A Fake Marriage ( Jenlisa ) (Gip )

Part 4

J

One Year Later

I loved Lisa's house. I loved everything and everyone in it. I loved the paint on the walls, the bamboo floors, the floor to ceiling windows that look out onto the back deck, I loved the big pots of bamboo that I planted along the edges of the deck and patio for privacy...I could go on and on. But it was the royal blue modern sofa that was here before I moved in that really did it for me. It was a stylish, bold statement, made by a young man who claimed to have no style or concept of good interior decorating. Which meant that he's a natural. And that he took risks. I liked that.

After Lisa had made her first million with the success of her Fitness Nerd app ("We do the math—you do the workout"), she had given me a ridiculously generous twenty thousand dollar budget to redecorate our floor of the house. I only ended up using about half of the budget, because I didn't really want things to change. That almost never happened. I would walk into almost every room of any house or store or offices and nothing could stop me from mentally rearranging or replacing furniture or artwork or color schemes. Lisa's house had felt right the first time I set foot in it.

I do small interior decorating jobs and staging for real estate listings on the side when I'm not busy with film set jobs. As a home stager, I look at a space with a different set of eyes than I do as a set designer. For home staging your focus is on selling the house, which means de-cluttering, highlighting architectural elements if there are any, enhancing small spaces with bold pieces, defining the use of an area in a stylish and straightforward way while helping potential buyers to envision their own belongings in the rooms. As a set designer you read the script to get clues about the characters you're creating spaces for, do research about the era in which the story is set, consult with the director and production designer and other departments about style and scale and budget. You're selling an idea about the characters that use those spaces. I get obsessed with colors and minor details like postcards on bulletin boards, patterns on drapes that give a hint about subtext.

But I didn't want or need to sell this space to interested parties, and I certainly didn't want to convey subtext with rug patterns in a house that was already cluttered with my hidden emotions. So I did what any designer who's a slave to Instagram would do—I had the walls painted a bright Benjamin Moore white, the kitchen cabinets painted a rich grey with lavender undertones, switched out all the lighting fixtures and hardware for high-end brushed gold, added some big beautiful statement plants, a gorgeous souk rug for the living room, Ikea sheepskin rugs for the backs of chairs, purchased a few big canvases from local artists and throw pillows for bold pops of magenta to echo the bougainvillea blossoms surrounding the house, and lemon yellow to match the potted lemon trees.

It looked good. I always got tons of compliments whenever I posted pics on Instagram, and more than a few free gifts from home décor vendors who follow me. Plus, there were tons of pretty things for me to look at when I was trying to avoid staring at my best friend's bare torso.

I was feeling nostalgic.

I would miss this house.

The time had come for Jisoo and Bobby to move out the next weekend, because they could finally afford to live in their own two-bedroom apartment mid-way between Santa Monica and Pasadena where they worked. I begged and pleaded with them to stay with us in their unit just a little while longer, at least until I'd moved out too, but Jisoo had put up with her commute for too long. So Lisa and I were throwing them a party on this, our last weekend together. I was dreading being alone with her, because there was a big conversation that we needed to have and I kept putting it off.

Lisa had been spending so much time up in the Bay Area and Portland, and I'd been so busy on film and commercial sets the past few months that we'd barely seen each other. That was way up at the top of the Why We Need To Be Just Friends list—I was done with out-of-town boyfriends. It's not that I didn't trust Lisa, even though I knew she had a bevy of Bay Area Babes who were always texting her when she was home. She'd always been discreet, and she never seemed to have dates when she was in L.A., but she didn't hide her phone when she was around me, and I teased her mercilessly about what a manwhore she was, even though she refused to talk about those girls with me. Because that's how it goes when you're best friends with her.