IMAGINES: Celebrity Encounters Starring You

by Anna Todd

  With his head down, he keeps his eyes on the screen of his smartphone and scrolls lazily.

  Is he googling his own name? You wonder how often celebrities actually do that—the vanity search. It must be beyond tempting. You hope he isn’t, though—for his own sake. You’ve searched his name a thousand times before (more than he’s ever done himself, no doubt), and often the things that popped up made you feel physically ill. Lies, most of it, anyway—most tabloids were just reams of paper consisting of undistilled bullshit—but still. He can’t be doing the vanity search, anyway, because there’s no reception down here in the bowels of the London underground. Whenever your husband caught you doing it, he’d roll his eyes but hover slightly over your shoulder, morbidly curious and making noises of barely disguised exasperation: That’s complete rubbish for a start. And that. Seriously? Where the hell do they get this stuff? Why do you read this crap?

  You twist the silver band on your ring finger and think about him—your husband—the man you love, the man who you sometimes daydream is the man sitting across from you now. The man who every woman seemed to be daydreaming about these days: Jamie Dornan. Or as the papers referred to him: Married Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan, 33 . . .

  As if he knows you’re thinking about him, Jamie’s mouth, partially hidden by a slowly returning beard, tilts up into a small half smile before it settles again, his whole body returning to its natural state of relaxed nonchalance.

  When did he get on? Before you? After you? At the same stop? Your body thrums with something hot and needy as you let your eyes linger on him.

  The carriage smells like it always does, a familiar thick marinade of engineering, earth, and people that settles over your clothes and permeates your skin. You gaze around to check if anyone else has noticed him yet, imagining the inevitable flood of requests for selfies and autographs that will follow if they have. Your body tightens in dread. You can’t be a part of that if it happens; the very idea of it makes you coil and tense with nerves. You don’t blame them for their fascination with him. You understand it because you have a similar fascination yourself, but the idea of Jamie being harassed and surrounded by strangers who all want a piece of him makes your gut feel like it’s filled with living eels and like your skin is crawling with a thousand tiny burrowing creatures. Thankfully though, he has his jacket buttoned to his throat and his collar up, managing to stay well below the surface of recognition. It’s possible they’re all far too distracted with virtual farm games on their phones to notice him anyway.

  The Central line isn’t packed, but the carriage is still fairly crowded with shoppers and the few commuters who’ve decided to stay late to avoid the rush-hour squeeze. As the train begins to slow, you stand up from the orange seat, hook your oversize tote bag over your shoulder, and steal a final glance in his direction. You’re farther away now, but somehow you know he can sense you looking at him, and to prove you right he slowly lifts his head and looks at you over the top of his clear-rimmed Wayfarer glasses. The depth of his eyes has always stunned you; they seem to have the ability to catch you in a snare and keep you there. So much seems to be in the look he’s giving you now—cold and indifferent, with the smallest hint of malignancy—it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck and goose bumps prickle down the bare skin of your arms and legs. You wonder momentarily if you’ve done something to upset him. Maybe staring at him this hard is what’s making him angry. God, he must be tired of being stared at by now.

  Outside, the evening air of Holland Park is warmer and more enveloping than the drafty platform. You’ve gotten out one stop before your normal one. Your “me free day”—as your husband had taken to calling it—had started with a meander down Portobello Road to your favorite vintage bookshop. You’d spent almost two hours running your fingers across the spines of well-worn, well-loved books; reading your favorite sections of Gone with the Wind and Wuthering Heights while speculating about the people who owned them before and what their favorite parts were. After buying a battered second edition of the latter, you’d taken the tube to Covent Garden for the facial and massage your husband had booked for you. Emerging relaxed and rejuvenated, you’d soon berated yourself for not arranging to have lunch with your old friend before the relaxation and rejuvenation—mainly as it had ended up being a terse affair in which you’d dodged questions about your husband’s new job. You hadn’t seen her for ages, but she’d spent the entirety of two courses and a cocktail questioning you about the job, which she seemed abnormally concerned with. In the back of your mind you wondered if this was the real reason she had been desperate to arrange something. You tried to change the subject, but she kept steering you back to it, wanting to know how you both were going to cope with the move and the life-altering effect of it all.

  Why on earth was she so interested, anyway? Her prodding and prying had felt particularly unseemly. It wasn’t out of genuine concern, of that much you were certain. You’d known her a long time, and whenever she’d talked about any of her other friends’ predicaments, she hadn’t shown much empathy. Sarah was unmarried and continuously lamenting how alone she was now that all of “the old crowd” had settled down and married, and yet at the same time asserting how perfectly content she was in her singledom; she seemed oblivious to the irony.

  Finally, you had relented and given her the briefest overview and the vaguest details possible. You loved your husband and supported him in all of his career decisions, but when you broke it down and analyzed what this particular job might come to mean for your lives together, it wasn’t something you enjoyed thinking about—in fact you’d become a master at avoidance thinking. She had merely pursed her lips and nodded gravely in a way that confirmed all of your worst fears about everything. As you’d said good-bye to her outside the vegan restaurant she’d chosen, you’d decided that your next “me free day” would be “Sarah-free” too.

  You take a turn you haven’t taken before, but you know the area and you know that if you walk the length of the road to the very end, it leads to the large Whole Foods three streets from home. The noises of people enjoying the last of the sun drift up and over the rich, dark brown fences that encase their expensive homes from the prying eyes of outsiders; the whole area was designed around that goal. The smell of barbecuing meat rouses your stomach from its postvegan slumber and floods your taste buds with want.

  A noise of shoes shuffling lazily along behind you startles you, and you turn your head.

  Jamie.

  Your heart freezes and everything in your body screams for you to stop walking, but you don’t. You can’t. He’s a little way behind you—not close enough to seem to be walking with you, which is maybe why you didn’t notice him before, but close enough to feel like a presence. He walks more slowly than you, and the sound of his feet landing on the concrete echoes after yours, creating a rhythmic tenor between his sneakers and your sandals. As a test, you speed up the pace of your steps, and after a short lag he does too. He’s going to call out in a minute, surely?

  You wonder what he might say—you’ve fantasized about what he might say if this ever happened. Ask for directions perhaps? Say he’s lost? You’d pretend you didn’t know who he was. Then maybe he’d say that he saw you looking at him on the train, and that something propelled him off after you, and then this thing would develop from there. Maybe he’d say he felt drawn to you in some way. . . .

  Okay, this is ridiculous. You should stop and turn around. This is crazy—exciting and new—but crazy. He has followed you from the train and along a street you almost never walk down. He’s stalking you. You. Jamie Dornan didn’t follow random women he saw on the train. The headlines if something like this ever got out—you almost laugh as you imagine telling the story to your friends. To the friend you had lunch with, perhaps—of course she’d love to hear something like that.

  You’d hate her to hear something like that.

  You can feel Jamie’s eyes on you as you walk, maybe even tracing ove
r the same parts of you that your husband does . . . the back of your neck, the crook of your shoulder, the length of your spine, the bare skin of your legs.

  You need to keep walking. You can’t stop. You can’t turn around.

  You enter the Whole Foods, which is busy with sunburned Londoners, and head straight to the back of the store to grab your husband’s favorite beer. You don’t see Jamie anywhere around, and it occurs to you that maybe you’ve imagined the entire thing. Putting three hazel-colored bottles in your basket, you move along the aisle to pick up some red wine for yourself—wine that your husband will help you drink when he’s finished his beer. Then you’ll lie together drinking on the couch and laugh about how Jamie Dornan stalked a woman he saw on the train all the way to Whole Foods.

  From the corner of your eye you spot something, a movement so fleeting that you almost miss it. Yet the colors are the same as those he was wearing, the light blue jacket and the darker hue of the baseball cap, which you remember has an orange badge logo on the front that reads ELECTRIC. The heat starts to creep and tingle over your body, and you swallow slowly, crossing hastily to the girl at the counter.

  As you give her your basket, she recognizes you and asks how you are, but you’re too distracted to respond right away, busy scanning the heads of the taller men to see if any fit his silhouette. You take the beer bottles from her one by one and pack them into your bag, folding them inside the vintage argyle sweater you’ve bought your husband. As she hands you the wine, you apologize and smile back politely before furtively casting your eyes around the shop again.

  You’re far more excited than you ever thought you’d be at the idea of Jamie doing this: following you, wanting you. You’d fantasized about it too many times to count. You stifle a laugh then because that surely makes you just like every other woman who’d fantasized about him, and you didn’t want to be that to him: you always wanted to be more. You didn’t care to think too much about the other women who wanted him. Your avoidance thinking extended to them too.

  You thank the polite girl behind the counter again, shove your purse back into your bag, and head out into the slightly darker evening. As you glance around the quiet street, you see no sign of your stalker hovering nearby, and you sense no eyes on you beyond the nondescript glances of strangers. Perhaps you only imagined him in the store. Your body deflates slightly as you brush a hand through your hair and let your thoughts drift purposefully to your husband. So different from him—from Jamie—the man idolized and swooned over by millions.

  Swooned. What a ridiculous word. An image forms in your mind of teenage girls fainting at Beatles concerts, and you concede it’s not that ridiculous. They couldn’t be more different, your husband and him. Your husband liked sports more than you thought anyone ever could, sang loudly in the shower, cried at books and those TV animal-abuse charity advertisements, made love to you like he couldn’t quite believe that you were real, often held your face in his hands and told you how you were the best thing that ever happened to him. That man was your strength and who your heart and body belonged to. The man whose heart and body belonged to you. That is the man you are in love with. Married Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan is just a fantasy.

  Home isn’t far now. Two streets and then a left turn onto your own, a pretty tree-lined stretch of Georgian houses that all look alike. You like this street. You’ve always felt at home here, and you’ll be sad to say good-bye to it, to move to a country you have visited a few times and liked but aren’t overly fond of. The only alternative is to stay here without him, and that isn’t an option at all. Plus, he wanted you with him, he’d said. He needed you with him, he’d said. He couldn’t do it without you, he’d said.

  The street is quiet and the sinking sun casts an eerie witching-hour light over the tops of the expensive parked cars that squeeze together along the edges of the pavement. A noise behind you startles you, making you realize that you’re still tense and on edge. You suck in a deep breath before turning round slowly, and then exhaling. It’s just Doodles, the Smarts’ cat, fighting with a plastic bag full of leaves.

  There’s no sign of him, your stalker, and the quick beat of your heart slows down just a little.

  You wonder where he went.

  Dinner?

  A pint of Guinness at the Iron Dog? It was only over on the next street after all. . . .

  In any case, your little frisson with Jamie Dornan, Celebrity Train Stalker, is finished. It was fun while it lasted. Though your body has relaxed a little, the little forbidden ball of sexual tension that builds up whenever you think about him doesn’t dispel—it continues to send pulses out into your blood and to your nerve endings.

  The house is in complete darkness as you approach. Climbing the steps up to the front door, you see immediately that they’ve been cleared of the leaves from the overgrown oak tree that curtains the garden. So he did exactly what he promised. It makes you smile.

  “Just enjoy your me-free day. I’ll entertain myself,” he’d told you this morning. “Then I’ll do all the things I promised you I’d do,” he’d said with a small tilt of his mouth. You’d raised your eyebrow questioningly, and he had pretended to look offended. “Baby, you’d be so bloody impressed by how much I get done when you’re not here distracting me.” By that you were sure he meant as soon as you’d left, he’d reach for the remote and turn on the football match he’d recorded.

  That morning he’d stretched out toward you and given you one of his distractingly perfect smiles and a glimpse of his distractingly perfect—naked—body under the brilliant white sheets of the bed.

  “I love that dress on you,” he’d whispered as he kissed his way up your arm.

  You’d smiled. “I know. That’s why I’m wearing it today. So you’ll think about me in it and miss me more.”

  He’d narrowed his eyes and pulled you down to meet his mouth, sliding his tongue against your own, a deep kindling kiss that always left you aching for more. “I always think about you and I always miss you when you’re not with me. Now go before I peel you out of this and make your me-free day something else altogether.”

  Right now the house is quiet, but feels filled with the sensation of something tense and electric as you close the door and lock the night air behind you. As you move through the space, you think you feel his eyes on you again, but it’s just your husband’s scent filling the air. His personality and style is stamped on every inch of the home the two of you have made together. Touches of him are in the colors you’ve chosen, and touches of you are in the furnishings you bought together. You place his beer in the fridge, pour yourself a large glass of the rich dark wine, and drape the sweater over the dining chair so he’ll see it when he gets home. You check your phone to see if there’s any message from him, either apologizing or saying where he’d gone and whether you should eat without him, but it’s not like you’re hungry, anyway. Wine and a bath is what you need to ease away some of the tension until he gets home. You leave your phone downstairs because you don’t want to be disturbed, but also in case you find yourself tempted to google Jamie Dornan again, specifically to see if anyone spotted him on the Central line or following some woman around Holland Park.

  As the lavender scent rises from the steam, you sip on the wine and rest the glass on the edge of the bath. Still, the steam does nothing to ease the heat in your body, heat that has partly to do with how today’s sun seeped into your bones, but is mainly to do with him. You wonder why he didn’t follow you after the store. Were you supposed to do something else? Act differently? Maybe you were supposed to turn around and act like you didn’t know him? Is that what he wanted you to do? You turn off the taps and leave the bath to cool slightly, walking back to the bedroom to undress.

  The movement is almost completely soundless as you sense someone behind you. You manage a small, short gasp of shock, and your body freezes instinctively as he slides a hand over your mouth and pulls you tight into his body.

  “Don’t screa
m,” he says quietly, pressing his lips to your neck. You know it’s him immediately, you’d know his voice anywhere. You can taste the salt from his fingers on your lips.

  “Breathe, just breathe. I’m not going to hurt you,” he tells you in that soft promising tone, and your eyes close in bliss.

  You let out a deep breath like he ordered you to. Maybe you should be afraid. Maybe you should fight him a little. Maybe that’s what he wants? Part of you wants to fight him and live the fantasy of him taking you like this, but the other part of you wants to give yourself over to him completely. He places another soft kiss to the column of your neck, the place where your husband liked to kiss too.

  This isn’t your husband.

  “I’m going to take my hand away. Don’t make a sound,” he commands before slowly unwrapping his fingers from your mouth. The saltiness of his skin stings your tongue and lips, and the saliva rushes to meet it.

  “How did you get in here?” you ask, panting slightly.

  He chuckles softly, grazing his mouth back and forth across the column of your throat, his thick facial hair taunting your hypersensitive skin.

  “Why aren’t you afraid?” he replies instead, that familiar Irish lilt you know so well washing over you.

  “Should I be afraid?” Of course you know you should be. And if this were anyone but him, you know you would be. Yet the only thing you feel right now is excitement—dangerous, intoxicating excitement.

  He lowers his hand to your neck and applies the tiniest fraction of pressure around your throat. A soft possessive tightening.

  “Hmmm, let’s see. . . . A man follows you home, breaks into your house through a downstairs window, and now has his hand around your throat. Why wouldn’t you be afraid?” He makes a soft moaning noise in the back of his throat, and something warm floods between your legs.

  “You don’t scare me,” you tell him defiantly.

  “So brave, baby, so bloody brave.” It’s a statement. Both awe and desire are in his tone. “How do you feel, then? Am I everything you imagined?” His soft, hot whisper clenches your insides.