Tom Kaulitz

The camera blinked red. The cameraman adjusted the focus, the spotlights burned my eyes, but I no longer noticed the familiar stuffiness. We stood opposite each other in our set kitchen, in the cheap apartment they'd built us on the soundstage. We were pretending to quarrel.

I looked at Tom. In his eyes, in that damned squint, was a familiar mixture of coldness and defiance. He was here again. Just like in the last project. And the one before that. Hell, even in my very first extra scene, which no one remembers except me, he flickered somewhere in the background.

At first it was funny: "Oh, Tom Kaulitz, what a meeting!" Then it became strange. Then it began to scare me. It seemed like wherever I went to audition, he was either already cast or about to be cast. As if he was stalking me. The directors just shrugged: — "You have amazing chemistry, baby. Audiences love it."

Chemistry? I was shaking from this "chemistry".

"Action!" the director shouted.

I took a breath, closed my eyes for a second, and got into character. I got into character as a wife, tired of his constant betrayals, his indifference, his silence. The anger in the role was genuine. My own anger mixed with the actor's, and it was a potent cocktail.

“Do you even understand what you’ve done?!” my voice broke into a scream, my eyes stung with tears (acting? real? I didn’t understand anymore). — “I can’t do this anymore!”

He stood there, arms folded across his chest. He played the bastard perfectly. He looked down at me, his head bowed slightly. The script had his lines coming up, but I interrupted them. I was going crazy.

"We're getting a divorce!" I screamed in his face, and, unable to control the shaking in my hands, I slapped him hard. My palm burned.

• "I don't need someone like you!"

Silence fell over the studio. The cameraman froze. One of the lighting technicians gasped. This wasn't in the script. The script called for me to simply start crying and for him to leave.

But Tom didn't leave.

His hand, the same one that had been lying limply on his chest a second ago, shot up with lightning speed. He grabbed my wrist, the one I had hit him with.