A Star is Born (8 page)

The cab dropped me off on the street, so I walked up the driveway. I didn’t see any lights on inside, so I walked around the side of the house on the right to see if they were home. If not, I knew where the spare key was kept so I would be able to get inside with no problems.

There were no lights on inside the house at the back either, but there were candles burning around one end of the pool. I walked toward the candles to see if maybe the guys were there. If not, I had to go in that direction to get the key anyway.

But I didn’t need to worry about the key—I had found the guys. When I spotted them, I was excited. When I saw them, though, I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. It looked like Derrick was on his knees in front of Bill. I froze. My worst fears had come true. Derrick and Bill were… Derrick was blowing my boyfriend. They were having sex. Bill was having sex with someone other than me. No matter how I thought of it, it still came back to the same bottom line—my boyfriend and his best friend were having sex.

I stood fixed in place for several minutes, trying to decide what to do. I quietly set my bag down on the ground and sat on a chair that gave me a good view of what they were doing. And it went on for a few minutes. I could tell when the big finish was approaching—I knew my boyfriend, and I could tell. And if I hadn’t been able to see, I could have heard, because he wasn’t exactly quiet. When they finished, Bill fell back on the chaise lounge, all boneless and relaxed. Derrick remained on his knees for a moment. Bill sat up with some effort and said, “We shouldn’t—” He was about to say something else when his eyes finally landed on me, and he said, “Mark!”

“Quiet,” Derrick said. “He isn’t here.”

“Yes, he is,” he said, pointing toward me. “Mark, this isn’t what it seems.”

Derrick turned around, saw me, and fell over, “Oh, damn!” he said as he righted himself. Both men were on their feet, not knowing what was going to happen. I was as shocked as they were, but I’d had a couple of minutes to adjust, so I simply sat in the chair with my legs pulled up, resting my chin on my knees while my arms wrapped around my legs, pulling myself into as small a shape as possible.

“Mark, what are you doing here?” Bill tried again. “We didn’t expect you.”

“Clearly,” I said, speaking my first words.

“Mark, this isn’t what it looks like,” Derrick tried.

“So you weren’t actually just on your knees blowing my boyfriend?” I asked calmly. Where was this calm coming from? I certainly didn’t know.

Neither of them spoke, since there was no denying what I had just watched, what I had just witnessed with my own eyes.

We had a bit of a standoff. They didn’t know what to say, and I wasn’t going to help them out any. After a full minute of silence, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I said one simple thing: “Bill, pull your shorts up.”

Embarrassed that he was still naked, he did as I instructed.

I used that time to consider how to handle this slap in the face. I was mad, I was surprised, I was hurt, I was caught off-guard. In retrospect I probably should have seen it coming. The two men were spending weeks and weeks and weeks together working on their movies. They were both incredibly hot, sensual, sexual men. I probably should have seen this coming. It pained me that I hadn’t.

I closed my eyes and tried to think, still pulled up into a tight ball. I felt a hand on my shoulder but quickly pulled away. “Don’t!” I simply said. As I suspected, it was Bill, and he did as I requested, backing off completely.

Derrick disappeared. The coward. Bill stayed, frozen in place, not knowing any more than I what to say or do. My earlier calm was disappearing. I would have expected it to be replaced by anger—violent, vicious, lash-out-at-whoever-is-nearby anger. But it wasn’t. I wasn’t angry. What I was, was hurt. I didn’t plan it, but I found my eyes filling with tears. Tears that I didn’t want Bill to see. I tried to hide my eyes to keep this information from him, but it wasn’t possible. I desperately wiped my eyes, trying to remove the evidence, but I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want him to see me crying. But I couldn’t stop. He had hurt me. And I had hurt myself by not foreseeing this.

“Mark,” he tried again, speaking softly. “I’m so sorry. I made a horrible mistake. I never meant to hurt you. I love you so much. I hurt you, and I hate myself for causing you any pain.” He knelt down on the ground next to my chair but didn’t attempt to touch me. “Mark, what can I say to help?”

“I don’t know,” I said in all honesty. “I really don’t know.”

After a few minutes of quiet, I unfolded myself, rose from the chair, picked up my bag, and said, “I should be going.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

I looked at him and said, “I don’t have a clue. But I can’t stay here. Even you must be able to see that.”

My comment stung him a little, but he couldn’t disagree.

“Can I come with you?” he asked.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But I don’t know where I’m going so I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take me to get there.”

“Let me help you find a hotel room. I didn’t know you were coming or I would have had something set up for you.”

“Obviously,” I said, referring to the part of his statement about not knowing that I was coming for a visit. I would like to think that, had he known I was coming to visit, he wouldn’t have had his pants down and some other man’s lips on his dick. If that was not the case, then I really didn’t know him.

“Can I come with you?” he asked again.

“Sure,” I said, more to get him to shut up than anything else. I picked up my bag and started walking back around the side of the house.

“Give me a minute. I need to grab a shirt, my wallet, some shoes. Can you give me a minute?” he asked.

“Whatever,” I said, not caring. I kept walking. If he made it, he made it. If he didn’t, then he didn’t. I didn’t owe him anything after what I had just witnessed.

Under a Thousand a Night

W
HEN
I got to the street in front of the house, as luck would have it, a cab was passing by. Never in a million years would I have expected that I could just flag down a cab and get a ride. Usually, on any of the islands, cabs had to be prearranged, so finally some stars had converged in a good way for me. There was no sign of Bill, so I told the driver to simply drive.

When we were about a mile from the house, the driver asked me where I wanted to go. I told him I needed to find a hotel room for the night.

“How much do you want to spend?” he asked. A perfectly fair and reasonable question.

And I realized that I didn’t have much money of my own. Bill had had me quit my job when he came into money, so I had been a full-time student with him supporting us. What I could call “my own money” was almost nonexistent by that point. My instinct was to tell the guy that I needed the cheapest place possible, but another part of me thought I should use the credit card Bill had given me for all it was worth and get the absolute best, to go out with a bang, so to speak.

My decision was made. “Something really nice. Under a thousand a night. What can you recommend in that category?”

He thought for a minute and said, “I know exactly where to go.” We drove for some time, finally pulling into some massive hotel compound that was on a beach—it was dark so I couldn’t tell exactly where. He parked, got out, grabbed my bag, and walked me inside to the front desk. He seemed to know somebody who worked there, so he got his buddy to the front desk and asked him to take care of me and put me into something nice. He relayed my information about the type of room I wanted.

After some tapping at the keyboard, the guy behind the counter said, “I have the perfect room for you.” I handed over Bill’s credit card. I had a plane ticket to fly back in four days, so I told the guy to go ahead and put through a charge immediately to cover four nights of the room plus another thousand for incidentals, and to just apply it to my account. I repeated that I didn’t want him to simply put a hold on the card but to go ahead and charge it. He understood and put the charge through immediately.

I was required to produce a photo ID, since this was apparently not typical. Satisfied that my ID matched the name on the card, he got me checked in. I gave my driver a twenty for a tip and was escorted to my room by a bellman. I would ordinarily just guide myself, but I was living it up at the moment. On the way to my room, I stopped at an ATM in the lobby and got $500 in cash from the machine. I never did this, so it felt wrong, but then I remembered Derrick where I should have been and it didn’t seem so wrong any longer.

The room I was taken to was a very nice-looking room, more of a suite, actually. The bellman showed me the living room, the bedroom, the Jacuzzi tub on my patio, and brought me a bucket of ice. I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and closed the door behind him.

I was tired, and my feet had just been kicked out from under me. My relationship was eroding in the worst possible way. My rock was crumbling. My best friend had deserted me, hurt me, and would no longer be there in the same way in the future. I dropped my clothes as I walked to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and climbed inside. It was a toss-up as to which produced more water—the showerhead or me. I cried until I was cried out. By that point my skin was starting to shrivel, so I quickly washed and rinsed and then hauled my tired, battered self out of the shower.

Hawaii was three hours different from California, so my body didn’t know if it should feel tired, hungry, or ready to run around. Not knowing what else to do, and since it was dark outside, I slipped under the sheets on the bed. Nice! I had no idea what made them feel so nice, but they certainly felt comfortable.

I guess that I was more tired than anything else, since the next thing I knew it was four o’clock in the morning. With the three hours’ time difference, my body was convinced that it was 7:00 a.m. and therefore time to get up and get started for another day. For a few minutes I lay in bed, hoping that maybe the darkness outside would trick my body into falling back to sleep. No luck.

Not knowing what I was going to do, I hauled myself out of bed, showered again—more quickly this time than before—and pulled on some clean underwear and a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. My stomach growled in hunger, which told me that it was time to go foraging for food. I hoped that I wasn’t the only person awake and hungry at such an early hour, and that maybe someplace in the hotel would be open.

Wandering back to the lobby, I asked and was directed to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop within the hotel. Their menu was simple but gave me what I wanted at the moment—something to eat. I wasn’t especially fussy. They had breakfast items at that hour of the day, so I was happy. Well, cosmically, no, I was not happy, but food-wise at least I was happy.

What the Hell Do I Do Now?

A
N
HOUR
later, just as the first hints of morning light were starting to appear in the sky, I was finished and walked outside the coffee shop. I had no plans for my day. The previous night—a short twelve hours ago—I had intended to spend my day with my boyfriend, getting physically and emotionally reconnected. But now I wasn’t even sure I still had a boyfriend. And if I still had a boyfriend, I wasn’t entirely sure that I still wanted him.

Even though I lived in view of the Pacific Ocean, the view from the Hawaiian Islands was drastically different from the view from the California coast. Since it was that way, I decided that it was my obligation to go to the ocean and check it out from this side. Since the hotel where I was staying was a big-name, glitzy, glamorous hotel, the beach was easily accessible.

I walked straight to the ocean, slipped off my shoes, and waded into the water until it was up to my knees. Why did it always seem that the Pacific Ocean was involved in every relationship difficulty I seemed to have? First, the Pacific had separated me from Bill when he was filming his movie in Australia. And now, this time, he was in Hawaii getting it on hot and heavy with Derrick while I was stuck back in California. Maybe the secret to a successful relationship was to never let an ocean come between you and your loved one. I don’t know. I really wished I did know, but I didn’t have a clue.