Someone I Used to Know

by Blakney Francis

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Declan

  “Well, there’s no doubt about it, you definitely have the best looking date here,” Cam said, straightening his tie in the reflection of the limo’s tinted windows.

  We were stopped in the long procession of identical stretch limousines, lined up waiting for their chance to release their cargo onto the red carpet. The deafening screams were muted inside the safety of the car, but as a particularly stout batch of screeching hit its crescendo, I felt assured I’d made the right decision by bringing Cam as my plus-one. If nothing else, he was an excellent distraction.

  “Can’t argue with you there, mate.”

  I took a deep breath. Something about the smell of limousines and town cars had always soothed me. The smell of leather; the fresh aroma of vacuumed carpet; the cold, eerily chapped flavor of air conditioner; the slight tang from the residue of whatever they used to polish the wood detailing; they all come together as a scent as familiar to me as they would for someone else who’d lived in the same home their whole lives. To me, that intricate bouquet was as close as I’d ever come to the smell of a real home.

  “There’s been something I wanted to ask you for a while. I know our –,” he stopped as if at a loss for just the right word he was looking for. His face struggled through the anomaly, and I couldn’t blame him for his annoyance. It must be terribly frustrating for an author – a man who always had exactly the right words – to be lacking of one in his moment of need. His eyes refocused with a new light when he’d finally found it. “– situation is unique, but I’m a collector of emotions – of reason, really.”

  “This is about Adley, isn’t it?” I spoke as he paused, knowing he hadn’t made his point yet, but unwilling to let the name go unspoken between us a second longer.

  It was more than just an elephant in the room, or limo as it happened to be. It was a falling meteorite, speeding towards us, destined to collide with us eventually, and I was tired of waiting for the impact. I wanted it to be on my terms for once. I thrust us upwards, forcing the explosion.

  He met my eyes, and it was funny that I felt like I knew him better than almost anyone else. I’m sure loads of people felt that way after reading The Girl in the Yellow Dress, but the book had nothing to do with my feelings. By getting to know Adley, I’d gained an understanding of Cam that I never thought was possible.

  “Isn’t it always?” he asked with a smile that seemed to me to be helplessly abashed.

  I understood it perfectly. She was the center of her own universe, a sun that we are powerless to, as she sucks us into her perpetual orbit.

  I said nothing. It had been rhetorical. We both already knew I’d joined him under her spell. He’d known it the day I’d shown up at his house, begging him to set her free, to let her love me.

  “You told her that you weren’t going to accept Gone with the Wind, but you weren’t just turning it down for her, were you? I’ve always gotten the sense from you that you’re an actor because it’s what you’ve always done, and you’re good at it…But you’ve lost the thrill for all this, haven’t you?” He gestured around us, to where girls with posters and cameras hung over the guardrails, their mouths gaping open in an endless scream that was dulled to nothing but a hum inside the car.

  That’s what it had felt like inside of my head, like all the fanfare and the roles and the next-big-things had become nothing more than a constant hum by the time they reached me where I’d retreated into the very back of my mind. It had been that way until the day Adley walked onto set with her anxious eyes and contradicting tongue. She’d drawn me out, brought me back to the surface; even if, at first, it was only to tease her or see how quickly I could make her brows crease with annoyance.

  I’d always love her for that. She’d given me a piece of myself back.

  I decided that Aurelia was right. Adley wasn’t coming back. I was Pluto, her rejected planet, but that didn’t mean I could stop her from being the center of my universe. I’d let her be, and I’d love from her afar until one day, maybe the love that had once made her the center of my universe could turn into a different type of love; an appreciative one or a nostalgic one.

  Another roar ripped through the crowd. We’d moved up until only two cars preceded us.

  “So why did you agree to do the film then?” Cam persisted.

  “I’d have been a fool not to.” I couldn’t even count the number of times the phrase a role of a lifetime had been uttered to me over the last four months. “I get to be home, and working for Joseph isn’t like anything I’ve ever experienced…It’s challenging, and I needed that. Working on this film reminds me of all the good parts of my job.”

  A sparkle of blue caught my attention farther up the red carpet as we moved up in the line once again. I watched Madeline, in her shining turquoise dress, posing, turning her back to the legion of photographers and looking over her shoulder at them demurely. She was a real star, an absolute pro.

  I still couldn’t get used to the black hair. It suited her fine, but I had to do a double take every time she bounded into the room in full costume. I grinned, thinking of how we bickered back home. I hadn’t been the easiest bloke to deal with as of late, and Madeline was never shy about letting me know where she stood on the matter.

  “You did it for her, didn’t you?” Cam had caught my gaze trailing after my costar. “In the beginning, before you could have known all those other reasons, you agreed to do the movie for Madeline.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” And I meant it.

  I had signed on to do the movie because they were right: it was the role of a lifetime. Only it hadn’t been my role that I’d been thinking of; it had been Madeline’s. She wanted it more than anything in the world, and more importantly, she deserved it. If Joseph needed me to play Rhett to give the right ‘chemistry’ to Madeline’s Scarlet, then so be it.

  “Adley was right, you know.” It was finally our turn to exit the car, but I stalled. An unexpected truth I’d just realized sat on me heavily. “She’s wrong about so many things. It’s almost my natural reaction just to disagree with her about everything. You’re almost guaranteed to be right if you just chose the opposite of what she does. I’ve always thought that she was unbelievably backwards in the most wonderful way…but just this one time, she was actually right about something.”

  An usher rushed forward, pulling my door open, thinking my delay was a signal that I wanted him to do it for me. Cheers flooded in, chasing away the serene ambiance.

  “About what?” He made no move to hurry towards the chants, perfectly unaffected as he stared at me with curiosity glinting in his eyes. The fact that Adley could be right about anything mystified him just as much as it did me.

  “I would have regretted not taking the movie.”

  Outside, I was immediately rushed by a studio-assigned publicist, since I didn’t have one of my own, and Cam and I were directed to a long line of reporters.

  One stale, rehearsed answer followed the other as I was asked the same questions over and over again. It was amazing how many different ways the same question could be asked. My temporary publicist steered me down the line, stepping in with a classic “no comment” when I signaled to her that a question was too personal.

  Cam was stopped for interviews of his own, and was even invited into dialogue with me a few times. There was only one foreign journo who dared inquire about our mutual ex-girlfriend, and after an awkward laugh, we both pretended not to understand the translator and moved on.

  Our last interview was a big one. The publicist made it clear we were both to be on our best behavior as she herded us towards a well-dressed man who had a halo of hairspray floating around his crafted hair. I wrangled my smile into the range of charming, and prepared to greet the stranger like we were old friends.

  “You’re looking great, man,” the reporter patted my arm with beaming enthusiasm, falling into the façade seamlessly. “Everyone’s been talking about your physica
l transformation, and I have to say, it’s impressive. We should hit the gym together sometime soon, man.”

  “Absolutely,” I lied through my teeth, not that it mattered. It was all a part of the charade. “I’ve never had to bulk up like this for a role before, but this project is so important to all of us, that we’re all willing to go the extra kilometer to bring Mr. Hoffman’s vision to life.”

  “Madeline Little, your costar, said as much the same…What’s it like working with her on a second consecutive project? Gone with the Wind is rumored to have a production timeline of years. Aren’t you worried you’re going to get tired of each other? It seemed like as soon as you wrapped The Girl in the Yellow Dress, you were both off to Australia almost the next day.”

  I wanted to say that Madeline was like a little sister to me, and our constant squabbles were a testament to our sibling-like bond, but we’d been discouraged by the higher ups on both films from making such comparisons. They said if we put that image out there, then the public wouldn’t want to buy into our roles as love interests. We didn’t have to say we were dating or anything, but we could leave the audience to wonder the true depths of our relationship.

  “Madeline is incredibly dedicated. It’s one of the things I admire most about her, but anytime you put two passionate people together…let’s just say, there can be fireworks. While we were filming The Girl in the Yellow Dress, for instance,” I said, finding the perfect segue to bring the topic back to the movie whose premier we were at, and give Cam a reason to be standing beside me.

  I put my hand on his arm and looked at him, preparing to bring him into the conversation with a clever anecdote about our time spent working together, but his attention was elsewhere.

  He was staring down at his phone with a quizzical look on his face. At my touch, he looked up surprised, like he’d forgotten all about the fact that a camera was rolling, capturing every moment of our interview with the biggest entertainment network in the world.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Cam said apologetically, stepping out of the camera’s range, “I’ve got to take this.”

  I painted over my confusion with a casual smile, tuning back into the reporter like nothing at all was amiss. The correspondent, to his credit, didn’t miss a beat. He picked up right where I’d left off; tossing me a no-brainer question about what it was like to work with Georgia Torres, the renowned director.

  I was thankful, and tried to muddle together a response that I hadn’t already used a thousand times, so he could take a fresh sound bite back to his bosses, but my distraction was evident. My attention was split as I watched Cam out of the corner of my eye. What could have been so important that he took a phone call in the middle of a televised interview? He was far enough away that I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his body language was tense and his mouth moved rapidly against the receiver pressed to his face.

  Finally, the reporter wrapped up our conversation, and only once we were off camera did the smallest ounce of irritation gleam in his too-blue eyes. I hadn’t given him anything newsworthy at all. They’d be lucky to edit together anything usable from me at all. My only condolence was that I was sure Madeline had turned on the charm, always doing anything in her power to increase her success.

  I was just racking my brain for an excuse to hurry over and find out what was going on, when Cam suddenly looked up and met my eyes. I saw, rather than heard, the meaningful sigh that left his body. There was defeat in it, and the oddly deflated demeanor didn’t leave him as he walked towards me, extending the flat cellphone in his hand like it was a gift.

  “It’s for you,” was all he said, and then at the same time, seemed to disappear into the crowd milling about the red carpet.

  I hesitated, but only for a moment, my body pulsing with expectation. “Hello?”

  “I read it!” the hollered exclamation exploded in my ear. I balked at the volume, but held the phone strong.

  “Adley?” Even amidst the exorbitant chatter trying to drown out her voice, I recognized it. I plugged a finger in my other ear, trying to single out just the sound of her and not the chaos shrieking in the background. “Where are you?”

  “You wanted me to see that I have to let people make their own choices. I read Cam’s letter from the book. I know I’m not the girl in the yellow dress.”

  I didn’t know if she hadn’t heard me speak or if she was just so swept away in the moment, desperate to speak her peace that she couldn’t stop, not even for a second.

  “I can barely hear you,” I shouted back. “Where are you?”

  For a second, all I could hear was raucous clamor from her end, and I was sure she was gone. She’d said what she’d needed to say, and it was over…for good that time. Our loose ends tied into a neat little bow. The moral of the story had been learned. The end.

  “I’m here.”

  My heart jolted.

  She was there. The erratic noise suddenly made sense. My eyes darted up, ravaging wildly through the crowd held at bay on either side of red carpet by guardrails and security guards. I was making a spectacle of myself, and people were starting to notice. I was going against the script. The publicist was in my face, her mouth moving with words of strained kindness trying to herd me back into protocol.

  I ignored her, shifting my gaze through the crowd, trying to find one girl in a sea of hundreds. It was impossible.

  And then I found her.

  There was an ocean of people between us. They swarmed and clamored for my attention, oblivious to the fact that I was blind to everyone but her. To them, she was no one, just another face in the mass, but to me, she was everything.

  “Hi,” she said, and I could easily make out her hopeful grin across the distance separating us.

  “Hi.” It was all I had in me.

  “I lied,” she admitted as she was jostled by a few overly eager girls. “That day, I lied to you. I do want you. I always have. I didn’t want to…but I did. And I still do.”

  “Why?” I didn’t realize until the question slipped out, just how badly I needed the answer. “Why do you want me?”

  Her mouth fluttered open. She hadn’t been expecting that.

  “Because you’re terrified of birds!” she blurted forcefully.

  “Excuse me?”

  “And because you have a ridiculous book club with your chauffeur.”

  “I don’t think you really understand wha –.”

  “And because you came to set the day of the adoption scene. I want you because you’re kind. Because of Lazarus and because you treat your housekeeper better than some men treat their own mothers. It’s because you never treat people like passing fads. You let them in, even when you know that one day, you’ll have to say goodbye. I want you because of that little birthmark on your jaw and the way you kiss the corner of my lips. Because you never back down from me.And because you love Madeline….And because you have a way of seeing things exactly how they need to be seen. I want you because you saw me that way. I want you because you loved me before I was loveable.”

  “Do you want me enough to let me make my own choices? I don’t want a martyr, Adley. I want a partner, someone to make decisions with me instead of for me.”

  “I can try,” she said, so softly I barely heard, but it was enough. It was a promise.

  “Then prove it to me,” I urged. “Prove it to me right here and now that you’ll let me make my own decisions. I want to be with you, and I don’t give a damn what the press thinks about my being with someone like you.”

  The phone went silent. I glanced down for just a moment to see that she’d hung up, and when I looked back up she was gone.

  A flash of pink caught my eye and I found her again. She was moving through the crowd, fighting forward as she earned curses and harsh shoves from those she displaced. I began moving, too.

  A mountainous body blocked my path. “Sir, we can’t let you get any closer for security reasons.”

  I slipped around him and darted towar
ds the guardrail just as Adley managed to wedge her slim body between two teenage girls. She probably couldn’t have managed it if the girls hadn’t been so distracted by me storming right up to them.

  I didn’t hesitate, and neither did she.

  We met at the lips. Her arms wrapped around my neck, and mine around her waist, every inch of our bodies pressed together where the metal fence didn’t hinder us. Even that was too much. I pulled her up until she could slide over.

  I couldn’t stop kissing her. She smelled like all the things I’d missed about California. My lips wanted to rediscover every part of her, but at the same time, I wanted to break away and just stare. I wanted to know every single thing about the last four months that I’d missed.

  When air became a requirement, the decision was made for me.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” she breathed out, giddy. Her cheeks were flushed a rosy pink, and the blue of her eyes sharpened with alertness.

  I laughed; the booming sound of it was like the echoes of cannonballs from a victorious battlefield. I drew her to me again, unable to restrain myself. I wanted to smother her with affection, and there was no telling how long this open gate of love and happiness with her would last. I’d soak up every minute of it I could.

  “I don’t believe you,” I told her with an impish grin. “I think you knew perfectly well that it would work.”

  She had to rest her chin on my chest to look up at me, and I was glad she didn’t try to pull away. It was the same feeling I’d had since the moment I’d met her, never growing rusty when I tried to water it down, or tiresome, despite all the time we’d spent together…I didn’t want to let her go.

  I never wanted to let her go.

  “You and I both know I can’t resist these ridiculous rubber ducky shorts.”

  Her eyes darted down to the garment, and she stared at the shorts in surprise like she’d forgotten she had them on. I watched her carefully, waiting for regret or realization that soon, her pajama clad form would be splashed all over newsstands and websites. Instead, she did the most wonderful and surprising thing in the world…