by Alyse Miller
Andie didn’t take the time to gage her surroundings. Instead, she made big, oh-my-gosh eyes at Scott and waved at him to follow her around the counter and into the small office at the back of the shop. When the three of them were safely inside the room, she gave the front of the café a safety once over with her eyes, and slammed the door marked Private behind them. Scott sat in an empty club chair in the office’s corner while Andie shifted from foot to foot above him.
Where do I start? A. A. Milne said to always start at the beginning, so I’ll start there. Where’s the beginning? She seemed to have lost all sense of time. Scott waited patiently. Tim went back to suckling on his duck. Andie was suddenly grateful these two were both PTSD trained, because she kind of felt like she’d just been through something borderline catastrophic.
“I slept with Guy.” There, that seemed like a start.
“Guy Wilder?” Scott’s mouth hung open, but his eyes flickered. Scott had had a long “bro”-mance with Guy Wilder ever since his Dickey Valentine days. “You go, girl.” He held his hand up for a high five.
Andie ignored him. “No, it gets worse than that. Or better. I don’t know.”
Scott learned forward on his chair, laced one leg over the other, and prompted her to go on.
Beginning. “Okay, so we went on that date, right? That he asked me on when we were here—you remember?”
“Right. I remember. I was here, too.”
She ignored him. “And nothing happened. We stayed in and had dinner and hung out in his hotel room, but it was totally…” She searched for the word. “Except for a little kissing—a little kissing—there was absolutely nothing. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“The next day—yesterday—I went to work as normal. Everything was fine. Well, almost fine. Tandy is all up in arms about—”
“Andie, focus.”
“Right. So I must have fallen asleep in my classroom or something, because next thing I know, Guy is there with coffee—hey, he came here for coffee (Scott nodded)—and we talked for a while, then left. We bumped into a student, but then went back to my place, and—”
The student. Cody Matthews. Andie suddenly realized what must have happened. Of course, Cody would have run off and told the first person he saw that he just met Guy Wilder, who had been with one of his teachers. Great. She groaned and flumped down on the armrest of Scott’s chair. Guy had been right all along. The moment word of her relationship with him got out, they’d be on her like vultures. She was so stupid; she should have listened.
“You went to your place and groaned in despair? You lost me, Andie.”
She stared blankly back at him. She’d probably sob if she weren’t so stunned. “Noooo! We went back to my apartment and it was…it was amazing. He was amazing—is amazing. (She ignored Scott’s gasp.) We woke up this morning and he made breakfast. He just left a little while ago, and I was on my way to a gala meet up, and I opened my door, and wham! There were cameras and some woman shooting questions like lightning, and I ran.”
Scott blinked at her. Apparently, shock was contagious. “Whoa, Andie. I’m not sure where to start.”
Andie exhaled loudly. Tell me about it.
“Okay.” Scott straightened up, patting Andie’s knee. Tim dropped his duck and cocked his head as if he, too, were paying close attention to the conversation. “So, things with you and Guy are good? I mean, he made breakfast.” That was dude code for sticking around, apparently.
“They’re great,” she confirmed.
“Like, thanks for a great night great or great, let’s do it again.”
Andie felt herself blush a tiny bit. “Great, like, let’s do it again tomorrow.”
Scott sucked his chin under and gave her big, approving eyes. “Well, Missus Foxglove. Aren’t you a feisty little thing? Okay, so things are ‘great’ and then he leaves, and you go to leave later, and paparazzi are at your door. Right?”
She mentally double-checked the sequence in his sentence. “Right.”
“And I’m assuming that your earlier groan meant you solved the riddle and figured out it was the student who saw you two who managed to alert the presses?”
“Yep.”
“So have you tried to call Guy?”
Andie waved her phone in the air. “Straight to voicemail.”
“Try again.”
She did. Voicemail again.
Scott sighed and checked his watch. “Okay. So, let’s close up shop. You’ve still got a spare outfit at my place, from that time we all went skiing at Keystone and you left your bag in the car. So, you’ll stay hidden at my place tonight, and eventually you’ll get hold of Guy and figure out what to do.” He stood, pulling up Andie with him. He peered at her with dark, espresso bean eyes. “It’s a respite, Andie. You’ll talk to Guy and all this can settle down.”
She met Scott’s eyes, nodded. All she needed was somewhere to lay low until she could talk to Guy. Lay low. It was almost exactly what Guy had said to her the first day they had met. Oh, the irony. Tim brushed against her leg. “Okay. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Guy’s phone went straight to voicemail for the next several hours. Andie huddled under a blanket on Scott’s sofa. She wasn’t sure whether to be mad, upset, scared, startled, proud, worried… Honestly, it felt like she was cycling through emotions like some kind of multi-personality maniac. The fact that she’d been basically pushing Guy’s number on redial for the past four hours straight was not helping her mood. Her emotions finally landed on sick. Just sick. Like, lock herself in her room in self-induced quarantine sick. Andie pulled the blanket over her face and moaned into the fabric. Where the hell is Guy, and why isn’t he answering me?
Poor Scott had made half a dozen noble attempts at conversation since they’d arrived back at his small house, but every time she opened her mouth to respond, she had the distinct sensation of vomit rising up the back of throat. Eventually he’d given up, patted her head in a brotherly way, and retired to his well-worn desk chair to work on photo editing on his giant iMac.
“How you doing over there, champ?” Scott’s voice sounded on autopilot. Andie had been moaning a lot.
She made some disgruntled noise as a response. Her phone buzzed and she checked it, groaned again, and jabbed the red button to send the caller to voicemail. Every time she hit that button, Andie couldn't help but wonder if Guy was doing the exact same thing to her calls wherever he was hiding out. It was Tandy calling again. It had been Tandy the eleven times previous, too. Elizabeth, Melody, and Denise—the rest of the literacy troupe—had also found their way into her voicemail, along with a handful of students, and her mother. My mother! The girls were probably just calling to see why she hadn’t made their meeting. Students probably had questions on whatever their next due assignment was. And her mom…probably wanted to talk about a new rice cooker or something. Andie’s attempts to logically redirect the intent of their calls were useless. Worst case scenario, whatever Barbie was hunting for this morning by now as probably flying around the Internet—and probably with Andie’s name scrawled all over it. Oh, the glory of the Internet Age. Didn’t even have to wait for the printing presses to warm up. There was no way Andie was going anywhere near Wi-Fi.
“This is torture! I don’t know whether to stay in hiding and keep calling Guy’s voicemail like some pathetic idiot or go out and face the music. Yes, world, I slept with Guy Wilder!” She crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. It wasn’t like it was a bad thing, just humiliating—like the housekeeper rifling through your underwear drawer. “I should get an award.”
Scott laughed and swiveled in his chair, his eyebrow arched. Andie wanted to keep her sulking face on, but that eyebrow did her over and she laughed. She was genuinely glad to have Scott in her life. Why didn’t I end up with Scott, anyway? He’s nice, and handsome, and a great guy…but he’s no Guy Wilder. Groannn.
“So, what’s it going to be then?”
Andie closed her eyes and took
a deep breath, tried to center herself. Perhaps she had overreacted just a tad. It was, after all, one reporter. How much damage could one reporter do? And seriously, she wasn’t the only girl who’d ever spent the night with a famous dude. This was more about Guy than her. She was a nobody, forgettable.
“I’ll call one more time, and if he answers, fine. If no one answers, then that’s fine, too. I’ll turn my phone off, we’ll order pizza and watch a movie, and tomorrow life goes on.”
“You got yourself a deal, little lady.”
Andie pushed redial on Guy’s number, fully expecting to hear his generic voicemail (“you’ve reached the voice mail box for 555…”) again. To her surprise, someone picked up on the second ring—but it was not the someone whose voice she’d hoped to hear.
“Hello.”
It was a woman’s voice, high, brisk, and sounding vaguely irritated. Andie knew the voice but couldn’t place it. She double-checked her phone screen just to be sure she hadn’t touched the wrong number on her phone screen and called Tandy instead. Nope.
“Hello?” The irritation in the woman’s voice was less vague.
Andie’s mouth rose up the same way it did when she smelled something bad. Finally, she said, “Hello?” She hadn’t meant it to come with a question mark ending. She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry; I was trying to reach Guy.”
“This is Guy’s phone. He’s in wardrobe. I’ve watched this number ring half a dozen times, figured it might be important.”
“Oh.” Andie was suddenly on information overload. Wardrobe? Did that mean he’d left Denver? Scott swiveled in his chair, setting his face on the hook of his thumb and forefinger, eyebrow arched. “Thank you. Who is this?” Do I really want to know? What if it was that phantom girlfriend that she’d worried about before? I probably shouldn’t ask questions that I don’t want answers to.
The woman gave a short, almost derisive laugh. “I would ask you, but since I picked up someone else’s phone—this is Jennifer.”
Jennifer? Oh, Ginifer. It had to be. That was the voice. Ginifer Stamos was Guy’s costar—the altruistic, almost angelic spirit of Moira Casey, the girl he’d once loved and who had been haunting him ever since his transformation from man to immortal. For a ghost and an undead guy, the two had a weird romance—one of those will-they, won’t-they impossible couples that everyone was rooting for. Andie knew logically that it was a purely fabricated romance, but that didn’t stop it from punching her in the stomach. Great, jealousy and insecurity.
“This is Andie.”
“Andy.” Andie could hear Ginifer misspelling her name, which she supposed was fair since she’d basically just done the same thing. There was hushed mumbling for a few minutes as Ginifer put her hand over the receiver and talked with someone in the background. When she came back on the line, her voice was noticeably friendlier. “Wait, is this Alessandra? The girl from Denver?”
Cue the vomit feeling crawling up her throat. “Yeah.” Andie’s voice was a croak.
“Listen, Andie. I know you’ve got to be freaked out about what the media is saying, but it’ll pass, I promise. We all go through this at some point. It’s not personal—just business.”
Oh God, what is she talking about? “I just opened my door this morning and there was this woman standing there. She just started firing questions. I didn’t answer anything, I just ran.”
Ginifer’s voice leapt from friendly to sympathetic. At least, Andie thought she sounded sympathetic. It was suddenly hard to tell when the voice was coming from a woman who was paid for her ability to put on any emotion at will. It felt harsh, but true.
“I’m sure it was overwhelming. Just try to ignore the headlines, nobody pays attention to them, and half the time they’re all bullshit anyway. Never give the reporters a straight answer, smile for the cameras, and they’ll get bored and move on. Listen, I’ve got to go—I’ll tell Guy you called. Hang in there.”
“Okay. Thanks. Oh—and nice to meet you.” Andie meant it. Fake or not, Ginifer had given her some measure of calm.
“Look, I’ve worked with Guy on this show for over a year now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look remotely happy about it. I’m pretty sure I actually saw him smile this morning. It’ll be fine.”
***
Guy called right as Andie was stuffing her third slice of pizza into her mouth. Something about the day had made her ravenous and eager to carbo-load. She still hadn’t found the courage to Google her name or Guy’s, and if Scott had read anything, he was keeping it to himself. Actually, since she’d hung up the phone with Ginifer, there’d been a sort-of moratorium on the whole thing. Nobody had even said anything that even remotely rhymed with guy.
She had thought she would jump out of her skin when—or if—Guy’s name ever popped up on her phone again, but then it rang. Andie found it was a surprising effort to answer the phone when his name appeared on the screen. “Hi.”
“Andie.” Guy’s voice was thick, like he’d recently been emotional. The line stayed silent while Andie counted heartbeats. One, two, three, four. “I’m so sorry.”
At least seventeen questions piled up the queue of Andie’s mind. Everything from “where are you?” to “what the hell is going on” was clamoring to be the first thing out of her mouth. But none of them seemed the right one to ask.
“So, what now?” When it finally came, her voice was surprisingly flat. She wanted to scream a little, yell at him for abandoning her, or demand he tell her what unflattering smear was flying around about her on social media. But she didn’t.
“You’re mad. I don't blame you.”
Mad? She had been mad three hours ago. It was too late—literally and figuratively—for mad.
“You left. Reporters came. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Instead, I find out that you’ve taken off and left me to fend for myself while you went back to work. So, I guess you could say I’m upset.” Could he hear her being reasonable? She could feel herself being reasonable. “I can’t believe you just took off on me.”
“I didn’t take off, Andie, I promise you. I had to shoot today, but thought I’d make it back to Denver tonight. I had no idea about the reporter. I thought we were safe.”
We? It was the right thing to say—too right. Reassurance, logic, references to “we.” He was trying to smooth this over before she got upset. Too late.
“Nope.” Okay, “reasonable” was starting to slip. He doesn’t just to get off that easy. Guy seemed awfully cavalier about the situation, seeing as how he was the one initially so worried about what would happen if the cameras got a hold of them on their first “date.” Did being a couple suddenly make it better for him, even though her feelings had never been consulted on either of those accounts? Wait, were they a couple? Andie felt her temper start to rise if for nothing else than the frustration of it all. Keep your calm, girl. Don’t overreact and make either one of you feel worse than you already do.
“That student you saw must have tipped—”
“Don’t blame him.”
“I’m not blaming, Andie. This is how these things go. Someone sees something, says something to a friend, and before you know it, your face is on the front page. I checked before I left and didn’t see anything—”
“But you still left. You didn’t even warn me!”
Guy sighed heavily. “Andie, please believe me that I didn’t think this would happen. I would never intentionally put you in this position.”
“Okay. I believe you.”
“But you’re still mad.”
“I’m still mad.”
More heartbeats. Five, six seven. Whatever Guy was thinking, he wasn’t saying it. But, maybe that was for the better. She was glad they were on the phone and not face to face. It was a lot easier for Andie to keep her frustration firmly anchored without Guy’s striking blue eyes peering at hers, or peeking out from behind a curtain of fallen hair… Okay, even thinking about it made her thaw a little. Andie ate another bite of pizza
, clamped her eyes, and tried not to picture Guy’s perfectly chiseled cheekbones or the way his t-shirt clung to his washboard abs when he peeled off his soft leather jacket. It didn’t work.
When he spoke again, it was like he was sitting right next to her. He cleared his throat. She could picture him running his hands through his hair and his characteristic glower. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll fix it.”
“You’ll fix it?”
“I will fix it. I’m not going to lose you.” Guy’s words were so fierce that his words were almost a growl. The line went dead before Andie could respond.
She looked blankly from the dead phone to Scott. He looked back at her, mouth frozen in mid chew, with a face as full of questions as hers had to be. “He hung up?”
“Yeah. He said ‘I will fix it’ and hung up.”
“Well,” Scott said, looking strangely impressed as he swallowed his bite of pizza and grabbed the remote. He tossed a couple of pillows on the floor beside her and settled down onto one. “Guess that means he’ll fix it. Now, Goonies or Pretty Woman?”
“Goonies, definitely Goonies.”
***
Apparently, good news travels fast—and personal humiliation existed definitively at the intersection of freedom of the press and total privacy invasion. The tidal wave of calls, texts, emails, and social media pings had forced Andie’s phone into some sort of anaphylactic shock. It seemed to buzz endlessly without stopping. She would turn the thing off (or maybe stomp it into a million pieces) if she weren’t holding out for Guy’s call. Oh, the irony—hating the phone and not being able to escape it. Actually, that kind of felt like the theme song for her whole relationship with Guy. They always said nothing worth having came easy, but still. This was borderline ridiculous.
By the time Andie made her way to campus the next morning, she’d already seen her face plastered all over the Internet. No matter where she looked, from Buzzfeed to Facebook to Yahoo! News, she was either kissing Guy or looking shocked and tousled in her own doorway.