#Starstruck

by Sariah Wilson

  Shaking my head, I got butter and eggs out of his Sub-Zero fridge, the inside of which resembled a small farmers’ market. He had a ton of fresh vegetables and fruits. Like they were in there reproducing.

  I located a medium-size saucepan and measuring cups and put the butter, water, sugar, and spices inside. I turned on the heat (more time spent figuring that out), intending to bring it to a boil.

  “What are you making?”

  “Spice-cake batter. You said you wanted my spice cookies, so that’s what I’m making. Because you seem pretty determined to have everything your way.”

  “Another compliment.”

  I stopped my hunt for a spatula. “Then I must have said it wrong, because stubbornness isn’t really a good thing.”

  “Says the girl who’s looking a little pinkish. Is that a faint sunburn I detect?”

  “That wasn’t because I’m stubborn.” I found the spatula and brought it over to the island.

  “No, that was because you ran away from me.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I didn’t run away.”

  Yes, I had. I’d totally run away.

  “I noticed you can be a little . . . skittish. I hope I don’t make you feel that way.”

  I almost laughed. My heart was pumping so hard right then that if I’d been standing in Texas, it probably could have pulled oil out of the ground. “Have you seen you?”

  “Every day in the mirror.”

  He said it like it was a joke, as if his appearance should have no bearing on this conversation. Like he couldn’t make a nun give up her vows just by winking at her.

  I’d basically just told him he was ridiculously hot. And here we were being domestic again, me baking for him in his ginormous kitchen. Clearly a subject change was in order.

  “You know, I’m supposed to be your assistant. Shouldn’t I be assisting you with those? Putting them in envelopes or whatever? I’m here. I could be killing two birds with one stone.”

  “Nobody needs to murder any birds. I’ve got this covered.” There was an evasive tone in his voice.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.” The ingredients on the stove started to boil, and I removed the pan from the heat.

  He put the Sharpie down. “Okay, I’m going to be honest with you. One-F has been doing most of the assistant work. Not running errands but just about everything else.”

  “Wait. You’re paying both of us for the same job? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “I wanted to help you. It’s weird, especially because we don’t know each other that well yet, and I know this sounds bizarre, but it’s like . . . I want to protect you. I’ve never felt that way about a girl before.”

  Little butterflies flapped around inside me at the thought that Chase wanted to protect me. Not that I needed his protection, but it felt amazing that he wanted to.

  “Not to mention it got you here making these cookies you couldn’t stop bragging about on your Twitter feed.”

  It was true. I was not humble about my baking skills. “I didn’t come here as your assistant tonight. I came over as your . . .” I momentarily panicked. What was the right word here? Just because Chase felt protective didn’t mean he wanted a relationship. He might see me as a little sister or something, and I was not about to make a huge fool of myself. “As your friend. And I don’t want you to pay me to spend time with you. Do you know what that would make you?”

  “Extremely lucky?” he answered with a wink that made my knees melt faster than the butter in the saucepan.

  “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I.” He leaned forward, and I realized his intent. To steal some of my batter. I smacked his hand and moved the bowl away, which made him chuckle.

  “If you want to spend time with me, then let’s just spend time together.”

  “Are you quitting?”

  “You could always fire me, and I could collect unemployment.” He didn’t smile at my joke. “If we’re . . . doing whatever this is, then I don’t want your money between us.”

  The silence lasted so long that I almost started babbling just to make it less quiet. “Does that mean you want to see if there’s something here?” he asked.

  What was that supposed to mean? “If we’re being honest, you’re not really my type.”

  “Remember what I said about you being a bad liar?”

  “It’s not a lie!” I stirred the wet ingredients into the dry ones, thankful for the distraction. “I tend to go for more nerdy, shy guys.” That feeling was back, the thick one that made it hard to breathe or concentrate, that made my pulse go haywire and my stomach do flips. So of course I had to make it stupid. “I mean, obviously, you’re everyone with a pulse’s type. I’m sure you’re on the hall pass of every woman in America.”

  “Hall pass?”

  “Yeah, you know—the celebrities you’re allowed to cheat with and not get in trouble with your significant other. You did an episode about it on Frenemies.”

  “I know.” His devilish smile made me want to smack him out of exasperation.

  “Then why did you make me explain it?”

  “Because of how cute you are when you get embarrassed.” He stretched, and my eyes couldn’t help but follow the lines of his arms. I enjoyed the way his muscles tightened. “I think we just established that we would like to hang out more. Without me paying you for it.”

  Did “hang out more” mean dating in guy speak? If we were dating, it was time to ’fess up.

  “There’s something I have to tell you first. And it may change your mind.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Why was this never easy? It didn’t seem to matter how many times I’d said it, how many times I’d practiced it so I could sound cool and sophisticated and above it all. Instead, I came across like a cavewoman, lacking basic language. “You. Me. No do it.”

  It didn’t help matters when he reached across the counter and took my hand in his. “I can’t imagine anything you could say that would change my mind.”

  “I’m celibate.” I blurted the words out without my usual buildup to explain my decision.

  Three beats later he said, “What?”

  “Celibate. I have chosen not to have sex until I get married.”

  Chase looked pensive, and I tried to slip out of his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go. Instead of being annoyed as I normally would have been, I was glad. The gesture showed that I hadn’t completely scared him off, that he wouldn’t be inventing a cat’s surgery in order to flee, and it comforted me.

  “Is it okay if I ask why?”

  He wasn’t the first. “There are a lot of reasons. At first it was religious. What my grandparents taught me. Then when I was old enough to realize how young my mom was when she had me, I decided I wanted to be the opposite of her. And then my best friend had a pregnancy scare when we were sixteen. I didn’t want to be a mother at sixteen.”

  “I totally get that. I didn’t want to be a mother at sixteen, either.”

  I smiled a little. “I’m not really a casual person. I realized it would never not be a big deal to me. And in addition to keeping me not pregnant, it’s also made me not diseased. My favorite teacher in high school contracted an STD without knowing it as a teen. It made her sterile, and she wanted a baby more than anything. It was so unbelievably sad.”

  Chase nodded, not saying anything. It was the most serious expression I’d ever seen on him. My stomach twisted, and I felt queasy. This was it. Now we would break up. Well, it wouldn’t really be a breakup, since we hadn’t actually dated, but I didn’t want this to be the last time I saw him. Spoke to him.

  Touched him.

  He cleared his throat. “This is why I like making movies. Somebody else always writes the perfect thing for me to say.” I squeezed his hand. He hadn’t run into the night screaming, so he was already ahead in my book. “I like you and respect you, and I can respect your choice. But there’s probably some things I should tell you. Like I don’t thi
nk I want to get married.”

  “Ever?” I realized why he’d told me. I was saying “No sex until marriage,” and now he was telling me there wouldn’t be a marriage.

  “My mother’s on her ninth husband. It’s hard to take marriage seriously when your own mom changes husbands as often as a politician changes their beliefs. Not to mention I work in an industry where I’ve had colds that have lasted longer than some marriages.”

  “I guess my perspective is different because I grew up around some really amazing marriages. I know how happy it can make people to find the right partner.” But I wasn’t going to change his mind. I understood why he felt that way and realized there probably wasn’t anything I could say to make him see things differently. He was being a gentleman, letting me down easy. “I guess that means this is it.”

  “What? That’s not what I was saying.”

  “If I’m waiting until marriage, and you’re saying marriage will never happen, then there doesn’t really seem to be a point to all this.”

  “The point is to see if we like each other. What we have right here is supposed to be about having fun and getting to know someone. Maybe even falling in love. And we can experience intimacy that has nothing to do with the physical. It’s about you and I feeling safe enough to be open and vulnerable with each other. Being honest and sharing pieces of ourselves. That’s what I’m looking for right now. Someone I can connect with on a different level than I have in the past. I’m still in.”

  Other than the no-marriage thing, everything else out of his mouth was perfect. Like I had ridden a unicorn over a rainbow into a fairyland, and Santa Claus was in charge of showing me around. Magical, fantastical, totally perfect.

  I looked down and remembered my cookies. My poor dough was going to get hard if I didn’t get the cookies baked. “I’m in, too. But if I don’t finish this, it will go stale.”

  Nodding, he let my hand go, and it was like a part of me had gone missing. I found cookie sheets. The good kind that prevented the bottoms from burning. I started rolling the dough into balls and coating them with granulated sugar. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re deeper than I thought you would be.”

  “I am more than just a pretty face,” he agreed, going back to his autographing. “Although I can’t take credit for my profoundness. That’s my therapist talking.”

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me. With all the weirdness that was his life, a therapist sounded like an essential.

  He let out a big breath. “And my therapist would say there’s something else I should tell you. I’m an alcoholic. Like my father before me. Although unlike him, I went to rehab, and I’m in recovery.”

  Chase had been so cool about my thing that I wanted to do for him what he had just done for me. I put the cookies in the oven and set a timer on my phone. “That sounds rough. When were you in rehab?”

  “I’m two years and ten days sober. I started rehab two years ago. For an entire year.”

  That year when I thought his tweets didn’t sound like him. One-F must have filled in for him.

  “At first I stayed away from alcohol because of my dad and his accident. He had filmed the performance of a lifetime and then ran his car into a tree. He won an Academy Award posthumously for that part. I thought he was so stupid, but I got it because Hollywood is all about partying and mind-altering substances. It wasn’t easy, but I avoided it. Then there was this director I really, really wanted to work with. Frederic Fontana. We went out to dinner, and he said he didn’t trust a man who didn’t drink. I wanted to impress him, so I drank. And all it took was that first drink. It was like something chemically changed inside me. Within a few days of hanging out with him, all I wanted to do was be drunk all the time.”

  “Didn’t Frederic Fontana direct Octavius?”

  “Sure did.” He nodded. “That’s why it jumped out at me when you talked about how I sucked in that part. I did, because I was wasted the entire production. The day I saw the final cut, I was fairly sober. I saw how bad I was. And I was doing exactly what my dad did. Throwing my entire life and career down the drain. I didn’t want to end up wrapped around a tree. I checked myself into rehab that day.”

  “So you aren’t perfect. That’s kind of a relief. My roommate warned me that everybody has skeletons in their closet.” It probably wasn’t the right thing to say, but it sort of fell out of my mouth.

  “She’s not wrong. Rehab helped me figure out I used to be kind of a douchebag. I was totally full of myself, believing my own hype. I thought I was a lot more important than I actually am.” He stared at the autographed pictures in front of him, as if recognizing the irony. “Therapy helped me see that I not only needed to change my behaviors and the people I hung out with, but also that I needed to be a different kind of man. I wanted to be better. Every day I’m trying to be.”

  Was that all I was to him? “So I’m someone to try out your new personality on?”

  “It’s not like that. I make these decisions. To think about other people before myself. I stopped being a jerk on set and make sure I show up on time. Which has led to more and better projects to choose from. There are so many jerks in the entertainment industry that people seem to enjoy the novelty of working with someone who tries to be nice.”

  As far as I knew, no tabloids, bloggers, or entertainment reporters knew any of this. He was telling me things that could totally tarnish his all-American, boy-next-door brand. “Thank you for trusting me with all of that.”

  “Thank you for trusting me.”

  The timer beeped, and I brought the cookie tray over to the island and laid it on a dishrag. Chase reached for one. “Let them cool off first. You’re going to burn your tongue.”

  “Don’t care.” The cookie fell apart in his hand, but he dropped it into his mouth anyway. “I’m sorry I ever called your skills into question. These are phenomenal.” Then he proved his statement true by grabbing three more.

  “Has no one ever baked for you before?”

  “My mom wouldn’t know what a stove was if it jumped up and bit her,” he said after he finished chewing. “My grandma was the ultimate stage mother, and she was far more focused on my career than anything else. The first time I got cookies I was fourteen. There was a guest star on our show. Shayna Rayne. She had an arc as my first girlfriend. She was actually my first kiss. She was a little bit taller than me, and when we tried to—”

  “Okay,” I said, holding up my hands. “I don’t need the details.”

  He gave me a half smile, like he found my simmering jealousy cute. “Anyway, on her last day of filming, she brought me a plate of cookies, claiming she’d made them herself. I remember being really impressed because they were perfect-looking, and no one had ever baked for me before. When my grandma saw them, she said they were store-bought. I didn’t believe her, so she sent out a PA to prove she was right. She was. And then she told me that someday I would find a girl who would make me cookies and not lie about it to impress me. When I saw it in your Twitter posts, it felt like another sign. Like the universe was saying, ‘That one.’”

  “My grandma said I would know I had the right man when we could wallpaper a room together and not kill each other. Although her frame of reference was definitely different from anyone else’s.”

  At the rate he was going through the cookies, he was going to wolf down the entire dozen before they’d cooled.

  “Didn’t you say your grandparents were Amish?” he asked.

  I used the spatula to take two cookies off the sheet, and I put them on the counter so I could eat them. “They were. My grandmother loved to learn, but once Amish kids turn fourteen, they don’t go to school anymore. She asked to go to a regular school, but her parents didn’t want her to fill her head with English ideas. They wanted her to meet a boy and get married. But the boy who caught her eye was Zev Miller, the son of her family’s sworn enemies. I don’t remember what the feud was about. Like, stolen cows or something. He liked her, too, but Hanna
h Yoder was off-limits.”

  “Like an Amish Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Exactly. They started to meet in secret and fell in love. My grandpa was so besotted that he told her he didn’t mind if she went to high school and college. And he promised to take her to see the ocean, something she had always dreamed of. When they told their families, there was a lot of yelling and threatening and forbidding. So my grandparents decided to leave. They eloped and ended up in Marabella. My grandpa did woodworking, and my grandma made quilts and cleaned homes. Other than watching Jeopardy! with me, I don’t have a single memory of her sitting down. She was always moving, always on the go. Eventually she got her degree and went to the beach every chance she got. They wanted a lot of kids, but they didn’t have my mom until their early forties. And then, you know, the whole video-vixen-knocked-up-at-fifteen thing happened. So when she left me with them, they didn’t let me go to public school because they thought it would be a bad influence on me, like it had apparently been on my mom. I spent my time doing schoolwork or cleaning or baking. Then my mother came and got me because she needed a built-in babysitter, and you know the rest.”

  “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with babysitting. Maybe once she got her life together, she realized what a mistake she’d made in leaving you behind and wanted you back.”

  I wanted to believe that, but years of feeling rejected and abandoned made it difficult to consider her motives that way. I ate my cookies, and they were practically perfect. Definitely brag-worthy.

  Chase got up and poured two glasses of milk, then handed me one. “To one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time.”

  I smiled, clinking my glass against his. I shared the sentiment, but some bitter, unbelieving part of me wondered if he was acting and pretending. Because of his desire to be a better person, he felt like he had to say and do certain things he didn’t really mean.

  I took a small drink, but he chugged his, leaving behind a white moustache. “You have milk on you.”

  “Where?” he asked. “Here?” He teased me by rubbing one side of his cheek, completely missing his mouth.