The Road To Her Part 27

My mouth went dry at Susie's words. My heart instantly started racing behind my ribcage, and I had to breathe through my mouth, because I thought that at any moment I might pa.s.s out.

"Gone?" Bella finally spoke. "What do you mean, gone?"

"Came in at eight this morning to see me," Kevin said, putting his pen down on the desk. "Told me she was taking an extended break with immediate effect."

"For f.u.c.k's sake!" Bella threw her hands up in the air and shot a look at me.

"Precisely." Susie pulled a face.

"And, what?" Bella said wearily. "She's just upped and offed, has she? Without a thought for any of us?"

"Apparently so." Kevin leant back in his chair and rubbed his hands over his face.

"Can she...can she do that?" I finally managed to croak.

"No," Kevin said bluntly. "She can't."

"So...?" I looked at Kevin numbly.

"I told her she was in breach of contract," Kevin said. "She told me that she was due some holiday, that she'd cleared it with her agent, and that she was going now."

"And has left us all up s.h.i.t creek," Susie piped in irritably.

"So it means we have to rewrite all of Jasey's scenes for the next two weeks, which the writers upstairs," Kevin said, jabbing his pen upwards, "are absolutely delighted about, as I'm sure you can imagine."

My head was swimming. Elise had gone? Gone where? "But she hasn't quit, as such?" I asked. "She's just taking some leave?"

"Who knows?" Kevin sat back in his chair, a weary look on his face.

"Did you have any idea she was going to do this?" Susie asked me harshly. "Because if she talked to you about taking unplanned holidays right in the middle of filming, we sure could have done with knowing about it sooner than this, Holly."

"No!" I said, aghast, looking frantically from Bella to Susie to Kevin. "I had no idea!"

My breath was coming in gasps, making me hyperventilate. I needed to find Elise, wherever she'd gone to, and convince her-no, beg her-not to leave. I knew what it was all about, of course I did. She'd freaked out over everything, and it was my fault. If only I'd kept my big mouth shut and not pushed her about everything, then it would all still be okay.

"Of course she didn't know," Bella said hastily. "Look at her! She's as shocked as we are."

"I have to go." I sc.r.a.ped my chair back noisily and lurched to my feet. "I have to go and find her." Ignoring Susie frantically calling me back to her, telling me I needed to stay around the studios, and Bella following me to the door, trying to stop me, I stumbled from Kevin's office, slamming the door behind me louder than I needed to. Half walking, half running back down the corridor and out to my car, I fished my phone out of my bag and rang Elise, knowing with a sinking heart that the chances of her actually answering were slim.

Where the h.e.l.l was she? More importantly, how did she think this was an okay thing to do? To just up and leave PR without so much as a word to me? And what about breaching her contract? I thought she'd been happy playing Casey. How could she just give up on her character like that? Angrily wiping tears from my eyes, I fumbled the keys into the ignition of my car, fired it up, and sped out of the studio car park, braking sharply to avoid a cat crossing the road and stalling my car in the process. Swearing and banging my hands against the steering wheel in frustration, I started the engine again and rammed the car into gear, my tyres screaming as I raced down the road towards Elise, wherever she was.

I arrived at Elise's apartment choking up with rage, anger, hurt, betrayal-you name it, but the second I pulled into the small communal car park and saw her car parked up, I began to relax a little. I pulled in beside it just as a thought struck me: perhaps she was leaving PR for the sake of us. Maybe everything I'd said to her the day before had sunk in, and she'd decided she didn't want to hide our relationship after all. Perhaps she'd done it to protect me-to protect us.

I killed my engine and sat back in my seat, puffing my cheeks out, my heart beginning to slow down again. Would Elise really have done that? I glanced up to the fourth floor of the apartment block-Elise's floor-and thought about what I'd say to her. If she had left the programme because of us, then it was up to me to persuade her to come back, despite everything I'd said to her. Jasey was more important right now for both of us. We'd managed to keep our relationship a secret for long enough already, and I was sure we'd manage to carry on seeing each other in secret until we both felt the time was right to go public.

Following another person in, I entered the lobby of the block and took the lift to the fourth floor, tidying my hair on the way up and wiping at my eyes with a tissue. I didn't want Elise to know I'd been crying; I didn't want her to think I'd panicked and didn't trust her, if the simple answer to her leaving really was that she'd done it to protect me and save our relationship.

I rang on Elise's door, but the look on her face when she saw me standing there didn't exactly fill me with confidence, and every comforting thought I'd had in the lift up to her floor immediately left me again.

"I thought you were the taxi, maybe," she said bluntly. She held the door open slightly to allow me in, shot a look around the hallway outside, then shut the door again.

"Taxi?" I asked, wandering a short way into her apartment and looking around. The irony that this was the first time I'd ever visited her apartment wasn't lost on me.

"You've heard, then?" she said, ignoring my question. She leant against the door, not following me in.

"You could say that," I replied. "Kevin rang me in a complete panic and summoned me over to the studios straight away."

Elise looked at me.

"So, want to tell me what's going on?" I asked. "And why you didn't think to tell me you were having yourself a little holiday?"

"Because I only decided last night," Elise said simply, looking down at her feet. "After I got home from yours."

"Why did you do it?" I asked. "Are you leaving because of me? Because of us? Or just because of you?"

"Because I need some heads.p.a.ce," Elise said, lifting her head to look straight at me. "Like you, I can't handle all the creeping around, all the pretence." She put her hands in her pockets. "And, like you, I feel as if this has all been a lie." She paused. "But, unlike you, I could have lived with that."

"This is all to do with me telling Bella, isn't it?" I said. "Bit of a knee-jerk reaction, though, isn't it? Cutting off your nose to spite your face and all that?"

Elise studied me cautiously. "I can't give you what you want," she said. "I want secrecy, you want openness because you can't pretend to be someone you're not." She took a deep breath. "But that's what we do for a living, Hol! We make out that we're something else, just to please people." She put her hands in her jeans pockets. "I've done it all my life-it's all I know how to do," she said, looking up and catching my eye. "You can't change me."

"So, what?" I shrugged. "You're just going to go, are you? Give up on me?"

"Isn't that what you've been planning to do with me?" Elise asked. "I know you've not been happy. I know you've been having this moralistic argument with yourself for days." She rested her hip against the back of her sofa. "So what do you do? Stay with me and have this fictional life you don't want, or leave me and be true to yourself?" She pulled herself away from the sofa and walked away from me.

"So you're getting in there first, is that it?" I said to her retreating back.

"I just need some thinking time, Hol," Elise said, robotically picking up her coat. "I feel like I can't breathe at the moment."

"Where?" I asked. "Where are you going?"

"Back to the States," Elise replied simply. "I have a friend out there," she said. "I already called him. Said I could crash at his place until I get myself sorted."

The colour drained from my face. I reached a hand out and leant against the back of her sofa, feeling faint. "Him?"

"Him," Elise repeated.

I stared at her, my mouth dry, my heart thudding in my neck. "Don't I mean anything to you?" My voice was thick with emotion. "Okay, so I've fought with myself over what to do, I've thought about calling it a day, but you know what?" I took a deep breath, my voice wobbling, "I thought you were too important to me to just give up on you like that."

"You know you mean everything to me!" Elise said. "I just think this is for the best for now."

"For who?" I asked. "You or me?" I gripped the sofa harder. "And what about Jasey?" I asked feebly. "What about the programme?"

Elise shrugged.

"Are you for real?" I stared at her incredulously. "You bail out on us all at a time when you-well, we-have never been so much in demand?" I asked. "You're throwing away all of this just because you say you can't handle being with me? They're having to rewrite all our scenes because of you!"

"So?" Elise said petulantly.

"What am I supposed to tell people?" I mumbled. I sat down on the arm of her sofa, my legs turning to jelly.

"You don't have to tell anyone anything," Elise said, finally shrugging on her coat and wandering past me.

I watched numbly as she walked into her bedroom, returning a few seconds later with a small holdall. She was perfunctory and uncaring, apparently ignoring the fact I was still perched on the edge of her sofa, in pieces over it all.

"So you're not going to say anything to me now?" I asked as she put the holdall next to the front door.

Elise stopped and turned to me. "I don't know what more there is to say, Holly," she said. "I've made up my mind."

After a few more minutes of watching her in silence, and when it was apparent she wasn't going to say any more to me, I lifted myself away from the sofa and headed for the door. "You know what?" I said, shouldering my bag angrily. "You don't deserve me, and I think I've wasted enough of my life on you, don't you?"

"No," Elise said, leaning against the side unit, staring down at her feet. "I don't deserve you."

"I thought you were cold and emotionless the first day I ever met you," I said, turning to look at her. "Guess I should have stuck by my instincts and stayed the h.e.l.l away from you." Finally Elise lifted her eyes to me, her face pale and tired. "I was prepared to give us a go, because I thought we had something," I said. "Despite everything, I would never have just given up on you."

Elise didn't answer.

"What, you don't have anything to say?" I said, my hand on the door handle. "Well, thanks a bunch, Elise," I said, fuming. "How f.u.c.king callous do you want to be?"

"Life would be so much simpler if you were a man, or if I didn't have to work with you," Elise said, wiping angrily at her eyes. "We wouldn't be having this conversation right now."

"You can't help who you fall in love with," I said numbly, my hand still on the door handle, not quite able to leave her. "You can't tell your heart not to love someone just because they're not your usual type, or because it takes you out of your so-called comfort zone. It doesn't work like that, Elise. That's what makes love so amazing. Because it's so b.l.o.o.d.y random. It gets you when you least expect it, and no matter what you do to try to ignore it, you can't."

Elise stood, silent, her fingers worrying the b.u.t.tons on her coat.

"It was bad enough when Grace left me," I said. "But at least she left me because she found something-someone-else. You? You're going because you're a coward."

"Perhaps I am, yeah," Elise said quietly.

"And you think you have an exclusive right to happiness?" I threw up my hands in exasperation. "It's not all about you, funnily enough. It's about me and you, and it's about me and how I'm feeling." I stared down at the floor, fighting the tears that I knew were just one look or one word away. Elise didn't reply this time, and the cold silence that lingered between us was unbearable. "There's nothing I can say that'll make you change your mind, is there?" I finally asked, lifting my head to meet her eyes. "Nothing I can do to make you stay?"

Again, she didn't answer. But she didn't need to.

The look in her eyes told me she'd already gone.

Chapter Thirty-one.

"Holly, I'm so sorry." Bella wrapped comforting arms around me, letting me melt into her warm, soft jumper. "Have you heard from her since you got home?"

I was back in my apartment. An emergency, tear-fuelled phone call to Bella had brought her over after she'd finished filming her scenes over at the studios, and now here she was, her arms around me like the comfort blanket I needed.

I shook my head against her shoulder. "I'd imagine she's halfway over the Atlantic by now," I mumbled.

The hours after I'd left Elise's apartment had flashed past me like speeding cars, and while life carried on as normal for the strangers I'd pa.s.sed on my drive home, my own life had ground to a halt. I no longer had the ability to function properly. It was as though I was living in a dreamworld, treading water, barely keeping my head above it, constantly gasping for air as if my life depended on it.

"I've spoken to Kevin," Bella said, "told him you're sick today, and probably will be for the rest of the week." She walked me to my sofa and sat me down. "No one knows a thing, so you can stop looking so panicked."

"Her hoodie's still where I left it," I said, getting up and taking it from the back of the chair where I'd hung it up. I gathered it up and buried my head in it, smelling the last remains of the citrusy scent Elise always wore.

"I'm going to say something now," Bella said, getting to her feet and gently taking the hoodie from me, "that you're probably not going to like."

"Which is?"

"Which is that I think we could both see this coming, couldn't we?" Bella said quietly.

"Doesn't make it any easier, though," I said. "No matter how much I tell myself our relationship wasn't going the way I wanted it to, I still feel like s.h.i.t right now."

"But maybe it's for the best," Bella offered. "You've been tying yourself up in knots about what to do and-"

"Elise has made the decision easier for me?" I finished. "Well, isn't that big of her."

"And I'm sure you hate her right now," Bella continued, "but if she was never comfortable with the whole idea, then was it ever going to last?"

"I do hate her," I said hotly. "I hate her almost as much as I love her, but you know what?"

Bella looked at me.

"It's that love that makes me know that if she walked in through that front door right now, I'd forgive her in a heartbeat."

"But I think you have to come to the realisation that at the end of the day," Bella said, "her career was more important than anything else."

"More important than me, you mean," I said miserably.

"You were fighting with your conscience as well, don't forget," Bella said. "Would you have stayed with her and sacrificed everything you've worked hard for?"

"Why are you defending Elise?" I looked at where Bella had placed Elise's hoodie, the familiar lump in my throat immediately returning. "When she's the one that's turned my life upside down?"

"I'm not." Bella ran her hand down my arm. "I'm just playing devil's advocate," she said, "as always." She looked at me. "You just have to ask yourself honestly if you ever thought you and Elise would be in it for the long run, or whether both your careers would have been too important to risk, even for different reasons."

"Well, I guess I'll never know now, will I?" I said, looking again at her hoodie. "Because from where I'm standing, there's no more Holly and Elise, and there's no more Jasmine and Casey." I took a deep breath. "So where on earth do I go from here?"

I couldn't face leaving my apartment for the rest of the week. I called in sick to work each morning on Bella's insistence that I was in no fit state to resume any vigorous filming schedule until I'd had time to make sense of everything that had happened to me.

She was right. I spent days sitting numbly in the window of my apartment, watching people come and go on the streets below me, or watching the London Eye slowly turn outside, trying to evaluate my life. Often, I'd find myself looking up at the planes that flew in and out of Heathrow right over my apartment every few minutes, stupidly imagining that Elise might be on one of them, and that she was coming home. I'd try to picture her sitting in her seat, then stare blankly at the plane until it was no longer visible, hating it for taking Elise away from me, and hating her for leaving me.

When I wasn't watching the planes, I was crying. When I wasn't crying, I'd torture myself by watching old clips of Jasey or reading fans' messages on forums, speculating over Elise's sudden departure from the show-which had inevitably been leaked to the press by someone from the studios-making the tears that had recently dried up come tumbling back out again. It was ironic, I thought, as I sat slumped in my pyjamas on the sofa, obsessively watching video after video, that Elise hadn't wanted to be plastered over the papers because of our relationship, but her hasty departure had stirred up something of a hornets' nest in the media. My tears weren't just because I loved and missed her. My tears were for a lost opportunity, brought about by my own stupid morals. If only I'd given her what she'd wanted, rather than insisting on being more open when she'd made it clear over and again she didn't want us to be, then I wouldn't be in this mess right now.

I spent time looking at a photo we'd taken in my apartment one time, both of us lying in bed, both devoid of any make-up and with hair sticking up in all directions. Despite how scruffy we looked, we both looked radiant-happy and comfortable in each other's presence. I stared at the picture relentlessly, remembering how she used to call me Holly Eight-Year, thinking about how I'd give anything to hear her call me that again. I took in every detail of her face in the photo, trying to recall all the things we'd talked about the day we took the photo, thinking back to how happy we'd been that day. How had it all gone so wrong?