God Bless This Mess(69)

That’s when Tyler called me and asked me to come down to his mother’s celebration of life in Jupiter, Florida.

I was planning to stay at a hotel, but Tyler made the effort to find me a guesthouse where I could stay with one of his friends. He introduced me to all of his friends, too. I was there to support him, but he wanted to spend so much time with me. I only stayed a couple of days, but we spent most of those days and nights together. He cried with me about his mom. Wow, I thought. I still really care about this person.

I came back home to be with my brother before he went into rehab, and a few days later we managed to get him settled in Texas—just as the whole country started shutting down because of the pandemic. COVID-19 had not only arrived in America, it was spreading like wildfire, including in Los Angeles. I wasn’t sure if that city was the safest place for me to go back to. Everything felt so uncertain.

Tyler had to go to New York on some business, but since COVID was bad in New York, he turned right around and went back to Jupiter.

That was right when the government was starting to tell people to stay put and quarantine—when everyone assumed that it wouldn’t last for more than a couple of weeks—and Tyler asked me if I wanted to come quarantine in Jupiter with him and his crew.

He had talked to some of his friends about it, he said, and they told him that this could be a perfect time for the two of us to “figure it out,” as he liked to say. “When else will we have a chance to just hang out like this?”

I had no concrete reason to go back to LA. I had some potential sponsorships lined up, and some meetings I was supposed to take, but it was nothing that had to be done in-person. I could call in to meetings and take photos just about anywhere. So I said, “Why not?”

A lot of businesses and offices were closing down in LA, and if I had to quarantine for a few days anyway, Jupiter, Florida, with Tyler and his friends seemed like a perfect place for me to be.

Only it wasn’t just for a few days. Once I flew down there, I found out that we weren’t supposed to leave. The COVID-19 travel restrictions set in, and I wound up staying there nearly a month.

The fact that the two of us were spotted together in Jupiter drew all kinds of attention from social media. My Instagram audience blew up, which really surprised me, since I wasn’t on TV anymore. Tyler’s audience grew, too. So we toyed with it. We started filming ourselves and putting up silly TikTok dances and Insta posts with our whole “Quarantine Crew,” and the media went nuts for it.

Suddenly there was all this pressure. The world wanted to know if we were dating. (I wanted to know that, too!)

I told Tyler I still had feelings for him, and he said he had feelings for me. But then everything kept happening so quickly. We were drawing so much interest on social media that some powerful people in New York and LA started asking us if we wanted to work together. For a hot minute, the two of us wondered if we should try to do some sort of a TV show.

Tyler was into construction. I loved interior decorating. We thought maybe we could team up, like Chip and Joanna Gaines! We talked briefly about making plans, and what we were going to do when the pandemic was over, when things got back to normal.

Things weren’t normal, though.

Neither one of us had taken the time to rest, to grieve, to heal from the wounds we’d suffered, and the loves and lives we’d lost.

Two unhealthy people do not make for a healthy relationship. Not even a “friendship,” or whatever it was we had. We slept in the same bed for twenty days, and he never tried to kiss me or anything. I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Like, “Is it because he sees me in the morning without makeup on?” I started to get so self-conscious. It was honestly miserable.

After a while, he started treating me like I was just annoying. Like he didn’t want me around. Some days, he wouldn’t even talk to me.

That’s when his friend Matt James and I started really talking, and he and I had more in common than me and Tyler. “What is going on?” I asked him. “Am I doing something wrong?”

“Hannah,” Matt said, “you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just very obvious that he is trying to distract himself from everything.”

I knew what he meant by that. I’d done plenty of distracting myself.

There were moments when it felt like Tyler and I were going to be more than friends. On some nights, we cuddled, and he would say things like, “You obviously still care for me, and I still care for you. Let’s figure this out.” And then he wouldn’t talk to me the whole next day.

He tried to tell me that he just didn’t want to talk about what this relationship was, or what was happening. And that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, either. At one point, I said, “I don’t care what we talk about. We can talk about football! I just want you to talk to me.”

His mom had just died, so it’s hard for me to criticize how he was acting. I know he was hurting. But I was stuck there. I couldn’t leave. And it felt terrible.

When I finally figured out a way to get back to Alabama, Tyler gave me a side hug, and then we didn’t talk the rest of the day. He texted to make sure I got home, and then I didn’t hear from him for another week—after I’d just lived with him and slept in his bed for twenty days.

The whole thing just got so weird. We tried to remain friends after that. Many months later, Tyler came out to LA and we filmed a YouTube video together, talking about our relationship and the mistakes we’d made. I was hopeful that we’d be able to hang out and sort of rebuild the friendship, and for him to meet my friends since I’d met all of his, but it always seemed like he had other plans. Or that our plans weren’t his priority. I felt sort of embarrassed, and like I’d misunderstood what was going on.