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It has been five years since I’ve self-harmed when, at a dinner in LA, I am introduced to a man with long, flowing hair who is wearing a keffiyeh. He looks like the world’s campest terrorist, but he’s actually a movie star with a storied reputation. In the candle-lit garden, we sit next to each other and talk, and he admits later that every single thing he tells me is intended to translate as, “I’m not like you’ve heard I am.” It works.

***

He worries a lot. He doesn’t like it that my front gate doesn’t close properly, so, though he is on a film set thousands of miles away, he sends builders to fix it and make me a bolt lock for my front door. He doesn’t like the way I can’t open my windows at night because I don’t have screens to stop the cats getting out. He sends the builders to make screens.
Whenever he comes home from making a movie, he brings me back strange things. He FedExes, from Spain to LA, a single Werther’s toffee. My LA girlfriends, the ones who have been here too long, snipe, “No diamonds?” and I explain I wouldn’t wear diamonds, never have. “Yes, but he doesn’t need to know that.”

“He knows that,” I say, and understand, myself, the answer to the question all the gossips are asking: “Why is he with her?”

An hour into a late-night phone call, he broaches a new topic. “When I get back from this film, let’s have a miniature human, that grows.”

I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses.

“A baby?”

“Yeah, one of them.”

****

Yet I am happy. We are happy, and we’ve been this way for six months now. It’s the longest I can remember. It’s not mania. We don’t need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we’re good people together. I love him and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me.

We agree to a road trip across America when he gets back. He asks me to book out Christmas and my birthday for a trip to Istanbul. He’s decided that we should definitely start trying for a baby in January. I want everything he wants.

“The only thing I know for certain,” he writes, “is that I want us to be family.”

He texts me from the plane to say he’ll be in my arms in a few hours and our life together will begin in earnest. Then he turns off his phone and the plane takes off.

When he arrives at my door, he is trembling. “I think I need space,” he says.

It takes me a while to understand this is him leaving our relationship. A thought occurs. “Did you think that if we had a baby, you wouldn’t be able to leave? Is that why you wanted me to get pregnant?”

“Maybe. That might be true.” He can’t look at me because he is crying so hard.

I lock myself in the bathroom. I call from under the door: “You can go now.”

“Em. Please let me in! Em!”

“I’m fine. Please leave now.”

“Have you cut yourself?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Promise me!”

“I can’t.”

But I don’t cut. I don’t do that any more.

I'm reading: Colin Farrell is ready to get you pregnant now