Flirting With Fame (Flirting With Fame) (18 page)

A picnic lay spread out on the beach before me. Complete with lanterns and wineglasses, a blanket—the thing I’d almost tripped on—covered the sand, with bags from the local fast food joint resting in the center. My stomach rumbled at the sight.

I’d been living on cafeteria and catered food the last couple of months, and while the food on set wasn’t awful, it was usually a combo of health food and donuts. Apparently, in Hollywood, it was totally okay to eat six donuts a day, as long as the rest of your meals were comprised entirely of lettuce.

I gaped at Gavin.
When did you do all this?
I signed.

Actually, I had my assistant set it up while we filmed.

You what?

Don’t worry
, he signed.
I told her it was for some random fan
.

And she didn’t question the fact that you were taking a fan on a romantic picnic in the middle of the night? Is this something you do often?

Actually, this is the first time I’ve done anything like this. Besides, she’s new. She’s afraid to question me. Come, sit down.

I moved toward the bags of greasy heaven, then stopped, the realization of where we were tugging at my feet like lead. I knew this place all too well. The trees and the shadows had made up my nightmares every night for the last six years. The boat. The blindfold. The beach. How had I not figured it out sooner?

“You brought me to Sheridan Island!” I managed to gasp out.

“Is that what it’s called? I went exploring the other day and stumbled on it. Doesn’t seem like anyone lives here. I thought it’d be nice and private.”

“I can’t be here.” I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders and backed toward the boat. “You need to take me back.”

“Elise, you’re shaking. What’s wrong?”

I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to look anywhere but between the trees. “Please, Gavin, can you just take me back?”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on. You’re scaring me. You’re white as a sheet.”

I closed my eyes, remembering the last time I’d stood on this shore. Six years ago. The day everything changed.

“This is where it happened,” I whispered. “This is where I killed my best friend’s sister.”

“W
hat?” Gavin jerked away from me in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“Gavin, please. I can’t be here.” My gut clenched. “It hurts. It hurts too much.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening. You need to talk to me. If I take you back, will you explain?” I nodded, clutching my stomach. “Okay, don’t move.”

He threw stuff onto the picnic blanket and balled it up. The large moon winked between the trees beyond him, and the shape of a mangled building emerged from the shadows.

Six years. For six years, I’d been afraid to come back here. Something hitched in my chest as I studied the building in the moonlight and I knew. I needed to go back there. I owed it to Annie to visit her one last time.

Without a word, I marched past Gavin and into the trees. As the building drew closer, I shivered violently. A blanket was thrown over my shoulders and I turned to find Gavin behind me, holding up one of the lanterns.

“What are you doing, Elise? I thought we were leaving.”

“I’ve never told anyone what actually happened,” I said. “Not the police, not my parents. I was afraid they’d hate me. Hell,
I
hate me.”

I broke through the trees and stopped in front of the ruined house. No one had thought to bulldoze what was left of it. Broken bottles and cigarette butts were the only evidence anyone still ventured there at all. A tear slipped down my face as I took in the walls that were no longer walls but charred stumps in the ground.

Gavin stepped closer, but I couldn’t bring myself to face him. My body shook and I pulled the blanket tighter as I closed my eyes and heard the last sounds I could remember. Annie’s laughter, the strike of a match, a loud boom.

“She died right here,” I said. “My friend Annie.”

I didn’t look at him, but his hand found mine and gripped it in a way that told me it was okay if I wanted to continue, or if I didn’t.

I released Gavin’s hand and stepped through the space in the walls that had once been a door. The memory of slipping through it those years ago edged along my mind. The squeak of the hinges as we pushed it open still echoed in my ears.

“This was Mr. Drake’s summer house. He lived in New York and ventured here when it got warm. He hired me to check in on it over the winter, so I had a key. It was the day after Christmas and Annie came to my house with a bottle of wine she’d stolen from her parents’ cabinet. She and I didn’t hang out a lot. In fact, I was closer with her younger brother, Jin. But she was two years older than me and beautiful. Her friends had left for the holidays and she chose to hang out with me. I was stunned and wanted to impress her by showing her I could handle whatever was in that bottle.

“We came out here to be alone. Just as we got to the shore, a storm hit and we ran through the snow, the wind biting our cheeks and freezing our tears to our skin.”

I stood in the spot I last remembered Annie occupying. She’d been wearing a purple parka and a pink scarf, her onyx hair hidden under a hood. She’d blown on her hands as she pulled off her gloves.

“The house was freezing, and the snow didn’t look like it was going to stop. Since he didn’t use the house in the winter, Mr. Drake hadn’t installed a fireplace and he’d had the electricity turned off. I left Annie in the living room and wandered into the kitchen.”

Moving through the debris, I stopped where the kitchen once had been.

“There was a gas stove in the corner and a pack of matches beside it. I opened the oven and lit the pilot light, hoping it would give us some sort of heat. After a while, we weren’t warm, but the chill had at least left the air. We sat on the couch in the living room and chatted and drank the wine Annie had brought. It was disgusting, but it kept us warm enough for a while.”

I wandered back to the old living room. I didn’t look at Gavin, but I could feel his eyes on me, taking in every word.

“The storm was one of the worst we’d had in a long time. A combo of ice and snow rained onto the roof and trees, making it impossible for us to leave. So, as the sun started to set, we polished off the wine and sat in a dizzy trance, wondering how the hell we were going to get home.

“I fell asleep at some point, and woke up to a blinding headache. The house was dark and covered in shadows. It was freezing. I could hear the wind whistling through cracks in the window and doorframes. When I glanced over at the kitchen, I noted the pilot light on the oven had gone out, probably due to a wayward breeze. I remember thinking something smelled funny, but my head was so fuzzy, I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Annie stirred beside me and mumbled that she needed to use the bathroom. She was just as out of it as me, stumbling around the room and swearing when she walked into the coffee table.”

My breath sped up as I moved to the left, where the table once had been.

“She discovered a candle in a drawer and picked up the matches I’d left on the table. It wasn’t until she struck the match that I remembered. We’d left the gas stove on.”

Gavin’s jaw tensed and he closed his eyes. He shuddered.

“I jumped off the couch and screamed for her to stop, but I was too late. There was a flash followed by a loud bang, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital unable to hear. And Annie was dead.”

I stepped over the wall, my legs shaking beneath me. When I reached a spot between two trees, I sank to the ground. The cold, damp dirt bit through my jeans, but I didn’t move.

“They found me right here. The doctor told me I’d been lucky. I was standing by a window when the place went up. The blast sent me through the glass and into a tree. Annie, however, didn’t have a chance. I still don’t know if she was conscious as the place burned. I pray every day she wasn’t.”

My throat tightened at those last words and I hid my face in my hands as I sobbed. Gavin kneeled in front of me. He placed the lantern beside him, and pulled me to his chest, rocking me. I wrapped my arms around his waist and let go of everything I’d been keeping in for six years.

The guilt at leaving out the matches and the scars that reminded me of that guilt every single day stung. I’d still been in the hospital when they’d held Annie’s funeral, and I’d been secretly glad for it. I couldn’t have taken seeing a box with only what remained of my best friend’s sister in it. Or the look in the Tams’ eyes as they said good-bye.

The fire marshal deemed it an accident. A faulty line in the oven. With one kid dead and another deafened and scarred, no one pushed the investigation beyond that. I never told Jin it was my fault his sister was dead. If I’d been thinking clearly and hadn’t let her light that match, she’d have still been alive.

Gavin smoothed his fingers through my hair as he rocked me. I hadn’t cried about the accident like this before. I hadn’t let myself. My body shook and vibrated beneath me, a victim to my sobs. I cried until my eyes burned and my throat ached and Gavin’s shirt was soaked with tears.

When I finally got up the nerve to look at him, he brushed my damp cheeks. Between the brightness of the moon and the flickering of the lantern beside us, the sadness on his face was clear to me. “You know it’s not your fault, right?”

“Of course it is,” I said. “I turned on the stove. I put the matches on the table. I didn’t stop her in time.”

“You were just a kid. You didn’t do it on purpose.”

“She’s dead because of me. And I let everyone believe it was a faulty stove. Mr. Drake thought he was responsible.”

“Have you ever told him the truth?”

“He’d hate me. Everyone will hate me. I used to wish it was me that had died and she’d been thrown through the window. At least that would’ve been fair.”

“No, Elise, no.” Gavin trailed kisses across my forehead. “Neither of you deserved what happened. Kids do dumb things. In fact, there are many adults who do things just as stupid. How many people have accidentally set fires leaving cigarettes or candles burning? You can’t keep punishing yourself for this.”

“I don’t know how to stop. I still hear her laughing as we sat on the couch talking about boys. Annie was so funny and smart. She was friendly, and great at chemistry. She was going to make something of herself one day.”

“And so will you,” he said. “You already have. You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman.”

I wiped my face with the blanket and pulled away from him. “How can you say that after you know all of this?”

“Elise, this doesn’t change how I feel about you.” He traced the scar that ran down my face. “Neither does this. This just proves you survived something awful. It shows me how strong you are.”

A bitter laugh bubbled up my throat. “I’m not strong. I’m the weakest person I know. I can’t tell the truth about this place. I can’t be around other people. I can’t talk to men like a normal person.”

“You seem to be doing all three perfectly fine right now.”

I froze. He was right. I’d told the story and it hadn’t killed me. He hadn’t run away screaming or told me he never wanted to see me again. I risked one last glance at the house.

“I know Jin misses her every day,” I said. “But I don’t let myself think about her. It makes my chest hurt.”

“It’s okay to mourn her, you know. I lost someone really close to me when I was younger. It still aches when I think about her, but every day the pain becomes a little bit less. Especially when I’m around you.”

Something clicked in my brain. “Wait. Are you talking about your sister? You mentioned she was Deaf. You never said she . . .”

“Died? Yeah.” He sat back on his heels. “I don’t talk about her a lot. I’ve especially never mentioned her to the press. She deserves better than idle gossip.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

He looked up at the sky as though the moon might provide the answers. We still hadn’t moved from the dirt and the knees of my jeans were soaked through, but I remained in place.

“Jess was one of those people that lit up a room when she entered it,” he said. “Like someone flicked on a light switch every time she was around. She was my twin.”

I held my breath as he gauged my reaction. Not only a sister. A twin sister.

“I was born first. Apparently came out so easy, my mother wasn’t worried at all about Jess following. Except something went wrong. My mother’s blood pressure dropped and they discovered Jess’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her throat, cutting off oxygen. After an emergency C-section, she came into the world, but was born Deaf due to the oxygen deprivation.”

He clenched his hands in his lap. “It didn’t matter, though. We were inseparable. She went to sign language classes; I went with her. She went to lip-reading classes; so did I. I learned how to be Deaf right along with her. I never wanted her to feel alone.”

I thought back to the day I left the hospital and my parents told me they were sending me to Deaf school. At the time, we’d been using a white board with erasable markers to communicate. Part of me was terrified of my new school, but part of me was excited about the fact that there’d be kids there with the same affliction as me. And, unlike the kids I’d grown up with, none of them carried memories of Annie.

“That’s so sweet of you,” I said. “She must’ve appreciated it.”

“Most of the time, she complained I was a pain in the ass. She said she could handle it all by herself. She often chided me for acting too much like an overprotective older brother. I’d remind her I had the right, since, technically, I was older.

“By the time we were sixteen, I’d decided I wanted to be an actor. My parents weren’t exactly excited about a career that usually turned into being a professional waiter, but Jess was my biggest fan. She’d cut out all these audition listings from the paper and accompany me to every one of them. When I’d get rejection after rejection, she’d be the first one to tell me it was their loss and would run lines with me for the next time. She never lost faith in me.”

“She sounds amazing,” I said.

He smiled, his mouth countering the sadness whispering through his eyes. “She was. One night, I went to a late audition out in West Hollywood. It was for a part in a big movie, and I couldn’t believe I’d landed an audition without an agent. I wanted to surprise Jess if I got the part, so I didn’t tell anyone. The audition went well. They practically offered me the role on the spot. I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Jess. But when I finally walked up the street from the bus stop, I saw all these police cars outside of our house.”

I swallowed and took a shallow breath. Gavin closed his eyes, but I’d seen pain flare through them before he’d shut it out. I took his hand and held it in my lap.

“She’d run to the store to get milk. It was maybe a five-minute walk from our house. A trucker had been having trouble with his brakes, and as he approached the red light, he honked to tell her to get out of the way. Except, of course, Jess didn’t hear him. I don’t know why she wasn’t paying attention. She was usually more aware of her surroundings than me. I can only think she was distracted by something. They said she died on impact.”

A tear slipped from his eye and he wiped it away before it had the chance to trail down his cheek.

I tightened my fingers around his. “I’m so sorry, Gavin. That’s so sad.”