Starstruck

by Anne McAllister

  “I’m not much of a writer, I’m afraid,” he said apologetically before she could speak. “I’m just beginning to find that out.”

  Liv shook her head emphatically. “On the contrary, I think you have the core of a really intriguing story here. A love story set against a revolution like the Spanish Civil War has a lot of potential.”

  “More than I have,” Joe said with a humility that she found strangely touching. “But the period has always interested me and, well—” He shrugged, embarrassed.

  “I think you have a really good start,” Liv said, tucking her knees under her and snuggling more comfortably into the comer of the couch. “But I think you have to give Elena more of a chance to prove herself. She’s flatter than Pio as a character, less of a mover, more of a pawn. But every now and then she shows flashes of spirit that make me like her a lot.” She tapped the manuscript with her fingernail. “You’ve got to let her go.”

  Joe frowned, but not angrily, merely as if she weren’t making herself completely clear. “What do you mean?” he asked, coming across the room and sitting down beside her.

  “Here.” Liv pointed to the scene she had just finished reading. “She is furious with Pio, and rightly so, I would think. But just when she’s ready to tell him off, she inexplicably calms down. Why?”

  Joe grinned. “I guess I was empathizing with Pio.”

  “Well, I empathize with Elena,” Liv retorted, then grinned self-consciously because she had, in fact, felt a real rapport with Joe’s fledgling character. “How about just letting her follow through with her anger? What would happen?”

  Joe rested his elbows on his knees, closing his eyes, considering her question. Then he nodded slowly. “Yeah. I see what you’re saying. If she really spoke up, then…” He opened his eyes, a glimmer of excitement shining in them. “You’re right, I think. Let me try it.” He bounded off the couch and sat down at the typewriter and began banging away. “Will you read it again when I’ve got this?”

  “Of course.” Meanwhile she simply relaxed, enjoying the luxury of just studying him. He typed for almost an hour, and she was nearly dozing when he handed her several pages. She read them, immediately caught up again in the lives of his two protagonists.

  “Well?” Joe demanded, hands on his hips, regarding her almost belligerently.

  “I like it.” She smiled.

  So did he. Then reaching for the pages, he said, “Let me add some more while it’s still fresh in my mind. Okay?” He gave her a boyish grin of sheer enthusiasm and Liv grinned back.

  “Go to it.”

  He was still at it two hours later when the Seth Thomas clock on the mantelpiece chimed twelve and Liv uncurled from her catnap on the couch and stared at his fingers moving quickly over the typewriter keys. For a man who was weary hours ago, he seemed to have got a second wind. His hawklike concentration was evident in his profile; he scowled intently at the keys, pondering, then typed some more. Liv smiled and stretched. Joe typed. She yawned and got slowly to her feet, trying to loosen the crimps in her back and neck she had got by falling asleep on the couch. Her loose peasant blouse stuck to her, a remnant of the sultry summer night, and she shook it, trying to get a breath of cool air. Joe had left the screens open to the patio and she heard the buzz of cicadas over the hum of the air conditioner she had turned on in the boys’ room earlier that night. She remembered nights like this when she was married to Tom, when she had fallen asleep while he sat up watching a late film. “Just like an old married couple,” she remembered Joe saying the first night they had washed dishes together in this house. Yes, she thought, it was. She looked at his dark head bent over the typewriter and longed to go over and tousle his hair, to give him a kiss and promise to meet him upstairs. If they were married, she would.

  If they were married! How many times had she thought that lately? It was a hazard of agreeing to share his house. But at times it seemed as if they were married— they were sharing a closeness, a partnership. And tonight they had even shared his work. For a change she had given something, even though it was only some simple ideas, and Joe had taken them. In that, at least, they were closer than she and Tom had ever been. What would Joe do, she wondered, if she did bend over and kiss his cheek before going up the stairs? She hovered, considering. But she didn’t consider long. The evening had been beautiful. They had relaxed together, shared something together, something important. She didn’t dare spoil it even if, deep inside, she knew she was tempted to ask for more. For years to come all she would have of Joe Harrington would be her memories and she wanted them to be good ones—ones she would look back on with joy and fondness, not ones that would cause her heartache and tears.

  “Good night,” she whispered beneath the clatter of the typewriter, and she blew him a kiss. Then she went upstairs to dream.

  It was almost two in the morning when Joe ripped the sheet of paper that ended the scene out of the typewriter and sagged across the keys. What would happen if he let Elena have her say? Wow! Fireworks, that was what! People talked about characters coming alive. Well, Elena had tonight. And so had Pio. Only, as he wrote, Joe had trouble keeping them black-haired and brown-eyed Spaniards. Elena kept turning into a blonde, slender and dynamic, with fiery depths to her cool gray eyes. And Pio? Ah, yes, Pio. Pio wasn’t sure what he wanted. Was it the revolution? Was it Elena? Could he make up his mind? Joe snorted. It hadn’t been hard to identify with Pio at all. He was a man in turmoil. A man who longed to get close to a woman for the first time in his life and who hadn’t the faintest idea how to do it. Everything he did worried him. Should he marry her? Shouldn’t he? Should he go away and fight or not? Did she care or didn’t she? Joe stood up wearily and flexed his shoulders, trying to shift the weight of his newly created world off his back. He had certainly written himself a pile of questions tonight. He wondered what Liv would think when she read it. He turned back to the couch, expecting to see her still sitting there, scowling when she was not.

  “Liv?” He frowned and rubbed his eyes, knocking off his glasses. When he retrieved them he saw the clock. No wonder she had gone to bed! Inside him there was an urge to go and wake her, to share with her what he had written. It wasn’t great, but it was better than anything else he had done so far. He was sure of that. Shutting out the lights and locking up, he weighed the manuscript in his hand. Then, on impulse, he carried it up with him. Maybe, just maybe, she was still awake.

  There was no sound from her room, though, as he walked past it down the hall. He stopped and went back. The door was slightly ajar and he peeked in. He smiled. She was curled up, facing away from him, her slim body lightly covered with a sheet. Next to her he saw Jennifer in a relaxed sprawl. For a moment he closed his eyes and ached. Not, he was surprised to discover, the purely physical ache of desire unfulfilled, though there was of course that. Rather, he felt a yearning to share with her on all levels, mental and emotional as well as physical—a yearning to crawl into bed beside her and hold her, to wake her and share with her this marvelous thing he had just written, to share with her the only way he knew how, what she was coming to mean in his life.

  Ah, Jennifer, you lucky kid, he thought and smiled wryly. How far he had fallen if he was in a position to envy a five-year-old girl with chicken pox!

  Chapter Eight

  The sound of cupboards banging woke him. Joe was amazed that he had been asleep at all. Visions of Liv and his yearning to be with her had kept him awake until he heard the first birds of morning begin their song. To have finally fallen asleep to dream of her, only to be jerked awake again seemed cruel until he realized that the banging was very likely being done by Liv herself. What on earth was she up to? He scrambled out of bed and stumbled out into the hallway. The light in the kitchen was on, so he made his way cautiously downstairs.

  Liv was hunting through the cabinets, and he paused in the doorway, croaking, “What’s up?” his voice breaking as she turned to face him and he saw the outline of her lissome figure through the
sheer pale-blue gown she wore. Just what he didn’t need on top of his dreams!

  “Sorry,” she apologized, her eyes raking him with the same intensity with which he looked at her. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was, if you can believe it—” she gave a small laugh “—looking for a packet of Kool-Aid. It seems to be the one thing that would make Stephen happy.” Her eyes were wandering away from Joe’s face to his chest to his navel and below. Damn it, why hadn’t he thought to grab his jeans? All she had to do was look at him and all his dreams promised to come true. He raked a hand through his hair, trying to control feelings that threatened to overcome him. Remember the treaty, he told himself.

  “I know where some is,” he managed, his voice jerky. “Hang on a sec.” He bolted out of the room and back upstairs, pulling on his jeans as quickly as he could. Stop it, he told himself firmly. You might want it, but she doesn’t. He took deep, cleansing breaths trying to convince himself that it was true. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t.

  She did want him—probably on all the levels that he wanted her—that was the whole trouble. Liv was no more indifferent to him than he was to her. He had thought so even before this week, but since she had come to stay, he felt more certain every day. The way she looked at him, the way she knew what he was thinking almost before he’d even thought it, all pointed to a sense of sharing, of oneness. It pointed, he thought grimly, to making love, didn’t it? Then why were they fighting it? He snapped his jeans, and his hands stilled at his waistband as he considered the question.

  “Because she isn’t ready,” he said softly, the words echoing in the quiet of his room. And are you, he asked himself. “Of course I am,” he said into the stillness. But as he went back downstairs he wasn’t sure.

  He met Liv again in the kitchen where she was now dressed in a robe that looked respectable enough for his own mother. She gave him a shy grin, sheepish almost, that made his heart pound like an awkward teenager’s. He shook his head wryly, wondering at the feelings this woman evoked in him, and bent to fish through the cupboard for Kool-Aid. “And the treaty lives another hour,” he muttered, shoved his hand behind the soup cans and came up with the requisite packet.

  “Thank you,” Liv said primly. “You can go back to bed now. I’ll make it.”

  “No. I can. You have to go to work in the morning.”

  “He’s my son,” she argued, tilting her chin and facing him. She looked weary and rumpled, even though he could see she had tried to comb her hair, and he wanted nothing more than to fold her into his arms and soothe away all her cares. He felt a warm protectiveness that caused him to reach out a hand and brush a stray tendril of hair back from her cheek, his fingers stroking the softness of her skin. For once she didn’t jerk away. He closed his eyes against the temptation, his teeth clenching so that he felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. Liv didn’t move; she stood rooted, her eyes dark and luminous, drinking him in, so that when he opened his eyes he was stunned by the look he saw on her face. Then, abruptly, she seemed to recollect where she was, like a sleepwalker come awake, and turned to pour a glass of grape Kool-Aid with only slightly trembling hands. Nothing like his own, which were shaking violently.

  “I can manage now,” she told him, speaking to the window over the sink, where the darkness reflected their closeness. She sipped the Kool-Aid in her hand.

  Joe’s hands went to her shoulders, and he stood directly behind her, his breath caressing the nape of her neck. His lips ached to touch it. “Liv, I, we…”

  “Stephen’s waiting,” she mumbled, stiffening under his touch.

  Joe sighed. “All right, we’ll take it up together.”

  He put the pitcher in the refrigerator and turned off the light, following her up the stairs, not wanting to let her go, though he knew that if he had any sense he ought to. She was getting skittish again, ready to bolt, their closeness of the evening before evaporating, replaced by a tension as taut as an electric wire. Let her be, he told himself. But he couldn’t. Following her around in the dark of night, seeing her with sleepy eyes and tousled silvery hair was such a refined, exquisite form of torture that he was insane to do it, and helpless not to.

  “Thanks for coming, too,” she said when they came out of Stephen’s room. “I know he was glad you came.” She looked as though the idea worried her, as though Stephen’s pleasure were not her own, but she was too polite to say so.

  “You’re welcome,” he muttered, wishing for a little pleasure from her, too. The silence lengthened between them, neither of them moving in the dimly lit hallway. Then Liv began to turn away and his control broke. His arms went around her like a drowning man reaching for a life belt, and his mouth came down on hers hungrily, seeking, tasting. She was so warm, so sweet, and he needed her so badly. In their mingling he tasted the grape Kool-Aid and felt his rough cheek move against the petal softness of her own.

  “God, Liv, you don’t know what you do to me!” he rasped, willing her to respond, to yield, to hold him as he held her. Finally, with aching slowness, her arms did creep upwards, did encircle him, did press him more closely into the softness of her worn chenille robe.

  “I do know, Joe,” she whispered, her hands stroking his back, sending shivers through him as they moved up and down his spine. Her voice trembled with an aching he didn’t understand. “I do. But it won’t work.”

  “Why?”

  Liv’s hands stopped and she stepped back to put a tiny distance between them. Joe inched forward to close it again, wanting—no, needing—her softness against him. But she put her arms between them, pressing them against his chest, holding him off.

  “Look at me, Joe,” she commanded. “I mean it. Really look at me.” She stepped back even farther so that he could not help but stare down at her whole body, taking in the slender figure barely camouflaged in the nubby robe, the pale face with its generous mouth, regal nose, and wide, sad eyes, the shoulder-length hair almost silver in the moonlight.

  “I’m looking,” he said hoarsely.

  “Then ask yourself if this is the woman you want to follow in the footsteps of Linda Lucas, Shallie Holmes, Trisha Kingdom and whoever else.” She named several actresses with whom he had been linked in the news as she stared into his eyes, daring him to answer.

  He felt as though she had hit him. Even to think of her in the same terms as those women appalled him. But when he shook his head mutely, unable even to articulate how ghastly the comparison was, she nodded slowly and said, “See?” and turned to walk away.

  “Liv! No, you don’t understand,” he gasped. “You’re not like them at all. But that’s good, don’t you see? That’s good!” He grabbed her arm and turned her back to face him, but the look on her face was not encouraging.

  A small, almost wistful smile touched her mouth. “Good?” Her words echoed his with a hint of mournfulness he didn’t quite comprehend. “Yes, I guess it is,” she said with something like regret in her voice. “But just where does that leave us, Joe? What about you and me?”

  The very question he had left hanging between Pio and Elena just hours before. Joe swallowed. The question had ceased to be an academic one. And just as Pio was left dangling, so was he. Olivia James was nothing like Linda Lucas or any of the other lovelies he had hustled and seduced for so long. So what did he want of her? And what would he do if he ever got her? Love her and leave her? Have a fling and forget her? Marry her?

  Marry her? He broke out in a cold sweat that owed nothing to the hot August night. “I don’t know, Liv,” he said softly, his voice low and confused. He ducked his head, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see the censure he expected to find in her eyes. And after a moment he heard her footsteps receding down the hall. There was a faint click as she shut the door to her room behind her.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered to the silent hallway. “God in heaven, I really don’t know.”

  He did know that he couldn’t get a damn thing written on the screenplay the next day because whe
never he tried to write dialogue for Elena, he saw the moonlit blond Liv in his mind and heard her voice asking, “What about us?” He began to wonder if he would even be able to finish the play until he had answered the same questions it asked in his own life. He hoped so, or he was likely to be in for a very long haul.

  Shaking his head wearily he crumpled up another paper and tossed it at the wastebasket. He missed. Ben and Theo booed from where they sat on the floor playing Chinese checkers.

  “Stuff it,” Joe growled, but couldn’t help grinning when Stephen picked up the paper and faked a dribble around the den before hooking it over his head into the metal wastebasket. “Show-off,” Joe grumbled. “Go lie down. You’re supposed to be sick.”

  “Naw, all I’ve got are scabs now,” Stephen contradicted. “I just itch.” He made apelike scratching motions and beamed at Joe out of his scabby face. “Hey, there’s the doorbell. Shall I answer it?”

  “No. You’d probably scare whoever it is to death,” Joe said, getting up to answer it himself. A moment later he wished he had let Stephen do the honors.

  “What in heaven’s name are you doing here?” he demanded as Ellie swept past him into the living room and dropped her suitcase in the middle of the carpet.

  “And I’m delighted to see you, too,” Ellie replied with her hands on her hips, grinning like a fool as she surveyed her surroundings.

  “Do come in,” he said belatedly, knowing his sarcasm wouldn’t touch her. He shut the door and glared at her, part of him annoyed, but part of him enjoying the expressions that flitted across her face as she surveyed his kingdom—the boys sprawled on the floor of the den, the towheaded girl with the remains of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on her face, playing with some blocks in the corner, his typewriter and the scattered sheets of paper on the desk and floor.