I loved Theo’s house. I loved everything and everyone in it. I loved the paint on the walls, the bamboo floors, the floor to ceiling windows that look out onto the back deck, I loved the big pots of bamboo that I planted along the edges of the deck and patio for privacy…I could go on and on. But it was the royal blue modern sofa that was here before I moved in that really did it for me. It was a stylish, bold statement, made by a young man who claimed to have no style or concept of good interior decorating. Which meant that he’s a natural. And that he took risks. I liked that.

After Theo had made his first million with the success of his Fitness Nerd app (“We do the math—you do the workout”), he had given me a ridiculously generous twenty thousand dollar budget to redecorate our floor of the house. I only ended up using about half of the budget, because I didn’t really want things to change. That almost never happened. I would walk into almost every room of any house or store or offices and nothing could stop me from mentally rearranging or replacing furniture or artwork or color schemes. Theo’s house had felt right the first time I set foot in it.

I do small interior decorating jobs and staging for real estate listings on the side when I’m not busy with film set jobs. As a home stager, I look at a space with a different set of eyes than I do as a set designer. For home staging your focus is on selling the house, which means de-cluttering, highlighting architectural elements if there are any, enhancing small spaces with bold pieces, defining the use of an area in a stylish and straightforward way while helping potential buyers to envision their own belongings in the rooms. As a set designer you read the script to get clues about the characters you’re creating spaces for, do research about the era in which the story is set, consult with the director and production designer and other departments about style and scale and budget. You’re selling an idea about the characters that use those spaces. I get obsessed with colors and minor details like postcards on bulletin boards, patterns on drapes that give a hint about subtext.

But I didn’t want or need to sell this space to interested parties, and I certainly didn’t want to convey subtext with rug patterns in a house that was already cluttered with my hidden emotions. So I did what any designer who’s a slave to Instagram would do—I had the walls painted a bright Benjamin Moore white, the kitchen cabinets painted a rich grey with lavender undertones, switched out all the lighting fixtures and hardware for high-end brushed gold, added some big beautiful statement plants, a gorgeous souk rug for the living room, Ikea sheepskin rugs for the backs of chairs, purchased a few big canvases from local artists and throw pillows for bold pops of magenta to echo the bougainvillea blossoms surrounding the house, and lemon yellow to match the potted lemon trees.

It looked good. I always got tons of compliments whenever I posted pics on Instagram, and more than a few free gifts from home décor vendors who follow me. Plus, there were tons of pretty things for me to look at when I was trying to avoid staring at my best friend’s bare torso.

I was feeling nostalgic.

I would miss this house.

The time had come for Chloe and Ethan to move out the next weekend, because they could finally afford to live in their own two-bedroom apartment mid-way between Santa Monica and Pasadena where they worked. I begged and pleaded with them to stay with us in their unit just a little while longer, at least until I’d moved out too, but Chloe had put up with her commute for too long. So Theo and I were throwing them a party on this, our last weekend together. I was dreading being alone with him, because there was a big conversation that we needed to have and I kept putting it off.

Theo had been spending so much time up in the Bay Area and Portland, and I’d been so busy on film and commercial sets the past few months that we’d barely seen each other. That was way up at the top of the Why We Need To Be Just Friends list—I was done with out-of-town boyfriends. It’s not that I didn’t trust Theo, even though I knew he had a bevy of Bay Area Babes who were always texting him when he was home. He’d always been discreet, and he never seemed to have dates when he was in L.A., but he didn’t hide his phone when he was around me, and I teased him mercilessly about what a manwhore he was, even though he refused to talk about those girls with me. Because that’s how it goes when you’re best friends with a guy.

I’d been in pre-production as set decorator on a low budget indie feature for the past four weeks. The pay wasn’t great, the script was okay, and it was contemporary so there wasn’t a lot of research involved, but I was working under a very talented production designer who I believed would be a great person to know, career-wise. Pre-production is the busiest time for me and for most of the crew in the art department. I had to book all of the larger props for the shoot, put together a breakdown of every type of prop we’d need, from newspapers to kittens, acquire furniture, clear copyrights for branded items, and keep track of every prop that’s allocated to each set. There was no room in the budget for an assistant set decorator on this film, so I was in charge of all of these duties in pre-production and then my team would dress the sets the day before shooting started. It was exhausting and exhilarating and I freaking loved it. While it was contemporary, the director wanted a Seventies thriller movie vibe, so the decor was spare and masculine and the color palette had a lot of beiges and browns, greys, navy blues and pops of fern green and mustard yellow.  That vibe made me horny for some crazy reason. Oh wait I know the reason—it was because I hadn’t had sex in a year. 

The crew always becomes my circle of friends for a couple of months for a film production, so I’m never lonely, but I had been missing Theo so much it pissed me off. I shouldn’t have been so attached to him at this point. I’d worked so hard at emotionally distancing myself from him that past year, but as soon as I got home the night before and saw him in the kitchen, I dropped my bags and ran to hug him. Five seconds into the hug, I remembered that I was supposed to be over him, so I wriggled free from his beautiful strong arms and fled to my room, claiming that I had to go straight to bed so I could get up early and start getting the house ready for the party. It was true, but it was a dick move on my part. It was only half his fault that there were cobwebs between my thighs and that I had to make myself fall out of love with him.

It was the weekend before I started on a twenty-one day production schedule, so I’d invited a few people from the crew to the party. It’s not a huge house, and we didn’t want it to turn into a rager, plus the party was for Chloe and Ethan, so I limited my invitations to three people. I invited Julia the prop master because we’d worked together before and I knew that she wouldn’t judge me in case I got drunk and made a fool of myself (which was unlikely) and I invited Jason the second assistant director, because Julia had a crush on him and I owed her a favor. And I invited Ben, the line producer, because he was a good guy who’d promised to introduce me to several set and production designers who could hire me in the future, and more importantly because I had quickly and carefully cultivated a crush on him in order to focus my sexual energy and affections away from Theo at that juncture.

It could have been anyone, really. For the eleven months leading up to this actual crush with a real guy that I’d actually met, I was an Instagram boyfriend serial monogamist. I had back-to-back fantasy relationships with numerous ripped male models, a handsome fun young celebrity doctor, and finally with Josh Groban. One afternoon I realized that I was singing along to Josh Groban’s When You Say You Love Me at a stoplight on Ventura Boulevard with my window open, on the verge of tears, and that a car full of actual hot interesting guys were in a car next to me watching—and I knew that it was time to get real and get back out there. Or to get out there, since I had never really been out there before.

I’d actually heard about Ben long before I met him. Kara, a girl I’d worked with on a crappy TV pilot the previous year, was dating him and had nothing but great things to say about his penis. She seriously talked about it all the time. My coworkers and I would say to her each morning “Hey how’s Ben’s penis?” and she’d tell us even though we had gotten really tired of hearing about it. But the day he broke up with her she started telling us what a selfish jerk he was and how he was only moderately good at cunilingus, due to his only having one girlfriend prior to her—someone he’d been with since college. So when I went in to meet with him for this job, naturally all I could think about was his above average penis size and purported average ability to make Kara’s vagina happy due to limited sexual experience. He sounded like the perfect starter boyfriend for a rookie dater coming out of a sexual hiatus! But he was cuter and much nicer and funnier than I’d imagined he would be, and he smiled at me the whole time, so voila, a crush was born. 

It felt both freeing and strangely guilt-inducing, to have a crush on someone other than my best friend slash secret fake husband. I expected to feel this way until my vagina made direct contact with Ben’s penis, at which point all inappropriate Theo-related feelings would magically vanish and I would suddenly transform into the sophisticated floozy that I was born to be. Until then, I was forcing myself to dress the part of sophisticated floozy for the night. I was wearing a new silk camisole, skinny jeans, four-inch heel mules and hoop earrings that were almost large enough to fit my fist through.

Guests were supposed to start arriving in about twenty minutes, and I wanted to do one last check to make sure everything was where it should be. When I opened my bedroom door and stepped out, two things were where I didn’t expect them to be…Theo’s eyes were practically bulging out of their sockets when he first saw me.

They didn’t follow a slow leisurely path down and up my body but rather they took me in, in a way that I had not been taken in by his eyes before.

It was kind of great.

Until all of a sudden there was a flash of something I’d never seen before in those warm brown eyes of his, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was more than appreciation. It was lust.

Just a flash in his eyes, but I could feel it all over. A shiver followed by tingling warmth.

Whoa.

What just happened?

I was either sexually aroused or having a panic attack.

God, how I hoped it was a panic attack.

And just like that he turned back towards the counter to grab a handful of tortilla chips. “Damn. These are good.”

Meanwhile, I had forgotten how to breathe, but in a matter of seconds, he had made me feel sexy for the first time in ages. There was nothing for me to do in this situation, other than not act on it or talk about it. Ever.

“Is the margarita machine all set up?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I mean, it’s not my area of expertise in engineering or drinking, but feel free to test it out if you don’t trust me.”

“Did you test it out?”

“I had a margarita while you were in the shower, yes.”

“How was it?”

“Your shower?” he asked innocently, while reaching for another tortilla chip. “Sounded good to me.” He grinned.

Why was he grinning at me like that? We didn’t grin at each other like that. He grinned at me in other ways. I got the “you are such an adorable non-athlete” grin, the “you are such a cute non-tech genius” grin, the “it’s so funny that you hate it when I don’t wear a shirt” grin. This was a flirty grin. The kind he used on hot waitresses when he thought I wasn’t looking.

“Try to leave a few tortilla chips for the guests.” I strode over to the living room area and angled the armchair so that it faced the sofa more than the TV. Better. That felt better.

“Who are you all dressed up for?”

“What? Nobody. Why, is it obvious?”

“Obvious that you’re dressed up for someone in particular?”

“Is it too chesty? Do I look like a Tits Magee?”

“Let me assure you that there is no such thing as ‘too chesty,’ and I’m not exactly sure what a Tits Magee looks like. Do you have pictures?”

“I’m changing.”

“No. Don’t go changing. You look…tasteful. Like a high-class prostitute at a cool club in Miami. Who’s the guy?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I could kill you.”

“I’m just kidding. You look good. Who’s the guy?”

“There’s no the guy. I’m gonna put on a cardigan.”

“I mean. Your milkshake will still bring a few boys to the yard if you just throw a cardigan over that little piece of material. Maybe a turtleneck?”

“Theodore! People are going to start coming soon! Oh my God I’m just going to change.”

“I’m totally kidding. Just stay like that. You look great. Have you been working out?”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious. You’re a lot more toned than you were the last time I saw your bare arms, which was like, never ago. Don’t tell me you’re doing strength training.”

I smirked at him. Take that, Walker! “Okay, I won’t.” I crossed over to the kitchen, past where he was leaning against the counter in his two hundred dollar jeans and simple grey T-shirt, so he could get a better look at my toned arms and décolletage and a whiff of my new perfume.

“You’re doing strength training? You. Not just lifting giant spoonfuls of ice cream into your mouth, but lifting actual free weights?”

“I’m doing yoga because it keeps me calm and centered!”

“Seriously? Since when? That’s awesome. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. Help me get that big bowl from the top shelf.”

“I’d go to a yoga class with you.”

“When? You’re never here. I need that big bowl from the top shelf.”

“I’ll go to a yoga class with you when I’m here. Do you wear actual yoga pants?”

“No, I wear virtual yoga pants—what is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just suddenly thinking about my next line of fitness clothing.”

“I thought you were going to focus on the treadmill thing next.”

“I was, but this way we could work together. You could be my model and my muse.” He was all smirky and flirty and still eating the tortilla chips.

“Just get the bowl down hurry up.”

“Who do you go to yoga class with?”

“Nobody, I just go. Why are you taking forever to do this one simple thing?”

“Wow, you’re so much more patient and tolerant now—Namaste!”

“OH MY GOD I HATE YOU!”

“Here.” He rested one hand on my shoulder and leaned against me, reached up over my head, for the big bowl on the top shelf, then calmly placed it on the counter in front of me. I had to hold my breath, because he smelled so damn good I wanted to plant my face in his chest and just live there for a few hours. “Why are you so nervous—who did you invite?”

“I’m not nervous. Three friends.” I took a deep breath and shook off the tension. “Work friends. Who did you invite?”

“A few interesting acquaintances. Colleagues.”

“Groupies?”

“I would if I had any.”

“Guffaw.” I bent over to grab the second big bag of tortilla chips from under the counter, and noted that Theo did not glance over to check out my cleavage.

“I don’t—who’ve you been talking to?”

“Your Instagram page.”

“I don’t actually know most of those people who comment on my pictures.”

“What about the ones who send you private messages?” I batted my eyelashes at him.

“I only respond to business-related messages. I’m not one of those male models you follow.”

He actually had more followers than many of the male models that I followed, and just as many women commenting on the occasional selfie that he posted. Not that I Insta-stalked him. And we never commented on each other’s Instagram posts, but we did comment on our private personal Facebook pages now and then, in case we would ever have to use our social media accounts as evidence in a marriage fraud investigation. But there was little chance of that happening. On paper, we were clearly a real marriage.

In a few days he would become a naturalized American citizen and our marriage could end, and so would this unique form of torture.

But first, I needed to change out of that camisole, because if Theo kept looking at me like that all night I would either run away screaming or hump his leg. Or both.