After loud protestations from Cat, Otto had ridden in the ambulance with her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him with her, it was that she wanted the ambulance to leave and for Otto to drive her to the ER in his truck. Mary Simmons had been the one to convince her, when she said, “Catherine Sparrow, we came all this way to help you. I’m putting you in this ambulance and you’re going to be thankful for it.”
Phil, the other EMT, had clucked over my scrapes, but I’d backed away and ran to the house to get a shirt. It hadn’t taken long, and I arrived at the hospital shortly after Grandpa and Cat.
I gestured to my chest. “I’m fine. Just some scratches.”
Grandpa sighed.
A young, blonde woman rushed through the sliding doors and scanned the room, her eyes landing on Grandpa. She crossed the room quickly and dropped into the chair beside him, short of breath. “Otto, how is she?”
“She’ll be fine. Landed wrong on her knee. She’s getting some x-rays and then we’ll know more. But she isn’t in any grave danger, thanks, in part, to my grandson.” He gestured to me proudly. “Valerie, this is Jesse. Jesse, this is Cat’s sister Valerie.”
Valerie’s eyes moved from Grandpa’s face to mine. She blinked. She stared. She knew who I was. I braced myself for her reaction. “Cat doesn’t know,” she said, in obvious disbelief.
“No. She doesn’t.”
“How doesn’t she know?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyebrows lifted accusingly, and she pursed her lips. “I don’t keep secrets from my sister, and I don’t like it when other people do.”
I nodded, chastened. I should have told her.
She looked back at Grandpa, her eyes still burning. “Otto, your grandson is a celebrity, a fact which my sister would want to know, and you didn’t tell her?”
He was quiet for a moment, as he took her hand in both of his and scanned her features. “Jesse is my grandson. He came here to be my grandson, nothing more.”
Valerie pulled her hands from his and crossed her arms over her chest, slumping back in her chair. “That’s not something to be held back. Cat should have been told.” She shot me an irritated look. “She’s not going to be happy about this, you know. She won’t like that you’re famous, and she won’t like that you kept it from her. She’ll feel like a fool.”
“She shouldn’t feel like a fool. It’s not her fault,” Otto said.
Clearly still upset, Valerie walked to the nurse’s station, quietly speaking with a woman there.
I stood. “I shouldn’t be here. I’m going.”
Grandpa stood, too, and I was about to tell him to stay, that I would pick him up later, but he walked around me and greeted a couple who walked in the door. He shook the man’s hand and gave the woman a kiss on the cheek. He turned to me, his eyes widening and then narrowing as if to say, Buck up. Get this one right, and he pulled me forward.
“This is my grandson, Jesse. He was with Cat in the cave, and he was able to extract her from the tiny passage so the EMTs could reach her. Jesse, these are Cat’s parents, Blythe and Nolan Sparrow.”
I held out my hand, understanding why Grandpa wanted me to put aside what Valerie said and make a good impression. I wanted them to like me. I craved their approval. I needed it. At the same time, feeling Valerie’s eyes on me from across the room, I knew I didn’t deserve it. Mrs. Sparrow bypassed my hand and pulled me into a tight hug. “Thank you, Jesse.”
Over the top of her head, I looked at Valerie, who watched us with interest. I swallowed my pride and said, “I may have helped her out of the tunnel, but if it hadn’t been for me she wouldn’t have been in there in the first place. I convinced her to go in.”
Mrs. Sparrow pulled back and searched my eyes with her watery ones. She wiped the corner of one with a tissue she gripped in her fist. Then she laughed. “I know my daughter, Jesse. Nobody convinces her of anything she doesn’t want to do. If anything, it’s the other way around.”
Mr. Sparrow stepped forward, smiling, his hand extended for a shake. “My wife’s correct. Don’t blame yourself for any of this.”
Valerie appeared at her mother’s elbow. “Cat is currently getting an x-ray. We can see her when she’s back in the exam room.”
Mrs. Sparrow patted my arm and smiled at me. “I hope we see you again, young man.” She joined her daughter in the row of chairs, and Mr. Sparrow shook my hand. “We’ll have you over to dinner. To thank you.”
My eyes widened in surprise, and I couldn’t think what to say. Valerie was probably right, and Cat would be angry I didn’t tell her. She’d want nothing to do with me after this. Grandpa stepped in for me and said, “He’d love that, and I’d sure love to tag along and get a heaping serving of Blythe’s macaroni and cheese.”
Blythe laughed and said, “Of course, Otto. I’d be honored to prepare you a big old vat of mac and cheese.”
This was too much. All I could think of was the look of trust on Cat’s face before I dragged her out of the tunnel. Of her hisses of pain, of the way she tried to stifle her cries, of the way my lips sparked with life and fire when they brushed against hers. She’d said the words. I trust you. I told her not to.
I pulled my keys from my pocket. “Good-bye sir,” I said to Mr. Sparrow.
“I guess we’re going,” Grandpa said. “Jesse’s my ride.”
“Oh, well, alright. It was nice to meet you, Jesse. We’ll be in touch about that dinner.”
I averted my gaze and nodded, heading for the door.
I strode across the parking lot, avoiding my grandfather’s eyes and climbed in my car. I slammed the door and jammed my key in the ignition. As soon as Grandpa had his seatbelt buckled, I shoved the gear shift into reverse and shot out of the parking space.
I waited for Grandpa to address my bad mood. He didn’t, which meant I couldn’t keep my fool mouth shut. “She trusted me, Grandpa.”
He nodded.
I pounded on the steering wheel, twice, hard. “She actually said those words. She said it, and I let her trust me. I talked her into going into that tunnel, and then I pulled her out of it, her trust in me the reason for both. And the whole time I was lying to her.”
“Jesse, you’re in the midst of a hard time. I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re hurting. You needed to turn inward and set aside parts of yourself, you needed to distill yourself down to your most fundamental aspects.”
I didn’t respond. Most people would think that being famous was fundamental to who I was. It sure felt like it most of the time.
“Acting is your job. It isn’t who you are. You didn’t decide people should photograph you when you’re out for a run, or that they should care what you eat for breakfast. Who you are is who you decide you are.”
“I’ve decided I’m a selfish jerk who keeps important parts of myself secret in order not to scare off a woman. I’m rash, and I don’t think things through, and I convince people I care about to do things they shouldn’t. Dangerous things.” My voice cracked. “I get people hurt with my recklessness. I get people killed.”
My throat was raw, thick with emotion. My eyes stung and my nose burned. The fist in my chest squeezed my heart until I was sure it would burst.
Otto grabbed the steering wheel and gently pulled it from my grip, turning it to the right. I hit the brakes, and he guided the car to the side of the road. He put it in park. I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the wheel, my hands useless in my lap.
“What brought you here, Jesse? What happened?”
He waited quietly. The pain built in my chest as his silence grew longer. I couldn’t take any more. His silence broke me. The sob ripped from my throat, expelling the pent up pain in a long howl. In my car on the side of the road, I let the pain rain down upon me, I let it pull me under, and I let my grandfather cradle my head against his chest. He held me, and rocked me, until my throat hurt too much to scream any more. When I came back to myself, I pushed off him and wiped my eyes with the he
els of my hands.
“What happened, Jesse?” He said again.
I allowed the words. “James died.”
“Your friend James? The one you mentioned sometimes, during our phone calls?”
The one you mentioned sometimes. Those words were like a hacksaw to my already ruptured heart. James had been my soul twin. My best friend since we were ten years old and Mom and Thomas moved us to a new apartment complex. First thing in the morning, James and I would meet outside and ride our bikes around the parking lot. We spent all day every day together. I auditioned for my first movie role on a dare from James, and when I got it, he laughed his head off. For years he gave me crap about being an actor. Until I got to kiss my first actress on screen when I was fifteen. Suddenly he wanted to be an actor, too. I helped him do it. We bought a house together. We did everything together. We lived our lives in parallel until the day his ended. And I had mentioned him sometimes to my grandfather.
The entire way I lived my life suddenly felt backwards and wrong. I wanted to do better. I wanted to be better. Instead, I was a mess, crying on my steering wheel to a man I should have invited into my life a long time ago. “It’s my fault, Grandpa. I’m to blame.”
Another long silence stretched between us.
“I know guilt, Jesse. I know shame and I know blame. When your mother left the first time, I was fully aware it was my fault. I’d been absent. I was a ghost of my former self, floating around her but not doing what I needed to. I didn’t know how to reach her, but that’s no excuse. I should have figured out how.
“Your father gave her the attention I didn’t. I told her it was bad attention. I knew then how controlling he was, how he would hurt her. Instead of pulling her closer, instead of listening to her and showing her another way to love, I fought with her. About him, about anything, about everything. I forbade her to see him. I pushed her away.
“And when she came back, when you were six, because he was hitting her, I thought everything had worked out. She was home, it was fine. So we didn’t discuss it. But of course, your father came back, the scourge we could never be rid of, and Poppy still couldn’t feel my love because I hadn’t made it clear to her. Dex was wordy and full of promises, and she thought that was love.” He paused a moment. “And when she packed you up and picked a life with Dex over a life with me, I knew I’d done it again, Jesse. I’d been complacent when she needed a fighter.”
He waited until I looked at him.
“So I know guilt. I’ve been trapped underneath it much of my life. It presses the air out of a person. You have to let it go or it will flatten you.”
All I could get out was, “How?”
“I’m not there yet, not all the way. But Cat came along. She was this spunky child who didn’t let me get away with keeping to myself. She reminded me who I was when Emily was alive. She reminded me who I’d been, and who I could still be. I learned from her how to be open, and how to love without fear.” He chuckled. “She showed me how to argue properly. How to forgive. How to work out differences without pushing the other person away.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t imagine that what happened with James was what you intended, the same as it wasn’t what I intended with Poppy. I think this kind of guilt can be eased. Never erased, maybe, but eased.”
“I’ve made a million mistakes in my life. I can’t go back and I can’t change things or undo what I’ve done. But you know what I’m going to do?”
I looked at him, wiping the tears from my eyes so I could see him clearly. “What?”
“I’m going to call your mom. I don’t know if it will make any difference, but I’m going to try.”
A small smile tugged up the corner of my mouth. Mom would like that. “She’s going to pretend she’s not happy to hear from you, but she will be. You have to keep going until you get past her resistance.”
When we got back to Grandpa’s house, I picked up my phone and called James’s mother. It hurt to hear her voice. It hurt to tell her I was sorry. But it healed, too, just a little bit. It eased.
Chapter 17
Cat
“Put the next one in,” I said, as soon as the end credits began rolling over the screen.
“You have to stop torturing yourself,” Audrey said, reaching for the remote and pausing it with Jesse’s face filling the screen. His handsome features were aimed directly at me.
She and I were home alone. Mom and Dad had gone to Aunt Glory’s for a visit, and Valerie was at the store replenishing our stash of movie snacks.
I’d spent an entire week in this house. Seven full days. My fractured patella hollered at me if I tried to move too much, but truthfully, I could have been more mobile. There was something else bothering me, and the broken kneecap was a good excuse to stay in bed and not face it.
I was getting restless, but I still didn’t want to venture out, and so I asked Valerie and Audrey to procure for me every single one of Jesse Relic’s movies.
Jesse Relic. Not Jesse Morgan. I wasn’t sure why he’d changed his name, but I supposed lots of famous people did that. And Jesse was indeed famous. Really, really famous. I’d now watched three of his movies, and he had such a charismatic on-screen presence it was no wonder he’d been successful. It was that same charisma that drew me right to him like a bee to a flower.
But Jesse hadn’t been acting when it was just the two of us hanging out in a cave together. He hadn’t. I was sure of it. Or perhaps I just desperately wanted that to be true.
I thought maybe I was still in shock. I hadn’t believed Valerie when she told me who he was. I’d just come back from the casting room, and I was woozy from painkillers and weak from stress, and the first thing she said to me was, “Otto’s grandson is Jesse Relic. He’s been lying to you.”
I blinked at her a few times and laughed. There was no way on earth a movie star would have halfway kissed me. She had to be mistaken. But then she pulled out her phone and showed me a headline, with his picture right below it. I’d turned away from her, not wanting to believe it. She hadn’t pushed it then, because Mama had urged her to let me rest, but she’d spent this week trying to convince me it was a terrible thing he’d done, keeping that part of his life from me.
That first day home, in my bed with Valerie on one side of me and Audrey on the other, I told them about the almost-kiss. Audrey was thrilled and wanted every detail. I told her how there was no pressure behind the kiss, that it was only a gentle brush of our lips, but she insisted that was definitely a kiss, while I insisted on calling it an almost-kiss.
“It was not a kiss,” Valerie put in.
“You just don’t want it to be a kiss,” Audrey said, “because you’re mad at him.”
“Of course I’m mad at him. He lied to her.”
“He didn’t lie, he just didn’t offer up the information,” Audrey argued back. “And now that we know he’s in town visiting Otto because his best friend James Flynn died, we know that he was grieving and was in no mood to play the celebrity.”
Audrey had done quite a lot of internet sleuthing, informing me of everything she discovered. I gobbled up every morsel of information, but it felt like she was telling me about someone else. A stranger.
“What do you think, Cat?” Valerie asked, nudging me with her shoulder.
“I don’t know what to think.” I hadn’t put it together in my head yet. He’d come to Alden to grieve in private. I understood that. Did I wish he’d told me who he was from the start? Yes. But if he had, a small voice inside me asked, would I have grown close to him?
“Don’t you feel foolish, though?” Val asked.
I turned my head and shot her a disbelieving look. “No, I don’t feel foolish. A person can’t know what they don’t know.”
“That’s what I mean, though. He should have clued you in, so you weren’t going along like he was just a regular person.”
“But that’s the thing, Val. He is a regular person. Maybe he should have told me he was famous. But maybe it’s als
o true that he couldn’t carry the weight of his fame at a time like this.” I paused, my heart cracked wide open, needing my sisters to reassure me. “You know what I keep wondering?”
“What?” Audrey asked.
“Why on earth did he almost-kiss me? What was he thinking? Why do that? Obviously he’s going to leave and go back to Hollywood.”
“Actually, he lives in Santa Barbara,” Audrey interjected.
I waved a hand. “The point is, he won’t be staying here. And he could have his pick of any woman on earth.”
“Not any woman,” Valerie said, her voice laced with venom.
I laughed. Her commitment to truth and honesty was admirable. That she could drop a celebrity crush so hard once she found out one questionable thing about him made me love her even more. But I wasn’t so black and white. People were complicated. “Okay, almost any woman. I can’t understand why he’d want to kiss me.”
Valerie scoffed. Audrey growled. They launched into simultaneous defenses of me—of my beauty and wits, my personality and caring nature. I listened patiently until they were done, letting their words bolster me. They were very kind, saying what I needed them to say, but I knew the truth. Jesse had almost-kissed me because he was in a grief spiral, or maybe because he felt guilty, and certainly because he was lost. I was a warm, available set of lips. I existed outside of his regular life, in a space where he didn’t have to confront reality.
A strange feeling wiggled in the pit of my stomach. Was I right? I hadn’t looked at the tabloids like Audrey had, or even searched his name online. But I knew I had to be right. Watching his movies had shown me that much. I could never compete with the actresses he got to kiss and pretend to make love to. I’d spent a week weighing these questions, never coming to any conclusion.
In the present moment, my casted leg propped up on a pillow on the coffee table, I sighed. Audrey was right—watching his movies like this was torture. “It’s just so weird.” I gestured to the screen where he looked back at us. “I’ve seen his actual pectoral muscles. Bare, in person. I know what he smells like. He pulled me out of a cave tunnel. He essentially rescued me, Audrey. Those very same hands held mine, with dirt under his fingernails. The lips he used to kiss Alessia Grant just a minute ago on that screen also touched my lips. Mine. It is surreal, Audrey. I can’t get over it.”
Broken Hollywood (Sparrow Sisters Book 1) Page 12