Falling Into You (3 page)

“Chris, tell us all about it. Is L
A
fabulous
?” Christine flickers
her
hand over my arm as she giggles
. I had completely blocked out the inane conversation
and the trolling laughter
and I realize I’ve been staring blatantly at the girl
in flip flops
.

I turn back to Christine, putting m
y face back into a composed mask
. It should be pretty easy to jump back into the conversation.
The last time I checked, they were obsessing
over the
ir
latest Fashion Week conquests
—both the clothes and the men
.
All they’ll want from me is a quick smile of admiration.

“It’s not New York, for sure.”

Ain’t that the truth?
I hated LA
. Plastic trees and plastic sunshine every day. Just not my thing. I had gone to set every day, wearing sunglasses and a hat to hide from any paparazzi interested in me. Not that there were many of them. A stray one, here or there
, would watch from the distance at a club or a restaurant, but they mostly left me alone
.

“Isn’t that Chris Jensen?”
one would ask, pointing my way and snapping a shot. It wasn’t the barrage of flashbulbs and lights that some part of me might have secretly wanted.

“Not yet,”
my agent had said.
“It’s in all good time, though. I’m putting my bets on you this time.
You’re the next megastar, Jensen.
”

The
most recent
movie I had shot in LA was a high-school romance. It wasn’t going to win any awards, but the director and my co-star said that I would soon be the next big thing, echoing the words of my agent. I mostly hoped that would be the case.
I would
have to be a total
fool not to fall for the vision
of girls falling at my feet and screaming fans. My time in LA had
taught me that celebrity was everything. Every door opened, every private jet chartered, every courtside seat
obtained.

Of course I wanted that. It was just
a tiny part of me
that said
maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stop all of this business and go back to school.

There was a shitty side to Hollywood. While there’s a shitty side to any place, it happens to be slightly more pronounced in the land of
Maseratis
and plastic surgery and broken dreams. I had seen it with my parents, both of who
m were in the business.

My father had been a well-known director until he took a shitload of money to direct the fifth installment in a lesser comic book movie series. The main character’s best power was shooting lasers out of his eyes. Everything about the movie, from the cookie cutter heroine to the glasses the hero wore during the daytime to hide his identity, had been stolen from another
film
.

I could have told my dad that
it
wasn’t going to work out.

It worked out well enough for him to purchase an apartment on the Upper West Side with six bedrooms, twice the size of any New York apartment I had ever seen and approximately 1/25th of what he would have gotten for the m
oney in any town but New York.
It also paid for my “unparalleled academic experience” at Sampson Prep and gave me enough money to play with until the acting jobs started rolling in.

I
t had
also
ruined my dad’s career and any hope he had of ever directing a major movie again.
It had ruined his life.

My mom’s
an actress
.
She’s not famous or anything like that
, but
she’s
good
enough to get steady work. She’s
currently the third lead in a play on Broadway.
The lead was a former
action star who had gotten drunk, screamed a bunch of slurs about black people in an interview
, and promptly crashed his car.

The play was supposed to rehabilitate his image, to show what an important actor he was.
According to the Broadway magazines, h
e
’s
fucking my mom and going out with a bunch of dancers from the theater across the street every night, so I’m not sure how
successful the attempt really was
.

My responses to the group of gigglers had been monosyllabic
.
I would need to make something of an effort to
get
something set up with Christine, j
ust in case
Sophia
knocked me off my feet and I needed something (read: someone) to pick me up.

“Call you
later,” I whisper
into Christine’s
curtain of blond
hair, letting my
lips graze her cheek. She leans
in, wanting more.

Not yet.
I turn
away from her promptly, knowing that it would just drive her
crazy. I laugh
to myself. It r
eally was too easy. With most girls
, at least, except for the one that
I wanted
.
Ain’t that the shit,
though?

As
I tur
n
to leave the balcony,
a noise startles
me, causing me to look again
at flip-flop girl. She’s
prettier than I t
hought at first
. My gaze lingers
over her, sizing her up.

Maybe she wasn’t
astoundingly beautiful like some of the girls in LA with legs for miles and chests that grabbed attention.
She
didn’t reek
of
sex
like
Sophia
did
. Her face was rounded slightly, and her hair fell, long and brown and wavy, to her shoulders.
It still wasn’t quite fair to classify
her as the girl next door type, which
had
never held much interest for me
. There was danger there, in the way her body moved and her eyes twinkled.

H
er enormous blue eyes
meet mine and they
grab
me
and thro
w my stomach around for a loop. This was getting more
interesting
b
y the minute.

I smile
at her.
She’s obviously startled for a second, but she manages to recover and she smiles back. It spreads
across her face and up to those eyes, sea-blue and green and endless.

I’ve heard people talk about smiles that reach to every corner of the face, but hers stretched beyond, lighting up every square inch of the space around her. This was getting curiouser by the second. I wanted to know how she came to be here, who she was.
S
he didn’t seem to know
anyone. A hanger-on? I dismiss
the thought as quickly as it came to me. Not the right descriptor. 

She was still standing there. I cou
ld go and talk to her, I think
. She didn’t seem unfriendly. Just…detached. Maybe even a little sad.

No
. No. You are here for one
reason
and one only. Unless you counted Christine, which I didn’t.

Sophia
.

I had to see if it was still there, the electrical chemistry that we always had. To be more accurate, the chemistry that I thought we had and that she had dismissed with little more than a wave of her hand. She had crushed me into a million pieces when we were thirteen and I had kissed her. She shoved me away, laughing and telling everyone that I had stinky breath.

When I had grown five inches the summer before our
sophomore
year and girls started
running their fingers through my hair at parties, interest had
started to appear in her face.
I took it
and grabbed it, knowing that I had wanted her for six years and there was NO FUCKING WAY I was missing my chance. Christ. I wished I had
left it alone
. And I was glad I hadn’t. Even if…

She had broken me
two years before
. I wonder
if she had seen the movie posters. Maybe the fact that I had recently given interviews to a dozen teen magazines and could possibly be on the verge of being famous could change her mind.

Would I want her if the only thing she wanted was a little taste of Hollywood? I would like to tell myself no. I would like to say, to hell with her if the only thing she wants is to te
ll people that she is dating a
fledgling
movie star.
I could find someone else, if that’s all she wants. Christine, maybe. I could even go talk to flip-flop girl.

That wasn’t really going to work.
Christine was nothing. Flip-flop girl was interesting.
But I had unfinished business.
Sophia
Pearce
.

I shake
my head, trying to get flip-flops out of it, but the memory of enormous, guarded
, and haunted blue eyes follow
me in
to
the
party
. I didn’t even want to think about what those eyes would look l
ike if they were truly laughing
. I peer into the kitchen. With one glance at
a black-haired girl swinging her
legs on the countertop, I move
all
thoughts of
fli
p
-flops
to the very back of my head
.

Sophia
’s
laughing
as
our
friend
Sam
pours
a large shot of whiskey into a rocks glass, adding more, looking at
her
, laughing, and then adding more again
.

It was
a motion he had down to an art
by the end of freshman year at Sampson.

He hands
it to
her
and she
throws
it back greedily
.
The apartment
is
filled to the brim with faces I did and didn’t recognize
but
my brain
is
glued to
a pair of dangling, perfect legs
.

“Sophia!” A girl, teetering precariously on sky-high heels, screams at her. She pushes
past me
to thro
w her arms around
Sophia
, who handles
her like she
’s a very poisonous snake
.

“Claire. It’s good to see you
,
”
she
replies tensely
. She’s
looking for an escape.

“We all thought you had disappeared for good into the land of Scarlett O’
Hara
,
”
Claire says
, grabbing Sophia’s arm even as she’s trying to extract herself.

“
Atlanta
isn’t exac
tly the Deep South, you know.
”
Sam had moved to a new group, shaking the bottle of whiskey suggestively
at
Sophia, who’s staring at Claire with a look of disdain. He raises his
eyebrows and me an
d throws
a nod towards
Sophia
.

I hadn’t managed to hide my sick fascination with
her as well as I had hoped
if Sam, the world’s biggest gossip, knew
about my not-so-minor obsession
.

“Why on earth, darling, would you have wanted to leave all of this?”
Claire’s
falling into the
counter, but
Sophia
grabs
her arm to straighten her
.

“Because…
”
Sophia
licks her lips and stares
directly at me
. “I
needed a few tastes of those Atlanta boys
.”

The thought of her with blond boys with thick accents
and na
mes like
Whitford
and Ashby leaves
a bad taste in my mouth
.
That line was clearly meant for me
. Of course.

Sophia
may still have the record for skipped clas
ses at Sampson—she managed to miss every single Western Philosophy class, telling the teacher that she had contracted some rare autoimmune disease—
but I had never forgotten how smart sh
e was, the way she
could
people
like musical instruments
.