“Okay. We can do that. Come on. I’ve got you.”
His knees went as soon as he stepped off the barstool. He didn’t so much fall as fold. He sank down slowly to the floor and I went with him. At first he hunched in a fetal position, but I needed him to stretch out and relax his diaphragm and chest, so – like I’d done a hundred times or more in the gym – I took hold of him and gently showed him where I wanted his limbs to go.
Chase had always been a dream client in so many ways, and he took direction well. I had him lying flat on the tiled floor, his chest rising and falling rapidly in time with his panicked breaths. “It’s okay,” I said, and touched my fingers to his neck. His pulse was strong, rapid and regular.
“Is it bad?” he said, his eyes wide.
“No, it’s great. Your heart’s fine.”
“Really? Because I can’t feel my hands.”
“Yeah, that’s because you’re hyperventilating,” I said. “You remember the yoga we did together?”
He nodded, still gasping.
“Remember the breathing? In through the nose, slow and deep. Exhale through the mouth.” I did a couple of rounds to remind him. It took him a moment, because he couldn’t get past the urge to open his mouth and gulp as much air as possible, but then he found his rhythm.
“Awesome,” I said. “Well done. Stay with the breath.”
He looked up at me, his lips pursed on an exhale. His eyes were shiny with unshed tears and I could tell this wasn’t the first time. He had not been kidding when he said he was stressed.
“How’s your chest?” I said. “Does it feel tight?”
“Not so much now, no. It’s better.”
“It doesn’t feel like someone’s squeezing or pressing on it?”
“No.”
“Any pain here?” I reached out and touched the left side of his jaw, sweeping my hand down his neck and over his arm. On reflection I must have given myself away, caressing where I meant only to indicate, because the darkness in his eyes shifted – if only for a second – from fear to confusion.
“No,” he said. “Why? Do you think I’m having a heart attack?”
“No. I think you’re having a panic attack. If you were having a heart attack you’d have gone gray in the face and keeled over by now.”
“I did keel over. I’m on the floor, Finn.”
I stretched out next to him, to keep him company. “There. Now so am I. You’re okay, trust me. Your pulse is strong, your color’s good. How are your hands feeling?”
Chase took another couple of slow breaths. “Tingly,” he said. “Oh God. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.”
“You’re not. You’re cool.”
“No,” he said. “I’m nuts. Sane people don’t hide from their agents in pool cabanas.”
“They do if their agent is Angie Lorde.”
That got me a laugh, which was great. If he was laughing he was relaxing.
“You forget,” I said, warming to my theme. “I’ve met her. If you took it into your head to move to Tierra del Fuego I wouldn’t judge you for it. Besides, it’s not like I’ve been the king of good decision making in the past few days.”
“I guess not.”
We lay there for a moment, silent, flat on our backs on my kitchen floor. We’d been in this position so many times before, side-by-side on exercise mats as I pushed him to match me crunch for crunch or showed him new stretches with resistance bands. And how many times had I laid there fantasizing about rolling over on top of him, his thighs parting under my body, his lips opening under mine?
I reached out and touched the back of his wrist, and this time I let my fingers linger deliberately. “Here. Let me get your pulse again.”
He exhaled and offered me his hand. Wide palm, strong wrists. I found the heartbeat thrumming under where the skin was softest.
“Thank you,” said Chase, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.
“For what?” I said, releasing his hand. I could feel the blood running to my groin and I returned my hands back to myself. It was awkward, but I’d learned a long time ago that it was impossible to be in Chase Morrow’s presence without having inappropriate thoughts.
“This,” he said. “Everything. For…for being on the floor with me.” He smothered a smile. “Why are you down here, anyway?”
“I don’t know. You were on the floor, so I was like ‘oh, all the cool kids are doing that now? Okay.’”
He laughed again.
“In case you didn’t notice, I was deeply pathetic in high school. A total follower.”
“Oh, you weren’t,” he said. “I know your type. You were the sports star. The untouchable jock.”
“Right. Says the prom king.”
Chase gave a little sniff. He seemed to be breathing properly now. “Anyway,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for keeping me company. And for making me feel a little less crazy.”
“No problem. That’s what friends do for each other.” I stared straight up at the ceiling as I spoke, timid of his reaction.
I heard him swallow. “Are we friends?” he said.
“I hope so.”
Chase exhaled, and turned his head, catching my eye. “So do I,” he said, with a million dollar smile. “It’s so hard to tell in this town, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It really is.”
I wanted to hold his hand again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d yearned to hold someone’s hand, and it was a weird longing. One that spoke of something way more complicated than simple lust.
He must have felt it too, whatever this was between us, because he returned his gaze to the ceiling. We both lay there staring upwards, watching the fan whirl slowly in the awful LA summer heat.
“I’m so sorry I got you electrocuted,” he said, after a while.
“Meh. It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t mean to scream at you. It was just…well, everything.” Clients and calcium deposits and crap. “Do you know how much it costs to get a pool drained? And then every day on top of that I’m dealing with huge egos and liars and Instagram fools who bring their horny dogs to work, and then vomit all over Ivy’s Pom.” I exhaled. “And then the Lorde called and…I don’t know. I guess I reached my limit. I feel like I’m one shaved head and an umbrella attack from a full-scale Britney meltdown.”
Chase sighed. “This fucking town.”
“Seriously.”
I watched the fan. For a first time in a while I felt something close to peace.
“So,” said Chase. “Tierra del Fuego, then?”
I laughed. “Ah, no. My passport just expired. That was another thing on top of everything else.”
“Shame. I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”
“I thought it was a rocky barren wasteland with no people?”
“Exactly,” said Chase. “Sounds lovely to me. The perfect antidote to LA.”
I wanted so badly to reach out and touch him again. It was so great talking to him like this, about things other than protein and obliques. That was the trouble with Chase. Unlike a lot of the beautiful people, he’d always struck me as genuinely nice, which made my crush all the deeper and more pathetic. If he’d been some dumb, handsome, closeted hunk of meat then maybe I could have already hate-fucked him and fired him as a client, but he wasn’t. He may have looked like a Greek God, but he was awkward, maybe too smart for his own good, and goofy in a way that I’d always found charming.
I don’t know what I had in mind when I said it. I don’t think I’d gone as far as to formulate some elaborate plan where I whisked him off somewhere romantic, somewhere where I could tell him that I desired him more than oxygen. No, I definitely hadn’t thought that far ahead, but I was already thinking how much more of this I wanted.
Whatever this was. Whoever thought lying next to someone on a kitchen floor could be so much fun?
“Be good to get out of LA, wouldn’t it?” I said, addressing my words directly to the ceiling fan.
“So goo
d,” said Chase, with a bedroom breathiness that made my balls override any further doubts I had about what I was going to say next.
“I know a place,” I said.
“Oh?”
“The perfect antidote to Southern California. Northern California. It’s cool, it’s quiet and you can walk around for miles without even seeing another human being, let alone being forced to talk at length about mindfulness or the price of avocados.”
I didn’t dare look at him. Once the words were out it was like shocked into silence at my own daring. All this time I’d been too nervous to even ask him out for a drink, and now I was asking Chase Morrow – the movie star – to come away with me.
He let out a slow breath. “That sounds amazing,” he said, and turned his perfect profile towards me. There was doubt in his eyes, but I’d said it now. No turning back. No point being so afraid of the word ‘no’.
“So,” I said. “Road trip?”
He smiled. That bright, expensive, beautiful Hollywood smile that was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “I thought you’d never ask.”
*
One thing about actors.
They’re all nuts.
Chase was no exception to this rule. We’d got out of LA fairly easily, having avoided the worst of the traffic, and now we were heading up I5 in a purple tinged dusk that had inspired his choice of music – Purple Rain.
“It’s a masterpiece,” he said, as the opening organ chords of Let’s Go Crazy rolled out over the car’s sound system. “I know some people say the extended version of Computer Blue is just self-indulgence, but they’re not seeing it in the larger context of the movie soundtrack. It’s a concept.”
“It figures,” I said. “That you’d have to be weird about something. Never suspected that thing might be Prince, but there we go.”
“How is it weird to think Prince was a genius? Everyone knew he was.”
“Yeah, but as an actor? You take his movies seriously? They sucked.”
Chase shook his head. “I don’t. Under The Cherry Moon is a hot mess, but it had to exist in order to give us the glory of Parade, which I think is even better than Sign O’ The Times. The movies were just part of his process.”
I laughed. “Oh God. Process.”
“What?”
“You’re starting to sound like an actor.”
“I am an actor,” he said. “And process is a thing. It’s a necessary part of the creative journey. Sometimes, when you’re trying to reach your destination, you find yourself in places that are even more interesting than where you were trying to get to.”
“And sometimes you make Under The Cherry Moon,” I said. “And win a Razzie. Did that win a Razzie?”
He giggled. “I think it won several, actually.”
“Oops.”
Chase swallowed a yawn and ran his fingers through his hair, which was also a subject that had been bothering him on and off since a brief bathroom pit stop when a couple of people had stared at him the way people often stare if they’re trying to figure out if you’re famous or not. “Do you think I should change my hair?”
“I think you should go full Britney and shave it,” I said, already sick of the question. “I’ve got an umbrella in the trunk. Shave it off and then the next time we have to stop for gas you can wave the umbrella about and scream.”
He gave me a sidelong look. “I’m serious, Finn. If someone recognizes me…shit, Angie’s probably already foghorning my absence all over town.”
I switched off Prince. “Okay,” I said. “We need some rules.”
“Rules?”
“Yes, rules. If this is supposed to be a mental health trip–”
“–which it is. Totally.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you agree. We’re trying to get away from the things that make us insane, and that includes all things Hollywood, okay?”
Chase nodded. “Okay.”
“Good. So. No celebrities, no premieres, no gofers, no agents, no pluggers, no goodie bag swag, nobody trying to cram their tongue up your ass, no D-Listed, no E!, no junkets, no pimping and definitely, definitely no TMZ. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” He still looked worried. “Come on, Chase. Look convinced. Isn’t faking emotion sort of what you do for a living?”
He bared his perfect teeth in a rictus grin. “Okay,” he said. “It’s all good. I’m happy. This is my happy face. See?”
“That’s a lot of teeth.”
He broke into a more natural smile. “Thank you. I get them from my mother. She’s from Montana, you know.”
“I didn’t know Montana was famous for its teeth.”
“It is. You can hardly walk five feet without coming across a T-Rex tooth.”
I laughed, trying to follow his train of thought. “And your mother is part T-Rex or something? Is her vision based on movement?”
He shook his head. “Misdemeanors. If you’re doing something you shouldn’t be, you’d better believe she sees you.” He drew his elbows into his chest and mimed a T-Rex trying to play a piano. “Also she can’t play the piano for shit. Tiny arms. Great teeth, though. Never had a cavity in her life.”
God, he was cute. A small, sensible part of me wanted to turn the car around and tell him straight that we could never, ever be friends, because I would never be able to stop wanting him.
But it was a very small part, and like most voices of reason, it got drowned out.
“Next time we stop,” he said. “I want to pick up some peroxide or something.”
“We’re still on the hair thing, huh?”
“It’s no big. I’m just trying out a character is all.”
I caught his eyes in the mirror. “Really, Chase? Don’t go all method on me. We’re supposed to be going sasquatch, not Marlon Brando.”
He laughed. It crinkled his nose. “Going sasquatch?”
“Something Angie said to me. Said you’d gone to ground. Gone sasquatch. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re going up to Bigfoot country and pretending we don’t exist for a while.”
Chase appeared to consider this. “Wait,” he said. “So you think Bigfoot is pretending not to exist?” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh my God. So you think there is a sasquatch?”
“When did I say that? Or even imply it? Besides, you just claimed to be part dinosaur…”
“Dinosaurs existed,” he said. “I’m serious, Finn. Do you believe in Bigfoot?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “Of course not.”
Chase sat back, took a beat. “I do,” he said.
Actors. Absolutely nuts.
3
It was just gone one in the morning when we checked into the Sasquatch Lodge, which would have been a no-tell motel if not for the fact that it seemed like everyone who had stayed there had told Trip Advisor that they’d done so. And not always in particularly flattering terms.
Despite the shitty reviews, they had one room available. “Ice machine’s outside,” said the clerk. “And it’s clean. No piss in it.”
“Thank you,” said Chase, with the kind of frozen politeness that I already realized he was way better at than me, having run the gauntlet of the red carpet and the kind of strangers who look you in the eyes and earnestly tell you they want to bear your children. “You’re very kind.”
The room was dark, with the sort of Seventies wood paneling that reminded me of a rapist’s basement. There were two double beds, each covered with a camo green comforter that might have been responsible for the smell in the room, but it was hard to tell. Our host had left a hell of a cloud of tobacco in his wake.
“It’s…nice,” said Chase, as the door closed behind us.
“Stop it,” I said. “It’s a dive.”
He shrugged and tossed his bag down on the bed. It creaked. “It’s one night,” he said. “We’ll find something better tomorrow.”
“We’d better. Oh God. It smells like the inside of a smoker’s lung.”
He
laughed and perched on the edge of the brown pleather chair to unlace his shoes. We’d both laughed a lot on the long drive up here, and I was already stupidly charmed by it. He had a loud, full-throated laugh, but also he had this giggle. An actual giggle, which bubbled out of him like a bird call whenever something struck him as funny. It was a strange sound to hear from a full grown man, especially one who was over six feet of carefully cultivated muscle.
“You wanted to get away from Hollywood,” he said, standing up and peeling off his shirt. “And this is as un-Hollywood as it gets.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that, mostly because the sight of Chase Morrow with his shirt off was enough to make me completely stupid. His belly was hard and flat, perfectly divided down the middle, his nipples stiff in the sudden chill. As he turned to go into the bathroom I saw that his jeans had slid far enough down his hips to show me those gorgeous dents at the base of his spine. All my misgivings came back at once.
How many nights had I laid awake thinking about him? Every time I worked with him I took some new piece of him home to bed with him, another page for my spank scrapbook. Somedays it was the obvious thing – the full, muscled curve of his amazing ass, or the tempting bulge of his cock in his sweaty shorts. Other days I’d linger on the shape of his lips or the way his blond-brown hair stuck to his temple in the heat. One night I’d gone to bed thinking about his feet, about how the tiny space between his big toe and second toe had to be the most perfectly proportioned toe gap since Michelangelo finished the feet of David.
It was safe to say I had problems.
And now I had the bigger problem of sleeping four feet away from the man who had made me run out of lubricant twice as fast as usual, and who had also rendered every single one of my consolation prize Grindr hookups as flat and unsatisfying as trying to bang cardboard.
I undressed and slithered under the grim, camo comforter. The sheets felt unpleasant, both scratchy and damp, and the bed squeaked every time I moved. So much for the prospect of sneakily rubbing one out in his holy presence.
“The water pressure’s good,” said Chase, coming out of the bathroom. “At least that works.”
“Works at what? Giving you hookworms?”
Going Sasquatch Page 3
