Fade Into Me (3 page)

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be home later sometime today.”

We stayed in Napa for lunch and went on a private tour of one of the oldest wineries in the area, escorted by the founder’s grandson who looked to be about Max’s age or early thirties at the most. His wife joined us, and more than once I caught her looking at Max in a way that was pretty risky considering her husband was standing right there.

It might have bothered me at some point in my life. Maybe even just a few weeks ago. But I was getting more comfortable in the feeling that Max wanted me and only me, so I didn’t care how she looked at him. Plus, the way Max was holding on to me made me think he noticed it, too, and might have been reassuring me.

It sounds ridiculous, I know. After all, what could he have possibly done? Lost me somewhere on the grounds of the winery, found a way to distract her husband, and gone off somewhere private and fuck her?

But Max knew how uneasy I was. I had expressed to him in no uncertain terms that I doubted my ability to keep up with his style of life. So far, though, I’d been doing just fine. But I still like to think his tight hold on me was a signal…not so much for her, but for me.

On the plane ride home, I raised the subject I had avoided the day before and asked him about his love life.

“I thought we were going to nap on the way home,” he said.

“When did we decide that?”

“We didn’t. I did.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I veto the idea. So start talking.”

He was good natured about me being so forward. Which is exactly what I expected. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone there.

Max’s first girlfriend was a girl named Denise. They were fifteen when they started dating, and sixteen when they had sex. It was the first time for both of them. Max admitted to being a fumbling ball of nerves during the act, and to freaking out when he saw a spot of blood on the sheet when Denise got up to go to the restroom afterward.

“Cherry-popper,” I said, hitting him lightly on the shoulder.

“You say that like I’m guilty of something.” He looked at me, an uncharacteristically sheepish look on his face.

“Well, aren’t you?”

“No more than the guy who popped yours,” he retorted. “Why don’t you tell me about him?”

“No, no.
You
go on.”

He laughed. “That’s what I thought.”

I didn’t want to talk about the time I lost my virginity. It was unremarkable. Actually, quite a boring story. I was older than Denise had been when she lost hers, and the guy was no Max Dalton. God, how I wished it had been Max that night….

I let go of the fleeting thought and focused on the rest of his story….

Denise cheated on him with a wide receiver on the football team. He never spoke to her again. Shortly after that, he met Katherine, and within two months they were talking marriage and kids. This was during his junior year in high school, and Katherine was much like my sister—wanting to get married young, have kids, settle down. Max played along for a while, figuring there was no harm and that he wasn’t leading her on. After all they were teenagers.

Their relationship ended when he left town, of course.

Once in California, he dated, but nothing serious. Mostly surfer girl groupies, the bleach-blonde bunnies who kick up sand all day while fit, tanned, athletic boys show off their board skills. Max wasn’t that great at surfing but, he said, the girls liked him anyway.

“Yeah, I bet,” I said. “Who could resist you?” I squeezed his bicep.

“Turns out a lot of girls could.”

“Oh, go on…”

“There’s nothing really interesting,” he said. “I haven’t been serious with anyone in quite a while.”

“Do you want to get married?”

He looked at me. “Are you proposing?”

I blurted out an indelicate laugh. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Marriage? I don’t know. I guess it’s just a matter of being with the right person.”

“Well, sure.”

“No,” he said. “I mean the desire. How can someone just want to get married? I think you really only have that desire when you’re with the right person. Nobody knows if they want to be married, as some kind of abstract idea. You don’t know what it’s like, and if you’re not with someone you’d marry, how can the thought even be serious?”

There was a pause and I guessed he was waiting for me to answer. “I think you’re over-thinking it.”

“Hmm. Maybe. All that matters is that you’re here.”

We were quiet the rest of the way back to Los Angeles. We hit some turbulence about ten minutes out, but otherwise it was a smooth flight.

Smooth in the physical sense, at least. Emotionally, things were a little rocky.

I didn’t want the weekend with Max to end. Tomorrow would mean back to the grind. And while I loved the work I was doing, it would be an extreme understatement to say I was distracted by thoughts of being with Max all the time.

On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, I was a little nervous about Max being so vague and dismissive about his relationships with women during recent years. I knew it was probably nothing more than him sparing me lurid tales of encounters with Hollywood’s hottest, horniest, and most desperate female starlets and socialites.

If that’s what he was doing, then he did the right thing. I really didn’t want to know about those women. All I wanted to do was see where this was going with Max. And, so far, he’d given me no real reason to be afraid. He had done and said absolutely nothing to make me feel like I wasn’t enough for him.

I mentally kicked myself for letting my negativity and self-doubt cap off such a wonderful weekend.

FIVE

Krystal wasn’t there when I got home. She hadn’t mentioned it on the phone earlier, but I guessed she had to work.

It was a little after 5pm so I decided I should do my regular Sunday check-in with my parents. Mom answered on the first ring. Dad got on the other extension. They asked how my week went, and I filled them in, minus the little jaunt up the coast with Max Dalton, of course.

They were having their kitchen remodeled, so I had to listen to about ten minutes of Mom describing precisely what the contractor was going to do, with Dad piping in every thirty seconds or so complaining about the cost of the new counters, cabinets, and pretty much everything else. A little bickering ensued and Mom finally said they should have that discussion when they’re not on the phone with me. Thank God.

“Is Grace around?”

“She’s just put the baby down. Let me get her,” Mom said.

I really needed to talk to my sister. I’d been putting it off all weekend. I knew if I had called her Friday night, I would have been so angry I probably would have said something I regretted. But now, enough time had passed where I could probably have a rational conversation with her.

When Mom and Dad dropped off the line and it was just Grace, I said, “Did you tell Chris where I was?”

“What? No! I told you I just said LA.”

“Then he stalked me.”

“He
what
?”

I said, “Chris showed up at my apartment door Friday night.”

“Holy shit.” The surprise in her voice was genuinely fearful and then changed to regret. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s my fault. Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

Over the next full two minutes or so, she must have apologized a dozen times as I explained what happened. I knew she was truly sorry, but I told her to stop apologizing. I got to the part about how someone saved me, but I didn’t tell her who it was, specifically. I just said it was a neighbor.

“I just need you to do something for me,” I said, trying to bring this conversation to a close for now.

“Anything. I’ll do anything.”

Monday morning. I got to my desk without seeing Kevin, thank God. The last thing I needed was my boss asking about my weekend and detecting from my blushing or body-language that I’d been up to something. Of course, he would have no idea I had been with Max. But the ramifications of my dating and sleeping with someone we were working with could have been disastrous for me and my future.

I did finally see Kevin around 11 a.m. He stopped by my desk and said I should pack up my things.

My heart sank. Did he know? Had he found out I had breached his trust by being with Max? I felt my throat go dry and the beginnings of that little stinging you get before you cry, as the tears well up.

“You look like you’re going to pass out,” he said. “Don’t worry. I was joking. Or trying to, anyway. But you do need to pack up your things and come with me.”

I stood. “What’s going on?”

“Just do it.”

He put a box on my desk and started putting things in it. I joined him, and it wasn’t long before we were done. There wasn’t all that much on my desk. I did make sure to pack up the drawer I used to stash my many packages of sunflower seeds—a snacking habit that caused Kevin to refer to me once as a bird.

He led me down the hall to an office that had been serving as a storage room. He opened the door. All of the extraneous stuff he had been storing in there was gone, and now in its place was a desk, a big leather chair behind it, and two nice visitors’ chairs on the other side of the desk.

“I think you earned your own office space,” he said, standing aside so I could walk in.

An office of my own. With a window! And out of that window was a view of a good part of Los Angeles. There was a lump in my throat as the realization hit me that I was already moving up in the show business world. Just a few months ago, I could never have dreamed of doing the things I’d already done, and now, with my new office, I felt like I was on my way.

“Wow. Thanks, Kevin.” I put my little box of belongings on my new desk.

“You deserve it. Now get settled in and back to work.” He smiled and turned down the hallway.

An hour later I was doing yet another interview of an aspiring actress who was seeking representation. Her real name was Madeline Ostrosvky but, like so many others with names that were hard to pronounce, she planned to use a different last name professionally.

“Redford,” she said.

“Redford,” I repeated flatly.

“It sounds elegant. Like a rich, successful sounding name.”

I handled it as gently as I could. “People will think you’re trying to capitalize on Robert Redford’s name.”

“Who?”

Oh, Jesus. Did she really not know who Robert Redford was? I mean, sure, he was of a different generation and it was entirely possible that she hadn’t seen any of his movies, even the more recent ones. But what kind of aspiring actor or actress hasn’t even heard the name “Robert Redford”?

So I told her who he was, how big a name that is in Hollywood, and repeated my previous warning about it—people would see it as a cheap ploy using Robert Redford’s name to make her more recognizable.

“We’ll have to work on the name,” I concluded, and started to look through more of her resume and photos.

“
We
? Does that mean you’re taking me on as a client?”

I paused. This wasn’t how we did things at Kevin’s agency.

She must not have liked the pause and seen it as bad news, and said, “I really need this. I got these just for acting.” She started to lift her blouse. “They’re still a little sore—”

“No, no,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to do that. Really.”

That’s the kind of afternoon I had. Oh well. At least I had it in my new fancy office.

“I have to go out of town for a few days.”

The words from Max coming through the phone disappointed me. It was just before five o’clock and I was sitting at my desk, surveying my new surroundings and wondering what I could do with the walls.

I had become accustomed to seeing Max so often, or at least talking to him every day, I knew I would miss him and it would just make the workdays drag on even more until I laid eyes on him again.

“When?”

“I’m leaving in a couple of hours. Got a couple of people scouting locations for a shoot and they can’t seem to agree so I’m going to do it myself.”

“Oh, such a take-charge man.”

“Do I sense a little sarcasm in your voice?”

I laughed. “No, you sense a
lot.
” I loved our banter, and decided to be playful to relieve my disappointment.

“And you,” he said, “better watch your mouth or I just might spank you.”

My eyebrows rose up my forehead. Thank goodness he couldn’t see them. “It’s about time you brought that up.”

“You like that, huh?”

“My favorite,” I said in a hushed voice, trying to sound sexy. The truth was, I had never been spanked. Never even really thought of it. But there was something about the idea of Max doing it that made my insides stir a little. Okay, a lot.

“I’ll keep that in mind. You should come with me.”

“What?”

“On my trip to New York.”

I’d never been to New York City before. I wanted to go so badly. But I knew I couldn’t. “I have to work.”

“Get out of it.”

“I can’t, Max. Especially since I have my own office now.”

He whistled sarcastically. “Now who’s the big-shot in this town?”

“Still you,” I said. I told him about the office and how Kevin had presented me with it. “So there’s no way I can just take off the rest of this whole week. That would look pretty bad.”

“Fine then. We’ll go this weekend. I’ll come get you and we’ll go. I enjoyed our weekend out of town. Nice, quiet—”

“Not so quiet in the bedroom.”

“I was getting to that.” He chuckled. “So we had the quiet getaway. Now we’ll have a not-so-quiet one.”

Max and I texted and talked on the phone over the next couple of days. He told me all about his trip and I filled him in on how my week was going. But mostly we talked and teased about our upcoming weekend in New York.

Grace called Wednesday morning as I was driving into work. She had done exactly what I asked her to do.

“He’s been to work the last two days,” she said.

Several days ago when I told her I had something for her to do, that’s what I was talking about. All I wanted was for her to find out if Chris was back home, making me feel safe knowing he was no longer in LA, and that’s exactly how I felt upon hearing her news.