Only May in Paris Will Tell

The emotional wreckage of a failed proposal. A broken ankle. A wild bachelorette party at a gay bar. A jaw-dropping exposé on one of the world’s top tennis players. That was May in Paris in 2009, when the tennis tour landed in the city for its annual French Open fortnight. Hilton Joliet, a photographer for the magazine Game Set Match and a friend of several players on tour, was at the center of it all. And in the two months since Paris, life has continued to serve up surprises.

A month ago in Vero Beach, Florida, Hilton told her best friend on tour Tanner Bruin she’s in love with him. Five nights ago in Indianapolis, they kissed, but Tanner still doesn’t know how he feels about her. Last night, Hilton knocked on the Indy hotel door of another friend on tour, her former hookup buddy Haidin Bayliss, to celebrate his latest tennis win. The door was opened by Haidin’s lingerie-clad ex-girlfriend and self-described Hilton enemy, bitchy, outrageous A-list actress Aubrey Gage. This morning, Hilton is 600 miles away in Kansas, driving across the country with her ex-boyfriend and still-best-friend Luke Windler, from whom she fears her life will soon go down a very different road.

In ten months, the next French Open will bring the launch party for Hilton’s photography book Living in a Postcard, a divorce less shocking than the events of the marriage preceding it, two pregnancy announcements, a fake girlfriend on a fake trip who may actually have gone MIA, and a connection between another of the world’s top tennis players and a year-old unsolved murder. Until then, the seductive dance that is the tour lifestyle…one that draws Hilton and her friends together one week and drops them in different corners of the world the next…will swirl on, clouding the air with questions and setting the stage for the answers only May in Paris can reveal.