Chapter 24
Three years ago
Benjamin Harroway walked onto set like he was the sun and we were simply the planets orbiting around him.
I was just a production assistant when we met. Twenty-three years old, fresh resume, good references from a friend who’d played hockey with me and moved to New York after graduation to work his way up in film. This was my first big movie.
And my first time seeing someone that famous in person.
And god, he was famous. Speed Run 3 had just broken a billion dollars worldwide. His face was on billboards, magazine covers, the side of buses. Everyone knew who Benjamin Harroway was.
Including me.
Especially me.
Benjamin noticed me on day three.
“You’re new,” he said, appearing beside me while I was organizing call sheets.
I looked up. Way up. He was tall—six-two, maybe six-three. Black hair perfectly styled even at 6 a.m., warm brown eyes, the kind of symmetrical face that photographed perfectly from every angle.
He looked exactly like he did in his movies.
“Yes, sir.” The words came out automatically.
He laughed, and even that sounded warm and genuine. “Don’t call me sir. I’m not that old. Call me Benjamin. Or Ben.”
“Ben,” I managed. Then, because I couldn’t help myself: “I’m a huge fan. The Speed Run movies are—they’re incredible.”
“Yeah?” He seemed pleased. Not surprised, but pleased. “Which one’s your favorite?”
“Second one. The subway sequence.” I was talking too fast but couldn’t stop. “The way you played the moral conflict, the choice between saving the city or saving—”
“You really have seen them.” He was smiling now, fully engaged. “Most PAs just say they like them without specifics.”
My face heated. “I might have seen each one multiple times.”
“How many times?”
“Uh. Four? Five?”
“Each?”
“...Yes.”
He laughed again and looked genuinely delighted. “And you are?”
“Matthew Quinn.”
“Matt.” Ben said it like he was testing it out. Then his eyes dropped, taking in my frame. “You’re built. You work out?”
“I—yeah. Kind of.”
“Kind of?” He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t get shoulders like that from ‘kind of.’ What’d you do? Football?”
“Hockey,” I admitted.
Something shifted in his expression. “Hockey. Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.” He looked me over again, differently this time, like he was reassessing. “Didn’t peg you for a hockey player.”
“I’m not anymore.”
“Why’d you stop?”
I shrugged. It didn’t feel like the moment to tell a movie star about my mom’s drinking, the medical bills, and the way money had a habit of running out when we needed it most.
“It was time to do something else.”
He nodded slowly. “Understood. Nice to meet you, Matt the hockey player who’s seen all my movies five times.”
“Four or five,” I corrected, then immediately regretted it. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t apologize.” He was still smiling. “It’s refreshing. Most people pretend they’re too cool to care.”
He treated me like an insider after that. Asked my opinion on scenes, and actually listened when I answered. Invited me to sit with him between takes. Brought me coffee. Remembered how I took it.
Three weeks later, he kissed me in his trailer.
It was late. Past midnight. We’d been running long, some technical issue with the lighting rig that had pushed the schedule back hours. Most of the crew had left. I was filing paperwork, getting ready to head home.
“Matt.”
I looked up. Benjamin was standing in the doorway of his trailer, still in costume—tactical gear from the climactic final sequence. He looked tired. Human, for once.
“Yeah?”
“Come here for a second.”
I hesitated, then walked over and climbed the steps into his trailer. It smelled like expensive cologne and the catered dinner he’d barely touched.
Ben closed the door behind me.
“You did good today,” he said. “Keeping everything organized when it all went to shit.”
“Just doing my job.”
“You do it well.” He was looking at me the way he’d been looking at me for three weeks, like I was a puzzle he hadn’t solved yet. “You’re not like my other assistants.”
“I’m not your assistant. I’m just a PA.”
“Semantics.” He stepped closer. “You’re different.”
My heart was pounding. We were alone. In his trailer. At midnight.
“Different how?” I asked.
“You’re real.” His hand came up, touched my jaw. “Everyone else is always performing. Trying to be what they think I want. You just. . . are.”
It took my brain a second to catch up. He was flirting with me.
Me.
The realization landed all at once. Surprise first, sharp and dizzying. Benjamin Harroway was gay. Or at least not straight. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even considered it. Movie stars like Ben didn’t exist in my world like that. They dated actresses or models, people who looked good on red carpets.
Not production assistants with student loans and a mess of a family.
“Ben—” I started, not because I wanted him to stop, but because my brain was scrambling to find the rules.
He kissed me before I could finish.
Soft at first. Testing. Then deeper when I didn’t pull away.
Because how do you say no to a movie star? How do you say no when he’s looking at you like that, like you’re chosen?
I kissed him back.
Of course I did.
When we broke apart, he was smiling, satisfied. “I’ve wanted to do that for weeks,” he said.
“Me too,” I admitted. And it was true, even if I hadn’t known it until just now.
“Good.” He kissed me again, slower this time. “This stays between us, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it, Matt.” His tone shifted, not cold, not threatening, just firm. “The press, the studio—they can’t know.”
“I understand.”
And I thought I did. He was Benjamin Harroway. Movie star. Billion-dollar brand. Of course it had to be secret.
The secrecy felt thrilling, and the next few months were a blur.
Benjamin started requesting me specifically.
Not just for set work, for everything. Coffee runs turned into lunch meetings.
Lunch meetings turned into dinners at restaurants I couldn’t afford, where the staff knew him by name and seated us in private corners meant to keep him visible and hidden at the same time.
He bought me clothes. Not gifts, but replacements. “You can’t wear that if you’re going to be seen with me,” he’d say, laughing, handing me shopping bags from designers I’d only seen in magazines.
Tickets to a hockey game. “Since you miss it,” he said. We sat so close our knees touched the entire game and left before halftime.
He made me feel like I mattered.
Like I was special.
“You get me,” he said one night, lying in his bed in his Tribeca apartment. “Everyone else just sees the character. You see me.”
I believed him. He liked saying things like that the most when we were alone in his apartment, the windows throwing the city back at us in glassy reflections, the bed too big, the sheets too clean.
Sex happened easily. Effortlessly. Like another box to check.
It was good in the way things are good when they’re rehearsed, when both people know their marks.
I mistook proximity for closeness. Access for affection.
My friend Perry—the one who’d gotten me the PA job—pulled me aside after a particularly long shoot.
“You’re spending a lot of time with Harroway,” he said.
“He likes having me around.”
“Matt—”
“I know what I’m doing.”
Perry didn’t look convinced. “Just be careful. Guys like that. . . they don’t live in the same world we do.”
“I know,” I said.
But I didn’t. Not really.
I didn’t see the lines until they were already drawn. Didn’t see how carefully he separated his life into public and private, how I existed only in the version of him that needed to be managed.
I saw the drugs for the first time two months in.
We were at some producer’s party in SoHo. Beautiful people everywhere, the kind of party where everyone was someone and I was just Benjamin’s plus-one.
He disappeared into the bathroom with two other actors. Came back twenty minutes later, eyes bright, talking faster.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Perfect.” He kissed my temple. “Just needed a pick-me-up.”
Later, in the car back to his place, I asked about it.
“It’s nothing,” he told me then. “Just recreational. Everyone does it.”
“I don’t.”
“I know. That’s why I like you.” He squeezed my hand. “You keep me grounded.”
I wanted to push back. To ask if it was really nothing. But he looked at me with those warm brown eyes, and I let it go.
It’s just recreational. Everyone in this industry does it. He’s under so much pressure.
I kept telling myself that.
Eventually, I wasn’t a PA anymore. I was Ben’s assistant. Official title with the official salary bump. My entire job became managing his schedule, his life, his world.
I stopped seeing Perry as much. Stopped going out with other friends. Stopped playing beer league hockey. Everything revolved around Ben’s schedule, around where he needed to be, what he needed, when he needed it.
“You’re my person,” he told me. “The only one I trust.”
I felt proud of that.
Looking back, I should have felt trapped, and I should have wondered why the hotel rooms were always in my name.
“For privacy,” Ben had explained. “If it’s under my name, press finds out. Fans show up. It’s a whole thing.”
That made sense. It really did. So when we traveled for press tours, premieres, location shoots, I booked the rooms. Penthouses, suites, the kind of places I’d never stay on my own.
All registered to Matthew Quinn.
I didn’t think about it. Didn’t question it.
I should have.
I was still starstruck and stupid two years later.
That night Ben was standing by the hotel window, backlit by the Manhattan skyline.
Even in crisis, he looked perfect. Tall, black hair styled just right, brown eyes that had sold a billion dollars’ worth of movie tickets.
He wore a white button-down, sleeves rolled to his elbows like he’d been working hard instead of pacing for the last twenty minutes.
He looked devastated.
“This is bad,” he said quietly. “You understand that, right?”