Gravity Happens
By Monica Alexander
Copyright 2013 by Monica Alexander
ISBN: 978-1-3013-2235-0
Cover Image: (c) micropix / www.fotosearch.com Stock Photography
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or personals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
The information in this book is distributed as an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Epilogue
About the Author
Playlist
Chapter One
Logan
“They’re still out there,” my dad said in disbelief.
“I know. They’ll probably be out there all day, and you staring out the window isn’t going to make them go away.”
He turned around and faced me, so I looked up from my phone where I was texting my boyfriend, Jase. My dad looked agitated. He’d pretty much looked that way for two weeks.
“What, Dad?” I asked in exasperation, even though I already knew exactly what had him ticked off.
He shook his head. “They’re like vultures, just waiting for that juicy little picture or story that they can print about you. It’s sick.”
I sighed. He’d been saying things like that since the first photographer had shown up in front of our house three days after I’d come home from college. The second one showed up later that same day, followed my three more. And they’d been camped out ever since, just waiting for me to leave the house and do something interesting.
When my dad realized this, he’d started pacing in front of the windows constantly, peeking out every few minutes to see if the paparazzi were still lurking, and sighing a lot when he realized they were.
Of course they were.
He’d even tried calling the police, but they wouldn’t do anything since it was a public street, and the photographers were right at the edge of our property line. That made my dad even madder, and he started muttering things about gated communities.
I hoped he wasn’t thinking about moving. I’d grown up in the house we lived in. I loved it. It was right on the Intercoastal Waterway, it was big but comfortable, and it felt like home. If he suggested moving, I was going to fight him on that idea.
I wished he’d just relax, but I knew what he was thinking. It was part of the reason why we’d moved to Florida when I was three. He didn’t want me raised in a place where my every move was watched and catalogued and recorded for the gossip rags. He’d seen my mother’s face plastered all over magazines for years, and he vowed to shelter me from that for as long as he could.
And I think he was frustrated that I was no longer sheltered. But I was the one who’d gone and fallen in love with Jason Brady, movie star extraordinaire, four months earlier, and I knew what I’d been getting myself into when I’d made that decision. I’d also been dealing with the paparazzi on a regular basis back in L.A., but this was my dad’s first taste of how my life had changed since I’d started school at USC and shacked up with one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood. He still wasn’t used to it.
For the first few days I’d been home for Christmas break, everything was quiet, and I was so relieved to be able to go outside without the threat of having my picture taken. I’d shopped, gone to dinner with some of my high school friends, and I’d even gone out to a club on South Beach, but I guess someone had spotted me, because my picture ended up online the next morning, and my dad went nuts.
He might have gone nuts because I was photographed with a drink in my hand, and I was only eighteen, but I think he was equally annoyed that the media circus had followed me east. Since then I’d been staying in since my dad was calmer when I was safely at home, but Jase was headed into town, and I planned to show him where I’d grown up. We were going to have fun. We weren’t going to hide.
And my dad was just going to have to deal with it, because I was getting stir crazy being cooped up in the house. I missed my boyfriend, and so what if someone saw us together. We’d gone public two months earlier, and at first the media went into a frenzy because it was the first time Jase had dated anyone publicly after breaking up with his girlfriend of two years, Chloe St. James, back in January. But over time they’d calmed down when they realized Jase and I were happy, stable, and probably a little too boring to be newsworthy.
Our picture still ended up online frequently when we were leaving a club or a restaurant or if we were at an event, but mostly we laid low and stayed in, usually at Jase’s house in the Hollywood Hills. And we didn’t really do anything scandalous.
It was the opposite of how Jase had been when dating Chloe. They were media darlings who stopped for photos whenever they were out, talked openly about their relationship to the media, and had been touted as ‘Hollywood’s Most Adorable Couple’ during the two years they were together. Then she’d openly cheated on him with the producer of a film she was starring in, which had caused a media frenzy in its own right.
And I think all of that made Jase rethink his outlook on life and how much he wanted to be in the spotlight. When we met, he’d been incredibly skittish about being in the public eye. He’d actually been hiding out from the paparazzi the first night we met.
Aside from that, he was also wary of relationships in general after having been burned so bad by Chloe. He hadn’t dated anyone in months, and he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. But we hit it off almost immediately. He’d asked for my number and actually called. Then we talked on the phone for a month before our first date. And after that night, we were pretty much gone over each other.
But what I learned was that when Jase Brady fell in love, he fell hard. So it was a good thing I was there to catch him. And we’d spent most of the past few months together, being sickly in love since I’d fallen pretty hard for him, as well.
He hadn’t been filming, and aside from a few media appearances for his new movie, I’d practically lived at his house. This break was the first time we’d been apart in a while, and I wasn’t a fan of being separated. I could tell Jase wasn’t either. He texted me round the clock, and even though I knew he was keeping busy going out with his friends, going to Lakers’ games and spending the holidays with his family, he missed me. And I liked that.
I actually wasn’t expecting to see him until I was back in L.A. the following week, but on Christmas morning while we’d been Skyping, he’d lifted up something to show me, and I realized – then screamed and covered my mouth – that it was a plane ticket to Ft. Lauderdale. Now I was anxiously awaiting his arrival. He’d texted to let me know he’d landed and was waiting in the car he’d rented for the week. His new security guy, Charlie, was getting his luggage, and as soon as everything was loaded in the car, he’d be on his way to me.
I felt like I’d been waiting so long to see him that the fact that he was now in the same time zone as me felt very surreal. I was almost as anxious as my dad, but for a completely different reason, although I knew my dad was slightly on edge because I was bringing a boy home for the first time. For the most part he couldn’t have cared less that Jase was famous.
My dad had grown up in L.A. and had been married to my mom, the outlandishly famous actress, Alana Davis, once upon a time, so fame didn’t do anything for him. It was more the fact that he knew how serious Jase and I were, and I think he was afraid he was losing his little girl. But the fact that he was losing her to a celebrity was a double hit.
“Dad, come sit down, have a beer and relax,” I encouraged him. He really needed to let this crap with the paparazzi go. He was going to give himself a heart attack, and he was only thirty-nine. “I don’t need you getting all stressed out before Jase arrives. I want him to like you, and I want you to like him.”
My dad chuckled, as if to silently say, ‘yeah right, like that’s going to happen’, and I was irritated that he was so skeptical of a guy who was incredibly sweet and caring and devoted to me. But my dad had a very negative experience with my mom – she’d cheated on him twice to get ahead in her career – so he was skeptical of all things Hollywood, especially actors. I knew Jase would have to work hard to prove that he was grounded and not at all like my mom.
But that wouldn’t be hard, because Jase was incredibly down-to-earth. He’d grown up in a really stable family with parents who, although they had money, didn’t act like it. They were actually a lot like my dad. And although they’d supported their son’s desires to act at an early age, they made sure his fame didn’t go to his head.
They’d always treated him the same as they treated his three sisters – Mia, Tara and Nora – never giving him the right to think he was better than anyone because of what he did and how the world viewed him. I actually loved his family since they were so normal, and aside from my dad, my family was anything but normal.
My dad crossed the room to sit at the kitchen table with me. I stood, grabbed him a Sam Adams from the fridge and placed it in front of him.
“This boy is really worth all of that garbage?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the front yard.
“Yes, he is,” I said firmly.
I really hoped he’d drop the attitude by the time Jase arrived. It would be a long evening if he didn’t. But at least after tonight, I would have covered all my bases. My dad was the last person in my life to meet Jase.
My mother loved him, but that was because she was thrilled that I was dating a famous actor who she thought was hot. She’d been an A-list actress since pretty much right after I was born, and although I didn’t live with her while I was growing up, I spent every summer at her house in L.A. And because of that, I knew she loved fame more than she loved anything else. It was what drove her and my dad apart and what had kept her from having meaningful relationships with me or my little sister, Skylar.
There was always something more important than her family, be it a movie she was filming, her beauty treatments that kept her looking ten years younger than she really was, her workouts with her trainer, or any number of social functions that showed she was still as relevant as ever in Hollywood.
She was definitely not one of those actresses who fades into the background and becomes a more dignified representative of their craft, like Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts. No, she was like Demi Moore, dating men half her age and going places where she could see and be seen. And even though she’d been acting for close to twenty years, she was only thirty-seven, so she felt justified in living a youthful, carefree existence.
I honestly didn’t have a lot in common with her. Fame was something that followed me, or rather it followed my boyfriend, and therefore me by default. I didn’t chase it. I was much more aligned with my dad’s camp that my life was really not fascinating enough to be recorded.
But here lately, it seemed my life had gotten more interesting. There had been rumblings that Jase and I were on the outs, since we’d been spotted together so often in the past few months, but then for the past two weeks, he’d been going out alone or with his friends. And the press knew I was in Ft. Lauderdale.
So speculations arose that we were fighting, especially after a picture surfaced of Jase hugging an unknown female. She turned out to be his best friend, Freddie Ruiz’s sister Janelle, who I’d actually met several times, but the assumptions that he’d moved on from me to her, and countless other women, were out there.
It was like the press couldn’t handle the fact that we were happy. They were just waiting for him to break up with me or cheat on me or do something scandalous. I wasn’t sure why no one had connected the dots that I’d just gone home for Christmas break, because that’s really all I’d done.
We both knew the paparazzi who were camped outside my dad’s house would have a field day when Jase showed up. I’d already warned him about them, and we had a plan to get him inside safely and unseen.
My phone beeped then, pulling me back to the moment.
Leaving the airport now. See you soon.
I smiled goofily. I missed Jase, and I couldn’t wait to see him.
Ten minutes later he texted me to let me know they were close, so I sent my dad out to open the garage door, and my heart started to pound. I didn’t think I’d been this excited to see anyone in a long time.
I could see the SUV with the blackened windows pull into the driveway and the paparazzi went nuts snapping pictures, but they only got the outside of the vehicle as it pulled inside and my dad closed the door after it. It was a carefully orchestrated arrival that Jase and I had planned out to minimize his exposure. It was annoying that we had to do it, but it was also a small price to pay for a little privacy.
As soon as the garage door closed, I was on my feet, bursting into the garage and practically knocking my dad over.
“Logan!” he said sternly, but I didn’t care.
“Sorry, Dad,” I said as I ran past him, right into Jase who was climbing out of the SUV.
I think I startled him when I wrapped my arms around him and shoved him back against the car, but he recovered quickly and looked down at me with a big smile on his face.
“You missed me,” he said with just a hint of awe in his voice.
Of course I missed him. I looked up in to his bright green eyes and took a few seconds to drink in his features. Seeing them over the
Internet was no comparison.
“So much,” I told him as I leaned up and kissed him, but he wouldn’t let me deepen it at all.
Which I guess was fine. My dad was watching, and he’d never seen me with a boy who wasn’t just a friend, so I honestly wasn’t sure how he would react. But I knew it would be hard to hide all the pent up urges I had since I was used to seeing Jase every day and spending the night in his bed on a regular basis. Now he was staying with us, in the guest room, right across the hall from me.
And it was going to be oh, so tempting.
I figured maybe I could sneak into his room after my dad fell asleep. His room was across the house, and he slept like the dead, but I wasn’t sure if Jase would go for it. He knew my dad was protective, and he wanted to make a good impression. Getting caught in a compromising position so my dad knew my virtue was no longer intact probably wasn’t the best way to do that.
Jase broke the kiss and untangled my arms from his waist as he looked up, and I’m sure, saw my dad watching us. I turned and caught his gaze, took Jase’s hand and walked him over to my father, as the guy who I could only assume was Charlie, unloaded Jase’s bags from the back.
“Daddy, this is Jason Brady,” I told my father proudly.
Jase immediately dropped my hand and stuck his out for my father to shake. “Call me Jase,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you, sir.”
“Steve,” my dad said, shaking his hand. “Call me Steve. I’m too young to be called sir.”
Jase grinned his seven-watt mega-movie star grin, and I hugged him around the waist.
“Okay, Steve it is,” he said, then he turned to Charlie who was standing quietly behind us. I hadn’t even heard him walk up. He was so stealthy.
“You good, man?” Jase asked him, and Charlie nodded. He seemed like the strong, silent type.
Jase was staying with us, but Charlie was staying at a nearby hotel. I’d figured he’d want his bodyguard nearby, but Jase wasn’t concerned about anyone breaking into our house. I think he was still adjusting to having full time security, and although I knew he liked Charlie, I didn’t think he was overly thrilled with the idea of having him around twenty-four seven.
Gravity Happens (Forcing Gravity) Page 1
