I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (28 page)

We were pretty much doomed.

After the taping (and giving the ring back yet again for safekeeping—it would be returned after the finale aired), we went back to the little Happy Couple house off Melrose. That night, “Women Tell All” aired. I couldn’t stomach watching it so I went to take a bath while Ben plopped down in front of the TV.

I submerged myself in the tub, trying to drown out the angry chorus of estrogen-fueled insults. But I still caught snippets of their bitching and moaning.

“These girls are
awful
!” Ben bellowed from the other room.

Ya think, Benny Boo Boo?

13

ENGAGED & DATING

I
watched the
Bachelor
finale and “After the Final Rose” on March 12 by myself in my apartment. When it was over, there was no fanfare or celebration or congratulatory e-mails, just an empty wine bottle and a pity call from my dad. The end result of the show was so depressing and unpopular that the interview we’d done for
People
magazine was bumped off the cover for
The Hunger Games
. I didn’t even care. The stylist for the magazine put me in a preppy pink sweater, something I’d never wear, to make me look sweeter. The shoot itself was awkward. I was so proud to be in my element and show Ben the modeling ropes, but he was as stiff as a board and ignored my advice to move a little in every frame. The inside story, with the optimistic headline “Can They
Really
Trust Each Other?” just rehashed all of the old drama.

Ben was so burnt-out by the entire experience that other than the
People
interview, he didn’t want to do any other press, morning or daytime talk shows, nothing. In fact, after “Women Tell All,” reporters witnessed him throwing a temper tantrum about doing more interviews. “One more of these fucking things and I’m done,” he complained. “I have so many better things to do with my life.”

Now that the full season had aired I wanted everyone to see the real me, but I never got a chance to defend myself or try to change people’s opinions or misperceptions of me.

The day after the finale, my three-carat engagement ring was messengered to me at home and I could now wear it publicly and proudly. The day after that, I told the crew of paps on my front lawn that I was going to see Ben tomorrow and booked my flight (which I paid for) up to San Francisco. I hadn’t been to his hometown since the very first week of taping. I was so nervous and excited. He picked me up at the airport in his BMW, gave me a bouquet of flowers he bought at the grocery store, and took me back to his place in the Marina, a hipster neighborhood near the Golden Gate Bridge with a lot of bars.

On the drive, I told Ben I had a big surprise I’d been holding off telling him until we were together in person. I had a secret meeting with the producers of
Dancing with the Stars
and they wanted me as an alternate, just in case anyone got hurt. The payday was incredible: $125,000 just to show up and $30,000 for every week I made it through. Cha-ching!

“They offered it to
you
?” he asked incredulously. I noted a tinge of jealousy. I hadn’t even thought about this kind of stuff yet and how it would affect our relationship. I was just excited the opportunity was there.

“If you do it,” he added coldly, “you won’t have a fiancé.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

“I can’t believe you’d even bring it up,” Ben growled, even more pissed off.

This was not a good start.

I dropped the conversation and ultimately dropped out of the potential
Dancing with the Stars
casting, even though we could have bought our first house together with that money.

Instead we spent the first three months of our public engagement staying in his frat house of an apartment when I’d visit. Ben explained that since he’d been gone for so long on
The Bachelorette
and
The Bachelor,
this was just a temporary living situation. It better be. His two winery business partners lived there, too. Ben and one guy had their own rooms, but the other slept on a queen mattress in the living room. The apartment only had one bathroom, and it looked like a bathroom used by three guys. It felt like we were in college.

I learned very quickly that in Ben’s world, the days were jam-packed with activities and his entourage. After cooking dinner together the first night, we didn’t have any alone time for the rest of the weekend. The first night we spent in the frat house one roommate had a hookup drop by. This was the “real life” relationship I’d imagined while we were locked up like inmates? The next day, Ben had a wine event scheduled at a restaurant in Sonoma, forty-five minutes away, where his mom lived. He decided not to take me to the tasting. Babs thought I would be hounded by the guests. So he left me with Babs at her condo while he worked the party. “This is better for you,” she insisted. “So you don’t have to answer so many questions.” We both took naps to decrease the amount of time we had to spend together.

That night Ben and I drove back to the city and had our first public dinner with his sister, Julia, and her boyfriend, Garrett, at Park Tavern. We were so lovey-dovey. After, we went back to his apartment and had sex. We were both so tired—him from going, going, going all day and me from having to be “on” all the time in front of his friends and mom—that it was just …
fine
. “It’s only going to get better,” I told him hopefully.

Early in the morning, Ben and I helped Julia and Garrett move into their cute new apartment. I was a little envious that they were at this step and we weren’t even talking about it. The paparazzi had found us in San Fran, which Ben blamed me for, and many of the tabloids mistakenly reported that we were moving in together. Afterward we had lunch then met ten of Ben’s closest friends in a park for an afternoon of drinking and kite flying.

The next morning one of Ben’s friends had to take me to the airport because Ben had work to do. The guy came to get me before the sun came up and dropped me off on the curb, even though my flight wasn’t for hours. It ended up being delayed and I sat in the airport for most of the day.

So, Ben wouldn’t “let” me do
Dancing with the Stars,
and didn’t want to do any press—but without telling me he arranged for a free trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in exchange for promoting the resort, a favorite destination of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. A telling sign, right? I thought we were just going on vacation, but the first day we were there, Ben informed me that we had to take a few pictures and then we could have the rest of the time to ourselves. Did he make money from this setup? To this day I don’t know.

Regardless, we had an amazing time together. It really felt like we were on our honeymoon. It was one of the rare times in our relationship—maybe the only time, come to think of it—we were completely alone for five days in a row. Ben, as painful as it was for him, attempted to relax as much as possible. We drank beer and sunbathed all day, and made love all night. We were super affectionate and intimate. We spent the whole trip holding hands and kissing.

There were a couple of hiccups. First, he made the mistake of checking his e-mail after dinner the first night. A friend had forwarded a photo of
In Touch Weekly’
s latest cover; it was the photo of me naked in the bathtub that Dylan had sold to them for a few thousand dollars. The headline was about my “Dirty Secrets” and the rag promised nude photos (yep, there it was on the cover), details of a
Playboy
spread (never happened), and a boob job (unashamedly true).

After the first story had come out, I’d fired off nasty texts to Dylan:

Me: I can’t believe you’re selling stories about me.

Dylan: I can’t believe you’d go on a show like that.

Me: Just remember, there are two sides to every story.

Dylan: Don’t you ever threaten me.

Me: I just did.

Dylan: Just leave me alone.

Me: Same to you.

This time I decided to ignore him. Though Ben never offered to beat Dylan up for me, he also didn’t freak out about the naked bathtub picture and was surprisingly supportive. “Can you sue that guy?” he asked. It felt like a turning point in our relationship. That no matter what garbage anyone threw at us, we were now a team and strong enough to get through it.

The other issue was that after three days of being by ourselves, we were running out of conversation. That troubled me a little bit. Over drinks one night, we fell back on old reliable, reminiscing about
The Bachelor
. Ben, for some reason, brought up Nicki. “She was really cool,” he glowed. “When we were on her Hometown, I looked over at her and it was like I was with one of my buddies.”

Seriously? Here we were, on our first vacation alone together and he’s fondly talking about an “ex” who treated me like crap. “Do you want to be friends with her?” I said, my voice trembling and on the verge of tears. “She wasn’t nice to me, Ben. And you were with her!”

“We said we’d never talk about that,” he said quietly. That was a nondenial. I mean I wasn’t surprised. Ben made out with like sixteen of the eighteen girls who made it past the first Rose Ceremony.

I pulled out the fiancé card he’d thrown in my face about
Dancing with the Stars
.

“If you want me in your life, you cannot be friends with her.”

“In all fairness, you talk about your exes a lot,” he said.

“I think the reason I talk about them so much is that I want you to know the truth, that I have had good relationships.”

“Okay, I got it,” he said and the conversation was dropped like an AT&T call.

In the beginning of our relationship, the offers to make money were rolling in. I turned down a lucrative opportunity to endorse a diet pill company, because I thought it sent a bad message to young girls. Without telling Ben, I turned down $50,000 each for us to appear on VH1’s
Couples Therapy
because I knew he’d never agree to it. Ben had several secret meetings about doing a reality show about the wine business called
Young Sonoma
and signed on without telling me. Only after he agreed to do it did he ask me to be on it. I felt blindsided. Already bitter about his
Dancing with the Stars
ban, I told him I didn’t want to be on it. I told him that I thought it would create problems in our relationship.

At the end of March, Ben and I had our first paid public appearance together for “Night of a Billion Reality Stars,” hosted by Svedka vodka, at SupperClub in L.A. Instead of staying with me at my place, which, unbelievably he’d still never seen, Ben went down to San Diego the night before the event to hang out with friends. When I picked him up at the train station, he looked like shit. I recognized a filmy haze around him and detected a scent of cocoa butter.

“Did you go to a strip club last night?”

“How did you know?”

“It’s written all over you.”

At the event, we had to walk the red carpet together and a reporter asked Ben about our plans for marriage. It was the first time we’d been asked about setting a date since right after the show ended.

“We’re taking it slow,” he said. “We’re engaged-dating.”

I was shocked. What the heck was “engaged-dating”? I’d never heard him say that in my life. Either he made it up on the spot or had been thinking about it and neglected to fill me in on our new status. Silly me, I was under the impression that we were engaged to be married.

I put that on the back burner as we entered the party. I rubbed elbows with Bravo Housewives Teresa Giudice, Kyle Richards, Brandi Glanville, and Gretchen Rossi, and sperminator Jon Gosselin.
Dancing with the Stars
pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy mingled with Mob Wife Angela “Big Ang” Raiola. And it was my first event as an official member of Bachelor Nation. I was introduced to Bachelorettes Ali Fedotowsky and DeAnna Pappas, and the adorable Stagliano brothers, the breakout stars of
Bachelor Pad
. Jesse Kovacs, from Jillian Harris’s season, was also there, wandering around looking extremely hot.

Then I met Ashley Hebert, who I knew from a very reliable source had slept with Ben in her Fantasy Suite. My first impression, well, I was really surprised that she was so short. A lot of people look small next to me, but she was just a teeny tiny little thing!

It was the first time Ben had seen her since their “After the Final Rose” taping, and they had a nice chat. “I’m sorry,” Ashley told Ben again. “I felt bad about it.” She was also very nice to me, but she had a nervous energy.

So what’s it like to be in Bachelor Nation? It’s a private high school on steroids. There are cliques within cliques, politics and hierarchies to wade through, and at least one secret Facebook group where alums plan exotic vacations together. There are official
Bachelor
-sponsored parties and a lot of charity events organized and attended by alumni. Of course, there is a ton of intermingling, cohabitating, and shocking hookups. For instance, not many people know that Vienna Girardi and country-singing bad boy Wes Hayden had a thing after she broke up with Jake Pavelka.