Ryder's Boys

by Cody Ryder

  “Yeah. Unless you’ve got something going on?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I’ve got nothing going on.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Sweet. Let’s do it then.” He called for the waitress and handed her his credit card, and when I asked how much I owed he shook his head. “Your company was enough. My treat.”

  When we went outside, the trio of girls were still there. They had given up on getting inside, but that didn’t really matter to them – they were waiting for Will to come out.

  “Oh my God!” one of them screeched. “Will! Will! I love you!”

  “Sorry ladies, I’m in a bit of a rush,” he said when they rushed up to him to try and get photos with him. He gave me an apologetic look, and I shrugged. “You can ride with me if you want,” he said, and so I ducked into his Prius and like that was on the way to his place.

  Will lived further west, closer to the heart of Los Angeles near the Arts District. His place was like he described – part of a former warehouse office building renovated into huge, modern apartment condos. We parked in the subterranean lot and took the elevator up to his floor, and he unlocked his door by placing a small tab that looked like a USB thumb drive on a circular metal panel above the handle. I expected to be blown away by what I saw inside, but still found myself gaping. The interior was like a gallery – a huge open living space that had a kitchen in the corner, and loft bedrooms overhead. The floor was hardwood and the walls brick, lined with huge windows that flooded the place with light. In the center of the living space he had built up a raised section that was lined with the Japanese bamboo tatami mat flooring which enclosed a small rock garden in the center.

  “I like it,” I said, enthusiastically. “You designed all this?”

  “Everything. Center is my attempt at the Japanese garden I told you about, though in my ideal home it would be outdoors and have more plants and a pond. The sun shines right on it in the afternoon and I like to sit there and play guitar or look at architecture books. Floor used to be concrete, but I replaced that.”

  He gave me the full tour of the place, showing me his mini recording studio and office.

  “This is great,” I told him. It really was, I had seen homes like this one in the home photography magazines I liked, but I rarely had ever seen anything like it in person.

  Will made tea and brought out a low standing wooden sitting table which he laid on the tatami mat, and two cushions for us to sit on, Japanese style. A potentially sensitive question had settled on my mind since back at the restaurant, and I finally gathered the courage to ask it.

  “Why’d you give it up, Will?”

  Will was sipping from his mug and looked up at me, his ocean blue eyes flashing like light on rippling water.

  “Your plans,” I continued, “the way you talk about it. Your designs.” I motioned with my hand at his loft. “I mean I’ve heard your music. You’re an amazing singer, but somehow it just doesn’t add up. From what I can gather, you’re someone who values authentic self-expression. That’s what I feel by looking at your place. You designed it. But your music… I’m having a hard time believing the same person wrote a song called ‘I’m Lit With U Bae’.”

  He smiled, though it was a lopsided, knowing smile and not the typical glowing grin that he had. “Singing is a passion of mine too,” he said. “I’ve played the guitar since I was a little kid, and my mom is a singer too. You might've read that one on my Wikipedia,” he added with a chuckle.

  I waited for him to expand on his reasons for giving up architecture for his singing career, to tell me a passionate story about how he had dreamed on being on stage since he was young or something like that, something with the same enthusiasm he had when he told me about his architecture and interior design goals, but he didn't. Instead I saw a slight change on his face, the same one I had seen on the night of the wedding. It was…sadness? I really couldn’t tell, but it made me even more curious about his reasons. He didn’t seem like he wanted to answer, and I felt like I already was getting a bit too personal by having asked him that question so I kept my mouth shut.

  The thing was, even though I barely knew him, Will didn’t put off any kind of air of enjoying fame or wealth. He seemed to want simple things in life, and getting rich wasn’t really a factor because I was pretty sure his family was already well off. I had looked up his dad’s Wikipedia too, and he had been in quite a number of big movies back in the seventies and eighties before he died.

  “So what about you?” he asked, “I looked at the work on your website. I’m surprised you’re not working for some place like…like Homeowners Mag or LivingStyle.”

  It was my turn to give the knowing smile with a tinge of sadness. “I interviewed with Homeowners Mag. They rejected me yesterday.”

  “Ouch. Sorry. Your work is awesome though. What happened?”

  “They said I didn’t have enough professional experience,” I said.

  “Seriously? But your work is already at a professional level.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I gotta keep working the wedding gigs while trying to find some way to fit in some freelancing jobs or an internship or something.”

  Will lit up suddenly, thunking his mug onto the table so hard that a bit of tea jumped out. He pointed at me. “You can shoot my apartment. I’ll pay you for the prints, and you can put that on your resume.”

  “What? No. Are you serious?”

  “Totally serious, man. I mean, it’s just one gig but it’s a start.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It wouldn't get me a job, but he was right – it was a start, and having a gig under a big name like his would be a pretty damn good one. “Okay,” I said gratefully, “I’ll do it.”

  “Alright.” He grinned that sparkling grin that made me feel all funny inside, like I had just been dropped from one of those carnival rides. He stuck out his hand, and I gripped it. His touch was warm and soft, and his handshake was firm. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Golden.”

  I laughed. “Thank you, Will. I honestly don’t know what to say. I mean really, you don’t need to do this for me. I’m just a guy.”

  His grin turned down to a charming, lopsided smile, and he looked at me in a way that lit up my heart like I had never felt before. “Well, because I like you, Luke,” he said.

  If his grin and the way he looked at me made me feel like I was on a roller coaster, those words made me feel like I was free falling from an airplane.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been able to share my love of this stuff with anyone,” he went on. “And plus, I just like talking with you.”

  We made plans to meet again the following Monday for the photo shoot, and after we finished another round of tea, Will drove me back to my car at Mr. Nice. I spent the drive home in a kind of daze. He and I were going to see each other again.

  I was doing my best not to let what I felt for Will get out of hand, but it was difficult. Not only was he handsome and charming, I liked talking with him too, and found myself wishing we could talk even more. I could’ve just chalked up the experience to being the whim of an eccentric celebrity, that maybe come Monday he would’ve already forgotten about our meeting and agreement, but I had thought the same thing about today and was proven wrong. Plus, Will had given me his personal cell phone number. That might’ve been the most boggling thing about it all. He could’ve given me the number of his manager or someone like that, but he gave me his direct personal phone number. For someone in his position, that was huge.

  Why did he have to be straight? Why did he have to have a girlfriend?

  And, as I pulled onto the evening bumper to bumper traffic on the 101 North, a thought occurred to me. Something that had nagged at me while I was at his place, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. The Internet said he was in a relationship with the actress Francesca White – but I hadn’t seen a single photo of her, or the two of them together in his entire apartment.

  There was the po
ssibility it was a design choice, given how meticulously he had done the renovation and interior design of his loft, but I did see other photos around – old snapshots of him as a kid with his parents, a black and white photo of his father, a recent photo of him and his mother. I wasn’t too familiar with actors, but I had looked up Francesca White’s Wikipedia too, and recognized her immediately as having been in the latest Judd Apatow comedy that I had watched with April a couple weeks ago. I definitely had not seen her photo around his place, let alone any photos of the two of them.

  I thought about this while I was stuck in traffic, but eventually it shifted to the back of my mind as I began to plan out what I was going to do to shoot Will’s apartment, and if we would see each other again once the gig was completed.

  “Duuuuude,” April said. I sat in my computer chair eating an In N Out cheeseburger while April sat on the floor, munching on fries. Once I got home I called her and told her what had happened, and she insisted on coming over to talk about it. “I’m telling you, Luke. Will Masterson is into you.” She seemed to be completely convinced, though she could get that way even about things she was obviously wrong about.

  “Okay, but even if he wasn’t dating someone that doesn’t mean that he’s into me. I think there’s a bigger chance of him being straight and just genuinely liking me as a friend.” The thought of a world famous pop star liking me as a friend was still a strange and mind boggling idea to me, no matter how resistant I was to being star struck.

  “You have his number, right? Why don’t you text him?”

  “Text? I’m not going to text him, April. I’m not going to bother the guy. He’s a busy person.”

  “He gave you his personal cell phone number, Luke. Personal. Number. Want some fries? I can’t finish these.” She held them out to me.

  I took some and put them on my plate. “So you’re saying he gave me his number because he wants me to text him.”

  “I’d say so. I mean, otherwise he could’ve just gotten your number and said, ‘I’ll be in contact,’ or something like that.”

  “I did give him my number too,” I said absently.

  April stood up threw away the empty In N Out bag in the trash can. “Anyway, I think you should text him. Or call him. Something, anything. You’ll see. In fact, you know what? I bet you he’s going to ask you to meet up with him again before your little photo shoot. And I bet you it’ll be something romantic.” She stretched the word out like she was dangling it over my head.

  “I doubt that. He’s got a recording session this whole weekend anyway,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I bet you, man. I bet you. I’m gonna go get some drinks. You want to go?”

  I shook my head. “I need some time to digest all of what’s happened,” I said.

  “Alright. Don’t give in to temptation and touch yourself to his swimsuit photos. Because he has them, I Googled it.”

  I laughed. “Go get drunk.”

  I have to admit, after April had mentioned the swimsuit photos I did have a moment of temptation to check them out myself, but I resisted. Instead, I took a shower and went to stand out on my tiny patio and enjoy the warm summer night air. The start of summer always brought on waves of nostalgia for me, probably because it was steeped in memories of finishing classes at Art Center and the crazy all night workloads that came with them. Resting my arms on the patio fence, I drew in a deep breath of warm air that carried the aroma of grilled onions, carne asada, and air pollution as a police siren wailed in the distance.

  I took my cell phone out of my pocket and stared at it, thinking about what April had said about texting Will. Honestly, I really wanted to talk to him. But I was afraid. Afraid that the guy was just a nice, trusting guy, and that he had given me his number so we could be in contact about the photo shoot and not so that I could text him at ten at night.

  I opened up my address book and then navigated to “Will Masterson”, still shocked that I even had his name in my cell phone. I opened up the text message box and hovered my fingers over the keypad, wondering what I’d even say if I were to text him. Just then, my phone vibrated and chimed, and a message flashed on the screen. I only got a flash of the sender’s name, because the phone flew out of my hands as I jumped in surprise.

  “Shit,” I hissed, looking over the edge of the patio and down into the bushes a story below. My heart was beating fast, but not because I had just ejected my phone, but because of who I could’ve sworn the text was from. No way, I thought, as I ran through the apartment, pulled on my shoes and went outside. I ran down the stairs and out the gate to the street, and then fumbled around in the bushes below my apartment window as a guy walking his dog stared at me. I found the phone, the edges scuffed but nothing broken, and turned on the screen.

  My heart jumped, hard. My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me – the text was from Will.

  I laughed when I read it. We hadn’t made an official bet, but I felt like I owed April dinner.

  “Hey Luke. You busy tomorrow night?”

  Five

  The next evening I drove out to Will’s house where we had arranged to meet and carpool together to a restaurant that he said he really wanted to show me. We drove in his Prius and went west from his place towards Beverly Hills and into LA territory that I was completely unfamiliar with.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said when he noticed me staring wide eyed at the Ferrari dealerships and luxury fashion stores we drove past, “I don’t really come to areas like this if I don’t have to. This restaurant, I’ve always admired for their interior design. And the building was done by Phillip James Dickson, one of my idols.”

  I was admittedly unfamiliar with the names of architects or even interior designers, and I told him that I had no clue who that was but I trusted him. He only smiled. On the radio, which he had tuned to a satellite radio station playing songs from the seventies, a song by Van Morrison started to play, “Moon Dance”, I think it was, and Will sang along. I was surprised by his voice. He had that smooth quality I heard in his pop music, but there was a distinct difference. It was looser now, freer sounding, and I realized that this was probably his normal singing voice, not the one that his producers told him to use because it was what would be popular with the fans and critics. I found my pulse picking up as it seemed to do so often around him, and a little thrill of excitement pulsed through my body and out to my fingertips.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of him as he sang that song, and I wondered if Will had his own music, not the music made for him but music he made for himself. When the song ended, I asked him, and he laughed.

  “Hey, I never said that I wasn’t the one who wrote ‘Lit With U Bae’,” he said.

  I grinned. “There’s no way I’m believing you were the one who wrote that. I refuse.”

  “Okay, you got me. Though it’s not a big secret or anything, anyone who looks can find out who produced all my tracks.”

  He told me that he did have his own songs, and that before he became a pop singer he used to write them often for his guitar. They were more folk songs, he told me, like the Van Morrison one we had just heard.

  “Do you still write them?” I asked.

  “Not so much anymore,” he said, in a voice that sounded a bit distant. I was curious. Every time I had brought up his music, I always seemed to detect some hint of sadness, or maybe it was regret, in his voice. I was going to drop the topic but he continued. “I used to write them for my mom. She’s a singer too, I think I told you that.”

  “She was the one who inspired you to become a singer, right?”

  Will’s crinkled up his face like he had just heard something offensive. “Inspired isn’t the word I would choose,” he said. It was the first time I had seen him react that way, he had always given off warmth, a smile hardly ever far from his lips. “But she definitely was a huge factor in me becoming a singer.” I could hear tension in his voice.

  I wished I hadn’t said anything, internally kicking my
self and swearing to forget the Wikipedia article’s half-truths. I dropped the subject and Will seemed to be lost in thought for a little while before apologizing. When the tension on his face faded to a smile, I immediately relaxed again. That damn smile of his, it melted me completely and I wondered how long I would be able to contain my feelings before they got out of control.

  I had dropped the topic, but my curiosity was even stronger now, and it was seeming now to me that Will’s career as a pop singer might not have been entirely of his own choosing. I wanted to ask him about it, but I suspected that there was pain there, and that he would need to bring it up himself when he wanted to talk about it.

  The restaurant was up in the hills, and we drove up a steep road that was surrounded on both sides by thick trees. He turned off this road onto a street that was lined with bamboo forest, and as we continued up I could just make out the warm glow of the restaurant in the fading light of the evening. When we emerged from the forest, driving up to the restaurant’s valet attendant, I again was wowed by the incredible design of the place. It was like a glowing glass box sitting in the middle of nature. Not real nature, of course, everything around us was carefully manicured and designed, but it had that feeling. The building was constructed almost entirely of glass, and in the inside I could see patrons dining, and what looked like a small garden.