Cue the tumbleweeds.
“Are you kidding me?” I said quietly.
“All right now, listen. I didn’t know that he—”
“Are you kidding me?” I repeated, my voice beginning to rise.
“Look, Grace. Settle down,” she responded, her pitch mimicking my own.
“Are. You. Kidding. Me?” I yelled. I sank into a chair, hysterical sobs breaking over me like a tsunami. All the crap from behind my Michael wall finally came out, all over her office floor.
She let me cry, handing me tissues, knowing I needed to wade through it. When my sobs began to sound pathetic rather than anguished, she began to talk.
“First, Grace, I had no idea he was the same guy. It’s a common name. Second, I had no idea that you were still so upset over him. I thought you had let all that go. Third—”
I interrupted her. “I didn’t know I was still so upset. But seeing him—”
“Third . . . you got the part,” she said quietly.
There was silence as I digested what she’d just said.
“What?” I asked, unsure that I’d really heard her right.
She nodded. “You heard me.”
Holy shit.
“What?” I asked again, a smile beginning to break through.
“You got the part,” she said, a little louder.
“Say it again,” I said, really smiling now.
“You got the motherfucking part!” she screamed.
“Holy shit!” we both screamed together.
Sara came running. We were jumping up and down, screaming, and I still had tears on my face. She backed out again quickly.
I got the part! I got the lead in a musical! I got the lead in a musical that was being workshopped on Broadway!
On Broadway!
In New York!
In . . . New York.
But what about J—
I pushed it away and felt the happiness.
When Holly and I looked at a calendar, we were stunned to realize that I’d have to leave for New York in ten days.
Ten days.
We began to plan. First, I was pulled out of the showcase. We called my scene partner and explained, and being a true professional, he was happy about my new job and wished me luck. Holly knew another actor who could step in for me. No problem.
Second, I needed a place to live. Holly called a New York agent she knew well who worked a lot with stage actors and was assured that they could find me something temporary near the theater. Until then, I’d stay at a hotel.
Third, I had a house that I hadn’t even moved into yet. Most of my things were in storage and the rest were at Holly’s. The contractors were almost finished, and Chad had given me a move-in date of early next week. I’d move in just in time to move back out again.
Most of the new furniture had already been ordered and was due to begin arriving tomorrow. Chad agreed to sign for all deliveries, and I’d worry about placing the furniture later, as long as they were set in the right rooms.
Finally, I had to tell the Brit.
It wasn’t as if we’d known each other that long, and while yes, we seemed to be getting along famously, there had been no declarations. We hadn’t defined anything because there was nothing to define. We were at the very early stages of whatever this was, and there really was nothing more to say.
Sure, it’s indefinable. You can’t stop thinking about him for ten minutes. Even five minutes.
It was true. He had gotten inside the walls and wasn’t budging. Whether or not this was too early, this was going to suck.
After dinner that night Holly went out with a client, and I had the house to myself. Jack was working on his reshoots, and I had missed a call from him earlier. His voice mail was sweet. I might have listened to it three times.
“Hey, Crazy. I have no idea what time I’m going to get out of here, probably pretty late. Lane, back off . . . no, you don’t know her . . . oh, piss off, will you? Sorry about that. Do you want me to come by tonight? It could be after two. Let me know. I don’t want to wake you. Is it crazy that I want to see you, though? Ah, Nuts Girl . . . right then. Speak to you later . . . it’s me, George, by the way.” Click.
“It’s me, George, by the way” . . . funny.
I did want to see him, no matter what time it was. Now that I knew I had ten days, I was desperate to see him as much as possible.
I found myself being drawn to my laptop. I still hadn’t Googled the Brit, and it was time.
I started with images . . . nice. He really was so pretty. A lot of the expressions in his pictures were somewhat weird, but he also had a lot with that signature smirk, that Johnny Bite-Down face that I found impossible to resist. And why would I, really?
Then I moved on to the fan sites. There were a lot. Then I YouTubed his ass. I watched his interviews, I saw his paparazzi shots, and I saw the videos fans had made about him. I even watched interviews from when he was in His Better Half, the small independent film he’d shot before being cast in Time.
As I watched, I became more and more sad. He was so freaking great. He was exactly the same way in real life as he was in all those interviews. He was so adorable with the press. I could tell he was really nervous but very honest.
I’d had no idea he had such a fan base. I’d had no idea these magazine stories were as popular as they were. He’d had a respectable career up until then, but now that he’d been cast as Super-Sexy Scientist Guy? He was about to be huge.
What the hell was he doing with me? Was he with me? Did I want him to be with me?
Of course you do.
Ah, and here was Jack out on the town. Mostly he was photographed with other scruffy hipster guys, all with ball caps as well. Did I miss the memo about ball caps? Then a few pictures with a brunette . . . wait a minute, there were more than a few with this brunette, and on separate occasions.
I found one with a caption.
“Newly cast Time hunk Jack Hamilton and actress Marcia Williams, still refusing to acknowledge their relationship.” Huh. Curious. Well, it’s not as if he didn’t have a past before me. I mentally pushed this tidbit away and resumed my cyberstalking.
When I finally closed the computer, it was late. I showered quickly, in case Jack did come over, and put on the T-shirt he’d left behind. It was huge on me. Then I slipped under the covers and watched The Golden Girls, sending him a quick text before succumbing to sleep.
Hey, George, by the way. Yes. Definitely come over.
I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I was being cradled to a warm chest and kissed.
“Hmm? What?” I asked stupidly, opening my eyes.
“Shhhh, go back to sleep, Grace. It’s just me,” my Brit said.
I smiled sleepily. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” he whispered, pulling me into his nook. His hands slipped under my shirt and slowly ran up and down my back, soothing me back to sleep.
“How did your reshoots—?”
“We can talk in the morning. Go back to sleep,” he said, shushing me.
This time I listened. I drank in his scent, my own personal s’more, and drifted back to sleep.
The last thing I heard him say was my name, whispered with contentment.
Three seventeen A.M.
A phone was vibrating on the nightstand. It was on Jack’s side and he rolled toward me in his sleep, away from the offensive sound .
“Ugh,” I mumbled, crawling over him to turn it off. I was lying across his chest, trying to reach the phone, and in his sleep his hands came up to my breasts and he muttered, “Fantastic.”
I smiled through my own sleepy haze. I grabbed his phone and punched random buttons to turn it off. The room fell blessedly silent.
Yawning, I started to put it back on his nightstand.
His nightstand?
I was putting it back on the nightstand when I saw that he’d gotten a text. Angel Grace and Devil Grace fought for 1.7 seconds . . . guess who won?
>
I opened the text, sent from “M.”
Hey, where did you go? You disappeared. I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye from Marcia
seventeen
My sleep that night was thin. I tossed about, not caring whether I woke him up, but he slept peacefully, totally knocked out.
I thought about what the text might have meant and went through all of the likely reasons why this girl—the same one he’d been photographed with and the nature of whose relationship with him had been publicly questioned—would be texting him at such a late hour. There were many reasons, and most of them were innocent.
I, of course, chose to focus on the not-so-innocent.
Jack had left this Marcia in a bar somewhere after she blew him in the bathroom.
Jack had left this Marcia in her bed after fucking her senseless and then telling her he was going to take a piss but never returning.
Jack had left this Marcia at a party, surrounded by all the other naked women he had schtupped that night, neglecting to say good-bye to her personally.
But in the end, I had to let it all go. He owed me nothing. We’d known each other for only weeks, and I was leaving.
Of course, what I already knew about him told me that nothing like that had happened. I didn’t really honestly think that he had been with anyone else—not in that way.
Still, I would have liked to meet this Marcia. If for no other reason than to stop referring to her in my head as “this Marcia.”
I looked at him, slumbering quietly next to me, his body warming my bed. His arms were wrapped around my waist. His hands were on, as was quickly becoming tradition, my breasts. And I knew that he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
Which was troubling, because very soon, all this fantastic was going to have to end. As all true Scarletts do, I decided to think about that tomorrow. I snuggled back into his arms and tried to put it all out of my head.
I was up before Jack and decided to go for a run. I left him a note:
George, I went for a run, be back in an hour. Coffee is downstairs. If you wait to shower, I’ll join you. Then, you know, we can be all kinds of naked.
Gracie
I almost wrote “Love,” but I changed my mind at the last minute.
Chicken shit.
As I ran, I thought about how to tell Jack I was leaving. I knew he’d be happy for me and would realize what a tremendous boost this would be for my career. Hell, this would make my career. And we could work something out, right? I mean, he was crazy about me . . . at least, that’s what it felt like. He’d still want to see me when I was back in town. And he’d probably be doing press in New York. We could get together then, right?
Who are you trying to convince?
Then I thought about working with Michael. Shit, this was going to be a nightmare. I knew that I could handle it. I could be a professional. A professional who wanted to remove his balls and wear them as earrings.
Gross.
Obviously, there would need to be some kind of air-clearing ceremony, or at least some kind of ass kicking. But as the writer, he had some say in who was cast, and he must have been okay with working with me.
Of course he was—he wasn’t the one who was left with a smashed-up mess of a heart.
I ran faster.
When I got home, I noticed that Holly’s car was in the driveway. That was weird. She never came home during a workday. I let myself in the back door off the kitchen and heard her talking to someone. Jack must have been up.
I was rounding the corner, ready to start kissing on the Brit, when I saw who she was talking to.
“Hey, Grace. Good to see you again.”
“Michael! Hi! Holly, look, it’s Michael!” I said, surprised into the defensive.
“Yeah, I thought it would be a good idea for the two of you to talk. Ya know, hash things out,” Holly said, offering me some coffee as a peace gesture.
The air-clearing ceremony would be starting earlier than I’d planned.
I took a moment to really look at Michael, since yesterday all I could see was red. He was the same guy I’d gone to school with. If anything, age had made him better looking. Curly brown hair, sweet face, deep brown eyes. I remembered those eyes.
He was looking at me expectantly. “Grace, until I talked to Holly, I didn’t realize there was anything to hash out.”
“Well, I’m not surprised,” I said, walking forward with my finger pointed straight at him. “You left my apartment, never saying a word about what happened, and then all summer you—”
“Um, guys? Let’s be constructive here. Grace, why don’t you take him out on the terrace and you guys can talk there. You don’t want to wake our houseguest,” she said, hinting heavily, reminding me that Jack was still asleep upstairs.
“Humph. Whatever. Come on, O’Connell,” I huffed, taking my coffee and the chip on my shoulder outside. He followed with a twinkle in his eye and a wink at Holly. I saw them both.
Once outside, I turned on him.
“So, let’s get this out now and then not speak of it again, shall we?”
“Fair enough. Why don’t you start by telling me why you’re so pissed about something that happened so many years ago?” he asked, sitting in a lawn chair. I took the seat next to him.
“I don’t know. To be honest, I didn’t know I was still so pissed. But when I saw you yesterday, it brought all that rejection back and it just slammed into me,” I answered. It felt good to finally be able to unload this on him.
“Rejection? What are you talking about? I watched you date countless guys, most of them jerks, all through school. And then you jump me at a party, I foolishly tell you how I’d felt about you all those years, and then when I don’t instantly propose the next morning, you go back to treating me like your little buddy.”
“My little buddy? You were out the door before I even had the sleep wiped out of my eyes! And then you were such a dick to me the rest of that summer!” I yelled, angrily brushing a piece of hair away from my eyes.
“Grace, did it ever occur to you that when I woke up with you that morning, after wanting to be there for three years, I panicked? I mean, come on, you’re Grace Sheridan! The fact that you were even interested in me was beyond the realm of possibility! And then when you invited me back to your apartment . . . oh man. That night was, well, amazing.” He sighed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees in a way that was so familiar to me.
It was like ten years faded away instantly and we were sitting in the campus quad, arguing about Brecht and Stanislavski like the pretentious theater brats we were. Or arguing about whether to use the fifteen dollars we had between us to buy the new Toad the Wet Sprocket album or keep us in pitchers and chicken wings for two nights.
“If you felt like that, why did you leave? And why did things get so weird for us?” I asked, a wave of nostalgia passing over me that was so strong I could almost smell the Drakkar.
“Because I was twenty-one. Because you were twenty-one. Who knows, who remembers? Because we were idiots.” He laughed, and I felt myself begin to relax.
We stared at each other and I saw him—really saw him. I saw the boy I remembered, and now I saw the man he had become. The face was different somehow. More full, and the facial structure was stronger. It was a little careworn, and the laugh lines that had been there even in college were etched a little more deeply. His hair was still curly and the eyes full of mischief.
I thought about what he’d said. Did I treat him like a “little buddy” after we had sex? Maybe, out of self-preservation. And our friendship had cooled so quickly after that.
“Revisionist history . . . ,” I muttered.
“What? I didn’t catch that.”
“Revisionist history. One event, two sides, and over the years it changes and twists into what we need it to be,” I said, looking at my old friend.
“And it is history, Grace. It really is.” He smiled, taking my hand.
I was quiet for a moment, ta
king it all in. “You know, it really is great to see you,” I said shyly, remembering how much fun we’d all had together.
“You too.” He smiled again. “Oh, come here,” he said, and pulled me into a big bear hug.
I heard the French door open.
“Grace?” It was Jack, standing there in jeans, once again bare chested and barefoot.
I removed my arms from around Michael’s neck and smiled. “Good morning, Hamilton.”
After Michael went back inside to talk to Holly, I pulled Jack to me for a close hug. He still smelled like sleep, warm and toasty. But his eyes were chilly. When he returned my hug, it felt perfunctory.
“Did you get my note? You must have, you haven’t showered yet,” I said teasingly, making a show of sniffing his underarm.
He gave me a compulsory smile. “Yes, I got it, and no, I didn’t yet. Who’s the guy?”
Wow, he went right for it. “His name is Michael, and he’s an old college friend. I haven’t seen him in years.”
“A friend, a college friend. Okay.” He nodded, his face relaxing a touch.
“And he’s also a writer. In fact, he wrote the show that I had the meeting about yesterday, and I—”
“Oh, hell, Grace. I wanted to ask you about it last night, but you were so sleepy. How’d it go?” His face was animated again.
“Well, it went very well. In fact. I . . . I got the part,” I answered quietly, looking at him with hesitance.
His face broke into a huge grin. “Grace, that’s brilliant! Well done!” He swept me up and swung me around in a circle. “Oh, love, that’s fantastic! I am so proud of you!” he exclaimed, laughing while he twirled me. Without setting me down, he crushed his lips to mine.
Love? Proud?
I smiled into his kiss, my legs kicking in the air.
He finally set me down, hands settled firmly on my ass. “Let’s go get some coffee and you can tell me all about it,” he said, taking my hand and walking me into the kitchen.
Shit.
Michael looked at our entwined hands and raised an eyebrow to me. He then walked over to Jack and stuck out his hand. “Hey, man. I’m Michael O’Connell.”