There was one final text from Cameron’s younger brother Daniel that might have hurt worse than them all.
Daniel: You’re a star now, man. You can get any piece of ass. No way that’s who you want to fuck for the rest of your life!
I abandoned the phone and staggered onto a stool before my legs gave out. Placing my head in my hands and closing my eyes, the ugly messages burned vividly behind my lashes. I’d worried about the public’s reaction, but never in a million years had I thought our friends and family would react this way. Surprise, ridicule, disgust, and even anger. Could they really be that upset? Why did they care so much who Cameron loved? How did it impact them? And then I knew. Some of these guys were hangers-on. Now that Cameron was a bonafide celebrity they expected to be able to bask in the aura of fame. If he wasn’t out trolling for pussy, they couldn’t tag along to soak up his sloppy seconds. That they expected that’s how Cameron would react to his newfound celebrity told me how little these guys really knew him. If I hadn’t been so damn hurt by their messages, I might have had to laugh at their ridiculousness.
Aside from those who were obviously upset not to be able to take advantage of Cameron’s celebrity themselves, I could almost understand the comments about whether or not I was pregnant. Jumping into an engagement at warp speed would naturally appear suspicious to anyone who wasn’t privy to the details of our story. While less common in our generation, it wasn’t entirely unheard of for a man to propose when the woman he was screwing got knocked up. While getting pregnant no longer necessitated a marriage proposal, guys like Cameron would still be honor bound to at least offer. So yeah, that was an understandable conclusion for them to draw. Perhaps they imagined while we’d been telling everyone, “Oh goodness no, we’re just really good friends,” we’d been secretly getting it on and the result of those sexy times was a pregnancy. Since it happened all the time I was almost willing to forgive those questions.
What hurt most though was the messages from guys who I’d considered my friends too. Fuck, one of them was even going to be my brother-in-law! How could they have hidden their distaste all this time? Oh, right. Because they hadn’t conceived of a situation where Cameron could desire – scratch that, love – a woman like me. In their narrow world view because of the way I looked, I was a romantic non-entity. I didn’t need to have it spelled out in black and white. To guys like them a woman wasn’t worth a damn if she didn’t look like a Playmate of the Month.
I tried to tell myself they were fools, their comments meant nothing. That their words would mean nothing to Cameron as well, but the more I protested, the more I feared he wouldn’t ignore them. That he might internalize those comments and decide he’d been too hasty in asking me to marry him. With everything that was going on in his life right now, I began to wonder if down the road he might regret my presence in his life. Think that I’d held him back. I feared that as awesome as I was, I wouldn’t be able to hold his interest while millions of women threw themselves at him. I questioned if our love was strong enough to endure that level of attention. Wondered if we’d been doomed from the outset.
And that made me angry more than his friends’ comments about me because I could deal with people discounting me. I’d been doing it my whole life. But those slivers of unease made me doubt Cameron – question his love and his commitment – while he’d done absolutely nothing to deserve that doubt. That I questioned his resolve in the face of their words meant I questioned his integrity and that pissed me off beyond reason.
“Fuck!” I slammed my palms down, furious that I finally had the one thing I wanted most in life and already I could feel it slipping through my fingers. I breathed deeply and tried to steady my heart rate, tried to prevent myself from overreacting. And then before I knew it, Cameron was standing there begging me to tell him what was wrong.
I tried to explain what I’d seen and how it made me feel but I couldn’t bring myself to speak the words. In my head I heard their voices, their snide, malicious intent, their utter disbelief, and it made me Hulk Smash livid. Despite the haze of red that clouded my vision, soon Cameron’s concern broke through my rage and I managed to come back to myself. By then, he’d quit asking what was wrong and had started guessing, each speculative scenario going wide of the mark.
“No one died,” I croaked out, my voice thick with ire.
“Tell me what’s wrong then. Whatever it is, we can fix it.” His voice had turned panic and that made me feel guilty. Knowing the quicker I handed him his phone, the sooner he would be clued in to what had tipped me over the edge.
“I shouldn’t have … I know … but …” I took two big gulps of breath and readied myself to admit to invading his privacy. “Here, check your phone.” I held it between us.
“I’m sorry?”
“Your text messages. Responses to your announcement.”
Cameron scratched the whiskey colored stubble on his chin. “Text messages have you this upset?”
Great, now he thinks I’m a lunatic.
“Your friends think I’m a joke,” I whispered, my eyes dropping to my feet, and then back up.
Confusion marred his perfect features but he finally took the device from my outstretched hand. Scrolling through the messages of congratulations only confused him more since there was no reason I’d be angry about that.
“Not the congratulations. Those are wonderful,” I smiled sadly. “The other ones.”
He looked at me as if I wasn’t making any sense and then with a couple more taps of his fingers, had opened the main menu where those other messages were located. As he scrolled through them, I watched his reaction to words I knew by heart. A furrow of his brow, his jaw clenching, a scowl, and then a furious intake of breath before he slammed the phone down on the counter, shattering the screen.
His chest rose and fell with rapid breaths. His eyes slid to mine. “You read that shit?”
Silence hung heavy. He was enraged, his body strung tight with suppressed violence, but I wasn’t sure if that rage was directed at me for having read his private communications or at the indelicacy of those texts
“I didn’t mean to.” My voice cracked with emotion and more words tumbled from my lips in a jumble. “I grabbed your and I noticed it hadn’t gone into locked screen mode, and that’s when I saw Jake’s response. And then I couldn’t seem to help myself. I read the others. I shouldn’t have. I know that. They were private, meant for your eyes only. Not mine.” I was babbling, trying to explain away my behavior in the face of the massive insult I had been dealt at the hand of people I had considered my friends.
“Jake’s an asshole,” Cameron responded dismissively, not addressing the rest of them.
“It’s not just him, Cameron.” It probably wasn’t fair of me, but I wished desperately that instead of acting like it was almost expected of Jake, he’d condemn the rest of his friends’ (and brother’s) unguarded thoughts about me.
He clasped my hand and squeezed reassuringly. “I wish you wouldn’t have looked at my phone,” his words held a gentle reproach, “but you shouldn’t have had to see that. I wish you hadn’t seen it.”
I laughed bitterly. “Yeah, me neither.” And then, “How am I ever going to look those guys in the face again?”
“You’re going to pretend you never saw this,” he said, holding up the cracked phone. Then he looked away, his mouth set in a grim line. “I’ll talk with them about it later today.”
“What can you say? It’s not like you can change their minds. They already think we’re a bad idea. That I’m a bad idea.” I tried to ward off tears that threatened to tumble down my cheeks. “I was worried about this, you know? We haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet”— I laughed, spiritlessly, because that was on him, not me— “but your life has changed in a massive way. You’re not just some actor anymore. You’re Cameron Scott, Movie Star, and whether you like it or not I’m not good for that image.”
He twisted away from me but before he could mask it,
I saw the pain of my words reflected in his eyes. “Don’t say that.”
“You know it’s true. I love you so, so much and I know that you love me … but what’s the world going to say when they find out about us? It’s not going to be kind.”
He stepped to me and pulled me into his chest. I breathed in the natural, woodsy scent of his cologne deep into my lungs, the comforting, intoxicating mixture of amber and something else.
“I don’t care what the world is going to say. I choose you.”
Cameron’s simple declaration should have loosened the pain constricting my heart, but despite those words of assurance, I knew those texts were just the tip of the iceberg. If people I considered my friends – people Cameron considered his closest friends – could be that harsh about me, what would complete strangers say when hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet?
“You know it’s not going to be easy, right?”
I hated what I’d seen, but I hoped something good could come of it, that maybe this could be the catalyst the conversation that had weighed heavy on my mind. That we could finally discuss the difficult path ahead, where our love for one another would be only a fraction of what defined our life together. The moment Cameron Scott became Xander St. John everything had changed; his life was not his own anymore and that meant our lives, our future together, would be dictated by forces beyond either of our control.
“What’s the saying … nothing worth anything in life ever came easy?” he asked, making light of the difficulty we faced.
“Please be serious for a second, please. We need to talk about this. All of it.”
“I know,” he sighed, weariness visible in every line of his body. “Obviously I’ve been avoiding it.” He stepped away from our embrace and shoved his hands back through his hair before linking his fingers behind his head and pacing the room. With his long open stride, he crossed the room in four steps, and then turned back and repeated the loop.
“How come every time I bring it up you change the subject.”
“I talked to …” He stopped – both speaking and walking – and instinctually I knew what he said next was going to hurt. A lot. That it would be way worse than anything I’d seen on his phone. Those comments had come from people I could pretend were idiots who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. But he’d spent all day Friday before he came to see me with his agent and lawyers signing paperwork and discussing his career. Now that he was on the brink of becoming one of the world’s hottest stars they would weigh in on how his private life impacted his public persona.
“There’s no easy way to say it, so I’m just going to come right out with it.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I’d been wrong. This wasn’t just going to hurt. Whatever he said next was going to obliterate me.
“In no uncertain terms, I’ve been told it’s a very bad idea for me to have a girlfriend right now. That if I was seeing anyone, I needed to break it off.”
I knew too much about the industry to argue that he’d been given bad advice. The studio wanted a heartthrob, a man who women would wantonly throw themselves at. They needed those women to see the movie three, four, or even five times during its opening weekend. They needed fans to buy all of the associated merchandise, including the books that would be re-released with stills from the movie as the new cover. They needed fans and gossipmongers to blog about him, tweet about the cast, and basically go overboard in their love for the character and the actor who played him. Someone without an established fan base – an actor like Cameron – needed to be able to play to the desires of the fandom and if he had a girlfriend marring their ability to picture themselves as the object of his desire, that could be problematic. A wife was an even bigger obstacle.
“Cameron…,” I breathed out, realization dawning. “You asked me to marry you after that meeting. You proposed to me knowing full well what people will say?”
Guiltily, his eyes held mine and his shoulders slumped.
“Well, I hate to break it to you,” I spat, “or your agent and lawyers or anyone else who tries to pull that shit, but we’re way past the point of glibly breaking it off.” My breath hitched. “I’m your fucking fiancé and they’ll just have to deal with it.”
“I told Julie my love life was complicated at the moment” — I gasped. Complicated, is that how he described what we had? — “and she told me I needed to un-complicate it. Julie sees things in black and white so I didn’t bother trying to explain us to her. Besides, on Friday I didn’t know whether or not you’d take me back.”
“Take you back? At that point I’d never had you in the first place.”
“You know what I mean Sarah.”
He was right, I did. Still, when my back was up against the wall I often became irascible and prone to fits of irrationality. And right now my back was pressed so far into the wall I thought I’d crash through it.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” I huffed out as I shot him daggers.
“What does that mean?” he asked, his voice cold as ice.
Now my shoulders slumped. “It’s not too late to back out,” I croaked, dropping my eyes. “We can pretend this never happened.”
“That’s not going to happen Sarah.” His tone was unflinching. “I asked you to marry me and you said yes. The time to change your mind was in those minutes before you answered. You said yes; you made a promise to me and I intend to make you keep it.” In two long strides he stood in front of me. “You can’t change your mind,” he whispered, the words laced with fear and desperation. “I need you. I need us.” He pulled me roughly against his chest and wrapped his arms around me in a vice-like grip.
I needed him too but I was worried – so, so worried – about what the coming months would bring, how I would manage to weather the media storm that lurked just over the horizon. Cameron would shine under the spotlight – he was made for this – but I didn’t know how I’d fare up under the scrutiny. I’d never wanted to be a celebrity, never for one minute considered what fame would do to my life. Up until now there was no reason to have done.
“You told me you loved me. Please don’t take it back.” He stepped back an arm’s length and I felt bereft at the lack of his warmth against my body. Sliding his large, hot hands up my arms, he rested them on my shoulders as he scanned my face. “Please say you still want to marry me.”
Reaching up, I covered his hands with my own. “You know I love you. It seems like there’s never been a time when I didn’t love you. Of course I won’t take it back. I’m with you Cameron, through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, to death do us part. I’m not going anywhere. But this is going to be hard. I don’t think you understand that yet.”
He slid his hands out from under mine and framed my face with his palms before capturing my mouth in a hungry kiss. Angling my head, he took the kiss deeper. His lips enveloped me, his soul encased me, and as our tongues danced I knew no matter what transpired, no matter what unpleasantness I would be forced to endure, I would do it a thousand times over because Cameron was my heart’s other half. I would weather anything Hollywood could throw my way simply for the chance to spend my life loving him.
Cameron had already left the bed. The sheets on his side having long gone cold, I padded out of the room, expecting to find him in the kitchen doing final prep work for the party but the house was silent and still. At first my mind fought against that emptiness, anxious that after the revelations of this morning he’d fled but I pushed that worry aside. I couldn’t go on like that, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He’d had his chance to undo us, but instead he’d begged me to stay by his side, to never leave him. I combed through my sleepy memories and recalled seeing him sniff the armpit of his shirt in distaste and then kiss me goodbye. Ah, that was it. He’d run back to his place to grab clean clothes for the rest of the week because there was no way we were camping out at his place.
Cameron lived in a tiny bachelor pad across town while I owned my house,
which was fine for us for now, but at some point we’d have to re-evaluate our living arrangements. A two bedroom, one-and-a-half bath cottage built in the 1920s, it was the perfect home for a single woman but at only 1000 square feet it was undeniably small for a couple and a dog to share with any level of comfort. Especially if one half of said couple was six foot, five inches tall with the wingspan of a California condor. The only reason I was able to entertain as often as I did was because my backyard was large for the neighborhood and its landscaping – a major investment by the previous owner – provided a lush and private space that extended the square footage, operating as an outdoor dining room several months of the year.
When my parents and I went halfsies on it five years ago I hadn’t considered whether the house could accommodate anyone else, let alone a future husband or his possessions. Low on closet space to begin with, during the past three years I’d added four vintage bureaus, two wardrobes from Ikea that took up an entire wall in the second bedroom, and as much other storage as I could creatively maneuver.
It wasn’t that I was a pack rat or anything, but being an artist I had a lot of supplies: paint, canvases, and other tools that required proper storage. When you added in the beat down but well loved mid-century modern desk that took up the middle of the second bedroom room, there was simply no space leftover to hold much else. Obviously, I’d need to find space for Cameron’s belongings, but as I ventured from room to room, evaluating the floor plan and which possessions I could live without, I had trouble figuring out where it would come from. In my small bedroom (which, at just 10x10 was the larger of the two) I already had an over-stuffed armoire that was packed-to-bursting and my tall, highboy dresser barely closed as it was. There just wasn’t any more room for additional storage. I’d definitely have to purge.
With the knowledge that I’d have to donate more than I kept, I added our living arrangements to the expanding list of things I’d have to address later, including what to do about his asshole friends. My body tensed just thinking about them. I couldn’t imagine coming face-to-face with any of them later this afternoon, assuming they had the audacity to show up. Following my nap, I’d felt better about the whole fiasco, but that didn’t mean I’d welcome them with open arms if they landed on my doorstep.
Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story Page 12