The search results for Samuel Bennett were still open. I scrolled through them slowly this time, reading more carefully. Articles about his career, and the speculation about his love life. The think pieces about representation and visibility and what it meant for a daytime soap opera to have an openly gay leading man.
He’d been out since he was twenty. Before he was famous and it could have been calculated or strategic or designed to appeal to a particular demographic. He’d just been honest about who he was, and the world had decided to make that complicated.
I understood complicated.
I closed the browser and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow I’d figure out how to be neighbors with a celebrity without making it weird. And I’d rebuild the appropriate wallsand remember that I was here to heal, not to get tangled up in someone else’s chaos.
Tonight, I would watch the fire and try very hard not to think about Samuel Bennett standing in his doorway looking at me like I was the first real thing he’d seen in years.
Chapter Seven
Samuel
I’d been staring at my reflection for approximately forty-five minutes, and the man staring back was rapidly losing his grip on sanity.
It had been two days since Farley delivered my groceries like some kind of cashmere-clad angel of mercy. Two days since he'd stood on my porch, looked at my puffy eyes and hadn't run screaming into the woods. Two days since he'd said I googled you with all the gravity of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis.
Two days of absolute, unrelenting silence.
I'd seen smoke rising from his chimney. I'd watched his Range Rover pull out of the driveway yesterday and return an hour later. I'd even caught a glimpse of him on his deck, coffee mug in hand, staring out at the mountains like a brooding hero in a BBC period drama.
But he hadn't come by. Hadn't knocked. Hadn't sent a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal or even let that gorgeous cat deliver a message.
Purrsephone sat on the bathroom counter watching me with her mismatched eyes. One blue, one green, both radiating judgment.
"Don't look at me like that," I told her.
She blinked slowly. The feline equivalent ofI'm absolutely looking at you like that.
"This is your fault, you know." I pointed an accusatory finger at her. "If you hadn't decided to be Mata Hari, running back and forth between our cabins like some kind of furry double agent, maybe I wouldn't be in this situation."
She began grooming her paw with aggressive indifference.
The situation, of course, was entirely my own making. I'd come here to escape, to figure out who I was without the show, without the tabloids, without Sabrina breathing down my neck about contracts and brand deals and whether my Instagram engagement was declining. I'd wanted anonymity.
Then I'd found it, and that fucking fan from the church choir had to ruin everything by screaming my character’s name across a general store.
I groaned and pressed my forehead against the bathroom mirror. The glass was cold, which was fitting, because my love life was dead.
Not that I had a love life. I'd exchanged maybe three hundred words with Farley, most of them about firewood and cats. That didn't constitute a love life. That constituted a neighborly acquaintance at best.
But would it be so bad if it was more?
That was the thing I kept circling back to, lying awake at night listening to the wind howl through the mountains. When Farley looked at me—really looked at me, with those sharp eyes that seemed to see right through the charm and the practiced smiles—I felt like myself for the first time in years. Not Dr. Brock Blaze, daytime television's resident heartthrob. Not Samuel Bennett, the celebrity whose sexuality was apparently too boring for tabloid consumption without manufactured straight rumors.Just... Samuel. A guy who couldn't start a fire and owned too many yoga pants and desperately wanted someone to see him.
Farley had seen me. And then he'd found out who I really was, and now he was avoiding me like I had the plague.
"This is fine," I said to my reflection. "I'm fine. I came here to be alone anyway. Alone is good. Alone is peaceful."
Purrsephone made a sound that could only be described as a scoff.
"Okay, fine, I'm lying. Alone is terrible. Alone is making me talk to a cat like she's my therapist." I turned away from the mirror and slumped onto the edge of the bathtub. "I just... I want to go outside. I want to go to that stupid general store and buy more coffee because I'm almost out, and I want to maybe run into Farley while I'm there. I want him to look at me like he did before he knew I was famous. Like I was worth knowing."
The cat jumped down from the counter and wound between my ankles, purring.
"That's not helpful."
