Flirting With Fame (Flirting With Fame) (22 page)

The room smelled like disinfectant and lemon Pledge, making my eyes water. Clint shared the space with an elderly gentleman who slept with his mouth open. The rise and fall of the senior’s chest and the blinking machines around him were the only indication he was still alive.

Clint lay beyond a yellow curtain that hung from the center of the room, and my body tensed as we passed it. My hand tightened around Reggie’s when I saw him. Reggie released my fingers and grabbed me by the waist, burying her face into my chest. Her sobs rocked us both.

I stared at Clint, trying to understand what had done this to my friend. Tubes sprouted from his mouth and nose. An IV snaked up one arm. And the other arm . . .

The other arm was missing a hand. Bandages covered the stump, already tinged with red. Similar bandages wrapped around part of his face. Purple lined his eyes and etched along the one cheek left uncovered. His face had swelled to twice its size.

“No,” I whispered. “They said he was fine.”

The doctor came around the curtain and I jumped at the sudden appearance of his body next to mine. “He is fine. He’ll make a full recovery.”

“He’s missing a hand,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And his face is cut up.”

“Sure. But he’s alive. And there’s nothing saying he can’t live a normal life, despite this.”

Reggie unlocked herself from my waist and stepped cautiously toward the bed. She looked back at us.

“Can I hold his hand?” She swallowed. “His . . . his good hand?”

“Of course,” the doctor said. “But you only have five minutes. Then you need to go. You can come back tomorrow.”

I tapped Reggie’s shoulder. “I’m gonna give you some privacy, okay? You come get me when you’re ready to leave.”

She nodded and sank into a chair beside the bed, clutching Clint’s undamaged wrist in her hand.

I slipped out of the room with the doctor, letting Reggie have some time with her boyfriend. Gavin leaned against the wall, his hands plunged into the pockets of what had to be designer black jeans.

“How is he?”

I shook my head. “He lost a hand, and he’s pretty banged up.”

“Oh God.” Gavin touched my waist. I tried not to notice that he wore a purple button-down shirt that highlighted every muscle of his upper body. “Is there anything I can do?”

I shook my head and pulled out of his grasp. “Thank you for coming down here and getting us back to see him, but I think you should go.”

“Elise, I know this isn’t the time, but I needed you to know I’m not mad anymore. I thought about it, and I realize now you were scared and you made a mistake. I forgive you.”

“That’s great, Gavin. Really. But I don’t forgive you.”

He took a step back. “Forgive me for what?”

At that moment, Reggie tugged on my sweater and leaned against me, her eyes red and barely open.

“Can we please go now?” she asked.

“Yes, Reg. I’ll take you home. Come on.”

I propped her on my shoulder and we started down the hall. After I got her buckled into the car and walked around the hood, I found Gavin waiting for me against the driver’s-side door. He crossed his arms.

“Look, I know you don’t want to talk now, but I at least need to know what you’re mad at me for. What could I have done between Wednesday and today? I wasn’t even in town.”

I shouldered him out of my way and threw the door open. Jamming the key into the ignition, I looked up at him, exhaustion and anger boiling up from my stomach. “Why don’t you go ask your new girlfriend, Leila? You had no problem being consoled by her last week.”

His eyes widened and he stumbled backward. “Elise, what are you—”

“No, Gavin. No. I’m done. I don’t know why I was so stupid in the first place, thinking this could work. Our worlds don’t mesh. You crave the spotlight like it’s oxygen and I . . . I can’t even put my own damn picture on something I wrote.”

The words spilled out of me as tears cascaded down my cheeks. I swiped my sleeve across my face and sniffed.

“We don’t make sense. We never have. You belong with someone like Leila. Hell, even someone like Veronica is a better match than me. So please, go be happy with one of them. Because I obviously can never give you what you really want.”

“Elise—”

He grabbed my arm, but I shook him off and slammed the door. I started the car and backed out of the parking lot, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I took a deep breath.

I only glanced in the rearview mirror once as I left him behind.

C
lint slept for two days and seventeen hours. In that time, Reggie unpacked her things and settled back into our room. Neither of us brought up
Viking Moon
or our fight. I didn’t really mind. Mostly, I was just happy to have her back. Despite each other’s company, neither of us slept well while we waited for Clint to wake. I stumbled between classes, the set, and the hospital in a daze, barely cognizant of how I made it from one place to another.

The next few scenes being filmed revolved mostly around Elof and the rest of Thora’s brothers, so Gavin and Leila weren’t going to be around for a couple of weeks. Stan informed me they’d gone back to LA for more interviews.

Perfect. I hoped they had fun together.

Reggie and I alternated spending time with the slumbering Clint every spare moment we had. She read him poetry the café writers had prepared for him, and I read out loud from the novels we were studying in American Lit.

I’d just reached the climax of
Of Mice and Men
on the third day, when the shifting of the sheets caught my eye. Slamming the book shut, I leaned over and took Clint’s hand.

He opened one eye and blinked a few times. His lips were still swollen, but I could’ve sworn I saw the tinge of a smile.

“Hey, cowboy. You hang on, okay? I’m gonna go get Reg.”

I pressed the button by his bed to call a nurse. Then I jogged down the hall to grab Reggie from the vending machines.

By the time we got back to the room, Clint was propped up and drinking through a straw from a cup the nurse held up for him. He saw Reggie and dropped the straw. His face broke into a grin. I spotted a flash of pain in his eyes as he moved, but that didn’t stop him from planting a kiss on her forehead when she curled up against his chest.

“I’m a lucky guy, waking up to two beautiful ladies.” Clint grimaced with every word, as though it took all his effort to form them.

“Your parents are staying at the hotel down the street,” I said. “I promised I’d let them know when you woke up. I’m just gonna send them a quick text, okay?”

Clint nodded and closed his eyes. He rested his chin on top of Reggie’s head as I pulled out my phone.

“Oh, one thing,” he said before I bent to find their number. “Can you ask them to bring me my hat?”

•   •   •

Duncan had told me to let Clint know he’d done well enough through the semester not to have to write the final essay, but the cowboy was determined to finish the class like everyone else.

I sat in his room a few days after he woke up, laptop propped on my knees while he dictated his thoughts about
Of Mice and Men
into my app and I translated onto a blank document. I picked up my phone and pointed to his last remark. “Are you sure you want me to type it this way?”

“Now,” he said, “I know you’re some big fancy writer and all, but I don’t want you correctin’ me on every little thing. I want the grade I deserve.”

“That last sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though.”

He shrugged. “It’s the way I want it. You just do the typing there, little missy.”

I went back to work, trying to form coherent sentences from an app that lacked serious punctuation and was especially challenged when it came to a fake Southern drawl.

I peeked over the computer screen. “So, I guess Reggie told you about me, then?”

“What, about you being the author of that famous book she loves so much? Yup, she did.”

“And you don’t hate me?”

“Aw, darlin’. I couldn’t ever hate you. But I don’t get it.” He scratched absentmindedly at a bandage on his face.

“You don’t get how I’d want to be someone else?”

“Not at all. I mean, who you are is pretty dang awesome, if you ask me.”

“Yeah. That’s one word for it.”

I pushed the laptop off my legs and pulled the newspaper at the end of his bed toward me. The front page of the
Fernbrooke Gazette
showed Clint in the hospital, covered in bandages, a woman standing beside him with tears in her eyes. The headline read
HERO COWBOY SAVES STRANGER
. The woman spoke in the article about how her car had broken down and Clint stopped to fix it. All of a sudden, another car came toward them out of nowhere. Clint had seen the wayward vehicle and pushed the woman out of the way just in time. He’d saved her life. Unfortunately for him, he’d ended up pinned beneath the car, his hand crushed under the front tire, face dragged against the gravel.

The photo was black-and-white and Clint’s face was swollen, but he grinned at the camera nonetheless.

“How do you do it?” I tossed the paper back on the bed.

“Do what?”

“You’re so confident in yourself. You never doubt who you are.”

He pressed a button beside him and raised the bed so he sat at my level. “Why would I doubt who I am? I don’t have much choice in the matter.”

“Of course you do. You don’t need to wear hats or speak with a drawl.”

“No, but where’s the fun in that?”

My eyes washed over the arm that ended in a bandaged stump. “And what about that? Doesn’t that scare you? How people will react?”

“Well, the way I see it, how they react is their problem, ain’t it? And this is nothing. It don’t change who I am. I mean, I’m gonna have to learn to ride a horse with only one hand, but considerin’ I’ve never actually ridden a horse with two hands, I figure that won’t be hard.”

I almost fell off my chair. “Wait. You’ve never
been
on a horse?”

“No, ma’am. Not a lot of horses where I’m from. But one day.” He looked at the stump and back at me. “I have two choices in the way I react to this. One, I let it beat me and stop me from goin’ ahead with my life the way I’ve always planned. Or two, I keep on fightin’ the same way I’ve always fought. I just learn to do it a little differently.”

Something clicked in my brain and I sprang from my seat.

“Whoa, darlin’. Where’s the fire?”

“I just . . . I had an idea for the last book.”

I grabbed my laptop and kissed Clint on the unbandaged portion of his forehead. “Thank you for that. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He looked at me like I’d sprouted a set of horns. “Sure, glad to help. But, darlin’, whatever you do, can you promise me something?”

“What’s that?”

“Consider being honest from now on. With yourself, with your fans, with Reggie. I know you’re scared, but I just took death head-on, and let me tell you, it’s a scary place to be. We only get one chance at this life. Make sure the one you’re livin’ is your own.”

My throat closed and I nodded. “I will. Thanks, cowboy.”

“Anytime, darlin’.”

I clutched my laptop to my chest and sprinted out of the hospital to my car. I didn’t bother starting it. Instead, I opened the computer and hit Delete on the draft I’d been working on for the last
Viking Moon
. It had never felt right and now I knew why.

I opened a blank document and began to type:

Dag surveyed the field behind his house, his chest rising and falling with exertion. Sweat trickled down his shoulders; it mingled with the blood and dirt on his torso, creating dark patterns on his flesh.

The warriors had come at him hard in the middle of the night, breaking him from sleep and forcing him to defend himself in the dark with only the sword he kept by his bed. Those men were sent by Thora’s brothers, no doubt. They’d demanded Dag’s blood since he’d pushed Elof off the cliff.

Despite his eventual conquest of the warriors, now dead at his feet, Dag knew Thora’s siblings would have his blood eventually. He just wasn’t expecting it so soon. He barely had a moment to appreciate his victory before another sword swung out of the darkness . . .

•   •   •

I holed up in coffee shops and my room over the next couple of weeks, leaving my computer only to go to classes and the set. The words poured from my fingers onto the page as fast as I could type, and when I tried to sleep, Dag and Thora tugged me from under the covers to finish their story. My wrists ached, but I fumbled at the keyboard anyway, icing them during my rare breaks.

Writing also served the secondary purpose of—mostly—keeping my mind off the fact that Gavin would soon be back. But before I knew it, it was time for him to make his reappearance on set.

That Monday evening, Veronica stomped to my car and slammed the door as she got in, shaking the entire vehicle with her wrath. So, it seemed her and Tanner weren’t quite the perfect pair, after all.

I plastered a frown on my face. “Problem?”

“Fucking actors,” she said.

“You got that right.”

“At least Gavin knew how to be romantic. I don’t think Tanner has a romantic bone in his body, besides, you know, the important one.”

“Uh-huh . . . And romance is what you were looking for?”

“Of course,” she spat out. “Who isn’t? Screw it. I’m gonna talk to Gavin. I know how to get what I want.”

“And what you want is him? Seems like you flip-flop on that a lot.”

“Sweetie, who doesn’t want him?”

“Well.” I slipped on my new sunglasses and put the car in gear. “Good luck. I think he’s back with Leila.”

She waved her wrist. “Like the fake ginger can stop me. Let’s go.”

I swallowed the sour taste in my mouth at the thought of Veronica getting back together with Gavin. He’d told me he didn’t want that kind of relationship anymore.

Of course, then he’d gone and sucked face with Leila, so he was capable of anything.

As if he’d called Mother Nature for a personal favor, snow had fallen over Fernbrooke exactly when Stan needed it. It was the Yule episode of
Viking Moon
, and the wardrobe department was up to their padded shoulders in furs. My boots kicked through the white powder while Veronica, wearing a pair of impractical heels, wobbled in my footprints.

I paused when we got to the set and Veronica held out her hand for my notes about that day’s scene.

This was it. My chance to be honest like Clint wanted.

Leila brushed past me, her hair exuding a sweet mango perfume. She waded through the snow like some sort of ice queen in a green velvet dress and cape. As usual, the sight of her took my breath away. My stomach knotted and I gritted my teeth.

What was the point in telling the truth now? Gavin had found out and it had made everything worse. We’d be done filming in two weeks and then everyone would head back to Hollywood and forget all about the scarred assistant. I bit my lip and held the pages out to Veronica.

As she made her way to Stan, I wandered to the craft services table and plucked a donut covered in sprinkles off the tray. I’d just taken a giant bite when Leila showed up beside me.

“Oh, hey, Elise.”

I chewed the wad of cake in my mouth and attempted to swallow.

“Hey,” I managed. A slew of crumbs flew from my lips and landed on the front of her dress.

She dusted herself off and plucked a celery stick from the vegetable tray. I set my half-eaten donut on the corner of the table.

“I can’t believe we’re almost done with this,” she said. She took a dainty bite of celery and chewed it like she was trying to decide whether or not to swallow it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Guess you and Gavin will be happy to get back to LA?”

“Well, I don’t know about him, but I’m not a fan of this cold. I’m more of a sun-and-sand kind of girl, you know?” She shivered and pulled the cape tighter. “Besides, being long distance with Rodney is killing me.”

“Rodney?”

“My boyfriend. I didn’t tell you about him? He’s an accountant in LA. He’s been out to visit me a couple of times, but I miss him so much. Can’t wait until we’re back in the same time zone.”

The donut sat heavy in my stomach. I massaged my gut. “You’re still together?”

“Of course. In fact . . .” She glanced around her and leaned forward. “Can you keep a secret?”

I clenched my jaw to avoid laughing out loud and nodded.

She pulled a gold chain from the bodice of her dress. A modest diamond ring hung from the links. “He asked me to marry him when I was home, and I said yes! We don’t want a big ceremony or anything, so when I’m done filming, we’re gonna head to Vegas and do it up all tacky-like. You know, fake Elvis and everything.”

My body went numb and I gripped the edge of the table. “But . . . I thought you and Gavin had gotten back together.”

She deposited the ring back in her cleavage and laughed. “What? Oh, God no. What would give you that idea?”

With shaking fingers, I pulled my phone from my pocket and searched for the photo I’d bookmarked. “You kissed him. When you went home for Thanksgiving.”

Leila pursed her lips. “Oh, sweetie. You think because we kissed, we’re back together? That was a peck for the press since we’re playing a couple in the show. They asked us to pose like that. And it literally lasted, like, half a second.”

“It did?”

“Yes. Honestly, after all we’ve been through together, kissing Gavin is kind of like kissing my brother. What we do for the cameras—on the show or off it—that’s just acting. Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s in love with you.”

I choked on a sprinkle still lodged in my throat. “What . . . What makes you say that?”