“What what was like?”
“Being somewhere with a movie star.”
The waitress who comes to our table is so nervous she slops water over the sides of the glasses as she pours from a pitcher. She can’t quite look at me, so she takes Jack’s order first.
“Fish cakes and a beer,” he says.
She can only get her gaze to reach as far as somewhere around the middle of my chest, so I smile and say, “The same, please,” and she actually does something that looks like a curtsy before she blushes and rushes away.
When I turn back to Jack, he’s watching me. More like studying.
“Go on,” I say.
“Go on what?”
Now he’s playing coy?
“Ask whatever you’re thinking. Whatever you want.”
“Do you enjoy it? The fans?”
People are listening. The tables around us are hardly speaking to each other, but I have zero room to ask Jack for anything, even if it’s that we talk about this somewhere else, so I go for honesty. Maybe the eavesdroppers around us will learn a thing or two, though so far they’ve all been pretty well-behaved.
“The fans are why the movies I make exist. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have a career. So yeah, it’s always great to meet people who like what I do.”
Jack waits, expression flat. He can tell that’s the canned response.
“Things like this, where everyone wants a few seconds of my time, maybe a picture or an autograph, and then they let me get on with my night, that’s pretty easy. It’s when they don’t take no for an answer that it can get tricky. I’ve had fans follow me for blocks when I’m stopping somewhere for a coffee, or others that try to sneak into my hotel. That’s not okay.”
Jack’s eyelashes flutter like he’s thinking, but all he says is, “No, I wouldn’t think so.”
I drop my voice so the people around us would really have to lean in to hear. “Or when they think they deserve parts of me that are private. The people who are important to me. I don’t owe them that.”
After the late-night interview, Roberta booked me a bunch more appearances so I could repeat my story. All high profile, all with sympathetic hosts who asked preapproved questions. It still doesn’t sit easily with me that I had to share that part of myself. Within the first week, Roberta got calls about a dozen different projects that all needed a gay lead. We turned them all down. The people who wanted to cast me were looking to ride my coming out coattails, and those aren’t the projects I want to be working on right now.
I want to tell Jack about what Iamworking on, but I also want to give him the space to figure out what he needs to. He hasn’t stalked off yet, so that’s promising, but this is my one and only chance to make amends.
“How’s your ex?” he asks.
Anderson is not what I want to talk about here.Shadow Leagueis still happening, and my contract commits me to two more movies. Roberta and I talked about it and agreed I’d be in a good position if I wrapped them up while the production company gets up and running. She’s happy to support the new plan but doesn’t want to burn all the bridges from her formula until we know what the future holds. We’ve scaled way back on the amount of promotional work I’ll need to do with each release, which will give me time to work on new projects in between shoots.
And also...
“My ex is gone.” It hasn’t officially been announced yet, but Anderson has been notified he won’t be needed forShadow League 5.Of course, they’ll say it has something to do with scheduling conflicts, but once the truth was out to Cedric and the rest of theShadow Leagueteam, there was no question about the studio keeping him on.
“Sounds like everything is going great then,” he says as the waitress comes back with our beers.
It is, but it’s not the way I want things.
“Jack,” I say.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks like he can’t hold it back.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “If I’d known someone was filming, I would have—”
“It’s not about that.” He drums his fingers on the side of his beer bottle. “Not all of it anyway. You lied. Even if no one else had been there, you let me think you were someone else. I kissed you. All while thinking you were someone else named David.”
“I know. It seemed like the right choice at the time, and when I knew it was the wrong one, it was already too late, because...” God, there are people everywhere. Phones. Every second of this could be online before the night is out. It’s like the air is being sucked out of the room and dragging the words out of my lungs with it.
