Falling into You

by Abrams, Lauren

  I open the door when I reach my room and what I find makes me slam it back in disgust. Just as Sophia had predicted, people had definitely found the bedrooms. Sighing, I open it again. The girl, literally wearing nothing but a serious tan and a red lacy bra, shouts at me. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Um…This is my room. I think there might be another empty one down the hall, though.” I’m trying desperately to avert my eyes. I have to sleep on that bed.

  The guy is muttering obscenities and finally manages to get out a “Sorry, dude.” I hear the sounds of them scrambling to get their clothes on, as I stand, embarrassed, outside of the door.

  This makes me angry. What WAS it with guys calling me dude? Did I look like a guy?

  Once they had managed to collect most of their things (a piece of lacy underwear remained on the floor), I dump all of the remaining coats in the hallway, all politeness forgotten in my eagerness to be alone. I lock the door behind me, throw the duvet off the bed, and stare into the big mirror on the wall of the attached bathroom.

  I definitely didn’t look like a dude. But I definitely didn’t look like Sophia, either. I looked at my features and tried to be objective. Everything was pretty average. Mousy brown hair. Blue eyes. An extra ten pounds that wouldn’t seem to come off no matter how many laps I swam in the pool.

  So, my face hadn’t magically gotten beautiful in the time since I had last looked in a mirror. I normally didn’t spend much time obsessing over my appearance (the brief moment of panic over my wardrobe earlier was pretty out of character). It’s not like I was totally naïve or anything; I know that appearances matter. It’s just that I always know what I’m going to find when I look in the mirror, so it seems silly to spend endless hours preening over myself. My looks are good enough.

  But not good enough for Chris.

  He was the most ridiculously handsome person I had ever seen in my life. He was going to be famous, and there was no doubt about that. I had no idea of whether he could act or not, but it didn’t really matter. He was going to be plastered all over the bedrooms of preteen girls and they would draw hearts all over their notebooks with his name stuck right in the middle. I had a few of those posters myself, and maybe even a few notebooks, when I was younger.

  I try to console myself with the fact that I would have a good story to tell my friends at home. Not only did he ask me for a light at a party, we had a whole conversation. He even made fun of my shoes.

  So, this trip was already a success, if you looked at it in a certain light.

  As I lay back, I shiver, remembering the way his skin had felt, taut and smooth when I had touched him. I just hadn’t been able to resist. If I would never see him again, I had to at least allow myself that. I let myself slip into a day/nightdream, a moment of indulgence in the moments before I fell asleep. Of course, the perfect life in New York that I had dreamed about since I was barely more than a baby had come complete with a perfect boyfriend. Sometimes I pretended that he was a famous actor.

  Chris would have fit that bill. He’d been so real. So normal. Talking about movie sets and co-stars and his actress mother like it was nothing at all. I’d come off like some little country hick, and I hadn’t been able to scrape my jaw off of the floor once he had started talking about his movie. I had even admitted that I had a whole barn full of guilty pleasures, like terrible teen movies and celebrity magazines. I had peppered him with questions, when the last thing he had wanted to do was talk to me.

  It didn’t matter. I would never see him again, I tell myself, hoping that the notion will somehow allow me to sleep.

  Chapter 6

  CHRIS

  After flip flops had run off without even telling me her name, I sat there for a few minutes, unable to feel of her fingers off my skin. God, I was such an asshole. First, I thought she was the maid. I had handed my coat to her without so much as a second look. Then, I ran my mouth the entire evening without even trying to figure out how I would ever see her again.

  When I entered the diner, I had resigned myself to a lifetime of chasing Sophia Pearce, who was the same as she ever was—beautiful and ruthless. She hadn’t missed a beat, asking me all about the movie I was making with making quick calculations in her head about what could be in it for her. I wasn’t in love with her. Hell, I didn’t even like her very much.

  But there was something about her taunts that made sure that I would keep crawling back for more. It was like her name was inscribed into my brain.

  But Sophia Pearce hadn’t even crept into the corner of my head while I was in that booth. I could find flip flops again, I think. She had definitely been invited to that party by someone who belonged there, because no one managed to crash Sampson parties, even if we weren’t at Sampson any more.

  Who had she come with? The thought that it was one of the guys I went to school with caused a sick little ripple in my belly. I would think about how to deal with that later.

  I would go to more parties, ask around, and see who she was. Sophia would be at some of them, I thought, and for the first time in as far as I could remember, I couldn’t quite decipher what I felt about that.

  After flip flops leaves, I don’t have an excuse to hand around the diner anymore, so I jump in a cab to head to my family’s apartment on the West Side. I didn’t want to see him tonight, or any night, really, but it was a foregone conclusion that I would go home.

  I had flown in from LA that morning and while I had successfully avoided my house all day, I was going to have to face it eventually. I had even walked around the city for a few hours that afternoon, something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. I glanced at my phone and briefly considered finding a hotel room for the night. Diana would kill you, my brain countered. The thought of an angry Diana was sufficiently terrifying to put me off of that idea. I would just avoid my father.

  After all of his producer and studio friends had disappeared after the comic book movie flop, my dad took a nosedive into alcoholism. I would come home every day to find a bottle of whiskey lying on the counter, completely empty. I suspected, probably correctly, that there was another empty bottle just out of my sight. The days turned into weeks and months and years.

  My mom, who had never been much for family time anyways, pretended like nothing was wrong and started taking jobs that kept her away from the city for longer and longer periods. When she was forced to take theater jobs in New York, she kept an apartment close to the theater. “For convenience,” she told me once. Convenience, my ass. I was seven when it first began. Eight when I realized my mom had completely checked out and that the prenup was the only thing keeping her from legally ending all ties with any of us. Once I was ten, she dropped all pretense of wanting to spend time with us and became a stranger.

  My older sister Diana had filled in, taking me to get ice cream or to go skating in the park and making sure that all of the field trip permission forms were signed and that I had new shoes on my feet. I think Diana thought that if we spent enough time together, I could ignore what was happening in my own house. Even at age seven, I saw my family crumbling around me.

  My father had always been somewhat of a mythic figure, powerful and imposing. He was a director; he was supposed to be in charge. In a matter of days after the movie opened to terrible reviews and Razzie award nominations, he lost control of himself and became a person who couldn’t make it through an hour without taking a drink. It wasn’t like she could keep me from seeing that.

  ***

  I found out about the cancer almost two years earlier, when I was in LA playing the part of the main character’s stoner friend in a low-budget horror movie that went straight to DVD. My mom had called in a favor for me after Sophia had broken me into a million pieces. It was the first thing I’d asked of her since I was seven.

  “I need to get out of here,” I told her.

  “I can get you on a film set,” she replied.

  “Whatever. I’ll do whatever.” I was desperate.

&nb
sp; To my surprise, I liked making movies, even if I was covered in blood the whole time and even if I had to spend about a week lying perfectly still and pretending to be dead. If nothing else, it was a temporary distraction from all things Sophia Pearce and the Jensen family. I liked the fact that movie sets were their own little worlds, seemingly removed from the realities of life. I liked the stories. I liked the characters.

  And I really liked the girls that came along with the making of movies. At the time, I was even thinking about staying in LA permanently.

  To everyone else’s surprise, I wasn’t all that bad at the whole acting thing.

  On the second-to-last day of shooting, Diana called me.

  “Dad’s sick.”

  “No shit.”

  “Really sick, Chris. His liver.”

  “Again, no shit.”

  “They think he has cancer. You should come home.”

  “You think I give a shit about that asshole? Fuck him, D.”

  “I need you. Mom’s off somewhere and she says that she isn’t willing to lift a finger to help him.” Diana mocked mom’s high-pitched voice. “Chris, I can’t do this alone.”

  She was business-like, a bad sign. There was no tease in her voice, no asking if any of the girls had come around yet. My usual response was that LA girls most certainly knew how to come around. I sighed. I knew I would be getting on a plane. In all of these years, Diana had never asked for anything. She was six years older than me and had taken the brunt of the responsibility for our father, putting him in rehab and AA so many times that I lost count.

  I had another sister, Callie, who had left for boarding school and then college and made it home maybe once every other year. We had never been close, exactly. Not like Diana and me. In addition to taking care of me, Diana had completely put all of Dad’s problems onto her own shoulders. Even when I was a little older, when I could have at least tried to help her, I was too angry at my father for leaving us when times got a little tough, for allowing us to be completely on our own, to even think about dealing with rehab and recovery and a bunch of bullshit that would never work anyway.

  She was the closest thing to a mother that I had. “I’ll be there. Just give me a couple of days.”

  So, I flew home and went straight to the hospital, even though I still refused to see my father. Diana looked just the way she had sounded on the phone, business-like. She pulled me into a quick hug, and then drew me back to take a long look. “He’ll need to stay away from drinking. Go through chemo. It’s in Stage 3, which isn’t good news. They think it’s bad, but they don’t know how bad.”

  Because she needed me, I went back to Sampson and I snuck around my house like a ghost for the next three months. I watched Diana take a leave of absence from her job at a magazine to come home. I watched as she destroyed her relationship with her live-in boyfriend. I watched her lose everything in the world that mattered to her, and I promised myself that would never be me.

  I heard the disappointment in her voice when she told me about doctor’s appointments and treatment options and recovery plans. Three months later, after successfully avoiding any attempts at conversation by my father, I allowed myself to hope, for just one second, that he had changed. The bottles had started to disappear, and I was foolish enough to think that maybe he was making an effort and maybe he could turn his life around.

  And then I came home to find him sloppy drunk and lying on the marble floor of the entryway. Disgusted, I headed to Diana’s room and found her crying softly.

  “They’ve done all that they can. Now we wait,” she told me.

  “For what?” I had asked her.

  “For him to die, Chris.”

  I let her continue talking.

  “I know…he isn’t, he hasn’t been…” Her voice trailed off, and her hand rested gently on mine.

  “Shit, Diana, he hasn’t been anything except the reason our whole family fell apart.”

  She sighed. “But…”

  “He’s the only father I have? Is that what you were going to say? Too late.”

  I hadn’t wanted to come back, to see him. He had been gone for ten years. What was I supposed to do? Come home and be a good son while he died?

  So, I left Sampson the next day, got on a plane to LA, and told my agent that I was ready to work. Diana flew out to see me every couple of months over the next year, and tried to talk about it, about him, but I quieted her with a look every time. Disappointment clouded her eyes.

  It was almost a year and a half before I got the next phone call.

  “They sent him home, Chris.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “He has days, weeks. Maybe a month or two. I need you, and you better show up this time. For real show up.”

  The news doesn’t surprise me. I didn’t feel anything, but I couldn’t refuse her. “I’ll be there.”

  ***

  I hand the cab driver some bills, and take the too short elevator ride up to the penthouse apartment. He’ll be passed out, I think. The next time I’ll have to see him, he’ll be in a casket.

  Incorrect assumption. As I walk in, there he is, sitting on the couch under a blanket.

  “Your agent called,” he states in a monotone. “Said to wake you up and have you call him whenever you get home. Your phone was off or something.”

  It’s probably the longest conversation we’ve had in ten years, and I don’t respond at all.

  Instead, I give him a long, even stare. He’s shriveled up and gotten smaller, and is nothing more than a shell of an old man. I nod my head, and he sighs and retreats under the blanket. I can’t offer anything else.

  I move quietly into my old room, which looks exactly the same as when I had left. There’s nothing of me in this room, just pieces of furniture and picture windows overlooking New York. I had stopped thinking of it as home as long time ago, and the nearly empty room reflects that. My bags had been shipped by the studio, and they’re sitting neatly in the corner of the room.

  After flopping onto the bed, I look at my phone. 17 missed calls and 28 text messages. Had I been gone that long? I glanced at the time. 3 am. Apparently, flip flops had been more distracting than I realized.

  I thumb through the messages. Sam had sent a few.

  9:49 Word, man?

  10:26 U at Sophia’s? Bad news, son.

  1:33 Call me.

  There were two from Christine, one of which included a picture. Against my better judgment, I decide to open it. She’s unbuttoning her shirt, showing one of her perfectly rounded breasts (a boob job was practically an entrance requirement for Sampson) and giving me what I think is supposed to be a sultry look. C sumthing u lik?

  No. There was nothing there that I liked. Maybe there was something that could serve as a temporary distraction, but there was nothing I liked about her. Not the fake hair or fake boobs or the trashy message. I shake my head, clearing it.

  All the rest of the texts are from my agent.

  They want u.

  Who wanted me? I start thumbing through the list more quickly.

  James Ross movies. Audition. James Ross.

  This was the part that I was sure I had never even been in the running for in the first place. The part I hadn’t even been able to admit that I wanted. The part that would make me certifiably famous.

  I call my agent, Marcus, my hand shaking as I dial.

  He rushes immediately into a diatribe. “Chris. Where the fucking hell were you? You need to answer your goddamn phone. Fuck. This is James Ross. The big time, and you’re off fucking anything that breathes. No girl is bigger than James Ross.” I don’t offer a response, because I’ve learned that it’s better not to interrupt Marcus once he really gets going. “Here’s the deal—Alan’s in New York at the end of the week and he wants to get this thing cast right away. You used to know Alan, right? Wasn’t he a buddy of your dad’s at some point?”

  He was.

  Marcus keeps going. “Maybe we can use that. I s
ent the script in the overnight mail to your apartment. One of the producers saw that piece of shit movie that you did about the submarine, so they asked to see some of the dailys from A Fairy Tale. This is a direct quote—Someone in casting thinks that ‘you have the right blend of masculinity and charm for the part.’ They probably also think that you’ll show the fuck up on set when you’re supposed to. I am having serious doubts about that part of it after this whole fucking I don’t answer my phone business.”

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t, really. I had enjoyed the conversation at the diner too much to be sorry that I hadn’t picked up the calls.

  There was a pause so I continue. “Marcus, I know we talked about the movie, but I thought they wanted…”

  He cuts me off abruptly. “They want to stick to what made the first round so successful—a mostly unknown lead who’s good-looking and young enough to keep pumping out these movies for another decade or so. It’s made for you. It’s yours. And it will mean a shitload of money for both of us. You need to nail the read. Use that fucking photographic memory of yours and blow them away. I don’t want you to do anything but focus on that script for the next few days. And answer your FUCKING phone!”

  “All right. I’ll call you tomorrow. E-mail me the details and I’ll get on it in the morning.”

  If I got the role, it would be life-changing. There would be no more walking around the streets by myself, no more going to high school parties, and it might even come with a tiny paparazzi army of my own. Like Cassidy had said, I would be famous. And most of me thought, as flip flop girl seemed to, that it would be pretty cool.

  But the other part of me, the one that had seen how Hollywood had spit my father out like a piece of trash, wanted to forget all about it and spend the next few days chasing down some girl that didn’t even think it was important enough to give me her name.