Page 19 of You Belong With Me

‘A what?’ Edie said, adopting the stillness of a lizard. She remembered a howlingly discomfiting interview for the autobiography they’d done together when she’d asked Elliot about this subject. Then, it was agonising as she wasn’t meant to care. Now, it was agony because she did.

‘Not like X-rated filth!’ Elliot said, seeing she was mildly stunned.

But it was too late: Edie felt like an idiot potato.

She was continually thrown off balance by him: one minute it was trattoria carbonara andmeet the folks, and she was lulled into the illusion of a standard boyfriend. The next, she was being ambushed by Ridiculous Things That Never Happened. Who did you go to for advice on this?

That Elliot was going to kiss other women (or men) as pretend was, as he’d put it, always implicit in the deal. Amid all the logistics, such frivolities had been overlooked. Edie felta crushing pressure to be a Cool Girl about it, and she didn’t know if she was.

‘I won’t do it if you don’t want me to do it. I mean it,’ Elliot was saying. ‘You matter more than any part. There won’t be any bargaining or anything – if you aren’t feeling all right, it’s not worth it.’

‘I’m thinking if it needs this sort of build-up, it must be farmyard stuff,’ Edie said, interrupting to try to reclaim some ground.

Did she say no and sabotage his career? Or did she say yes and wreck her head?

‘There’s no nudity …’ Elliot paused. ‘Or at least,I’mnot nude.’

‘Elliot,’ Edie said abruptly, as yet again she’d not considered this possibility. (How? Denial, that was how.) ‘Don’t wind me up. What exactly needs my permission?’

‘The show is a dramedy calledYour Table is Ready, about this hectic restaurant in Manhattan in the 1990s that everyone who’s anyone wants to go to.’

‘This is what you’re going to New York for tomorrow?’

‘Yup. I play front of house, maitre d’ guy Matteo, and he and Gaby, the head waitress, have this Bruce Willis, Cybill Shepherd inMoonlightingbickering, love-hate, sexualtension dynamic. In the last episode of the first series, they’re fighting after service and end up, y’know, grappling with each other.’

‘Grappling?’

‘As in, the enemies to lovers thing abruptly explodes from the first to the second.’

Edie’s heart leapt atexplodes, and she tried to banish the mental imagery of spurting.

‘You’ve already signed up for it?’

‘I’ve said yes in principle, but contracts aren’t signed yet. I can easily get my agent to haggle this scene. They won’t lose me over it, I feel sure.’

‘Who plays Gaby?’

Elliot replied, with incredible insouciance as far as Edie was concerned: ‘Ines Herrera.’

Edie stifled aYOU FUCKIN’ WHAT?!and substituted it for a deliberately unimpressed: ‘Ah.’

Ines Herrera, for God’s sake. When she told Nick and Hannah, it would be what Nick called a ‘marmalade dropping’ moment. Her name was synonymous with outrageously sexy.

Was there a Reddit thread to help Edie, here?My Boyfriend Will Be Enthusiastically Simulating Coitus Onscreen In Front of Millions With The Guatemalan Julia Roberts. Any Tips Or Hints On Retaining My Chill? PS It Will Probably Go Viral, Become A Cultural Touchstone For Frenzied Eroticism And A Meme Captioned With Things Like ‘Me Versus Jaffa Cakes’ So I Am Ambushed With It Three Times A Week.

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‘What does it involve?’ Edie asked. ‘Apart from the obvious.’

‘Well …’ Elliot got down from his seat, walked over to a bag slung on the kitchen table and rummaged, producing a wad of A4 held by a bulldog clip.

‘I was going to suggest you read the script. Then you know exactly what I know, and I can’t misrepresent it in any way. This is episode eight at the end of the first season.’

He handed it over.

‘Why does it have your name across it in big letters on every page?’ Edie said, leafing through.

‘The watermark? If the pages get out, they know whose script it is and can collar whoever leaked it. Welcome to the showbiz jungle, baby. Nobody knows anything, and no one trusts anyone.’

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