by Lisa Ferrari
I go inside, drop my stuff, and flop on his sofa.
It’s weird being here when he’s not here.
But I also kind of like it. I have an incredible urge to snoop through his entire house, all his drawers and closets and stuff.
But I won’t. That would be messed up. Kellan trusts me in his home. I must honor that trust. Plus, it’s beginning to feel like my home as well. I can’t remember the last time I slept at my apartment.
I unpack, pull out my laptop and plug in my charger, take a quick shower, and put on clean clothes. I’m off until tomorrow, so I have some time to recover from my trip.
Except that I didn’t do any cardio or work out once during my trip the way Kellan instructed.
I should work out now.
But I just took a shower.
Maybe later.
I busy myself with my laptop, taking a seat out by the pool. But it’s chilly, so I go inside and flop on the sofa. It’s not as much fun without Kellan beside me.
I want to text him or call him on Skype but I don’t want to be the pesky, needy girlfriend constantly interrupting her man while he’s out working to bring home the proverbial bacon.
Claire, stop saying ‘proverbial’.
But mmm, bacon…
I go to the kitchen and do a cursory inventory of the refrigerator. No bacon. Just lots of fruits and vegetables and eggs, and frozen protein in the freezer, and ready-meals and condiments.
I pull out a chicken-and-asparagus meal and pop it in the microwave. It’s much better when eaten hot. I enjoy it on the sofa with my laptop.
I Google Nathan Wentworth (wondering if the verb form of ‘Google’ is capitalized) and spend the next three hours learning everything I can about him and scouring his social media channels and profiles, of which there are many. He’s been on Twitter since 2008 and he posts to Instagram several times per day, mostly pics of food, coffee, cool Manhattan stuff like pictures of buildings, as well as himself in myriad interesting poses and gracing a vast array of locales. Restaurants, clubs, the gym, the subway, what I presume to be his insanely-awesome penthouse apartment with a view of the city that is so gorgeous and so awesome it almost looks fake.
The next thing I know, it’s almost midnight.
I haven’t heard from Kellan.
Nor have I gotten any writing done.
Nor have I worked out.
Nor have I eaten in the past six hours. That means I’m two meals behind. But am I still supposed to eat if I don’t train?
It’s all so confusing.
How am I supposed to get ready for round two of the big film audition thing if Kellan’s not here to help me and to tell me what to do?
My eyes are closing and I’m getting nauseous with fatigue.
My phone pings. It’s a text from Kellan.
Hi. Get home okay?
Fine. :)
How are you?
Tired. Hungry.
Missing you.
Miss you, too.
How’s work?
Another good day.
But Stacy is driving me crazy.
She won’t shut up about
getting her pro card
and she keeps
making mistakes, undercharging people.
She’s talking a mile a minute.
I think maybe she’s
on coke or something.
Probably just too many fatburners.
This is the LAST time
I’m using her as an assistant.
I should’ve hired YOU.
You want to fly to meet me at
my next stop in Dallas?
I consider it; I do want to see him. And we had so much fun working his booth at the show down in Hollywood a couple months ago. Even though Stacy was there photobombing us and making ill-timed suggestions about Kellan and me. But I have to work, so I can’t.
I would but I have to work.
It’s only 3 more days.
Then you’re all mine.
Yes…
I don’t mention that I haven’t trained or stuck to my nutrition plan. I hope he doesn’t ask.
I’m going to bed now.
OK
I want to suggest Skype sex like we had last night. Or I want Kellan to suggest it. But he sounds tired. And I am as well.
Kellan texts:
Sweet dreams.
Don’t forget your
fasted cardio
in the morning.
I won’t.
I already know I’m going to screw it up somehow and not do it.
Kellan texts:
I love you.
I love you, too.
Night.
Night.
I close my laptop and go to bed.
Kellan’s bed is huge. It seems even huger without Kellan in it with me. My previous fantasy about rolling around naked in it and masturbating myself into a sexual coma doesn’t happen. I’m kinda tired and kinda down, although I’m not sure why.
I have to be at work at 10:00 a.m. sharp.
I set my alarm for 7:00 for the fasted cardio. One hour on the treadmill and I should then have plenty of time to cool down and shower and eat and be at work on time.
I OPEN MY eyes and the bedroom is bright and sunny.
It doesn’t look like seven o’clock in the morning.
I check my phone: 9:43.
What the crap?
I want to cry.
I am instantly wide awake, pumped full of adrenaline.
I check my phone’s alarm and discover that when I set it for seven, I didn’t set the a.m./p.m. It’s still on p.m.
There’s no way I can make it in seventeen minutes.
I try anyway.
I throw on my work clothes, my baggy work pants and my loathsome white tuxedo shirt.
I brush my teeth, wad my hair up in a lopsided bun, grab my phone and purse and a protein bar and jump into my little red Pontiac.
I break the speed limit the whole way there and clock in at 10:09. Not bad, but still nine minutes late.
I’m the last one to enter the ballroom and everyone is already working. Nancy is monkeying around with a bunch of floral centerpieces. She gives me the look when I come in. She doesn’t say good morning. Crap.
The rest of the shift passes without incident.
Almost.
On my way into the ballroom, I’m carrying a tray of dinners and for some reason my shoe catches on the squeaky-clean hardwood dance floor. And I trip.
The big black oval tray and all ten meals go flying.
They hit the floor.
Food goes everywhere.
The noise is insane, with plastic lids spinning on the dance floor.
The guy on the stage giving his speech stops speaking and looks at me. The whole room looks at me. Nancy most of all. She sends me to the kitchen to get ten more meals while the staff goes about cleaning up my mess, using white towels to push the food into piles.
I want to jump up my own ass and die.
So, other than that, the shift passes without incident.
Chris doesn’t come and talk to me like he normally does, which is weird but also a relief.
When I get back to Kellan’s, I wash my work clothes for tomorrow and resume my place on the sofa, scouring Nathan’s social media.
Kellan texts me later and says Dallas is crazy and he’s not sure if we’ll be able to Skype later. He asks if my training and eating are on schedule.
I lie my ass off and say yes.
THE NEXT SEVERAL days are more of the same. I’m obsessed with Nathan Wentworth, I’m skipping workouts, not doing my morning cardio, blowing off my weight training sessions, half-assing it at work, and showing up late. But I manage not to drop any additional trays in the ballroom, which, until recently, is something I’ve never, ever done. Kellan doesn’t call on Skype and his text messages become steadily fewer. When I do hear from him, it’s a quick one or two messages to say he’s in New Orleans or Boston or Miami and things are going well but he�
�s exhausted.
Our exchanges usually end with me asking a question he doesn’t answer.
I tell myself he’s busy; that’s all it is. He’s not banging Stacy every night. They each have their own room. It’s just business.
I start getting texts from Nathan, though. A lot of them. He’s excited about my books. He says he has some publishers interested. International rights are being discussed. Film rights, too. A four-book contract is not out of the question, including a hybrid deal where I would get to keep the ebook rights, which would be totally awesome.
Saturday evening, I am at work, carrying trays of dirty dishes and glasses out of the ballroom and into the kitchen to the dishwasher. It’s a wedding. People are dancing. But it’s winding down. A lot of people have already gone home. So now we go through the room, cleaning up as much as we can so when the lights come on at midnight all we have to do is linens and stack chairs.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a pic message from Kellan. He’s on stage, posing, wearing little black Speedo-like posing trunks. He’s all oiled up and shiny. He looks good. It’s not a selfie, though. Stacy must be in the front row, snapping pics on Kellan’s phone.
I refuse to get sucked into a downward spiral of paranoia and jealousy.
It’s business.
That is his job.
That’s all.
AT LAST, SUNDAY night rolls around. I’m home from work early because the wedding was small and when Nancy asked for volunteers to clock out early, I was the only one who raised my hand. I wanted to get the heck out of there, so I could be home when Kellan arrives.
But he’s already there when I walk in.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
He looks exhausted. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so exhausted.
He immediately sweeps me into his arms and hugs me so tight I can scarcely breathe.
It’s wonderful.
He’s home. We’re together. At last.
To my surprise and utter delight, Kellan takes me to the sofa, undresses me, and makes love to me. I would’ve liked to shower first, but once his mouth is on mine and he’s inside me, I forget about everything. There is only him and me and our bodies and our hearts joining as one.
And I’m happy once more.
SOMEHOW, WE WIND up on the carpet in front of the fireplace, spooned in post-coital bliss.
My stomach growls.
Kellan laughs. “Hungry?”
“Very.”
We get up and he prepares a huge skillet of scrambled eggs. He cuts up some tomatoes, covers them with cottage cheese, and spoons the eggs on top, one bowl for each of us. It’s incredible. The tomato juice mixes with the cottage cheese to make a yummy cream sauce. The eggs and cottage cheese also combine to form a unique flavor.
After we eat, Kellan asks how my training has been going.
I know I can no longer maintain my charade. “Um, not that good, actually.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been busy working and writing and going back and forth with Nathan about my books, and without you here to help me I guess I kind of fell off the wagon.”
I wait for him to get pissed, like he did that time in the movie theater, but he doesn’t.
We go to the gym and he has me stand on the scale.
I’m up eight pounds.
Kellan weighs himself to check the scale’s accuracy. He weighs me again.
I weigh the same. Still up eight pounds.
Crapola.
“How did you gain eight pounds?” Kellan asks. “Have you not trained or eaten your meals at all?”
I shake my head, coming clean.
“Claire! What the fuck?!”
“Don’t yell at me! I’ve been busy. Besides, you’ve been running around half the country with Little Miss Pearl Necklace. How many training sessions have you missed?”
“None, thank you. I even had to do burpees and lunges in my hotel room several days because there were no weights or machines in the fitness center, just cheap, malfunctioning treadmills and bikes. Stacy and I did a great leg workout on the hotel stairs, though. My legs are still sore.”
“Yeah. I bet they are. Probably from fucking her standing up.”
Uh-oh. I said it.
“Oh, Jesus, Claire. Not this again.”
But I can’t stop myself. “Bullshit. I saw that pearl necklace she was wearing in the car the day you totally blew me off. Did you come on her tits? Her perfect, Beverly-Hills-plastic-surgeon, ten-thousand-dollar tits?”
“Did you have a good time getting fucked in the ass by Nathan Hamburger Wellington in the men’s room of the dance club you went to?”
“Hamburger Wellington? His name is Nathan Wentworth.”
“Whatever. I saw the way he was trying to butt-fuck you on the dance floor. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Why haven’t you been training and following your meal plan? Don’t you want this part?”
I consider it for the first time in many days. Everything has sort of taken a back seat to what I’m daring to hope is the real beginning of my writing career; the career I’ve been working at for longer than Denise was working at becoming a partner in her law firm.
“In light of the interest in my writing on the part of Nathan and his company, maybe I don’t want the part. Maybe I don’t want to subject myself to the random, idiosyncratic, superficial judgmentalistic bullshit required to be in their little movie.”
“It’s not a little movie, Claire. I talked to Aaron today. Dreamworks and Warner Brothers are both interested in co-financing with Paramount. They’re talking about upping the budget. They’re even talking about each company putting in two-hundred million and making it six-hundred million. Which would be the biggest budget in the history of Hollywood. T.J. Abrams is interested in directing. Aaron is shitting his pants because he could be replaced.”
“How could he be replaced? He’s the director and it’s his script. His and Rami’s.”
“How did Steve Jobs get fired from Apple, the company he founded? For six-hundred million dollars, anybody could be replaced. You. Me. Aaron. Rami. Sheila. Heather. Remember how Megan Fox got fired off the third Transformers because she made a Hitler comment about Michael Bay and when Spielberg heard about it he said fire her ass? And guess what? She got fired. Nobody’s too big.”
“How? I mean, why? Six-hundred million? For a movie with you and me? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Ever since Garth Stone dropped out of that stupid haunted library movie, which, let’s be honest, was a bad idea to begin with, but ever since then, when he got involved in our project, things have changed. He’s huge. He’s Hollywood royalty. He’s box office gold. At this point, even my part is no longer secure.”
“What?”
“I could be replaced in a heartbeat.”
“Who could replace you?”
“They’re talking about Henry Cavill or Ben Affleck. Jason Statham is interested. So is Channing Tatum, and he has the body. He proved it in his Magic Mike movies. Daniel Craig is also interested. Even Liam Niesen is interested.”
“Isn’t he too old? He looks nothing like you. Or Channing Tatum.”
“He wants to do a Raging Bull-style transformation and get all yoked-up like Stallone did for Expendables.”
“Jesus. This thing has gotten big. Now I’m totally freaked out. There’s no way in hell I can get that part. You know they’re going to give it to Calista Roth.”
“Not necessarily. She’s more high profile than you, that’s true, but she’s also a lot more expensive. Aaron said he talked to her agent and her manager and her publicist, and she wants twenty million.”
“Think they’ll give it to her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But if they can get her for twenty million and you for a hundred-and-fifty grand and you’re both good on camera, they might go with you.”
“You think so?”
“It’s possible. They’re going to do whatever will make the most profi
t. If they spend six-hundred million, they have to spend at least another three-hundred million on advertising. Probably more. That puts the grand total close to a billion dollars.”
“That’s insane.”
“Maybe. But when people hear it’s the first billion-dollar movie, they’re going to go see it. Everyone is going to go see it. Probably more than once.”
“Oh Lord, okay now I’m scared. I may as well give up now. I may as well stop training and go back to my writing. Now that Nathan is interested in me. Um, I mean, in my work.”
“I thought you wanted to be in the movie with me.” Kellan sounds disappointed.
“I do. At least, I did. I guess I do. I don’t know. Fuck.” I feel myself starting to lose it.
Kellan comes and puts his arms around me. His big, strong arms.
He looks into my eyes. “I want this role,” he says, softly. “As much as anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. But I want it to be with you. Now, to be completely and totally one-hundred percent no-bullshit honest with you, if they cast me and not you, I’m planning on taking the part. I think you know that and can fully understand that, right?”
“Right. Of course. You’d be a moron not to take it if you can get it. It’ll take your career to a whole ’nother level.”
“Right. Even if I suck and the movie blows and it loses more money than Cutthroat Island and The Lone Ranger combined, I won’t regret having done it. And… if they offer you the part, but not me, I fully expect you to take it. Okay? I would always regret it if you didn’t. But the thing I will regret most is if you and I aren’t together.”
“You mean… in the movie or in real life?”
“Both. But especially the second one.”
My phone pings and the romantic moment full of hope and promise and laden with the possibility of a future with Kellan hangs in the balance.
My phone pings a second time and the moment is pretty much ruined.
My phone pings a third time.
“Jesus, answer it.”
I check it and see that it’s texts from Nathan.
I very much enjoyed
dancing with you.
You’re the most beautiful,
sexy writer I’ve ever met.
I look forward to your
visiting Manhattan,
again, quite soon.
Crap.
My hopes for my writing and publishing career go down the toilet with a few little lines on my phone.
