14
Now
“So, Shane,” Dr. Deena said, leaning forward in her chair. “Is it possible that your unwillingness to believe your brother stemmed from a subconscious attempt to relieve your own guilt about the way you behaved toward both of them after your last sexual encounter with Lilah?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Lilah saw Shane shift in his seat. Good.
“Sure,” he said noncommittally. “I mean, anything’s possible.”
Lilah swallowed a frustrated groan. After their display at the premiere party, they’d been sent to an emergency therapy session, but their attempt to unravel what had caused the blowup in the first place was going about as well as expected.
Dr. Deena sighed. “Okay, let’s try a different approach. Why do you think you reacted that way?”
Shane crossed an ankle over his other knee, jiggling it restlessly. “I guess I felt like she was using sex as, like…a power play. Like she was only doing it because she had something to prove.”
“So you felt that, for her, the sex was divorced from any emotion.”
“Yes.”
“But not for you.”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean…I don’t know. I just felt kind of…used.”
Lilah rolled her eyes. “Oh, give me a fucking break.”
Dr. Deena turned to Lilah, her gaze sharp. “Let’s hear it from you, then, Lilah. What were you feeling that day?”
Now it was Lilah’s turn to be evasive. “It’s hard to say,” she said tersely, crossing her arms. “It was a long time ago.”
“Why don’t you take a moment and try your best to remember.”
Lilah tried to ignore both Shane’s and Dr. Deena’s stares as she cast her eyes to the ceiling, considering the question.
“I guess I just got caught up in the moment,” she said after a long pause. “I didn’t have any ulterior motive.” And it was, to date, still the hottest sex of her life—even though she’d burst into angry, helpless tears the moment she’d slammed his trailer door behind her.
“And would you say there were emotions involved on your end?”
Lilah pursed her lips. “I thought this was about fixing our professional relationship, not our romantic one.”
“Well, it does seem like those are more intertwined than we’d like them to be, doesn’t it?” Dr. Deena said coolly, looking down at her notes. “What about when you were together initially? You’ve both said it was just casual. But I have to say, it’s hard to imagine that you two would still have this level of hostility after all these years if there was no deeper emotional connection whatsoever.”
Lilah and Shane exchanged uneasy glances. Neither said anything for a long beat.
“Yeah,” Shane responded gruffly, in a tone she’d never heard before, like it was being pulled out of him. “Yeah, I was in love with her.”
It wasn’t a surprise, not really. Still, hearing him say it outright like that made Lilah feel like her lungs had been vacuum-sealed. She stared straight ahead, keeping her face as neutral as possible.
“And did you ever talk about it?” Dr. Deena prodded gently.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Shane nod. “I told her.” He swallowed. “And she ignored it.”
Lilah inhaled deeply and refrained from rolling her eyes again. He was obviously playing up the melodrama, trying to get Dr. Deena back on his side. “He told my shoulder blade he loved it. During sex. That doesn’t count.”
“Why not?” asked Dr. Deena.
“Because it’s just…it just doesn’t,” Lilah finished lamely, before changing course. “He didn’t love me, he barely knew me.”
“Bullshit,” Shane said. “I spent more time with you than anybody.”
“So what? That’s not how it works. You’re not automatically an expert on me once you log your ten thousand hours, or whatever.”
“You think you make it easy, Lilah?” he blurted out, turning to face her for the first time the whole session. She just looked back at him, stunned at the intensity behind his words. “You don’t think I wanted to know you? Maybe I got tired of waiting around for the drawbridge to lower, to finally get permission to cross the moat to Lilah Island.”
“Why would an island need a moat?” she muttered under her breath, unable to help herself.
Shane exhaled loudly, bordering on a groan, dragging his hand over his eyes in frustration. “See? This is exactly what I mean.”
Dr. Deena held her hand up to silence them.
“I’m curious why you’re so eager to invalidate Shane’s feelings for you, Lilah.”
“I don’t doubt he had feelings for me. But it wasn’t love.”
“Why not?”
Lilah crossed her legs, adjusting herself to sit upright on the couch. She spoke slowly, selecting her words carefully. “To me…love needs a degree of reciprocation. Of mutual openness. Choosing to let someone in, letting them see all of you.”
Dr. Deena nodded, making a note in her pad. “So you don’t believe unrequited love is possible, then?”
She shook her head. “A crush, maybe. Infatuation, lust, whatever. But that’s not love. It’s not even about the other person, really; it’s just about projecting some weird fantasy of who you think they are.”
Shane scoffed, and both their heads turned toward him.
“You can’t control other people’s feelings, Lilah,” he said. “If I said I fell in love with you at—I don’t know—our first audition, you can’t tell me I didn’t.”
“At our audition?” she exclaimed, louder than she meant to, unable to hide her irritation that he was obviously fucking with her while she was trying to take things seriously. Sure enough, his eyes were sparkling with mischief, even as the rest of his expression remained innocent.
“It was just an example.”
“You’re both entitled to have your own perspectives,” Dr. Deena said before turning back to Lilah. “But as you were saying. You and Shane weren’t in love—by your own definition—because you weren’t open to it.” It wasn’t a question.
Lilah felt herself flush. “I think that’s a little reductive.”
“Did you ever develop any kind of romantic feelings for him at all, though? Ever consider pursuing something more?”
“Sure. I mean, yeah, of course.” She shrugged, trying to keep her voice casual, like it wasn’t her first time admitting anything of the sort in his presence. “I’m not, like, a robot. We were sleeping together for months. Of course I…” She trailed off, looking down at her lap. Next to her, Shane’s gaze was fixed straight ahead, his posture tense.
She realized, then, what Shane had meant by his outburst at the party: Because he didn’t know. It hadn’t been an unforgivable crime for Dean to go home with her, because as far as he knew, things hadn’t been serious between her and Shane. But as much as they’d tried to deny it—then, now, and every moment in between—they both understood, deep down, it was more complicated than that. That was why her betrayal had been worse.
“We’re just…really different,” she said after a long beat. “The only thing we had in common was the show. It happens all the time, people bonding in a high-pressure situation like that. That doesn’t mean it’s real. It can’t sustain itself long-term.”
“And that was the only thing holding you back from taking things to the next level?” Dr. Deena prodded gently.
Lilah glanced at Shane, who was already looking at her, his gaze impenetrable.
“That, and…taking it to the next level would have meant taking it public. Eventually. It wouldn’t be ours anymore. It would be everybody’s. And then, if it didn’t work out…” She shook her head. “Things were so overwhelming during that first year. It just seemed like all this extra pressure to put on it, on ourselves. It would’ve been too much to handle.”
“But that’s part of the bargain you make as an actor, isn’t it?” Dr. Deena asked. “That if you’re successful—if you become a public figure—you give up a certain level of privacy in your personal life. That’s no reason to shut yourself off from love and relationships entirely.”
“No, I know. I only felt that way about us, me and Shane specifically. I think it was just, like…if we were together together, it would’ve been like our feelings were…a commodity, or something. Something they could sell alongside the show. That’s not the kind of relationship I wanted.”
Dr. Deena nodded. “Is that how you felt, too, Shane? Were you concerned about public scrutiny impacting your relationship?”
Lilah snorted. “Please. He jumped from me right into the most public relationship he could find.”
“Oh really?” Dr. Deena asked, with mild curiosity.
“Um…” Shane shot Lilah an annoyed look. “I was with Serena Montague, yeah. For three years.”
Dr. Deena stared at him intently for a moment, brow furrowed, before a look of comprehension dawned on her and she snapped her fingers. “You know, I didn’t recognize you with the beard. You looked younger without it.”
“I was younger,” Shane muttered.
“I thought you don’t watch TV,” Lilah said, a hint of petulance creeping into her voice.
“Well, I’ve been to the supermarket and the doctor’s office and had quite a few haircuts,” Dr. Deena said with a smile.
Lilah slouched back against the couch. “I guess that proves my point, then.”
“I suppose it does.” Dr. Deena shifted in her seat, tucking her legs beneath her. “Have you ever been in love, Lilah? If not with Shane, then with anyone?”
Lilah’s mouth went dry; she was intimately aware of Shane next to her. “I feel like we’re getting off topic.”
“Humor me.”
Lilah’s gaze flicked to the clock behind Dr. Deena’s head, contemplating whether she could try to stall until they were out of time. But they still had a good twenty minutes left, so she was stuck.
“No,” she said quietly. “I haven’t.”
“And do you think of yourself as lovable?”
Lilah recoiled like she’d been slapped. “What?”
“Do you think you’re worthy of love?” Dr. Deena repeated.
Lilah opened and closed her mouth a few times, stunned into silence.
When Lilah was sixteen, her first serious boyfriend had dumped her the first time she’d had a panic attack in front of him. He’d at least had the decency to wait until the next day to do it, pulling her aside between classes and informing her that she was “too much drama.”
Naturally, she’d retaliated by covering his car with mayonnaise: sneaking over to his house with a Costco-sized jar while his family was out of town, so that the acid would eat away at the paint as it baked under the hot sun, the stench seeping through the cracks and into the upholstery. If she’d already earned the label, she reasoned, she might as well live up to it.
She hadn’t had much luck in the subsequent years, either. She was a magnet for men who would pursue her relentlessly, only to realize once they had her that they wished she was someone else. Men who’d coveted her for her appearance but resented everything she had to do to maintain it. Men who’d been attracted to her status and success, then complained that she was always busy, seethed with jealousy over her onscreen love interests, and grumbled about the attention she got when they went out.
But even before all that, she’d always been—as her bubbe had half-affectionately, half-derogatorily declared her many times as a child—a handful. Opinionated, self-righteous, stubborn, with a brain hell-bent on twisting every good thing in her life until it found the angle that made her miserable.
When she’d met Richard at Juilliard, performing in a reading of one of his plays, she’d recognized a kindred spirit—someone even pricklier and more difficult than she was (though of course, as a writer and a man, it was seen as proof of his brilliance and not an innate character defect). She’d been flattered to make the cut as one of the few things he didn’t hate, addicted to the thrill of chasing his conditional, unpredictable approval. It had been enough to sustain their relationship for years, on and off and on again, his interest revitalized every time she ended things.
But she’d never felt truly safe with him. Her sense of security had come from knowing he was always just out of reach, that he’d never see her as anything more than a supporting character. That she’d never have the power to break his heart, or him to break hers. It wasn’t love, but it was as close as she’d thought she could get.
After Richard, Shane had been such a shock to her system that she’d had her guard up practically from day one. It felt strange, now, to remember how worried she’d been about accidentally hurting him, when she’d spent the next several years trying as hard as she could to do it on purpose.
But then, she’d misjudged him, too. He had more edges than she’d given him credit for. Not only could he take it, he could dish it right back. Or maybe she’d just been the first person to bring out that side of him—maybe the impulse for cruelty could be sexually transmitted.
It wasn’t the first time she’d behaved badly in a relationship—that honor went to her condiment-based vandalism—and it wouldn’t be the last. She couldn’t change any of that now. Over the years, she’d done the work to love and accept herself as she was, flaws and all. That didn’t mean that anyone else would ever be able to, though.
“Sorry,” she finally managed, laughing nervously. “I just…I feel like I’ve really been in the hot seat here today. I don’t think I’m comfortable with”—she shot a sideways glance at Shane— “this situation. Going any further down this road.”
Dr. Deena nodded. “I understand. We can move on.”
When the session was over, they walked out of Dr. Deena’s office in heavy silence, Shane holding the door to the emergency stairwell for her. By the time they reached the bottom of the first set of stairs, Lilah was still so shaken that she couldn’t help herself.
“You were laying it on a little thick in there,” she said.
Next to her, Shane kept his eyes forward. “What do you mean?”
She pouted dramatically and assumed an Eeyore-esque cadence. “ ‘I felt so used.’ ”
He looked down, like he was suppressing a smile. “Well, what about you?” He turned to her, his voice becoming breathy and high-pitched, stopping just short of outright mocking her. “ ‘I didn’t want them to sell us.’ ” When they reached the third-floor landing, he stopped. “Was that all bullshit? You feeling some type of way about me back then? ’Cause this is the first I’m hearing about it.”
Lilah stopped, too, a few steps below him. She looked up at him for what felt like a long time.
“No,” she said softly. “It wasn’t bullshit.”
“Well. How about that.” He looked a little too pleased with himself.
She braced her arm against the banister, peering up at him skeptically. “Come on. You’re really telling me if I’d wanted to…if we’d decided to…you would’ve just…” She snapped her fingers. “What about your little friends?”
“I don’t know. Fuck those guys, I haven’t talked to any of them in years. I would’ve picked you.”
“Why?” The question slipped out in a vulnerable exhale. She forced herself to stop there, the rest of it only implied: Why did you love me?
A hard line formed between his eyebrows. His gaze dropped to the ground, then back to her.
“How could I not?” he asked quietly.
The look on his face made the remaining air in her lungs escape in an involuntary whoosh.
She suddenly understood, with a nauseating surge of regret, what a precious thing she’d been so careless with all those years ago, too blinded by distrust and self-loathing to see it standing right in front of her, if she’d only been brave enough to reach for it.
“But that was before,” she said, her throat tight, once again unable to finish the thought. Before she’d spent years systematically dismantling the pedestal he’d put her on, dead set on showing him what bad taste he’d had to fall for her.
He nodded slowly, then descended with purpose, closing the gap one stair at a time. She pressed her back to the wall to create as much space between them as possible. Once he reached the stair she was on, he leaned against the banister on the other side.
Her heart thudded in her ears in anticipation of what he would do next. But he just stared intently at her for a long moment, his forehead creased.
“We really made a mess of it, huh?”
She raised one shoulder. “We were young. It was a weird situation. It happens. We just have to move on.”
“Do we?”
“Yeah. We do. That’s why we’re here.”
He shook his head slightly. “That’s not what I mean.”
It felt like the stairs had dropped out from beneath her. She leaned her full weight against the wall, resting her head on the rough cement. “What, then?”
“I mean…” He pushed himself off the banister, slowly moving closer to her. “You weren’t being totally honest with her back there.”
“I wasn’t?”
“The show isn’t the only thing we have in common.” His gaze swept over her from head to toe, the sudden heat behind it making her light-headed.
He was messing with her again. He had to be. Or maybe he was deluded enough by the dangerous combination of post-therapy vulnerability and misplaced nostalgia that he thought they could get away with sleeping together a few more times.
It was a terrible idea, obviously. She shouldn’t even consider it. She definitely shouldn’t think about his hands, how she could practically feel how warm they’d be through the thin cotton of her shirt—or better yet, underneath it. She shivered, praying he didn’t notice.
It was bad enough that she was entertaining the thought to begin with, made even worse by the fact that she knew exactly how it would all go—how good it would be—if she wanted to.
No, not if she wanted to. If she let herself.
She realized with a jolt that she was still staring at his hands, so she forced her gaze north, snagging on his mouth for a beat too long.
The mouth she’d kissed hundreds of times. That had murmured filthy secrets in her ear. Traced every inch of her body.
The same mouth that had hurled insults, taunts, accusations. Twisted in scorn. Smirked at her misfortune.
Lilah choked out a disbelieving laugh, hoping the dim lighting camouflaged her burning cheeks. “You’re not serious.”
“Why not? I’ve tried just about everything else to get you out of my system.” He said it playfully, but there was an edge of genuine frustration to it that made her heart stumble in her chest.
She fought to keep her tone neutral, conflicted about whether to play along. “We’ve already tried that, too, remember?”
His gaze never left hers, his voice low and gravelly. “I can’t fucking forget it.”
Lilah swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly dry. With effort, she broke the spell of their eye contact, glancing down at her shoes before her willpower eroded completely. She took a deep, ragged breath, then shook her head, meeting his eyes again. “We can’t undo the last eight years. It’s too late, the damage is done. Antagonizing each other, being constantly at each other’s throats…it’s toxic. Dysfunctional.”
At the mention of throats, Shane glanced down at hers, and he took another step forward. Her pulse fluttered as he brought one hand to her neck, fingers sliding smoothly across the nape, thumb coming to rest along the bottom of her jawline. She felt like she’d forgotten how to breathe.
He slowly leaned down to the other side of her face, his beard rasping against her cheek, his voice low.
“I think you like having me at your throat. Sometimes.”
She was grateful she was against the wall; otherwise she wasn’t totally sure she’d stay upright. She knew for sure she wouldn’t have a second later, when she felt his lips brush the pulse point behind her ear. She inhaled sharply, and his grip tightened on the back of her neck, just for a second.
Too soon, he pulled away again. She expected him to look smug about getting such an easy and obvious reaction out of her, but he seemed flustered, too, like he was fighting for control of himself. He slid his hand out of her hair and dropped it back to his side, and she followed its path with her eyes without thinking.
If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have caught the brief, involuntary shake of his fingers before he turned and descended the rest of the stairs without another word.