This Will Only Hurt a Little(58)

“Ahhh. Yeah. She’s tricky.”

I didn’t want to seem needy, so I just waited for him to come find me. Which eventually he did.

Here’s the thing. When Marc and I were alone, it was great. He was fun and we could talk about anything. We watched American Idol and reruns of Friends and movies at his house. We woke up late and walked to Toast, the restaurant around the corner from him, and we would eat giant plates of scrambled-egg quesadillas for me and soup for him. It was easy to fall in love with him. He was certainly the smartest man I’d ever dated, just objectively speaking. The fact that he thought I was smart, and was always interested in what I had to say, made me fall for him even more. I had spent so long trying to figure out how to make myself LESS ME in order for Craig to fully love me, and then here was this dude, who HAD HIS SHIT TOGETHER, who thought I was wonderful the way I was. He liked my weird loud laugh, especially in restaurants. This is hard to explain fully, but within weeks it seemed like we had been together for years, in the best way possible. We even took to lying to people about how long we’d been dating, because it seemed absurd to say that we had basically just met.

But when we were out with his friends, things were a little bit more complicated for me. And we basically only hung out with his friends. More often than not, I would find myself alone, trying to figure out where he had gone and what I was supposed to be doing. I guess just making friends with his friends, which I tried to do. I tried especially hard with Abby, who seemed unsure about me, and who would also call at all hours. Marc would always pick up and talk to her in a quiet, soothing voice, calming her down about whatever pitch or rejection they were facing. He didn’t seem super interested in getting to know my friends, aside from Emily, who I would invite everywhere, like my security-blanket friend from childhood. But I figured that that was just the way it was. He had known all of his friends for years and years. It probably just took a while for him to get comfortable with people. Plus, he was nine years older than us, so that was probably part of it too. But my friends didn’t really see it that way.

“Marc’s a jerk. Like, he totally thinks he’s better than us,” one of Emily’s work friends said one night when we were out.

I didn’t know how to respond. I tried to tell her that it wasn’t true, but over time, I slowly stopped hanging out with them in favor of Marc and his friends. It was just easier. Marc took me to a superfancy resort in Cabo in August for the weekend, where we drank tequila and ate chips and salsa and got massages. If this was being an adult, I wanted all of it.

In the fall, I started working on a sitcom for the now-defunct UPN network. ABC didn’t pick up the Peter Dinklage show, and in July I’d gotten a call that UPN was looking to recast the lead on a sitcom that had already been picked up called Love, Inc. The part was played in the pilot by Shannen Doherty, but they had decided to replace her only after they had trotted her out at the up-fronts and used her for publicity, which I thought was a fairly shitty thing to do and made me wary of going in for it. But the showrunners were huge fans and wanted me to come in and at least meet them. The script was actually pretty funny, and one of the showrunners had worked on Friends (my favorite show in the world), so it seemed like something I should consider. After I met with them, UPN asked me to do a screen test. I’m not sure if there were other girls up for it or not. In my memory, it was clear I was the first choice of the showrunners but that’s not to say UPN didn’t ask them to screen-test more than one girl.

The sitcom was super fun. I loved being in front of a live audience and I liked my costars. Holly Robinson Peete was the other lead and she was so fun and such a real TV veteran, I loved her instantly. But I had some difficulty with the showrunner from Friends. I felt like he would often try to push me in a direction with my acting that was super cheesy, and he was prone to giving me line readings, which I fucking hated. For me, as an actor, line readings are truly the worst. I know that writers sometimes have in their heads exactly how they want a joke to sound, or a particular turn of phrase, but I’ve always believed there’s value in how an actor brings a joke to life. Sometimes in TV, though, it doesn’t matter how you think it would be funniest—you’re just there to service the script. Marc came to every single Friday-night taping of the show, even when it overlapped with Lakers games, for which he had season tickets. The only time he missed one was when the show was on the same night as the rehearsal dinner for Abby’s wedding in Napa Valley.

As Marc and I had gotten more serious, I tried my best with Abby. But it actually wasn’t the easiest thing for me. I would try not to feel jealous of their relationship and late-night calls, but it was hard. Of course, I knew she was already engaged to someone else and was about to get married. But they were older than me, and a lot of times, I would feel like I was this little kid tagging along with them. I had traded one enmeshed relationship that I could never penetrate for another. Well, at least I have a pattern! Not to mention, all their friends were the same friends that he had when he was engaged to Abby. In fact, most of them, he had met through her. She and I had a few run-ins where we were less than kind to one another. At one of Marc and Abby’s friend’s bachelorette weekends that I’d been invited to out of obligation, all the girls were drunkenly talking about their respective boob sizes and teasing one another when Abby piped up about her own bra size. I shrieked with laughter across the table, “WHAT?! ABBY! You DO NOT wear a C! YOUR BOOBS ARE SO SMALL!!!!!”