Wilmer was beginning to grow tired of Paris. It really was over romanticized, or maybe he just hadn't seen enough of it to really fall in love with it like so many people apparently had. He had taken some great pictures but he was just ready to go back home to his shabby little Brooklyn apartment because Europe was beginning to drain him. He had encountered more drama here than he had in his entire life and he was beginning to regret this trip.
But there was one thing that was stopping him from doing so, and that was Demi. Her face filled his dreams and she was the last person that he thought about before he went to sleep and the first person that he thought of when he woke up. It was wrong because she was married with two kids and she had so much going on but he had given up on fighting it. He really liked her. If he could describe it, it was the way that he had felt about Rosalie when he first met her in high school. He was so infatuated with her. Everything about her was perfect and he always wanted to be with her. That's how it was with Demi but even more powerful than it was with Rosalie. And he didn't know how to tell her that without scaring her away or getting the whole, "I love Nick," speech so he kept it to himself.
It was a new day and apparently some photographers and interviewers from Cosmopolitan had flown to Paris just for a photoshoot, but Demi said that this shoot was special and had asked Wilmer to come with her to film some of it because she could already tell that it would be one of her favorite shoots. And of course he couldn't object because it was Demi, and he had quickly learned that anytime he got to spend with her was precious.
The photoshoot was at a little studio outside of the main city. When they got there, the woman that was supposed to be interviewing her, Anna, was already there but the photographer wasn't. From the way her face flushed when she heard the news, Wilmer could tell that Demi was annoyed but didn't say anything. Instead she went to wardrobe and hair and makeup.
An hour later and he was still a no show. Anna was freaking out and every thirteen seconds she was apologizing to Demi for the inconvenience. Wilmer was just minding his own business and looking at the video that Isa had sent him from her class.
"I have a solution." Demi cut Anna off in the middle of one of her apologies and clapped her hands together.
"Wilmer is shooting a documentary about me for HBO but I'm sure he could take the pictures, right Wilmer?" He looked up from his phone, meeting her eyes. Even in the minimal lighting they were still sparkling and he had to look away before he got lost in them. After a few minutes of trying to focus on something else, he realized that everyone was waiting on him for an answer and he couldn't even remember the question.
"Uh sure," he uneasily replied, causing Demi to beam, and then he had to look away again because her smile was just so bright and beautiful and it made him want to caress her face and kiss her so that he could feel her lips spreading against his in that gorgeous smile that she didn't show often.
"Great, let's get to work!" Wilmer cleared his throat and went over to his camera bag. He wasn't a camera snob or anything but he did like working with his own equipment because it's what he knew. Demi's hair and makeup team were doing last minute touch ups on her before they stepped into the separate, smaller all white room where the pictures were originally supposed to be taken. There was only one window in the room, and it was a skylight and Demi just happened to step directly underneath it. The soft glow of the light shining down on her made her look like she had descended directly from heaven and even though they hadn't started yet, Wilmer just had to take a picture.
It was a rustic style bedroom with furniture that had chips in the white paint and a golden headboard with messed up white sheets. Wilmer didn't know what the theme for the shoot was supposed to be but since he was the photographer, he guessed he could decide.
"Why don't you sit on the bed first? Um, lay on your stomach and kick one of your legs up or something. Just do whatever feels natural and comfortable for you, okay?" Wilmer instructed as Demi nodded and hopped on the bed with a soft giggle. Wilmer snapped a picture of that and smiled at the look on her face. For the first time in a while, she looked genuinely happy.
Demi rolled around on the bed a little bit, letting the sunlight stream down on her face as she played around with different positions on the bed, looking back at the camera sometimes and other times pretending like it wasn't there at all.
After Wilmer got the perfect shot, he grabbed a stool from the corner of the room and placed it directly under the sunlight.
"Come sit down," Wilmer said and Demi rolled off of the bed and went to sit on the stool. Wilmer fixed her hair a little bit so that it wasn't in her eyes and with the way that she was smiling at him, he couldn't help but to smile back at her.
"It's pretty here. It reminds me of my old bedroom at my parents' house." There was a faraway look in Demi's eye and Wilmer made sure to capture it. They did a few different poses on the stool before Demi decided that she wanted to take a break and do the interview before they had to take anymore pictures.
While Demi did her interview, Wilmer scrolled through the pictures that they had taken so far, and at every single one, it felt like he was falling harder and harder for Demi. Before they even met, he hadn't thought of her as a real person; just some superficial bitchy CEO who owned an expensive company and had only agreed to the documentary to help her image. But she was a person. She was a human being with feelings and he had watched her at what seemed to be her weakest points, but he had also seen her triumph over every obstacle in her life and claim her victory. And that part of her, that human part of her that everyone else seemed to forget about, was the part that he was falling in love with.
Nick tried as hard as he could to just push Demi out of his mind. But no amount of champagne or sex with Olivia or loud music could make him stop thinking about her, and the more he thought about it, the angrier he grew. Here was Demi who, for the past three years, had been blaming him for their marriage falling apart. Yet she was the one who had cheated on him, lied about the paternity of their kids, and even worse, she cheated on him with her brother. How the hell could he have married someone like that? How could she do that to him, after all that they had been through together?
He knew that he should've listened to his mother when she told him that she wasn't any good for him and she was just using him as her meal ticket. Was that true? Did Demi really only marry him to benefit herself? Now that he thought about it, right after they announced their engagement, her company had really began to soar to the top without anyone being able to stop her. Did she know that was going to happen and that's why she had said yes to him when he proposed?
They used to be so in love and Nick couldn't even fathom what had happened between them. Something that could've been so beautiful was destroyed because his wife had cheated on him with his brother and his kids weren't even his kids. That was the worst thing about it all. He thought he was a father to two beautiful children but he wasn't and Demi had never even bothered to tell him. How could she do that to him?
"What did I tell you Nicholas? I told you that you should've married Selena instead of that no good, gold digging, parent less whore. You know her parents were crazy and killed themselves. That's who raised her. I don't know what you were expecting from someone who came up in a household like that," his mother sneered across from him. They were having a meeting in the family home because Nick had told them about what happened and they were discussing what to do in case the media found out. Nick winced at the way that his mother was talking about Demi but he didn't correct her. He didn't have the energy to and he just didn't care anymore.
"If this gets out we're not playing nice, Nicholas. We will go to war with her, for you, and you'll divorce her and throw her and those bastard kids out on the street on their asses."
"Ma..." Nick cut her off because technically, those were still her grandkids. They just weren't his kids.
"The kids are Kevin's. You can't ignore your own grandkids." The muscle under Denise's left eye twitched and she pursed her lips but didn't say anything.
"Demi can have those kids. I don't want them. She's the one who came onto me when you were working late one night. We all told you how she was from the beginning Nick and you didn't listen," Kevin spat with nothing but disgust in his voice. Next to him, his wife Danielle uncomfortably shifted in her seat before she dismissed herself from the table to use the bathroom.
Nick didn't want to go nuclear on Demi. He just wanted her to tell him the complete and total truth and then they could work on moving forward. Until then, until she was willing to admit to what she had done, he wanted nothing to do with her.
After all the pictures had been taken and the interview was over, Demi was glad to be back at her hotel room with her kids. Tomorrow she would be stuck in meetings and run throughs but right now she just wanted to spend some time with the two people who meant the entire world to her. It felt like she didn't get to do a lot of that lately.
Since Nick had left Demi had no choice but to have Dorinda fly back to Paris. She felt bad about it but Isabella had ballet and Demi didn't trust anyone else with her kids and she couldn't just leave them alone all day. So Dorinda was her next best option. She promised that she didn't mind but Demi was gonna have to remember to give her a pay raise when they got back to the states.
"MOMMY!" Nolie squealed as soon as Demi entered the room. It was a dual suite so it had two bedrooms but the twins were in the living room watching TV.
"Hey princess!" Demi matched her excitement and caught her in her arms as she jumped on her and she showered her with kisses. She couldn't fathom how Nick could so easily give them up, even if they weren't his, they had still raised them together and they might not biologically be his children, but he had been a father to them for their entire lives. That had to count for something...right?
"We missed you mommy. And we didn't even get to hang out with daddy. Why did daddy leave?" Nolie questioned with a pout on her face that perfectly matched Demi's.
"He just had some business to handle back home. I'll sure we'll be able to call him later or something, okay?" Demi stroked her hair down and kissed the top of her head because she knew that wasn't the case. Why hadn't she just told Nick about Kevin right after it happened? Now her kids were going to get dragged into this and that's the last thing that she wanted to happen.
"Nicholas, did you not miss me?" Demi questioned as she set Nolie down. Nicholas didn't say anything and stayed focused on the TV. Demi went to sit next to him and hug him but he scooted away from her.
"Baby, what's wrong?"
"You made daddy go away," he huffed, folding his arms over his chest and looking so much like Nick that it almost caused her to cry. These were his children, biological or not.
"Daddy went away because he had business to do back home sweetie. There was nothing that I could do about that. We're leaving soon so we'll get to see him, okay buddy? I'm sorry he went away and couldn't stay with us. I really am," Demi apologized, but she wasn't just apologizing for Nick leaving. She was apologizing for the fact that their lives were about to completely change and she couldn't do anything about it. She was apologizing because she had been raped by her husband's brother and they had been the product of that and she had never told anyone so now it was all blowing up in her face. She was apologizing for her faults, for her mistakes, for disrupting their peaceful childhood.
"Cuddle time mommy?" Nolie questioned and Demi nodded. She kicked her shoes off and shrugged out of her jacket. She abandoned her phone and took their hands and led them back to the bedroom that her and Nick had shared. They both hopped onto the bed on either side of her and she smiled as they cuddled up to her and held her as close as possible. In their eyes, she was still their superhero. Just like they were everything to her, she was everything to them and that's why she loved her children so much. They were too young to highlight everything that was wrong with her, to understand that she was a human being with faults who made mistakes and it was something that she could now appreciate even more than she did before.
Demi didn't mean to fall asleep but two hours later she was waking up with Nolie's head on her chest and Nicholas's head in her lap and the sun was still up but it was low on the horizon. The clock in the room said that it was 5 o'clock and she knew that she should've woken the twins up to eat and stuff so that they wouldn't be up all night but she couldn't even bring herself to. Instead she carefully climbed out of the bed and walked out of the bedroom to the main area of the suite where she poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it down before there was a knock on her door.
"Hey." It was Wilmer. Of course it was Wilmer. She realized that they hadn't actually spent that much time together today and opened the door wider to let him in.
"I just thought that we could knock out another interview session, ya know?" Wilmer said as he came in with his camera and the other equipment that he needed to film her. Demi nodded and took a seat on the couch, pushing her hair out of her face as Wilmer set the camera up. It was quiet between them but Demi didn't mind. She was thankful that Wilmer wasn't like a lot of other people in her life who tried to fill the silence with awkward, insignificant chatter.
"Tell us about what happened today and how it affected you," Wilmer said. They had about ten or so more fan questions to get through because they were behind schedule. It was his fault. He had been slightly...distracted.
"Today I did a photo shoot for Cosmopolitan magazine. I was half naked, which I've never done before actually, and it was one of my favorite photoshoots ever. There was just something so pure and beautiful about it. I looked back at the pictures and I couldn't believe that that was me in all white, in that two piece lingerie set, with that body. When I hit puberty, I didn't have my mom there to help me through it. I had my grandmother, and she was very strict in the sense that she believed that girls should be very thin and they should have control of their bodies and what they ate and how they exercised and stuff like that. She forced me to do things that I absolutely hated like dance and gymnastics so that I could be graceful and thin and beautiful. I think she had good intentions but in the end she made me hate my body because I wasn't built to be thin. I was built with thick thighs like my mother's and strong arms and a tiny waist and small breasts and it's an odd combination but it's me. At one point I just hated myself so much that I couldn't even look in the mirror. And with this photo shoot, it was just so different and beautiful and I saw myself in a new light. The photographer made me love my body all over again, like I never did before, and I think this shoot was so important because it reminded me of what I went through when I was with my grandmother and how far I've come."
Wilmer of course wasn't expecting that answer, but it was just another thing that reminded him that she was human and she was real and she had been through a lot, but she was still standing strong. And that only aided in him falling for her.
I'm a bit "eh" about this chapter but I wanted to update before I left for the weekend. Hope you enjoyed it!