Chapter 6: The Green Room
The city below his window was a circuit board of light, a silent, electric sprawl. Matt stood absolutely still, watching it. His own reflection was a ghost superimposed over the traffic patterns. He looked calm. He’d spent twenty years learning how to look calm.
His phone was a live wire in his hand.
He’d muted notifications an hour ago, but the habit was too deep. He thumbed the screen awake, opened Instagram, and went directly to her profile. Her story was still up. tomorrow at 5 mr blue eyes granted your wish, he is coming.
The comments were a river of insanity. He scrolled, his jaw tight.
He’s going to propose on stream, I’m calling it now.
A sharp, airless laugh punched out of him. It echoed in the sterile, elegant suite. Proposal. They’d reduced a decade of tangled, unspoken history into a cheap, five-minute plot twist. The absurdity of it was a physical pressure behind his ribs.
He couldn’t read anymore. It was like listening to a thousand people describe a painting they’d only glimpsed through a keyhole, getting every single brushstroke wrong.
He tapped her name in his messages. The cursor blinked. What did you say to the person who’d just thrown a lit match into your life and was currently fanning the flames with a grin?
He typed: You started a war. I hope you have a strategy.
The three dots appeared immediately. She was holding her phone, too. The thought of her alone in that amber-lit studio, watching the same digital firestorm, untied something in his chest.
Her reply was pure Dee: Strategy? I'm flying blind. You're the actor. Improvise.
A second message followed: tell them that you are dating somebody and I will fake a heart attack. That will put it to rest.
He could see her face as she typed it. The arched eyebrow, the wry twist of her mouth trying to deflect the genuine panic he knew she had to be feeling. The flippancy was her armor. He knew that. He wore a similar one.
He leaned back against the cool glass of the window. Typed: A heart attack. Dramatic. I like it. But introducing a fictional girlfriend feels like bringing a squirt gun to a napalm fight.
Got a better idea? she fired back.
He didn’t. That was the problem. Every scenario he ran in his head—the casual denial, the practiced laughter, the friendly shoulder touch—felt like a performance. And the worst part was, it was a performance. The one thing he didn’t know how to play was himself. Not with her. Not with ten thousand people watching.
We just be us, he typed, then deleted it. Too vague. Too risky. What was ‘us’? A collection of haircuts and inside jokes and a thousand moments of charged silence he’d never had the guts to bridge.
We stick to the truth, he sent instead. We’re friends. I get my hair cut. You’re good at it. The internet has a collective overactive imagination.
The truth, she replied. Cool. And what’s the truth about why you agreed to do this?
He stared at the question. The city lights blurred. Why had he agreed? Liza’s pressure. The brand synergy. The chance to control a narrative. All the professional, logical reasons crumbled like ash. The core reason was simple and terrifying: because she’d asked. Because when Dee Waldorf looked at him with those warm, challenging eyes and presented a frankly terrible idea, his resistance had the structural integrity of wet tissue paper.
He couldn’t type that.
His thumbs hovered. You know why, he wrote. Deleted. Because you’d have done it without me, he wrote. Also true. Also not the whole truth.
He settled on: Seemed easier than explaining to Liza for the hundredth time that we’re not a PR couple.
Her reply was instant: Coward.
He smiled. A real one this time, tired at the edges. Yeah.
Silence stretched between their phones. A comfortable, aching silence he was used to. It was the silence of the salon chair, her fingers in his hair, the quiet hum of something neither of them voiced. It felt more real than anything in the past six hours.
He walked away from the window, the plush carpet muffling his steps. He stopped in front of a large abstract painting on the wall, all angry slashes of red and grey. It meant nothing. It was a placeholder for a life that was all placeholders. Hotel suites. Film sets. Press lines. The only thing that ever felt solid, anchored, was that velvet chair in her studio.
His phone buzzed again.
I’m scared, her message read. No emoji. No deflection. Just two words that cracked the perfect facade of his suite wide open.
He closed his eyes. The admission was a gift and a burden. It meant she trusted him with the mess. It meant he couldn’t hide behind his own cool detachment anymore.
He called her.
She picked up on the second ring. He could hear the soft hum of her studio, the distant sound of a car horn. “Hey,” she said. Her voice was smaller than usual.
“Hey.” He sank onto the stiff, designer sofa. “Me too.”
“You don’t get scared. You give interviews to Anderson Cooper.”
“Anderson Cooper doesn’t matter,” he said, and it was the truest thing he’d said all day. “This does.”
A beat of silence on the line. He could picture her curling into the velvet chair, tucking her feet under her. “What if we mess it up?” she whispered.
“Then we mess it up. It’s hair. It’s not brain surgery.”
“It’s not about the hair, Matt.”
“I know.” He ran a hand through the hair she’d last cut. It was getting long at the sides. He’d waited, telling himself he was busy, but the truth was he liked having a reason to go back. “Look. Tomorrow, at five, I’m going to walk in. You’re going to roll your eyes at me for being late, even if I’m on time. You’ll make a joke about my split ends. I’ll make a joke about your playlist. We’ll do the thing we always do. The only difference is we’re leaving the door open so some people can watch.”
“They’re not ‘some people.’ They’re a mob with keyboards.”
“They’re just noise, Dee.” He said her name to ground himself. “The only people in that room will be you and me. Okay?”
He heard her take a slow, shaky breath. “Okay.”
“And for the record,” he added, his voice dropping into a softer register, “if I were going to propose, it wouldn’t be on a goddamn Instagram Live. I have some sense of theatricality.”
A wet laugh escaped her. “Noted. Good to know my hypothetical public humiliation has standards.”
“Always.” He smiled again. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah. See you.”
He hung up and let the phone fall onto the cushion beside him. The suite felt even quieter now, but the silence had changed. It was charged, like the air before a storm. He had told her they’d just be them. The problem, the thrilling and terrible problem, was that he had no idea what would happen if they ever truly were.