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residentgoodgirl · 5 years

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Chances are that you know what made Lorena Bobbitt famous in 1993, even if you aren’t old enough to have experienced it in real time. Just over 25 years ago, Lorena — who now goes by her maiden name, Lorena Gallo — cut her husband’s penis off in the middle of the night, driving away with it and throwing it into a field. The trial and media coverage were sensational, as you might expect them to be around any penis-chopping case — and Lorena’s story became a punchline, an oddity, a way to consider supposedly hotheaded Latina women.

Amazon is now premiering a four-part docuseries about her, aptly called Lorena. The documentary, produced by Jordan Peele, covers the trial, of course, but also explores the context around it that people have largely forgotten, or never learned to begin with: the ways Lorena’s husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, allegedly abused her; the cruel treatment she received from the media, her tender age (she was 24 years old); and how this case brought the issue of marital rape to the forefront for the American public.

The timing is excellent, if a total bummer. The embers of the #MeToo movement are still burning, marital rape continues to be a surprisingly controversial topic for the courts to grapple with, and everyone is still afraid of immigrants. Lorena is compelling and well-made, a narrative that focuses both on the salacious details of the case (wanna see a severed dick? Girl, you got it) and Lorena’s activism in preventing domestic violence and sexual assault. It acts as both a historical primer for those who didn’t live through Lorena’s trial and a rectification for the way she was treated, not just by her husband but by late-night talk show hosts, journalists, and the public. “The media was focusing only on the penis, the sensationalistic, the scandalous. But I wanted to shine the light on this issue of spousal abuse,” Lorena told Vanity Fair in an interview this past summer.

As a documentary that reassesses a notable ’90s scandal with the benefit of a couple decades’ hindsight, Lorena is one among many recent examples. And these retrospectives tend to fit a similar pattern: We are asked or encouraged to reconsider a woman whose public image was linked inextricably with a man’s bad behavior, whose reputation was destroyed while the man got away relatively consequence-free.

2013’s Anita was a reconsideration of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against then–Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The documentary recast her not as an angry black woman trying to keep a man from his deserved job, but a reserved, smart attorney who merely told the truth about a man about to be given a tremendous amount of power. (Sound familiar?) 2014’s The Price of Gold gave Tonya Harding room to tell her version of the story of her career and the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan, replete with class context and details about her own abuse.

The 2016 documentary O.J. Simpson: Made in America, though primarily about Simpson, also forced audiences to rethink how his murdered ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was treated by him and by the press. And 2018’s The Clinton Affair included an interview with Monica Lewinsky herself about her affair with President Bill Clinton — long considered a salacious sexual scandal, with Lewinsky cast as a slut trying to fuck a powerful man — and reframed the incident as one in which a young intern was seduced (and then thrown under the bus) by the goddamn president, who should’ve known better.

These reconsiderations aren’t limited to documentaries. In June, journalist Allison Yarrow published the book ’90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, which includes Hill, Harding, Lewinsky, and Lorena in telling “the real story of women and girls in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media.” Podcasts like Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes’ You’re Wrong About… also serialize reassessments of history, often focusing on women mired in scandals. They’ve done episodes on Amy Fisher (the “Long Island Lolita”), televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton (the “dingo’s got my baby” woman, who never actually said that), Courtney Love, and Lorena herself.

“America is going through this period of realizing how much we misread what was right in front of us,” says Marshall. “We came to the realization that we elected a reality TV president. We elected someone whose image was made by reality TV. That kind of understanding can allow us to go back and say, “What else did I just swallow that I was sold?”

Documentaries that revisit scandals are no doubt valuable in that they can profoundly change the way we consider the past and hopefully, the future. But they also pose a certain temptation to get too comfortable: There is some risk that we might watch something like Lorena, pat ourselves on the back for figuring out who the bad guy really is, and walk away thinking that the past is the past and we won’t make the same mistakes again. But what Lorena Bobbitt’s story meant in 1993 “is not that different from what it means today,” says journalist Kim Masters in Lorena. “It’s the same story.”

Then, too, there’s the reality that these reconsiderations tend to revolve around trials or public hearings, which provide a clear way to revisit the past through criminal records and court transcripts and recorded interviews. These were big, splashy stories that now get big, splashy reappraisals. But the world is filled with smaller, more mundane injustices and oversights, and most of those who suffer will never make it to court or Congress, or receive a high-profile opportunity to seek vindication.

Watching something like Lorena feels important, but it also feels lousy, because not enough is different now. Reconsiderations like these can’t be antidotes if we ignore the cure — if we continue to dismiss women and other marginalized, vulnerable people when they’re being abused, or taken advantage of, or otherwise maligned. Lorena receives a tremendous amount of empathy in Lorena, as she should. But why can’t we extend that kind of empathy to more people like her today, instead of waiting two and a half decades to rethink how we’ve behaved?

Apology tours for sexual misconduct are practically rote at this point: Transgressors get plenty of airtime to beg for forgiveness for touching butts, to come out of the closet, to recommend a supposedly great pizza dough cinnamon roll recipe. Meanwhile, victims or survivors are largely forgotten after the accusation becomes public. It’s relatively new that women like Lorena or Hill are getting some space to tell their stories on their own terms, and still rare that the opportunity is afforded to women of color in particular.

Lorena is timely not only in the sense that conversations about sexual abuse and assault have taken center stage over the past year, but also because anxiety about immigrants taking advantage of the system and of poor, unwitting white Americans is currently at a fever pitch. When Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt got married in 1989, she was 20, and in the US on a student visa. “There’s women who are opportunists, gold diggers, they use you as a stepping stone to advance their career,” Bobbitt says, referring to his ex-wife in an interview in Lorena. “These women, they know that their backup is [to] use law enforcement to their advantage by saying, ‘You know what, if you leave or you fuck up this relationship or you don’t get my citizenship, I’ll call the cops.’”

Despite Bobbitt’s own laundry list of arrests — many of which are for domestic violence against past partners — he still uses Lorena’s citizenship (or lack thereof) as supposed proof that she was unstable, demanding, and manipulative. “She was obsessed with having her American dream, her American dream, her American dream,” Bobbitt told Vanity Fair. “She just wanted too much, too fast.” And even in a supposedly silly reality series like 90 Day Fiancé (a show about bad American people marrying other, noncitizen but still-often-bad people), it’s clear that many of the same biases against immigrants that were at play in the Bobbitt case are alive and well today.

Lorena takes great pains to draw similarities between then and now, reminding viewers that domestic violence is still a secret shame for countless women, and that it’s still incredibly challenging to get away from your abuser. The last episode of the series is called “The Cycle of Abuse” and opens with a slideshow of women’s bruises and scars from domestic violence. “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena recently told the New York Times.

And that may be true of what Lorena experienced at the hands of the media, as well as her husband. “If Lorena’s story hit today, Fox News would take the place of Howard Stern, and the 24-hour news cycle would focus on what she did, rather than what he did,” says Kim Gandy, the president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Documentaries like Lorena are timely for a reason — a bad reason — and instead of feeling smug for finally listening, 25 years later, it’s worth taking the opportunity to see what we can do better now.

While the outrage around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court this past fall might have sounded deafening depending on who’s inside your political bubble, the result is ultimately the same as it was for Clarence Thomas after Anita Hill’s testimony. He’s in, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Meanwhile, Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who came forward to detail Kavanaugh’s alleged assault, was left unable to work and in need of a security detail.

I was 3 years old during Lorena Bobbitt’s trial. I was 7 during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. I was a few months old for Anita Hill’s hearing. When Blasey Ford testified late last year, I was 27. And yet somehow her testimony still felt like unbearable déjà vu, as if I had lived through this already and already knew the inevitable conclusion.

Today, though entertainment industry figures like Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves are facing some long-overdue music for accusations of sexual assault and harassment, it’s taken decades for that to happen. For figures like Bryan Singer and R. Kelly — both the subject of recent reporting that details sexual abuse allegations stretching back many years, both of whom continue to deny any wrongdoing — it remains to be seen what lasting consequences, if any, they will suffer. Their accusers, like Lorena, have been vulnerable people from already marginalized groups — in these cases young, primarily queer boys and black girls — who have been either painted as liars and manipulators or outright dismissed.

What’s upsetting about these stories is not just the abuses they describe, but the public indifference they often get in response; the rumors and allegations around Kelly, for example, have done astonishingly little to tarnish his celebrity or dim public affection until very recently, following the release of the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly. And it’s taken 10 years since Michael Jackson’s death for a significant documentary about the allegations of child molestation against him, HBO’s Leaving Neverland, to crack through the surface.

Ten or 20 years from now, will we be watching a heartbreaking five-part docuseries on the alleged victims of Bryan Singer? On the many accusations against him, on how they were ignored for years, on how they sort of broke through in early 2019, how they quickly petered out, and how he continued to get work — and watch his movies win awards — even after the allegations were made public? (Hopefully not.) Is years or decades of hindsight the only way any of us can begin talking about things like domestic violence or sexual assault? The distance might make it feel safer to discuss, especially when powerful people are involved, but it also means the conversation starts far too late.

Lorena also reminds audiences that she was the subject of wild cruelty from the media and comedians during and after her trial. “David Letterman used to call me his girlfriend,” Lorena says in the docuseries. “The jokes did bother me, because I didn’t know to handle it. People were talking about my background. They were saying I was just a hot-blooded Latina woman. It hurts my heart. It hurts my brain. It hurts my whole body.”

Howard Stern practically made a career out of promoting Lorena’s ex-husband — he had Bobbitt on his show repeatedly and during his 1994 Rotten New Year’s Eve Pageant special, raising money for Bobbitt’s medical expenses. During the pageant, Stern airs a mocking reenactment of Lorena’s crime. “A penis is a terrible thing to waste,” Stern says, holding two pieces of a fake member, cut in half, aloft. The Bee Gees performed a parody song that included the advice “Don’t ever piss off your wife.” The metaphor is so blatant it’s embarrassing: A man’s penis is his power, and this woman had the audacity to try to take it away. She needed to be put in her place. “To me it was just cruel,” Lorena told the New York Times. “Why would they laugh about my suffering?”

In hindsight, jokes like these may seem to be in such bad taste that it’s a wonder Stern still has a career. But jokes at the expense of victims and marginalized people haven’t gone away, and neither have most of the comedians who make them. Amy Schumer used to crack jokes about Mexicans being rapists; she apologized for it years later. Sarah Silverman did blackface in 2007; it took her until 2015 to apologize for it (sort of??). Louis C.K. is, currently, mocking the Parkland shooting survivors and joking about his history of masturbating in front of nonconsenting women, all to applause from comedy club audiences. Every Saturday, Michael Che and Colin Jost turn Saturday Night Live into a Statler and Waldorf sketch where they complain about having to learn a few new gender pronouns. None of this will age well, but even in the moment, plenty of us don’t find these “jokes” all that funny to begin with.

The only tangible thing to learn from watching Lorena, besides the full facts of her case, is that the strongest advantage people like Lorena have on their side is time. You just have to wait. You have to wait out the cruel late-night jokes and the sexist media coverage about you and the gossip and conjecture and slut-shaming and mockery. You have to wait two and a half decades, and then maybe, if your case was a big enough deal, someone will make a movie about you, and you’ll get a chance to wear a nice blouse and trousers and sit on a couch and tell your story from the beginning, without interruption, for the first time in your life. The world will turn in your direction, and your abusers will look worse and worse with every passing day (even if they’ve evaded any concrete kind of consequences), but first — you have to wait.

Scandalous stories like Lorena’s are also undoubtedly complicated by the fact that they don’t only boil down to a bad man and a woman wronged. Even in light of widely publicized and well-produced reconsiderations, not all viewers will be on board with Lorena, who did commit a crime, just as Lewinsky is far from a fully redeemed figure now in the public eye. And both women will always be punchlines to some people; even for the few who do get their turn to reframe the stories of their own lives, not everyone is going to listen.

“We always want to find a victim, a villain, and a hero,” says Marshall. “We accept the story we’re told. Having everyone filed away as a certain kind of person and every event filed away as a certain kind of story is how we impose order in the world.” But if you’re able to turn away from that tidy story, and hear what the people who lived it are really saying, “you get closer to the truth.” ●

CORRECTION

February 19, 2019, at 6:34 p.m.

The name of the Michael Jackson HBO documentary Leaving Neverland was misstated in an earlier version of this post.

#news #tw: domestic abuse #tw rape

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douxreviews · 5 years

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Legends of Tomorrow - ‘Terms of Service’ Review

"The power is in the Palm(er) of your hands."

Is it rude to point out that the Emperor has no clothes, if you point out at the same time that the Emperor is super ripped and has been clearly doing a lot of cardio?

Because.... Damn, Emperor. You got it going on.

Which is, of course, my frivolous and subtextually homoerotic way of saying that there's an embarrassment of riches in this episode when it comes to things to like, but they all kind of rely on some serious glossing over of problem spots.

The problem in a nutshell can be boiled down to one thing. The basic opening foundation for this episode doesn't match at all with where things were left at the end of the previous one. I'm tempted to assume that I'd missed an entire episode worth of plot development, except that I know perfectly well that I didn't. It's almost as if the writers room broke a 17 episode series of stories and then just completely excised one of them when they found out they were only getting 16 to air.

For the love of God, CW, please start giving Legends a full boat of 22 episodes. It's getting embarrassing.

OK, so here's what I mean. A not insignificant portion of the plot development tonight entirely relies on the fairy godmother currently being under Gary's control. That's actually an inspired plot development, and his relationship both with Tabitha and with the next inheritor of the fairy godmother mantle were pure gold as far as both comedy and plot development goes.

The problem is, when exactly did Fairy Godmother bond herself to Gary? He calls to her at the end of the previous episode and she saves him from Mona as if their relationship was an established thing, but unless I missed something significant completely, that was not a thing they'd ever set up.

I'll be fair. I drink a lot of wine. If I missed something that explains this, please do let me know in the comments.

Additionally, at the end of 'Nip/Stuck,' Mona ate off Gary's evil nipple – not a sentence you get to type every day – and Gary was rushed out of the Time Bureau with unconscious Mona, Tabitha, and Neron in Ray's body. The implication strongly was that Gary's nipple was behind the mass hypnosis of the Bureau, and now that it had been destroyed the bureau was saved. Left behind to witness the bad guys escape was Nora, Ava, and Sara.

This week we open with the bad guys still in possession of the Bureau, only now it's due to Gary's influence over the fairy godmother rather than his fancy hypnotic nipple. Not only do we see no evidence of the bad guys leaving the bureau together, they aren't even all in a group anymore. Mona is imprisoned in the Bureau cells, which makes no sense if they were fleeing with her body ten minutes earlier. Neron and Tabitha aren't even there anymore as they're busy setting up 'PalmerX 2019,' a low key tech con with only one panel and one guest. Ava and Sara are back on the Waverider as if they'd never liberated the Bureau in the first place, and Nora is Die Harding her way to rescue Mona with no mention of how she got separated from them.

I'm sorry, show, but I have to ask. Did you smoke a gigantic bag of crack between these two episodes, or what?

It's all very frustrating, because I said earlier, where they take all of those plot threads is fantastic. Neron's plan to create fear using the monsters so that people will download an app in order to locate the monsters and in doing so sell their immortal souls through a lengthy terms of service agreement is both goat-shit crazy and completely brilliant. What's more, it would absolutely work. If you doubt it, just consider how much none of us noticed when the guests of PalmerX were shown agreeing to a terms of service agreement that they didn't read. Seriously, go back and look. The camera shots practically luxuriate on people swiping through the TOS as fast as they can, but nothing about that reads as unusual or sinister to us anymore and so we just blanked it out.

Similarly, Tabitha's plan to trick Nora into taking on her fairy godmother mantle was inspired, despite being lifted pretty completely from genie-lore, particularly Disney's Live Action Aladdin Soon in Theaters Near You. And God bless the show for keeping Jane Carr around as Tabitha. I absolutely expected that they'd find an excuse to recast Tabitha into the body of someone younger and sexier as soon as they possibly could, because that's the kind of gross thing that network execs tend to insist on. I love, love, love that they're keeping her around as Neron's love interest. And while we're talking about it, it's such a good choice for them to show that Neron and Tabitha do genuinely love each other. It would have been so easy to tumble into the cliché of a villain team eager to backstab one another.

But the best choice this episode made was in the nature of Gary Green himself. Wonderful reveal that Gary was perfectly aware the entire time that the fairy godmother was trying to get him to wish hurt on the Legends and so he was deliberately just focusing on wishing to hang out with them as a way of defying her. Even when 'Dark Gary' finally gets called forth, his glorious flow of vengeance never goes further than acne and tap dancing. Gary is a good man, fundamentally. And he's absolutely right, he does not deserve to be laughed at. I've been saying since the beginning of the season that the Legends need to face a consequence for the way they're played Gary as convenient bait that can be had for a little flattery. I think they finally learned that lesson here.

Which brings lastly to John Constantine, in a plotline I like to call, 'This should absolutely have been an entire episode all on its own.'

When they mentioned Hell's Triumvirate I briefly entertained the thought that they might be about to do the good parts of 'Dangerous Habits' that everybody always leaves out when they try to adapt it, but alas, no. It felt right that he chose Astra over Ray, as much as it broke my heart, and it felt equally right that Astra betrayed him. Can't wait to see what will happen there when Nora gets to Hell to rescue John. I do, however, which that they'd gone with the imagery from the comics and had Astra only have one arm.

Everybody remember where we parked:

There was actually shockingly little travel this week. The Waverider just hung around Washington D.C. in 2019, and a couple of our heroes went to Hell, which may or may not equate to the same time zone, it's hard to tell.

What is interesting is the reveal that Zari grew up a little outside of D.C. Did we know that already, or was that a reveal of convenience this week? Zari appeared to me to be in the 8-10 range, although I am a notoriously bad judge of age so she might be a bit older. That actually answers a couple of longstanding questions I was pondering last year about what baby Zari might be up to in our time period.

Zari mentions that it's only a few years away from when ARGUS takes over everything and creates an anti-Meta, anti-Muslim Dystopia. We're all kind of assuming they're just never going to deal with that, aren't we?

Quotes:

Sara: "Mick, Nate, do you think you can handle Tabitha?" Mick: "Granny’s dead."

Sara: "OK, can you guys stop being dragon baby crazy right now?"

Gary: "And now I have three nipples, because a spare never hurts." Having a third nipple was historically a sign of witchcraft. There is a zero percent chance the writers don't know that.

Calibraxis: "You’re dead, demon hunter!" Constantine: "I was gonna be a demon proctologist, but the pay wasn’t as good."

Calibraxis: "I’m a demon, not a pirate, John."

Zari: "It’s a demon app. I’m gonna read the fine print."

Charlie: "If I die, I’m gonna come back and haunt you." Zari: "I would love a ghost friend."

Nora: "Gary, you dick!"

Bits and Pieces:

-- This season has for some reason brought up a lot of embarrassing confessions from me. Adding to the list that already contains my love of semiotics and the assembly of flatpack furniture, this week I have to tell you how much I love logo design. Honestly. I bring this up because the PalmerX logo is a masterwork. The solid 3-D cube implied by the background framing device conveys an unspoken implication of solidity and dependability with the third implied square breaking the frame and shooting 'toward' the viewer implying a daring willingness to work outside conventional rules and by implication 'think outside the box.' The coloring, meanwhile, subtly underscores the 'Palmer' portion of the name, thus reinforcing the higher brand. Honestly, and with no ironic joking involved, the PalmerX logo is a f*cking masterpiece of work.

-- I actually have a startling number of opinions on the quality of logo design. Feel free to ask, but I warn you that the answers get lengthy.

-- I get that they were underscoring the connection between Tala Ashe and Zari's younger self, but that hairstyle just fundamentally did not work for her. That's actually kind of rare and notable for her. Just about every hairstyle they've ever given her has looked gorgeous.

-- Looks like Wixtable the dragon is hatching in time for the season finale.

-- I went back and forth on whether or not it was smart or stupid for Zari to have brought the egg with her on the mission. Ultimately, I think there was no guaranteed safe place for the egg, given how often messed up stuff happens on the Waverider when they aren't there.

-- I hope Nate is understanding about Zari leaving the egg behind.

-- So many questions about why Nate has a 'Kid Steel' costume hanging around. And why Gary picked it.

-- This week's fabulous dress watch. Jane Carr looked stunning in that evil black number she adopted once she'd ditched her godmother duties. Also, the designer of that asymmetrical sheath number that Nora wore to PalmerX is underpaid. Regardless of how much he or she is paid, they are underpaid. That dress was amazing. Please, please, Courtney Ford, tell me that you stole that dress and have it in your personal collection. Also, call me. We'll brunch.

-- They're really getting their money out of the Stein puppet. Bless.

-- Hell's triumvirate included Satan, not Lucifer. Which means a crossover with Lucifer is still possible. Fun fact, in the comics the triumvirate in Hell stepped in to rule when Lucifer left to go open up his nightclub in LA. Which means it all totally works together if they can get Tom Ellis to make a stop in the Waverider. And then possibly he and Matt Ryan could share a torrid embrace and... I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?

-- That's like the third episode in a row where they've mentioned Damien Darhk. Dare we hope to see him again next season?

If you squint at it and assume that we missed an episode of plot development, this would easily be a four. Sadly, we can't, and so I can't in good conscience give it more than three out of four fantastic logos.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, volunteer firefighter, and roughly 78% water.

#Legends of Tomorrow #Sara Lance #Ray Palmer #John Constantine #DC Comics #Arrowverse #Legends of Tomorrow Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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all-sortsa-stuff · 7 years

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A new start, part 1

Pairing: Chris Evans x Reader

Word Count: 1856

Warnings: Language and a little angst

A/N: This is set after the first Avengers movie, before the Winter Soldier. An actress experiences betrayal from someone she loves. This is the story of her finding a new start.

“I am headed out now. I promise I will meet you in Tennessee in a few days. You know how the studio gets if I am late. Love you babe.” Your boyfriend, David, quickly ended the call as you drove towards his Los Angeles home. The whole reason for the call was let him know you had to stop at his house to grab one of your dresses and the script for the movie you were starting in a week. You tried calling back but it went straight to voicemail.

“Ugh, fine. I will just grab the stuff and head to the airport.” You were running behind but you could not leave without the script. The producers would be pissed if they had to overnight you another copy right before you started filming. The ride to his house was thankfully short, as you seemed to have scooted around most of the midday traffic. When you pulled up you noticed his car was still in the driveway along with another one you did not recognize. A bad feeling started creeping up your spine but you pulled out the key to his house and let yourself inside. The first thing you heard was a female laugh coming from the kitchen. Your stomach dropped. As you entered, the kitchen you found a woman dressed only in what was probably one of David’s shirts with her legs wrapped around his hips, laughing as he kissed her neck. You stood there for a moment in utter shock staring at the pair, before you could actually make a sound.

“Umm yeah sorry. I think I came in at the wrong time.” David turned to look at you with horror all over his face. He dropped the woman on the counter and walked towards you with his hands out in front of him, as if to keep you from hitting him. It was then you saw he was only dressed in a pair of thin boxers.

“Oh my God, [Y/N]. What are you doing here? I thought you were headed to the airport. This isn’t..” You put your hand up stopping him.

“Don’t even try. This is exactly what it looks like, asshole. And I’m pretty sure she was on the cover of the last Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.” The woman piped up from behind David.

“It was the Victoria’s Secret spring catalog.” You gave a short, fake laugh.

“Even better. A Victoria’s Secret model.” Rolling your eyes you turned around heading towards the stairs to his bedroom. He followed you, begging you to listen to any of the half-assed excuses he could think of. You pulled out a bag you kept there for your clothes, filling it with every item you could find that belonged to you. A few times, you had to step around her clothes that had been strewn about the room. After a few minutes of you ignoring him, he finally stopped trying to convince you otherwise of what he had done. He had pulled on a tee shirt and jeans before sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. As you finished packing the last of you things, you stopped to look at him, his back towards you. Up until that moment, you had been fueled on pure shock and adrenaline. Now looking at the man who you had spent the last year loving, your heart broke. The pressure in your chest leading to the tears that started falling down your cheeks.

“Goodbye, David. I hope you find what makes you happy. I know I am not it.” Half way down the stairs, he came running. You could hear the tears in his voice.

“[Y/N/N], please! I am so sorry. It was a huge mistake. Let’s talk this out. You mean so much to me. Please.” You sniffed at the tears that were still falling from your eyes. Shaking your head with a sad smile.

“This broke anything that was there of us. You went out of your way to lie and deceive. There isn’t a way back from that.” With the bag over your shoulder, you walked out the front door with David standing there watching you leave. The girl in his tee shirt forgotten for the moment.

As you drove away, you released the rest of the emotions that had been fighting to get out. Sobbing as you headed in the direction of the airport. You weren’t even sure you would make it on time, but at this point, you didn’t care. Everything inside you hurt and all you wanted was to crawl in bed to sleep for a few days. Or until some of the pain went away.

You did make it to the airport on time. The car was dropped off and you checked in for your flight. Not bothering to take off your sunglasses as you showed your ticket and identification. The ticket agent giving an oddly anxious look as she realized who you were. “Oh Miss [Y/L/N] right this way. We will make sure no one notices you.” With the help of TSA and the ticket agent, you were seated quickly onto the plane. You knew you must have looked awful with the red tear swollen eyes and no makeup. It did not matter. You just wanted to get back to the comfort and safety of home. The day needed to be over.

The days that followed only grew worse. After the first two days of crying, feeling sorry for yourself, and venting to your best friend, the press got wind of the breakup. Seems the model had a big mouth and told her story to anyone that would listen. She was proud of the fact that she had stolen away the popular actor from his actress girlfriend. David was being portrayed as a man whore, who broke your heart. Your publicist was going crazy because you refused to comment on any of it. The phone never seemed to stop ringing or alerting with texts messages. Your parents, your manager, friends, even David would not stop trying to call or text. David, you simply ignored every time, deleted all his texts without reading. Everyone else pretty much got a short dry answer that would have to do for the moment.

You weren’t ready for someone to knock on your front door. Though you should have known, it was coming. Your dad stood there in the doorway waiting for you to let him in. You hadn’t said a word, just standing there biting on your lower lip trying to keep the tears at bay. When he opened his arms, you lost it. You moved close and felt him envelop you just as he always had when you needed him. “Oh, daddy…”

“It’s okay, sugar. You are going to be just fine in a little while. You will find someone who is worthy of your time and your heart. I promise you.” He held onto you, as if his life depended on it. After the tears had finally stopped he pulled back to look down at you. “Better baby?” You nodded wiping the wetness from your cheeks. “Good, how about some coffee and we can talk?”

The two of you talked for a while. The whole sad story coming out. You father grumbled a bit through the worst parts of it, threatening to kill David and hide the body somewhere on his extensive property. You laughed for the first time in days, telling him it wasn’t worth the effort but you appreciated the sentiment. Before too long he left for home, which was only a half mile away around the pond. The rest of the week, you kept yourself busy with packing, working your lines and trying to keep your mind off everything that had happened. It was difficult, but you tried. You rode your horses and fed the goats. Took your truck for a ride through the mud a few times just to have a little fun. Kaley, your assistant and close friend came over several times for coffee and business, making sure the two of you did not fall into that hole of talking about certain people.

When the end of the week came and it was time to head to North Carolina for your new movie. You were still sad but you were no longer crying all day. The movie was set in the early 40’s during World War II and was about a couple who fall in love and are ultimately separated when he goes off to fight. You liked the part that the story was narrated by the couple’s granddaughter as she was reading the love letters sent between them during the war. Telling the stories of growing up together, falling in love, marrying against their parents’ wishes and bringing their son into the world. Right now, you thought the movie was exactly what you needed to help you get over David. There had been a last minute recast for the character of Thomas, your character’s love interest. The original actor had to drop because of a previous commitment. Your new costar was Chris Evans. Of course, the entire world knew who he was, but you had never personally met him. The hope was that he was going to be easy to work with and you wouldn’t have to stress making this movie.

You left the rented beach house early in the morning to make sure you were on set on time. This morning was costume fitting, and then meeting the hair and makeup staff to ensure the right styles and colors were used for your skin tone. A rather sweet and brightly styled woman was measuring your inseam when you heard a knock on the open trailer door. A male’s voice calling out, “Hope I’m in the right place. I was told this is where I needed to get my measurements done.” You turned to see short blond hair and bright blue eyes. He stopped short in the doorway once he saw you standing there with Marion at your feet. A wide beautiful smile crossed his lips. “Oh sorry I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Marion looked up from the floor.

“You didn’t sweetie. Go over there and take a seat. Me and [Y/N] here are almost done.” Chris did not take a seat. He walked towards you will that smile firmly in place. He held his hand out to you as he spoke.

“I’m Chris, seems we are going to be falling in love here. I mean…Our characters are going to fall in love here. For the movie. Yeah the movie. Wow, I’m an asshole. I am sorry.” You shook his hand laughing. He was cute and goofy and he had made you laugh. Especially now that was welcome.

“I’m [Y/N]. It’s nice to meet you Chris. You aren’t an asshole. Everyone has times where their minds and mouths don’t talk to each other before something silly comes out.” He grinned though you thought you could see a blush on his cheeks.

“[Y/N], I think we are going to get along just fine.”

Part 2

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