chapter 5
HALLIE
After Chris left my hotel room, I was immobilized for long minutes that stretched into hours and maybe days. Time has seemingly lost all meaning for me. I check the clock and realize that an hour has passed, but the air is still filled with his presence, his scent, the faint whisk of something woodsy and masculine.
“One breath at a time. Find your strength.” Thanks, Dr. Feelgood. That little mantra might have been fine a month ago, but it sure isn’t working very well at this exact minute.
Finally, I manage to perch myself on the edge of the bed. As the annoyingly flowery comforter moves slightly with each breath I take in and out, inspiration strikes. I grab my phone from my bag and murmur a silent prayer that he’ll pick up immediately.
“Hey, Hals. Just thinking about you, actually…”
I cut him off. “Sam, I need a place to stay. Now. Tonight.”
I start shoving my stuff into the bag like a madwoman.
“You need a place to stay? Do you mean a place to stay in New York? Are you in New York? What’s wrong?”
He’s going to be angry, but it can’t be avoided.
“Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this, but I’m in the city. I really needed to get in and out as fast as possible, and I just couldn’t face the thought of spending more than 48 hours here. You and Marie would have insisted…”
“The f*ck? You’re actually in New York? I thought you were joking.”
Yep. He’s totally pissed. Of course. Great. Just what I need right now. I reach for my hairbrush and shove it into the front pocket of the black leather bag.
“Yes, Samuel. I am in New York. And I need a place to stay for the night.”
“Oh, so you didn’t see the need to tell one of your oldest and dearest friends, who adores you, that you were making your first trip to his hometown in more than five years. Now, you need a place to stay? No, no, no. Where’s the quid pro quo? Do you know how many times I’ve dragged myself out into the wilderness to see you? Into a variety of states which all look and smell the same, like pine trees and small-town lives….”
I manage to swallow the urge to berate him for the condescending comment.
“Sam, I saw Chris.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other line. “What? When? Where?”
“The movie deal.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
He hisses in frustration. “You really should have told me.”
“I know, I really should have, and I’m sorry about it.”
“Do you want me to send a car for you? Where are you?”
“The Marriott in Times Square.”
“They put you up in a dump like that?”
“The quality of the hotel is absolutely not important right now. I need to get out of here before he comes back.”
“What do you mean, when he comes back? When was he in your hotel room? Why you would agree to see him if…”
“Sam, I promise that I will explain everything to you as soon as I get out of here, but time really is of the essence. I’m just going to take a cab, okay? Give me thirty minutes.”
“You do know that Marie is going to kill you for not telling her that you were in town? She’s in Africa right now, so you’ll miss her. If you think I’m keeping something like this from her, you are absolutely, totally crazy.”
“I’ll just have to deal with the consequences.”
Sam mutters something about sending a car, but I manage to brush him off before I hang up. After blindly throwing everything else I brought into my bag, I rush out into the hall. I don’t even check under the bed and in the closet and behind the shower curtain, like I always do.
I’m looking back at the door to make sure it closed behind me when I feel a bit of solid flesh collide into my own.
Before I can look up, the pulse of his invisible force field envelopes me; there’s always been and there always will be something in the air around Chris that announces his presence. It’s unmistakable, even in my current state of disarray.
I grit my teeth and force myself to look into his face for the third time today. It’s a miracle that I’ve found the strength to do it twice. This time almost breaks me entirely.
There’s an ocean of regret in his eyes. Not pity. Just regret.
He knows, then. At least there’s some relief in that. I’ve never had much affection for secrets.
He takes a step towards me, still not breaking eye contact. For a second, I’m afraid he’s going to try to wrap me in a hug, or even worse, that he plans to offer some words of comfort. I must be made of clay, because I don’t even attempt to move.
He neither lifts his arms nor opens his mouth to speak. Instead, his eyes still intently focused on mine, he reaches up to brush away the loose strands of my hair. It’s an intimate gesture. What’s worse, it’s one that carries a thousand memories with it, most of them perfect and loving and wonderful and warm.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
I wish I could say that I hadn’t thought about our first day together a million times, replaying it over and over and over again until memory began to play tricks on me and I couldn’t figure out what was real and what was a shadow of the truth. But I had thought about it, memorialized it. The look on his face tells me that he remembers it too.
He removes his hand from my skin, but his palm is still raised, hovering around my face. His eyes are wide and questioning, and he looks like the old Chris, the one who taught me how to ice-skate and wasn’t sure if he even wanted to be James Ross and made up funny stories about art and laughed at all of my bad jokes.
I turn my eyes down to the ground and move away, backing up against the wall. Physically, I’m as far away from him as I can get. He takes one hesitant step towards me and then another, and then he’s so close that I can feel the warmth of his breath on my face.
Out of habit, of madness, or the need to shatter even the last piece of myself, I raise my arms slightly. I need…I need so much to touch him, to feel his arms around me, to throw myself headfirst into what I had always told myself I would never do again. I need the weight of his skin on my own. I need to forget. I need to remember.
I need Chris Jensen. To hell with it. With all of it.
As I hurl myself into his arms, I feel him shake slightly under the force of my embrace, but his skin closes around mine and I lose myself in the minefield of memory.
In that moment, we’re no longer grown-up Chris and Hallie. We’re eighteen and madly in love and lust and everywhere in between.
* * *
7 Years Earlier
Los Angeles
“Good morning, beautiful.”
He hands me a cup of coffee as I glance down at the tangle of sheets around my feet. I stretch myself like a contented cat and grin at him.
“What are we doing today? Steak dinner? Sightseeing? Disneyland?”
He snorts. “Hallie, you really don’t want to go to Disneyland, do you?”
I turn my face to his hopefully. I do, actually, kind of, sort of, want to go to Disneyland, but his incredulous face stops me from saying it aloud.
“No?”
“If you really want to go to Disneyland, we can go to Disneyland. Since today is our last day here and all.”
“It’s silly. Never mind. That’s for kids.”
He laughs. “Nope. That’s it. To Disneyland we go. I won’t hear any more arguments about it. You want to go, so we shall go.”
“My hero!” I place my hands firmly on his face and give him a long kiss.
“One promise—we have to get the mouse ears with our names on them.”
“That’s a deal.”
I laugh, and as he touches my cheek gently, I realize that he looks exhausted. I can’t blame him, because the last two weeks had been a blur of costume fittings and read-throughs and meetings with Marcus and Alan. For me, the last two weeks had been a blur of long days hanging around the pool and working on my tan while reading romance novels and pointedly ignoring the pile of books I had ordered for my classes in Prague, which were still sitting neatly in their plastic wrap.
Despite the long days, there had been time for us too, to find the small things, the little quirks and the upward flights of eyebrows and little noises that made up the big things. I’ve tried to memorize every single one—the looseness in his body as he drifts off to sleep, his complete inability to remember that bottles of toothpaste have caps, the way he taps his spoon against a bowl of cereal.
People say that love is hard, and I guess that’s true. The Sophia disaster had been hard. Delving into the wreck of long-forgotten memories of a fourteen-year-old girl who was changed, perceptibly and imperceptibly, had been hard.
Honestly, though, this felt easy. And more importantly, it felt right. Like I had found my perfect place in the world.
“Mama…ooooo ooooo.”
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” blares from my phone. Chris bursts into laugher as I cover my face in abject horror.
So, everything had been easy, except for one little thing—convincing my mother of the fact that I had found my perfect place in the world.
When I had called her from the Atlanta airport on the way to LA, she had screamed and cajoled and begged and pleaded for me to stay at Greenview. While I hadn’t expected any less, her words still stung. “Throw your life away, Hallie, throw away everyone who cares about you and loves you and only wants the best for you, and you’ll regret it. This won’t end well.”
Three weeks ago, I might have agreed with her. Now, I was all about the happy ending and totally converted into a true believer.
Chris grabs the phone and taunts me, holding it just out of my reach. “You’re going to have to talk to her again sometime, you know.”
I lunge for the phone, but before I can reach it, he gives me one last evil look and touches the glowing green button.
“I’m going to kill you,” I mouth at him.
“What a way to go,” he mouths back, handing the phone to me.
My mother’s voice is an alarming screech. “HALLIE VIOLA CALDWELL! You have broken my heart. If you think that you can just traipse off with some boy you don’t even know into the depths of Eastern Europe, where you’ll probably be turned into a prostitute by the Russian mafia, you have another thing coming. You will take the next flight back to Greenview and enroll in the Philosophy of Confucius class that we discussed, along with statistics. No more questions, no more complaints.”
She’s picked up the conversation just where we left it the last time I talked to her. It isn’t a good sign.
“Mom.”
“Your father would be turning over in his grave if he knew that you were wasting all of your intellectual resources in order to go play house on some movie set with some boy. However, it’s not too late. There’s probably even still time for you to sign up for that history course covering Marxist theory and its role in shaping modern thought and the course of history.”
I glare at Chris, who’s laughing and pointing his finger at me. I flip him off and try one last plea with my mother.
“Mom, I won’t have to read about history. I’ll be living it. Prague has…”
“Prague has some boy who’s bewitched my impressionable daughter with his good looks and empty charm. I looked up a picture of this boy on the internet, Hallie, and he has a salacious look about him. He will ruin you. Mark my words.”
I sigh. There’s no way she’s going to let me get off the phone without another lecture. I keep talking. Better me than her.
“Mom, I am not impressionable. Why does everyone always think that? ‘Hallie’s so innocent. Hallie’s naïve.’ I am a grown woman. An adult in the eyes of the law.”
I’m laying it on a little thick, but I need to get out of this call alive. I ignore my mother’s snort and try another tactic.
“I am going to Prague. My whole life, Mom, I’ve always done everything that you wanted. I was the editor of the newspaper. I was even in that stupid musical. I went to Greenview, because it was your favorite school out of all the ones that I applied to. I took the dance lessons. Now, I want to do something for me. I want to go to Prague. I want to explore the city. I want to see Europe. I want to do all of the things that you and Dad did, once upon a time. If I remember correctly, you once dropped out of school for two whole years to hang out on a beach in Ibiza, selling homemade jewelry. Remember? You both used to say those were the best days of your lives. And I’m not going to be selling jewelry. I’ll be going to school.”
I get only another dissatisfied grunt. I thought maybe the reference to her own youthful indiscretions might work. Apparently not. I’m running out of options here.
Chris, who’s been listening this whole time with his hand over his mouth to cover his laughter, whispers over my shoulder.
“Let me talk to her.”
I stare at him and shake my head violently. With a naughty look in my direction, he grabs the phone and ducks into the bathroom, shutting the door between the two of us. I’m still pounding away furiously when he reemerges a minute later.
“We’re all set. At the very least, she’s not planning on calling in a kidnapping charge to the authorities, which would definitely be more than a minor inconvenience.”
I gape. “How did you manage that?”
“I dazzled her with my salacious charm.”
I punch him in the arm. “Christopher, that’s really not funny. Seriously, what did you say to her?”
“I started by carefully outlining the course offerings at Greenview’s partner university. I delved into the bountiful array of cultural experiences in Prague. I waxed poetically about music and art for a while.”
I stare at him. There’s something he isn’t saying. He sighs.
“And we’re going to see her tomorrow. Well, tonight, actually. I told her we would hop the next flight out. She requested at least three or four hours for a full-on inspection.”
For a minute, I think that it’s some kind of really sick joke, so I start laughing. Then, I look more closely into his face and realize that he’s serious.
“No. No way. Nope. Not going to happen. You honestly have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You’ll regret it after three minutes. Three seconds. Maybe less.”
Chris shakes his head and grins. “Why? You’re afraid that all of your deepest, darkest, childhood secrets will come out?”
That hits a little too close to home, but I manage to force my facial muscles into a small smile. “I’m afraid your psyche will be permanently damaged. My mother is…” I try to find the right word. “Difficult.”
It is a massive understatement. However, if we’re really going to Ohio, he’ll see for himself soon enough.
“I’m good with difficult parents. They find me charming.”
Of course Chris would be good with parents. It made what I knew was about to happen with my mother seem slightly comical.
“We’ll see.”
He grins cockily. “No, you’ll see.”
“Confident much?”
“It worked on you, didn’t it?”
“I’m an easy target.”
He kisses me gently before leaning back onto the pillows. “Sorry about Disneyland. At least you won’t have to worry about the impact of that particular brand of commercialism on your impressionable mind.”
“I’m going to let that one go, even though it’s killing me a little bit to let you slide with your unfounded assumptions. But I am only letting you slide because I know that you are so not ready for my mother. I’m going to enjoy this one. I’m going to enjoy this one a lot.”
“I so am ready for this. It’s really only fair. You got to see the baby pictures. Diana’s probably given you more unsavory information about my childhood than even I know.”
He definitely doesn’t even know that I had seen the videos of him as Turkey #7 in the Thanksgiving play. But that’s neither here nor there.
“Chris, you don’t know my mother. This is going to turn into an intervention. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. She’ll drag in the cavalry. And by the cavalry, I mean her fully stocked arsenal of verbal daggers. You really have no idea. It’s the worst. It’s a miracle that I escaped that house alive.”
But he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, because his hands have already started to rove over my body as he starts to play with the top of my tank top. A smile flickers across his face as I make an undignified noise.
“We have at least an hour before we need to get to the airport. That means…”
“That I have time to prepare you for the dragon lady?”
“That’s not exactly the direction that my mind was going in.” He lifts me effortlessly on top of him and drags his fingers through my tangled hair, gently finger-combing the knots, his eyes locked on mine. “I love you, Hallie. And if that means that I have to deal with the dragon lady once in a while, it’s worth it. Anything would be worth it.”
His lips meet mine hungrily, and I kiss him back, trying to forget that my mother is probably sharpening her knives.
“I love you, too.”
“Actions definitely speak louder than words.” His voice is low and teasing, and I manage to extract myself for just a second to stare at him.
“You think you deserve a reward right now, huh?”
“I definitely deserve a reward right now. I’m about to meet your mother.”
I pretend to consider it for a moment before pouncing on him. “Just so that we make this very clear—I am not rewarding your behavior. This is pity sex. I pity you.”
“Hey. A guy’s gotta take what he can get.”
“You’re impossible.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I manage to hold him off for precisely one more second before he pulls me back under his spell.
Eight hours, a limousine, and a fancy private jet later (I harp on that one for a while and I’m ultimately just glad that my mother didn’t see it), we’re standing in my living room in Ohio. My mother flung open the door without a word to either of us, and she’s currently standing with her hands on her hips, staring at Chris through narrowed eyes.
She opens her mouth to speak and I let out a little groan, because I certainly know what’s coming when she grabs a folder from the table next to the sofa. Besides Ben’s mother, her closest friend at work is a social studies teacher who does a little private investigation on the side. Her memory, while not photographic like Chris’s, is firmly sharpened after years of working as a researcher, so she doesn’t actually need the notes, but they make her look official and unapproachable. It’s clearly by design.
The litany of facts starts. She and Chris are stuck in a stare-down as I look on powerlessly.
“Christopher Jensen. Parents are Agnes and Harry Jensen. Agnes’s stage name is Lavinia Crawford, and she’s an actress of some repute, I suppose, on the New York stage. Your father is recently deceased. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Chris nods, but she continues, undeterred.
“Two sisters. One of them, a Diana Jensen, was a fairly successful features editor of a women’s lifestyle magazine before she became a full-time caretaker. The other is in graduate school and studying sociology, which is a path I had once hoped my now-wayward daughter would travel.”
She gives me a pointed look. I try my best to ignore it.
“Then, we come to you. Christopher Jensen. An actor.” She can barely disguise her disdain. I close my eyes and look down. “Three films completed. The most recent one is a modest box-office success. I had to use one of those pirate sites to view it. I generally consider the use of those to be a base form of stealing, but sometimes you have to do unsavory things in the spirit of hunting down information about the child who has apparently stolen my child away.”
Chris is trying to hide the amusement on his face, but it’s unsuccessful. My mother gives a little harrumph as he nods again at her.
“It’s a poorly made film, although you have a certain je nais se quoi, at least on the screen.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, Mr. Jensen. The more recent tabloid stories focus on your most recently obtained role as James Ross, which I assume is the reason for your imminent Prague trip. There’s a string of flings with girls from Sampson Preparatory School, otherwise known as Sampson Prep, which you attended at different points during your high school years. You achieved middling grades, but excellent standardized test scores.”
Chris shrugs.
“My least favorite kind of student. Gifted, but lazy. A tragedy, really.”
I would try to stop her, but she’s on a roll, and I know nothing that I could say could stop her now. It’s best to just let it run its course.
“None of that tells me why you’re interested in my daughter. None of that tells me why my baby, who has always had a fiercely independent streak and once promised me that she would never change her priorities for a man, would lose her mind and decide to follow you to the ends of the earth.”
She stares at Chris expectantly. He draws in a breath and looks at me for a second before speaking.
“Mrs. Jensen, I wholeheartedly understand that you’re upset about the fact that Hallie will be taking a brief break from Greenview. However, coming with me to Prague won’t affect her studies at all. Study abroad programs look excellent on a resume, and before even asking her to come with me, I made sure that nothing would happen to her standing at school.”
I stare at him in amazement. He hadn’t told me that. I had just jumped headfirst into being with him, assuming he had done the same. Instead, he had thought, planned, calculated. I should have realized it when registering for classes in Prague required nothing more than signing a few forms and transferring my scholarship, but I had just accepted it, without questioning. I want to throw my arms around him, but another surreptitious glance at my mother tells me that it would be a very bad idea, indeed.
I see Chris take control, adjusting his vocabulary and the tone of his voice to match my mother’s. I’ve seen him do it before; when he talks to Marcus, there are more “f*cks” and “shits” and his normally musical voice becomes brisker, more urgent. It amazes me every time, that adaptability. I don’t have it. Instead, I’ll always be bumbling Hallie, words coming out in spurts and gasps.
He gives her a quick grin, the same one that charmed me, the one that will soon charm millions of preteen and teen girls and middle-aged women all over the planet. My mother, on the other hand, just continues to glower at him.
“I apologize, Mrs. Caldwell. I’m actually just evading your question, which in its most elemental form, is why I felt the need to steal your daughter away from her life.”
“Yes, it is. The circumlocution is a nice trick, though.”
My mother smiles wryly. She’s trying her hardest not to like him. What she said about her least favorite students being brilliant but lazy? A total lie. Those with prodigious and undisciplined minds have always been her favorites, because they’re the ones who have the power to surprise her, for better or worse. The look on her face tells me that Chris had surprised her.
“I love your daughter, ma’am.”
Okay. Now, she’s really surprised. She opens her mouth to speak, but Chris is the one who keeps talking now.
“I know it’s selfish.” He runs his fingers through his hair nervously, and I reach over to touch his hand. He takes in another breath before shooting me a grateful smile. “I know it is. But I’ve tried to arrange things so that she doesn’t have to make a once and for all choice between school and me. Your daughter is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, ma’am, but it’s more than that. I can’t live without her.”
She’s not going to take that well. I glance at her, see the beginnings of an explosion, and brace myself for fireworks.
Chris gives me an innocent shrug. “It’s true, flip flops. Can’t live without you.”
“YOU ARE EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD! WHAT THE FU…”
My elegant and always perfectly composed mother is neither elegant nor perfectly composed anymore. Uh oh.
“I’m very happy that both of you think that you’re mature enough to accept the consequences for your actions, but you have no idea what it takes to make a relationship work, over years, over time, over sickness and health and turmoil and tragedy.”
Those words are an echo of my father’s, the last pearls of wisdom that he imparted to me before he left us forever. She realizes it and her face colors as the realization hits her. Her argument, her intervention, has gone off the rails, but this isn’t how I wanted it to happen. I’m struck briefly by the memory of her catatonic state, the days of staring into nothing which came and went for years after my father died. I’m not looking to go back to that. I move quickly to nestle close to her on the couch, looking at the tiny lines around her eyes.
“I don’t know what it takes to make a relationship work, Mom. But I need to find out, and I’m certainly not going to find out in a class about Marx or Confucius. Dad wouldn’t have wanted me to pass up a chance at anything, let alone this. Remember what he used to say? ‘Be an explorer, Hallie. Find the strength in yourself by taking risks with your heart.’ I haven’t been very good at taking risks, Mom. I’ve never been very good at that. But I’m taking one now. And he would be proud of me for trying it out, for being an explorer. That’s what he would have wanted.”
She looks searchingly into my face. “Do you really that he would be proud of you right now, Hallie? Do you really think he would be proud of the fact that you’ve been sneaking around behind my back, that you’re making decisions without even so much as consulting me? Hiding things from me? Running away?”
“He wouldn’t be proud of the way I’ve handled things. No. But people make mistakes. Even you, Mom. I’m going to make a million more mistakes. And some of the risks won’t pay off. But it’s better than being afraid, of not taking the leap, of being so scared of consequences that you never even try to make a move.”
Chris moves into the corner of the room to give us space. She’s silent for a long time before she turns back to me. She shakes her head one last time before patting my hand.
“Please tell me that you’ve registered for enough credits so that your graduation won’t be delayed.”
It’s a minor victory.
“I have.”
“And what are these credits, if I may ask?”
“I’m taking statistics, just like you wanted, an art history class in place of the one I was going to take this semester anyway, sociolinguistics, psychology, and French.”
She nods. “The psychology class will be good for your psyche. It might help you to understand why risk-taking behavior is so prevalent among eighteen-year-olds.”
It’s a little dig, but as she grabs my chin and looks into my eyes, I see fear, not censure, there.
“I want daily phone calls. Daily. Do you understand what that means? You need to call me every day. Not once a week, or never. Every. Single. Day.”
I grin. “You got it. Every day. Daily phone calls.”
“I don’t approve of this little jaunt to Europe. I want you to hear me loudly and clearly—you’re making a life decision with serious ramifications, Hallie Viola Caldwell. And I think it’s a poor one. But only time will tell that. And thankfully, time is something that you have a lot of, baby.”
She runs her fingers through her closely cropped blond hair to smooth it before turning to give Chris a malicious little smile.
“Mr. Jensen, while doing my research, I saw that you took a course in anthropology at that fancy high school of yours. I have to admit, that field has always held a special interest for me. Mind regaling me with some of your knowledge over lunch?”
He glances at me, and I give him a very small nod.
“I would be happy to, Mrs. Caldwell. We have about three hours before the car comes for us, and that should be enough time to tell you about some of the theories that I like best. And those that I don’t.”
She smiles slightly and raises her eyebrows at me before turning back to Chris. Because I know exactly what’s coming, I groan inwardly and close my eyes.
“You can call me Dr. Caldwell, Mr. Jensen. I think it might be a few millennia before we address each other in more familiar terms. Archaeology might have been a better field of study for you, now that I think about it. Now, Hallie, I’ve had far too much take-out since you went away to school. Go make yourself useful while Mr. Jensen and I have a little debate.”
With a mock-sympathetic look at Chris, I exit the room, laughing a little bit to myself.
After all, he was the one who insisted on meeting my mother. I know he was hoping for baby pictures, but my guess is that they aren’t coming out anytime soon.
* * *
7 Years Later
New York
I’ve made a lot of life decisions with serious ramifications. Willingly making the choice to fall back into the wreck of Chris and me is one that I won’t be able to take back.
I never wanted him to see me like this. I never wanted anyone to see me like this.
It’s no longer a matter of what I want.
Just what I need.
I fall into his arms, no longer able to resist seeing if the real-life version of him can compete with my memories.