The Seat Filler: A Novel

by Sariah Wilson

  A smile. “They can take care of their own travel. They can just call our car service. They’ll be safe.”

  He had a car service? Couldn’t he have just called that for me, too?

  He wants to take you home. He still wants to spend time with you.

  It seemed so dumb that I hadn’t really figured that out before, that he wanted to be alone with me without his entourage around, but it was like it had just occurred to me and I didn’t know what to think.

  “Ray needs your address,” Noah said. “Or if there’s somewhere else you want to go, we can take you there instead.”

  Why was I getting the distinct impression that if I told him I was in the mood for Rio de Janeiro, we’d be heading for an airport? “Home is good.”

  I recited it to the driver, and Ray nodded. “We’ll get you there quick as we can, but there’s traffic.”

  It was LA. There was always traffic.

  Then Ray pushed a button to raise the dividing barrier between the front and back of the car. The movement of that dark window sliding into place had this feeling of finality for me.

  It made the space feel so small, and Noah was so big, sucking up all the room left in the back seat.

  And I was back to being freaked out. Being at the party had felt less threatening. We’d been surrounded by people. Obviously he wasn’t going to make a move with so many people watching everything he did. So my mind hadn’t gone to the possibility that he might. The time we’d spent together had felt comfortable, and I’d allowed myself the luxury of not overreacting to every one of his movements and overthinking everything that was going on and just enjoying myself. Pretending to be normal, like every other woman out there.

  That was all over now.

  Because he might try to kiss me.

  And then I would have a full-on panic attack.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Do you want something to drink?” Noah asked, leaning forward to open a compartment, from which he pulled out a bottle of champagne.

  “No champagne for me,” I said. “I’m such a lightweight.” In my current living circumstances, I could afford neither alcohol nor the potential hangovers that might interfere with an early-morning appointment. “Plus, not being able to hold my liquor makes me very confessy.”

  And why had I felt the need to tack that on? I resisted covering my face with both of my hands as he put the bottle back.

  “Do you want us to stop and grab something else? Water?” he offered.

  I let out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t going to home in on what I’d said. “No, I’m good. Thanks.”

  Then, of course, he made sure my relief was short-lived. “I take it that being confessy is a bad thing.”

  “It could be,” I said honestly. At least one of my secrets was totally humiliating. The other would destroy this entire evening. I wasn’t up for either experience.

  “What is it that you don’t want to confess to me? Do you have a deep, dark secret?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” I was aiming for lighthearted, but I was afraid I’d missed the mark.

  “Do you want to know mine?” he asked, and me being me, of course I desperately wanted to know it. I didn’t know if that made me a hypocrite, keeping my secrets to myself while being way too enthusiastic about him spilling his.

  “If you want to share it.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully before saying, “I haven’t spoken to my parents in nine years.”

  As far as I could recall, he’d never mentioned his parents in any interview. Ever. “Really? Wow. Why?”

  He settled back against the seat, unbuttoning his jacket to get more comfortable. “My parents were my managers. My mother was a child actor on a sitcom and never had a substantial role after that. My dad was a radio DJ. They met at some event, fell in love, and had kids.”

  Kids? My ears perked up. As far as I knew, Noah Douglas was an only child. He didn’t have any siblings. Right?

  Or maybe he did and he’d been protecting that fact all these years. He was so intensely private that it was shocking he was saying anything to me now. His interviews consisted of the same set of facts over and over again—he’d starred on Late for Class, had joined the army at eighteen, came home three years later, and did some small movies here and there until he broke out with the Duel of the Fae trilogy. Now every director in Hollywood wanted to work with him, and he was doing an excellent job of choosing roles that were getting him all kinds of critical accolades.

  That was it. He’d never said anything about his family.

  And knowing how private he was? Why was he telling me? I could totally betray him and tell this to, like, the ENZ website, and it would be everywhere.

  Because he trusts you. Even though he shouldn’t.

  I was torn between guilt and selfishness. So I didn’t choose. I stayed quiet and let him talk, let him make the decision.

  “The one thing my parents wanted was for me to be a huge star. My dad quit his job, and they spent all their time managing me and my career. I paid the bills. Everything depended on me. There were no choices in my life, no normal childhood activities. I was either on set working or memorizing lines or with one of my instructors for acting, dancing, or singing. Nobody asked me if I was doing what I wanted. Or if I was happy. Nobody cared.”

  That made my heart break. I’d never imagined when I’d watched him as Felix that he’d been unhappy. “I’m so sorry.”

  He raised one hand, as if to wave off my sympathy. “It got worse when I was a teenager. I rebelled in the worst ways possible. I was a mess, totally acting out and partying all the time. The day I turned eighteen I got married, just to prove I was an adult.”

  Oh, I remembered. My fifteen-year-old heart had been entirely broken when he’d married one of his costars. A voodoo doll of his bride may or may not have been constructed.

  “I just wanted to show them that they couldn’t control me anymore. And they took my challenge seriously. They tried to get control back. They attempted to get a court to declare me incompetent and give them a conservatorship over me.”

  I gasped. I’d had no idea. “Who would do that?”

  “My parents. They didn’t want their cash cow to wander off into another field. It made me wake up and I realized I had to be out of their reach. I stopped partying, got my marriage annulled, and did what anyone in my position would do—I met with my local army recruiter and signed up.”

  I smiled slightly at his joke. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “That’s why I wanted it. I needed something hard, something authentic. I’d never lived in the real world with real problems, and I wanted it more than anything. To be my own man and be in a place where I’d be treated just like everyone else. My goal was to become an Army Ranger. If I was going to be in the military, I was going to be the best.”

  More than one director had talked about his incredible work ethic. I wondered if it was something his parents had instilled in him or if he’d found it in the military. “What happened? Why did you leave?”

  “Because they made me,” he said with a wry smile. “We were deployed to Afghanistan, and when we arrived, on our way to the base, we hit an IED. The blast pressure caused me to have a pneumothorax.”

  I was both horrified and enthralled. “What is that?”

  “Basically it’s when your lungs collapse. It was incredibly painful, and I couldn’t breathe right. I thought I was having a heart attack and that I was going to die. Fortunately there was a medic in the jeep behind us, and he stabilized me. The explosion banged everyone up, but we all survived.”

  “Is that when you came home?”

  He shook his head. “A little bit after that. They performed a thoracoscopy on me and let me heal up. Then they sent me home with a medical discharge. The doctors determined that I was at too much risk of a recurrence if I sustained another physical injury. It’s why I can’t do my own stunts in movies, either. Which is frustrating. Anyway, I was pissed off. I’d trai
ned with my company for three years, and they were off to serve our mission while I was sitting in an apartment in Brooklyn with no idea what to do with my life.”

  “You didn’t go right back to acting?”

  “No. I considered becoming a police officer or a firefighter. Something where I could still serve and protect. But I went to this play, A View from the Bridge, and I was blown away. The way the lead actor played this character, how he channeled this rage and frustration into a work of art . . . I wanted that in my life again. I resisted at first, because I didn’t want my parents to get credit for any of my success.”

  “Have they?” I had to admit it, I was dying to get my phone out of my purse and see if I could look his parents up. What kind of people would treat their son that way?

  “I don’t think so. Somebody on my team would tell me if they did.”

  “I’m sorry.” It felt like such an inadequate thing to keep saying, but I was at a loss here. Things had worked out for him, but it couldn’t have been fun to go through it.

  “That’s just how it was. Not everybody’s parents are mentally healthy, and sometimes the best thing for you to do is move on with your own life. My army-appointed psychiatrist told me that and I agreed, and now here we are.”

  Now here we were. With him being nominated for the most prestigious acting award in the country. It was strange to think he’d almost walked away from all of it. “Do you regret your time in the army? Because your career might have been different if you’d stayed?”

  “No. Joining the army was the best thing I could have done for myself. It taught me to work hard, gave me discipline and structure, and made me understand what was really important in life. It made me the person I am now, and I’m generally happy with who I am. Even if I can be a little impatient and annoyed with others.”

  My curiosity was eating away at me, and even though I shouldn’t have asked the next question, I did. “Do you think your parents watched the show tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I know they are still representing child actors and have opened their own acting school. For all I know they’re putting my face on their promotional posters. But I can’t spend all my time looking back and reliving the worst parts of my life.”

  I startled at that, my heart rate jumping. It was like he’d seen inside my head. Because all I did was look back and relive the most humiliating part of my life.

  He put his arm across the seat behind me. “Do you ever find yourself doing that? Reliving hard times?”

  “Recently? A whole lot.”

  “Is that what caused . . .” He trailed off, his hand hovering next to my neck, and I could feel the warmth from his skin, even though he didn’t touch me. “And is this why you don’t date?”

  “My scars? No. I usually only feel a little self-conscious about them when somebody stares and makes comments. Usually I forget because it’s just a part of me now and they’re not that bad.” It was one of the things I liked about Noah, that he didn’t stare or say rude things.

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  “I was in an accident just after I graduated from high school. I got rear-ended by a drunk driver and glass from the windshield got embedded in my neck. The settlement from his insurance company paid for college, and I saved the rest. Which I’m using to live on now, because somehow I thought I’d start a business and people would just call me. I had no idea how hard it would be to get it off the ground.”

  “Sounds like you could have used a four-hundred-and-forty-euro tip.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, nudging him slightly with my hand.

  Then he looked at me. The way that Malec had looked at Aliana after their first bout of hand-to-hand combat.

  And I knew what that meant.

  He wanted to kiss me.

  Again I felt like I’d been lured. Only this time it was into a sense of complacency. Him sharing things, trusting me, telling me these stories about himself—it made me forget myself and my own fears. At his expression, they came rushing back.

  As my heartbeat pounded out a panicky rhythm, I realized just how close we were on this seat. As if my body had been subtly making its way over toward him, like he was a giant magnet that I was helpless to resist.

  So I started inching my way toward the door, wanting to put some space between us. Because he was too much and it felt a little like my throat was starting to close in on itself.

  “Why are you afraid of me?” he asked.

  I stopped moving. “I’m not.”

  “You are. I know I’m a big guy and sometimes that can come across as intimidating, but I’m harmless.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said with a laugh. I did not want to talk about this. I did not. I felt sweat break out on my hairline, and a wave of nausea made my stomach roil.

  He looked really upset and pulled his arm off the seat, putting it back at his side.

  I realized that I’d hurt him, and I hadn’t meant to do that. “I’m not afraid of you in the way you’re thinking. I don’t think you’re going to hurt me. That’s not it.”

  He relaxed slightly while I wondered hysterically how much it would cost to steam clean the leather seat we were sitting on after I upchucked all over it.

  While I concentrated on breathing in and out, he said, “You’re so hard to read. Part of my job is figuring out what makes people tick. Why they do what they do and what they mean by it. And sometimes, sometimes I feel like you’re attracted to me and you want me to touch you, and then other times you look at me like I’m a lion about to swallow you whole.”

  “If anyone is looking at anyone in a weird way, I’m not the only one at fault here.” I felt tears at the edges of my eyes, which was so stupid. I was not going to cry about this. I wasn’t. “It feels like you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.”

  “When I told you earlier that you were easy to think of, I was being serious. I find myself thinking about you a lot. Trying to puzzle you out.”

  What in the holy freak was I supposed to do with that?

  He kept talking. “In the last couple of minutes, you’ve made enough space between us for a marching band to pass through.”

  That was true.

  And I considered something I’d never considered before. Telling him. There was something inherently trustworthy and reliable about him. Like he was so strong that I could depend on him to help me carry my burdens. Maybe it was because he’d spent this car ride telling me all about himself, trusting me, that made me think that I could confess. I’d get through it, it would be embarrassing, but wouldn’t it be a relief to have another person know?

  I couldn’t tell him every detail, but I could tell him most of them. And then he would understand. He was a logical person. He would see that we couldn’t be together and nothing would ever happen and that while we’d had a nice time together, this was as far as things could ever go.

  What would his reaction be? I wanted to imagine that he would be gentle and understanding. But what if he wasn’t?

  It was too scary, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I couldn’t.

  So I clung to what I was good at—putting off and discouraging men. “I can’t explain it to you. I’m sorry. I can be friends and nothing more. That’s all I have to offer you.” And if he didn’t want to be friends, well, I’d be okay with that. I was okay before we met, and my life would go on just fine without him in it.

  Even if that thought did feel a little sad.

  He stayed silent for a moment, considering. “Then I’ll take whatever you have to give. I’d like to be your friend.”

  Relief coursed through me so powerfully that I felt a little dizzy. I sagged against the seat. “Good. So we’re friends.”

  “Do friends hang out in a non–dog grooming capacity?” he asked.

  I weakly smiled. “You did that tonight.”

  “Right. So I’ll have to add in wanting to spend time with you in a non–seat filler capacity, too. Maybe this Friday?”

/>   “I can’t on Friday,” I told him. “My mom is doing this one-woman show where she’s giving birth to herself for one of her theater classes.”

  “That sounds like an oddly specific lie,” he said.

  “It’s the truth. My mother’s midlife crisis involves her going back to school to pursue that acting degree she’s always wanted. You should totally stop by. Fun will be had by all.”

  The car came to a stop, and the engine turned off. I looked out the window and was surprised to see that we were in front of my apartment building. The night was officially over. And other than my one mini-freak-out, things had gone well and I’d enjoyed spending time with him. As friends did, right?

  I put my hand on the door handle and was about to thank him when he said, “Wait. There’s something else I need to tell you.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That worried, panicky feeling returned. Was he about to take it back? Say he didn’t want to be friends?

  “It’s about Shelby,” he said, and I immediately felt reassured.

  “You mean how the two of you masterminded this evening? Don’t worry, it doesn’t take a genius to have figured that one out.”

  “No. I mean, yes, we may have schemed a little, but this is about something else.” My mind went to a weird place. Like, if he told me right now that in the last week he and Shelby had fallen in love and were running away together, I was going to march straight into our apartment and set fire to all of her favorite lipsticks.

  “What?”

  “I’ve hired her to do renovations on my house.”

  “Oh.” Yeah, that made much more sense. Shelby’s makeup was safe. “Well, that was a good choice. She’s excellent at what she does.”

  “I only did it because—” He stopped himself short, studying my face like he was hoping a clue would appear. “I guess that doesn’t matter now. With us being friends and all.”

  The rest of that sentence felt vitally important, but I knew I didn’t have any right to it. I was the one who’d said friends only.

  “The important thing,” he continued, “is that she agreed and we’ve already started. She’s working on getting the permits.”