“People kept calling me,” Isaac said, as if that explained everything. Then he asked, “So are you really going to do this?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
Earlier I’d told him the entire story of my attempted career relaunch and ClosedDoors and Bianca von Honey and meeting Bee on set. How we accidentally fell into bed and I accidentally fell in love too, and then how I fucked it up.
I’d also told him the plan I’d abruptly hatched after talking to my mother—a plan that involved laying my soul bare and utilizing some unlikely allies.
“And your manager doesn’t know about this interview,” said Isaac.
“Nope,” I replied with a grin. Maybe he could hear it in my voice because he finally turned his head enough to look at me. He gave me the same look he used to give me when I’d clamber onto his tour bus bed with a bottle of Southern Comfort and an ambitious plan for how we and Kallum should spend the night in a new city. Like somewhere deep in his unknowable Isaac mind, he found me both mildly entertaining and profoundly puzzling.
Unfortunately for past Nolan, Isaac had always looked extremely hot when he gave me that look. Honestly, it was a little distracting even now.
“You realize that doing an interview about falling in love with a porn star while filming a Hope Channel movie is the opposite of the image you were trying to build by taking that role in the first place, right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said simply. I did realize it. But the interview was all I had to give. I had no social capital, no friends left in the business other than Isaac—who hardly counted as being in the business these days, what with being a hot recluse and all.
All I had was the truth. A truth that felt as raw and bloody as a skinned knee that needed to be kissed better.
“Do you ever think,” I said, looking down at the glass cradled in my hands, “that maybe that’s what went wrong the first time? Letting the image mean so much?”
There was a pause, filled up by the suck and roar of the Pacific.
“Yes.”
“We cared more about our given identities than ourselves,” I went on, my chest hurting for us INK boys then and also us INK boys now. “Defending a brand that was at best a slice of us and at worst a shell.”
“We did what we were told,” said Isaac. “Because it worked out often enough that there was never a reason to question it.”
He took a drink, looking at the ocean again after he finished. I wondered if he was thinking of Brooklyn.
“If I’m going to do this being famous thing again, then I think I should do it differently this time around,” I said. “I don’t think that everyone deserves parts of myself that I don’t want to give, but Ideserve for the parts of myself that I do choose to give to be honest ones, you know? I just want to beme—not the manufactured version of a bad boy or a reformed bad boy. Just me. Nolan. Nolan Shaw, who is in love with Bee Hobbes, full stop.”
Isaac looked down at his glass again. “You know, Brooklyn and I were never out of the spotlight. Not for a moment. And there were times when it felt so hard I could scream. But no matter how hard it was”—he dragged in a long breath—“it was never harder than being without her.”
I slid along the railing and pressed my shoulder against his. He allowed it, although I could feel the struggle inside him to stay still, as if he wanted to shrink away. I wondered if he’d touched anyone, even a friend or family member, since Brooklyn’s funeral.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Brooklyn was amazing.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice brittle and splintered, like shards of a glass dropped on the floor. “She was.”
A few minutes passed like this, our shoulders warm against each other’s and the waves rushing in. Then Isaac drained his drink and pushed away from the railing.
“You’re doing the right thing, Nolan,” he said. “Even if youfail miserably and look like a giant asshole afterward, at least you’ll know that you didn’t waste a single second letting her know that you loved her.”
And with that, he walked back inside the house, leaving me alone with the inky sky and the restless sea.
Chapter Thirty
Bee
Duke the Hallswrapped on the twenty-ninth of December around eleven at night, and no more than seven hours later, I was on a flight home with my moms to spend New Year’s Eve in Texas with them.
Diving back into the movie had been a good insulation from the crushing heartbreak I felt every time I thought of Nolan. The crew had been mostly supportive, especially the handful of people who, like me, were also dirty, porn-making people. But even a lot of the folks hired by the Hope Channel seemed to be unbothered. Of course, there were a few, like Maggie from craft services, who couldn’t manage to make eye contact with me. But Gretchen and Pearl went out of their way to make me feelas comfortable as possible. If this single movie was my only experience with mainstream entertainment, then I had no regrets. (Other than the whole hiding-my-true-identity thing.)
Sunny had been my knight in shining armor through it all, never leaving my side. And each night when I came back to the hotel, my moms were there waiting for me so that I was never fully alone beyond the hours I spent in my bed, staring at the ceiling until exhaustion took hold.
Now, on New Year’s Eve, I sat alone in my childhood bedroom with my laptop balanced on my knees, FaceTiming with Sunny as she sorted through weeks’ worth of our junk mail back at our place in Los Angeles.
