Star Crossed: A Hollywood Romance

by Reiss, CD

  And who would that be?

  I’d resisted it as long as I could, but looking at him, with his hair flattened on one side and a touch of sleep lingering in his eyes, I couldn’t imagine being a paparazza. I’d heard how deeply he groaned when he came and felt his touch in the middle of the night. He was just a man and a better man than most. I hadn’t captured that betterness until the pictures in the loft upstairs, and those were mine alone. They were private.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I would figure out who I would be, but in the moments before I had to worry about money or identity, while he was still with me, I let myself get excited at the prospect of reinventing myself.

  His phone rang from somewhere in the bedroom, probably inside a pocket. He reached for me, and I taunted him with a laugh, running naked to the living room to get my bag. I grabbed it from the guest house door, taking a second to admire the view. I pulled the pictures off my server and put them onto my phone. They were film, so they had defined grains that looked tactile, even on digital.

  He was already on the phone when I got back to the bedroom. He stood naked against the door to the patio, his body as flawless from the back as the front. I crouched on the bed, my back to the headboard. Michael didn’t look happy with what he was hearing.

  “Okay, I’ll be right there. Thanks for letting me know.” He tapped off and stared at his phone for a second before looking at me. He tossed the phone on the bed. “Last night, I sent Carlos to take the money and get the pictures. He did, but he got stopped at a DUI checkpoint. He had to tell them he was carrying a weapon, and so, because it was Tuesday or for whatever reason, they checked the car and arrested him for possession of child pornography.”

  I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, God. What should we do?”

  “You shouldn’t do anything. You’re the victim. You don’t need to show your face anywhere, and you shouldn’t. But I need to go take care of this.”

  “I’m so sorry. Can you tell Carlos I’m sorry?”

  He was already getting dressed. “You didn’t do anything, Laine.”

  I didn’t do anything. Nothing but get Carlos arrested because I hadn’t taken responsibility for Jake earlier. I should have gone to give him his money and been done with it. Now Michael had to go explain that he had wanted the pictures, all because I couldn’t see what I’d been given when I was fostered by Orry and Mildred Hatch. I only saw that the sweet boy I liked left me. Now that sweet man had to step in front of his bodyguard to get him off the hook.

  “You’re going to have to say you were the one who wanted them,” I said.

  “Yep.” He buttoned his pants with a faraway look. “I don’t know if there’s a way to keep your name out of it. They’re going to ask me why I wanted them.”

  “What if I say I was eighteen when they were taken?”

  “Lying will only make it worse, and I don’t want you involved.”

  “Michael, really? I couldn’t be more involved.”

  He crawled onto the bed, shirt half buttoned, until he was close enough to kiss me. “Really. You’re protected until you speak. So just hush until someone with a badge asks you a question.”

  “I hate this. I hate that I caused you trouble.”

  “I knew you were trouble when I saw you on that balcony at NV. I wanted you then, and I want you now.”

  He had so much to lose, and I was poised to take it all away. He kissed me tenderly, and I wondered who he cared for: the screwed-up paparazza who was nothing but trouble or some fantasy of a woman he was going to save from her past?

  I wasn’t comfortable with either option, but I didn’t know what I wanted to be loved for either. What was it about me that I wanted to hold up and say “love me for this and not that?” Nothing I could think of. I had nice hair. I could run in heels. I took a good picture quickly.

  “Laine?”

  Michael snapped me out of my trance.

  “Sorry. I should go. They’re going to come find me and ask me questions.” I gathered up my things. “I had this friend. Sister. Whatever. The cops found out about some shit her dad had done. Her fosters opted her into notifications, and the rest of her life, the phone rings every time he has a probation hearing or her picture shows up somewhere.” I gave a fake little laugh that sounded hollow and nervous. It seemed to echo off the walls and unfamiliar corners. Not my bed, not my pillows, not my pictures, not my view.

  This was going to explode. Michael Greydon, official famous person, found trying to obtain pictures of me as an adolescent. His intentions had been innocent, and no one would care.

  I was a victim now. I wasn’t the sole owner of my life. I wasn’t in control, and I didn’t have power over the land. I was weak and wrecked, a puppy on the yellow line, waiting to get hit or be saved but unable to move. I hated it. I hated feeling like a target someone had hit and everyone else wanted to rescue.

  Naked in the middle of the room, hugging my bundle of clothes, I must have been a sight to Michael in his movie star jeans and celebrity smile. I must have looked like a lost china lamb.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said, putting his perfect hands on my bare shoulders. “They’re on paper. He told Carlos the versions he sent you were the only digitals, and he took them with his camera phone. They won’t be around. I’ll explain what happened. It’ll be done.”

  “No, it was supposed to be done years ago, when I left. And it was. Now I have to explain everything to strangers. It was hard enough to explain just to you. And once I walk out of here, they won’t let me near you until you’re cleared. Trust me. I know the system.”

  I stared straight in his face, but I couldn’t see him. I had no idea what he was feeling or thinking. I couldn’t feel past the need to run away and do something, anything.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying my best to be comforting when all I wanted to do was leave. “This is going to be a pain in the ass for you, and it’s my fault.”

  “You need to stop saying things like that.”

  “Well, it’s because of me. You can’t deny that. So listen, thank you for helping me with this. You’re a good guy, and you did something amazing for me that you’re going to pay for. You have to go, and I have to go. Let’s just get on with it.”

  As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.

  I jumped out of my skin. “The gate?” I gasped half a sentence.

  “My damn publicist.” He kissed my cheek tenderly and walked to the front.

  I went into the bathroom to dress. Through the door, as I hitched up my lace-topped stockings, I heard voices, not the whisperings of two men who worked together but something else. Something more terse and businesslike. I wrestled with the zipper on the back of my dress, contorting myself into a knot rather than walk out the bathroom door undone. When I did walk out, a new scene awaited.

  The bedroom door was closed. The sheets were twisted all to hell, as if two people had been entwined in them all night long. A middle-aged woman stood in the room with her hands folded in front of her. She wore a blue sweater with beads around the neck and a navy skirt that ended right below the knee. Her light brown hair was darker at the roots, and her black shoes had a sensible low heel.

  “Are you Laine Cartwright?” she asked.

  Could I say no? Could I deny everything? Could I laugh and ask how anyone could think a man like Michael Greydon would knot up the sheets with Laine Cartwright?

  “Maybe,” I replied, unable to hide my hostility.

  “May I speak with you?” She pointed at a chair as if she was the one who had fallen in love in that room a few hours earlier.

  I realized she was going to tell me about the pictures. She was going to say Michael had bought them. She was going to ask my age and about Jake and why I’d been a fuckdoll when I was fifteen. I didn’t want to answer any of it. I didn’t want to hear a bad word about Michael, and I didn’t want that room tainted with those years. I wanted that space, that bed, the air, and all of it
to only hold love.

  “No,” I said. “If you want to talk to me about the pictures, you have to take me to First Street. I want all of it recorded, because I’m not repeating it.”

  She nodded as if the request wasn’t unusual.

  “And I’d like to call my lawyer.”

  “You’re not being accused of anything,” she said. “But of course, that’s fine. Would you like to call a friend to come with you?”

  I hadn’t expected that. I figured I’d go alone to the precinct like a criminal, get questioned in a cold, hard room, and take a cab back to my empty loft. But I did want someone to go with me. I wanted to lean on another human being for strength and comfort, and I wanted it to be Michael. I pressed my lips between my teeth, holding back the choke and blubber that gathered in my throat. He was the last person I could ask for, and he was all I wanted.

  Who would a normal person ask for? Their mother. I barely remembered mine. I’d visited her twice in a grey room with aluminum folding chairs and a card table. She’d tried to squeeze all of life’s lessons into half an hour, and I remembered none of them. Stay out of trouble. Value yourself. Don’t let a man run you. Blah blah blah. Goddamn her. What useless high-handed crap it all was.

  My mother was supposed to teach me to do something, cook, get an apartment, go on interviews, balance a checkbook. But Irving had taught me how to do that, and how to pay quarterly taxes, calculate focal length, go on an interview. He’d cosigned my first checking account, helped with the deposit on the apartment I got after I left Jake, gave me a trade I could use to support myself.

  “I do,” I said. “I do have a friend I want to bring.”

  32

  michael

  Here’s a secret the LAPD keeps pretty close to the vest, and one they’ll deny to your face. If they want to get into your house, they’ll get into your house no matter who you are or what security system you have. They didn’t need Ken to give them my maid’s key. They had tools.

  My gate was broken, and the door to the main house had been broken in. I couldn’t believe they’d even knocked on the door of the guest house when I saw that, but I had no time to ask before I was put in a squad car and driven away.

  Outside the broken gate, they waited. I’d never resented the paparazzi before, with their cameras and catcalls. But that day, with everything in my life interrupted, a day of explanations ahead, and ugliness between Laine and me, I hated them. They stood a respectful distance from the police car, but they caught me there. I’d be stuck in a room explaining things while they guessed at the truth and made up lies about Laine.

  And it was so titillating. What could be better than Michael Greydon staring at child pornography with his hands in his pants? It explained why I hadn’t had a long-term relationship since Lucy, why I didn’t stay out late or do drugs. My vice was worse than a simple substance abuse problem. It was the story of the year, and they’d ignore the truth for as long as they could, because the truth was honorable and real.

  The LAPD didn’t book me right away. They took me into a room and asked questions, the most pertinent being, “Did you or did you not arrange for the purchase of sexually explicit photographs of an individual you knew to be under the age of eighteen?”

  Once my lawyer, Joe Barnett, showed up in his suit and aftershave, I told him the truth, because that was what I knew how to do. Then I admitted to the LAPD that yes, I’d arranged for the purchase of the pictures, and yes, I knew that the girl in them was under eighteen.

  They booked me without hearing the rest of it. Barnett had told me that was what would happen. I asked about Carlos. They told me he was being held but not arrested. I asked about Laine. No one would tell me if she was all right.

  “Find out,” I told Joe. “I don’t care what you have to do.”

  “If she’s implicating you—”

  “I don’t care. Make sure she’s not alone. Make sure she’s not upset. Go to her house and make sure she’s okay.”

  He agreed, but he lied. I knew it from the way his mouth moved. He was as invested in protecting me as I was invested in protecting Laine. There was nothing in it for him to check on her and report back to me.

  So I sat in the quiet cell, which was comfortable enough with its soft seat and frosted glass, as if designed with a pending apology in mind. I thought about what I’d done, and not done, and the foolhardy arrogance that had led me there. Laine’s past had been her secret. She’d protected it, and because of me, it was no longer a secret. It had the potential to go horrifyingly public. Guilt lay on top of regret, whispering potential ammunition in my ear.

  You arrogant, overconfident ass.

  This is her life.

  It’s not a movie.

  It’s not a story you’re telling yourself about yourself.

  “She’s fine,” Ken said after my two-hour wait in the apology room.

  We sat across a table in a white room with a wood table. Portraits of dead cops looked down at us.

  “How do you know?” I asked, infuriated by his casual posture, his legs crossed and foot shaking at the ankle as if he needed to be somewhere else.

  “If she’d killed herself, we’d have heard.”

  “You know what, Ken—”

  “Don’t you even think of firing me.” He put both elbows on the table. “You need me, and I’m not wasting my breath convincing you of it. I don’t care if you admit to me that what you did was stupid, but once you’re out of here, you’d better admit that to the public. They want your head.”

  “It was stupid,” I said.

  “Good. That’s progress.”

  “Did the pictures get out?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I slammed my hand on the desk. “Answer me.”

  “Yes.”

  A vacuum opened in my chest, and my heart fell into it.

  Ken continued. “Her brother—”

  “Foster brother.”

  “This Jake guy had them scheduled to post to a porn site,” he said. “He was going to use that to pressure her, but they went up while he was being questioned.”

  “We can’t stop it, can we?”

  “Look, she’ll get over it. You, on the other hand, might not.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I want resources behind getting those pictures taken down. I know it’s impossible to get them all.”

  “It’s just plain impossible. If she were nobody, I could contain it. But she’s not. She’s your girlfriend.”

  My girlfriend. The word sounded infantile.

  “So here’s what we have outside these walls,” Ken said, “and try not to get discouraged by the fact that it’s all bad news. On one hand, you’ve got a news media cycle that only knows why you were arrested. They haven’t found out that you sent your bodyguard to get pictures of your girlfriend to protect her. All anyone can envision is America’s Boyfriend beating off to shots of naked little girls. On the other hand, Laine’s pictures are taking a slow tour around the porn world tagged as ‘vintage teens.’ They’ll get drowned out in two weeks by the flood of shit on the internet. But when you explain publicly what happened, people will start searching for the pictures, and she doesn’t look that different. They’ll stop being a fetish tag and start showing up on CelebrityOgler.com with blurred nipples.”

  I must have made some move with my hands or some expression that betrayed my immediate rage. I didn’t have a word besides No for the invasion that would be.

  As if Ken saw an opening, he leaned forward. “If you don’t want to get run out of town, you have to explain what happened. If you want those pictures to die a quick, painless death by irrelevance, you have to quietly yet openly dump her now. No one will care about her enough to search.”

  “Quietly yet openly? What the hell is that?”

  “Call her a girl you used to know, had a short thing with, then start talking about the movie.”

  “What movie?” I was biding my time in asking that. I didn’t know what to think,
so I asked a meaningless question.

  “Any movie. Just make the studio happy, because Bob Rice is cancelling contracts. You’re already in breach for not doing the PR you agreed to.”

  I shook my head. There was no use in talking further to Ken. I wasn’t leaving Laine. If there was a third way out of this, I would find it. Breaking up with her wasn’t an option, even if it was the best way to protect her.

  33

  Laine

  Phoebe was in Las Vegas to see a client, but she promised to get back by morning. She gave me the number of a colleague, but they didn’t pick up.

  The lady in the blue sweater said I didn’t have to talk to her until my moral support showed up, which pissed me off. I was a grown woman and didn’t need backup. Her name was Karen, and she treated me like a victim, incapable of consenting to anything. As if my being a little older would have changed my ability to make a decision about who could stick what inside me. I’d consented to the sex. Yes, I’d hated it, but I consented. And I consented to the pictures, and yes, I hated that more, but I consented.

  “We may find they were distributed over the internet,” Karen said softly.

  “I didn’t consent to that,” I said, crossing and uncrossing my legs. My stockings had started sagging, and I felt out of place, with my fancy pink dress, in a room decked out in jeweled colors and decorated with the alphabet. An indoor play structure sat in one corner, and in another was a child-sized white table stacked with anatomically correct dolls.

  “Miss Cartwright, we can prosecute a distributor of child pornography whether you consent or not.”

  “So do it. Just not Michael. Hang Jake out to dry. I don’t care.”

  She handed me papers, and they all had the word victim on them. I wouldn’t sign them. I wouldn’t even look at them. Before I could shove them up her ass, there was a knock on the door.