Accidentally Married

Chapter Fourteen

Tom Hiddleston POV

I was on the brink of earning myself a bad reputation and I knew it, but then I'd never felt pain like this before.

I've had breakups and my heart has been broken, but they paled in comparison to this fresh pain. I simply didn't know how to cope with it.

Besides, I was tired of being treated like a trained monkey and expected to perform perfectly. Sometimes I just wanted to be left alone to be me, to not be on show, to not have to be polite and engaging, to just be like I was with Mac.

Mac. She was the reason for this pain.

Our wedding had come out of a joke. I'd been explaining to her how rarely I was able to cut loose these days; I didn't want to do anything too crazy but recently my life had become all about obligations. For about three months I'd been doing press for three movies that almost coincided on their release dates, so I was flying all over the damn world to recite the same sentiments to hundreds of different reporters, chat show hosts and journalists, in the hopes they each had a sound bite that they could use to generate interest.

I understood the reason for these junkets, especially as two of the movies were small independent films that needed as much publicity as possible, but that didn't stop them from being any less tedious and with the travel involved, very taxing.

That was not why I became an actor.

I also had a reputation to uphold so things which might have eased the tedium, such as a risqué joke, couldn't be said with so many strangers about. I constantly had to be careful that something uttered in jest didn't become fodder for the tabloids.

It's all very well to travel on a whirlwind tour of the world, but when all you see is your hotel room, a windowless meeting room where you sit in front of movie backdrops and see an endless procession of journalists, and then when you are able to see the outside world, it's only to visit the cinemas where the premiere of your film was being screened, travel begins to lose its lustre.

Telling the same stories over and over, I felt as though I was becoming boring. Certainly it felt boring, and over dinner that first evening, I had confessed those feelings to Mac. I hadn't told her I was an actor, just that I travelled a lot with my work.

Mac has a huge playful side to her that is impossible to miss and even on that first day, when she'd been weighed down with grief, her humour shone through.

"Well you are in Vegas," she had teased me. "Get married and no one will ever call you boring again!"

I'd laughed but the idea had stayed with me. A bottle of champagne, three whiskeys and a bottle of wine later, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

Mac was a little harder to convince but I was pretty sure it wasn't legal, and I told her about all the hoops a friend of mine had to jump through to make his beach wedding in Mauritius was legal in the UK.

In my defence, I was very drunk at the time and being unsure of the legalities of foreign weddings didn't seem particularly important.

I felt like a fool the next morning but I was determined to salvage something from my drunken idiocy, and I knew I liked Mac. I quickly grew to admire her as well, and somewhere along the way, I fell in love. I even turned down a few projects that would have taken me away from London for too long. She wasn't the only reason I turned them down, but she was a big part of it.

Never before had I put someone before my work. Not even myself.

I thought she cared about me too, I would have staked my life on it in fact, which I think is why her leaving was such a shock. If I knew why she left, because we'd been fighting, because we'd fallen out of love, because we were never in love, then I think it would be easier to live with.