog Show, the daily show that makes you feel like every day is the only day. She snorts. Allen looks away from her deceitful tears and pretends he can’t see her sadness. There is no sarcasm in his indifference, but she can’t mistake his sourness.
It didn’t matter before, when his pain was further away from her heart than her own pain.
It matters now.
It matters now that she, trapped in a Bill Murray film, misses him more than she ever thought she could-even if they are trapped together. He knows this like she knows. He misses her as well. But at least he’s got the local tabloids to read about the things she doesn’t tell him anymore. Like Jimmy. He's read about it on the Daily Nowhere, like everybody else. She can only read about him in the lines he writes for her and, over the years, they’re growing more cryptic, and she is getting tired of their daily guessing game.
Today, the news is Jimmy is getting married to some cheap movie star. Meanwhile, in Small Town, Juliet’s getting old and lonely and you can see her every day in your local TV station.
She grabs Allen's hand right before his fingers slip away, before he has time to run away and disappear down the corridor, leaving the stage in silence. Her grasp is determined, brave, firm enough for him to stop, shudder and turn around. (This is rare: they never touch if they can avoid it.) She is surprised to find out that his eyes are sadder than hers. He quickly looks away; he doesn’t want her to know.
Her heart shivers in sympathy, and she sighs, "I don't care."
That’s a confession. She doesn't know why she says it, but she’s fully aware of what it means-and so is Allen. Maybe she believes she owes him. She certainly knows that her words can only make things worse, but she’s having a bad day and she can’t help it. Even if what she says doesn’t move him. Even if her loaded words only serve to give him the strength he needs to pull away and smile at her as if he didn't care at all, as if his own eyes weren’t drowning in her false tears.
His head falls and he narrows his eyes at her ridiculously high heels. "Of course you don't."
His expression is almost malicious, resentful, but she knows him well enough to convince herself that he is just hurting.
Juliet tells Allen about her dreams because once upon a time she told him everything, and because she still enjoys playing with fire and watching as the flames devour everything they touch. She likes watching him stir with pent-up desire and blatant fury. She likes the pain she feels every time she lets him know that she wants him-she wants him too, she wants him more-but their love is by default an impossible love. Because it’s true and raw and made of high-standard literature, of the stories he’ll never write because of her.
“We are alone,” she says, whispering, leaning closer, only seconds before they go on air. To replace his unwritten books, she offers him her unrealized dreams. Dozens of eyes are set on them, as always, but she doesn’t care about anyone else, as always. She only sees him. He only sees her. “It’s the middle of the night and all the lights are out. We’re right here, on the set. We’re on the couch…” There is a couch on the set for the guests to sit and fidget as she asks them the funny crazy questions he writes for her. Her eyes travel to the couch, before meeting his narrowed stare again. She nods. It’s only seconds before the show begins; at least now her words are her own. She smiles triumphantly, and sighs: “… making love,” she concludes, firm and confident, as if her legs weren’t shaking at all.
Allen raises his eyebrows and then shakes his head, like a father would before scolding his naughty child. A thick grey mist clouds his eyes; it’s a mixture of arousal and resignation-it always is. He doesn’t say anything-he rarely does. This time he can’t speak. There is no time. She has to walk into the set and smile like she means it and he has to watch her go and sit just a few feet away, and enjoy the wonderful performance of the star he has created.
That is his comfort. She knows because it is hers as well. Being nothing but what he makes her be.
Every. Single. Day.
It didn’t start with a kiss, as it often does. They are an unusual love story. It wasn’t a kiss which started it all. As far as she can remember, she threw herself at him and grabbed his shoulders awkwardly. Her teeth embraced his bottom lip for just a second and then she pulled away. It ended as quickly as it had begun.
“Did you just bite me?”
He is a quiet man, but he never shuts up when you’d want him to. He’s always got a punch line ready. After all, he works with words.
“I’m drunk,” she shrugged.
“No, you’re not. You’re a Mormon.”
You see now what she means? She is definitely not a Mormon. She is just a good old liar, and likes to dodge responsibility. He, clever as he is, knows how to make a good joke out of that, as he knows how to make a good joke out of anything. Like her teeth on his lips. The truth is she never drinks because she doesn’t like the taste of alcohol. She’d much rather taste him. This and no other is the reason why she did it-biting him.
Her hands were still resting on his shoulders after he was done being funny. She moved closer still, seeking revenge, until her toes bumped against his boots and he had no option but to grab her hips and pull her closer, so close that there was no breathing space between them. There was no breathing, either.
For a second or two, she felt guilty.
Allen is such vulnerable man.
This was the first thought that came to her mind when her backside hit the couch. They were on the set. They were always on the set. His hands were shaking on her thighs as he pulled her legs apart and rolled up her too-short, too-fancy poppy-red dress. His hot breath was burning the skin of her neck and she felt like she was in somebody else’s dream. But it couldn’t be. They were still on the set, and that almost made it feel right, like she was still acting, playing a part in a funny sketch he’d written for her. He, pressed tight against her, didn’t feel real at all. He felt too strong, and taller than she remembered him.
(She forgot, you see, that she had already kicked off her super-high heels)
“This is wrong,” he whispered between short interrupted kisses.
She smiled. Finally an empty line. For his standards, that counted almost as speechless. It encouraged her. She didn’t even thought of pulling away. His usual sourness was gone and she needed to cling to that-for as long as it lasted. Only his vulnerability remained, and that made her cling to him harder, fiercer. It was surprising in a very devastating way that a man like him could have such a tireless capacity for letting the world walk all over him. Allen was the smartest man she had ever known, but he was a very insecure man. From her position, she could do nothing but make him feel more so, even if she didn’t want it. It was her job. It was this guilty moment: his thigh pressed against her crotch, her ankles coiled around his hips and her fingers tangled in his hair.
He was too far gone when he whispered that he loved her, so low and husky that she is only twenty-percent sure she did not imagined it. She wanted to say something back, but she couldn't. She was further gone than him. She couln’t speak at all.
After they fucked-once and accidentally: this is all she allows herself to remember-she kept on telling him about her dreams. From time to time.
She still called it making love when they talked about her dreams. He’s rather fussy when it comes to words and she likes to be precise. Deep down in her core she knows that is what they do every day on and around the set-making love. They are building a love that in unreal but not at all untrue. They’re building it with their own hands, deliberately delaying the end of their task, fearful of what might happen the day they stop manufacturing the words he doesn’t dare to put on paper because he knows she would blush, reading them in front of a camera.
They’re on the set. They’re always on the set. Today, however, they’re sitting together at her desk and that means something, because it hardly happens. The desk is meant for on-screen people only. She doesn’t know how they ended up here today of all days, awkwardly holding hands as if a supernatural power didn’t allow them to pull away, and looking down at the table while coffee-stained tabloid pages stare up them, but she doesn’t want to find out, either.
On the blurry paparazzi pictures, Jimmy looks thinner than she remembers, but being honest, she has tried to forget as much as she possibly could from their past relationship. He doesn’t look well at all, but it’s not like she’s going to start caring for him now, is it? Why is she even looking at Jimmy’s pictures with Allen now? Do they enjoy punishing themselves like this?
As in her dreams, the set is empty and most of the lights are off. The magic of TV has vanished and now it’s only them and a big empty cardboard box surrounding their awkwardness. What are they doing? Only the make-believe scenery reminds her of her dreams.
“I always thought you’d end up marrying him,” Allen suddenly says, as if believing that a comment like that might break the ice. She snorts, doesn’t bother to get offended-she knows he’s only introducing a witty joke. He looks up and smiles at her. “I always thought you would move to Hollywood with him and you would live in the hills in a big house with glass walls and big tacky bowls full of cocaine.” She snorts again. This is why she can’t help but love him. He always knows the right wrong thing to say to make her smile as if her life was somebody else’s. “You would make bad horror movies until one night, in front of millions of people, one of your silicone breast implants would explode in a late show.”
She laughs out loud, and involuntarily squeezes his hand. There is something undeniably hot and undeniably sad in his biting comments-it makes her feel desperate, though for what she can’t know. She wants to hug him as a friend almost as much as she wants to straddle his hips and kiss him. She does neither; she can’t. They are not friends and they are not lovers. She can only smile at him and make it as if she couldn’t see anything else.
“I always thought you would move to New York City or San Francisco to be the tortured bohemian writer you always wanted to be.” Instead of staying in the middle of nowhere, just as tortured, but writing stupid funny lines for a third-rate actress like me.
As always, he hears the words she doesn’t say, as if he had written them himself. Judging by the way he is looking at her, as if he could see everything she doesn’t even know yet, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out he has written her thoughts, too. He hasn’t, she knows; that would be impossible. Her thoughts are her own to think in silence. Of course, the choice to speak them out loud is hers as well.
“I never thought you’d become my best friend,” she says, not being entirely sure if she means it.
He ignores her for a couple of seconds. “I can’t leave you,” he says later, focusing on answering her previous unvoiced question. Why had he stayed? Suddenly he looks so serious, so determined to be honest then and there, than her heart shudders and then stops until she remembers it is okay to keep on breathing. For once, his eyes don’t flicker away. They remain pressed tight against her soul. “You’re the only thing that’s really mine, Allison.”
Her answer is immediate: “You mean Juliet.”
He means Juliet. Not Allison. Juliet is the only thing that’s truly his. Her character. The only thing he’s ever written.
He ignores her again. He keeps whispering: “Allie… Allie…” He holds her eyes and says it again, louder: “Allie…” He runs his thumb up and down the back of her hand and ignores her protests as if he hadn’t heard her, as if he couldn’t see her at all.
Her heart beats frantic. She is confused, but she doesn’t think twice before leaning closer. She presses her closed lips to his half-open mouth, hoping he will stop saying her name, hoping he will allow her to keep on being somebody else. The kiss is too fast and too soft, like a stolen caress, but it works. He shuts up. He smiles against her lips and doesn’t ask why-doesn’t really need to. She kisses him because she wants to-because she always wants to, but today she isn’t feeling like making pointless sacrifices.
Perhaps it’s Lady Gaga’s fault.
Somewhere in the backstage a window must have burst open. A sudden rush of sweet mild hair flies by them, and for an instant the bitter scent of his cologne invades her senses. She returns the smile slowly. The backstage breeze has brought with it some horrid lyrics about a bad bad bad romance. She would appreciate the clumsy irony if ten years of bad television by his side hadn’t taught her the true meaning of that word.
Pulling away slowly, finally dropping his hand, she shrugs, and tries to smile away the nausea. Her head is spinning like a spinning top around a silly thought: maybe they’re supposed to remain nothing but this-an intermission of who they would have become if they hadn’t got stuck halfway. A tattered cliché. Nothing but the interrupted bad romance between a failed writer and a wannabe movie star, living stuck on Groundhog Day.
Every. Single. Day.
.end
Juliet is a TV star. Allen is her scriptwriter. Jimmy is a rock star (but Jimmy doesn't matter at all).
3150 words. pg-13. for decolletages at inrevelations.
*
I need you, you want me
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect.
The Cardingans - Communication
This happens in a country that doesn't exist, in a smallish town that is nowhere. No roads ever lead here because nobody cares to come.
Juliet is not even her real name. That is also part of the script Allen writes for her.
Everything is fiction.
Every. Single. Day.
Juliet likes to pretend she is stupid because that is what TV stars are supposed to do. In the dusk of what her supposedly glamorous life has become, it isn’t that hard to act like somebody else. She does it every day. She isn’t a TV star-not really. She only says she is because it makes her mother feel proud. She is just the stupid hot girl in some local network daily show. She reads somebody else’s lines and has a pretty face and a crazy smile and there is not much more to it-not really.
Allen is different, though. Allen is real, and he is a genius. He is her genius. He writes her lines and watches her dusk from the shadows in awe, overwhelmed by the beauty ashy halo that surrounds her lively black eyes. He is the tragedy their daily show will never tell-both of them are. He has the talent and the guts to make it Off Off Broadway but he never will, because he stayed.
Allen is in love with Juliet.
He has never said and he never will but he knows like she knows.
He is in love with her.
Shining stars are not supposed to fall in love with nobodies.
(This is years later: they don't pretend like they don't know this is the story of their life.)
Allen encouraged her when she met Jimmy and this is how the story goes. His words, as always, were half sarcastic, half heart-broken. It didn't matter because she didn’t care back then. Her own pain was much closer to her heart than his pain. His silent rejection burned her skin like the bitter cold of the desert night. She was full of spite and boredom.
Rock stars are a much better match.
Half-sarcastic. Half-heartbroken.
Jimmy was a rock star. Allen wasn’t. There’s little else about Jimmy worth saying because little else about him matters.
“He’s bad for me,” she remembers saying.
It had been a deliberate defiance. Allen knew, and didn’t back away. (He never did.) Instead he nodded. “I know.” Didn’t really mean he cared.
Jimmy was really bad for her. This is why she broke up with him, a couple of years later. This is also why she started their kind of off-again-on-again-but-mostly-off relationship. It was simple enough. Jimmy was either away on tour or too stoned to do nothing but mumble and puke. The rare days when he was sober he used to visit the set with a bouquet of expensive flowers and a fleeting erection and an endless string of apologies she didn’t care to hear about. She knew it was wrong what she did with Jimmy in her dressing room, knowing Allen was at the other side of the wall; but her actions-he was, after all, her scriptwriter-mirrored his spiteful words.
Half-sarcastic. Half-heartbroken.
Juliet is in love with Allen, too.
For her, he’s an inspiration, a ray of bright light among the ashen dust of their little town. He is a genius. He is her genius. He’s got real talent, going waste for her, and she can’t help but love him for that.
She loves him.
She loves him enough to vow she will never tell him. She doesn’t love him enough to let him go.
Sometimes Juliet feels like every day is Groundhog Day. It isn’t just the cold. It isn’t just that her life sometimes is misty and gray like a February day.
Allen hands her the script (he has been promoted: he’s a producer now) as he does every other day and she reads the lines, welcome to Groundhog Show, the daily show that makes you feel like every day is the only day. She snorts. Allen looks away from her deceitful tears and pretends he can’t see her sadness. There is no sarcasm in his indifference, but she can’t mistake his sourness.
It didn’t matter before, when his pain was further away from her heart than her own pain.
It matters now.
It matters now that she, trapped in a Bill Murray film, misses him more than she ever thought she could-even if they are trapped together. He knows this like she knows. He misses her as well. But at least he’s got the local tabloids to read about the things she doesn’t tell him anymore. Like Jimmy. He's read about it on the Daily Nowhere, like everybody else. She can only read about him in the lines he writes for her and, over the years, they’re growing more cryptic, and she is getting tired of their daily guessing game.
Today, the news is Jimmy is getting married to some cheap movie star. Meanwhile, in Small Town, Juliet’s getting old and lonely and you can see her every day in your local TV station.
She grabs Allen's hand right before his fingers slip away, before he has time to run away and disappear down the corridor, leaving the stage in silence. Her grasp is determined, brave, firm enough for him to stop, shudder and turn around. (This is rare: they never touch if they can avoid it.) She is surprised to find out that his eyes are sadder than hers. He quickly looks away; he doesn’t want her to know.
Her heart shivers in sympathy, and she sighs, "I don't care."
That’s a confession. She doesn't know why she says it, but she’s fully aware of what it means-and so is Allen. Maybe she believes she owes him. She certainly knows that her words can only make things worse, but she’s having a bad day and she can’t help it. Even if what she says doesn’t move him. Even if her loaded words only serve to give him the strength he needs to pull away and smile at her as if he didn't care at all, as if his own eyes weren’t drowning in her false tears.
His head falls and he narrows his eyes at her ridiculously high heels. "Of course you don't."
His expression is almost malicious, resentful, but she knows him well enough to convince herself that he is just hurting.
Juliet tells Allen about her dreams because once upon a time she told him everything, and because she still enjoys playing with fire and watching as the flames devour everything they touch. She likes watching him stir with pent-up desire and blatant fury. She likes the pain she feels every time she lets him know that she wants him-she wants him too, she wants him more-but their love is by default an impossible love. Because it’s true and raw and made of high-standard literature, of the stories he’ll never write because of her.
“We are alone,” she says, whispering, leaning closer, only seconds before they go on air. To replace his unwritten books, she offers him her unrealized dreams. Dozens of eyes are set on them, as always, but she doesn’t care about anyone else, as always. She only sees him. He only sees her. “It’s the middle of the night and all the lights are out. We’re right here, on the set. We’re on the couch…” There is a couch on the set for the guests to sit and fidget as she asks them the funny crazy questions he writes for her. Her eyes travel to the couch, before meeting his narrowed stare again. She nods. It’s only seconds before the show begins; at least now her words are her own. She smiles triumphantly, and sighs: “… making love,” she concludes, firm and confident, as if her legs weren’t shaking at all.
Allen raises his eyebrows and then shakes his head, like a father would before scolding his naughty child. A thick grey mist clouds his eyes; it’s a mixture of arousal and resignation-it always is. He doesn’t say anything-he rarely does. This time he can’t speak. There is no time. She has to walk into the set and smile like she means it and he has to watch her go and sit just a few feet away, and enjoy the wonderful performance of the star he has created.
That is his comfort. She knows because it is hers as well. Being nothing but what he makes her be.
Every. Single. Day.
It didn’t start with a kiss, as it often does. They are an unusual love story. It wasn’t a kiss which started it all. As far as she can remember, she threw herself at him and grabbed his shoulders awkwardly. Her teeth embraced his bottom lip for just a second and then she pulled away. It ended as quickly as it had begun.
“Did you just bite me?”
He is a quiet man, but he never shuts up when you’d want him to. He’s always got a punch line ready. After all, he works with words.
“I’m drunk,” she shrugged.
“No, you’re not. You’re a Mormon.”
You see now what she means? She is definitely not a Mormon. She is just a good old liar, and likes to dodge responsibility. He, clever as he is, knows how to make a good joke out of that, as he knows how to make a good joke out of anything. Like her teeth on his lips. The truth is she never drinks because she doesn’t like the taste of alcohol. She’d much rather taste him. This and no other is the reason why she did it-biting him.
Her hands were still resting on his shoulders after he was done being funny. She moved closer still, seeking revenge, until her toes bumped against his boots and he had no option but to grab her hips and pull her closer, so close that there was no breathing space between them. There was no breathing, either.
For a second or two, she felt guilty.
Allen is such vulnerable man.
This was the first thought that came to her mind when her backside hit the couch. They were on the set. They were always on the set. His hands were shaking on her thighs as he pulled her legs apart and rolled up her too-short, too-fancy poppy-red dress. His hot breath was burning the skin of her neck and she felt like she was in somebody else’s dream. But it couldn’t be. They were still on the set, and that almost made it feel right, like she was still acting, playing a part in a funny sketch he’d written for her. He, pressed tight against her, didn’t feel real at all. He felt too strong, and taller than she remembered him.
(She forgot, you see, that she had already kicked off her super-high heels)
“This is wrong,” he whispered between short interrupted kisses.
She smiled. Finally an empty line. For his standards, that counted almost as speechless. It encouraged her. She didn’t even thought of pulling away. His usual sourness was gone and she needed to cling to that-for as long as it lasted. Only his vulnerability remained, and that made her cling to him harder, fiercer. It was surprising in a very devastating way that a man like him could have such a tireless capacity for letting the world walk all over him. Allen was the smartest man she had ever known, but he was a very insecure man. From her position, she could do nothing but make him feel more so, even if she didn’t want it. It was her job. It was this guilty moment: his thigh pressed against her crotch, her ankles coiled around his hips and her fingers tangled in his hair.
He was too far gone when he whispered that he loved her, so low and husky that she is only twenty-percent sure she did not imagined it. She wanted to say something back, but she couldn't. She was further gone than him. She couln’t speak at all.
After they fucked-once and accidentally: this is all she allows herself to remember-she kept on telling him about her dreams. From time to time.
She still called it making love when they talked about her dreams. He’s rather fussy when it comes to words and she likes to be precise. Deep down in her core she knows that is what they do every day on and around the set-making love. They are building a love that in unreal but not at all untrue. They’re building it with their own hands, deliberately delaying the end of their task, fearful of what might happen the day they stop manufacturing the words he doesn’t dare to put on paper because he knows she would blush, reading them in front of a camera.
They’re on the set. They’re always on the set. Today, however, they’re sitting together at her desk and that means something, because it hardly happens. The desk is meant for on-screen people only. She doesn’t know how they ended up here today of all days, awkwardly holding hands as if a supernatural power didn’t allow them to pull away, and looking down at the table while coffee-stained tabloid pages stare up them, but she doesn’t want to find out, either.
On the blurry paparazzi pictures, Jimmy looks thinner than she remembers, but being honest, she has tried to forget as much as she possibly could from their past relationship. He doesn’t look well at all, but it’s not like she’s going to start caring for him now, is it? Why is she even looking at Jimmy’s pictures with Allen now? Do they enjoy punishing themselves like this?
As in her dreams, the set is empty and most of the lights are off. The magic of TV has vanished and now it’s only them and a big empty cardboard box surrounding their awkwardness. What are they doing? Only the make-believe scenery reminds her of her dreams.
“I always thought you’d end up marrying him,” Allen suddenly says, as if believing that a comment like that might break the ice. She snorts, doesn’t bother to get offended-she knows he’s only introducing a witty joke. He looks up and smiles at her. “I always thought you would move to Hollywood with him and you would live in the hills in a big house with glass walls and big tacky bowls full of cocaine.” She snorts again. This is why she can’t help but love him. He always knows the right wrong thing to say to make her smile as if her life was somebody else’s. “You would make bad horror movies until one night, in front of millions of people, one of your silicone breast implants would explode in a late show.”
She laughs out loud, and involuntarily squeezes his hand. There is something undeniably hot and undeniably sad in his biting comments-it makes her feel desperate, though for what she can’t know. She wants to hug him as a friend almost as much as she wants to straddle his hips and kiss him. She does neither; she can’t. They are not friends and they are not lovers. She can only smile at him and make it as if she couldn’t see anything else.
“I always thought you would move to New York City or San Francisco to be the tortured bohemian writer you always wanted to be.” Instead of staying in the middle of nowhere, just as tortured, but writing stupid funny lines for a third-rate actress like me.
As always, he hears the words she doesn’t say, as if he had written them himself. Judging by the way he is looking at her, as if he could see everything she doesn’t even know yet, she wouldn’t be surprised to find out he has written her thoughts, too. He hasn’t, she knows; that would be impossible. Her thoughts are her own to think in silence. Of course, the choice to speak them out loud is hers as well.
“I never thought you’d become my best friend,” she says, not being entirely sure if she means it.
He ignores her for a couple of seconds. “I can’t leave you,” he says later, focusing on answering her previous unvoiced question. Why had he stayed? Suddenly he looks so serious, so determined to be honest then and there, than her heart shudders and then stops until she remembers it is okay to keep on breathing. For once, his eyes don’t flicker away. They remain pressed tight against her soul. “You’re the only thing that’s really mine, Allison.”
Her answer is immediate: “You mean Juliet.”
He means Juliet. Not Allison. Juliet is the only thing that’s truly his. Her character. The only thing he’s ever written.
He ignores her again. He keeps whispering: “Allie… Allie…” He holds her eyes and says it again, louder: “Allie…” He runs his thumb up and down the back of her hand and ignores her protests as if he hadn’t heard her, as if he couldn’t see her at all.
Her heart beats frantic. She is confused, but she doesn’t think twice before leaning closer. She presses her closed lips to his half-open mouth, hoping he will stop saying her name, hoping he will allow her to keep on being somebody else. The kiss is too fast and too soft, like a stolen caress, but it works. He shuts up. He smiles against her lips and doesn’t ask why-doesn’t really need to. She kisses him because she wants to-because she always wants to, but today she isn’t feeling like making pointless sacrifices.
Perhaps it’s Lady Gaga’s fault.
Somewhere in the backstage a window must have burst open. A sudden rush of sweet mild hair flies by them, and for an instant the bitter scent of his cologne invades her senses. She returns the smile slowly. The backstage breeze has brought with it some horrid lyrics about a bad bad bad romance. She would appreciate the clumsy irony if ten years of bad television by his side hadn’t taught her the true meaning of that word.
Pulling away slowly, finally dropping his hand, she shrugs, and tries to smile away the nausea. Her head is spinning like a spinning top around a silly thought: maybe they’re supposed to remain nothing but this-an intermission of who they would have become if they hadn’t got stuck halfway. A tattered cliché. Nothing but the interrupted bad romance between a failed writer and a wannabe movie star, living stuck on Groundhog Day.
Every. Single. Day.
.end