Close

by Laurelin Paige

  Nat is the one who collects herself first. “Yes,” she says overly cheerfully. “We’re working on a project together. I’m going to be in one of Nick’s videos, and since we were both in Orlando for other things, we decided to meet and discuss the details.”

  “At Disney World?” one of the brighter, or less wasted, girls asks.

  But Nat’s quick with this as well. “My other project required me to be here,” she says mysteriously. “Nick was kind enough to meet with me here.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the next live action Tarzan movie?” This from the redhead who was sitting on my knee just a moment ago. “Are you starring in it? I just knew that TMI blog was right! I’m dying to know everything.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t say more. Contracts.” She’s brilliant, I think, but she won’t meet my eyes, and I start to fear this moment has ruined the entire day—both because of the women hanging on me and because we’ve been spotted in each other’s company.

  “Right. Contracts,” the girls say in awed voices.

  Natalia kindly signs the Disney autograph books the girls have in their possession, meant to capture the signatures of princesses and other famous characters encountered in the park. When she’s finished, I politely disentangle us from the groupies, and usher the woman I love out of the restaurant and to the closest dark corner of the park I can find.

  We’re completely silent until we discover a quiet, unlit area. Even in the dim light, I see Nat’s shaking.

  “Nat . . . I . . .” I don’t know what to say. I could apologize, but apologies suggest some sort of responsibility and a promise to not let what happened happen again.

  The run-in with the girls was not my fault, though. And I most definitely can’t promise it won’t happen again.

  Her response is not at all what I was expecting. “I was believable, wasn’t I?” Her tone is full of pride and enthusiasm. “I’m never good at improv. I can’t tell a lie to save my life, but I think I was actually believable!”

  “You were,” I say, smiling, still stunned at the way the conversation has turned. “You were totally believable. It’s almost like you’re an actress.” I mean, not totally believable—when the alcohol wears off, the girls might question her version of the story, but it’s not an incident that’s going to make it to TMI.

  “I hadn’t planned it at all beforehand! I don’t know even know how I gathered myself so quickly. I saw that little twit practically molesting your chest through your T-shirt, and all I saw was red, but then they were asking about us being together, and panic washed over me, and I thought, ‘Oh God, it’s all over.’ But it wasn’t over! The excuses started coming out of my mouth, and it wasn’t ridiculous and they bought it! Look at me. I’m still shaking!”

  She’s hyped up and animated and so fucking adorable and brilliant and perfect, and I want to congratulate her and reward her with a smattering of kisses, but I’m too distracted by one tiny detail in her rant.

  “You saw red?” I ask, like the cocky bastard I am. “You were jealous?”

  She rolls her eyes, but her cheeks get dark. “That’s not the point of what I was saying.”

  “I know, I know. The point is . . . you were jealous.” I’m grinning like a madman because she can’t deny it, and she knows it.

  She grabs a fistful of my T-shirt and steps close. “Yeah, I was jealous,” she whispers studying my lips. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “All sorts of things,” I say kissing her mouth with my eyes. “Later.”

  We’re less careful about the distance between us for the rest of the night. Her hand brushes mine as we walk more than once. Twice she “accidentally” touches my ass. Once, she even takes my hand in hers.

  It’s dark now, though, and while we’re no longer wearing our sunglasses, it feels like the night is a good enough disguise. It feels safe. The worst thing happened, and it wasn’t so bad. Somehow, that’s actually reassured her.

  During the fireworks, she feels comfortable enough to lean against my shoulder. “That’s what happens in my head every time you kiss me,” she says quietly.

  My heart speeds up and my chest pinches in a good way. I wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her closer. “Yeah? Me too, baby. Me too.”

  She sighs into me, and she fits against me so perfectly. Like she was made to always be there. Like she’s a part of the puzzle that makes up Nick Ryder, and I haven’t been complete until now when she’s cozied up at my side. Clicked into the bigger picture of my life.

  “It’s been a good day,” she says dreamily, her gaze on the sky above us.

  And in the light of the bursting colors overhead, I see what I haven’t been able to see until just now—I’m not the only one with feelings here. This coaster is one we’re on together.

  Natalia’s in love with me too.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Caught

  Natalia

  Dazed, I stare down at the pictures printed out from the Internet, which sit on my coffee table in front of me. Five of them, images of me and Nick Ryder, snapped at various times during our day at Disney World, including a very unflattering picture of my backside as I climbed into the Pirates of the Caribbean boat.

  Just before he felt me up. Thank God it was dark and private in there.

  All the time we thought we were getting by unrecognized, we’d apparently had a secret stalker, taking snapshots with his phone from a safe distance.

  All that time I’d thought we were safe, and we weren’t. I should have known better. I did know better.

  “A website posted them?” Rowan asks, picking up one of the printouts to study it closer.

  I called an impromptu girls’ night as soon as I discovered the catastrophe. Rowan and Hadley showed up like always, bringing two bottles of nice cabernet with them. My girlfriends are the best.

  “TMI first,” I answer. “But now several other Hollywood gossip sites have picked them up.” My publicist was the one to inform me, the glee at this kind of potential publicity clear in her voice. Before she’d even called, she traced the pictures back to someone named Tylor Tuttle. He had posted the pics on Twitter as he took them. It took four days of shares and comments before they reached the major gossip rags.

  “The way Nick looks at you in this picture is super hot,” Rowan says, flashing the picture in my direction so I can see which one she’s talking about.

  It’s a picture of us at the fireworks. My head is resting on his shoulder and I’m looking at the sky, but he’s gazing down at me, his expression intense. It still makes my heart warm to remember. The whole night sky was lit up with color and spectacle, and Nick Ryder only had eyes for me.

  And now everyone in the world knows it.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You’re not helping.”

  Rowan shrugs. “I’m not the one who helps. I’m the one who pours more wine.” She fills up my glass and hands it to me.

  I gulp half of it down in one swallow.

  Hadley reaches over from the other side of the couch to pick up the picture that Rowan just set down. “It really is sweet how he looks at you,” she says. “I think he has it bad.”

  “Fuck you both.” I mean it. All four of the other pictures are harmless. The story I gave the sorority girls could almost explain them, except this fifth picture. And they’re quick to note it. This one shot where Nick gives everything away in his look.

  I can’t even deal with what it means that he’s looking at me that way right now. I’m too consumed with what it means that he’s been caught doing it.

  Hadley sets the picture back down on the coffee table in front of us and then claps her hands onto her thighs. “All right. So you’ve been busted. What’s the big deal? You already knew this might happen. Won’t it be easier to have a relationship now, since you don’t have to sneak around anymore?”

  “Unless that was the part of it that turned you on . . .” Rowan says, waggling her eyebrows.

  I throw he
r my most practiced glare. The one I get paid the big bucks for. “First of all, this is not a relationship.” I wave my finger over the pictures to emphasize what this I’m talking about.

  In unison, both of my friends say, “Uh . . .”

  I start to gesture with my wine, think better, and set my glass down before I ruin my point—and the pictures—by spilling. “It’s not, though,” I insist. “It’s just banging.”

  Rowan turns her head as she scans the pages on the coffee table once more. “This isn’t just banging. You went to a theme park together.”

  “He finger-banged me during the Haunted Mansion ride,” I say, my voice rising. “It’s purely sexual.” If I say it enough times, it has to be true.

  “He finger-fucked you on a ride at Disney World?” Rowan’s eyes are wide. “Oh my God, you are my hero.” She falls on the floor dramatically and bows at my feet.

  I roll my eyes and focus my attention on my supportive friend, Hadley. “And in answer to your question about what the big deal is, the big deal is that now I’ll have to end it, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

  Again, both women say, “Uh . . .”

  Apparently there’s an elephant in the room that I can’t see. I gaze expectantly at my friends, hoping they’ll fill me in.

  “You’re in a relationship, kid,” Rowan says.

  Nope. That’s not the elephant. Can’t be.

  And I’ve already mentally written Rowan out of my figurative will, so again I turn to Hadley. She will set the record straight, I’m sure.

  Instead she says, “It’s definitely a relationship. Big time. Sorry to be the ones to break it to you.”

  My eyes flick from one friend to the other and back again. I want a second—or, I guess, a third—opinion. Unfortunately, the only other person I trust enough to ask is Nick. He’s somehow become one of my best friends. With benefits! Not a relationship! Am I being pranked?

  “I have no idea where you get that idea. It’s just plain wrong.”

  “You talk on the phone every night!” Hadley says, as though that’s an explanation.

  “A lot of the time it’s phone sex,” I argue. Or half the time. Or used to be half the time and now it’s maybe a quarter of the time. Or once a week.

  It still doesn’t mean anything. I talk to both of them every night, too. Or every three nights. Whatever.

  “The library, the helicopter, dinner and a private room, Disney World!” Hadley points a finger at me. “Those are dates. Not wanting it to end? That implies feelings. That’s a relationship. Dating a guy you like makes him your boyfriend.”

  My chest tightens, and my breathing becomes labored. “But . . . But . . . You told me I wasn’t in a relationship!”

  “I told you you didn’t have to be in one. You went out and got in one anyway.”

  Goddammit.

  I really am in a relationship.

  I have feelings for Nick, feelings I’ve been ignoring. And the problem isn’t just that our relationship has poisoned my brand—though that’s the issue blaring most obviously at the moment. Gossip blogs are having a field day with the “secret wild life of America’s Sweetheart” angle.

  The real problem is that I’m a thirty-six-year-old woman with a loudly ticking biological clock and Nick is just a baby himself.

  The only way through this is heartache. I’m sure of it.

  I cover my face with my hands and begin rocking back and forth while I moan.

  “I’m not sure what’s so terrible about it,” Hadley says. “You haven’t been this happy with someone in . . . well, ever.”

  I drop my hands. Happiness is beside the point.

  “Are you kidding me?” I can’t believe I have to explain this to her. “It is bad enough that I was caught fooling around with the guy half my age,” I say with a dramatic sigh.

  “Two-thirds your age,” Rowan interjects. “It’s simple math.”

  Again, I ignore her. The tabloid readers of America won’t care about the difference between half and two-thirds. They’ll just see it as a cougar rebound fling.

  “But now that it’s a real relationship? Who am I anymore?” I tuck away the dilemma of what to do with my feelings for Nick and focus on the thing I keep coming back to—my newly lost identity.

  “Nineteen, ladies. I came out here to Hollywood at nineteen with nothing. High school drama classes, two years of tap dance, and a modeling gig for the state fair were the only items on my resume. Immediately involved in not one, but two dating scandals.”

  “Awwww, like the Tanner James thing! I shipped you two,” Rowan says fondly.

  I sit up quickly, so quickly that Hadley has to grab my wine glass to keep it from sloshing as I bump against the coffee table.

  “No. You don’t. Because it nearly ended my career. The TMI shot of us kissing that broke up him and Jenna Stahl? The golden couple? No one even cared about the story behind it, that it was a total setup.” The memory still makes my hands shake. It was when I decided to make myself over, become the woman I am now.

  I march over to my bookshelves where I keep the magazines that I have been featured in over the years. I grab the entire stack and hold them out for my friends to see.

  “Natalia Lowen, the Girl Next Door,” I read off the first cover, then throw it to the ground. “America’s Sweetheart,” I read off the next cover. I toss it onto the ground. “People Magazine. Why We Love the Good Girl.” I throw it down to join its companions. “Entertainment Weekly. Pure and Powerful.” I drop the whole stack on the floor.

  “I had nothing when I started, at some points less than nothing, and I worked my ass off to get to where I am now. But look at me! One hundred orgasms was all it took to ruin the whole career I killed myself to earn by dallying away from my brand!”

  Rowan cowers when I look to her, panting and furious with myself and the whole world.

  “But you’re Natalia Lowen,” she ventures.

  “I was. If all my hard work was for nothing, if my career is over . . . then what was it all for? All the sacrifices I made? All the holidays I didn’t go home, the friendships I let slide . . . for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing.” On this, Rowan is definitive. “You got rich and famous.”

  Oh yeah, I remember. She’s not much older than Nick. Still a baby herself. For her, being rich and famous is enough. In ten years, she’ll have a very different perspective. Knowing that doesn’t make this moment any less lonely.

  I look back to Hadley.

  “Hey, Nat. Stop that. You haven’t ‘ruined’ anything.” She stands up from the couch and comes to me. “Your career was built with solid acting and smart, calculated role choices. You got where you are with talent and tenacity. This?” She bends down to pick up a stack of the magazines I’d entered into evidence all over the floor.

  “This is what the media decided you were—not you. They gave you these labels, but you didn’t ask for them. So you went back to blonde and never played a villain—why does that mean you have to live up to their stereotype to have worth?”

  “Because . . .” I trail off, not really knowing how to argue against her logic.

  “This,” she shakes the magazines at me, “is them telling you who you are. But now, this relationship with Nick? That’s you telling the world that you get to decide for yourself who you are. You hear me?”

  There’s a really good reason Hadley is a life coach. There’s a reason she’s my life coach. She knows just what to say and how to say it and when to say it. And Rowan’s tentatively holding out my wine, so I accept my defeat and my glass together.

  “Do you hear me?” she asks again, more ferociously, when I don’t use my words.

  I swallow. “You’re shouting and I’m exactly seven inches away from you, so yes, I hear you.” Before she chides me for being a smartass, I add, “And I hear what you’re saying too.”

  “Good. Now believe it. Own it.”

  I nod as I sip my wine, but I don’t even know what she’
s talking about. What does it mean to own my identity? I’ve been as caught up in the media’s definition of who I am as the rest of the world has.

  Do I even know my own identity at this point?

  Hadley can see the confusion in my eyes, I guess. Or at least seems to see that I need more of a push.

  “You know what we’re going to do?” she says in an authoritative way that makes me think she might be hiding a secret dominating side. Or maybe she just has more coaching tricks than I knew. After all, until now her biggest task with me was hand-holding whenever I got sad about Garner ignoring me or leaving me unsatisfied. Again.

  And I don’t know what we’re going to do, so I shake my head, hoping whatever the answer is, it will give me some answers.

  Because right about now, I’m feeling more lost than ever.

  “Where’s your paper shredder?” Hadley asks, her grin spreading.

  Rowan jumps up. “I know!”

  “Go get it, will you?” Hadley instructs, and Rowan is gone before I even have time to question why she knows where I keep my shredder.

  “I need candles, now,” she then orders me.

  “I, uh, okay.” It’s clear I’ll get answers when she’s ready to give them. At least the ones from her. The ones I need from myself might take longer.

  There happen to be several decorative candles in the drawer of my bookcase, so I only have to turn to the shelves behind me to pull them out. I grab six of them and a lighter before handing them to Hadley. “They’re my fall candles. Is it okay that they smell like apple pie?”

  Her face says it doesn’t matter. Rowan comes back into the room then, her arms wrapped around the shredder as she lugs it. Without being asked, she plugs it in and moves the beast to sit directly in front of me.

  Hadley sets candles around the room, lighting them, and nods to Rowan to kill the overhead lights. She returns to my side. “This would be better if we could burn stuff. But between your fake fireplaces and the California fire ban, we’re improvising instead.”