Three steps later I passed the kitchen, and was caught.
“You’re up!” Jamie said, and I cringed. It wasn’t that seeing him was bad, it was that seeing him reminded me of what had happened, and I was in no way ready to face that yet.
Jamie was standing over the stove, an admittedly fantastic smell coming from the pan in front of him.
“I really need to shower,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, of course—let me grab you a towel,” he said, putting down a spatula and walking in front of me down the hall. “Did you sleep okay? Wicked hangover?”
“Wicked doesn’t even begin to describe,” I said. Truthfully, the hangover was fine—I’d had worse—but the memory of my idiotic behavior was the doozy.
“Well, I’ve got sausage and bacon cooking up right now. I’ll scramble some eggs and you can have yourself one hell of a sandwich to help the hangover. Gotta get some fat into your system.”
He led me to the linen closet and grabbed a clean towel, pushing it into my hands. I nodded at him, barely able to make eye contact. It was embarrassing, actually; waking up at nearly 11 in the morning and finding that he’d clearly been waiting for me to get up.
I made it to the shower and it finally made me feel like a half-normal human again. And for that, I was proud, because the shampoo in the shower smelled like Jamie did, and the scent almost derailed everything. He’d smelled like that when I was next to him, when my lips were on his. I ran my fingertips over my mouth, remembering how he’d felt.
But my thoughts cleared as I washed myself, and I formed a sort of plan. I would go back out into the kitchen, very politely decline Jamie’s food, thank him effusively for letting me stay on the couch, and tell him last night had been a mistake.
Adult, responsible, the right thing to do.
I got dressed again and ventured back out to the kitchen, readying myself for Jamie’s imminent disappointment.
But when I saw what he’d done, my resolve began to crumble. The breakfast was laid out perfectly on the kitchen table, with an orange juice, a water, and a coffee nearby. He’d made bacon, sausage, eggs, and toast, and in a little bowl at the center of the table sat fresh strawberries and blueberries.
“Jesus, Jamie, it’s like you’re setting up breakfast for the queen or something.”
He turned to me, his face almost stern. “You’re not getting out of here without eating something. You had gummy worms for dinner last night.”
God, the gummy worms. How easy it was for him to get to me.
“Jamie, I really appreciate it, but I don’t even eat breakfast usually.”
“That’s great, cool story,” he said, pouring his own glass of water. “You’re eating it today.” He took a seat at one side of the perfect little table, stuck a fork in a strawberry, and lifted it to his mouth.
“Mmmh,” he said, giving me a supremely exaggerated “yum” face.
I sighed and sat across from him. “I am going to devour this in about five minutes, and then I really have to get going.”
“Big plans today?” he shot back.
I thought about my day. My soap opera definitely already had started, so that was a bust. I was sure Mr. Ginger Boots would get along fine with the food any of the other neighbors on the block provided for him.
“There are a couple plants in my backyard that are going to kick the bucket, like, yesterday—I really should go water them.”
Jamie stared at me for a minute, chewing, and then nodded. “Eat your breakfast,” was all he said.
His food was perfect, because what about him wasn’t, other than his random lapses into incredibly strange behavior like feeding me properly and giving me aspirin for a hangover. As I ate I felt more and more guilty for enjoying every minute of the meal. We barely even talked, and he idly browsed a magazine he had on the table next to him. But it was just what I needed at the moment.
What would it be like, to be Jamie? To be his age again, have his energy and optimism? Last night in a fit of pathetic drunkenness, I was convinced I’d wanted to fuck him—but did I actually wish I could be him? The terrifying truth was that it was probably a little from column A, and a little from column B.
I realized I knew so little about him. He closed the magazine softly and looked up at me.
“Jesus, you were reading the fucking Economist?” I blurted out, realizing how different his world must be from mine.
“Yeah, my dad got me a subscription as a housewarming gift. To be honest I still don’t understand 90 percent of it, but he said that he wants me to do better in the world than he did, and I need to have a ‘well-read perspective.’” He popped a strawberry in his mouth.
“He’s probably right,” I said. “And color me impressed, professor. You can understand 10 percent in a magazine where I’d understand zero.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Jamie said, giving me an admonishing look and shaking his head.
“Do what?”
“Act like you’re not smart, or whatever. You obviously are.”
I rolled my eyes, but smiled at him. “And how do you figure that?”
He hitched up one shoulder in a quick shrug. “’Cause you’re so cynical.”
I remembered when I used to thing cynicism was intelligence, too.
“I’m not so sure,” I said, grabbing a handful of berries. “I think optimism is smarter.”
“Why? It’s good to be critical of things.”
“I don’t know. The world is gonna suck whether or not I think it sucks. So I might as well just try to be happy. …Not that I ever think I’ll achieve happiness,” I said, “but I do know that it’s what I want.”
He looked at me, kind of reverently. “Wow. You know what you want. That’s a big deal.”
I actually laughed. “Not worth a hell of a lot if I can’t get it. And shit, what are you talking about? You know what you want. Clearly.”
He shook his head, standing up and starting to clear plates off of the table.
“Wait, wait—no fucking way I’m letting you clean up after you did all this,” I said.
He looked at me, about to protest.
“Seriously,” I said, fixing him with a glare. “Let me do something, please.”
Finally that got him to relax. He sat back down, and I cleared away all the plates, leaving only the berries and drinks. I loaded everything into the tiny dishwasher and then joined him again.
“I don’t, by the way,” Jamie said to me, his big eyes meeting mine.
Oh shit, did I fuck something up? “You don’t use the dishwasher?”
“No, dummy,” he smiled huge and wide. “I don’t know what I want. In life. At all.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know what you want? You’re Mr. Goal-setter Extraordinaire, Here I Come Los Angeles,” I teased him.
“I mean, yeah, I know I want to succeed some way or another. I’d love to write movies. Love to get my screenplay out there. But that’s just… career. I’m talking about life. I have no goddamn clue what I want.” His eyes almost looked pained.
“You’re so young,” I said, my voice soft, “Life would be boring if you didn’t leave some mystery in it.”
He paused for a while, as if deep in thought. After a minute or two I broke the silence.
“What’s it called?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“Your screenplay.”
He puffed out a laugh. “You don’t wanna hear about my movie. Don’t you have rose bushes in your backyard to go water?”
“They’re loquat trees, not roses. What’s the screenplay called?”
He groaned loudly, smiling and shaking his head. “It’s called Made Contact.”
I nodded, trying to suppress a grin. “Made Contact. Let me guess—is it a biopic about the guy who invented contact lenses?”
“Very funny. It’s an alien movie, duh.”
The faint blush on Jamie’s face was so adorable, and I do not fuck around with saying the word adorable. I don’t
even think that word. But it was the only word for it. I wanted to reach over and lift him into the air.
Instead I just let a smile onto my face. “Aliens. Cool. We’ve got a sci-fi nerd on our hands?”
“Leo, if you didn’t know I was a nerd by now, you’ve got more problems than I thought.”
“Problems? Me?” I said, feigning surprise. “Anyway, what’s your alien story, Jamie?”
“If I tell you, you can’t laugh.”
“Okay.”
“…It’s a story about aliens, but really it explores themes of homosexuality and coming out. There’s some horror elements as this teenager is growing up and realizing that he’s turning into an alien, but by the end he realizes that it’s okay to be an alien, and he makes contact with others on another planet who let him know he’s not alone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Wow. That’s… actually… really sweet.”
Jamie nodded, his eyes looking down at the table. “It’s called Made Contact, but really in my head I just refer to it as Gaylien.”
I wanted to kiss him again. I really fucking did. It was stupid, and irrational, and the cause of all my internal self-loathing, but I was starting to realize that there was no fucking way I didn’t want him.
Because of course I’d fall for my biographer.
I watched him eat a few more berries and sip on his water. He looked lost in thought, surely thinking about the plot intricacies of Gaylien—sorry—Made Contact. I wanted to crawl over the table and straddle his lap, sink into him, bury my fingers in his hair.
But then I thought about what would actually happen if I went there.
Self-loathing I could live with. Ruining Jamie’s life and career, I could not. I knew what I had to do.
“Jamie.”
He met my eyes, as if he was broken from a trance. “Yeah? What’s up? I know you need to get going—”
“I’m sorry for what I did last night. I’m sorry I kissed you. It was not only rude on a personal level, with how drunk I was, but it was also unprofessional and unwarranted.”
“Leo, I—”
“It won’t happen again, Jamie. I really do want this book to be good, and it’s probably better for both of us to stay on professional terms.”
He sighed, then nodded.
“You do agree, right?” I asked.
He paused for a long time. “Yes. It’s for the better.”
“Good,” I said, though a small part of me was disappointed to hear him say it. “I need to talk to Ella, but I’m sure we can meet again soon for an interview—a proper one this time, with no wine.”
Jamie smiled weakly. “Yeah, wine doesn’t really help the interview process. Maybe a glass or two would, but not five.”
I got up, and went over to put my shoes on. When I looked up he was standing near me, hands stuffed in his pockets, biting his bottom lip.
I gave him a short little platonic hug goodbye. It was awkward, and all wrong, and made me feel like how close we’d been last night was all a dream.
As I walked back to my car I felt distinctly numb.
Everything would turn out fine, as long as I could control myself. Somehow I didn’t trust that I could.
Eight
Jamie
It was beyond stupid to think for a second that a member of 5*Star could have wanted me. It’s just not plausible that my literal teenage celebrity crush would end up interested in me.
But for a split second when he’d kissed me, I thought it could be true.
It was dumb. He’d been so drunk, and clearly had just gotten too and kissed me against his better judgment. His face was so full of regret in the morning—he barely even wanted breakfast. He’d probably finally realized that he’d made a mistake kissing me. Why would a hot as fuck celebrity who’d traveled the world want a naïve, skinny 22-year old?
But whatever. I could be professional. Make it work. I’d still write a fucking great biography, and hopefully kickstart my own career and revitalize Leo’s.
I went to my room, sat at my desk, and opened the laptop. A minute passed, which turned into five minutes, where I didn’t even touch the computer, completely phased out in a daydream about last night.
The thing is, I’d wanted more than that. I’d wanted Leo inside me, for fuck’s sake. I should have felt guilty about it, but I didn’t. It would never actually happen, but I could dream, right? Fucking Christ, that kiss—his kiss was the equivalent of a drink of water after days in the desert. He kissed with his whole body, gripping around me, sinking into me. How could I not want him to sink even more, even further, to forget every logical reason why I shouldn’t and just tell him to fuck me already?
I’d have let him. If he made me beg I would have done that too.
God, I was in the gutter. I’d already jerked off once last night after I went to my room—it was necessary, after that fucking kiss—and I’d done it once again this morning. I was spent. I didn’t know how else to get my mind off of Leo.
There was only one thing I could do: try to delve into something distracting and mind-numbing to get my brain back. My screenplay. I needed to compile a list of places that I could submit my screenplay. Essentially cold emailing movie studios with a screenplay is not the best way to get it seen, but I was desperate, and had read stories online of people finding success just from emailing studios, as long as their screenplay was good enough.
If theirs were good enough, couldn’t mine be too?
I did a quick internet search for small movie studios in L.A. Clicked through page after page, vetting them, making sure they were legit, and compiling a list. Ones that had open calls for screenplay submissions went into the top tier of my list, all others to the bottom.
And an hour and a half later, I had a list of 8 L.A.-based studios, with websites that didn’t look like they were created in 1998, and had open calls for screenplay submissions.
That was just the easy part. Formatting the documents how they wanted them and filling out the submissions for the first two studios took until 5 p.m., and the next thing I knew, Chelsea was home, barreling into my room, still in her scrubs.
“Dish,” she said, sitting on my bed and crossing her arms. She had a devilish smile on her face.
“Don’t sit on my bed in those dirty scrubs,” I said.
“Okay, I’m gonna go change and shower real quick, but be prepared to dish.”
I groaned loudly, saving the documents on my laptop and slamming it closed. I cleaned my room up as I waited for her, realizing that I hadn’t even eaten lunch. When I heard Chelsea come out of the bathroom, I yelled to her.
“I’m ordering pizza, you want?”
“Fuck yes,” she called back, “Pizza and gossip about your boy band hookup.”
“Prepare for disappointment,” I yelled.
Half an hour later, the pizza arrived, and I sat at the kitchen table with Chelsea, telling her in vivid detail what had happened the night before.
“Okay. Wait a second. So he is the one who kissed you, and yet he said it can’t happen again?”
I nodded, taking a bite of the prosciutto pizza.
“I don’t buy it,” she said, sitting back in her chair.
“Why the hell not? He was drunk as fuck, I was in front of him, and he was probably feeling all lonely and vulnerable because I was rudely asking him questions about his family.”
“Why do you think asking him questions about his family is rude? It’s friendly. And you’re his interviewer, you’re supposed to do that.” She looked at me like I was an idiot.
“I’m an idiot,” I said, smiling a little. “I know. But trust me… he doesn’t seem like he wants to keep messing around. He seems weirded out by the idea. I don’t know if he’s really the kind of guy who gets… close to people a lot.”
She nodded, thoughtful. “I mean, that’s probably because of all the tabloid shit that happened to him, right? If my relationships were blasted out into the public eye, I’d feel terrible about them, too. P
eople thought he was like, a sleazeball back then.”
Chelsea was right. Leo had dealt with extreme invasions of privacy in the past.
I shrugged. “I think the truth of it, though, is probably just that he’d rather have someone his own age. Why would he be into me? I mean maybe for a little kiss or hook up, but never for anything more than that.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. You’re cute as hell and you’re not that young anymore. You can drink legally. You’re almost 23.”
I stood up with a sigh, and brought the pizza box back to the kitchen counter. “I don’t know, Chels. It’s too damn confusing. He’s probably right that we should just keep things business only. Otherwise it’s just too complicated, even for my almost-23-year-old brain.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket as it buzzed, hoping that it wasn’t my mother asking again if I’d gotten an Oscar yet after being in L.A. for a month.
I was shocked to see the name come up on the screen: Leo Stone. We’d exchanged phone numbers on the first day we met, but I expected we would only ever use it for scheduling interviews.
I opened up the text. It was a little picture of the family of quail I had seen in his backyard, underneath a tree. Leo had put a little caption underneath:
>>LEO: Evidence that I really did have to water the tree. And the quail are safe from Mr. Ginger Boots’ wrath—for now.
“Oh my God.”
“What?” Chelsea asked.
“Leo Stone just sent me a total dad text.”
“Huh?” Chelsea walked over and looked at the screen. She laughed as I stared at the screen.
“It is mega adorable,” she said, smiling at me, slackjawed. “And proof that he clearly thinks of you in his ‘off hours.’”
I shot off a reply.
>>JAMIE: that pic is going in your biography. itll be one of the full-color pictures in the center. with the caption: “watering plants is how leo now spends his afternoons—often after eating a fulfilling lunch of pizza rolls.”
He was going to murder me.
“Look at you, smiling at your phone,” Chelsea said.
Your Fallen Star: Under the Stars Book 1 Page 7