1
Cash Rivers, aka a movie star who cannot get this ray of sunshine out of his head
The last timeI was at a holiday party this awful, a loose pet tiger, a malfunctioning smart home system, and undercooked chicken were involved.
On a private island.
With auto-locking doors that left me trapped with the pet tiger and an upset stomach in a room rapidly chilling to below freezing.
Not exactly where a kid who grew up in a middle-class family in a city near the Blue Ridge mountains in southern Virginia ever would’ve expected to find himself, but life’s interesting sometimes. One day, you’re a normal kid goofing off and making a music video with your buddies to post on YouTube for fun. The next, you’re in a world-famous boy band. Then those boy band days are over, you move to Hollywood, and you’re getting invited to places only the richest of the rich and most famous of the famous hang out.
This party, however, is awful for a different reason.
And possibly far more interesting.
In the bad way.
“I’ll bite,” Davis Remington, my childhood friend and former boy band buddy from our Bro Code days, says over a bottle of holiday kombucha. We’re lingering in one corner of the living room of our friend Beck’s weekend mountain mansion, which looks like it was decorated by an overzealous tipsy elf.
“What’s with the grumpy face?” he asks.
“I’m notgrumpy. I’mthoughtful.”
He slides a look at me and smirks.
With his brown man bun, thick beard, and tattoos, he’s more often mistaken for an underfed, lost lumberjack than he is for anything else.
“Thoughtfully staring at your pool house tenant,” he says.
Asshole’s not wrong.
I’m very much staring at my pool house tenant.
I would’ve thought being all the way across the country from my house in Malibu and its accompanying pool house that Aspen Bowen has rented out for the past year would mean I wouldn’t have to see her.
Think about her.
Hear her.
Watch her.
Feel like a creepy old dude who needs to get my shit together and quit obsessing over a woman who’s fifteen years younger than I am.
“She’s blocking the dart board,” I tell Davis.
He keeps staring at me.
Doesn’t have to say a word.
I know what he’s thinking.
Whole damn game room with another dart board in the basement.
“So ask her to move,” he says.
There are roughly a dozen people between Aspen and me. All of them are my family, or they’re friends close enough to be considered family. People I don’t see often enough. I should be chatting with more of them instead of hiding in the corner with Davis.
But I’m not merely hiding in a corner with Davis. I’m hiding in the corner so I can watch Aspen. She’s a rising pop star, invited to our annual hometown get-together by virtue of being tight with Waverly Sweet, girlfriend of Fireballs’ second baseman and future baseball hall-of-famer Cooper Rock, who’s always invited because he lives next door to Beck and all of us are rabid, lifelong Fireballs fans.
