Chapter 3 Ella
Imade Benjamin Kakoa laugh. Several times. Hard.
This bizarre reality kept me up late last night after I got home from Jack’s and was entirely to blame for why I was already awake at – I rolled over to look at my alarm clock. Oh, God, it was five o’clock in the morning. I’d gotten four hours of sleep. Today was going to be rough.
Sam, sensing I was awake, snuggled closer to me. I knew it was him, even in the dark, because while Fred was my shadow during the day, Sam was my cuddlebug at night. I slipped an arm out of the covers, tossed it over him, and closed my eyes, willing myself to fall back asleep.
Sheep. Think of a herd of dumb, fluffy sheep jumping over a white picket fence. I counted one, ten, eighty. The sheep started doing weird little side-kicks to keep my thoughts on them instead of drifting back to -
No! Don’t think of him. Watch these sheep. You’re getting very tired watching these acrobatic sheep, Ella. Very. Tired. Look, that one did a little back flip! Isn’t it adorable? Doesn’t it just make you sooo sleeepy?
No. Not even a little. Because I made Benjamin freaking Kakoa laugh. And frown. And roll his eyes. Toward the end of the evening, I even got him to join me in teasing Jack.
It’s weird, meeting a celebrity. You have this whole persona built up in your head of who they are and how they’ll act.
Take an ex-football star turned advocate.
I’d assumed he’d be stoic, tough, with a dash of toxic masculinity added in to spice it up a bit.
That had less to do with Ben’s public image and more to do with the acceptance of violence that surrounded the sport of football, both on and off the field.
Watching him laugh at my murder-squirrel Christmas card kind of blew my mind.
And made me feel like a complete asshole for making all those assumptions about him.
I hadn’t been that embarrassed in years.
The strength of my blush made my face feel like it was on fire.
Then he kept laughing, and, well, I was a red-blooded heterosexual woman, and holy shit that man was beautiful when he laughed.
Especially since he did it so unselfconsciously.
My raging embarrassment had been immediately eclipsed by raging hormones.
My cheeks burned again thinking of him catching me with that look on my face when he finally stopped laughing. You know, that one. That, “Oh, yes, I will gladly climb you like a tree. Now please?” look that is utterly unmistakable.
Ugh. Why did I have to be sweat-slicked and dressed like a weirdo the night I met the hottest man I’d ever seen?
I rolled onto my back and pressed the heels of my hands into my forehead. Fred jumped up on the bed, the mattress sagging beneath his added weight. His hot breath hit my face a second later.
I reached blindly toward him in the dark and grabbed the fur of his neck to give it a little shake. “Lilac leggings, Fred. And an olive shirt. With this hair.”
That’ll teach me to never speed-dress again.
Fred let out the low woof-yip that Huskies were famous for.
“No. Wrong response, boy. Forlorn howling is far more appropriate right now.”
He woof-yipped again.
“I have failed in your training.”
He whined.
“Better.”
Sam shifted on my other side, then the mattress rose and I heard his paws padding over the hardwood. Fred pulled free from my hands and followed him out the door. I was awake, which to them meant it was time to go potty.
I gave up on sleep and turned the light on.
It took me an excruciatingly long time to get out of bed.
My body was like, “No. What are you doing? We were warm in there. Go back to that place,” and actively attempted to sabotage my upward momentum, while my brain was all, “BENJAMIN KAKOA JUST HAPPENED. ARISE, GODDAMN YOU!”
Eventually, I managed to stumble downstairs, where the dogs waited by the front door. I cracked it open just enough for them to slip out. The draft that snuck in was damn near arctic, and the second Sam’s tail whipped past, I pushed it shut.
I complained about the dogs, but they were pretty well-trained. My yard wasn’t fenced in. The fact that I could let them outside and trust them not to take off and also bark when they were ready to come back in spoke volumes.
I staggered to the kitchen and made myself a strong pot of coffee, all the while thinking about Ben.
It had taken work to coax him into taunting Jack with me.
I wasn’t used to that. It usually only took me a few minutes to get people to relax enough around me that they were cackling with laughter and sharing their deepest, darkest secrets.
Mom said it was because there was something inherently trustworthy about my face.
Dad said it was because of my self-deprecation.
My brother Jacob’s wife, Sofia, said it was because I had a sociopath’s ability to read people, paired with a pathological need to be liked.
She was a clinical psychologist, so obviously I ignored her and went with my parents’ explanations. Because she was just joking.
I hoped.
Even with the hard work I put in last night, Ben remained steadfastly guarded and quiet in between those small bursts of emotion, letting Jack and I do the bulk of the talking.
Whenever the conversation drifted back toward him, he managed to expertly steer it away from himself.
I wasn’t sure if that was because he was worried I’d somehow slip-up and reveal his fame to Jack, or if he didn’t want to tell me anything because he thought I might race home to blog about it, or if that was just how all celebrities had to be to protect themselves.
Not that I could blame them. It must suck to spend your days hounded by paparazzi, unable to even go to the grocery store for yourself.
Or make a new friend without fearing that they were only using you to further themselves in some way.
Then there was the digital aspect of it, allowing both fans and detractors an outlet to comment on every single moment of a celebrity’s life, as it happened.
I read somewhere that it takes a hundred positive comments to overcome the emotional damage that a single negative one can wreak on your psyche.
I believed it. I had ten thousand followers on Instagram and got trolled at least once a week.
For painting whimsical watercolors of chipmunks and raccoons and moose.
Like, seriously? The span of the moose’s antlers is somehow morally offensive to you?
And yet I’d found myself looking closer at my paintings afterward, inspecting the distance between those antlers and wondering if they really were off in some way that I just couldn’t see because I created them.
That was nothing compared to what Ben had to put up with.
He had well over two million followers – I checked before going to bed last night – and posted about controversial issues like taking a knee during the National Anthem, the societal repercussions of idolizing large, violent men while denigrating any male who shows vulnerability, and the class-action lawsuit that he and a slew of other former players had recently filed against the USFL for downplaying the dangers of the sport to those who played it.
Some of the comments on his feed were so enraging that I almost hulk-smashed my tablet. The kind of vile, racist, bigoted vitriol spewed through the filter of anonymity that makes you lose what little faith you have left in humanity.
No wonder he was so guarded.
It made me that much more determined to get him to loosen up around me.
If I ever saw him again. For once, it wasn’t because of some need of my own.
It was because of him. Because it must be terrible to feel like you can never relax.
To always be worried that some small detail about your life that you accidentally let slip might appear on a celebrity gossip site the next morning. The man deserved a break from it all.
The sound of barking pulled me from my thoughts.
I went to the door and let the boys back in.
They waited patiently on the tile floor of the entryway while I toweled off their feet and legs.
Afterward I gave them each a treat from the jar of biscuits on the upper shelf of the coat rack, then left them to demolish them as I went to get coffee.
My kitchen was small, like the rest of the cabin, but it didn’t feel cramped thanks to the bright white paint and open shelving.
I eyed the shelf containing my mismatched collection of mugs and opted for the largest. I think it was supposed to be a soup bowl, but I’d never used it for that.
Instead it served as my coffee version of “we’re going to need a bigger boat”.
I added a dash of cream and then poured it to the brim. My first sip was heavenly.
A snuffling noise came from the living room, followed by a low, playful growl.
The dogs. Sometimes it felt like I was raising two toddlers.
Every time I heard an unfamiliar sound, I rushed over to make sure they weren’t getting into trouble (they were usually getting into trouble).
With so little sleep, my rush this morning was more like the shambling of a freshly turned zombie.
I rounded the couch and found the source of the scuffle.
The dogs were sprawled out on the rug near the fireplace, playing tug-of-war with each other over one of their favorite toys.
That was one of the good things about having two of them; they could entertain themselves in the morning until my brain came online.
I set my coffee down on a side table and stepped over them. Up here, you had to plan your life around the weather. I kept enough firewood in the house to get me through a week without power, just in case a tree came down on a line from the weight of the snow.