Chapter 16

Heidi

Smelly. That had been my first impression when I’d stepped foot in Spats Bath and Body Shop.

Smelly in a good way, granted. The place was like Bath & Body Works back in the US, but it seemed to somehow be crammed with twice the number of products: fizzy bath bombs, bubbly soap dispensers, natural soap bars, you name it.

After today’s shoot, if I had any luck, I’d be getting us a swag bag of the stuff. At least that was what my agent, Ron, had promised.

Anyway, right now I had to stay on task. We were doing a photo shoot in the store after all, which they’d shut down for the affair. Management probably wanted to get this done and over with so they could get back to doing what they normally did—sell their handmade Spats products.

Taking in my surroundings, I smiled outright. They hadn’t started snapping shots yet, so I was still free to do so. On my throne of pink, sparkly soap bars, I was the goddess of bathroom products if there had ever been one.

In one hand, I held a blue-and-purple whirled bath bomb up to my mouth, as if it were an apple I was about to bite. I was a bit tempted to, truth be told. It resembled one of those Gobstoppers they sold at serve-yourself candy shops.

One fateful night a few months back at the end of a drunken romp, Liza and I had stumbled into one such candy shop and filled a bag full of ten pounds’ worth of candy. On the way home, our ambitious purchase had broken and we’d fallen to our knees sobbing, mourning the loss in a completely over-the-top fashion.

“You’re eating, not smiling, Heidi,” the photographer said.

Apparently he had decided to start taking pictures without letting me in on the fact. Although I guessed what he’d just said was a heads-up of sorts.

I obediently forced my lips more into the shape of an O. At least this photographer, a young guy with a wild nest of red curly hair, had called me by my name.

As the shoot progressed, I came to learn that Chancery, which was the photographer’s unusual name, had quite a few creative poses and setups for this. After my throne of soap bars, the various poses for which dragged on for a good hour and a half, I was instructed to lie on the floor with a whole army of soap dispensers in every color of the rainbow positioned on top. Sure, it wasn’t the most comfortable pose, but I was actually excited to see how the photos from it turned out.

The shot after that was even less comfortable. Chancery had set up probably every bath bomb they had in the store in a giant clear container, except it wasn’t the typical plastic container you bought at the store for five bucks. It was as tall as two of me and as wide as three. Its size did allow me to position myself in a sea of the bath bombs. Luckily, that pose took a grand total of five minutes, since getting crushed by pounds of pastel bath bombs wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.

“All right,” Chancery finally said, after I’d been smothered by the things so long I thought my body might shut down on the spot. “That’s a wrap, everyone.”

We breathed a collective sigh of relief. It’d been a long day. Chancery’s over-the-top ideas were not just creative, but they demanded a huge output in terms of manpower and even timing to get them right. The other two shots had taken over two hours apiece just to get one good photo. But now, finally, we were done. Finito.

After I had been helped out of my bath bomb hell, I hovered for a moment, considering what to do. Instinct urged me to just hit the road wearing the apron they’d provided me with and said I could keep. Even the prospect of swag didn’t seem worth the extra ten seconds to ask about.

After my first step toward the door, however, the store manager, Cindy, stopped me, trailing a suitcase behind her.

“Don’t forget your swag bag!”

The blinding whiteness of her teeth momentarily mesmerized me. Then I looked down at the bag she was rolling to me and grinned.

To think I’d almost left without this! There, in a pink-and-white striped suitcase of a shopping bag, was my swag.

A better phrase for what was encompassed was a whopping wonder of ah-mazing goodies. Tucked in the striped depths were enough bath bombs to keep me happy for years, every last soap I’d seen in the store, and, not to mention, an alluring fragrance the whole dang day. There had to be at least hundreds of pounds of free makeup in there. It was wild.

“Thanks so much, Cindy!” I told her.

She gave me another glinty grin and shook my hand warmly.

“No, thank you, Heidi. This is really going to help build our customer base over in the States. You have a nice day.”

“You too,” I told her.

--

The “fun” wasn’t over yet. Once I was out of the mall, a man lunged directly in front of me with a camera where his face was supposed to be.

Wrenching away, I groaned. Paparazzi stalking me was way less funny when I wasn’t with Liza. When I was beat tired and probably looking like a horse ran into my face, it just felt invasive and creepy.

All there was to do was shove on the biggest sunglasses I had and run in my most dignified manner to my car. One quick glance behind me revealed that one man had just been the tip of the iceberg. There was now a whole stream of paparazzi following me, yelling questions over one another that I couldn’t make out.

Luckily, I was already at my car. After ducking in, I pulled away just as they were flocking near. I didn’t let my relieved exhale escape my lips until they were just an ugly, faraway blot in my rearview mirror.

Driving down the road, my heart still thumped heavily in my chest. One of my greatest fears was hitting one of those idiots with my car on an impromptu flight from their nosy selves. I’d seen and heard of it happening to other public figures in enough horror stories to know it wasn’t unheard of.

Catching my anxious expression in the rearview mirror, I forced my lips into a grim smile. Anyway, that was all over now. Now I could kick back, drive home, and relax at the flat with Liza.

It only took about fifteen minutes to get there since there was little to no traffic, although waiting for the crappy old elevator to decide to show up wasn’t exactly the fastest thing in the world.

Once I finally made it through our rickety front door, I was just about ready to keel over onto the first soft surface I spotted. Halfway to the couch, I froze. Liza was in the main living space. She was sitting on the floor watching Lady and the Tramp and crying.

“Are you okay?”

As I tentatively approached her, she glared at me as if I’d suddenly lost my marbles.

“It’s a beautiful story, okay?”

Checking the TV revealed that Lady and Tramp were currently sharing that iconic piece of spaghetti.

“He took me out for spaghetti that second date night, you know.”

Liza’s voice was low as I settled beside her. I shifted uneasily, partly because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how she found this floor-sitting position comfortable, and partly because it really tore at me to see Liza this way.

For as long as I’d known her, she’d never been one to cry easily. She was usually the one to laugh it off, whether the issue was a contract flaking out or even a guy ghosting her. The one exception to her steadfastly unnerved temper was the loss of food, as the expiring of yogurt was sometimes cause for a five-minute rant on the transitoriness of life.

“I think things are over between us.” Her voice was both decided and wretched.

All I could think to do was to give her shoulder several awkward pats. Even though Liza was my best friend, I had no idea how best to comfort her, probably because I never knew what to do when another person was upset and I wasn’t.

Any attempt I made always felt fake to me, like I was putting on a front of feeling sorrier for them than they were. Although, right now, seeing Liza, the most carefree and devil-may-care of all my friends, reduced to this was nothing short of galling. If her breakup with Henry, who she’d only seen over a weekend, hurt her this much, then what would my inevitable breakup with Charles do to me?

My stomach swirled at just the thought of the answer, and I returned my attention to Liza.

“Want to go shopping?”

She snapped off the television and stood up. On the way to her door, she said, “I think I’m going to just sleep.”

“I hope you feel better,” I called, rising, tormented about whether I should be following her, holding her, and telling her he was an idiot, to screw that. But the shutting of her door was followed by the click of her lock, which meant she definitely did not want me in there with her.

Which I could understand. Whenever I started crying when I wasn’t 100 percent alone, the one thing I wanted most was to be alone, to despair unobserved, cocoon myself in my sadness. So best to let Liza have her space for now.

My wooden legs flopped on my bed while my aching mind realized what all this really meant. Liza was nothing more than a blond version of me. Henry was a younger and wilder version of Charles. Their fling had burned brighter, but faster too. It was just a foreshadowing of what was inevitably coming for Charles and me, what I had hardly let myself think of and could hardly bear to.

Things with Charles couldn’t—and wouldn’t—last indefinitely.