Summer:May I come? Pleeeeeease? I need pummeling too! I am pummel-deficient!
Carah:I’d fucking love that, Summer
Carah:You can share my room!
Summer: ??
Maria:I’m so sorry you can’t come, Asha. And of course, Summer. I’d love to see you!
Maria:Tack tack for the group weekend in Napa, Peter. It’s really sweet of you.
Peter:...
Peter:Yes. Sweet.
Peter:Maria, I just want to say that Benny and Björn were true geniuses
Peter:They might as well have been the only people in ABBA, what legends
Maria:TAKE IT BACK, SKITSTÖVEL
Peter::-)
23
Two months later, when Peter and Maria arrived at Con of the Gates in San Francisco, the first large publicity event they’d ever attended as an official couple,Gatesfans lost their fucking shit.
Sure, the two of them had been spotted together before the convention. At Alex’s charity auction, Peter hadn’t tried to hide how he felt about Maria, and various Hollywood insiders had taken notice. And their relationship truly became public on their Napa trip, when some asshole at the winery had captured video of them making out in a seemingly private corner and posted the clip all over social media. A predictable burst of online excitement and interview requests had followed, and after that, they received a certain amount of attention whenever they explored LA together.
So people knew they were a couple. ButGatesfans hadn’t seen that up close and in person until the con. So their relationship was the talk of the event. For, oh... four hours, maybe.
That Friday afternoon and early evening, as they checked into the hotel, found their room, and posed for their joint fan photo sessions, he couldn’t count how many con attendees used their phones to record the sight of his arm around her shoulders, or the number of times some bearded dude in an artistically tattered Viking costume shoutedFinally!orI knew it!to him at top volume, or—once, memorably—Pillage away, you lucky motherfucker!
That guy made Maria grin. As did all the fans in tees readingviking? no, vi-QUEEN orshield-maidens do it wearing leather, or his personal favorite:if your slow burn lasts more than four years, please consult a physician, accompanied by a stylized drawing of Cassia and Cyprian looking long-suffering.
“Instead of a physician, shouldn’t that be a script doctor?” Maria whispered right before the camera clicked, and that particular fan photo caught him choking on laughter.
It was a lot of attention.A lot, even by con standards.
Then Alex lost his entire goddamn mind at his Q&A session that first night. After that, most fans became too occupied either checking Urban Dictionary for the definition ofpeggingor reading all of Alex’s thinly veiled sexual fantasies about Lauren and equally transparent screeds against their showrunners to pay much attention to Maria and Peter.
Normally, he’d saythank fuckto that, but Alex had become a dear friend and was a very good—if very impulsive—man. So Peter and Maria tried to help with damage control however they could, even before Alex vanished from the convention entirely to pursue his fired minder... somewhere. His disappearance caused yet another hubbub Saturday morning, when fans realized he was gone and wouldn’t be attending any of his remaining sessions and panels.
And then later on Saturday, Marcus—Mr. I’m an Extremely Intelligent, Thoughtful Man Pretending to Be a Shallow Idiot for Some Reason I’d Rather Not Disclose Even After Six Years—decided to reveal both his dyslexia and the fact that he sounded like a fucking classics professor whenever he wasn’t in character. In character—as himself—Marcus Caster-Rupp.
It was all very confusing and attention-grabbing, and that wasbeforeMarcus shoved his way through crowds of confused fans to interrupt his estranged girlfriend April’s own session and announce his devoted love, then French her in front of a live studio audience.
Okay, to be fair, it wasn’t a studio. It was a convention hall.
The rest: one hundred percent accurate.
At that point, theGatesfans who’d decided to skip this particular convention kept posting videos of themselves weeping in despair.
By Sunday morning, Peter already knew the audience for the last event of the convention, his joint Q&A session with Maria, was going to fall into one of two categories: They’d either slump into the hall, sagging with postdrama fatigue, or burst into the space wired as hell and waiting with twitchy impatience for the final bombshell to drop.
But he and Maria were the normal ones, and they had no earth-shattering news to share. By now, everyone knew they were together. Each of them had accepted a few smaller, short-term roles and auditioned for others, but they were both willing to wait for the right project to come along before committing to anything bigger. Especially since the longer they waited, the more time they could spend together, and they couldn’t get enough.
Enough time together. Enough sex. Enough conversation. Enough privacy.