Falling into You

by Abrams, Lauren

  He’s cocky now, self-assured. “I’m pretty sure you were willing. But I think that calls for another test.”

  I stand up, because I’m more comfortable with the verbal sparring than with the not talking, but he catches me again and pulls me back into his arms for another kiss. What I don’t say is that the Chris’s charms are much more appealing than James Ross’s. There’s nothing that I would deny him. He must know that by now.

  “I want you,” he repeats as we stand in the middle of the room. “But I’ve made some mistakes with girls in the past…”

  I really don’t need to think about that right now. I remember the gaggle of gigglers from the night before and I have to suppress a little chuckle and the knot of jealousy that the image conjures.

  “It’s ok. I don’t need to hear about any of that. This…”

  I gesture between us. “It doesn’t have to be anything. I mean, I had a really perfect day and we can just leave it at that if that’s what you’re thinking and you can just…”

  I’m shaking my head in confusion. He wants me, he just doesn’t want me. I’m trying to give him a way out of the situation, because it’s becoming clearer that maybe this was all a huge mistake. “I mean, you’re obviously incredible and this has been like, the best day ever, and all of that. Whatever you want, I mean, I’m happy to just hang out or whatever. Or, we could…”

  He grabs my hair and yanks me to him. Even though I’ve never been good at the whole romance thing, his intent is unmistakable.

  “And, then, there are always other things.” I try to conjure up my best seductive tone. I’m offering. The slight catch of his breath tells me that he knows it.

  “No.” It’s another long minute before he speaks again. “I want more than that.”

  I’m confused. I’m clearly not understanding what’s going on here. There’s heat between us, an undeniable chemistry that I’m definitely not imagining. I’ve never been so comfortable with someone that I’m also ridiculously attracted to. Did he want sex? Friendship? Nothing? Was there a hidden camera somewhere?

  He answers my questions with his next words. “I want another New York day with you. I want a dozen more days with you. I want you. I am not about to screw it all up because I have some fucked-up desire to rip every last piece of your clothing off and shred it to pieces. I’ve been down that road, and I don’t want to repeat those mistakes here. I want more than that.”

  His voice is husky and urgent. He’s serious. I decide to ignore the shredding of clothes comment, even though little flickers of heat are running through my body. I don’t want to spoil this moment, either. I just want to bask in the glow of his smile for a few more hours or days or weeks and not think about anything else.

  But the practical part of me knows that we are from two very different worlds and that whatever it was between the two of us wasn’t a forever kind of thing. I would go home to Ohio, to my very nice and very Midwestern mother, and then back to school, and he would go on being James Ross and Chris Jensen, movie star. I could put a stop to all of this right now, and it would end better for me. I’m only setting myself up for unavoidable heartbreak.

  Obviously, the practical part of me loses the battle.

  I would have to be crazy to turn him down, to forget about the heat in our kisses and the look in his eye when he told me that I was beautiful. I’m willing to take this feeling for as long as I can get it.

  I finally respond. “That’s probably a good thing, because these are Sophia’s clothes, and there’s no way I could ever afford to replace them.”

  “She would never miss them.”

  “So true.”

  I still haven’t responded to him wanting me (me!) and there’s still a question between us. I can tell that he needs my answer.

  “I mean, you’re basically the only person I know here, so I think you’re stuck with me for the foreseeable future,” I add lightly. I’m trying to keep the fact that I’ve never wanted anything or anyone so badly in my entire life out of my voice.

  His smile tells me that those were the right words.

  I’m uneasy again, and I need to look away. I yawn and stretch out my arms. “You’ve got a long day of hard work ahead of you.” I smile at him. “You need your beauty sleep.”

  He’s uncomfortable for a minute. I remember his words about his father. I remember his uncomfortable face as we stood in the lobby of his apartment building.

  “You can stay here,” I offer.

  A dangerous look comes into his eye. “That’s tempting, but…”

  “No, no, no. You’re determined to stay away from me,” I announce, grabbing his arm and dragging him to my room. I grab a couple of pillows from the bed and shove them in the middle. “See, you can have this side and I’ll take this one.”

  The bed is now a mountain of pillows, evenly divided in the middle to create little sleeping zones. It’s the same way Ben and I sleep when we go camping, I realize suddenly, staring at the pillows. Ben…I push all thoughts of him from my mind, and smile at Chris instead.

  Chris shakes his head slightly. “I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough to keep me on my own side.”

  “I can tell you some more embarrassing stories. I promise, I have some that will definitely keep you on your side of the bed.”

  “No!” he says harshly. “Those little stories of yours make it worse. The one where you ripped your skirt trying to climb the fence practically killed me.” He hides his eyes from me with his hand. “The only thing I could think about was the ripped skirt and how I wanted to sweep you up and get the rest of it off.”

  Maybe there’s an upside to being the least coordinated person on the planet after all.

  “Well, I’m fairly certain that I can control myself. I’ll have to pull out the old chastity belt or something, but we can manage.” I’m really not at all certain that I can control myself, but the temptation of having him in my bed is too great. I grab a pair of soft pants and a t-shirt from my suitcase and bring them into the bathroom after tossing him my favorite oversized shirt that had once been my father’s, which he takes it gratefully.

  Once I emerge from the bathroom, he’s turned the light off and crawled into bed. I lift the covers and carefully shift the pillows so there’s room for me on “my side.” He makes a guttural noise and I can tell that he’s turned over.

  “Good night,” I whisper.

  “Good night.”

  Exhausted and happy and still disbelieving that he’s actually in my bed, I curl onto my side and fall quickly into deep sleep. When I wake up hours later, he’s curled around me, covering my body with his own, and the pillows are strewn across the room. I nudge myself closer to him and fall back into darkness.

  Chapter 14

  CHRIS

  The pillows lasted approximately five minutes.

  I needed to make sure that she was an actual physical presence, I told myself, so I wrapped myself around her in the most and least sexual way possible and consoled myself with the fact that I had made the right decision, despite her teasing and the fact that we could be basking in the afterglow of sex right now.

  Stop, stop, stop, thinking about sex, and that’s an impossible thought as I see her in my arms. She’s been fighting off sleep ever since the sun started peeking in the windows, rocking a little bit to each side and tossing her head. It’s the goddamn sexiest thing I have ever seen.

  I’m counting sheep and trying to distract myself from my ever-growing hard-on when she turns to me. Total fail. “Hey,” she whispers, looking at the pillows on the floor. Her eyes are full of laughter. “My foolproof plan didn’t exactly work, huh?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Ahhh.” She reaches up to touch her hair, wincing. “I must be a total mess.”

  Her hair is puffed out in clouds around her face, and little pieces stick out everywhere, and it is perfect. She is perfect. I kiss her for a long minute and she covers her mouth immediately.

  “Oh, no.
I have total morning mouth.” She jumps up and runs to the bathroom and squeals. “Wow. Ok. So, it’s the total zombie look.”

  “We could just stay in bed all day,” I suggest.

  She peeks her head out from the bathroom. “Really?”

  “Absolutely not. Too dangerous.”

  She looks disappointed for a minute, but then excitement flashes across her face. “And we have to work on your script.”

  That is the last thing I want to do. I want to spend the day showing her all of my favorite things about New York, all the little nooks and crannies that I spent the first sixteen years of my life finding. I want to share all if it with her.

  “I’ll make you a deal. 50/50 split. Half the day, we can work on the goddamn script,” I growl impatiently, because the script is becoming a serious obstacle. “And half the day, we can do what I want to do.”

  I plan on using every trick in my repertoire, including pulling out lame New York trivia, to keep us from doing what I actually want to do, which is to ravage her body. Right decision, I tell myself, over and over. Sex was easy. It had always been easy. I want more than that.

  My phone buzzes on the nightstand and since it’s a welcome distraction, I pick it up.

  “Tell me you’re ready for your goddamn audition.”

  “Marcus. It’s early.”

  “No, it is fucking not.”

  Marcus never sleeps. He’s always running on adrenaline and espresso and some combination of legal, half-legal and totally illegal drugs. Emphasis on the illegal. He’s also one of the best agents in town.

  “Someone leaked the fact that the James Ross remakes are finally getting pulled out of the fucking development drawer. It’s already in the Reporter, which means it’s about to be everywhere. The producers think it’s a fucking brilliant plan to get this thing cast so they can take advantage of the press, and while I would normally agree, it means that you’re going to have to be ready sooner than we anticipated. They’re trying to move the auditions up. 1:00? Today?”

  Hallie’s looking at me from the bathroom door and nodding her head vigorously, so I glance at the clock on the wall and groan. It’s 9:00 now, which means out whole day has been blasted into pieces. “Yeah. Text me the address.”

  His breath hisses out of his lips. “Thank fucking god.”

  Hallie emerges from the bathroom. Her hair is wrapped in a towel and her face is entirely devoid of makeup. She is so breathtakingly beautiful that it makes me want to grab her and crawl back into bed to waste the day away.

  “Auditions got moved up,” I confirm, even though the neighbors probably heard Marcus. To say his voice is booming is a gigantic understatement.

  “1:00 today?” Her head is tilted a bit to the side. “You’re ready. You’ve got this.”

  I stand up and pull her to me for a long kiss. “But it means our day is spoiled.”

  She can’t quite hide the crestfallen look in her face but she recovers pretty quickly. “The fact that you are going to be James Ross just made my day. Can I make coffee or something before you’re on your way? Would that help?”

  She’s misunderstood. I’m not going to the audition without her. Charles in the lobby downstairs could just be waiting for his time to make his move. “I was hoping that you’d come with me. It’ll be boring, and you’ll have to wait in another room, I’m sure, but…”

  “Really?” Her eyes are all lit up.

  “Really.” I pull her in for another kiss.

  ***

  I’ve been in the audition for almost two hours and they just keep asking me to read more and more scenes. I’m not sure if it’s a good sign or not. I’m not sure if I want it to be a good sign or not.

  There are three rows of people watching me, and I recognize some of the faces but not others. The director is sitting in the middle of the front row, and he’s one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Alan Peterson. He’s a no-nonsense type who made his name making truly terrible films about aliens falling in love with humans. The characters all had names like Chinook-Chinook-Mak-Hail. They all ended the same way, too—the humans betrayed the aliens and blew them up to save the world.

  I have to give him credit, though—the explosions were top-notch. No one competed with Alan in the mass destruction business.

  He was also one of my father’s drinking buddies back in the day. Like all the rest of them, he had disappeared after the comic book flop. Not that I blame him. I would have disappeared, too, if I could have.

  A couple of the producers are there too, which surprises me. I figured this would be the pre-audition. Marcus had told me that Alan was going to be there, and I figured the casting director would show up with a couple of flunkies to run lines and grab coffee. Instead, the entire cavalry is here and all eyes are on me. Every fifteen minutes or so, someone announces a “break,” but no one moves from their chairs. Instead, dozens of pairs of hands whip out their phones and fingers punch furiously at keys for a few minutes and then the someone announces, “Break over!” and the phones disappear and I’m expected to start performing again.

  I’ve just finished the scene with Boudreaux. One of the producers is reading the lines, and I have to keep from laughing because the very bad accent is not unlike Hallie’s from the night before. Just as I think I’m about to totally lose it, I hear “Break.” I’m waiting for the phones to come back out, but everyone’s just staring at me instead.

  Maybe they’ve finally noticed my apparent lack of hygiene. I’m still wearing my clothes from the day before. Hallie had tried to get me to change but we had been delayed because the sight of her making coffee with wet hair and bare feet called for another round of long kisses.

  “Chris,” she’d exclaimed as we rolled in a tangle on the couch. “You’re going to miss your audition.”

  I had asked, “Who cares?”

  Then, I started running my hands under her shirt and over her smooth skin. She’d eventually managed to extract herself from me, hissing that there was no way that she was going to be the reason that I missed the audition. I had thrown some of my best pick-up lines at her, tossing one after another, but they did nothing but make her laugh. She had eventually barricaded herself in the kitchen, refusing to come out until I promised I would stop attacking her. It had been too late to grab a change of clothes or to shower, but she had insisted on going through each of the scenes in the car ride over.

  When we got to the place for a three-way conversation between James, Nick, and James’s former partner, she’d convinced the driver to pull over and bewitched him into playing one of the parts. He had some potential, I’d thought.

  I’m laughing at the memory of the smile on Hallie’s face when the driver jumped over the seat to mimic his character’s movement in the scene when Alan shouts from out of nowhere.

  “Wait!” Alan shouts. He jumps to his feet and crosses the room so that he’s standing face-to-face with me. “Put that look back on your face.”

  I try to remember the last scene and what my character had said. A dark frown crosses his face. “No, Chris. The look you just had on your face.”

  I really have no idea what he’s talking about. I think about Hallie instead, since that’s been my default pattern in between scenes.

  Alan nods. Apparently, I finally did something right. He circles me like I’m a caged tiger, inspecting every ounce of my flesh. He’s known for being a total tyrant, for demanding absolute perfection from his actors. It’s kind of ironic given that the last ten films he made were basically stinking piles of shit except for the explosions.

  “All right,” he calls back to his team. They immediately straighten their spines and start taking furious notes.

  “We’ll be in touch,” he says to me, looking at me carelessly over his shoulder.

  I’m dismissed. I must have blown it totally, because I know that the next scene up had been my best shot at winning them over. It hadn’t been one of the original three, but it was the most powerful scene from the scree
nplay. Alan had sent someone running for more copies of the script after we’d gone through the first three.

  The only thing I could figure was that they wanted to see whether or not I could muster the emotional range to make James’s deathbed promise to his mother, and I had been waiting to pull out all the stops. Now I wouldn’t even get the chance to do that.

  No one says anything else to me as I grab my bag and walk out of the room. For a while there, I thought I’d been making a real connection with some of the people in the room. I even caught one of the women in the back row wiping away tears. I felt like James Ross deep in my bones in there. But the dismissive tone of Alan’s voice indicated that I wasn’t what they wanted.

  Marcus would be pissed. I’d have to break it to him gently. But if James Ross wasn’t meant to be, he wasn’t meant to be. I still had options. College, maybe. My mom had gone to NYU, so I’d be a legacy there, and both my parents gave ridiculous sums of money to Columbia, so that was probably also a possibility. However, Greenview College had an excellent academic program, and there were other temptations that were pushing it to the top of my list...

  I open the doors to the waiting room, and Hallie is kneeling next to the receptionist’s desk. She glances up at me, eyes are wide on mine as I come through the door. I shake my head almost imperceptibly and her face falls. She turns to the woman behind the desk.

  “Sarah, let’s do lunch sometime, please,” Hallie suggests, and the receptionist nods eagerly in response. “I near to hear that story about Miles throwing the computer in all of its glorious detail again.”

  “You actually need to see the pictures. They’re worth more than a thousand words.” They collapse into giggles like old friends.

  I can tell that Hallie wants to get me out of the building, to ask about the audition, but her innate politeness demands that she finish her conversation. Just as I’m about to make a very hasty excuse and grab her away, one of the women from the audition comes barreling out of the room that I had just vacated with her phone to her ear. She puts it down momentarily and says something in low tones to Sarah, who glances back and forth between me and her before she exits back through the doors.