His Leading Man

by Ashlyn Kane

  “I do know,” Lorna said sympathetically. “But be nice to him. Something tells me he’s a keeper.”

  Drew was starting to suspect the same thing.

  And it scared the crap out of him.

  Chapter Ten

  DINNER on the front lawn of the Aquarium of the Pacific was an experience Steve wouldn’t soon forget.

  A slight breeze blew off the water, ruffling the canopies of the tents overhead. Every so often Steve caught a whiff of whatever course was coming next: pear and chèvre salad, and center-cut beef filet, and crab cakes with fruit salsa, and potato gratin. The champagne kept flowing, and people kept talking to Drew, and asking about Steve and their movie, and being famous and fabulous and extremely well-dressed.

  Drew had to drive them home. Steve took advantage and had a few more glasses of champagne in order to relax.

  “I need to walk around a little before dessert,” Drew bemoaned, pushing back in his chair.

  “There’s more?” Steve stared at the half-eaten remains of his meal. He’d eaten too many little crackers with unidentifiable delicacies on them. He had Hollywood experience, but this chef was next-level.

  “Some kind of s’more thing with chocolate ganache,” Drew said mournfully. He hadn’t cleaned his plate either.

  Steve mentally added another mile to the route for his morning run. “I—”

  “Drew! Buddy!”

  He and Drew turned at the interruption. Steve recognized the man from a movie he’d done with Drew a few years back, an ensemble thing with a complicated con plot.

  “Jason!” Drew pushed back from the table and stood to shake his hand. “Long time no see. I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I just got back from Korea yesterday. I still don’t know what time it is.” He shook his head. “Hey, you got a minute? You have to meet my wife, man. She’s a riot. You’re gonna love her.”

  For the first time that night, Drew looked like he might actually want to catch up with someone. Steve waved him off. “Go on. I will wait for dessert and death.”

  “You should come.” Drew looked from Jason to Steve. “I’m reasonably sure his wife doesn’t bite. At least not people she’s just met. And Jason’s had his shots.”

  Truth told, Steve wasn’t ready to go with him and start meeting people as Drew’s… whatever. Random famous acquaintances were one thing. People he was actually friends with were another. That felt like too much pressure. “No, you go ahead and catch up. I’m too full to move.”

  Drew furrowed his brow, obviously torn. “I don’t want to leave you alone….”

  “There are like eight hundred people here.” Worst-case scenario, he could track down Lorna and ply her with alcohol for more dog stories. “I will be fine, I promise.”

  Drew looked at Jason, then back at Steve, and finally huffed in resignation. “All right, if you say so. Don’t eat my dessert!”

  “No promises.” Honestly Steve wasn’t sure he was even going to be able to eat his own dessert. But if it was anything like the rest of the food he’d eaten tonight, he should probably try to find a takeout box.

  Drew and Jason left, and a waiter came by to bus away their entrée plates. Steve leaned back in his chair and looked up. The lights of the aquarium and Long Beach made it impossible to see the stars, but he knew they were there. Look at me now, Dad, he thought. A writer with a script optioned and being shot, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous on a Saturday night. Who’d have thought?

  “This seat taken?” someone asked, startling Steve back to earth. He turned to find Cooper Miles standing behind Drew’s empty chair, smiling at Steve.

  “It is, yeah,” Steve told him a little warily. He wasn’t going to be the gateway to gossip about Drew’s personal life. Not even for Cooper Miles, whose music he adored. But he didn’t want to be rude either. “I’m sure he won’t mind if you keep me company for a few minutes, though.”

  Cooper pulled out the chair. “Hi.”

  Oh boy. Had Steve unknowingly cast some kind of spell? Were handsome eligible famous men going to hit on him for the rest of his life? All of a sudden there was a windfall. “Hi.” Steve wasn’t a seasoned actor—some of the skepticism he felt escaped in the word.

  “Ouch,” Cooper said ruefully. “Okay, let me try that again.” He stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Cooper. I’m not here to hit on you or give you the third degree on what a nice guy like you is doing in a place like this with Drew Beaumont.”

  Steve didn’t like that much better—he had a feeling he didn’t want to know what Cooper meant when he said with Drew Beaumont that way—but he shook hands. “Steve.” Let Cooper find out his last name from someone else, or not at all.

  “Nice to meet you, Steve. What do you do?”

  “Writing, mostly. Script doctoring. A little acting.” Not a lie, even excluding Dog Gone—he was once in a cell phone commercial. It shot in Washington; he was fifteen.

  “Is that how you met?”

  He obviously meant Drew. Steve didn’t like where this was going at all. He reached for his glass of champagne. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I don’t!” Cooper said, too loudly. Then, quieter, “I don’t. I just… look, if I’m out of line, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to see what happened to me happen to someone else.”

  Steve’s stomach soured. “What happened to you?” he repeated. It wasn’t a question. He didn’t think he wanted to hear this.

  “I mean, I get it,” Cooper went on. “This whole Hollywood schtick is a game, and the people on your team are always changing. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

  What is he talking about? “I’m pretty sure Drew Beaumont isn’t using me for publicity,” Steve pointed out icily.

  “Well, no.” Cooper shrugged. “But think about it. When’s the last time he dated a man, huh? His love life’s practically a matter of public record. He’s never done it.”

  Steve opened his mouth and closed it. Drew had already spoken about his reasons for keeping his love life private. Or, well, nonexistent, to hear Drew tell it.

  “It was years ago,” Cooper said, swirling a glass of wine that had appeared from—somewhere. Steve didn’t know. Maybe he’d had too much of his own. “I’m over it. I just don’t like to see history repeat itself. You know?”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, even though he didn’t. “Thanks.” He wasn’t sure he meant that either.

  “All right. Well. Take care, Steve.” Cooper stood up. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he must have changed his mind, because he just lifted his glass in a wordless toast and left.

  A waitress came by with their dessert plates, leaving one at Drew’s empty place. Steve picked up his fork and debated taking a bite. It seemed a shame to let it go to waste. But somehow he was even less hungry now than he was ten minutes ago.

  “Hey!” Drew flopped down in his chair, startling Steve out of his dessert contemplation. “Sorry about that. Jason’s an old friend, and I sort of got the feeling you weren’t into that today.”

  Well, he was right about that. “Good guess,” Steve said without looking up. Ooh. That sounded moody.

  “Yeah, well, I…. Is something wrong?”

  Steve must be off his acting game tonight. He released a slow breath and reached for his water glass. Obviously champagne was not the way to go. “Everything’s fine. I’ve been meeting famous people all night. Cooper Miles came and introduced himself.”

  Silence reigned for long enough that Steve turned to look. Drew was staring at his dessert, his shoulders rounded, head bent a bit. “Oh.”

  Steve took a sip of water and set his glass down. “He doesn’t like you very much.”

  “Well, no, he wouldn’t.” Drew sighed and pushed his plate away. “We should probably talk, I guess. But not here.”

  Their desserts looked so sad sitting there uneaten. It seemed like a shame to leave them, even if Steve wasn’t very hungry. “Do you think we can get a takeout box?” />
  Between his earnest expression, polite request, and a hefty bribe, Drew procured them a takeout box and two plastic forks. Steve lifted a bottle of Perrier from a serving table near the back of the lawn as they reentered the building, which was almost deserted.

  “It’s weird to see this place so empty.” Steve almost expected his voice to echo. “Everyone must still be outside.”

  Drew smirked. As if on cue, from outside came the imperfectly conveyed notes of a sound check. “Didn’t I mention? They’re capping off the evening with a performance by Ed Sheeran.”

  At least it wasn’t Cooper Miles. “The perks of Hollywood.”

  “Anyway.” Drew shifted, looking from Steve to the mostly empty aquarium. “I can drive you home and we can talk there, if you want. But it’s pretty quiet in here, and I haven’t gotten to see my favorite exhibit. So… what do you say?”

  How could he say no to that? Steve gestured forward with his free hand. “Lead the way.”

  Drew led him back through the Great Hall toward the Honda Blue Cavern. “My mom used to take me here when I was young,” he said. “I didn’t go to a regular school, so the closest I got to a normal life was a trip to the aquarium. Here I could be just another kid.”

  They passed the Amber Forest with its kelp skyscrapers and the Redondo Canyon with its baby giant sea bass. Steve paused to watch it dart in and out of the rocks in the tank, but Drew kept going past the seahorses and the lobsters and the abalone until….

  “The jellyfish?” Steve asked. He’d expected Drew to take him upstairs to the ray touch pool or the penguins, or to keep going toward the sea lions or the shark lagoon. Something either badass or cuddly.

  “There’s a webcam for the exhibit,” Drew said, settling onto a bench. The area was mostly dark, the better, Steve thought, to highlight the light and color show going on in the water. “I cue it up on my laptop when I can’t sleep. But it’s not the same.”

  Steve took the seat next to him and set the Perrier on the floor. “Interesting choice.”

  “I like them because they’re pretty,” Drew said. “But they’re also fascinating. They can reproduce sexually or asexually, or both, depending on the species. Some of them even shrink when conditions are bad.” He paused. “Plus they’re heartless, brainless, and spineless on top of being beautiful, which is pretty apt in this town.”

  “I can see why you’d like them.” But as mesmerizing as they were, blue and pink and green and yellow and white, dancing through the water to a song Steve couldn’t quite make out, that wasn’t why they were here.

  “I don’t want to be that whiny actor who cries about how hard it is growing up famous. I had it pretty good. My mom moved with me when the work started picking up when I was a kid and stayed with me until I was twenty-one.” Drew set the s’mores down beside the Perrier and cracked open the bottle. “She tried to make sure I had a normal life—field trips, family vacations that didn’t come out of my paychecks, tutors who treated me like a regular kid. But you know how it is when you’re a teenager. Partying at all hours, drinking too much, making bad decisions. Imagine that, but on a Hollywood scale.” He took a swig.

  “Sounds… indulgent.” Steve tried to imagine Drew as twenty-one and beautiful, entitled, famous, the world at his feet. That could only lead to trouble.

  Drew snorted. “That’s one word for it.” He handed the bottle to Steve, who took a sip of his own. He wanted to be clearheaded. “Anyway, that’s what finally made my mom leave. She couldn’t take any more of the drinking and the partying and the rest of it. I guess the last straw was the day I showed up to set hungover one too many times and almost got fired.”

  Steve winced, imagining his own parents’ reaction. “Not exactly a magnet-on-the-refrigerator moment.”

  “No. I was a little asshole.” Drew shook his head. Music played distantly in the background. “You were probably such a nice boy. But I’m digressing. About the same time, the girl I was dating, Corinna…. Let’s just say she didn’t want more than a role in my next movie, but I was head over heels and I didn’t see it. So. By the time filming wrapped, we’d broken up and she was on a whirlwind publicity tour, signing deals for makeup endorsements and launching a clothing line because she had name recognition now because of me.” He stopped and made a face. “Oh God, I sound full of myself, but I swear it’s true.”

  “I believe you.” Steve remembered the movie, and the woman. She’d delivered a forgettable performance at best and had since faded into obscurity. Hollywood could be cruel.

  “Yeah, well. At the same time, my friend Leigh—we’ve been friends since we had neighboring sets when we were working for the Mouse—she went through the same thing. So she set me up with this friend of hers.”

  “Cooper Miles,” Steve guessed, passing back the water bottle.

  “Yeah.” Drew took the bottle but didn’t drink from it. “I’m not proud of who I was in those days. I was a little lost. My ego took a lot of damage too, and I thought, ‘No one is going to use me again.’ So when I hooked up with Cooper, I made sure he knew that was all it was. I wasn’t gentle, and I knew damn well I should’ve told him up front instead of after the fact. Leigh gave me an earful.”

  Steve had the feeling that if he ever had the opportunity to meet Leigh Miller, they would hit it off immediately. “I bet she did.”

  “Suffice it to say turning the tables didn’t make me feel any better, so after that I decided I was better off not dating at all. I fired the publicist that hooked me up with Corinna and went looking for one who didn’t care if I showed up with a date.” Drew made a face. “Cooper’s never forgiven me for using him, which is pretty fair. Maybe one of these days I’ll try apologizing and see if that works the way it does in the movies.”

  Steve thought about what he’d do if his ex apologized to him. “Don’t count on it.”

  “I guess not.”

  They sat in silence, watching the jellyfish, for a few measures. Then Steve took a deep breath, curling his hands around the edge of the bench to keep himself grounded. “Remember when we commiserated over being used by romantic partners?”

  “I remember.”

  “Yeah, well.” Steve bit his lip and debated telling the whole truth, but at the last minute, his courage deserted him. “Austin Sparks is my ex-boyfriend.”

  For a moment he thought Drew might ask him if he was serious, or what Austin had wanted him for. But then Drew grimaced, his face a rictus in the multicolored light from the jellies, and shook his head. “God. I’m sorry. I don’t know what he was like as a boyfriend, but….”

  “Whatever you’re imagining is probably pretty close.” Steve allowed himself a smile. “I have to admit it made my day when you called him a hemorrhoid without any prompting.”

  “Pleased to be of service.” Drew nudged his shoulder. “I’m always available for therapeutic name-calling.”

  Steve’s skin tingled from the contact, even through several layers of haute couture tuxedo, but he had no intention of moving away. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “So we’re okay now? You’re not mad? I don’t want you to have any reservations about….” Drew stopped, and Steve squinted at him. It was hard to tell in the dim lighting, but he thought Drew might be a little flushed. “I remember the other reason I don’t date now. I am terrible at it.”

  Steve laughed outright. “My track record isn’t significantly better than yours, so we’re on an even playing field, at least. We can learn together.”

  Drew leaned into him a little harder. “I like that idea.”

  Steve did too.

  “I think,” Drew said, “that in the movies, this is the part where we split dessert.” He opened the takeout container and tucked the lid underneath.

  The scents of chocolate and marshmallow assaulted Steve’s nose, and his mouth watered. Suddenly he was hungry again. He dug their plastic forks out of his jacket pocket. “Cheers.”

  Drew took one, a bit awkwardly, with his left
hand. For a second Steve was confused—and then Drew’s other hand covered his on the bench.

  Oh.

  Steve turned his hand palm up and laced their fingers together. His ears were hot with pleasure.

  They didn’t let go even after the last bite was gone. Somehow, that made it all the sweeter.

  Chapter Eleven

  DREW flopped down on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He’d pried his feet out of his uncomfortable shoes, hung up his tux for Jorj to take to the dry cleaner’s, and showered off a layer of Hollywood shine and hair gel. But he couldn’t seem to wipe the smile off his face.

  He was probably being ridiculous. All that time together, getting to know each other, learning each other’s secrets, and they hadn’t even kissed. Yet somehow it still felt like the most intimate date Drew had ever been on. Then again, he’d already admitted that he’d been doing it wrong for most of his life. If it took going slow to get it right, he’d go slow.

  Even if the memory of Steve’s body against his own, as the night drew to a close and they decided, on a whim, to dance to the music drifting in from the front lawn, made him want to skip ahead. Steve was just a hair taller than Drew, and broader in the shoulders. “This reminds me of my eighth-grade dance,” Steve had snorted as they tried to work out who would lead.

  Drew didn’t have an eighth-grade dance. It was nice to get to experience some of what he’d missed. He laughed and took Steve’s hand, lacing their fingers together. “Maybe if we….”

  They didn’t have much of a shot at the Dancing with the Stars title, but there was no one there to judge, and Steve fit too well against him for Drew to care that they were just making slow circles in their jellyfish spotlight.

  By the time he dropped Steve off, he felt like he was walking on air. Steve didn’t invite him upstairs, but that seemed right. Instead he thanked Drew for a nice time, his eyes laughing all the while at the cliché, and then leaned in and kissed his cheek.