“For some people, it’s the difference between heaven and hell. Can you imagine?” he asks. “Anyway, so are you flicking the bean or not?”
“Not,” I tell him. “I’m just naked in the water.”
“Can you even see anything?” Damian asks.
“Well, again, I haven’t actually seen any of the pictures, but I don’t think much is left to the imagination,” I tell him. “It was low tide.”
“Okay,” he says. “So, you’ve got an ex who’s blackmailing you with some old nudie pics you had him take back when the two of you were a thing. You haven’t seen the pictures, you don’t know if they actually exist, but even if they do get out, there’s no sexual contact going on, only nudity. Fuck it,” he says, “I’d save my money and wait for the book offers to start rolling in.”
“Book off—” I start.
“People are into weird shit,” Damian says. “A lot of people are going to say that being betrayed like this humanizes you and a lot of other people are going to say that it humanizes you too much, that your mystique is gone and they’ll call for you to drop out of the spotlight. There are going to be parents groups and church groups that condemn you for acting in a manner that’s immoral and sets a bad example. While women are generally going to be understanding and sympathetic, there are going to be a lot of them that start calling you a skank.”
“What about men?” I ask. “We’ve covered just about every other demographic. How would they react to those pictures?”
Damian smiles and says, “How do you think?”
Well, this is just great.
“Overall, this really isn’t going to hurt you that much. You’re going to have a lot of people in the media turn on you, but even more will hop on your bandwagon, either because they want to fuck you or because they want to make some cash off the fact that you got fucked,” Damian says. “Overall, though,” he repeats, “this really isn’t going to hurt you that much.”
“So you’re saying I should just tell him to go screw himself and let what happens happen?” I ask.
“I’d start by finding out whether those pictures are real or not,” he says. “Pay attention. So that’s the worst case scenario of you not paying him off. If you do decide to pay him off,” Damian continues, “you run the risk that he ups the price on you or that the million only gets you some, not all, of the pictures, or that he otherwise tries to screw you. Best case scenario, he keeps his mouth shut, keeps the pictures in his drawer, and you end up paying him a shitload of money. Yeah,” he says, “I’d say you’re pretty well fucked.”
“I think the real worst case scenario would be the pictures get released and nobody cares,” I mutter.
“There’s always that,” he says. “I really don’t think you’ve got to worry about something like that happening, though.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“So,” he says, “we’ve got a few minutes before we’re halfway through waiting for the next scene to get set up. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?”
“What? Why?” I ask.
“Call it a favor for a favor,” he says. “So, what happened with the guy who’s blackmailing you? I can’t imagine he was that good of a boyfriend if he’s the kind of person that’s willing to do this to you.”
“He wasn’t,” I answer. “He wasn’t a very good person in general, actually.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Damian says. “Isn’t that a weird kind of response to the situation? What else is there to say, though? After a while in the dating world, everyone dates a few people that
should earn them a sorry, I guess. Were the two of you serious?”
“I was,” I answer. “I think. I don’t know that I was really all that serious about making it work with him. It was more that I was terrified of not being able to make a relationship work at all. I was just out of high school, and I was really insecure because I hadn’t really dated all that much, and why the hell am I telling you this?” I ask.
“I’m in the room,” he says.
Something in the way he says it convinces me to keep going, so I talk for a while about the nightmare that dating Ben really was and Damian just keeps nodding as I go.
“I don’t know, I guess if nothing else, he taught me that true love is a myth,” I conclude.
“Why do you say that?” Damian asks.
“We all just put whatever we want to see on whomever we’re with,” I tell him. “Most of the time I was with Ben, I didn’t see him as a neglectful, emotionally abusive dick. I saw him as the man that I loved, a man who was so patient with me that even when I was making all of these mistakes in my life, he would still take the time to tell me where I should go from there. It’s a rosy version of the truth, no doubt, but for a while, it was my only truth.”
“I guess you could say that we have a tendency to put our hopes on those we’re with,” Damian says, “but I don’t think that rules out love.”
“What’s love, though, if you’re never sure if your feelings for someone you’re with are there because of who it is they actually are or because they just happen to be fitting your narrative closely enough that you can scrawl out some of the details that you’d rather ignore?” I ask.