Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story

by Rebecca Norinne Caudill

  I know what you’re thinking. I even thought it myself: he was buttering me up because he thought I could help him. With anyone else that would have been the case, absolutely. But with Cameron? I didn’t think so. What I did think was that Cameron was too good for this ugly, superficial town. How had it not broken him yet, I wondered.

  By the time I finished my coffee, we’d stopped talking about work altogether and moved on to what life was like growing up in a small town in rural Ohio, then he’d asked me what I’d been like in high school, and finally we regaled each other with stories about the ridiculous situations we’d gotten ourselves into as only 21-year-olds could. Coffee turned into dinner and by the time we finished eating our meal, we’d spent several hours in each other’s company.

  He walked me to my car and, like a perfect gentleman, didn’t try to put the moves on me. I fully expected him to and maybe I wouldn’t have turned him down. No, that’s a lie. I definitely wouldn’t have turned him down. But he didn’t, so that was that. Instead, as I was pulling out of the parking lot, he approached my car and invited me to go hiking with him and a group of friends that Saturday.

  And that’s how we started hanging out.

  That hiking trip led to barbeques, which led to trips to the beach, and group outings to Disneyland. Have you ever been to Disneyland after dark when all the kids are gone? It’s so much fun. Don’t laugh, but I have a season pass. On this one particular day it was like 110 degrees out and we were on a mission to ride every single water ride because it was too hot to wait in line for anything else. It was about 7 p.m., the sun was still shining, and we’d already dried off from our last ride when we got in line for Splash Mountain. When it was our turn to load into the imitation log, I sat in front with Cameron positioned directly behind me. I know there’s nothing sexual about an amusement park ride, much less one at Disneyland, but when you find yourself firmly ensconced between your crush’s legs, your mind goes to a lot of different places. Let’s just say I was giddy.

  You should see the picture they took as we went down that last huge drop. I look like the biggest weenie, my eyes screwed shut and my mouth hanging open in a high-pitched squeal of terror. Cameron though? He’s as beautiful as ever, his hands thrown up in the air and a giant smile spread across his face like he was having the best time in the world.

  I think that was the day I started to see him in a different light.

  But what you really want to know is when I realized I was in love with him, isn’t it? That’s an easy one to answer.

  About a month later he’d texted to ask if I had any plans that coming Saturday. Since I didn’t, I asked what he had in mind, not thinking too much about the question. We were buds, we hung out a lot and there was nothing odd about the request. He wrote back quickly, telling me it was a surprise but I should dress comfortably. Even though I badgered him, he wouldn’t give me any other hints and all sorts of different scenarios ran through my head. In the end, none of them were correct.

  He picked me up at 7 a.m., a cup of my favorite coffee in hand, and asked me if it was okay if we brought Duke. Before I could respond, he’d grabbed my dog’s leash off the back of the kitchen door and Duke came bounding into the room, barking and jumping like a maniac. You know how they say animals can tell good people from bad? Well Duke loved Cameron from the very first moment he’d rubbed his head and called him a good boy. Sometimes I’d watch the two of them together and think maybe that damn dog loved him even more than me.

  Even once we’d gotten on the freeway, Cameron still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. Twenty minutes later we pulled up to a nursing home which not what I expected. He turned to me, a sheepish grin on his face. “I hope you don’t mind. I volunteer here once or twice a month and it occurred to me last time that Duke would be spoiled rotten.”

  I couldn’t guess how Cameron knew I’d have a good time that day, but it was amazing. My dad’s parents, who I’d spent so much time with as a child, had been gone for fifteen years. I hadn’t realized how much I missed them until I’d been surrounded by people from their generation.

  Throughout the day, I watched him interact with nurses, orderlies, and patients and saw how everyone responded to him. You could tell the patients especially really cared for him. And I became convinced that Mrs. Jones, who was at least 95 years old, fancied herself madly in love with him. As we went to leave, he shook hands with everyone, and some of the women even gave him hugs and kisses, asking him to come back soon. Mrs. Jones stole herself a number of those kisses as well as smacked him on the ass the last time he’d walked past her.

  You expect someone who looks the way he does to behave a certain way. Guys like that have expectations about the way people will treat them, but that wasn’t Cameron. He was unfailingly kind to everyone all the damn time. And when someone was the opposite of type of person who surrounded you Monday through Friday – people you would never interact with if your career didn’t depend on it – that could be a really magnificent feeling. When someone emailed you to ask how your day was – nothing else, just to see how you were doing – that was pretty damn wonderful. And when they’d show up at your house on Saturday morning with coffee and orange juice because you were both hung over as fuck? That deserved a medal of honor. But that’s who Cameron was to me. And clearly he was special to other people as well.

  When we were back in his truck, Duke worn out from all of the attention he’d received, it hit me hard. I didn’t just like Cameron. I loved him. Truly, madly, deeply. Just like the randy Mrs. Jones.

  And that picture of us at Disneyland? I kept it hidden in the bottom drawer of my nightstand in a locked box that held my diary from high school, my map of the Louvre in Paris, the airplane stub from my first trip to London, and my very first teddy bear. That box held a lot of firsts, but that was only fitting. After all, Cameron was my first love.

  Yeah, I had it bad.

  So that’s how we met and how Cameron and I became the very best of friends. But now you’re curious about that other thing: how he became famous. That’s quite the crazy story.

  There’s a book that’s adored by millions of women around the world. Actually, adored is probably too trite a word to describe how they really feel. These women are obsessed with this series. For years there’d been rumors it was going to be optioned into a movie franchise, and then it happened but nothing ever came of it. One studio owned the rights, but when they couldn’t lock down a script the author approved, they’d sell those rights to a different studio. It was like a hot potato everyone wanted to get their hands on but no one ever managed to hold on to for any length of time.

  After awhile people stopped paying attention but then last year seemingly out of nowhere the author announced on her Facebook page that she was working with a major studio to bring it to the big screen. The industry went insane – again – and immediately entertainment magazines and gossip sites began speculating who would be cast as the male lead.

  That speculation was nothing though compared to the reaction of the fans. Whole campaigns were launched on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to lobby for the actors and actresses they’d been imagining for so many years. People tweeted directly at random Hollywood executives who had nothing whatsoever to do with its production in hopes of getting their favorites cast. It was madness, complete and utter insanity.

  And then when Broderick told me he’d been chosen to make The Ties That Bind, I knew my life was about to change dramatically. All of our lives, really.

  When the fandom found out he’d been named the director, they tracked down everyone who had anything to do with him and started stalking them on social media. Strangely, I began receiving tweets telling me who I should push for in casting, as if I had anything to do with Broderick’s decisions. It was as if overnight I’d become famous by proxy which was weird as shit.

  But it wasn’t just the fandom that had gone nuts. It seemed like every actor and actress in Hollywood – both known and unknown – wanted a
shot at the major roles. Some even leaked to the press they were in the running. Broderick hadn’t yet put a PR team in place because he actually loathed the whole philosophy behind public relations. And so quite suddenly my job description expanded exponentially. I wasn’t just doing PA duties anymore, but also began reaching out to bloggers on his behalf to offer them interviews in exchange for their help in stopping the negative rumors from escalating. If I hadn’t developed some sort of rapport with a handful of them early on I don’t know what would have happened when a particular actress with a really terrible, widely known drug problem started telling the world she was in talks for the female lead. While I cleaned up messes and put out fires about fake casting, Broderick and his team went about trying to find the actual actors and actresses they wanted for the roles.

  At first they looked at some of the big names, celebrities with name recognition who they could bank the success of the franchise on. But as time wore on it became increasingly clear it would be difficult to build a series of movies around the schedule of someone already so well established. That’s when they started looking at unknowns on the down low.

  You see where this is going, right?

  Again, I probably shouldn’t have said anything but one night over margaritas I mentioned that little known fact to Cameron who didn’t take me seriously. In fact, he laughed and told me I was crazy. He didn’t think he was right for the role but somehow, over the course of our enchiladas and tacos, I managed to convince him otherwise. Once I had him believing he was the right sort of actor for the part, I told him what I had learned. As the words left my mouth I knew it was wrong to have said anything about it at all, but since Hollywood was built on lies and deceit I figured I wasn’t the first person to have given someone I was close with a leg up on the competition.

  As the evening wore on, we got filthy stinking drunk, our margaritas leading to shots of Patron. You know those moments you look back on and can pinpoint exactly when things changed? And how sometimes you wish you could go back and stop yourself from doing the stupid thing you did? Well, for me, it was those shots of tequila. Where I’m concerned, nothing good ever came from drinking the stuff. And then the bar was closing and because my house was within walking distance, Cameron left his truck in the lot and came home with me.

  It probably wasn’t the wisest decision I’d ever made to invite him home with me but what was I supposed to do? I guess I could have sent him home in a taxi but the thought never crossed either of our minds. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t stayed at my place before. Okay, it wasn’t as if he and a bunch of others hadn’t ever stayed over. That was the first time it would be just the two of us. I swear to you though, none of that ever occurred to me. Sleeping at my place just seemed like the most obvious option and so we set off down the boulevard toward my place.

  We stayed up all night going over the various scenes he could choose to do for his audition tape. At one point he even tried to practice his lines, but by 4 a.m. he was reading with one eye squinted shut and his words were more slurred than not. I wasn’t much help either since when he tried to do a serious monologue about protecting his family, I’d laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. He implored me to be serious and I tried to but I’d just burst into a fit of giggles.

  Sometime in the five o’clock hour, exhausted but still giddy, I caught him staring at me with a pained look on his face. We had stopped talking about the audition a few minutes prior and had both been drifting in and out of consciousness. Or at least I had. Which was why I was surprised when he slid next to me and rested his hands on either side of my face. He said my name and drunk though I was, I recognized the change in his voice, his mannerisms. I could barely breathe, frozen in place, awareness dawning that this was the most intimately he’d ever touched me.

  I remember thinking I needed to pay attention, to focus on what he was saying, what he was doing. As I stared back, I silently willed him to kiss me the way I’d long imagined him doing so. When he gazed back at me with that hungry look a man gets when he’s contemplating a woman he wants desperately, I sobered right up.

  I can’t tell you how long we stayed like that, staring at one another while he held my face so tenderly in his hands, his eyes taking me in. I’m sure it was only a handful of seconds but it felt like hours passed as I silently begged him to do something to break the tension that he’d built between us. When he caressed my cheek with the pad of his thumb I almost sobbed out loud, the feel of his skin on mine an extraordinary sensation, one that I had wanted more than anything for so, so long. He’d touched my face before, but never like that. He’d also never looked at me before the way he looked at me then.

  I don’t know what came over me. I think it had to be the fire I saw burning bright in his eyes. I’d seen that look before from other men, but it had never affected me the way it did at that moment. I wanted Cameron to the depths of my soul – I wanted him in me – and I wasn’t going to let the moment pass. I could tell he wanted me too but I think he was too much of a gentleman to make a move in case it looked like he was trying to take advantage of me when I’d been drinking.

  In the split second before I could change my mind I leaned forward and kissed him ever so gently, just a slight touching of my lips to his. When at first he didn’t respond, I started to pull away but then something ignited within him because he kissed me back, only now he wasn’t being quite so gentlemanly. It felt like he was trying to consume me, kissing me like a dying man whose only chance at survival was to be found in my lips.

  I reveled in it. My God, how I reveled.

  I’d never put much stock in kissing as a standalone activity but now I knew that was only because I’d been doing it wrong my entire life. Or rather, the boys I’d kissed hadn’t known what they were doing. I don’t mind telling you it was transcendent. Kissing other men had always been … nice, but it had only ever served as the lead up to something more, the amuse bouche, if you will, that arrived before the appetizer. But Cameron’s kiss? That kiss was on a whole other level. It was the main course and dessert all rolled into one. There were lips and teeth, sucking, nibbling, and biting, our tongues caressing, dancing a tango inside my mouth in a rhythm I longed for his cock to mimic below.

  I straddled his lap and our kiss deepened as I rubbed myself against him. His hands clutched my hips and he pushed me down onto his erection and with the exact right pressure, he urged me on, rocked my body against his hard, delicious cock, my strongest desires made real. I was on fire, the flames of my lust licking at my body.

  It was exquisite torture but it wasn’t enough. I wanted his hands on my naked body, wanted us skin to skin. I remember thinking our clothes were a ridiculous impediment to what we both knew was going to happen. I broke away and pulled my shirt off over my head, revealing a plain white cotton bra. Not exactly the lingerie I’d been wearing when I fantasized about this moment, but there it was … and there I was, on display to him for the very first time. He’d seen me in my bathing suit plenty of times before and wasn’t as if didn’t often wear low cut tops to emphasize some of my best features, but being that close to him, knowing it was only a matter of a few expert flicks of his fingers to be bared to him completely was exhilarating.

  The sight of my breasts so close to his face – offered up to him in supplication – entirely changed the mood between us. He’d been ravenous for me but now he was worshipful. Slowly, he dragged his hands from my waist to cup my breasts, and ran his thumbs over my raised nipples through the thin fabric of my bra. The torture of that caress was almost enough to make me come right then.

  I couldn’t stay still, didn’t want to, so I rocked my hips along his steely shaft, wanting so badly to come. With a lustful haze of wanting unlike anything I’d ever known, I nuzzled my lips against his neck and when he groaned I captured his skin between my teeth and bit down. Startled, he dug his fingers painfully into my flesh. I recall shushing him, as he rubbed at his neck. I felt terrible for causing him pain and I didn’t qui
te understand why I had bit him in the first place. Like Jamie Foxx so brilliantly said, “blame it on the alcohol.”

  His hand dropped from his neck and his eyes held mine. His breathing deepened and the mood shifted again. My aggression seemed to have torn something loose in him, broke the careful restraint he’d shown. I swear he growled before pulling me in for a soul-crushing kiss, our lips mashing against one another as he savagely invaded my mouth with his tongue.

  He tore my bra off and began to feast on my left breast while he rolled the bud of my right nipple between his strong, capable fingers. He wasn’t gentle about it and I didn’t ask him to be. Didn’t want him to be, actually. I wanted the pain of it, wanted to feel him on my body long after this experience ended.

  The more he worshiped my breasts, the harder I rode him, pressing my body down onto the rock-hard bulge in his jeans, thinking that it’d be so much better if we were both naked and his cock was actually inside of me. The more I pictured what it would be like to have him thrusting into me, the closer to orgasm I came and then, all at once, I shattered into a thousands shards of incandescent light. My body tingled from the top of my head to the tips of my toes as I screamed out his name and begged him to fuck me.

  He stopped sucking on my breasts and looked at me questioningly.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Please just fuck me this once. I need you inside of me. You can’t know how badly I’ve wanted you inside of me.”

  And then he was kissing me again, carrying me across the living room toward the back of my house. He managed to kick open the door to my bedroom without ruining it or the wall that it crashed into, and then he tossed me onto my bed. I lay on my back in nothing but my jeans while at the foot of the bed Cameron took off his clothes. I watched in greedy, open-mouthed awe, the reality of the body before me so much better than it had been in my deepest, darkest fantasy. His boxer briefs tossed somewhere behind him, his penis jutted out in front of him, thick and heavy, begging for me to love every huge inch of it. He was bigger than I had imagined, even bigger than I thought given I’d been riding him like a cowgirl just seconds before. His cock was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen but its size gave me a moment of pause.