Good at Being Alive(20)

He doesn’t explain what a DIT is, nor does he specify roles for Katrina and Caden, but I assume that Katrina is the PA and Caden is simply here to annoy me.

“Oh,” he adds as the crew disperses, “and the volcano has changed some things, so we’re shooting at Sky Lagoon near Reykjavík instead of the Blue Lagoon.”

Which means that instead of going right around the fucking corner, we’re adding drive time to a trip that was already way, way too full. I know he said it was the volcano, but I still choose to blame Theo.

With that established, we hit the highway and Theo is once again sound asleep. I eat a second croissant, staring at the barren landscape around us.

My god, his sleep breathing annoys me. It’s too loud, too calm, too smugly pleased with itself for functioning autonomously. It’s salt in the wound, the way he sleeps so easily when I can’t sleep at all. It means he’ll be fresh as a daisy when we film, sounding all smart and British while I stumble around like a thick-footed toddler, yawning and weeping about the cold.

I lean my head against his chest. “Stop breathing,” I whisper.

“No,” he replies.

Alas. I tried.

There’s too much fog to see the mountains at all, and the ground is still covered in snow. It should be Bronwyn here instead of me, bored and a little depressed by the view. It should be Bronwyn wondering if it’s all volcanic rock under that snow, or mythically green in summer.

It’s appalling that it’s not her. It’s equally appalling that I’m still capable of complaining about my fatigue and the view when I should be desperately grateful simply to be here to experience any of it.

I miss my father, but it’s the way I miss Bronwyn that bothers me most. Perhaps because I didn’t expect it. She was the favorite, and it was wearying, watching that play out again and again. So wearying that I never admitted something: she was my favorite too. And now I’ll never get a chance to tell her.





Theo


We’ve just pulled up to Sky Lagoon, which is apparently where I’m going to have to interact with Rebecca…in swimwear. Rebecca, who loves talking about vibrators and fucking glass bottles and had no issue with the fact that I saw the underside of her breasts.

What could possibly go wrong?

Inside, I’m directed to a locker room that’s far more upscale than I’d expected—spotless slate floors and pale wood lockers that you operate using your wristband. I shower as instructed, don my swim trunks, and walk out into a little cave that leads to the lagoon. When I step down into the waist-high, piping-hot water, the crew is already there, attired in swimwear, equipment held aloft.

The day is so gray and foggy that it’s hard to tell where the steam ends and the fog begins, but I still get a too-thorough view of Rebecca when she emerges a moment later…in a tiny olive-green bikini that covers far too little skin.

I turn away, but Caden does not. If there are rules about drooling in the lagoon, he’s violating them.

“Theo, look a little more cheerful,” he calls. “Your wife is hot as hell.”

“Caden,” I growl in response, “look a little less cheerful. Fast.”

He doesn’t stop leering. I wonder how Lars would feel about me beating his intern to a bloody pulp, because I’m incredibly tempted.

“Okay,” says Lars. “My crew will let me know when they’re ready. When you hear me say ‘action,’ it means you’re up. At that point, Bex will come down the steps to Theo and then the two of you can walk through the spring together. Go check out the waterfall to the right and then you can get a drink. The sound quality won’t be great here, so this is mostly going to be B-roll. Don’t worry about what you say.”

The reminder seems unnecessary. Rebecca never worries about what she says.

“Rolling,” LJ says.

Jon nods, holding a huge microphone over the water. “Speed,” he says.

Lars looks from me to Bex. “Action.”

Bex walks down the steps as instructed. Instead of walking up to me, the way a normal wife would, she passes me entirely, moving through the small cliffs of volcanic rock toward the main part of the lagoon, which rests right against the sea wall. I’m forced to follow, and the view is spectacular—the green moss-covered rock vivid against the smoke-gray Atlantic—but my gaze keeps returning to Rebecca and the flare of her hips, Rebecca and that drop of water sliding down her spine. Rebecca, who fills out a bikini far better than I’d have imagined.

The gaze of millions of men will focus on her in that bikini if the show gets picked up, a fact that I hate. A fact that her father would have hated more.

I wish I’d walked ahead of her.

“It doesn’t matter what you say,” Lars calls to us. “But you do need to look as if you know each other.”

“You heard the man,” I say, stepping close behind her, “but let’s avoid talking about your vibrator this time.”

“Is this about your erection again?”

“Nothing I’ve ever said to you was about my erection, as it did not exist.”

“I could have seen that erection from space.” She tips her head toward the sky. “NASA has probably uploaded the footage. Let’s pull it up online.”

I smile before I can stop it and her eyes light up, their dark gray becoming something else entirely, like a hint of sunlight breaking through a storm cloud.