There was a reason she’d stopped dating or at least looking for a Mr Right Now and that was the awkward morning after.
Why hadn’t she thought through the awkwardness when she had decided to pretend she didn’t know Gee last night? It was ridiculous. She was lying in her own bed in the house she paid rent for and she was hiding.
She could hear the banging and crashing of Gee getting ready for the day downstairs. Could she pretend last night didn’t happen? Wander downstairs in her pyjamas with a borrowed hoodie on top. Make coffee and bacon sandwiches with him, move round each other without speaking. The unspoken agreement to curl up under blankets on the sofas watching mindless TV until the caffeine kicked in or the gym appointment came too close.
She could do it, couldn’t she?
‘Em,’ Gee called out from the living room as she snuck downstairs to the front door.
Damn it. So close.
He came out of the room and stood in the doorway.
‘Where are you off to?’ he said confused.
She looked down as if surprised to see the gym clothes she was wearing, even though she’d thrown them on as soon as she realised there was no way she could spend the morning going through their usual routine. Not yet, anyway.
‘Got a waitlist bike at Psycle,’ she said, meaning the spin studio that she used frequently. She couldn’t meet his eyes. Not yet. Okay, staring at his lips was not a good alternative, she decided. The ghost of their kiss lingered and tingled on her own mouth. She could taste him, still.
‘Come on, Emma.’ He said part pleading, part exasperated.
‘See you later.’ Some people would say that she was running away, she thought as she jogged down the road to the bus stop. And she could see that it could look that way to an outsider. But it wasn’t a lie, she really did have a bike booked. Admittedly she’d only booked it about ten minutes before she left the house.
It was more what she would call a strategic retreat. It was only until she worked out how to act around him, how they could be Em and Gee again. And maybe if she sweated enough today she could forget the way she’d fitted so perfectly in his arms.
But perfect moments didn’t make for a perfect life. They were fleeting as snowflakes and once they melted they were gone. They weren’t something you could build forever on. Bloody Lewis for making her forget.
***
‘The bears.’ Jamie was the one who eventually said what they had all been trying not to address since late October. No one wanted to add them into the official monitoring reports to McKee or Si but it was getting harder and harder to keep quiet about it. But how the hell did you explain that you suspected that someone was communicating with BOTP fans through soft toys?
Emma’s eyes were struggling to stay open as she sat in the meeting room. She didn’t need this. When had the wheels come off the bus? Ever since she’d taken on this project, she could feel her promotion getting further and further away from her. It was keeping her awake at night.
Okay, and maybe a little bit of her sleeplessness was the fact she and Gee hadn’t actually spoken properly in a fortnight. She rubbed her thighs which were still sore from her now daily, sometimes twice-daily, spin classes. She had been meaning to get fitter and now seemed like a really good time just before the Christmas season started. Not that it kept her out of the house more often.
And she was so tired by the time she got home, she was crawling into bed. And Gee, well he’d tried to talk to her, but what would he say? She didn’t want to know. It was amazing how easy it was to ignore texts and only answer with practical everyday things.
But she missed him. Desperately. She felt as if she had a limb missing.
So, yes, there was that but really work was the biggest worry she had. Those damn bears. Maybe if she could get control over them, then everything else would fall into place.
Why was her life starting to revolve around stuffed bears?
Because it was easier than dealing with what was going on at home – the thought crossed her mind before she ruthlessly suppressed it.
Nope, she and Gee would be fine. She’d never divert from the plan again.
‘The bears? What about them? They’re kind of cute.’ She said playing dumb and ignoring the glaring issue with them. She hadn’t been keeping up with them as closely as Jamie. He had become obsessed with them. Muttering about cryptic clues before diving into Tumblr and spending hours reading blogs that were writing about them. She wasn’t totally sure that it could really be counted as work. Except it did give him an encyclopaedic knowledge of current fan theories. Even the most bizarre ones.
‘Emma, they are causing the fandom to go up in flames.’ Jamie thrust his hands through his hair, making his curls go wild.
Flames? It couldn’t be that bad. It was a few stuffed toys stuck on the stage and a handful of tweets, how could it cause the fandom to be in such a state?
‘Okay, I know you’ve been distracted for a few weeks, and your sudden obsession with going to Psycle has been taking precedence, but here. Look.’
Jamie projected his laptop to the screen in the room. He had Twitter open and he began flicking through the @bop_bear account. There were a mix of original posts made by whoever owned it and retweets of posts from fans. Jamie clicked through the photos from the retweeted fan accounts. They were from every Breach Of The Peace concert, and there was always a tableau of bears somewhere at the edge of the stage. They were spot lit and arranged in increasingly weird and wonderful ways. They wore different costumes and held props. Sometimes they repeated the staging for a few nights in a row and then for the next week it was new every night. And there were the ever-present smiley or frowny coloured sticker faces. They were usually stuck to the feet of the bears, with the larger bear usually with a green sticker and the smaller with a blue one.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t get it? What are all these pictures meant to mean? Is it to say that someone has a fetish for soft toys?’ She asked. It all seemed a bit random and she wasn’t sure why it was making the fans so upset.
‘Okay,’ Jamie frowned and pointed to a photo of the bears wearing sunglasses and one posed with a headscarf. Both were wearing outfits with hearts on them. ‘This was taken at their concert in Denver on the 5th of November. As you know that is the same day that we tweeted from Ed’s account those cryptic Feckless Rogue lyrics.’
Of course, she remembered those lyrics, she was pretty proud of how she’d put that together. Alluding to deepest love.
If you can’t send me you, send back my heart
‘Yeah, well…’ Jamie zoomed in onto the tableau.
Oh… That really wasn’t good.
Yet another Barbie, or maybe it was the same one, was hanging onto the back of a toy jeep, as if trying to catch a ride, while the bears were sitting in the front and she realised they looked a lot like Thelma and Louise. It definitely undermined the lyric interpretation.
‘Maybe it’s a coincidence?’ It could be, couldn’t it?
In silence, Jamie flicked chronologically through the narrative schedule they had set up. All the tabloid stories about Ed or Will, sometimes Amit and then showed the corresponding tableau or tweet that the bears starred in.
Yeah, when she saw it like that, it was pretty damning. There was no way this was a coincidence. In every circumstance, the bears somehow undermined the story they’d been putting out there. If they said Ed and Frankie were having a private date, which they couldn’t be because they still hadn’t seen each other since the pumpkin patch, it showed the two bears doing the same thing together, with the Barbie doll somewhere in the picture looking desperate or as a support act.
‘Okay, do we know who is behind the bears? I mean this is a big production, the crew need to know who is doing this.’ Those orange stained fingers of Will were coming back to haunt her.
‘The boys say it’s the crew, the crew say it’s the boys. And there was a rumour that someone called Mike or Matt the sound guy was doing it, but as the sound guy is called Dave and doesn’t have the salary for gold Rolexes…’ Jamie trailed off.
Yeah, Mike or Matt the sound guy was probably a stretch, she thought. Probably because Mike the sound guy was the fake person they’d set up to spread any behind the scenes rumours. So that story could only come from someone who knew.
In fact, this had one person’s fingerprints all over it. Pumpkin stains and all.
‘Bring it on.’ She could hear Will’s raspy voice in her head.
This was not on, the little… She put all this effort into sorting out these PR relationships and they kept fucking it up. She needed to get control back. She had to stop wasting all her time and energy worrying about Gee and the discomfort at home. This was what was important. Her job. She couldn’t rely on someone else for her happiness, if she didn’t have her career, her plans then what did she have? Nothing that was what.
Nope, she wasn’t going to let Will and his childish silliness ruin it for her.
‘Okay, I think I know how we can sort this out,’ she said to Jamie. She wasn’t going to tell him who she thought it was, not yet. ‘Why don’t we distract them? The fans, I mean, with something different.’
She brought up her spreadsheet for Will’s fauxmance. So far, he’d got off lightly, most of the Will and Tina romance had been through articles in the press. With Don Warton at the Daily Planet running his traditional ‘Who is ‘insert relevant girlfriend’s name here’?’ article and then regurgitating Emma’s carefully crafted fauxmance, there was not a touch of truth in the whole thing from start to finish. But that was going to change, she thought. They needed a few new photos to go with the articles. Something that could be reblogged and retweeted across the internet. And keep Will too busy to muck around with toys.
Yes, here it was, she stopped scrolling through the spreadsheet. Tina was due to fly out and join them on tour for a long weekend. It wasn’t for another week but if she brought it forward by a few days, and maybe extended it by a few…
Excellent.
That should keep Will occupied with being dragged round numerous shopping trips smiling for the cameras. Maybe make sure there were no Build-A-Bear workshops anywhere in the malls. Wouldn’t want him to be tempted. She made a note to let Amanda and her team know.
And, of course, there was the band’s Thanksgiving dinner that week. Not that they usually celebrated it, but they were trying for the American market. With Frankie and Ed also cuddling up, that was pretty much a double date. The fandom would go wild.
Checkmate Will, she thought.
***
‘Emma, we need to talk.’ Gee was standing in the hallway his arms crossed when she pushed the door open at ten o’clock that night.
Her heart slammed to a stop and then after a breathless moment started again, racing hard. There was a lump in her throat. She tried to calm down but she could feel herself shaking.
This was why she and Gee wouldn’t work. He made her feel too much, there would be too many peaks, and that meant there would be troughs. Out of control and unplannable.
‘I’m really tired, can we do it another time?’ She put her bag down and stared at the floor. She didn’t want to look at him. Because if she did she would remember what it felt like to be with him. That feeling of completeness.
‘No, Ems. We can’t.’ He said it firmly.
He walked into the living room and sat on his sofa and stared at her.
Crap. She’d managed a whole two weeks, but her luck had run out. She followed him into the room and sank onto her own couch, kicked off her shoes, tucked her feet under her and grabbed a cushion holding it close to her chest.
‘Emma, about the party…’ he began. Not even Ems or Woodhouse but Emma.
They really were going to rehash the biggest mistake she’d ever made. Reliving the most perfect moment of her life, even though it had started to fade in the cold light of the day. Like everything that was good did.
‘Can we just make like it didn’t happen? Pretend that it was just a joke?’ She couldn’t help but look at him when she said it.
Did he flinch? It looked like he did.
‘Is that your go to action with anything difficult, Emma? Pretend it didn’t happen? And spin a story over it to cover up the truth? Making things up?’
No, didn’t he get it? It wasn’t about making things up, it was making sure things didn’t get broken further.
‘No, I just… This, us. We’re good the way we are. No ups and downs, no mess. Safe. You know… I don’t want to lose you.’
‘But, Ems, you won’t lose me if we…’ He pointed between the two of them, gesturing at what could be.
‘No.’ She had to stop this. It couldn’t happen. Didn’t he know that? ‘Look, Gee. This can’t happen. Please, you know this is silly. I need stability, you’ve met my parents. You know.’
She watched his face grimace, because he knew what they were like.
‘All I want is a life that doesn’t rollercoaster, one where I know that it isn’t going to disintegrate because the highs are too high, and the lows are too low.’ Why couldn’t he understand? It wasn’t him. It was her.
‘Em, you are being ridiculous.’ He sounded angry. ‘You know you can’t predict what is going to happen no matter how much you plan and regiment your life. Surely you can’t be that naive. All you’re doing is cutting yourself off from any kind of happiness by trying to make everything fit into the exact shape you believe it should be.’
And part of her knew he was right.
He reached out a hand as if to touch her.
How she wanted him to. She almost dropped the cushion and let her hands brush his, to feel him again.
But the swirling feeling in her stomach was too much like the panic she’d get as a child. When she didn’t know where she’d be next, when they were stuck at that airport with no place to stay. When she was the last one at the school gates because her parents had been thinking of something or someone else and forgotten about her. Because if the people who were biologically supposed to look after her could leave her then…
She flinched back from him. She couldn’t help it.
‘Oh,’ he said, his hand dropping to his side, his brows furrowed and he took a step back.
No, but this wasn’t what she wanted either. She didn’t want him moving away from her.
‘Gee, can we just go back to before?’ she asked. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Her life to go how she’d always pictured it, and that meant the calm black and white of the strategy she’d made all those years ago.
Colour and excitement was good, but not for ever after. It couldn’t be.
‘Okay, fine.’ He thrust his fingers through his hair and tugged on it. She knew that gesture, he was pissed off. ‘But Ems, life is messy. You can’t get away from that.’
‘Gee…’ she said pleadingly.
‘Em, we’ll do it your way for the moment. Nothing happened. Nada. Zilch. Zero. You’ve got your way. But you know you can’t keep doing this, and I don’t just mean with me. At some point you’ve got to come out from behind all these stories you spin, this is no way to live.’ He sounded so sad.
Suddenly she wanted to rewind the last five minutes to when she could have touched him, and not flinch away this time.
‘I’ll leave you to get to bed,’ he said, his voice raspy, and his eyes not meeting hers.
He left the room, and she sat there hugging her cushion to her chest, feeling like her foundations had started to crumble.