Page 69 of Fan Favorite

“You can have feelings, you know. I won’t tell.”

“Promise?” he said with a grin. He looked down at his tray table and sighed. “I think I’m just realizing how much I shut down after my divorce—how much I threw myself into work so I wouldn’t have to think about it. And I was angry, you know? Just the maddest producer of love stories in the world.” He looked out the window, and then back at her. His eyes were sad, and Edie felt very aware of his physical presence. If she reached her hand across the aisle, she could touch him. “I don’t feel great about that,” he continued. “I’ve been thinking about my past, about love. Maybe it’s time for me to change.” He noticed how she was folded up into herself, listening to him intently, with her arms pulled into her sweatshirt and her hood up. “You cold?”

“A little.”

“Take my blanket.”

“Oh, I have one in the overhead bin. I just have to get up and get it.”

“This one’s already unwrapped.” He stood and fluttered his blanket over her, wrapping her up in his nice Peter-y smell. He sat back down. “But what about you? Weren’t you with someone before this?”

“Brian,” she said.

Edie sighed. The one thing shehadbeen letting herself think about—finally—was Brian. About how there’d been red flags, starting with the fact that he’d only been separated from his wife for two months when they’d met. And how separated was he? He’d been living in the basement. Edie wasn’t an idiot; she knew from the beginning that everything with Brian was high-risk. But she’d just wanted it so badly. And so she’d steamrolled ahead until she got her heart broken. And then Charlie Bennett had been on TV.

“I think maybe I’m the opposite of you,” Edie said. “When Brian and I broke up, I threw myself back out there immediately. All the apps. All the dates. And then the first chance I got, I flung myself all the way to Los Angeles.”

Edie shut her eyes and pulled the blanket closer. The breakup with Brian had always been about more than just Brian. But it was a hard thing to admit, because wanting Brian, wanting Charlie, wanting love… if she really thought about it, she could find her desire for a partner deeply embarrassing. Because her desire for love coupled with the persistent absence of love always brought Edie back to the painful conclusion that it must be her—that there must be something wrong withher.

“I’ve always just wanted this very simple thing, you know?” The intimacy of the darkened cabin made it easy for her to tellhim the truth of it. “Love. And I just don’t understand why I can’t have it.”

“Maybe because it’s not simple at all,” he said. His eyes were green with little flecks of gold. “Maybe love isn’t this thing we stumble into one day. Maybe you have to wait for it. And maybe that’s what makes it special.”

25

When Edie Pepper imagined herself onThe Key, she was always bathed in a gorgeous, diffused light, sliding a Tiffany rock onto a perfectly manicured finger. Not sitting around all day at some theater in Scotland with her sister wives, not only still single but also unbelievably bored, her nails chewed to bits.

“My feet hurt,” Edie proclaimed into the ether, just to saysomething, dosomething.

“That’s because for once your shoes don’t look like they were made for a gnome,” Zo said, rising from a downward dog. “Those Birkenstocks make me ill.”

“This is where I get confused.” Edie struggled to sit up on the gear cart she’d been sprawled across for the last hour. “I thought Birkenstocks were in? Don’t the cool kids wear them?”

“You’re not a cool kid.”

“Point taken. But just wait till you’re thirty-five. Plantar fasciitis sneaks up on a bitch.”

“News flash: I’m a ballerina.” Zo pirouetted across the floor to prove it. She landed near the craft services table. “I know about feet.”

“Then why are you always wearing stilettos!” Edie demanded. “They’re bad for you!”

“Because I’m five-two, and unlike you, I care if I look like a troll on TV.” Zo picked at the food trays. “What do you do anyway?”

“Like, my job?”

“Yes, like your job.”

“I’m a copywriter.”

Zo curled her lip. “Gross.”

Edie laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is sort of gross. Not the sort of thing dreams are made of.”

“Too bad, so sad.”

Edie let out a dramatic sigh. “Seriously, when are they going to be done?”

They turned to stare at Bennett and Bailey, who were learning a traditional Scottish fling on the other side of the theater. Bennett had the hem of his kilt tucked into his waistband, and his bare butt had been on display for at least ten minutes. The first time he’d pulled this trick—literally this morning, walking down Victoria Street with his string of girlfriends on the Edinburgh group date—it had been sort of funny. But now that they’d been filming forhours, it seemed decidedly not funny at all. The day felt interminable because they were constantly stopping for little one-on-one scenes. The Scottish fling with Bailey. Bennett feeding Max a hog roll. Watching Bennett and Zo get sorted into Hogwarts houses at a coffee shop where J. K. Rowling wrote parts ofHarry Potter. (Zo was a Slytherin, obviously.) And now, with nothing to read, nothing to do, and no way to leave, Edie was so bored she could scream.

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