The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice, and the Road to Reinvention (21 page)

“I can’t,” I laughed, trying to hide the fact that I was blushing. “I have a boyfriend.” I stepped out of his car and thanked him for the ride. My “thanks for the ride” came out as if there were a question mark attached to the end. It was so odd that he had shown up at the airport to greet me. Had he been bored, looking to impress me, or what? Was it even appropriate that I accepted the ride? It would have been rude to turn it down, considering Eric and I were friends. I thought holding Eric firmly in the “friend zone” while I had a boyfriend meant I was in control of the situation, even though his flirting was inappropriate.

A few days later, I was back in L.A. on my day off. Mark and I curled up in our designated booth at the Polo Lounge for dinner. As if purely to torture me, a wire basket sat in the center of the table, overflowing with pieces of lavash and blue cheese bread.

“A McCarthy Salad, please, no meat,” I ordered when the white-coated server appeared at our booth. That was all I planned on eating.

I hadn’t mentioned my new diet to Mark, hoping he wouldn’t notice my drastically different dining habits. He didn’t need to get caught up in my tailspin, plus I couldn’t think of anything that would be more boring to this confident guy who just so happened to have a perfectly fit physique.

“So,” Mark began, “a friend of mine was talking about Crystal Harris, that girl that got engaged to Hef.” He broached the topic gently, without even a drop of judgment in his voice. “How are you feeling about that?”

“You know, I really don’t care about it as much as people think I do,” I responded quickly. “I’m not surprised by it either. He seemed to be slowing down even back when I was still there, so it was only a matter of time.”

I looked directly into those breathtaking blue eyes, gave him a smile, and shrugged, hoping my response sounded as unattached as I was to the matter.

“So, tell me about this audition,” I asked excitedly, eager to change
the topic. Mark recognized my shift and launched into an animated story. No one is really comfortable talking about their ex-boyfriends with their new ones—and I was no different. Unfortunately, mine wasn’t your standard awkward situation; it was made increasingly more uncomfortable by the amount of press this news received. Underneath my discomfort, I was really amazed at how cool Mark was being.
You know,
I caught myself thinking,
no one I know personally ever asked me how I felt about the engagement . . . not even my closest friends
. Everyone just assumed they knew how I felt or avoided the topic altogether. We had staged a scene about it for the TV show, but no one had bothered to discuss it with me in real life.

Mark’s ability to see past his own ego in order to make sure I was doing okay just proved what a well-adjusted and caring person he was. In some ways, he was almost too good to be true.

All I ever wanted was a partner who respected me enough to value my opinions and thoughts, instead of rushing to judgment. Part of me wanted to explain to him how annoying I thought all the public assumptions were, but for some reason, I just couldn’t manage to get the words out. Automatically I shut him out. I wasn’t ready to open up that can of worms. Being told for years that I wasn’t quite good enough was only one issue out of a whole host of dysfunctions I had bottled up inside.

I wasn’t yet comfortable enough in my own skin and feared Mark would find those elements of me unattractive.

My earlier resolve to just be myself in that relationship had exited stage left. Mark had become my escape. When I was with him, I was in a space where my concerns about body issues and public scrutiny weren’t allowed to enter. I didn’t want our relationship to become this heavy thing where we suddenly threw our baggage on the bed and started unpacking. I didn’t want to risk losing what we had, which was light and fun. I wanted to be that adventurous girl he fell for months earlier.

After changing the subject to one I was more comfortable with (work),
I had plenty to talk about. For the second season of
Holly’s World
, producers wanted to bring in two new cast members. First was Claire Sinclair, who arrived in Vegas in January. Mary O’Connor had told me about Claire, who was coming to Vegas to guest-star at Crazy Horse Paris, just as I had planned to do a few years earlier.

“Maybe you could be like a big sister to her,” Mary suggested. “She’s a wonderful girl. She’s just a breath of fresh air around here,” she had said, referring to the mansion. Claire was a quirky nineteen-year-old who had recently been published as a Playmate. She was intelligent, outgoing, and had an offbeat sense of humor.

With her porcelain skin, naturally buxom figure, button nose, and brunette bangs, she looked like a modern-day Bettie Page. Claire had recently been cast as the protagonist in a pilot (produced by the same company that did
Holly’s World
) called
The Bunny House
, which wasn’t picked up by E! There was only so much room for these Playboy-related, advertiser-unfriendly shows, and
Holly’s World
and
Kendra
were currently taking up that space. A producer had told me that they hoped that putting some cast members from
The Bunny House
on my show would make them popular enough for E! to reconsider. I could have felt threatened or used by this move, but I didn’t. I knew E! wouldn’t order another Playboy show, and frankly, I liked Claire. I thought she could be a relevant cast member, not because she was a Playmate, but because she was a budding Vegas showgirl. Plus, I loved
Crazy Horse Paris
and was excited about featuring it on an episode.

Claire needed a place to crash for filming, so I was happy to offer her my room at Planet Hollywood, much to Laura’s dismay, who had been enjoying having the whole suite to herself since I spent most days at my house. After a year of back and forth, I was finally ready to make my house in Southern Highlands my sole residence.

The second cycle of the show was set to air in just a few weeks, and E! spared no expense sending a team to Las Vegas for an elaborate promotional shoot. Planet Hollywood’s largest ballroom was transformed into a
dreamland. One setup was a pink, sparkly candy land; the other one was a giant yellow-brick road to Oz, complete with a field of poppies.

The producers wanted to include Jayde Nicole, a Playmate of the Year who was also joining the show for our second season, in the promo shots. But since she was hired to assume the role of resident Vegas villain, I put my foot down because it seemed so unnatural.

“If she’s supposed to be our enemy, why would we be posing for photos with her? That doesn’t make any sense,” I asked, which seemed to put to rest any argument they considered heaving my way.

Production wanted Jayde on my show for the same reason they had wanted Claire. Jayde had been cast as the antagonist on
The Bunny House
, and some of the executives at E! thought she was great at being “the girl you love to hate.” At first I was fine with the decision to include Jayde. I know reality shows thrive on drama, and if she was willing to come in and play the role of the shit-stirrer, great! After all, I’d much rather have fake drama in my life than real conflict.

However, when it was announced she was going to be joining the show, the drama became a bit more real, as the addition itself created tremendous tension among the existing cast members. No one felt like their place was secure anymore. If we had such a good thing going, my costars were unclear on why we needed new people. As filming went on, I started to feel less and less in on the joke when it came to Jayde’s role. Between local gossips, manufactured drama, and lack of communication, any friendship I had with Jayde before we started filming quickly evaporated. Just as I had with the Benji situation the season before, I felt out of control of what was supposed to be “my own show.”

In fact, everyone in the cast was feeling strained and uneasy about the situation, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I figured that when the season was wrapped, everything would hopefully go back to normal.

M
Y NEXT VACATION COINCIDED
with the Super Bowl, allowing me to book a hosting job in Dallas that weekend, which left a few days for Mark and me to make a pit stop in Mexico before heading to Dallas. What could have been more perfect?

I chose the same resort that we had filmed at a year prior. Without my wild and crazy crew present, the whole property was incredibly quiet and relaxing, as if the energy had been dialed down several notches.

Our first stop? The spa. Because we were both performers, we were constantly exhausted. Naturally, we opted for the ninety-minute couples massage. But after an hour and a half of detoxing, we decided it was time to retox!

I had successfully shed about ten pounds in the last four weeks, due mainly to the crash diet I’d subjected myself to, so I happily climbed into my bikini for some beach barhopping. We walked along the white sand beaches, and Mark filled the air with talk of our plans for the rest of the year.

When we wandered around the resort, our heads fuzzy with margaritas and our skin warm from the sun, we happened across an arts and crafts workshop on the beach. A beautiful older Mexican woman with deep cocoa brown skin and wiry hair the color of ash gestured for us to come closer.

“Sit,” she playfully commanded, flapping her hands to encourage us to kneel in the sand. Without preamble, we both dropped to the beach. She pushed a set of paints in front of us.

“Married?” she asked, pointing from Mark back to me.

“No,” I replied with a polite smile. I knew she wasn’t being presumptuous and could immediately feel the kindness in her eyes. “You?” I asked, attempting to replicate the warmheartedness in which she asked us.

“No,” she responded, a small but sincere smile framing her face.

“Here, you should do this seahorse and I’ll paint the lizard,” Mark offered as he grabbed the statues and reached for the purple and black bottles of paint.

We sat side by side, painting our silly sculptures, laughing, and teasing each other against the beautiful backdrop of the clear blue Caribbean. When we finished our self-proclaimed masterpieces, we handed them to the tiny woman to bake in the kiln.

With long fingers covered in leathery skin, she reached out for my seahorse, then the lizard. Deep lines creased the skin surrounding her eyes, which beamed a radiant, almost shimmering black as she nodded her head ever so slightly as a thank-you, and in that moment, I was struck by her beauty. She wasn’t trying to fit any conventional or trendy beauty standards, but she was radiant standing there on that beach—and I felt ashamed. I had spent the better part of a month obsessed over my weight, and here this woman was perfectly content, beautiful, and unique just as she was.

After we thanked her, we walked to the pool bar and ordered two frosty margaritas while our sculptures baked.

“Hey, are you okay?” Mark inquired, a concerned look on his face. “I’ve noticed that you’ve lost a lot of weight. I’ve been meaning to ask you about it.”

“Yeah, well . . .” I started with a smile and roll of the eyes, proceeding to pour out a condensed version of the story. I confessed that the ordeal was going to be a story line on the series and even how I had crash-dieted in order to quickly lose the weight I needed to in order to reveal the kind of “transformation” I wanted for television. Attempting to play it cool and brush it off as no big deal, I proceeded to gloss over the situation. Mark did not seem convinced.

When I finished sharing the whole saga, Mark sat quietly for a moment, clearly contemplating what to say next. To be fair, this was a difficult tightrope for any guy to walk, because there really was no right answer.

“Well, I think you’ve always looked amazing,” he said earnestly. “You never needed to lose any weight. I mean, you can do what you want, but I always thought you looked perfect just as you are.”

I smiled, and leaned down to take a sip of the jumbo-sized margarita, less concerned about calories now that I had reached my desired weight.

“You can talk to me about this kind of stuff, you know,” he added, hoping that this would spark further dialogue. I knew that he was trying. His blue eyes, the same ones that had first bewitched me months earlier, gazed with genuine compassion into my own, begging me to let him in.

“I’m good, really,” I insisted, playfully patting the top of his hand as if to acknowledge how cute his concern was. “It’s just really not that big of a deal.” I felt like I had opened up enough for that day, I wasn’t ready for an emotional deep dive. I didn’t want to ruin our vacation.

“Hey, we should go check on our pottery. I bet it’s done now,” I suggested, standing up and walking away from the bar before he even agreed.

After that first day, we spent the majority of our time tucked into the large king-size bed inside our luxury villa, sleeping most of the day away. We were both so exhausted from our respective schedules that we desperately needed the rest. A hectic workload was one of the major things we had in common, but it was still disappointing to wait all this time to see each other, only to spend the lion’s share of it passed out.

Maybe we are
too
similar,
I wondered. I had tremendous respect for his work ethic and realized, for the first time, what an enormous effort he was making just to be able to spend time with me. It gave me pause to think about what my intentions were toward him beyond just having a good time. It seemed like he was pretty serious about me . . . but was I that committed to him? I certainly liked him well enough, but would we still be a good match in a few years? And, in the meantime, was I even
ready
to settle down and be serious with someone? Instead of continuing to live in the moment, as I had done with this relationship so far, I reverted to overthinking things, marking every aspect of my life down on one of my mental to-do lists.

“When’s your next vacation?” Mark asked. He was wrapped in a fluffy white robe. The sun was setting and we were holed up on our patio to bask in the last few minutes of warm sunlight.

“The second week in March,” I replied. My voice was soft and groggy, having just woken up from our late afternoon nap. “That’s usually a slow week, right before spring-break season starts.”