Page 36 of Marlowe Banks, Redesigned
“I guess?”
“God, no.” Tanareve laughed, all brightness and sparkles. “We dated for, like, four months when we first met. Realized pretty quickly that we were a terrible match. We’re perfect as friends, though. He keeps me grounded. I push him to get a little more adventurous.” She tore off a piece of her biscotti and fed it to Edith, who gobbled it up with crumbs flying out both sides of her floppy lips. “We hang out a lot. The press can’t decide what to do with us. Saying we’re just friends doesn’t get clicks. We both leave it in the hands of our publicists now. They know when a few cozy photos will help build ratings. Butthatcrap”—she gestured at Marlowe’s phone—“that, you learn to ignore.”
Marlowe pocketed her phone, still feeling ten steps behind. After seeing photos of Angus and Tanareve splashed across magazines and websites for the last few weeks—and the last ten years—the idea that they’d only ever dated for a few months as teenagers seemed impossible.
Before she could form another question, the waiter returned with a bowl of water. He set it on the table without requesting that the dog drink from the ground, which was good because Edith was already lapping up the water, splashing in all directions. The waiter turned to go but Tanareve halted him by pointedly asking if Marlowe wanted anything. He took in her stretched-out T-shirt and sloppy ponytail, raising a droll brow. Marlowe brushed aside his obvious disdain as she ordered a latte, requesting it to go. As grateful as she was for Tanareve’s company and candor, she still had to make it to four more stores before they closed.
“So how do you learn to ignore what people say about you?” she asked, a question that was simple enough on the surface, but one that resonated bone deep.
“You build a thick skin. You get a good therapist. And you find the humor in the situation.Hollywood Reporteronce ran a piece about how I stole a monkey from the zoo.BuzzFeedclaimed I’d auctioned off my underwear. People will say anything for clickbait. Now if a monkey auctions off my underwear,thatwill be worth clicking on.” She laughed again, making her hair-model waves fall forward over her perfectly tanned and sculpted shoulders. Marlowe used to dream of having shoulders like that. Then she learned that exercise was involved. Tanareve clearly didn’t share Marlowe’s athletics aversion. She probably liked vegetables, too. Even kale. “If the chatter really bothers you, you could do what Angus does and avoid the Internet altogether. He has email and he reads the news or orders stuff online, but he has pretty much anything else blocked.”
“Ah…” Marlowe’s chin dropped onto her palm again as the full weight of Tanareve’s revelation sank in. “So he doesn’t run his Instagram account?”
Tanareve shook her head, sending up another waft of her fruity shampoo.
“It’s a fan account run by a PR pro. She has a backlog of photos and she’s never without her phone to sneak a new shot. Angus lets her do what she wants with the account as long as it means he never has to see the trolls.”
Marlowe let that information sink in for another minute. Everything made so much more sense now—all of those discrepancies between who Angus was in person versus who he was online—but what a weird life, to have one’s entire public persona not only curated, but completely manufactured by someone else.
As she pondered that idea, Edith Head turned in circles on her chair, precariously balancing on her skinny legs before settling again on her bony butt and adopting her usual guilt-ridden expression.Marlowe suspected her own expression was similar. No wonder Angus got so angry when she criticized his social media use. Though how could she have known someone else ran his account? In her world, people didn’t have PR pros at their command, which was obvious by the amount of insanely boring food and flower photos they posted, yet another reason she barely touched social media. Still, if her friends put something out there, it was because they wanted others to see it.
“I had no idea,” she said. “I guess I misjudged him.”
“Easily done. He’s a hard read and he doesn’t let many people in.” Tanareve fed Edith another bite of her cookie. “He’s a good actor so he knows how to ‘turn on the friendly’ with his fans. He’s a grade-A flirter, obviously. He’s also tight with his closest friends, like, once you’re in, you’rereallyin. But you probably noticed by now that he’s a hardcore introvert. It’s why Idi, Whitman, and I pushed so hard to get him to dance.”
“Right. The dance.” Marlowe slumped forward, nearly sagging into Edith’s water bowl.
Tanareve studied her, eyes welling with concern.
“I don’t know if something’s going on between you two or not,” she said. “But if you’re interested in more than a dance, he just takes a little patience. He puts up a lot of walls. Like most guys, he hides his soft underbelly, but all that impenetrable confidence is an act.” She caught the surprise in Marlowe’s eyes and chuckled in response. “Don’t get me wrong. He knows a lot of women find him attractive, but he doesn’t consider himself ‘relationship material.’ Most women don’t bother getting to know him. They just want a story to tell their friends.” She paused to take a sip of her tea, giving Marlowe a moment to realize she’d thought of Angus in precisely that way on the shoe-shopping day. NotI’d like to get to know himbetterorI enjoy his company. Her thought had been,This will be my go-to party story for years. But she’d also seen him with fans.
“He doesn’t seem to mind that kind of attention,” she said.
Tanareve shrugged her amazing shoulders. “To some degree he does enjoy it, but he leans into it more by habit than by any real intention. It’s all so superficial. Most fans want to meet the characters they’ve grown to love from a show, not the people who play those characters, and they don’t always understand the vast difference between the two.” Tanareve smiled as though she’d learned this through experience, and Marlowe recalled Angus saying something similar in her car the other day. “The truth is, Angus is lonely. He’d kill me for telling you that, but it sucks to know people prefer the fake version of you to the real version. It’s not exactly a morale boost.”
While Tanareve sipped her tea and finished her biscotti, Marlowe reframed every interaction she’d had with Angus, from the Instagram posts she’d taken as egotism to the flirting she’d commanded him to stop to the anger he’d expressed over her frequent assumptions.Maybe our lives aren’t as different as you think,he’d said. And maybe something had sparked between them, but what then? After only one dance, Marlowe was the center of a new wave of gossip.
She’d tried not to look but she couldn’t help herself. Between stores, she’d GoogledAngus Gordon + Tanareve Hughes + waitress. TheStar Spottingarticle had bled onto other sites and the #IShipTheWaitress hashtag was trending on Twitter again, this time with fans split between declaring they “knew something was up” and tweeting about all the ways Marlowe “didn’t deserve him.” She couldn’t even deal with reviews of her creative work back in New York. How was she supposed to handle criticism that was so much more personal, so much more vitriolic, and so much less informed?
Answer: she couldn’t.
“Nothing’s going on between us,” she said. “Though I owe Angus an apology.”
“It’s as good a place to start as any.” Tanareve shined her million-dollar smile on Marlowe, making her feel as though maybe everything would be okay. It was that warm, and that powerful. No wonder Tanareve’s career had taken off when she was ten. And no wonder fans were furious about Angus and Marlowe’s supposed indiscretion.
The waiter soon returned. Marlowe bought her latte and wrangled Edith Head to depart. Tanareve gave them both earnest hugs and encouraged Marlowe to text anytime. Marlowe thanked her sincerely, at which point Edith squatted for a pee right there among the café tables. Marlowe was mortified. She scrambled for napkins, but Tanareve shooed her off, laughing in her infectious, joyful way.
“Go!” she said. “I’ll smooth things over with Mr. Snootypants.”
“Thank you!” Marlowe skirted the puddle and stepped away. “And next time, I don’t think you should play the girl in peril. I think you should play the superhero.”
“Damned straight I should!” Tanareve called after her.
As Marlowe clambered into her stinky, overheated car and forced her window ajar—as much for Edith’s sake as for her own—she promised herself she’d stop making so many assumptions, even ones she had a reasonable right to make. Then she shoved aside thoughts of Angus and Tanareve and gossip sites that treated real people like chicken feed to peck at. It was all beside the point. Marlowe had a job to do and an impatient boss to please. For the next few hours, nothing else mattered.
Chapter Sixteen
Marlowe: The wardrobe building’s locked
