Body Double for My Famous Ex

Three years after we broke up, I ran into my ex while working as a body double for the nude scenes. That intimate scene.

He had me pinned to the bed and we shot the kiss over and over. After the director called cut, I said it quietly. "Thank you, Mr. Lu." He nodded. Nothing on his face. But I saw it.

The little finger on his left hand hooked, just barely, into the hem of my shirt. That's the thing he only does when he's nervous. Three years, and he still hasn't kicked it.

In three years I sent him seventysix messages. He never answered one. I assumed he never saw them. Chapter 1 Three years ago I wasn't a double.

Back then I was a senior at drama school and I'd placed top ten in my year for scene work. A teacher told me I had a face made for the big screen.

That face was worth nothing in front of a casting director. Thirtyseven auditions. Cut thirtyseven times. I met Elias at a dinner some friends threw together.

He'd just graduated then. Third and fourth billing in two indie films.

He sat across from me the entire night without saying a word, like somebody had dragged him there to fill a chair. When it broke up he stopped me at the door.

Six foot two and folding himself smaller, ears burning red, stammering out a question about whether he could get my number. I said sure.

Later I asked him what he'd actually been thinking about all through that dinner.

He said he'd been working out how to say it so I wouldn't think he was a creep. "Did you work it out?" "I just… got to can I have your number." "And if I'd said no?" "Taken a car home and called myself a coward the whole way." The two years and four months we were together, he'd ride a rented bike forty minutes to come see me at school, with a mango boba sweating in the basket, syrup leaking the whole way, the bag going sticky.

He'd stand under my dorm building out of breath, still carrying that leftover teenage thing in his face, and say, "Every director who cut you is blind.

When I make it, I'm bringing you on set with me." When I couldn't sleep he'd get an arm around me from behind and rub his thumb along the inside of my wrist, around and around, saying it into my hair. "Remy, don't be scared." I didn't take it seriously.

The bringingmeonset thing. I filed that under sweet nothings. But I believed other things. I believed in him.

I believed the way he looked at me every single time: focused, serious, like he was looking at something he'd lost and gotten back.

I believed him putting my freezing hands in his coat pockets in winter and shaking with cold himself while insisting he was fine.

I believed him at the little desk in the rental drawing storyboards, looking up in the middle of it to say, "We should get a cat. I've already got the name.

Little Remy." And that thin strip of red at the tip of his ear. Then he actually made it. A supporting role in a period drama. Beautiful, dangerous, doomed.

When it finished airing he'd picked up eight million followers. People held up lightup signs at the airport. The comments were all walltowall husband.

He wore couture on the red carpet. I watched the livestream on my phone in the rental, and the smile on the screen was polite. Distant.

Nothing like the dumb one he had in front of me. I was still Remy Song, cut from auditions, going back, getting cut again.

I came out of one and was waiting at the bus stop when the news broke that he'd been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. My first reaction wasn't happiness for him. It was cold.

I couldn't tell you where the cold came from. Like we'd been standing on the same step, shoulder to shoulder, and then he'd gone up several and I was still down there.

He turned around and put a hand out and said Remy, come up. But those steps were too high. I couldn't lift my leg. It wasn't that he didn't bring me.

It's that I'd already ruled myself out before he opened his mouth. The better he got, the more scared I was. Chapter 2 Scared I'd hold him back.

Scared people would say his girlfriend was a double who wasn't even Dlist. Scared that one day he'd suddenly work out that I wasn't enough.

Scared the way he looked at me would go from Remy to why are you still standing there. I was the one who ended it.

He called that day with his voice wrecked and said Remy, can we just take some time. I said let's break up. Hung up. Blocked him. Deleted every account. Moved. New number.

Evaporated out of his life. Cleanly. The night I deleted my accounts I cried until morning. Two years of messages, photos, every voice note he'd ever sent me. All of it gone.

Before I deleted them I played the last one. He was out of town shooting, and he sent it in the middle of the night. "Remy, the pillows in this hotel are too soft. Can't sleep.

Miss you." I listened to the whole thing. Then I hit delete. Then I powered off, pulled the SIM card out, and dropped it in the trash. After that I took nothing but double work.

Taking hits for people. Falling off buildings for people. Taking my clothes off for people. My name in the end credits is smaller than an ant, but I screenshot every one.

I have seventysix of them.

Seventysix films, seventysix times watching my own name slide off the bottom of a screen too fast to catch, then rewinding, pausing, taking the picture.

And sending it to a contact that will never answer: a fivedollar stuffed bear off a street stall, set as the photo. I gave him that bear.

On a shoot at the backlot outside Atlanta once, I went off a thirdstory window for the lead.

The airbag was right there and the director said nothing would happen, but my legs still shook standing on the sill.

The second before I jumped, what went through my head wasn't the technique. It was his face. I thought, Elias played a jumper once. Was he this scared. Then I jumped.

Hit the bag and bounced. My back hurt for days. After we wrapped I turned my phone on and sent that dead contact a screenshot of the day's end credits with two words under it.

Good night. Like a sick person. But it was the only way I still had of talking to him. He'd never see it. Never, which suited me.

Three years, and one thought the whole time: don't look back, keep going, stop thinking about him. Who was I kidding. I thought about him every day.

The afternoon Marla called I'd just come off wire work on a period drama with three pain patches on my lower back, lying on the bed like a fish somebody had pulled the spine out of.

Rolling over was work. "Desmond Pike's got a new one. Body double, nude scenes, two grand, three days. You in?" "I'm in." "Male lead's Elias Lu." I sat up off the bed.

The patches on my back came loose with an audible crack. "I'm telling you, this one landed at the right time," Marla said, with the excitement of someone who'd found money on the sidewalk. "Elias's people put the word out specifically.

They don't want a double who's worked with him before, they want somebody new. Desmond went through a whole stack before he picked you. Talk about luck." Nobody he's worked with.

Somebody new. A coincidence. "Remy? You still there?" "…Yeah." "You in or not?

I'm telling you, a Desmond Pike picture, you don't get this twice." I held the phone and my fingers had gone stiff. Two voices going at each other in my head.

One said don't go, are you insane, you hid for three years and now you're walking into it.

Chapter 3 The other said go, he doesn't know you anyway, shoot it and leave, two grand is two grand.

And one more, very quiet, the one I'd shoved all the way to the bottom: go, you want to see him, stop lying to yourself. "I'm in." I hung up and sat there a long time.

Then I opened X and searched Elias Lu. Thirty million followers, two Best Actor wins, and the most recent post was a call sheet from three days ago with a threeword caption.

Back to work. The replies were solid rows of he's so hot and let's go.

I scrolled a long way down and found one buried at the very bottom. "he hasn't posted anything personal in three years. do you think he's still not over it." Nobody had answered her.

I looked at that reply for a while, and something ran a light scratch across my heart. Not deep. It still hurt. Not over it? The mystery ex?

The woman he never confirmed, the one this business has been trading rumors about for years? Then I texted Marla. Send me the contract. The day I went to set, Chicago was brutal.

Wind straight down my collar, cold enough that my knuckles ached. I wore the thickest black parka I own and it went through that too.

There was a black Escalade at the hotel entrance, vanity plate EL 0721. July twentyfirst. His birthday. Three years, and I still knew it.

Three years ago he drove a secondhand Jetta with a busted wiper and had to stick his head out the window in the rain. He said when he got a decent car he'd take me to Iceland.

I said do you even know where Iceland is. He said no, but there's navigation.

The way he'd lean over the map on his phone working out a route, so serious about it, so stupid, I wanted to kiss him. Now he has everything. The car. A driver. An assistant.

Someone else in the back seat. I stood outside that hotel for maybe ten seconds. Wind down my collar, hands balled up in my pockets. Thinking, Remy, you can still turn around.

Walk through that door and you have to face him. Then thinking, what are you scared of, he doesn't know you anymore, to him you're a stranger. Right. A stranger. It's fine.

I put my head down and went in, and my suitcase wheel caught in a seam in the tile and I pitched forward. A hand came in from the side and caught my arm.

Steady. "Careful." That voice. I didn't need to turn around. My body reacted before my head did. Back locking, breath skipping a beat. Elias. Standing right behind me.

Still holding my arm, not hard, not soft. Exactly the same as before. I turned my head. He'd gotten thinner.

The jaw was sharper than three years ago, with a shallow hollow under the cheekbone.

The teenage thing in his face was gone entirely, replaced with a steadiness that didn't invite you in.

The cologne on him was a stranger's, something cold and woody, nothing like the clean laundry smell he always used to carry. He looked at my face.

No expression. "You're the double?" "…Yes, Mr. Lu." I heard my own voice come out flat, like I was reciting. "Which scene." "The one opposite you." I waited for a reaction. A frown.

A pause. Even a have we met. Anything. Just give me something, so I know you still remember me. He said, "Mm." Chapter 4 Then he went past me into the hotel.

The hem of his coat brushed my arm and pulled a draft after it. I held onto the suitcase handle and stood there for several seconds.

Wind came through the revolving door and blew my hair across my face.

The girl at the front desk leaned out and looked at me, probably wondering why this person was standing in the middle of her lobby. He doesn't know me. I should have been relieved.

He doesn't know me, so I can shoot this thing in peace, take my two grand and go, keep doing double work, keep living my life without him. But something sat in my chest.

Like somebody had packed it with wet cotton. Couldn't breathe in, couldn't get it out. The table read had the whole production around one long table. I sat in the far corner.

Nobody even handed me a water. I took a bottle off the table that nobody had touched, cracked it, and drank. Cold, all the way down into my stomach.

The director, Desmond Pike, shaved head, midforties, a voice like he'd swallowed a PA system.

He'd taken international prizes for his indie work and had a famously vicious temper, but he turned into somebody else when he talked about a scene.

Even his voice dropped. "This intimate scene is the emotional peak of the picture. Two people apart for years, both with new lives, and the knot between them never came undone.

What I want here isn't lust. It's confirmation. It's what he feels when he touches her. Is it really you. And every response from her is saying: it's me.

I never left." I kept my head down and pretended to turn pages, pinching the paper until my fingers went white. Confirmation. It's me. I never left.

Why does that sound like it's about me and Elias. Don't flatter yourself, Remy. The man is talking about a scene. Sloane Avery, the lead, spoke up.

She's better looking in person than in pictures. Small face, sweet smile, and something quietly measuring behind the eyes when she looks at you. I know that look.

In this business, that's how everyone looks at a double. "Mr. Lu, the body double probably plays these scenes better than I do.

Walk me through it, and then she can block it for me afterward." Perfectly polite. Everyone understood it. I'm a tool who tests the scene for her, and once it's tested I'm done.

Body double. In plain terms, a prop that walks. My face went hot, ears burning.

Under the table I had the script in a fist, creasing it. "A body double is an actor." Elias was turning pages.

He didn't look up. "Nobody is testing anything for anybody." The room went quiet for a second.

Sloane's smile froze, then came back sweet as ever, but I saw her fingers tighten on her script, knuckles pale