Page 41 of #Starstruck

I smiled a little. “I’m not really a casual person. I realized it would never not be a big deal to me. And in addition to keeping me not pregnant, it’s also made me not diseased. My favorite teacher in high school contracted an STD without knowing it as a teen. It made her sterile, and she wanted a baby more than anything. It was so unbelievably sad.”

Chase nodded, not saying anything. It was the most serious expression I’d ever seen on him. My stomach twisted, and I felt queasy. This was it. Now we would break up. Well, it wouldn’t really be a breakup, since we hadn’t actually dated, but I didn’t want this to be the last time I saw him. Spoke to him.

Touched him.

He cleared his throat. “This is why I like making movies. Somebody else always writes the perfect thing for me to say.” I squeezed his hand. He hadn’t run into the night screaming, so he was already ahead in my book. “I like you and respect you, and I can respect your choice. But there’s probably some things I should tell you. Like I don’t think I want to get married.”

“Ever?” I realized why he’d told me. I was saying “No sex until marriage,” and now he was telling me there wouldn’t be a marriage.

“My mother’s on her ninth husband. It’s hard to take marriage seriously when your own mom changes husbands as often as a politician changes their beliefs. Not to mention I work in an industry where I’ve had colds that have lasted longer than some marriages.”

“I guess my perspective is different because I grew up around some really amazing marriages. I know how happy it can make people to find the right partner.” But I wasn’t going to change his mind. I understood why he felt that way and realized there probably wasn’t anything I could say to make him see things differently. He was being a gentleman, letting me down easy. “I guess that means this is it.”

“What? That’s not what I was saying.”

“If I’m waiting until marriage, and you’re saying marriage will never happen, then there doesn’t really seem to be a point to all this.”

“The point is to see if we like each other. What we have right here is supposed to be about having fun and getting to know someone. Maybe even falling in love. And we can experience intimacy that has nothing to do with the physical. It’s about you and I feeling safe enough to be open and vulnerable with each other. Being honest and sharing pieces of ourselves. That’s what I’m looking for right now. Someone I can connect with on a different level than I have in the past. I’m still in.”

Other than the no-marriage thing, everything else out of his mouth was perfect. Like I had ridden a unicorn over a rainbow into a fairyland, and Santa Claus was in charge of showing me around. Magical, fantastical, totally perfect.

I looked down and remembered my cookies. My poor dough was going to get hard if I didn’t get the cookies baked. “I’m in, too. But if I don’t finish this, it will go stale.”

Nodding, he let my hand go, and it was like a part of me had gone missing. I found cookie sheets. The good kind that prevented the bottoms from burning. I started rolling the dough into balls and coating them with granulated sugar. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re deeper than I thought you would be.”

“I am more than just a pretty face,” he agreed, going back to his autographing. “Although I can’t take credit for my profoundness. That’s my therapist talking.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me. With all the weirdness that was his life, a therapist sounded like an essential.

He let out a big breath. “And my therapist would say there’s something else I should tell you. I’m an alcoholic. Like my father before me. Although unlike him, I went to rehab, and I’m in recovery.”

Chase had been so cool about my thing that I wanted to do for him what he had just done for me. I put the cookies in the oven and set a timer on my phone. “That sounds rough. When were you in rehab?”

“I’m two years and ten days sober. I started rehab two years ago. For an entire year.”

That year when I thought his tweets didn’t sound like him. One-F must have filled in for him.

“At first I stayed away from alcohol because of my dad and his accident. He had filmed the performance of a lifetime and then ran his car into a tree. He won an Academy Award posthumously for that part. I thought he was so stupid, but I got it because Hollywood is all about partying and mind-altering substances. It wasn’t easy, but I avoided it. Then there was this director I really, really wanted to work with. Frederic Fontana. We went out to dinner, and he said he didn’t trust a man who didn’t drink. I wanted to impress him, so I drank. And all it took was that first drink. It was like something chemically changed inside me. Within a few days of hanging out with him, all I wanted to do was be drunk all the time.”

“Didn’t Frederic Fontana directOctavius?”

“Sure did.” He nodded. “That’s why it jumped out at me when you talked about how I sucked in that part. I did, because I was wasted the entire production. The day I saw the final cut, I was fairly sober. I saw how bad I was. And I was doing exactly what my dad did. Throwing my entire life and career down the drain. I didn’t want to end up wrapped around a tree. I checked myself into rehab that day.”

“So you aren’t perfect. That’s kind of a relief. My roommate warned me that everybody has skeletons in their closet.” It probably wasn’t the right thing to say, but it sort of fell out of my mouth.

“She’s not wrong. Rehab helped me figure out I used to be kind of a douchebag. I was totally full of myself, believing my own hype. I thought I was a lot more important than I actually am.” He stared at the autographed pictures in front of him, as if recognizing the irony. “Therapy helped me see that I not only needed to change my behaviors and the people I hung out with, but also that I needed to be a different kind of man. I wanted to be better. Every day I’m trying to be.”

Was that all I was to him? “So I’m someone to try out your new personality on?”

“It’s not like that. I make these decisions. To think about other people before myself. I stopped being a jerk on set and make sure I show up on time. Which has led to more and better projects to choose from. There are so many jerks in the entertainment industry that people seem to enjoy the novelty of working with someone who tries to be nice.”

As far as I knew, no tabloids, bloggers, or entertainment reporters knew any of this. He was telling me things that could totally tarnish his all-American, boy-next-door brand. “Thank you for trusting me with all of that.”

“Thank you for trustingme.”

The timer beeped, and I brought the cookie tray over to the island and laid it on a dishrag. Chase reached for one. “Let them cool off first. You’re going to burn your tongue.”

“Don’t care.” The cookie fell apart in his hand, but he dropped it into his mouth anyway. “I’m sorry I ever called your skills into question. These are phenomenal.” Then he proved his statement true by grabbing three more.

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