I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (8 page)

Four nights later, he flew to L.A. and we were back together.

When I was a kid, I’d gone years without even so much as touching a boy. But once I started dating guys, I became one of those girls who couldn’t be alone. It was like I was petrified of having another dry spell. My motto from that point on: “The best way to get over a guy is to get under another one.” It wasn’t healthy, but it’s what I did. I was a serial rebounder.

So while Chris and I tried to make it work long distance again, Jesse refused to let me go. He drove by my apartment, sometimes when I was walking hand-in-hand with Chris. He showed up at my gym at times he knew I’d be there. One time, I called him out on it. “I like to drive by hoping to get to see you,” he admitted shamelessly.

His persistence paid off and by the summer I’d ditched Chris again and Jesse and I were as hot and heavy as Elaine Benes and the saxophone player. At first, it was a dream again. Jesse bought me expensive diamond necklaces and spoiled me with lobster dinners. We drove down to a resort in La Jolla, where the valets called me Mrs. Metcalfe, and he showed me off at paparazzi hotspot the Ivy. He even met my family in Newport Beach and played Ping-Pong with my dad and drank beers with my mesmerized mom. She actually refused to get a new cell phone for almost ten years because she didn’t want to lose her prized pictures of Jesse. Jesse even invited me to be his date at the Emmys. I got dolled up in a Mark Zunino gown and had my hair done by Frankie Payne, stylist for Kim Kardashian and Eva Longoria, and Jesse and I walked the red carpet holding hands.

I often felt like Cinderella when I was with Jesse, but over the next four years, the pumpkin slowly rotted. I’d bounce back and forth between Jesse and Chris like a pinball machine. Chris was a little lost, but my soul mate and my rock. Jesse was exciting and passionate, but a total mess. He liked that I grounded him, but deep down we both knew I wasn’t wild enough for him. He was stubborn and really possessive. If he thought I was even slightly flirting with a guy in public, he’d put his arms around me and squeeze just a little too tight.

Jesse was also, by his own admission, an alcoholic and an addict. He never did drugs in front of me but he was always disappearing into bathrooms when we were out. He would also disappear for days at a time. When he was coming down, he’d feel like an ass and be super depressed. Jesse’s addictions spiraled out of control after he left
Desperate Housewives
at the peak of his fame. He went into rehab—and in and out of my life. It pained me to see him struggling to stay sober, so I tried not to drink in front of him and to be a positive influence. But he kept falling off the wagon, going MIA, and dating other women. One was a serious relationship with Nadine Coyle, from the Brit band Girls Aloud. After they broke up, for some reason he appeared on the show
LA Ink
to get a tattoo of her naked, holding his bloody heart, on his arm. I could tell that he was in a really bad place.

As much as I liked Jesse, I never felt like I could trust him. Our relationship made me totally paranoid and I turned into that awful girl who resorts to snooping. One night we were going to a Jason Mraz concert and he forgot to print out the tickets. I overheard him tell a friend his password so he could print the tickets and made a mental note. The next day, I broke into his e-mail and discovered he was having a full-on, intimate relationship with a girl in London. He called her “baby,” which really bothered me because he never called me that. I also broke into one of his social media accounts and found evidence that he was flirting with random, extremely trashy girls.

I called to ream him out and, as usual, he owned up to everything. I broke up with him again. And again. And again. Over the course of our six-year fling, we were really never together for more than two months at a time.

After bouncing back and forth between two polar opposite guys for years, Chris finally moved out to L.A. in 2007 and into my new apartment by the beach in Marina del Rey. For the first time in our long, rocky relationship, we were a real couple trying to do the whole domestic bliss thing. I was jetting off to modeling assignments, like Nautica and Hearts on Fire, and he got a job at the Ralph Lauren store on Rodeo Drive. We flew to Maui and had sex on the beach. We were always love machines, doing it up to four times a day. Our chemistry was off the charts.

Our physical connection could only go so far though. Emotionally, we were growing away from each other. After so many years apart, living totally different lives, we didn’t have much in common anymore. I was living a busy, urban lifestyle and Chris wasn’t into it. I also wanted a boob job and he wasn’t into that either. I’d always been self-conscious about being a brick wall and truly believe I lost out on some sexier modeling assignments because of my flat chest. I’d done the water bra and used chicken cutlets to enhance my chest, but for me it wasn’t enough. Chris was adamant: he did not want me to get breast implants.

He’d also started a strict new raw food diet. I’d been a meat-and-potatoes kind of girl up until then, so the new diet turned me off. But for him I gave it a go. For the next three years I was a strict vegan, and only ate raw foods.

As it turns out, Chris wasn’t that into me anymore either. He flat-out told me he wasn’t sure if he believed in marriage. And making matters worse, I found a “cons list”—that’s right, there were no pros, just cons—he’d made about me and actually carried around in his wallet. It included character flaws such as:

Watches too much TV at night

This was true. I enjoy my downtime and being a lazy-ass couch potato is one of the ways I’ve unwound since my days ditching school to hang with my mom. It was during this time with Chris that I first started watching one of my guilty pleasures,
The Bachelor
. I forced him to watch with me so I could see which girls he found attractive. I would also talk about
The Bachelor
on the phone with my sister Rachel, who was such a big fan she held regular viewing parties for her friends. Also on the con list:

Smokes

Guilty.

Eats meat

Because of Chris, I became vegan/vegetarian as much as I could. But I never liked taking meat and fish out of my diet completely. He wanted his kids to be 100 percent raw. He didn’t even want them to drink milk.

My mom

It’s true she could be unsupportive and not very nice. Chris may have disliked my mom, but she turned out to be spot-on about him. He was kind of shady. One day, after I came back from a modeling assignment, I found flirty e-mails from a former coworker he accidentally left up on my computer and a long black hair in our shower.

AFTER A YEAR
and a half of living together, I kicked Chris out and moved to Santa Monica. He ended up moving to Idaho to work in a raw food restaurant. With Chris’s objections out of the way, I bought myself an $8,000 boob job. I got the smallest upgrade possible, from a full B to a small C, so they’d look completely natural. I absolutely love them and would highly recommend implants to any woman who doesn’t like being flat chested and wants to feel sexier. So there.

I wish I could say at this point that I decided to be alone to work on myself and figure out why I was attracted to guys with questionable character and/or addiction issues. But old habits die hard.

Within a week after the breakup, I was back at the Chateau Marmont carousing with my model friend Matt. One night at dinner, Matt sat me across from his friend Gerry, a.k.a. Scottish actor Gerard Butler, whose abs had starred in
300,
but was better known to a lass like me for his cheesy romantic comedy
P.S. I Love You
. In fact, Gerry wasn’t eating that night. He was on a liquid diet, because he had to film a love scene with Katherine Heigl for his next rom-com,
The Ugly Truth
. I didn’t need to read
Us Weekly
to know that Gerry’s bad-boy reputation preceded him. He flirted mercilessly with me, looking deep into my soul like a champion snake oil salesman. He was impossibly handsome and completely hypnotizing, but I forced myself not to jump his bones right then and there.

The next day, Gerry texted me in the middle of the day. He was at the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica and wanted me to come over. I was torn. I had a callback for another commercial for Old Navy. I desperately wanted to blow it off but after an internal argument with myself, realized I’d possibly be giving up about $20,000 just to spend a few hours with a horny movie star who would try to bone me then instantly avoid me like the plague. So, like a good girl, I went to the callback.

I didn’t get the job, but I was so glad I went. The day after that I had lunch with a model girlfriend, who told a wonderful little story about how the handsome movie star Gerard Butler had hit on her at the gym that morning and wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when she said she was married.

See, I
could
make good decisions when it came to men. Except for when I couldn’t. Another night at Chateau, Matt tried to entice me with another setup. “He’s a big agent at CAA,” Matt said. “You might really like him.” Jim Toth was thirty-eight, about thirteen years older than me, and ready for marriage and babies, the whole nine yards. I wasn’t, because I had just dumped Chris, but Jim was funny and smart, and we really hit it off. So when he asked for my number, I gave it to him.

Sure enough, he texted and asked me out for sushi. (What is it with these guys and sushi? It’s so L.A.!) We had a really nice time but it was clear to me that we were in different places in our lives and he was too old for me. After our date, he texted me a lot, but I kept blowing him off. Eventually, he called me out on it and I decided to be honest with him. “I’m not ready to date right now,” I admitted. After graciously saying he understood, he stopped contacting me completely. The next time I heard about Jim, he’d become Mrs. Reese Witherspoon.

He wouldn’t be the only good guy I let get away. I also briefly dated Jamie Linden, the adorable screenwriter of
10 Years
and
Dear John,
who last time I checked, was very seriously dating
New Girl
star Zooey Deschanel.

Instead of dating Jim or Jamie, who were rich, handsome, and talented, whose arms did I run to? A washed-up model friend named Dylan who was scraping by with short-term gigs as a cameraman on reality shows like
Undercover Boss
. Oh, and selling the medical marijuana he grew in his apartment (he was a licensed pot dealer). Dylan was the exact opposite of Chris, which is why I stupidly gravitated to him. He was a man’s man, someone who liked drinking and eating meat.

Only two weeks after Chris left, Dylan was on my couch as much as the throw pillows. And for the next year, I thought we were actually quite happy. My career exploded during this time so I was gone a ton. Tragically, my beloved agent, Mamie, at L.A. Models was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a week before she passed away, she took me to lunch and basically ordered me to switch to the Ford agency in L.A. “Don’t tell anyone I said that,” she whispered naughtily.

After Mamie died, nobody else at L.A. Models remembered to submit me for castings, so I listened to her advice, and signed with Steve Miller at Ford. He had booked me on the Rome A&F shoot in Arizona and had also made the move to L.A. Signing with him was a smart decision: I landed my first US magazine cover for
Fitness
and a bunch of lucrative TV commercials, like Jim Beam, Caesars Palace, and Clarisonic, which was a $35,000 payday alone. My face was also plastered on the front of a Clairol hair dye box, which was very exciting considering my classmates nominated me for Best Hair way back in eighth grade. I also flew to New York once a month to shoot catalogs, which was my bread and butter, and even did a photo shoot with Conan O’Brien, who was on
People’
s Most Beautiful list that year. He was so humble and asked me if I did anything wild and crazy the night before. He said he wanted to live vicariously because he was an ol’ married guy.

I was also constantly getting what I called mailbox money, unexpected residual and royalty checks that appeared every time one of my commercials aired. I was loaded and loved spoiling Dylan, who was always anxiously awaiting his own mailbox money—unemployment checks. I made him gourmet dinners, homemade tamales, Ina Garten’s meatloaf—and took him on a crazy-expensive trip to Maui, where I rented a stunning three-bedroom beach house.

I must have been so busy that I was ignoring all of the red flags that were right in front of my eyes:

1.
Dylan was sponging off of me and eating all the food in my refrigerator.

2.
He drank like a fish. When he wasn’t working, he’d ride his bike to all of the beach bars, his own little daily pub crawl, and get smashed.

3.
Our sex life was awful. Not sure if it was all the booze or what, but we rarely had sex. One of the few times we did, he stopped in the middle because, as he put it, “I just got tired.”

4.
I was gaining weight. Dylan was so slothy it rubbed off on me (luckily I got the
Fitness
cover before this happened). My agent Steve asked me to lose a few pounds, so I started taking four-mile walks back and forth to Venice Beach. On one of these walks, I bumped into Cavan Clark, a wild and woolly photographer, who shot me for Charlotte Russe in San Francisco years before. He had a gorgeous house on the strand and invited me up to his porch to chat sometimes.

5.
Dylan flat-out told me he didn’t believe in marriage. He was the second long-term boyfriend to do so.

Even though we had absolutely no future together, about a year and a half into the relationship, I made two gigantic mistakes. First, I allowed Dylan to take pictures of me naked in the bathtub, which I had innocently gone into one night when I was sick with the flu. Second, I found a cute little house to rent in Mar Vista and we moved in together. Two months into it, when rent was due, Dylan told me he could only contribute $200 of our $2,700 rent.