Hollywood Dirt (Hollywood Dirt, #1)(100)
CHAPTER 109
The movie wrapped on a Tuesday. It felt weird, the short week. Like the last days of school where you just watched movies and signed yearbooks, we all kind of milled around like lost children, Don barking at everyone constantly, the few scenes filmed were short redos that he hadn’t been in love with the first time.
It was so much easier to film with Cole after that night. I didn’t realize how much I’d been pushing him off, how much I’d fought my heart. When I stopped that fight, the surge of affection was scary, the feeling heady, the risk exhilarating. Now I knew why they said you fell in love. I plummeted with no parachute, and hoped like hell he would catch me when I hit the bottom. Only, there hadn’t been a bottom. There was just him, his cocky grin grabbing me from the moment I woke up to the moment our bedroom light turned out. His hand sliding up my thigh in the midst of a production meeting, his sexual touch turning sweet as he found my hand and grabbed it. His chuckle, the one that used to light my anger—I was addicted to it. I understood his laughter now; I knew his smiles and his glares and everything between them.
A week earlier, we camped out on the edge of the Holdens’ plantation, down by the lake. Ate s’mores and drank wine, and he told me about his mom, and how much he loved mine. And then we talked about Life After the Movie and what would happen to her. Cole wanted to bring her to California. I told him that Mama would make up her own mind about where she wanted to be. I’d never been to California, but I couldn’t see her there. Not with everything Cole had described it to be. I wasn’t even sure I saw myself there.
He was the first person I ever told about my Departure From Quincy. I think it hurt him a little. Not in a feelings sense, but more like the idea physically pained him. I had spent a lot of nights thinking, in my bed at night, staring up at my ceiling. My Departure From Quincy plans had been quite glamorous. I’d give Mama a budget and let her pick her poison—there were new homes going up on the edge of town, and eighty thousand dollars would get her a brick three-bedroom, two-bath with everything she never had. Or, if she’d rather, she could take that money and find something else. Maybe an older house on some land, farther out, on one of our hundreds of dirt roads. And I’d trade in the truck and get an SUV, something with air conditioning and low mileage. And then I was going to go someplace cooler. Maybe North Carolina. Find a town big enough to disappear in. Buy a house, find a job, maybe go to college.
That’d been the gist of it all, my fantasies lining up into place in the dark of my room. Before Cole. I told him the plan and watched his throat as he swallowed. He turned his head away, and the moon lit the line of his profile. We had joked about marriage, in front of the reporters. Had been connected at the hip since that night at his house. But we hadn’t discussed the future. He’d tried, I’d evaded, and then, beside that fire, overlooking the lake, I stopped. I stopped running and turned and faced our future.
“What do you want? For us?” I asked the question and he turned, pulling me onto his lap so we faced each other.
“It’s not about what I want. I want you to be happy. So I need to know what you want.”
“I think I want to go back with you. To California.”
“It’s not a city you can get lost in, Summer. Not tied to me.” His voice was guarded, tinged in worry.
“That’s okay. I’m a big girl. I can tough it out.” I had smiled up at him and saw the turn in his eyes, knew—before he’d even reached for me—what was coming. When Cole Masten loves, it is scary. The man puts his entire heart out with the expectation that it will be crushed. Sometimes I worry at the way he looks at me, at the way I feel for him. It seems too precious, too rare—our combination of souls. If I ever lose this man, I will never recover. If he ever loses me, I fear for the man that he will become.
I could take on California for him. I knew that already, but decided it there, by that fire, his push of me back onto the blanket, his hands frantic as they pulled at my clothes.
Together, we could take on anything.
CHAPTER 110
The aftermath of the magazine article was big. Bigger than I ever expected, bigger than even Casey and Cole had expected. Bigger… but different. The public, the big scary monster that I had been told to expect… loved me. Embraced my act of rebellion with a protective fury that scared the news outlets into submission. I avoided interviews, declined requests for comment, and with each retreat from the spotlight, my lore grew. Fan pages popped up in my name. A jilted ex in Chicago pulled a Summer Jenkins of her own at a bachelorette party. The hype also helped The Fortune Bottle, award nominations rumored before the premiere, the foreign distribution deals pouring in. I was happy for the movie but didn’t want the fame, the attention claustrophobic in its unending continuity. The fame I may not have wanted but I loved the support. I didn’t realize how much I needed it, didn’t realize how the positive feedback, the love of strangers, would be inhaled by my greedy soul. The circus of support washed away the three years of scorn, the hundreds of dirty looks, upturned noses, and whispers. It made me feel, for the first time since that night, that I wasn’t in the wrong. They were. That I wasn’t the one broken but that they were.
I hadn’t gone back to Quincy since the movie wrapped. I packed up my things that last week of filming, Mama and I staying up late, my belongings scant when put into cardboard boxes and weeded through. I threw out a lot. The purge was good for me.