I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (31 page)

I almost didn’t get my $2,500 for the interview though. When a few weeks passed and I still hadn’t gotten a check, I asked Ben where it was and when I could expect it. Ben said his business manager had accidentally deposited the check in his business account and it would take some juggling to figure out how to pay me. Ben had this image of me as a rich model, but I was struggling after the show and I needed every penny we earned together. It was very annoying having to beg him for
my
money.

A few weeks later, I told Ben I needed the money and asked if he had figured out how to pay me.

“Why do you need it?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need it?’” I said, puzzled. Ben gave me another lecture about my spending. “I don’t understand why you need it,” he repeated.

“Ben, it’s
my
money. I need to pay my bills, too.”

It seemed kind of fishy to me. Turns out
Life & Pile
was fishy, too. After they got the story, they said it was never their intention to let Ben keep the new furniture. Before it was all hauled away, Ben decided to throw a housewarming party for forty of his closest friends. I was terrified the furniture would be destroyed and we’d have to pay for it, but he wasn’t worried.

In typical Ben style, the party was a rager and I spent half the time running around picking up beer cans and begging people not to sit on the new white couch. Ben’s dog, Scotch, was so freaked out I had to tuck him under the covers in the bedroom. The
Life & Style
reporter and the park massage girl both showed up, but I was okay with it. As time went on, I’d gotten used to Ben’s girl-space-friends hanging around.

Bachelor
and
Bachelorette
alum Ali Fedotowsky, who was in town, popped by with a twelve-pack of beer, her hair in a bun, wearing a touristy San Francisco sweatshirt she bought at a CVS. I thought she was hilarious, cool, and laid-back, but Ben wasn’t a fan. He ironically didn’t like that she always traveled with a sycophantic entourage. He used to make fun of her name, drawing it out like a
Downton Abbey
butler: “Ohhhh, I’m Ali Fedotowwwwwwsky.”

Ali and I got along great and she opened up to me about the demise of her engagement to Roberto Martinez. She was very upset about rumors that he might be the next Bachelor because their breakup was still fresh. To make her feel better, I told her that Ben and I weren’t doing well either. It felt great to be honest about our situation with someone other than my sister.

At one point in the night I spotted Ben on the outside staircase by himself, texting. Um, Ben was never by himself. And he had the posture of a man trying to hide something. Around 1:00
A.M.
, the party was dying down and he said he was going to grab some food with the boys down the street at Pizza Orgasmica (yeah, Kacie B’s parents would have loved Ben) and would be right back.

While he was gone, I cleaned up his apartment. An hour later, he came back and didn’t even say thank you. “Where have you been all this time?” I nagged. When he went to the bathroom, I saw the PR girl’s name pop up on his phone. I’d met her once when he went to pick up some cases of Fernet at her office. She was cute, but a little standoffish with me. Ben told me she was married, but I never checked if that was true or not.

It read: Are you at Hi-Fi?

He’d responded: Darn, I just missed you.

When he came out of the bathroom, I ripped into him.

“Were you just at a club?”

“No! Why are you going through my phone? We just went out for pizza!”

I told him that was bullshit and asked if he was cheating with this PR rep. He denied it, but then added, “I have to maintain relationships! Sometimes for my job I have to be flirty!”

I was drunk and pissed so I said, “Oh really? Well sometimes Chris still texts me!” It was true. I’d actually told Chris he couldn’t text me anymore, but Ben didn’t need to know that right now.

“What!”

“We’re just
friends
,” I said sarcastically. “I’ll show you the texts and pictures. You can go through my phone.”

“That’s not okay. This is a problem.”

“Every time I see your phone her name keeps popping up!”

“Everyone knows I’m in love with you,” he said, starting to soften. “I don’t want you talking to your exes anymore. It makes me feel like they gave you something I’m not giving you, which makes me want to try harder.”

And then we had sex.

14

BUILDING & BREAKING

W
e kept building up the relationship and then breaking it. Build and break. Build and break. At this moment, we were building toward something, though I wasn’t sure what. Ben was starting to be more supportive of my career and when I’d come up to San Francisco he drove me to castings for Gap and Old Navy. I spent time exploring the city and taking the bus all over, meeting Julia for lunch, and trying to get used to the fact that San Fran would be my new home soon.

Ben seemed very happy with me lately, and had no clue that I was unsatisfied in our relationship. I felt like there was no end in sight, in terms of moving in together, and the long distance was getting old. At the end of August, Arie Luyendyk Jr., the sexy race car driver from Arizona who was the runner-up on Emily Maynard’s
Bachelorette
season, tweeted Ben and me that he was coming up to San Francisco for a race. It was funny, because at brunch once with Ben’s sister, Julia, we’d both admitted that we had crushes on Arie. To get even, Ben said his celebrity crush was Zooey Deschanel and Garrett admitted he liked Kate Upton. It was one of those harmless hall-pass conversations.

I private messaged Arie that I was going to be out of town, but Ben would love to meet up with him. I’m not going to lie. I was a little flirty. I’d heard through a very reliable source, another former contestant, that Arie was the best sex she’d ever had. “Next time we’re in the same place, let’s rendezvous,” I teased. Eeek.

Ben met up with Arie and Lucas Daniels, from Ashley’s season, and had a blast. Arie even took him for a spin around the track. After they hung out, Arie tweeted that he had fun with Ben and that seeing how happy we were together renewed his faith in love. Ben also told me that he gushed to Arie that our relationship had never been better, bragging, “We are in such a great place!” Then he made the mistake of telling Arie that I had a crush on him. “I better keep you two away from each other,” Ben joked.

Ben wasn’t worried about telling Arie I had the hots for him. In his mind, we were happy and moving toward marriage. He was thinking fall 2013 and now wanted an over-the-top, glamorous affair. “We should have a fancy black-tie wedding!” he said, all excited. “It’ll be really cool! Everyone will get dressed up to the nines and it’ll be really chic!” I was confused. He knew I’d always wanted a rustic, outdoor wedding at the Farm.

“I guess so,” I said, totally deflated.

Then we had the other big conversation.

“I have baby fever!” Ben said out of the blue one day while we were driving to get him new furniture. “Me, too!” I said. We talked about our parenting styles and we agreed that Ben would be the disciplinarian and I’d be the pushover.

This was a thrilling turn of events, but it scared the shit out of me. We’d been up and down so many times—and now he was actually talking about marriage and babies? I didn’t know if I should get my hopes up. Ben had recently joined not one, but
two
co-ed softball teams. He did whatever he wanted at all times with no real consideration for me. Was he mature enough to be the father of my children? I mean the guy was constantly showing me dick tricks, like his famous fruit bowl or “the stork.” (Sorry for the visual.) I pictured him out having beers with his softball team(s), while I was home with our colicky baby. I’d text him and ask, “Where are you??” and he’d say, “I’ll be right there …” And we all know how that goes.

Anyway, marriage and babies were both moot because he still had not officially asked me to move in with him. And there was still the issue of his mother, who I was convinced had tried to kill me on an extreme bike ride through Sonoma. As she whizzed through narrow paths and rugged terrain, she yelled at me like
Biggest Loser
trainer Jillian Michaels: “Keep up! Come on!” At a stoplight, she brought up
The Bachelor
again, reminding me how Ben almost gave up on me when the negative press got to be too much. I didn’t understand why she’d want to rehash the past, other than to stir the pot.

“You know Ben came to me and said, ‘I don’t want to have to defend this woman for the rest of my life.’”

“Well, I think when you love someone unconditionally, you do anything for them,” I responded. “I think he was very weak.”

Babs was flabbergasted.

“And by the way,” I continued, “I get asked constantly about him being a cheater. Perfect strangers walk up to me and tell me to get rid of him. I
always
defend him.”

When Ben heard about this argument, he called Babs and warned her that she better get on board and be nice because he was in love with me. Ironically, she agreed to make more of an effort and bought me a beige scarf as an olive branch. But the truce didn’t last long. And Ben’s support of me was short-lived, too.

I’d always had Ben’s back throughout our entire stressful experience—both on the show and after. I was always supportive of him. And, ironically, the one time I wasn’t became the breaking point in our relationship. In the end, I was the one who totally blew it and caused the thin ice of our relationship to break. I made an incredibly insensitive mistake.

On Ben’s thirtieth birthday his beloved family dog, Sophie, had to be put down. Ben, Julia, and Babs went to the vet and I met up with them afterward for lunch. They cried and told stories about Sophie. I gave Ben his gifts, a set of All-Clad pots and pans, a Boos cutting board, and a beautiful framed photograph of him and Scotch on Baker Beach heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge. “Look, he’s running away from you,” Babs said to me.

That past weekend we’d already had a fun pirate-themed party on Angel Island for Ben, so he spent the evening of his actual birthday sitting on his couch, tooling around on his laptop. I sat next to him, wiping his tears away and rubbing his head. He seemed so sad. I thought he might want to be alone. And to be honest, I was exhausted from spending the day with his mother. I changed my flight and left that night instead of early the next morning. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it at the time.

On the way to the airport, Julia texted me.

Why did you leave?

Only then did I realize the gravity of what I’d done. I’d just left my fiancé alone on his birthday, after his dog died. This was very bad.

And that one decision marked the end of my “fairy-tale” romance. Ben’s feelings changed for me that day and we never recovered as a couple. I apologized over and over again for leaving, but we spent the next three weeks apart, barely speaking. He canceled a trip down to L.A. to see me, and I didn’t go back to see him until early October, to help him with his winery’s grape harvest in Sonoma. Of the countless flights I’d taken up there, this was the only time during our relationship that he’d bought my ticket. Normally I would have considered it a lovely gesture, but I had a hunch it was an ominous sign. Unbelievably, my flight was canceled and I ended up buying the replacement ticket.

The weekend was truly abysmal. As soon as he picked me up at the airport, I could tell he was still mad about the dog incident and wasn’t happy to see me. He was cold and quiet, and barely looked at me.

“I can’t do this back and forth thing much longer,” I said.

“I agree,” he said. “It’s getting old.”

We had dinner and the silence was the worst it had ever been. He again brought up his reality show
Young Sonoma
. He really wanted me to be on it, but I told him I wasn’t ready for another reality show. He also talked about a falling-out he’d just had with a very close friend. The guy had written him a Dear John e-mail. “You’ve changed,” it said, reaming him out for being selfish and a bad friend.

We had to be up at 5:00
A.M.
for the harvesting so we slept on a bed in Ben’s office in Sonoma. After picking the grapes, which was actually quite fun, I changed out of my dirty clothes in the backseat of the car and Ben didn’t even look in the rearview mirror once. I was waiting for him to look back at me, so I could flash him or do something sexy and playful, but he stared straight ahead at the road.

That night, Ben had an event at the Envolve tasting room and his mom tried to interfere with our relationship again. She told Ben that my friendly good-bye to one of his friends was inappropriate. “Bye!” I’d said innocently to his business partner. Babs gave me a death stare as we all walked to the car and Ben picked up on it. Later, he asked me, “What happened with my mom? That was the meanest stare she’s ever given anyone in her life.”

“I have no idea!” I said. “What did I do?”