by CD Reiss
“I came here to seduce you with breakfast and to apologize for my publicist and also to tell you that you need to protect yourself.”
I remembered the two paps who had followed me downtown. I hadn’t even wondered how they’d found me. I assumed it was a tip or something, but what if they’d followed me from my front door?
The frame got dark as he put his hand over the lens and pulled the camera away.
“There’s information out there, and it’s not a big deal for most people,” he said. “But you’re out there now. Until they forget and move on to the next thing.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
“I understand.”
“I just take pictures.”
“I know.” He put the camera on the table.
“And I kissed you. That was—”
He put his finger on my lips. “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to teach you how to do this.”
I stood. “No. I don’t need to be protected. Who’s coming after me? A bunch of smelly paparazzi? Sitting out front in their shitty SUVs waiting for life to come into frame? No. Screw them.”
“What about your family? They say screw you too?”
I stiffened. I didn’t talk about that to anyone, but I’d told him so much in the bleachers. I’d told him I’d worked in Mister Yi’s sweater factory because my hands were small enough for the machines and that he sent me away when the order was done. I’d told him about Sunshine and Rover, who I’d loved and who loved me. I’d told him about the perfectly put-together mom I’d called June Snowcone, her super particular OCD, and how I’d never done anything right for her. I told him about the mom and dad who’d ignored Tom and me, the nights and days we’d spent wandering the city instead of going home. I never expected him to remember it all.
“I told you all about my family.”
“Your mother is dead. She died in prison when you were eleven.”
“Do you remember that? Or is it from Ken?” I asked.
“Both.”
I bit my lower lip, and he reached down to free it from my top teeth. I sat down, toying with my camera on the table.
“This is awkward,” I said. “I want to get mad about my privacy, but being who I am and what I do for a living… I can’t really, can I?”
“You can if you want. It’s just not a good use of your energy.”
“I wasn’t prepared for this.”
“We’ll figure it out. Is there anyone else you need to warn? What about your father?”
“You don’t remember?” I spun the camera on the table. “He left my mother when she was pregnant. I’ve never met him. She never told me who he was, not even when she went to jail and I went into the system. He doesn’t even know I exist. Why are you even talking about this shit? No one’s family is safer than mine.”
His elbows rested on his knees, and he looked up at me with big green eyes. “I thought you knew.”
Between my intellectual disorientation (What? Who?) and my emotional confusion (Why?) I froze in place. If I’d ever thought of my father as a real person, which I realized had never occurred, I might have been angry at him. But how could I be angry at a man who had never existed? Dead, alive, gone, here, none of it mattered.
Was Michael trying to resurrect the dead? Was he making a man out of a pile of dust or the extra bone of a rib cage?
And his silence. The way he closed his mouth and didn’t let his eyes waver from mine. I felt observed, peeled open, and examined in a way that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn’t been him. I couldn’t explain to myself why it was all right coming from him, why his silent, deadly scrutiny didn’t feel invasive but welcome.
“I’ve seen my birth certificate,” I said. “Brian Nordine is nobody. I looked for him. He’s gone like the freaking wind. And the wind can have him,” I said. “I don’t give a shit.”
“Really?”
Where did he get that confidence? That ability to say one word that would throw me off my axis and catch me at the same time?
“Really.” I grabbed my camera. “Thank you for the eggs. Your apology is accepted, and your warning… I get it. Thank you. I’ll keep my eyes out.”
Fifteen steps to the door. Why were those lofts so damn big? What was I thinking?
Five steps, and I heard a shuffle behind me, the scrape of a chair. I picked up the pace, and I knew he was behind me. By the time I got to the door, his chest was against my back and his hand was over the doorjamb.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“I’m going to get between you and this. I don’t like anyone knowing where you are. I don’t like you walking around at night unprotected. Especially because of me.”
I turned, putting my back to the door. “I haven’t seen you in ten years. Now this?”
“I should say it’s that I feel responsible for what’s happening. But you’re in this business as much as I am, so it’s not that. It’s you. I was up half the night thinking about you in those bleachers. The things you told me. The stuff I told you. How I felt. Back then, I was so confused, and I left you without a call or checking on you for reasons that…” He shook his head. “The reasons were pathetic. No one would have approved of you, and I lived on approval.”
He touched my hair, and those long strands became nerve endings for desire. The little hairless spot on his chin shifted, and I wanted to touch it so badly that I did so without thinking.
“Whatever it was I felt before, I’m not hiding from it this time. This time, I’m not going to worry what anyone else thinks,” he said.
“What if I’m worried?”
“I’ll make you not worried.”
His breath warmed my cheek, and I believed he could change things, even as I knew he couldn’t. He could only drag himself down. This could only go bad. But I turned my face until my lips touched his, and he stopped being a movie star. He was the boy in the bleachers, the one who worked too hard and cared too much, and I became the girl who could be anything she wanted, the one who was accepted and whose life was about to turn around.
But I’d wanted it then. I’d wanted his hand in mine to be the warning bell for change. In the penthouse loft, with his lips and tongue growing more urgent and his hands on the sides of my face, I didn’t want my life to change. I’d done everything I’d set out to do since he’d left, and there he was again, ready to destroy everything I’d built in exchange for a mouth that fit mine like a palm curled over a fist.
I turned to face the door, still trapped by his arms, and opened it a crack. He slapped it shut.
“If you’re not busy, I want to take you somewhere.”
“I’m always busy,” I said, leaning into him.
“Doing what?”
“Taking pictures of Hollywood royalty.”
“Bring your camera then.”
I held my finger up to him and said in pure mockery, “That kind of thing isn’t going to fly, superstar.”
He stepped back and took his jacket off the counter. “Today it is. Come on. It’s fun. You’ve never seen this part of the city before.”
“Ha! Fat chance of that.”
“You’ll only know if you come.”
The possibility of showing him a thing or two about the city he pretended to rule was too good to pass up. “You’re driving.”
He opened the door. We went out and strode to the stairs.
“Are we going to get mobbed? Because I’m not up for another LA Post story,” I said.
“We have ways around you guys when we need them. Today, I needed it.”
“What ways?”
He opened the door to the parking lot. “We’re not ready for that, Shuttergirl.”
I hadn’t expected him to tell me the strategies he used to avoid people like me. Or maybe I did. Maybe I’d forgotten who I was for a split second and became no more or less than a girl with a boy, because I was disappointed at the same time as I knew I had no right to be.
&nb
sp; He approached a green two-seater Aston Martin and opened the passenger side door.
“This isn’t exactly inconspicuous,” I said as I buckled in, “but it’s super cute.”
“One tends to cancel out the other.” He leaned in, one forearm on the roof of the car and one on the open door. “You have the very same drawback.” He kissed me quickly and closed the door before I had a second to absorb the compliment.
I was smiling like a schoolgirl when he slid in next to me. God, would that be us? Would I do nothing but grin like an idiot around him? I shook it off. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t impressed so easily.
“If you’re taking the 101 anywhere north,” I said, “you should get on after the Cahuenga Pass. Time of day, and all.”
The engine rumbled to life, and he pulled out, looking bemused. “I should blindfold you, or you’re going to just boss me the entire way.”
“Good luck with that.”
He took my hand at the first red light, drawing his fingertips from my wrists to the webs of my fingers and bending them closed. After everything I’d done in my life with men, after what Jake and his friends had exposed me to—the humiliations, the distasteful acts, all the things I tried to not think about—I couldn’t believe that having my hand held could make me feel like four pounds of joy in a two-pound bag.
“Do you want the top down?” he asked, squeezing my hand a little as he headed up Western Ave.
“Will people see you?”
“Yeah, but it’s fun. The top, I mean. Not getting seen.”
“Next time then.”
Damn. I’d said next time, which presumed that there would be a next time. After the LA Post story, which was undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg, the last thing we had were guarantees.
“Nighttime’s easier,” he said. “And anything one lane is good, so no one can get astride, and any cars going the other way can’t turn around because it’s too narrow. They’d have to pull a K on Sunset by Palisades, and the twisty part of Mulholland.”
“Are you telling me your secrets? Because I could be taking notes right now.”
“That won’t make the road any wider.”
“I could just wait until the sun goes down and stand at the side of Mulholland with a motorcycle. All I have to do is wait until I see a good-looking guy in a convertible, then he’s mine.”
He glanced at me sidelong. “Just call me next time. It’s safer.”
“But not half as much fun.”
Why was I digging this hole? Why was I making this an issue? I was the hunter, and he was the prey. I made money from his work whether he liked it or not, and that was what it was. Maybe I kept bringing it up because it was real. The nagging pragmatist in me wouldn’t let the fantasy of our connection exist undisturbed.
But there were our hands, clasped in a double fist, and the longing in my body surged again. I crossed my legs. I was wet. I knew it. Just from this nothing we were doing.
I wanted to say something. I was going to say something, but I couldn’t find a way to open a conversation without apologizing for how I made my money, and that was the most insincere thing I could do.
At the light at Franklin and Beechwood, just before the psychological barrier of the Hollywood Hills, a horn honked.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did. He looked over my shoulder and grinned, making a peace sign out the passenger side window. Through the other car’s window, someone squealed.
I didn’t blame them.
“You should get a driver,” I said.
He leaned back in his seat. He was turned toward me, close enough for me to smell the cinnamon on him. “Driving my own car is an entitlement. Sorry. I’d rather deal with red lights.”
He took off, twisting into the park and around the corner, checking his rearview mirror as we went into the deep recesses of the hills. The houses were set back behind foliage, big, well-kept, and selling in the multi-millions. There wasn’t a sound up there but the rumble of the Aston’s engine and the birds. I was sure he could have put the top down safely.
“I’ve been up here, you know,” I said. “You hardly have to blindfold me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. If you make a right up here and go down a little ways, you’ll catch the back entry to the Griffith Park Boys Camp.”
“Uh-huh.” He kept driving up Deronda, a little curve playing on his lips.
I started realizing that maybe I hadn’t been that far up before, because there was nothing there. At the end of the road were two identical gates. One had signs all over it warning against hiking and threatening arrest. The other warned against trespassing.
Michael flipped his visor down and clicked a little beige box that looked like a garage door opener. The trespassing gate creaked open. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
“You win,” I said. “I have never been past this gate.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it.” He pulled past the gate onto a hidden street of mansions. “I had to do my share of begging to get access today.”
The twists and turns of the road were etched into the shape of the mountain, making it impossible for me to keep track of what street we were on. Not that it mattered. I’d never get up there again. “Who the hell even lives up here?”
He put his finger to his lips, taking my hand with his as if he was afraid to let it go, and whispered, “Shh. Lawyers.”
I laughed.
The houses fell away, and we drove headlong into the nothing of nature with its fullness of sound. He put the top down, and I looked up, holding my tennis player’s hand while watching the canopy of trees, a moving border on the clear blue sky. Still holding my hand, Michael punched the radio. I expected the same techno he’d played in the loft above mine, but something else came out.
“Sinatra!” I yelled over the music.
He sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with the full force of his voice, and I joined in off key, more joyfully shouting than actually singing.
We made it to the end of the song, entertaining the bugs and squirrels all the way up. A radio tower appeared through the trees. I’d only ever seen that radio tower from the ground, and only then did I know where we were going.
“No way,” I said, sitting up straight. “We’re past the razor wire!”
A cluster of official-looking buildings appeared, and Michael turned down the radio. “We are.”
“Do you know how many times my friends and I tried to get up here?”
“How many?”
“The fence is electrified. And there are cameras everywhere.”
“And there’s a good reason.” He opened the door. “Because troublemakers like you would get yourselves killed.” He got out without waiting for an answer, went around the front, and opened my door, holding out his hand.
I let him help me out, and he walked me to the ridge. Below us, from the back, was it. The Hollywood sign, standing like an oddly-shaped billboard in the side of the hill, the grid of steel supports holding up the backward letters.
“That thing? That’s mine,” I said.
“I went to grade school with a kid on Deronda. We came up here all the time. So you’re wrong. It’s mine.”
“Dude, do not even.” I took a step down the hill, and the sand and grit slipped from under my shoe.
Michael held me up then slid down a little in a controlled fashion. I took my cue from him and slid a little then steadied myself, gripping his biceps. I wanted to stay still for a moment, just to feel the hardness of his muscles, but he stepped and slid again. Leaning on each other, hands on arms and shoulders, weight on weight, stretching, catching, fighting gravity with only our bodies as a bulwark, we made it to the bottom of the sign.
I looked between the Y and W. “You can see everything.”
“To the ocean.”
“It’s really smoggy.”
“It’s best the Monday of a holiday weekend.” He nudged me, a glint in his eye. “Are you ready?”
> “For what?”
He gripped a steel rail on the back of the first O in WOOD. “I could have brought you to any hill in Los Angeles for that stinking view.” He put his foot on a rail and hoisted himself up.
“You’re going to climb up it?”
“Coming?”
“Oh, hell yes.”
He got to the top first. He swung his legs over the side, straddling the letter. He guided me to the same position, steadying me until I was sitting securely enough to face the view. Then he swung his leg over and sat next to me.
“It’s breezier than I thought it would be.” I closed my eyes then opened them, trying to see that spread of the city for the first time. “Thank you. This was a nice surprise today.”
“I used to come up here all the time after I did Fractured. Some days, I felt like I was becoming that guy in the magazines. So big. Bigger than I could make sense of. And flatter too. It’s hard to explain. But up here… how many people are looking up here right now? None of them can see me. I feel real and unimportant at the same time. I wanted you to see the unimportant me.”
“I remember unimportant Michael from high school.”
“He couldn’t take his eyes off you.” His hair flicked in the wind, and the gold of the sunset burnished his skin. “You were a serve-killer.”
“I’m sorry I was a distraction.” I wasn’t sorry. Not a lick. All I wanted at that moment was to be a distraction all over again, even though I knew I’d change my mind in the morning.
“It was worth it. You were worth it. Every minute. Meeting you, it changed me, and I didn’t even realize it at the time. The first time I saw you behind a camera, I didn’t acknowledge you because I knew I couldn’t walk away again. I wasn’t ready to face what everyone would say.”
He put his hand over mine, and we sat in silence. After a years-long minute, he slipped his arm around my shoulders and put his face in my hair. I felt him breathing against me.
“It must be hard to keep your head on straight,” I said.
“It’s not a big deal.” He waved it away.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “This is complicated.”
“Not up here. Up here, it’s very simple.”
I wanted to tell him how I felt about him in the simplest language. I wanted to use words like warm and safe and joy, words like admire and appreciate, words that a six-year-old could use. I wanted to use words without guile or hidden meanings, without the weight of everything that could, and would, come between us. But he kissed my mouth, stealing the words and turning them into actions that were complex, layered in desire, and breathing with possibilities a six-year-old couldn’t imagine or understand.