Fanfare (3 page)

“Gita? I have to go, but I’ll call you back.”

“Right, it’s actually still Tom.” Great. Dumbass.

“Sorry. Let’s try this again.” I fumbled around with my phone a second time. I really should have read that damned manual at least once instead of pompously discarding the packaging and placing ill-gotten faith in my own technological aptitude.

“Gita? I’ll call you back,” I said in a rush.

“Okay, sure! Bye!” she replied.

“Tom? Sorry about that,” I said while attempting to slow my speech.

Jeez! I really wasn’t enamored at all, but I think the whole famous thing was getting to me. I pursed my lips and steadied my shaking voice. I’d rather eat shit than have him think he could make me freak out just because some idiots in Hollywood thought he was easy on the eyes.

“Don’t apologize. It’s not a big deal.” Again, I felt like I detected a faint level of anxiety in his voice that caught me off guard. Wasn’t being obnoxiously self-assured a staple characteristic of the cinema elite?

“Are you nervous?” I blurted without thought. Strike two, Cris . . . or maybe three. I’d lost count.

“Uh.” He exhaled in surprise at my bluntness. “Actually, I am. I don’t normally call girls I just met in passing. It’s not exactly at the top of my list of fun things to do.”

Right. Sure. Pretending to be the awkward guy was apparently his current trick for tricks. “I guess you don’t normally take their iPods either,” I said with a sarcastic laugh.

He chuckled softly. “No, I don’t typically do that. I actually rescued your iPod. You should probably thank me. Some girl thought she’d struck gold.”

“Unless ‘gold’ is code for a lime green iPod with a giant scratch across the screen, I don’t know why she would want it. There’s probably not much on there that would interest her. I’m not into the Jonas Brothers.”

“So I noticed. What exactly draws you to angry music with a politically-charged message?”

I thought for a moment. “Irreverence and rebellion.” If he asked, I would give it to him straight. I had enough experience with word games to fill a book that would make The Brothers Karamazov look like a walk in the park.

He laughed comfortably this time. “I can see both of those things in you.”

“How?” I asked carefully.

“I actually noticed you before you made it up to the signing table. You were squinting oddly at me.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t see anything. I left my glasses in the car.”

“That was probably unwise. Sight’s important.”

“So I’ve heard.” Freaking Hana.

“I thought you hated every moment of standing in line. Whenever your friends came over to talk to you, you couldn’t wait for them to leave. Most girls like having the distraction and the attention of their peers, especially in public. I dunno, I think it makes them feel desirable.”

Man, he had noticed a lot. “How did you manage to sign all those autographs and notice enough around you to make social commentary?”

“Are you kidding? Do you know how many times I’ve had to sign my name in my life? Honestly, I’ll bet if someone handed me a pen in my sleep, I’d wake up with my name tattooed over half my body and all across the sheets.”

“So, you’re subconsciously a narcissist? Interesting—a narcissistic movie star. There’s a new one.”

“And here comes the irreverence. Aren’t you supposed to be charming? Usually, girls I meet go out of their way to be charming to me. You actually went out of your way to suggest that I’m a racist wanker.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Do you want to know the funny thing? I actually like Daddy Yankee.”

He laughed loudly. “A Latin girl who likes reggaeton. It’s downright shocking.”

I was surprised at how easy he was to talk to. “I can be charming when I want to be. It just wasn’t my day.”

“I honestly prefer the irreverence. It helps to ground me.”

“If you’re telling me that you dislike hearing a bunch of girls say how gorgeous you are, I’m going to scoff in disbelief.” Shit, I’d used the word “scoff.”

“Scoff away. I actually hate it.”

“Please.” I snorted.

“I really do.”

“Explain.”

Awkward boy was back with a vengeance. “I hate feeling like I have to live up to some figment of perfection they have in their imagination.”

“So, you can’t handle the pressure of being scrutinized. My next question is painfully obvious. Why would you go into the film industry if you hate having people treat you like eye candy?”

“Truly, I have no idea how to answer that question. It was just an opportunity that fell into my lap, and it seemed foolish to throw it away.”

“Yeah, I hear the money’s good, too.” I smiled in spite of myself.

“It definitely helps. In truth, I’m quite a miser. If you saw the way I lived at home, you’d be really surprised.”

“You know, I believe you. Enough about this conversation has surprised me into believing that I shouldn’t make snap judgments. Movie stars are people too.”

He laughed again, then sighed regretfully.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I actually have to go; I have a plane to catch.”

I could swear he almost sounded like he wanted to keep talking to me, and I couldn’t stop a surprising feeling of loss from creeping into my stomach. Man, I was pathetic. I must really miss late-night phone conversations with a cute guy.

“Well, how am I supposed to get my iPod?”

“I really am sorry about that. I’m going to New York tonight, but I can have it sent to you sometime in the next few days.”

“That’s fine. If you lose it, I’ll sue the hell out of you. Then I can quit my job and sip Mai-Tais along the Caribbean.”

“You really are refreshingly irreverent,” he said with a chuckle.

“And you really are incredibly surprising,” I admitted.

“That’s a start. Goodnight Cris.”

“Goodnight Tom.”

A start?

TWO

“You need to understand that we are finished.”

The frigid words cut at my soul with biting stabs. Eight sharpened daggers hell-bent on merciless destruction. The end of dreams, and the beginning of nightmares.

“What are you talking about, Ryan?” My voice was steady and calm. I had already mastered the ability to talk my way out of uncomfortable situations. This false sense of control belied the screams building in my throat.

“How much clearer can I be? Do you want me to say it, Cristina?”

“I want you to tell me why.” Even in my nightmare, I looked refreshingly unruffled while witnessing the heart-stopping destruction of my carefully designed future.

Frosty blue eyes glared at me. There was no warmth to be seen in their bleak wasteland.

“There’s someone else.”

Finally, my face showed some signs of understanding. It began at my eyes and rippled through my features with slow deliberation. Pain. More pain than I thought existed—pain outside the realm of physical reality. I would rather have felt thousands of small needles pricking my skin protractedly, one at a time. There was no music in this memory—only the silence of a death. When a soul screams its last, can anyone hear it?

“Why?” My voice broke. Something suffocated my lungs slowly, as though I were drowning from inside out. I clasped my hands behind my back in an attempt to maintain my posture. I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing me crumble like a beaten dog.

“Why do I need a reason?”

“When you destroy a dream, you have to have a reason,” I whispered.

“You’re not the person I fell in love with. I will never be the person you want me to be.”

I can change! I wanted to scream. I can be whatever you want me to be! The screams were held back unconsciously by my pride—a blessing I clung to months after the fact. Just don’t leave. My mouth refused to form the words that my heart ached to say.

I wouldn’t beg. I wouldn’t be pathetic.

“But I love you,” I said simply.

“It’s not enough.”

He looked at me with the blue eyes that had shared four years of laughter and tears . . . four years of successes and failures. Four years of love. Now they were the eyes of a stranger.

“I’m not staying here tonight. When I come back on Sunday, you won’t be here. Take whatever you think is yours.”

His eyes narrowed as he watched my world unravel with the gaze of a detached observer. “Don’t worry. You’ll find someone else. You’re very easy to like.” This was the moment in my recurring nightmare where I really wished I had held a sharp object in my hands.

He turned around quickly and walked down the shadowy hallway towards the front door. I forced my feet to stay glued to the carpet. Dramatic visions of me sprinting after him into the darkness and collapsing on my knees in the wet grass flew to mind.

Please, Ryan! Don’t do this to me! Don’t destroy us!

No. Never. He could not take my pride from me too.

The room grew colder, as though he had taken all the warmth away with him. Alone in my anguish, I fell to the floor and dug my nails into the carpet to prevent them from clawing at my skin. Cold. Dark. Suffocating. The vision blurred. . . .

I woke in the darkness the same way I always did: with a gasp. The tightness in my throat and pain in my cheeks were now predictable. I tried in vain to stop the vicious cycle from completing yet another circuit as the hot, stinging tears coursed soundlessly down my face. I couldn’t prevent them. If I did, the pain would remain and grow until it consumed me. I lay still in my bed and breathed deeply to silence the rapid thud of my pounding heart. Sometimes I wondered if my subconscious recreated this scene to remind me that my heart still worked. If it did, my subconscious was seriously fucked up.

I silently moved aside the sheets and padded through the darkness to my bathroom. The cold water was soothing on my cheeks and neck. I turned on the light and stared at my reflection. I had a small face with dark brown eyes rimmed in thick lashes that stood in contrast to the lighter bronze tone of my skin. My mahogany-colored hair hung past my shoulders. I was pretty—nothing to write home about, but definitely not a troll. This was one of the trite things I said to myself from time to time in an attempt to move past the pain of reliving my own personal anguish . . . a mini-therapy session with me, myself, and I.

I bit my lower lip as I continued to peruse my swollen face and red eyes. This was going to be one of those nights. Maybe this recent bout of subconscious self-flagellation was brought on by my conversation with Tom. I was unusually happy those few moments on the phone with him; it reminded me of the good times in my relationship with Ryan when we would stay on the phone until sanity left us, and we laughed together at nothing.

Taking a deep breath, I walked over to my desk and pulled out my cat-o’-nine-tails. The innocuous box shook in my hands as I lifted the lid. My pain returned, renewed. The engagement ring glittered in the shadows as the light from the bathroom caught its faceted prisms. I was unable to toss it, just like I kept the letters he had written to me when he was deployed in Afghanistan. The pictures and other mementos had been burned or thrown away not long after it happened. I had agreed to do that mostly for Hana. She needed that therapy since I refused to let her even speak to Ryan for fear I would lose my best friend to a prison ward.

I lifted the sparkling lie from the box and put it on. It still burned my skin, but it wasn’t self-flagellation if you didn’t feel pain. Gita would probably beat me if she knew what I was doing. Hana would just go to the bathroom and cry. I stood there and tried to summon a semblance of the happiness I had felt when the lie rested on my finger in earnest. A time when not even the birds could touch me as I flew through the air on a high of self-content: the best drug in the world.

It had become harder and harder to retrieve those sentiments. This was what everyone meant when they said “Time heals all things.” I had personally amended that statement in my mind. Now it went: “Time kills all things.” I was probably one of a few select people who would actually laugh at that joke given my situation.

I curled back into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. I had no reason to feel lonely. I had my loving mother, wonderful friends, my health, and a good head on my shoulders.

I had no reason to feel lonely. . . .

Chapter Three

The buzzing sound of my phone’s message indicator yanked me from my sleep. 6:18 am? Who the hell would text me that early?

Blocked ID (6:18 am): r u awake?

What? Irritation poked a hole of lucidity through my cloudy mind. If this turned out to be a wrong number, I’d be pissed.

Me (6:20 am): Who is this?

Blocked ID (6:21 am): tom, i know it’s early, srry

Huh? Why in God’s name was this guy text messaging me? Maybe he had the numbers mixed up. He probably thought he was texting someone else he was supposed to meet or something.

Me (6:22 am): This is Cristina in North Carolina

Blocked ID (6:23 am): i know

He knew? So he honestly meant to text message me this early in the morning? I could have used that extra forty minutes of sleep, but my curiosity was killing me and my mind was whirling again.

Me: (6:25 am): Do u know what time it is?

Blocked ID (6:25 am): yes, r u mad?

Blocked ID (6:27 am): hello?

Me (6:27 am): I’m thinking. Prolly not.

Blocked ID (6:28 am): that’s a load off, what r u doing?

Me (6:28 am): I was sleeping. Now I need to go to work.

Blocked ID (6:30 am): what do u do?

Me (6:31 am): I’m a social worker.

Man, I couldn’t believe I just told a movie star what I did for a living. I almost wanted to make something up, like tell him I’m a porn star or teach skydiving classes. A social worker? Yuck. How terminally uncool was I?

Blocked ID (6:32 am): i bet ur good at it

Me (6:32 am): Riiight. What r u doing?

Blocked ID (6:33 am): hair and makeup L

Me (6:34 am): LOL

I really couldn’t help it. I just pictured him sitting forlornly in a chair while someone torturously applied some cakey mess to his face and dumped product after product onto his hair to achieve the same look he managed by simply failing to bathe regularly.