11. Chapter 11
Presley
“You’re seriously not going to tell me your middle name?” I ask, leaning across the bookshop counter toward Briggs, who’s printing out some kind of sales report from the register after closing.
“No,” he says, adamantly. “I hate it.”
We’ve been going back and forth like this for a few minutes, not long after I showed up outside the bookstore, knocking on the glass door with my hoodie pulled up over my head. We were talking about our first names and how we got them (mine is after Elvis, of course, and his is an old family surname), but we’ve now moved on to middle names. Briggs is refusing to tell me his, which is both infuriating and exhilarating because I feel like I have to know. Like it’s now become the most important thing in my life .
“Did you know Presley James isn’t my real name?” I ask him, crossing my arms in front of me, bunching up the front of the pink tank I’m wearing.
He furrows his brow behind his glasses. “It’s not?”
I shake my head. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“Couldn’t I just google yours?”
“That’s not fair,” I say, giving him my best pout.
“How about you guess mine,” he says, the corner of his lips pulled up into a smirk.
“Okay . . . How about Rufus?” I say, conjuring up the worst name I can think of.
He shakes his head.
“Bartholomew,” I guess again.
“Nope,” he says.
“Driggs?”
He gives me a confused look. “You think my name is Briggs Driggs?”
I snort out a laugh. “Well, I don’t know. But wouldn’t you hate it if it were?”
“I definitely would.”
“Is it worse than that?”
He nods. “You know, come to think of it, I’d rather be Briggs Driggs. Maybe I can have it changed.”
“Give me a hint,” I say, unfolding my arms and placing my hands on the counter between us. I feel like I might spontaneously combust if I don’t know it right away. Patience has always been a struggle of mine.
“It’s literary,” Briggs says, grinning slightly.
I think for a minute. Literary? Truthfully, I’d need the help of Google with this one, because it’s been a while since I’ve read any classics. And I’m assuming it’s probably a classic name.
“Atticus,” I say, wondering if maybe Briggs’s mom loved To Kill a Mockingbird and likes a theme, since his sister’s name is Scout. He does live in a very themed princess and fairy apartment, after all.
“Try again,” he says, picking up his phone and typing something into it. The short sleeves of the black button-up shirt he’s wearing pull taut around his muscles, and it almost makes me forget my train of thought. But I stay the course.
Anyway, I’m sort of glad it’s not Atticus because I like that name and I think I might have been disappointed if he hated it. Why, I’m not exactly sure.
I snap a finger. “Oh, is it Heathcliff?”
“Nope,” he says, looking up from his phone.
“Frodo?”
He laughs at that one.
I huff out a breath. “You’re really not going to tell me?”
He shakes his head slowly. “Nope.”
It has now become my life’s mission, my sole purpose, to figure this out .
“Well, I’m not telling you mine until you tell me yours.”
“Presley Renee Shermerhorn,” he says, looking me directly in the eyes.
“Curse you, Wikipedia,” I say, trying not to smile so he doesn’t get the satisfaction, but the extra smug look on his face is making it hard not to.
He reaches up and rubs his jaw. “Not gonna lie, I can see why you went with a stage name.”
I let my jaw drop, mock appalled. “I like my name, thank you very much.”
“Yeah, but Shermerhorn is a mouthful.”
I let out a breath. “That’s exactly what my agent said.”
“Where did you get James from?”
“It’s my grandpa’s name, and I’ve always loved him, even though he’s gotten crotchety in his old age,” I tell him, and then make a scoffing noise. “Why did I tell you that? I could have used it as leverage.”
“That was foolish of you,” he says.
I give him my best what am I going to do with you? look. “I’ll figure out your middle name, you know,” I tell him.
“I have no doubt,” he says. “So, are you ready to get out of here?”
“Sure. What . . . exactly are we doing?”
“It’s a surprise, of course,” he says, a little twinkle in his eyes. I should have never told him that I hate surprises. But I don’t mind them so much when Briggs is behind them. And so far, they’ve been exactly what I needed.
“Okay, Briggsy, let’s get out of here.”
“You have a little bit of . . . um . . . chocolate on your face,” Briggs says, pointing to my mouth.
“Where?” I say, knowing full well there’s a big glob right by the corner of the left side of my lips. But I’m in a silly mood tonight as we sit by a gas firepit in his mom’s backyard, roasting marshmallows and making s’mores.
“It’s right here,” he says, pointing to the spot on his own mouth.
“Here?” I purposefully point to the other side.
“How can you not feel that? It’s practically half of a candy bar.”
I laugh before swiping the melted chocolate from my face with a napkin.
“So how is your first marshmallow roasting experience?” he asks before taking a bite of a graham cracker, marshmallow, and chocolate sandwich. The firelight reflects off his glasses and casts an orange hue onto his face.
“I like it,” I tell him. “Thanks for being a good teacher. ”
Apparently, there’s an art to roasting a marshmallow, at least according to Briggs. You have to hold it just right, just above the flames, so that you get a nice golden color to it. The first time, I’d just gone for it, sticking the fluffy thing right into the fire and blackening the outside. It had a very bitter aftertaste—because of course I ate it. I wasn’t about to waste a marshmallow.
“Is this your first time having s’mores?”
“Of course not,” I say, my tone mocking. But then I think about it. “Actually, I . . . don’t know.”
He shakes his head. “How have you missed out on one of life’s greatest treasures?”
I hold my half-eaten s’more toward him. “I mean, this is good, but I don’t think it’s that good. I give this an eight point two out of ten.”
He feigns shock. “That’s sort of blasphemy, you know.”
“My apologies to the s’mores gods,” I say before cupping my hands with my mouth, angling my head toward the sky, and yelling, “I’m sorry if I offended anyone.”
Briggs laughs, and it makes me feel a little wobbly on the inside.
I pull my legs up, my feet now sharing the seat with my butt, my arms wrapping around my knees. It’s a stance that makes sense when I’m cold, to use my own body heat, but right now I’m not cold. Not with the warm, summer night weather and the low heat emanating from the gas fire. It’s more of a steadying pose because I’m feeling things for Briggs. Bigger things than I should be feeling. Bigger things than I want to be feeling. No, that’s not true. I don’t mind the feelings. It’s just not the best idea. I will inevitably get my heart broken—or worse, I’ll break his. Because I think my feelings are reciprocated. It’s in the way he held my hand on Tuesday.
Or right now, as I look over to find him staring at me.
I try some levity. “What are you looking at?”
“You,” he says, no apology in his voice. “You’re just . . . surprising.”
“How’s that?”
He looks away, his eyes on the fire now. “It’s that you’re not like I’d expect.”
“Seen too many movies with bratty, entitled actors?”
He nods, looking back toward me. “And real stories on social media.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stock into those. Fame is a weird thing. Most everybody wants a piece of it, and if they can hitch themselves up on your downfall, they’ll do it.”
There are so many TikToks now of people who’ve said I was rude to them at restaurants and stores, and it’s all a bunch of lies.
He crosses a leg over the other. “That’s the thing, though. The video—”
“Oh gosh,” I say dramatically, looking up toward the sky, cutting him off. The truth is, I’ve hardly thought about that stupid video over the past few days. And it’s not because I’ve been avoiding it—it simply hasn’t entered my mind.
“Hear me out,” he says. “That video of you is more like what people expect of stars, what we’re, I guess, taught to expect. But spending time with you, that’s not you at all.”
I shake my head. “That video was me, Briggs. One hundred percent. I wish I could say it was AI or a body double or something. But it was me having a moment, a real, human moment where I just . . . lost it. I haven’t done that in fifteen years, since I started working.”
Since I’ve been working nonstop. Which is why I’m now currently on an island, sitting with a man I’ve just recently met, eating roasted marshmallow-and-chocolate sandwiches and feeling contented for the first time in a long time. Maybe instead of working so hard, instead of taking every role that came my way to keep my career on an upward trend, I could have taken more time to do things like this. To just be.
“You’d never lost your temper until that moment?” Briggs asks, his brows peeking out from behind his glasses.
“No,” I say through a chuckle. “Of course not. But I’d gotten really good at holding it in, and then letting it out when I’m alone. I have a very nice soundproof closet at my place in LA that gets the brunt of it. And when I’m on set, which is a lot of the time, the bathroom in my trailer is usually a good place. Although I have to be more cautious there. People are always around, always listening.”
“I’m . . . not sure if that’s terrible or maybe sort of healthy,” he says.
“It’s not, because you saw what happened. Millions of people have seen it. I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“So, what happened?” he asks. But then quickly adds, “I mean, if you want to talk about it. We don’t have to.”
I rest my chin on the tops of my knees, watching the embers of the fire dancing in the sea breeze. I think talking about it might ruin this lovely night, and I definitely don’t want to ruin it. But also, I kind of do want to tell Briggs. Mostly because he’s not expecting anything, and I don’t think he’d judge me. Actually, I’m pretty sure of that. He’s seen the video, after all, and he was madder about the possibility that I was cheating on freaking Declan Stone than about my viral actions.
I haven’t fully said out loud what went down that day on set. I didn’t want to feel the shame of it, mostly. Maybe if I did, though, it would set it free. I could release all the feelings and emotions from that day that have been sitting deep inside me somewhere.
I sigh. “To give you the full picture, I’ll have to go back to the beginning of my career.”
“Okay,” he says, turning just slightly in his chair, demonstrating that I have his full attention .
Actually, that’s kind of a unique thing about Briggs. He listens—like genuinely listens. In my world, people are always half listening to you, their minds always on other things, or looking at their phones, trying to multitask. Ill-mannered Betty with her big-brimmed hat was right about no one looking up anymore. It’s a sad fact.
“So, I have a very . . . interesting relationship with my mom,” I start. “When I first got signed, she was very supportive of everything. She made sure every contract we signed was good, worked with my agent because I was too young to do it myself, and she hired any staff I needed. She had my back, for the most part. And then, I’m not sure when it shifted, or if it had always been that way and I just finally noticed, but my acting career had become basically her entire personality.”
It was more than that, really. Didi Shermerhorn sort of became obsessed with it all. My career was her career. My highs were her highs, and my lows . . . well, those were all mine. She was, and I guess still is, the quintessential stage mom.
“Anyway,” I continue. “I’ve been working pretty much nonstop since I was fourteen, hence why I may have never had a s’more—the jury’s still out on that—with only a few breaks here and there. Don’t get me wrong, that sounds like I hate it, but I really do enjoy my career. I love acting; it’s hard at times for sure, but it’s also a lot of fun. ”
“Is that what you wanted to be when you were younger? An actress?”
I shake my head. “No, I wanted to be a heart surgeon, actually.”
“Really?” Briggs asks, a soft smile on his face.
“Right up until I did my first play in middle school, which was basically how I got started. But”—I hold up an index finger—“I did get to play a heart surgeon in a movie once. It was on a pirate spaceship, and I was a green alien doctor.”
“ Galactic Heist ?”
“That’s the one,” I say. “Getting into that makeup was not fun. It took three hours. But still, I loved it. I love acting. I don’t care about the other stuff—the fame or the money, although that is nice.”
“I’m glad you added that caveat,” he says.
“But it’s not why I do it.”
He nods, a quick dip of his chin showing me he understands, that he gets it. “So, back to your mom.”
“Right,” I say, giving him a single nod. “So, I’ve basically been working for fifteen years straight with hardly a break, not getting to go to regular school, and most of my time off was spent with my dad, because that’s all I’d have time for.”
“Are you close to him? ”
I lift a shoulder and let it drop. “I guess. I mean, I love him—he’s my dad. But he’s kind of played a side character in my life rather than a main one.”
“That’s pretty sad,” Briggs says.
“Yeah, but we’re good,” I say. And we are. I love my dad, and he loves me. He may not have been a prominent figure in my life for the past while, but he’s always been there, in the background. Calling me occasionally, sending me supportive messages.
After everything went down on my last set, I sent him a text telling him I was going offline, and he wrote back right away telling me that if I needed him for anything to please reach out. I almost considered hiding out with him at his house, but my mom would have bullied it out of him. She can be a tyrant, my mother.
“So, anyway, I had filmed three movies since last June, ones where I had big roles. Lots of hours on set, all three were very physically taxing, and I even shot a couple of smaller parts for other movies.”
“Five movies in a year?” Briggs asks, and he doesn’t sound impressed exactly—more like it’s hard to believe.
“Yeah,” I say, bobbing my head up and down. It’s hard even for me to wrap my brain around it. “I needed a long break. I’ve needed one for a while. I landed that big role that I may or may not still have, and I was finishing up my last movie and there were no press tours coming up. Suddenly I had an entire summer with nothing going on. So, I planned to go to Europe for a month or maybe two and do absolutely nothing that had to do with acting or any of the stuff surrounding it. I wanted to travel and see things with no one to tell me what I was obligated to do, and I had lots of plans, a whole itinerary full. I’m sure I would have had run-ins with fans and possibly paparazzi, because that’s part of the job, but I was going to try to stay away from it if I could. I was going to be on a hiatus of sorts. A little summer hiatus.”
“Hey, but you did sort of get one,” Briggs says, his arms outstretched, palms up.
I smile. “I did, but . . . it wasn’t exactly how I planned it.”
“It’s not so bad, right?”
I reach over and give his hand a squeeze. “It’s not so bad at all, actually.”
It’s really not. I’m on a small island, hanging out with a handsome man, and there are no paparazzi, or anything like it, around me. No movie sets or publicists telling me where I need to be. And there’s no Mom, trying to run my career. If I didn’t have the whole viral video hanging over my head, it might actually be idyllic. Exactly what I needed.
“Where were you going to go?” he asks, turning his palm over and intertwining our fingers, which sends a little tingle down my spine .
“Italy,” I say. “I’ve been to Venice before, to shoot a movie. I did a few touristy things during my downtime, but it was barely scratching the surface.”
“I’m assuming your plans were thwarted.”
“Right, yes. So, I was planning my trip, and none of my friends could go with me.” My so-called friends, I want to add, but I don’t. “And I thought, maybe I should ask my mom to join me for part of it. With all the work I’d been doing, and her basically managing my career, I was feeling sort of disconnected from her. Like our mother-daughter relationship was more like client-manager.”
“I get that,” Briggs says. “My mom is a tough boss.”
This makes me cackle. Like, the laugh that comes out of me sounds more witchlike than human. “She seems like she’d be hard to work for,” I say, sarcasm evident in my tone.
He shakes his head slowly back and forth. “You have no idea.”
“Anyway, so I invited her to go with me. And she was excited, I think. I started telling her about my plans, and she basically told me we could do whatever I wanted.”
Looking back now, I should have seen the next part coming. It seems foolish I hadn’t expected it.
“But about a week before the film I was shooting was set to end, she asked for an itinerary, claiming she just wanted to know what I had planned. Little did I know, she’d leaked it to some people so we could get some paparazzi shots while I was on my much-needed vacation. She was going to use it for publicity because ‘the world is always watching,’” I say, doing a poor imitation of my mom. “It’s something she’d often say to me. Especially when I’d try to go incognito to even the freaking grocery store. She didn’t like that.”
“I’m assuming you confronted her?” Briggs asks, giving my hand a little comforting squeeze.
“I did,” I say, rubbing my thumb over the back of his hand. “It was the last day of shooting, and my assistant handed me an invitation she’d received, inviting me to stay at a hotel in Florence, which surprised me because no one besides my mom knew my plans. So, I called the hotel and they said they had confirmed I was coming to their city and offered me a suite at their hotel. I confronted my mom right after, and she wasn’t even remorseful about it. ‘It’s all part of the job’ is what she said.”
“Wow,” Briggs says. “So then you, what . . . lost it on set, and it was recorded?”
“Yes,” I say. “Except, before that happened, it got worse.”
He pushes his glasses up his nose. “How so?”
I laugh, and it’s an ironic-sounding one because I haven’t fully wrapped my brain around it and I’ve never said it out loud. “I was mad, of course, but right as I was about to do my last shot of the film, she pulled me aside and asked—actually, she told me that Declan Stone would be joining us on the trip. ”
“Why?” Briggs asked.
“For publicity, of course. More buzz, or whatever. At least that’s what I thought. It turns out my mother and my fake boyfriend who’s my age are dating.”
“What?”
“That’s right. My mom wanted Declan to come along so it would look like he and I were together for pictures, creating a buzz, when really it was going to be a secret romantic vacation for the two of them.”
“That’s . . . that’s ridiculous.” Briggs chortles then. The kind of laugh that just bubbles right out of you.
“I’m glad you find it funny,” I say, kind of feeling the same way. Saying it all out loud, it’s even more absurd than I realized.
He lifts his glasses with his free hand, since I’m still holding on to his other one, and swipes at his eyes with his fingers. “It sounds like a soap opera,” he says.
“It does, right? But it’s not. It’s my life.” I’m giggling as I say this, even though it’s not all that funny. But it kind of is at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” Briggs says.
I take in a deep breath. “It’s . . . whatever. It’s frustrating. I just wish I had handled it differently, yelling at the crew and calling them all unprofessional, singling out that poor gaffer who’d done nothing wrong. I especially wish I hadn’t swiped all that food off the craft services table. ”
“That did seem a little over the top,” Briggs says, making a pinching gesture with his thumb and index finger.
“Oh gosh,” I say, leaning my head back on my chair. “It’s so embarrassing.”
Even though telling all this to Briggs has been mostly lighthearted and I haven’t once felt judged by him, I turn my head away, my eyes tearing up as pictures of the fallout go through my mind. The people I thought were my friends, the online uproar, the lies everyone made up about me, fans canceling me.
“Presley?” Briggs asks, concern in his voice after he hears me sniffle. I thought I’d done it quietly, but apparently not.
“I’m fine,” I say, the words sort of choking out of me. The tears are coming faster now.
“Come here,” he says, tugging on my hand.
“What?” I ask on a sob, confused by what he’s getting at.
“Just come here,” he repeats.
I put my feet on the ground, moving to stand, and he pulls me toward him so I’m now in front of him. Then he tenderly guides me onto his lap, where I instinctively turn on my side toward him like we’ve done this before, curling up while he wraps his arms around me and rests his chin atop my head.
I let out a breath, like I’d been holding it, as I lean into him. This. This is what I’ve needed. Someone to hold me, not tell me it’s okay or that things will turn out fine. But just be with me .
I’ve always told myself I don’t like to be consoled, but maybe that was just something I made up in my head because I’ve never known what true comfort from another person feels like. This is it, right now, in Briggs’s arms. And when I feel him kiss the top of my head, another tear escapes down my cheek. This is what feeling cherished must be like. I realize if none of the story I just told him had happened, if I were in Italy right now, visiting the Vatican or drinking wine at a vineyard, then I’d never get to have this . . . this time with Briggs. I’d never even have known he existed. And right now, snuggled up in his lap, I’m feeling happy to know there’s a Briggs in this world and I get to be here with him.