The Honey-Don’t List by Christina Lauren
When Joe ushers us out of the hotel later that morning, we’re shocked to see that the bus has been rewrapped overnight. In addition to the Tripps’ ginormous faces and book cover stretched along the sides, it now includes promo for the new show, too. Nothing like a forty-five-foot visual reminder that you’re trapped inside a giant PR machine that surges full steam ahead, whether you’re ready for it or not.
It also says a lot about the Tripps that a guy who regularly deals with entitled, difficult people for a living doesn’t seem to be weathering this tour well. In the days since meeting the Tripps, Joe looks like he’s aged five years. His swoopy hair has deflated; his eyes are dim and glazed over with a constant air of panic. Even his muscles seem sad.
With a clipboard in one hand and a bottle of Kaopectate in the other, he says, “I wanted to go over the schedule for the next couple of days.” Joe checks his watch with a frown. He frowns a lot lately. “We’re stopping in Sacramento to sign stock at four different stores. We’ll have to be pretty quick at each stop because we need to make it to Medford tonight. The event tomorrow is in Portland, at Powell’s. It’s a ticketed event and we’ve sold out both the signing and the Q-and-A … which is good.” He wipes his forehead. “But both today at the stores and tomorrow at the event there will be a lot of eyes, so …” He lets the sentence hang to see if anyone will complete it for him. When there are no takers, he adds, “Let’s try to put on a good show.”
I startle when Melly leans in, whispering, “Tomorrow we can get ready together.” She smiles, and in the stark daylight, I see how much she’s aged from the past several months; tiny lines fan from the corners of her eyes, and her mouth has taken on a mild tilt. Instead of softening her appearance overall the way time generously managed for my mother and grandmother, it makes Melly seem slightly unhinged. “We’ll get someone to come to my suite and get blowouts before the signing. That way you can relax.”
Relax. Did everyone get that? Melly gives my hand a little squeeze as if to emphasize that this is about me, not her. The me who has never had a blowout before in her life and who never gets downtime to relax.
We both know she’s pointing out how good she is to me. It’s her way of keeping me close, but also clearly keeping me away from James.
The elephant in the room doesn’t care that we’re back in the tight quarters of the bus: the short drive to Sacramento is as awkward as you might expect after having sex with one person and being found naked in bed by another. James clearly wants to talk and is quietly waiting for his chance. Melly is watching him watch me, but also watching to see what I’ll do if he dares to try. Rusty is in the back avoiding his own elephant, and once we’re on the road, Joe locks himself in the bathroom, wanting to avoid us all.
The sprawling landscape of the East Bay is a blur on the other side of the windows while I stare down at my small leather notebook. Work is usually my escape, and any one of a number of upcoming projects could easily occupy my time, but the weight of James’s and Melly’s attention is like a physical presence in the air, pressing down. It makes me anxious, and my fingers soon become stiff and uncooperative.
When my pencil falls to the floor, both Melly and James practically nosedive to the carpet to retrieve it. Melly is closer and reaches it first, setting it on the table with a victorious little smirk.
“Thanks, guys.” I give them each a You’ve just gone overboard look. I’m sure I’ve never seen Melly rush to pick up anything in her life—even if she’s the one who dropped it.
“So, James.” Melly settles back in her seat. “You’ve been with us for how long now?”
James looks up, surprised at being addressed directly. “Just over two months.”
I blink across at her, wondering what she’s up to. I’ve never seen her engage James in conversation before. Someone is just full of surprises today. “Remind me what you did before?”
“I was a structural engineering consultant.”
She taps her lips with a graceful finger. “I forget—where did you work?”
A muscle in James’s jaw clenches, and color slowly blooms along the tops of his cheekbones as we both realize what she’s doing. “Rooney, Lipton, and Squire.”
“Ohh,” she says, like it’s just now come back to her. “Right, right. That was the place with all the embezzlement. They were inflating the books and taking money from employee pensions, right?”
He answers with a clipped “Yes.”
She whistles. “I sure hope you didn’t lose everything.”
My stomach drops. I can tell from his expression that he did.
I catch our driver Gary’s eyes in one of the oversize mirrors, and we both wince. I can never tell how much he hears, but the tension is so heavy and the conversation so razor sharp, he’d have to have cotton in his ears to miss the feel of it.
“Aren’t they still investigating that?” Melly’s saccharine voice is wrapped in a brittle veneer of indifference. “Maybe you’ll get some of your retirement money back.”
“Melly.” I very rarely admonish her, but I’m already tired of whatever this is.
“He’s one of my employees and I’m just concerned about him.” With a breezy wave, she goes back to her magazine. “I sure hope he isn’t in a sticky situation.”
Closing his laptop, James stands, meeting my eyes across the bus. “I appreciate your concern.”
When he disappears to the back of the bus, I walk to the kitchenette and open the fridge, needing a little distance. The close proximity is starting to make me feel panicky and oddly dissociated from my body, like we’ve all been put here for something else entirely, and none of this is real. In some ways, that might even be a nice outcome: Ted and Robyn step out at some point, smiling broadly, admitting they’re not a producer and a publicist but instead are really collaborators on a psychological study on the effect of forced proximity while attempting a task with absolutely no chance of success.
As I survey Melly’s pressed juices and gluten-free, dairy-free, taste-free snacks, my mind drifts back to James. I can still feel what we did last night in the tenderness of my joints, the ache that lingers from the delicious frenzy of our first time. Every move I make today requires the use of some sore or exhausted limb, and the sensations become these mocking little reminders about what life could be like if I decided to be brave.
In truth, our phone call earlier shook something loose inside me. I’ve never thought of Melly as abusive before. Temperamental, yeah. Manipulative, sure. But abusive? What would Debbie say if I was honest with her about what really goes on? Have I held back from describing everything accurately not because of the NDA but because I’ve always known, deep down, that what James said is true?
He asked where I see myself in the future. If it were up to Melly, I’d be working with her for at least another ten years. Keeping her calendar organized. My stomach clenches with dread. I don’t want that. Working for Comb+Honey solves one problem but creates another: I have the resources to pay for anything I need—including whatever treatments I might need in the future—but the constant stress of dealing with the show and the Tripps is making my symptoms worse. If I’m struggling to hold a pencil now, what will it be like in five years, let alone ten?
Unfocused but staring into the open refrigerator, I imagine telling Melly that I’m quitting, damn the fallout. It would be unpleasant, but it wouldn’t last forever, and then I would be free to think, for the first time in my life, about what I’d really like to do. I’d be broke and it’d be hard, but I might have James. I might have time to get myself a house and a dog and a few hobbies. I might actually have a life.
Just knowing that the possibility is there is like that first gulp of air after kicking toward the surface. Somehow, the elephant doesn’t seem so huge.
James tries to talk to me a number of times once we get to Sacramento, but it’s just too chaotic. We are off the bus, into one store, signing stock in a flurry, then getting back on the bus to weave through downtown Sacramento to the next store. It doesn’t actually seem to be the best plan, because obviously we are not at all inconspicuous inside Melly’s and Rusty’s heads on wheels, and by the time we pull up at a Barnes & Noble, a few cars have trailed us on the journey, with fans getting out and asking for pictures.
Joe paces in the background, fighting what seems to be a strong urge to check his watch every minute that Melly does what Melly does best: chatting with people and smiling for photos. I’m grateful that Rusty put on a nice shirt, and I realize with a mixture of fondness and surprise that it must’ve occurred to James to remind his boss that he might be in front of a lot of fans asking him to pose for selfies.
James sidles up to me, and my pulse jumps. I like the smell of his laundry detergent on him. I remember how it lingered on his skin even when his clothes were on the floor.
“I need to talk to you,” he says.
I look up, grateful for the distraction of fans so he and I can share one quiet minute. “Me too,” I tell him. “I made a decision about something …”
He frowns a little and then his expression clears, like he thinks he knows what I’m going to say. “Yeah?” His voice has dropped a few decibels and the volume turns it a little scratchy. “Then you go first.”
“I’m going to quit,” I say. His face doesn’t do what I expected it to; he doesn’t immediately smile. “I’m going to tell Melly tonight. I’ll give her until they wrap up the tour in Boise.”
James frowns. “Are you sure the timing is good?”
“What you said. On the phone?” I wait until he nods, barely. “You’re right about all of it. I realized today I don’t talk about it with Debbie—my therapist—because I know what she’ll say. Working here isn’t good for my hands. It’s not good for my mental health. I can find something else.”
He shifts on his feet, looking back over his shoulder at Melly and Rusty. “Melissa will be a mess without you.”
“I know, but this is insane, right?” I search his eyes for the conviction I heard in his voice earlier. “Like you said, what does my life look like in five years?”
James squints past me, into the distance. Something about his demeanor makes my stomach do a weird flip. I expected a grin, maybe a quick, covert hug. Hell, I’d take a thumbs up at this point. I didn’t expect him to look so … conflicted.
“I thought you’d be a bit more supportive and a bit less … I don’t know. Concerned.”
“No,” he says quickly, “I’m just thinking.” He meets my eyes again, and his are so deep and emotive, I want to pull him into the light and study them more carefully, the way he studied me last night. I feel like that connection has been severed, and I don’t know if it’s the fact that we aren’t alone, or if it’s something else.
“I know what I said,” he continues, “and I do think you should leave. But we both made a commitment to get them through this, and it won’t look good for either of our résumés if they fall apart on this tour. If they become a scandal, it’ll just be another Rooney, Lipton, and Squire for me, and an unending stretch of being an assistant to a scandal for you.”
My gut turns sour. I can see his point, and hate that my decisions seem to simultaneously be too late and too impulsive. “I don’t know how to do this,” I admit, my voice thin. “When does it end?”
James seems to have a physical response to the desperation in my voice because something in his demeanor shifts, like it hurts him to ask this of me. “Just wait until the second season is a go, okay? Just a few more weeks, at most.”
I think ahead to what we have left: a drive to Oregon tonight and then finishing the trip to Portland tomorrow, where we have a big event. From Portland to Seattle for another event and a stretch of interviews, then Boise before heading back to Jackson. From there, the Tripps are supposed to gear up for a tour of the East Coast. If all goes well, I definitely won’t be around for that.
I look to where Melly fawns over a woman’s pink coat, and I know she’ll climb back on the bus and immediately comment about how ugly it was, and how could someone wear something like that in public? James wants me to hang in there for another couple of weeks—and I know he has my best interests in mind because he’s good like that—but I don’t even want to be around them for another hour.
But then Joe comes over, hands me his phone, and grimaces.
Looks like someone from the hotel caught a picture of Melly and Rusty fighting as they got into the elevator alone last night. Melly’s pointed index finger is spearing Rusty in the chest. Her face is so twisted in anger that she looks like she’s spitting. The photo on Twitter has only been up for an hour and already has over four thousand likes.
