Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper (3 page)

It suddenly occurred to me that I was starving. It was after noon by then and we hadn’t had a bite all day. As if someone had read my mind, a waiter appeared with a towering tray of food and gracefully slid it onto a table. I started to thank the man, but he disappeared before I could say a word.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rob said. “I want to pretend it’s just us.” There was clearly a staff up here—a chef, this waiter, someone who kept everything spotless and warmed bathrobes for guests—but from the utter silence you never would have known it.

The tray before me was spread with delicacies. On one side was a block of ice, carved with rocky edges and a flat top. Was I wrong, or did a narrow path winding up the side look exactly like the path we had climbed to get here? On the peak, exactly where the Lodge would be, was an architectural arrangement of sashimi and an artistic smear of wasabi. I raised my eyebrow. “We’re supposed to eat the Lodge?”

Rob deftly picked up a bite of yellowtail with his chopsticks and popped it in his mouth. “I just ate your bedroom. Now where are you gonna go?”

On the warm side of the tray were small bowls of miso soup, tender
bites of lobster somehow cooked with foie gras, and squid tempura. It was so over the top that it came all the way around again and tasted like comfort food.

For the first time that day, Rob and I sat face-to-face and talked. We covered unexceptional first-date ground—the annual ice-cream socials in his hometown (Hudson, Ohio), my frustration with this phase of my career, and our favorite places in the world. But what stood out to me was how easily the conversation flowed. He did more of the questioning, to be sure, and I did more of the talking. Here was a man who could have any girl he wanted. If I wasn’t right for him I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. On the contrary, I did everything I could to emphasize the ways we didn’t match. Where he was supremely confident and unflappable, I was overly cautious; a bit cynical; serious, but sometimes brazen. He persisted nonetheless. In a way, weirdly, that was what convinced me we belonged together.

A few hours later another boat arrived at the island. We watched its passengers disembark from above, and Rob pointed out his brother, Scotty; Scotty’s gorgeous pregnant wife; and Geoff’s girlfriend, Patricia.

“I’m wearing a robe. They’re going to make assumptions,” I said.

“Your clothes are probably ready. Let’s check your room.”

Indeed my clothes were back on the bed, now dried and folded—maybe ironed, from the look of them. Somewhere in this fortress was a roomful of Oompa Loompas cooking, washing, ironing, and God knows what else. I wondered just how carefully they were watching me. Before I went into the bathroom, I took one of the red roses out of the vase on the dresser. I broke it halfway up its stem and left it on the table. When I came out of the bathroom, two minutes later, there were a dozen perfect roses once again in the vase. There was no sign of that broken rose. No sign, in fact, that I’d been there at all.

By the time I returned to Rob, the new guests were sipping cocktails in the great room. Rob introduced his older brother as “the handsome Mars.” Apparently when they were growing up Scotty had been the high school’s star football player, a top student, the pride of the family. Even now, having taken a backseat to his movie star brother, Scotty radiated charm and self-confidence.

“I never watched your show; I must be the only one,” he said.

“Oh, don’t worry!” I said. “It’s actually refreshing not to be confused with my character. People are constantly telling me that I shouldn’t have set the family house on fire. I’m, like,
‘It’s a TV show.’
”

“Didn’t I hear something about how you got the part? Something about how you didn’t have to audition?”

“It wasn’t like that exactly,” I said.

Rob jumped in to tell the story, which had been reported in practically every feature ever written about me. He’d obviously read up on me, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. “She turned down the audition for
American Dream
because her grandmother was dying.”

The media constantly reported that I skipped the audition to be at my grandmother’s deathbed. It was a better story, but it wasn’t accurate. “Actually, she was just in the hospital
,
” I said. “It was a massive stroke, and nobody thought she’d make it. But the doctors didn’t know Granny.”

Rob went on, “She wasn’t about to leave her grandmother for some lousy lead in a network series. The showrunner, Steve Romany, gave her the part of Lucy McAlister anyway. Sight unseen.”

“Actually, we’d met before,” I explained. “And my mom sent him a tape of my high school play.”

“Now I remember,” Scotty said approvingly. “How honorable of you to set aside your dreams for your family.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope I haven’t changed.”

“Not if everything Rob has told me about you is true,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. Rob jumped in. “You embarrassing me already, dude?”

“Apparently he’s heard all about me,” I teased.

“Don’t butt in,” Scotty said to Rob. “We’re getting along just fine without you.” Rob threw up his hands and backed away in mock surrender.

Then, just to me, Scotty said, “I really want Robby to find someone. It’s been six years since he and Lexy split up, and it’s so hard for him to meet people.”

“Seriously?” I said. “It’s hard for Rob Mars to meet women?”

A long, rough-hewn table stretched out from the fireplace like the line of an exclamation point. Dinner had magically appeared on it: The Oompa Loompas at work again. Rob rematerialized at my elbow and guided me to a chair between him and Scotty. I was relieved. I hadn’t talked to Geoff’s girlfriend, Patricia, yet, but her mouth was set in a thin line and I had her pegged as an ice queen.

Rob had told his brother about me. I knew what that meant—or thought I did at the time, because I was still operating on the standard Boy Meets Girl protocol. In that manual, Boy Tells His Brother About You translated to: Boy Has a Crush on You. I was flattered, and talking to Scotty made Rob seem more like a typical vulnerable guy looking for love, with the added complication of being The Biggest Freakin’ Movie Star in the Whole Wide World.

On my other side, Rob was talking to Geoff about an island in French Polynesia. “Rapa is a tiny dot in the middle of the ocean,” he was saying, “three hundred miles from the closest island. The fruit I ate there was the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s out of this world.” Rob turned to me. “You don’t realize how much pressure civilization exerts until you truly escape it. God, you would love it, Elizabeth. I hope to take you there someday.”

Rob, who could go anywhere in the world, longed for the isolation of far-off lands. This bit of knowledge might have appealed to my sense of
adventure. Or at the very least caused me to consider what it meant that this man had a thing for islands. But to be honest, all I heard was the word “someday.” I made a mental note for Aurora. Rob was the opposite of my ex Johnny. Johnny couldn’t commit to seeing me later the same night, much less “someday” in the vast and unpredictable future.

After dinner, the other guests made their excuses and turned in early. I smiled inwardly. It felt like they were conspiring. They wanted to give me and Rob a chance. Once again I got the sense I’d just passed a test that I hadn’t even known I was taking.

The sun had dropped below the horizon, its fiery wake still blazing the sky. Rob took my hands in his. “Elizabeth, I’m having an amazing time. That boat is at our disposal. We can head back whenever you want. But I want to ask you if you’re willing to stay here with me tonight.”

Aha! There it was. He expected me to sleep with him on our first date. He’d shown up at my apartment without calling first, transported me to a secret island without telling me where we were going, and now he thought I would just hand it over? But of course he did. Because who
wouldn’t
sleep with Rob Mars on the first date? I had to admit that he’d gone to a lot of trouble for a guy who could just walk into any bar in the world, snap his fingers, and have his choice of the hottest women around. Still, I wasn’t about to give in. So what if he was Rob Mars? I wasn’t anyone’s conquest.

“Rob, this is so fantastic. You, this place, all of it. But I have to get home! I didn’t plan . . .”

“Don’t worry,” he interrupted me. “You’ll have your own room. We’re not there yet. I’m very attracted to you, but I respect you too much to proceed with anything but caution.”

“Do you always speak in . . . road signs?” He was just too perfect. I couldn’t buy it. I needed him to crack.

“You want to know what I’m really thinking?” he asked, and now he was close, leaning against the wall to make himself closer to my height, his voice low and flirty.

“I think so,” I said. Then he put his hand around my neck, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. And for every ounce of cynicism in my body, even knowing how gag-inducing these next words sound, I have to admit that an electric charge ran through me. I know, I know, but cut me some slack. There was a glorious sunset. I was alone on a balcony overlooking an island with a man who had been named
Glam
’s Sexiest Man of the Year more times than I knew. I was standing on my tiptoes to reach him, clean, warm, and buzzed, and that first kiss threw me completely under his spell. When we finally came up for air, I stood there, dizzy and dazzled, until Rob said, “P.S. I’m not gay.” We laughed, and all the distance between us—our ages, our Hollywood status, the fact that he was the one calling the shots, the totally ridiculously over-the-top setting—it all evaporated and we were two regular people who wanted to know each other. And that’s what the whole prolonged date was like. Moments that were normal and mundane and just like anyone else could have been experiencing, surrounded by events and situations so far outside the realm of normal experience that, after an entire day, it got hard to tell which was which. Living that way for months, or years, only made that distinction fuzzier.

But that night, in the moment of our first kiss, the extreme and ordinary met in a flutter that brought a flush to my cheeks. I’m always too cautious. I haven’t missed a night of flossing since I got my first and only cavity in 1994. Three friends have extra sets of my keys, just in case. So what if I was going to miss my Pilates class in the morning? So what if tomorrow turned out to be the day my dream script arrived by messenger
and I wasn’t the
very first
girl next door to read it and respond to my agent? So what if my doorman silently noted my walk of shame the next day? I was tired of being so relentlessly well behaved. All that responsibility looked good on the outside, but I secretly knew that it was just fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of taking risks. Fear of the unknown. I felt safe with Rob. And I wasn’t even going to sleep with the guy! It was time to be spontaneous for once in my life. This was an awesome, once-in-a-lifetime date and I wasn’t ready for it to end. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay . . . ?”

“Okay, I’ll stay.”

Rob saw me to my room, and it was hard to leave him, but it was what we both wanted. I clung to the knowledge that he would be there again in the morning, because I already didn’t want us to be apart. We parted at my door. Walking back down the hallway, Rob tripped and caught his fall. Then he turned back and saw me watching him.