Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Samuel
I’d been staring at my reflection for approximately forty-five minutes, and the man staring back was rapidly losing his grip on sanity.
It had been two days since Farley delivered my groceries like some kind of cashmere-clad angel of mercy.
Two days since he'd stood on my porch, looked at my puffy eyes and hadn't run screaming into the woods.
Two days since he'd said I googled you with all the gravity of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis.
Two days of absolute, unrelenting silence.
I'd seen smoke rising from his chimney. I'd watched his Range Rover pull out of the driveway yesterday and return an hour later. I'd even caught a glimpse of him on his deck, coffee mug in hand, staring out at the mountains like a brooding hero in a BBC period drama.
But he hadn't come by. Hadn't knocked. Hadn't sent a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal or even let that gorgeous cat deliver a message.
Purrsephone sat on the bathroom counter watching me with her mismatched eyes. One blue, one green, both radiating judgment.
"Don't look at me like that," I told her.
She blinked slowly. The feline equivalent of I'm absolutely looking at you like that.
"This is your fault, you know." I pointed an accusatory finger at her. "If you hadn't decided to be Mata Hari, running back and forth between our cabins like some kind of furry double agent, maybe I wouldn't be in this situation."
She began grooming her paw with aggressive indifference.
The situation, of course, was entirely my own making. I'd come here to escape, to figure out who I was without the show, without the tabloids, without Sabrina breathing down my neck about contracts and brand deals and whether my Instagram engagement was declining. I'd wanted anonymity.
Then I'd found it, and that fucking fan from the church choir had to ruin everything by screaming my character’s name across a general store.
I groaned and pressed my forehead against the bathroom mirror. The glass was cold, which was fitting, because my love life was dead.
Not that I had a love life. I'd exchanged maybe three hundred words with Farley, most of them about firewood and cats. That didn't constitute a love life. That constituted a neighborly acquaintance at best.
But would it be so bad if it was more?
That was the thing I kept circling back to, lying awake at night listening to the wind howl through the mountains.
When Farley looked at me—really looked at me, with those sharp eyes that seemed to see right through the charm and the practiced smiles—I felt like myself for the first time in years.
Not Dr. Brock Blaze, daytime television's resident heartthrob.
Not Samuel Bennett, the celebrity whose sexuality was apparently too boring for tabloid consumption without manufactured straight rumors.
Just... Samuel. A guy who couldn't start a fire and owned too many yoga pants and desperately wanted someone to see him.
Farley had seen me. And then he'd found out who I really was, and now he was avoiding me like I had the plague.
"This is fine," I said to my reflection. "I'm fine. I came here to be alone anyway. Alone is good. Alone is peaceful."
Purrsephone made a sound that could only be described as a scoff.
"Okay, fine, I'm lying. Alone is terrible.
Alone is making me talk to a cat like she's my therapist." I turned away from the mirror and slumped onto the edge of the bathtub.
"I just... I want to go outside. I want to go to that stupid general store and buy more coffee because I'm almost out, and I want to maybe run into Farley while I'm there.
I want him to look at me like he did before he knew I was famous. Like I was worth knowing."
The cat jumped down from the counter and wound between my ankles, purring.
"That's not helpful."
She purred louder.
I thought about Chandra, about all the times she'd had to navigate being recognized in public.
She had a whole system. Sunglasses, hat, minimal makeup, different hair.
"The key," she'd told me once, nursing a margarita at our favorite dive bar, "is to look different enough that they second-guess themselves.
Most people won't approach you if they're only sixty percent sure it's you. Too scared of being wrong."
She'd proven it, too. We'd gone bowling once—actual bowling, at an alley by the Santa Monica Pier.
She'd worn a blonde wig and glasses, and not a single person had recognized her.
Meanwhile, I'd been mobbed in the snack bar because I hadn't changed anything, and ended up signing autographs on bowling shoes for twenty minutes while Chandra laughed herself sick in lane seven.
"You have to commit, Sam," she'd said afterward, wiping tears from her eyes. "Half-assed disguises don't work. You have to become someone else entirely."
I hadn't thought much about it at the time. Why would I? I wasn't trying to hide. I was trying to be visible, to build a career, to make sure everyone knew my name.
Funny how things change.
I stood up abruptly, startling Purrsephone, who gave me an offended look before retreating to the doorway.
"I'm going to do it," I announced. "I'm going to disguise myself and go to the store like a normal person."
The cat's expression suggested she thought this was a terrible idea.
"Don't judge me. This is proactive problem-solving."
I rummaged through my luggage, which I'd barely unpacked since arriving. I'd brought mostly California clothes—linen shirts, designer jeans, enough athleisure to open my own boutique. Not exactly disguise material.
But I did have a baseball cap. Some sunglasses. And—I pulled out the item triumphantly—one truly hideous Christmas sweater featuring a sequined reindeer with a light-up nose. I wore it every Christmas as a joke, and this year was no exception.
"Perfect," I said. "No one would ever expect Dr. Brock Blaze to wear this."
Purrsephone had migrated to my bed and was watching the proceedings with what I could only interpret as morbid fascination.
The sweater was a good start, but I needed more. Chandra had been clear: commit to the disguise. Half measures would get me recognized and mobbed.
I stared at my reflection, at my carefully maintained stubble and my artfully tousled hair.
My hair.
The tabloids had once described it as "lusciously wavy" and "a testament to premium hair products." It was, admittedly, one of my best features. Dark, thick, styled within an inch of its life even when I was supposedly going "casual."
Which meant it was the first thing people recognized.
I grabbed the baseball cap and jammed it on my head, tucking as much hair as possible underneath. Then the sunglasses—oversized aviators that Chandra had left in my car six months ago and I'd never returned.
I looked like I was hiding something. Which I was, but the goal was to look like I wasn't.
"I need facial hair," I muttered. "Something that changes the shape of my face."
I didn't have a fake mustache. Obviously. Why would anyone pack a fake mustache for a mountain retreat?
But I did have scissors. And a lot of hair that I'd just shoved under a baseball cap.
"This is insane," I told my reflection. "This is absolutely certifiable."
My reflection seemed to agree.
I did it anyway.
Fifteen minutes later, I had a pile of dark hair on the bathroom counter, a noticeably thinner section at the back of my head that was hidden by the cap, and a makeshift mustache constructed from my own hair clippings and double-sided fashion tape I'd found at the bottom of my suitcase.
The tape was meant for keeping shirt collars in place and preventing wardrobe malfunctions on set.
It was absolutely not meant for adhering human hair to human faces.
The mustache was... something.
It sat on my upper lip like a caterpillar that had been through a divorce.
The color was right—it was my hair, after all—but the shape was more "guy who owns a windowless van" than "sophisticated disguise.
" It curled slightly at the edges in a way that suggested either 1970s pornography or a man who sold fake Rolexes out of a trench coat.
"What am I doing?" I asked my reflection.
My reflection, now sporting a dodgy mustache, and the haunted eyes of a man who’d made a series of escalating poor choices, offered no answers.
From the bedroom, Purrsephone let out a sound that was definitely, unmistakably, a laugh. I didn't know cats could laugh. This one had apparently learned specifically to mock me.
I adjusted the mustache, which immediately shifted slightly to the left. I adjusted it again. It shifted right. I pressed harder, and the tape made a concerning squelching sound.
"This might work," I said, with absolutely zero conviction.
I added the sunglasses. The baseball cap. The hideous Christmas sweater with the light-up reindeer nose, which I turned on because if I was going to commit, I was going to commit.
The man in the mirror looked like a cryptid. A holiday-themed cryptid who had wandered out of a fever dream and into a rural Virginia general store.
But he did not, definitively, look like Dr. Brock Blaze.
"Victory," I whispered, and the mustache wobbled.
I grabbed my keys, my wallet, and what remained of my dignity, and headed for the door.
Purrsephone followed me to the front porch, where she sat down and watched me with an expression that clearly said I'm going to tell everyone about this.
"You're a cat," I told her. "Who are you going to tell?"
She looked pointedly toward Farley's cabin.
"Don't you dare."
I was halfway to my car when I heard the crunch of gravel.
Farley stood at the edge of my driveway, wearing a navy peacoat and gray scarf, looking like he'd just stepped out of a J.Crew catalog.
He was holding a canvas tote bag—the kind that screamed I shop at farmers markets—and had clearly been on his way somewhere before the sight of me stopped him in his tracks.