fic: GAG REEL (rpf) (2/3)

[falseeeyelashes]

J A N U A R Y
2 0 0 9

S u n d a n c e ;

They fly out to Sundance to premiere Adventureland at the start of the new year. Kristen hates flying, and she gets drunk at JFK while she waits for her flight with him. She drinks gin because she likes the way it warms her chest, and Bill doesn’t comment, but he doesn’t drink beyond that first beer she bought for him.

She falls asleep next to him before their plane even leaves the runway. They idle there for a half-hour and she misses take-off completely, already asleep and tucked up against the side of his body.

When she wakes up, her body is draped heavy against his, her hand on his thigh, his fingers combing absently through her hair. He’s reading some Raymond Chandler book; he’s been on a real pulp kick as of late and his desk has been littered with small little Chandler and Dashiell Hammett paperbacks. He’s listening to his iPod, his head bobbing slightly to the beat. She watches him through slanted eyes and he flips a page with one hand, the tips of his fingers brushing against her scalp, unaware that she is awake. The plane dark, the light over his seat on, hers off, and she nuzzles his shoulder a little as she wakes fully and he finally looks down at her.

Kristen glances around and catches Kristen (Stewart) looking over her shoulder at her and Bill strangely. Kristen blinks, and without thinking, rubs her hand against his thigh. His whole body stiffens, but he still has his hand in her hair and he looks at her curiously.

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Blotto,” he teases. “You sleep off the booze?”

She rubs at her eyes, but her head is still resting against his shoulder. The armrest that should be between their bodies is raised (she doesn’t remember doing that; she distinctly remembers falling asleep with that armrest biting into her ribcage and being either too tired or drunk to care about it), and there is no point where their bodies are not touching.

“How long was I asleep?” she asks.

He shrugs, his shoulder moving under her face. “An hour? Maybe?”

“So we still have way too many hours until we land.”

“Like, two. Two is not too many.”

She yawns. She cuddles up a little closer to him and his hand drops down to her neck.

“What are you listening to?”

“Radiohead.” He pulls one ear bud from his ear and hands it to her. She slips it in her ear.

Kristen listens a little, and Bill goes back to reading. Her eyes slant to shut again as Thom Yorke warbles . . . whatever in her ear set against some remix hip hop beat. There is no sound of the pages turning and when she opens her eyes, just a little, she finds that he is on the same page he was when she woke.

She closes her eyes, and Bill moves his fingers through her hair again.

They spend their time out at Sundance drifting from interview to interview, the same questions, the same canned (yet sincere) accolades for Greg. The same comparisons between Saturday Night Live acting and cinematic acting. The same chorus of open-ended comments from interviewers about how natural their chemistry is. How great, how refreshing, how enjoyable, entertaining, believable. The words all serve as interchangeable praise, and each time they are lobbed their way they each seem to be at a loss for words. She laughs sometimes, and he’ll offer their thanks.

It’s a strange thing to be complimented on though -- your ability to build a rapport with a fellow costar. Your ability to convince the audience in the handful of scenes you are granted that you love each other, that you’re a pair, that you belong together.

In a way, they’re the faux married couple the entire time they are there just as they were faux married the entire time they were on set. So when they get drunk their last night there, the only night it snows and the night when the local Utah news warns of high velocity winds and low visibility, and when they are alone it makes sense that he kisses her.

He kisses her.

She kisses him back, but he kisses her first.

It’s sort of a miracle that they made it to Sundance without this ever happening before. They have skirted the edge before. She spends too much time with him and he spends too much time with her. It’s no longer 2005 and it’s not 2006, and Kristen is now all but divorced. She’s alone. It’s 2009 and she’s apartment hunting. She’s in Utah; she’s alone, but she’s with him.

That first year they both had been overwhelmed, by the job and by other people, and their friendship had been built fast but steady. She was a newlywed, and just as quickly, so was he. But he makes her feel guilty, to a certain degree. For him, she knows that first year, that in 2005 and in 2006, the only woman that mattered to him was Maggie. She was everything and he saw nothing else. He saw no one else; there was no room for that.

Kristen thinks it would be great if she could say the same thing about that year. That in 2005, in 2006, for a year, a month, a day, Hayes was everything she wanted. That he occupied that space inside her and there was never room for anyone or anything else, but she’s not entirely sure that has ever been the case.

2009 in Utah she comes as close as she has ever come to saying that name inside her head Hayes had so desperately wanted to hear only a couple of months before.

Bill kisses her. She kisses him back.

The tilt, the change, has led them here. She believes that. She believes in inevitabilities the same way she believes hard work will get you what you want. They are two ideas that should run parallel, two ideas that should never touch, but in her mind they do. In her mind they both can stand true.

I did everything for you and you don’t even have any room left for me there’s no fucking room just tell me his name just tell me his fucking name.

He kisses her first. She thinks she has wanted him longer than he has wanted her, but of the two of them, he has always been more open and obvious about it (he’s the one she caught looking and not the other way around), like he can’t keep the want he has for her contained inside.

Like he can’t keep her contained inside himself.

They’re drunk. They’re in his hotel room when he kisses her, and they split a twelve-pack of beer they bought at the small liquor store in town. They watched an old James Bond movie (a Dalton iteration, and she had to endure not only Timothy Dalton’s take on James Bond but Bill’s bizarrely impassioned rant in defense of the dude), and she was cold so she borrowed a sweater of his that she will never give back.

He does not kiss her until she goes to leave. He kisses her next to the door, and it’s both the most obvious and most unexpected thing ever.

She said, as she stumbled off his bed, stuck her feet in her boots and left them untied, “I need to pack and, like, rearrange my life before our flight tomorrow morning.”

He snorted and he stood up too, dragged a hand through his too long hair leaving it messy and standing up in disarray.

“Thanks for the beer and the Timothy Dalton,” she said at the door, the sleeves of his sweater too long on her and they hide her hands. And he was right there, his messy hair and wide mouth, wide eyes, sharp jaw, and she was suddenly sad that Sundance was over for them, that no one was going to look at them as though they were a matched pair that belonged together, that that time was over, and she was aware, in such an acute and terrible way, that this was the point where things can go forward, forward and not back, and maybe he was aware too, or maybe he just liked the way his clothes looked on her or he liked her face or he never quite knew what to do with her when her face went sad and honest on him, but this was the point, this was it.

This is when he kisses her.

His mouth is hot over hers and he cups her jaw as he kisses her, his body bent to meet hers; her own face is raised up to his, and it takes only that first kiss before her fingers curl into the front of his shirt (she can feel his chest under his t-shirt, under her fingertips, solid mass and muscle and bone) and she kisses him back. When she kisses him back, he grabs at her waist and he holds her too tight, but then he’s always been guilty of that, he has always held her too tight.

They kiss sloppy and eagerly, her neck craned back and him bearing over her, his fingers fisted in her hair at the base of her neck. He eats at her mouth and the stubble along his jaw rubs raw against her face. She can’t stop making these small little sounds when he starts pushing his hips against hers, pushing her back against the wall next to the door, grabbing at her thigh and spreading her legs wider, pushing her up on the very tips of her toes, his hips braced under hers, rocking hard against her as he pants into her opened mouth.

She’s the one to pull back from him. She doesn’t say anything at first and she keeps her eyes closed. She can feel his breath on her face, his hips still flush with her own, and there are so many things she wants right now, so many things she wants that should not be attainable. She thinks he’s one of those things. She thinks they have gone scattershot here, off-balance and off-kilter. She has the taste of him in her mouth, and he has the taste of her, and that changes things. That’s why she opens her eyes and she looks at him, up-close, his mouth right there, and she says, “I need to go to bed.”

He doesn’t stop her when she leaves his hotel room. She never returns his sweater.

The next morning her mouth feels bruised and abraded. She spends the flight exclusively talking to Kristen and sometimes Jesse but mainly listening to her iPod, and even over that she can hear Bill laughing with Martin and Greg in the row behind her.

She makes a quiet promise to herself that this whole thing, this trip, his mouth on her mouth, is a thing that will never happen again. It was an anomaly. It was not the culmination of things; it was not all building to this.

The formula of the comic triple, and this right here was the third element. The unexpected twist. The train going off the tracks. And, she thinks, you never tell the same joke the same way twice. And, she thinks, they won’t return to here.

You never tell the same joke twice, and certainly not three times.

S P R I N G
2 0 0 9

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

She was wrong.

The third element is waiting for them back in New York.

The third element: his wife is pregnant.

I wanted him, I had him, he was already another woman’s problem!

Rimshot.

Applause.

This is the after-Sundance era and this means they are being good. They are being good which means they aren’t doing any of the wrong, bad things they used to do.

The wrong, bad things include:

Hanging out at his desk when she’s supposed to be writing or when she needs a break. She pals around with Will and Jason a little more often than before. She takes more coffee breaks with Maya. And on his end, he and Andy seem to be coming up with more and more half-baked ideas for laser cats or whatever;

Hugging after the show, on-stage, with everyone else. She’s not sure that’s a wrong, bad thing in it of itself, but it is a thing they no longer really do. And that’s not so rare itself: it’s a small stage, but there a lot of people, and if she keeps to stage right and he tends to stage left that means there are a lot of people in between and there are a lot of people she should be hugging that are not him. It’s kind of like they are behaving like they’re feuding, like they’re mad at each other, and sure, they get mad at each other, they totally have in the past, because she can be intolerable and stubborn just as much as he can be intolerable and stubborn (and also obtuse and narrow-minded and all too glib), but the problem with that is that they can never stay mad at each other for long, and just as they can never stay mad for long they never can really avoid each other either. But when they are mad at each other (and she thinks he is mad at her now, mad at her for trying to be a good person or whatever or maybe mad that she avoided him after Sundance, mad that she’s taking the high road and leaving him to ponder the low road, but whatever, fuck him, except not, because that’s sort of the problem here) he’d stay to his side of the stage and Kristen wouldn’t approach him, and sometimes it was because she knew he was still mad or he knew she was still mad, or worst of all, he was afraid of what would happen if he touched her outside the guise of character. She assumes that was the fear because that is her fear now, all bright and real and tempting and wrong and bad. So now he’ll stay to his side of the stage and she’ll stay to hers, and when Abby asks her if she’s fighting with Bill, Kristen’s response is a long yowl of “Whaaaaaaat?”;

Getting drunk with him at the after parties. Getting drunk with him in general. She goes out with the girls more and more and her tolerance increases shockingly and exponentially over that spring the more she drinks with Amy (“She’s a tank, it’s insane, I’m convinced she has, like, a secret colostomy bag she funnels all that booze into,” she tells Bill one afternoon when they’re rehearsing and he does the wrong, bad thing and starts teasing her about her hangover);

Sleeping on his couch, letting him sleep on her couch, texting him in the middle of the night when something dumb and amazing occurs to her or the world’s best infomercial is airing (the designation of the world’s best infomercial changes regularly, dependent on the hour, her state of sobriety, and the absurdity of the commercial in general) or she’s drunk and he’s not there with her so she’ll call him and even if he answers, even if it’s his voicemail, she’ll say, “Hi just calling to let you know I’m mad at you bye,” and he’ll call her back if only to laugh at her and that’s bad and it’s bad to answer his own late-night texts when he orders her to read some book he’s now obsessed with (he’s obsessed with something new every two to three weeks and it’s like he expects her to keep up, hence the three A.M. texts that are more exclamation points than actual letters) or he just so happened to remember something hilarious and random and he just had to share it with her because “she’d get it,” and it’s that part -- i had to tell u bc i knew you’d totally get it ok --that makes them the actual worst and wrong and bad and that makes all this a wrong, bad thing to be done away with in the spirit of being good and better people who don’t stray or lose direction.

She stops thinking about it and she stops thinking about him. She starts dating more. She signs the divorce papers. She rents a new apartment. She does the whole moving on thing and she likes to think she has done it pretty well. There are certain patterns she can discern but she will not allow any credence for, that she will not award any merit. She met Bill the same year she married Hayes. The year she divorced Hayes, Bill’s daughter was born. She has known Bill for longer than her marriage lasted. These are things that shouldn’t matter. There isn’t a pattern. There’s nothing to see here. She stops thinking about it.

It’s all easier said than done though.

Mid-spring James Franco hosts and it’s like some sort of spring fever-fueled restlessness that leads them all not only to the after party but doing it up in a grand fashion befitting a college spring break crew. The party goes super raucous super fast and it’s all shots and loud Jamaican music and Amy doing some sort of Stomp-inspired reggae dance at the bar.

Franco is just one weird cat, no bones about that, and Kristen has a hard time holding onto the thread of conversation with him. But the guys seem to love him, Andy and Bill in particular.

She gets drunk. Bill is hammered and Maggie isn’t there. That’s two wrong, bad things right there.

She goes outside for what she says is fresh air but when she gets out there she lights up a cigarette she bummed off of one of the Kings of Leon or whatever and leans back heavy against the brick wall.

She’s out there for awhile, watching the traffic and the really, really drunk girls across the street shriek at each other (one is apparently “a slut” while the other is “the dumbest fucking ho I ever fucking seen,” neither of which appear to be fully capable to navigate the conversation or the sidewalk in their platform heels) as she smokes.

Suddenly the reggae music inside the club gets really loud as the door opens, and then it’s quiet once again. It’s quiet, and she hears Bill say, “There you are.”

She smiles small at him over her shoulder and he joins her in the alley.

“Dirty habit,” Bill says to her but he bums the cigarette off of her anyway -- their fingers brushing as he takes it from her and slips it between his own lips and inhales. She watches him smoke. She likes watching him smoke. She likes when he does things that shouldn’t fit her view of him -- the wrong, bad things he does and can do, the things that don’t match the funny good guy persona he embodies so easily. Not that she doesn’t think he’s a funny good guy -- he is, there’s no question of that -- but sometimes it’s easy to forget or ignore the other facets, that parts that make him incongruous, the parts that can smile mean and the parts with the venom and bite. The parts of him that know how to smoke a cigarette naturally, like he’s no stranger to vice. That doesn’t add up, but at the same time it does. She doesn’t give him enough credit. That’s the moral here, she thinks. She doesn’t give him enough credit.

She snags her cigarette back from him. She’s gained a few inches on him in the towering heels she’s wearing but she still has to look up to meet his gaze. She takes the final drag off the cigarette and then stamps it out underfoot. The girls across the street are gone and the door to the club has stayed shut and the taxis are quiet as they crawl Ninth Avenue, and he’s looking at her like he hasn’t seen her in a long, long time.

“I miss you,” she says suddenly, and then she starts laughing. It’s so overwrought. They’re drunk and they’re smoking in the alleyway next to some terrible Jamaican-infused club and she’s telling him that she misses him.

He doesn’t laugh though. He looks at her fondly (she wants to use the word fondly because any other word makes her feel anxious) and leans into her a little. Their shoulders bump together. She looks up at him, and he’s looking down at their feet and the still smoldering cigarette she just stepped on.

“I miss you too,” he says, his voice a quiet rumble, and this is wrong and this is bad, but the fact that it’s wrong and it’s bad doesn’t seem to matter all that much anymore. They’re on the same page here. She misses him and he misses her. She misses the way things used to be. She’s not sure what kind of person that makes her, but she doesn’t move away from him and she doesn’t apologize for missing him.

They stand side-by-side in silence until she starts laughing again and launches into a retelling of the truly disastrous date she endured the week before, and he laughs too and he makes fun of her and she laughs and if that’s wrong and that’s bad then maybe deep down they’re just wrong and bad and what’s the point in fighting that.

They seem to be sliding back to something familiar, something that had been once theirs and then abandoned, and it’s so easy to reclaim it.

Too easy.

The slide continues. By the end of the season, things have gone more or less back to normal (if normal is a word you can ever in good conscience use to describe the both of them) and whatever experiment they had played at after Sundance forgotten and unspoken of. They work together until late in the night, early in the morning. The calls and the texts resume.

Everything wrong and bad reasserts itself, but she no longer finds herself labeling it that way anymore.

“Someone called me Kiki the other day,” she tells him Monday morning, Alec Baldwin the host that week, and they’re all gearing up for the pitch meeting, “and I was like whyyyyy would you do that? And they were like, I thought you’d like that.”

He laughs breathlessly. “Calling you that from now on. ‘And this, old chap, is my dear friend Kiki,’” he says in a vaguely European sounding voice.

“Don’t you dare. Fair warning: your new name will be Bibi then.” He laughs harder.

“Like BB King?”

“Or Bebe Neuwirth.”

“Bibi Netanyahu.”

He laughs again. “The Adventures of Bibi and Kiki!”

“Just two kids on the run! Looking for delights and diners and and and dinosaurs!”

“But only ever finding cocaine!”

She laughs until she snorts.

“We should totally pitch this today.”

“David Lynch takes on Dora the Explorer.”

“Exactly! Exactly what I was thinking.” She leans back in her chair.

“Even the ensuing bizarre and unsettling eroticism that would accompany this masterwork?”

She holds her arms open in a sign of agreement. “You get me, Bibi.”

“Yo tambien, Kiki.”

S E P T E M B E R
2 0 0 9

N e w
M e x i c o ;

Before the start of the season they make a movie about an alien out west.

The two of them have a lot of downtime, and yet not a single scene together, not a single exchange of dialogue.

They have a blast anyway.

They do a lot of late night shoots, the desert cool, and most of the time spent blowing off steam and joking around. Simon and Joe are the champs at making up the most mindless and most weirdly hilarious games, and they play them, and they’re stupid, and in the future Kristen will remember this as one of the most fun times she’s ever had.

Bateman likes to make fun of them, but then Bateman likes to make fun of everyone. Bateman likes to think he’s the salted old pro of the group and his mere presence amongst the cast is sort of akin to god’s great gift or something -- or at least that’s what Kristen hears. She finds Bill’s open contempt for him hilarious. If anything, it’s always been Kristen with an ill word for someone and Bill laughing at her abject animosity. Sure, he’d join her in whining and complaining and the inevitable mocking and name-calling, but this time it’s him leading the offense.

“He’s a dick,” he complains one night and Kristen just snickers at him, punch-drunk and strung out on too many Red Bulls and not nearly enough sleep or food or other important things a person supposedly needs to function.

“When you write your tell-all memoir at the plum age of, like, sixty-five you can devote an entire chapter to his diva antics and how he picked on your oversized head and made you cry to your beautiful and wise and talented costar, footnote one Kristen Wiig, footnote two no one made fun of her because she was perfect.”

“Footnote three they made fun of her behind her back because she was the ugliest crier anyone had ever seen, footnote four and they had all seen Will Forte cry, footnote five she was uglier.”

Her jaw drops and she starts laughing. “Rude,” she says, and she flicks an olive at him. He plucks it off his sleeve and pops it in his mouth. Kristen makes a grotesque and disgusted face and he swallows and smiles.

Simon takes too many behind-the-scenes photos and too many videos. He only publishes a couple of the photos in, like, Entertainment Weekly or something, and she’s really glad the rest didn’t reach public consumption.

Intimate is really the only word to describe how her and Bill look in those photos: huddled together over his iPhone sharing the same blanket, him sleeping on her shoulder, her braiding his hair that one time (it’s so short now though! and that might have been the weirdest surprise ever that first day of filming! he looked like a normal, well-kept human instead of, well, Bill!), et cetera, et cetera.

She knows Andy has even worse photos, his Blackmail File, of not only her but HerAndBill, but Andy’s like family. Andy’s in on the joke.

Andy gets the potential consequences.

They get stoned together towards the end of filming.

She never asks him where he scored the weed, but the simple fact that he not only did but wants to share it with her is amusing enough.

They’ve wrapped for the day, and even though she showered she can’t seem to rid herself of the thin layer of dust that seems to cling to her skin.

He passes her the blunt and she takes another hit while he scrolls through his iTunes or whatever. “Can you imagine if we’d been stoned the entire time we filmed this mess?” she asks and starts giggling. She’s tucked her body into the opposite corner of the couch and he looks at her over his shoulder as something super mellow and quiet and, like, college-y starts playing on his laptop.

“We’d be in Mexico by now, on the run from Bateman, and the law, and I joined a mariachi band by day and a knife-fighting ring by night and you work the door at the knife-fighting ring and tell everyone your name is Consuelo and we bought a cocker spaniel with our knife-fight earnings and we drive around with it trying to evade justice and the law and Jason Bateman.”

She slumps a little lower on the couch.

“You’ve given this a whole lot of thought,” she teases.

He blinks at her, and smiles, almost sheepishly, and shrugs before he says, “You’re all I really think about anyway.”

And maybe it’s the weed (and it is great weed), or maybe it’s the sense of how remote they are right now -- the middle of the desert, New York so far away, almost invented by them it seems, at least now, at least with all the dirt and the sand and the way Bill’s pale skin gets ruddy in the sun and the heat here, but it feels like every line they have ever drawn and never talked about is without meaning. It all feels completely arbitrary, a charade, just another sketch for them to act in.

Or maybe it’s just the way he says, “You’re all I really think about anyway,” and he makes it sound innocent and predatory all at the same time, he makes it sound like he means it and she believes him when he says it, and maybe that means nothing else really has to matter.

But her pulse feels like it’s taken over her throat, and she’s starting to think there’s something wrong with the west, that they go wrong when they head to the west and they leave New York, or maybe they don’t go wrong at all. Maybe they can see clearly in the west and it only feels wrong because she’s used to the city.

He doesn’t try to backtrack though. He doesn’t try to save the conversation and he doesn’t say that he doesn’t mean it like that, come on, Kristen, your ego is terrifying. He’s just looking at her, and he says, matter-of-fact and unabashed, “I think about you -- all the time.”

If this was a romantic comedy about good strong people and she was the heroine and he was the hero, she’d be the stronger person. She would sit up straight and she’d take his hand in hers and she would outline each and every reason why he’s not allowed to think about her, how there already exists a woman who should occupy his thoughts, and it isn’t her.

But she’s stoned in a trailer out in New Mexico, and she’s not that great of a person, she never has been. And maybe he’s a good person, but he’s sacrificed that. He’s shown his hand. He said: I think about you -- all the time.

So she looks at him. So she says, her voice quiet and deadly serious, “I think about you too.”

She sighs heavily, and the room is charged with all the big things they never have the guts to say, all the big things except for the one big thing they have just given voice to: they live in each other, they’ve become a part of each other.

The worst thing, she thinks, has already come to pass.

You’re all I really think about anyway.

She’s wearing a short floral skirt and her legs are bare. Her fingers are curled over the short hem, her knuckles brushing against her thighs, and, like him, she says it again. She says, “I think about you all the time.”

Something changes in his face. His pupils are blown to hell, but she’s not sure how much of that is the weed and how much could be her.

“Yeah?” he says, his voice low and kind of broken. His gaze keeps cutting from her face down to her hands, the stretch of her legs, and back again.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, and without thinking about it, she pushes her skirt up her legs, just a little.

And let the record reflect that in the future she will forever blame the weed and she’ll blame Ray LaMontagne or whatever the fuck he has playing on his laptop, and she’ll blame New Mexico and she’ll blame the heat and she’ll blame him for being honest, she’ll blame all of that for what happens next.

There are major potential consequences here, but she’s not thinking of them. No one is here to record this moment. No one is here to figure out where this rests in the pattern that has been their relationship from the start. No one is here but the both of them, no one is watching her but him.

She can almost believe in this moment that she’s the only woman that matters to him.

She drags her skirt the rest of the way up her thighs, and she can hear the way his breathing goes shallow. Nothing about this seems like a good idea, but nothing about it seems wrong either -- more inevitable than anything, and when she touches herself, the front of her plain white panties, she’s not really thinking about anything other than how good it feels, how she likes that he’s watching, how he sounds when he sucks in a harsh breath.

She rubs at herself, her hips arching just a little, her knee bent and raised. She bites her bottom lip, finds it hard to look at him the longer she does this, but she’s too wet, too aching for it, to stop now.

And it’s like he knows. He reaches over, his body between her splayed thighs and he bats her hand out of the way. Her thighs shake a little when he drags her panties down off her legs, and she can’t not moan, high and surprised, when he rubs the pad of his thumb down the line of her cunt. He slips two fingers inside of her, his other hand holding her thigh down against the couch, and it takes hardly anything to finish her off: a few noisy, wet twists of his fingers and him saying roughly, “This doesn’t count,” as he leans over her.

His words bring her back. She comes, but his words bring her back. There’s all this bizarre guilt associated with what they’re doing. His wife is getting ready to drop a baby, and here she is in New Mexico fucking around with him, and somehow, for whatever reason, this doesn’t count.

So she reaches for the fly of his jeans. And both their fingers work his jeans open, and he takes his cock in hand.

She looks up at him, mouth dry, and shifts a little under him. He laughs but it sounds more like choking.

“I wouldn’t last two seconds,” he says, breathless and still laughing, but the tendons are strained and tight at his neck. His cock is already dripping, and he’s pumping himself.

Kristen sits up and bumps her nose and mouth just under his jaw. He exhales, shaky, the start of a grunt. His free arm is looped around her back, his hand under her shirt and creeping up to her breast. Her bare thighs press against his, her cunt wet and warm against his skin.

“Fuck, Jesus,” he mutters, and she thinks it would be wrong to kiss him. That they’re playing at some weird rule here, embracing moral relativism a little too enthusiastically, and kissing him would somehow be worse than his fingers inside of her, so she wraps her hand around the base of his cock and squeezes.

The sound he makes seems to stick in his mouth, and their hands bump together over his cock. She sort of whimpers against his neck, and that’s it: he’s thrusting up into her hand and he’s coming.

“It’s fine,” she whispers as he catches his breath.

“This doesn’t count.”

They finish filming two days later.

They return to New York and they return for the start of the thirty-fifth season of SNL.

And like everything else that has come before, like every other moment they have discounted as some sort of aberration, they never talk about New Mexico.

They never talk about the desert.

It didn’t count.

J A N U A R Y
2 0 1 0

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

After a gross amount of time, Bridesmaids is actually going to be a thing that exists.

For the last month, Kristen has been cutting her time among Los Angeles and New York and rewrites with Annie and Paul Feig’s office and Judd Apatow’s office, and the end result of it all is starting to look like some bizarre cinematic reality.

They’re currently in the process of looking for someone to play her love interest, and she knows they’re sitting down with auditions and tapes later in the week out in LA. Paul already has a couple favorites, but so does Judd, and it’s Judd who brought up the obvious at their most recent meeting.

He said: what’s Hader doing these days?

Which is how, she guesses, that she winds up at a coffee shop with Bill in the middle of the afternoon asking him to be her fictional lover.

She looks pointedly at him from across the table.

“Come on,” he says with a nervous laugh and throws the script down onto the table. “I’ve already played one Apatow-backed cop.”

“True,” she bites on her pen cap. “But God, how that’d make my life so much easier.” He laughs again and leans back in his seat. “You’re so easy to boss around,” she teases. “So . . . pliant.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Hey! I am not those things! I am not pliant! I do not yield.” He leans forward again and points at her. “This is exactly why I’m not allowed to play your . . . your cop lover,” he says. She tries to take a sip of her coffee despite the fact that she’s laughing at him, her shoulders shaking as she swallows.

“You’d take advantage of me,” he says, pretending to sound wounded. Kristen snorts.

She salutes him. “Apologies, Officer.”

His smile goes all mean and devilish, dark, and she knows that grin. Something clenches low in her gut and she resists the urge to press her thighs together under the table.

That’s the real reason, she thinks, why he could never play her kind-hearted love interest -- his face would betray him.

“We role playing now?” he asks, and the script in front of him is completely forgotten. His focus is now completely on her.

She rolls her eyes, an attempt to defuse the weird tension that has settled between them.

“Our entire relationship is premised on role play,” she says. He goes for a look of surprise, but there’s still that glint in his eye.

“Well, hell-o, Nurse. Want me to turn my head and cough?”

She smirks despite herself and shakes her head. “Cops and nurses aren’t even a thing. Cops and robbers? Yeah. Doctors and nurses? Sure. Cops and nurses? That’s a new one. That’s undocumented.”

He waves her off. “We’re mixing it up. I’m a cop who has stopped in for my one-year check-up, and you’re the dirty nurse who is really into testicular health. Like, really into it.”

“Very elaborate,” she dead-pans. “You’ve given this some thought.”

“Nah, the porn industry has given this some thought. I’m merely a consumer. An avid consumer.”

Kristen considers him for a minute, the pen cap hanging out of her mouth again. His eyes keep darting to it, the blue plastic mangled and marked by her teeth, and she hastily, and not too gracefully, spits it out.

“What’d they hook the handcuffs around in a doctor’s office?” she asks, deliberately serious, and Bill laughs hard.

“Dirty nurse!” he chides.

And this is how they wind up creating a sketch that ultimately gets shelved between dress and the actual show:

Bill, the inept porn actor, and Kristen an actual nurse, the entire premise revolving around miscommunication, bad porn dialogue, and how doctor’s offices are hardly the best venue for bondage.

It bombs, the only two laughing Kristen and Bill.

M A R C H
2 0 1 0

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

She has to learn how to bake for her role in Bridesmaids.

Well, she doesn’t need to learn, but she likes the idea of being able to bake really elaborate cupcakes or whatever or just eating really elaborate cupcakes and saying it’s all in the name of character development.

“Wanna come watch me bake cupcakes?” she asks Bill.

His eyebrows scrunch together.

“Is that a euphemism?”

He comes over anyway, and sits at her kitchen counter, flipping through an old Urban Outfitters catalog as she stirs up a bowl of cake batter, old Sonic Youth playing on her iPod.

“You’re not going to help?” she asks with an expression of faux outrage.

He raises an eyebrow and takes a long pull from his beer. “Not really my wheelhouse,” he says.

“Mine either,” she says as she stirs. She licks some batter off the side of her hand and he watches her. “Kinda why I’m attempting this right now.”

“What? No baking body double?”

“We were going to have Paula Deen sub in for me, but the studio said she was too expensive,” she jokes.

He laughs, even though it’s a weak joke, and he moves on from the Urban Outfitters catalog to an even older issue of the New Yorker she’s pretty sure she never read.

While the cupcakes bake (“do I set a timer? or do I just guess? I think I just want to guess”) he reads lines with her, his Maya Rudolph impression pretty admirable.

She frosts the first cupcake messily, nothing at all like what that lady in charge of that baking class she took a month or so back achieved. She has the shakiest hands and Bill laughs as he watches her.

“Have you been secretly suffering from Parkinson’s all this time and you never told me? Or are you having a stroke right now?”

“Shut up,” she laughs.

The second cupcake turns out far better than the first.

“The first was an experiment,” she says.

“And the other twenty-odd unfrosted cupcakes?”

“Leftovers.”

She takes a big bite of the cupcake and smears frosting all over her mouth. “Not to toot my own horn,” she mumbles, “but I’m totally tooting it: this is a damn fine cupcake.”

He gets up and comes around to the other side of the counter.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he says in a haughty British accent, and she arches an eyebrow.

She expects him to take the cupcake out of her hand, but instead he rubs his thumb over the frosting stuck to her lips. She sucks in a sharp breath, and if he notices, he doesn’t say anything. He licks his thumb after, and all he says is, “mmm,” before taking a bite out of her cupcake.

“Delicious,” he says with his mouth full.

“Victory!” she sings, but her voice sounds kinda hollow. It’s just, he’s still looking at her mouth, and he’s looking at her neck, and for the first time in a long time, for the first time since the desert, when New Mexico didn’t count, when Sundance never happened, she thinks they might let that tension snap.

And they do. He does.

He kisses her. His mouth tastes too sugary sweet, and she’s sure hers does as well, but she can still taste him. There’s still that part of him that doesn’t taste quite like anyone else she’s ever kissed, his tongue hot and wet as it pushes into her mouth. She moans without meaning to, her fingers, still sticky, in his hair and scratching at his scalp, and he pushes her back against the counter. The edge digs into her back, but it doesn’t really matter; she still squirms against him, and he still works a hand under her t-shirt. She arches her spine that much more, and his hand slips under the waistband of her jeans and grabs at her ass.

She can hear a ringing in her ears.

She can her a ringing.

It’s his phone, and of course it's his phone, and they both seem to realize it at the same moment and they freeze. He rests his forehead against hers and catches his breath. He pulls back and looks at his phone. It’s his wife. Of course it’s his wife. Anymore, Kristen finds herself thinking of her exclusively that way: His Wife, capital letters and all.

Bill pulls back even farther, takes a wide step over to her fridge and studies her assorted magnets and takeout coupons as he answers his phone. She watches him for a beat, self-conscious and strange feeling before she turns around.

Kristen starts washing the dishes. She has no right to feel wounded by this. She knows that. The rational part of her thinks she’s an idiot for even considering nursing that hurt. But then, the rational part of her always thinks she’s an idiot, especially where Bill is concerned.

When he hangs up (and she knows he hangs up because even though she wasn’t listening, not really, her apartment goes quiet, even though she’s not listening she hears him say good-bye), he says, “I should go.”

She flashes him a quick smile over her shoulder as she rinses a wooden spoon. “Yup,” she says.

She turns back to the sink and the hot water. She doesn’t say anything else. She thinks that this is yet another thing that doesn’t count, and she thinks she wants it to. She thinks she likes him in her kitchen and she wants that to be a thing that counts.

She drops the wooden spoon onto the drying rack, and she can feel him at her back, the solid width of his chest pressed against her and she doesn’t move.

He kisses the back of her head and then he squeezes her shoulder.

“See you tomorrow morning,” he says, and they do.

They see each other tomorrow morning. They see each other, and he says, his grin filthy:

“You didn’t bring me the leftovers?”

The following day she drops a tupperware container off at his desk.

Inside, half a dozen cupcakes (plus one) spell out the word ASSHOLE.

He’s still laughing about it that evening at dress rehearsal.

J A N U A R Y
2 0 1 1

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

She goes to bikram yoga with Annie down in Lower Manhattan, right off of Fulton Street.

She only goes because Annie a) promises it will be hilarious, and b) promises that Kristen gets to pick what they’ll eat for dinner after.

There’s no show that week, and there wasn’t a show the week before that or the week before that, and Kristen has spent the better part of the last month mainlining Bravo TV and re-editing the script for Bridesmaids, so convincing her to come is easy.

Bikram yoga, as it were, is not.

They leave immediately after, mutually deciding that this place is a hell Dante had yet to learn of and the female creatures nudely occupying the locker room were hell beasts they had no desire to interact with, so they towel off as they stagger down the stairs, both shouting at each other.

“That was terrible!” Kristen shouts. “That was the living and absolute worst!”

“I sat through an all-male rendition of The Sound of Music last week and this was worse than even that,” Annie hisses.

They step out onto the sidewalk, the sun already set, and they both shiver. It’s unseasonably warm for January, but still cold, and Kristen rubs her hands together frantically.

“My sweat is going to freeze all over me. You’re going to have to crack me open when we get home,” Kristen says, her teeth chattering. She reaches in her bag and wraps that faux pashmina thing Casey bought all the girls that year she was at SNL for Christmas.

Annie’s laughter switches all of the sudden to a low, mean snickering. “Oh my god, of all the gin joints and all the bikram yoga hotspots,” she says and starts laughing harder.

“What?” Kristen wipes at her neck and her hand comes away wet. She scowls and then looks at Annie, and then she looks at where Annie is looking.

Walking down the street, complete with wife and child, is Bill.

She hasn’t seen him at all this entire month, and for a very real split second she considers hiding behind the overflowing trashcan next to her.

“You got to be fucking kidding me,” she mutters. “You think he sees us? You think they saw us? You think -- yup, they saw us, yup, they’re coming this way, fucking A.”

Annie’s holding her side as she laughs, more air than sound, and Kristen rolls her eyes. Kristen thinks she hates Annie in this moment. And, okay, sure, it’s not like Kristen ever sat down with Annie and laid her hands and her cards on the table and said, “Annie I’d like to bare my soul to you and tell my secrets and inform you that I am Madame Bovarying it up with a fellow coworker whom you happen to know as Bill Hader and while intercourse has yet to occur it is a thing I want and a thing I think he wants in similar desperate achy really needy ways the end,” but it’s Annie and Annie knows things, like a savant or Miss Jessica the tarot card reader on 5th Avenue or one of the wise men who visited the Baby Jesus and brought myrrh, so Annie likes to bring Bill up in conversation and Annie likes it even more when Kristen brings him up.

“Get your shit together,” Kristen hisses and elbows Annie in the ribs. She glances down at herself and deems it all unsalvageable and tosses the end of the wrap over her shoulder hiding the better part of her sweat-coated torso.

“Hey stranger,” he calls. “What brings you down to our neck of the woods?” She’s not sure why she didn’t put two and two together when Annie mentioned Fulton Street earlier. Bill’s always talking about the new place he’s renting and how long it takes to haul ass into work. Maggie waves at her but doesn’t say anything, and Annie just kinda smiles at the both of them, her face pink with either schadenfreude or the bikram yoga or a little bit of both.

“Yeah, we were doing that bikram yoga . . . thing,” Kristen says. She’s still dripping sweat and her thin tank top is clinging to the sports bra she has on underneath. She shifts a little, uncomfortable. She feels crazy self-conscious and Annie is the absolute and total complete worst for just standing there, equally sweaty, but looking like she’s seconds from just bursting into laughter. “Charles Barkley is a big, uh, proponent. And Kareem Abdul Jabaar.”

“And Madonna,” Annie deadpans.

“Wikipedia,” Kristen supplies with a shrug. Maggie just nods but Bill’s mouth has crumpled into a suppressed grin.

“And what’s the verdict?” Bill asks, smirking. “Are we going to have to add your names to that wikipedia page as new converts?”

Kristen scrunches her nose up. “Overrated.”

“She’s just bitter,” Annie says. “Diaphana, our diaphanous instructor, called K out on ingesting poisonous saboteurs, those villains better known as processed sugar and a bottle of red. And that’s why she can’t open her inner eye and why her body won’t oxygenate and contort properly. Well, that, and she needs, desperately, to get laid.” Kristen’s eyes go wide. Of course this is when Annie chooses to start talking. Of course. Bill and Maggie’s kid is asleep in the stroller and Maggie has cocked her head a little to the side and Bill is already laughing. “And for what it’s worth, as a second opinion to Diaphana’s expertise, I concur.”

“She told an entire yoga class that you need to get boned?” Bill asks as he laughs.

Kristen shrugs, but she's blushing. “I think the public humiliation was an added perk -- designed to make me sweat just that much more.”

She shrugs again, like a nervous tic, and her wrap falls off her shoulder exposing her soaked through tank top. She reaches for it quickly, and it’s hilarious. Later, Annie will tell her it’s hilarious, and also tragic, which somehow makes it that much funnier. Her tank top is soaked through with her own sweat and the night is cool and of course her entire tank top is see-through and of course her nipples are hard and poking through the fabric and of course Bill’s eyes drift down and of course his laughter trails off, obvious and undisguised, and his comedic timing always does operate on point, and of course, of course, of course, his wife is standing right there next to him.

“So,” Kristen says, awkward, so awkward, and she thinks Annie’s face is turning purple while Maggie just looks kind of pale, “we’re gonna go, we’re gonna, you know, go find some more poison sabers, saboteurs, whatever, and they’ll be . . . delicious, but, um, have a good night, and I, I’ll see you Monday?”

He nods, his face sober yet somehow still amused, and he repeats, “Monday,” and then he waves.

They don’t talk about bikram yoga on Monday.

O C T O B E R
2 0 1 1

N e w
Y o r k
C i t y ;

Bill ends the show that Saturday dressed as a priest.

She gives him a hug on the stage after the show is over (because they do that now, that’s a thing they no longer avoid) and he laughs in her ear.

“Stay back,” he says, “can’t have a boner in a priest costume.”

She laughs at him and swats him on the arm.

After the show he comes by her dressing room, still in his unholy vestments, and shuts the door. He leans on the doorjamb with what he thinks is an over-the-top “come hither” stare.

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” she says without inflection, but she smirks at him all the same.

“Ahhmen,” he says and waggles his eyebrows. He drops down onto her couch and starts pulling at his collar.

She snorts. “This is blasphemous, even for us.”

He smirks. “There’s a pun to be made about you getting on your knees but I’m too tired to think of it.”

“What a shame,” she says, and then she makes a quick sign of the cross and bows in his direction, her hands held together as though in prayer.

“You coming to the afterparty?” she asks as she drags a brush through her hair again.

He shakes his head. “Nah. Told Maggie I’d make it an early night.”

It’s all he says, and she doesn’t add anything. More often than not as of late the mere mention of her name -- His Wife -- is like the casual threat that, oh hey, there might be a landmine under there! tread carefully! watch your step! but she’s never been good at that. So she stays quiet. Even though it’s not like she doesn’t have plausible deniability on her side.

No, she could say, I never fucked your husband. Cheer up! That never happened! I’m trying to be good! We’re good people! I didn’t fuck him!

And that, she thinks, is the worst thing you can do to a person. That’s the worst thing she could do to Maggie: fuck Bill.

But that’s not entirely true, and she knows that, and Bill knows that, and in their shared apartment on the Lower East Side, Maggie knows that too.

Sometimes she thinks she has already done the very worst thing she could have done and anything else that would happen now is just collateral damage.

The very worst thing is that she has wormed her way into his heart and even if she were to leave now she has already left her mark. She thinks this is what happened, that she’s not being some egotistical asshole, but she’s not entirely sure. They don’t talk about these things. She just knows that for her, he’s there. He’s in her in such an awful intractable way, and she thinks some people call that love, but she doesn’t think she’s brave enough for that.

Not yet.

F E B R U A R Y
2 0 1 2

L o s
A n g e l e s ;

She calls him from her chartered car leaving the Vanity Fair Oscar party. She slumps back in her seat and stretches her legs in front of her, graceless, her skirt riding up, but there’s no one there to see her.

“Hello?” he mumbles into the phone. He sounds half-asleep, or like he’s playing at some curmudgeonly old dude character he plans on busting out at their next rehearsal. Or Clint Eastwood. He sounds like his Clint Eastwood impression.

And she’s pretty sure that’s not it, it’s not the Clint Eastwood impression, but the fact that it’s his voice on the other end of the phone, on the other end of the country, and here she is -- sprawled out inelegantly in the back of a large, large, very large black car that up till now she was pretty sure only foreign dignitaries and foreign drug dealers or Brangelina rode around in, certainly not her -- here she is on the other end, and she suddenly feels stupidly shy. And drunk. She licks at her teeth. She is definitely drunk.

“Hi,” she says. That’s it. That’s all the says. But she says it like she wants to laugh, and she says it like a secret, like she’s going to start laughing at some secret (her secret? his? Clint Eastwood’s secret?) any minute now.

“What time is it?” he says, mumbles again, and wow, okay, she is slowly getting what a terrible idea calling him was, because how many times has she heard him mutter that particular line in that particular voice? Granted it was never over the phone and usually right beside her and usually dragged thick through with guilt and Kristen would keep her eyes closed and tell him something glib, her own mouth muffled against the couch cushion or her arm or his side; she’d tell him: I am all-knowing on some points but this isn’t one of them; she’d tell him: I don’t know check your fucking phone; she’d tell him: Nothing at all.

This time she tells him: “I know what time it is here but that does not mean I know what time it is there.”

“Thanks, Lewis Carroll,” he says, wry and more alert sounding, but his voice is still scratchy.

She can hear the muted patter of the TV on his head. All she can make out is polite applause, and then, louder, she can hear him moving -- fabric scratching against fabric, his heavy breath as he shifts, and she’s about seventy-five percent positive he fell asleep in front of the TV and not in his bed with his wife.

“Done with the party circuit?” he asks after an awkward silence.

She nods, but he can’t see that. “My flight is early tomorrow.”

“How early?” he asks on a yawn.

“I don’t know. Like, eleven?”

He laughs. “That’s not early at all!”

“I’m meeting Maya and and and Rose and Mel for breakfast though. And that is early! And besides, I’m not that great of a flier to begin with. Pretty sure a hangover would only . . . compound matters.” Bill just snorts at that. After he saw Bridesmaids, the only thing he said to her was, “Art imitating life, huh?” and there was a truly awful moment where she had no idea what he meant by that until her brain touched down on that truly awful flight they shared out to Sundance circa-Adventureland and what a truly awful companion she made for him on that flight. She had been drunk even before they left the terminal at JFK, and she kept talking about Lost over super strong gimlets (why had she thought gimlets would be a good idea?) and how they still didn’t know how that story ended and for all they knew they died when that plane crashed and does he want to die in a plane crash does he want to be stuck on an island with her for the rest of his much-shortened life and was that not the dumbest question she ever could have asked because even three-and-a-half gimlets deep she had been able to recognize the weird look on his face when she asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her on a deserted island.

The second thing he said to her about the movie was that he loved it. He said it in that super earnest and super sincere way of his, the way his face gets when he talks about Star Wars or his daughter or about half a dozen other things she doesn’t fully understand, and it was his face more than what he said that left her feeling embarrassed, that made her feel too transparent and too open, so she hugged him and decided that she never wanted to talk about the movie with him again.

Until now, she guesses.

“I didn’t win,” she says suddenly.

“I know. I was watching.” She snorts.

“Yeah.” He had been the one cheering her on throughout the whole awards show thing. Either he had literally no comprehension of how the industry worked, which she doubted, or, well, she doesn’t like dwelling on the or. The or means too much.

Before she left for LA they had grabbed lunch together. “We’re not going to win,” she had said around a spoonful of yogurt.

“Look at that sparkling optimism!” he mocked.

“It’s called,” and she paused to catch the yogurt spilling off her spoon, “it’s called pragmatism.”

Now, he’s laughing on the other end of the phone. “Guess you should have cut all the dialogue and made it a black and white tap-dancing wedding adventure. You ladies are meant to be seen and not heard.”

Kristen laughs too. “Shut up.”

Another moment of silence passes.

“You looked really pretty,” he says quietly.

“Oh,” she says, sort of surprised. And then, “Thank you,” and it’s so dumb.

It’s so dumb. It’s so dumb that she was at a party and she was having fun and somewhere around her fourth cocktail and second time blessing the rains down in Africa and incalculable time mocking Harvey Weinstein behind his back she found herself wishing Bill was there. She thinks it was the Weinstein mocking. It was the wrong crowd; Bill would have joined her. Bill would have laughed. Bill would have laughed that awful maniacal laugh of his and everyone would have found whatever lame drunk joke she told to be that much funnier.

C O N T I N U E D :

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