21. Caroline Ungettable
caroline: ungettable
I DIDN’T LEAVE CHASE AARONS’S side for four days.
Four days. We barely left his apartment except once for a fancy dinner—he had a glam squad on speed dial that came to do my hair and makeup, so I didn’t have to go home—and once to get acai bowls.
Otherwise, we were holed up on his couch or cooking in his kitchen or training with his trainer in his home gym or having lots and lots of cinematic, movie-star sex.
There were stretches of hours when I forgot that I was almost forty.
I forgot that I was a mother of two. I forgot that I was nearly divorced.
I was simply a woman totally swept up in a completely delicious man she could not get enough of.
When was the last time I had felt like that? So unencumbered?
Yes, it was James’s week with the kids, so I wasn’t, like, neglecting them.
But this is also the longest I had ever gone without seeing them with the exception of camp.
I had talked to Preston every day. Vivi wasn’t returning my texts and, in my most mature mothering move to date…
I decided not to call her. As Emerson reminded me, I had put up with sixteen years of bending to her every whim. This was my moment.
Chase and I were sitting side by side on his cushy kitchen barstools, eating ice cream out of the same container.
His spoon-free hand was on my leg, which was bare.
I was wearing his rumpled oxford, and having the surreal, out-of-body experience of one of those movie characters who wakes up to find she has switched lives.
My phone beeped. I checked it, of course, because it could be one of my kids. It wasn’t.
Wes had forwarded me the picture of Chase and me kissing and written I’m not going to lie. This hurts. My feelings for you are so real.
I sighed and shook my head.
“What?” Chase asked.
“Just this guy that simply cannot take a hint.”
“Do you need me to handle him for you?”
I laughed. “No, no. It’s not like that. Just hang on.”
I texted back: Wes, I have tried to be incredibly clear with you that I am not looking for anything serious right now. I like you and enjoy working together, but I think, for now, we need to leave it at that.
The response came immediately: Are you breaking up with me by text?
I let out a low frustrated groan and slid my phone across the island. “Back me up here: You can’t break up with someone by text that you aren’t officially dating.”
Chase slid his hands up and down my thighs and leaned toward me. “Did you break up with him for me?”
He kissed me quickly. “I couldn’t break up with him, because I have said a million times that we aren’t in a relationship.”
He stuck his lower lip out a tiny bit, and I laughed again. “But, okay, also, kind of yes.” It wasn’t like I thought Chase and I were going to be serious. It was just that there was a reason I hadn’t committed to Wes. Wes never made me feel this way.
“Yes!” he said, kissing me again, and then turning back to his ice cream.
“Subject change!” I announced. “Was there, like, a movie you watched that made you want to get into acting?” How I hadn’t asked him this yet, I couldn’t be sure.
He smiled at me. “First of all, I don’t care about your past. I only want your future.”
That was really cute.
He cleared his throat. “So, when I get asked this question in interviews, I tell people it was Harry Potter.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense. Famous, important movie. Great acting. Great special effects.”
He pointed his spoon at me. “Exactly. Makes me seem sort of legit.”
I scrunched my nose and said, “Well, you know, sort of.” I scooched a little closer to him. “But what was it really?”
He looked like he was debating. “I don’t know, Car. I’ve never told anyone this before.”
“Well, that’s why you’re going to tell me now. So I can leak it to the press for millions and retire.”
He nodded. “Right. I figured that was your plan.”
“It can’t be that embarrassing.”
He grinned at me. “Okay. I’ll tell you the real movie if you tell me something embarrassing about you.”
I laughed. He really was so cute. “Oh, I see. So this is like blackmail. You have something to hold over my head if I leak your secret.”
He snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”
“But, see, I don’t have anything embarrassing to tell. I don’t get embarrassed.” That wasn’t true, of course. Everyone gets embarrassed. Especially when we’re kids.
“Okay. Well, I trust you’ll come up with something.”
In truth, I already had. I gestured with my spoon for him to get on with it.
“My favorite movie, that made me want to become an actor was… drumroll, please… A Cinderella Story.”
I burst out laughing. The only reason I knew that movie was because I’d watched it about a million times with Emerson.
“Stop!” he said, tickling my side. “Stop laughing at me!”
“Was it Chad Michael Murray’s performance that moved you to change your life? Hilary Duff’s?” I wasn’t downing them. They were both great. And they were both super young in that movie. But that movie was not necessarily life-altering.
“Nope. I thought Hilary Duff was the hottest thing going.”
I shrugged. “She’s still hot. Do you remember that whole she’s thirty-five and still rocking a bikini scandal?”
He laughed and nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was a good day for America. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the beautiful movie star can still wear the bathing suit of her choice at the elderly age of thirty-five.” I paused. “Okay. Off topic. Hilary is still smoking hot. Continue.”
“I just figured that if Chad Michael Murray could get Hilary Duff, then I just had to be an actor and I could get her too.”
I tried to look really serious. “Wow,” I said. “That’s deep.”
He nodded seriously too. “I was ten. What do you want from me? But now that I know that Chad was twenty-two when they filmed it and Hilary was only sixteen, the whole thing is kind of gr—” He was clearly about to say gross, but instead he coughed and amended, “Great! Because age differences are amazing! When they are legal, I mean. Legal, consensual-age differences are fantastic.”
I couldn’t help but laugh—and feel a tiny bit self-conscious.
“What about Emerson?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Emerson was always an actress. My mom didn’t want her to act, but she just had this it factor.
” I took a bite of ice cream and held it in my mouth, savoring the sweetness.
“She still does, obviously. But I used to sneak around and help her get parts and stuff. I was, like, a teenager.” I laughed, remembering.
“I was seriously like a fourteen-year-old stage mom. I would take her to auditions, and I swear they must have just thought I was a teen mom or something. Our poor mother.” I didn’t know if I wanted to get this deep with him, but this was my next memory, and I felt like I had to let it out.
“She was actually performing in the dress rehearsal for The Littlest Angel at school when the first tower got hit.”
“Oh, God. Seriously?”
“My dad was supposed to be there, but then—” I cleared my throat, realizing I was in serious danger of crying. Wow. It was amazing how, more than twenty years later, a memory could sneak up on you.
Chase hopped up and held me to him and kissed my head. “That’s awful,” he said.
I pushed him away lightly, back to his stool. “No. I’m sorry. Wow. I didn’t know that was going to hit me like that.” I took a deep breath. “I think Emerson was born to act, but it has been a really hard road for her, you know?”
He nodded. “Yeah. And now that she’s starring opposite me, it’s like… what’s next? The pinnacle has been reached.”
We both laughed.
“So, what do you want to do tonight?” Chase asked.
I flipped my spoon over and licked it the best way, the way where the ice cream side hits your tongue and you don’t have to taste the spoon side at all. As I was pulling it back over my mouth, Chase leaned over and kissed me. A long, sumptuous, delicious kiss.
I laughed. “Nothing, Chase. I have to go home. I have to go back to my job. I have to visit my children. I have a whole life to tend to, which I seem to have forgotten. Have you put a spell on me?”
He grinned. “You’ve sure put a spell on me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Is this, like, a dare or something? Like that movie where Freddie Prinze Jr. turns Rachael Leigh Cook into the prom queen?”
He knitted his eyebrows together and I laughed. “No. You wouldn’t know that movie. Because I have almost an entire decade on you, so we share no cultural references.”
“You knew A Cinderella Story!”
“Only because I happen to have a baby sister about your age.” That did soften this for me, though. A little. Yes, Em would always be my baby sister, but she was a full-grown, wholly functioning adult. As was this man beside me.
His eyes widened. “That’s what we’ll do tonight! We’ll have a movie marathon, and then we’ll have all the same cultural references.”
“Chase! I haven’t, like, moved in here! I have to go home.”
“Then I will go with you.”
I sighed. “Are you for real right now?” Every cell in my body was tingling and alive from the proximity of him.
And it wasn’t just the sex or his thirty-year-old abs or the thrill of living out every movie-star fantasy I’d ever had.
At the risk of sounding like a teenager…
The man got me. He understood me. We saw the world in the same way, which was oddly wonderful.
“If you go, I must go. I can no longer be apart from you.”
“Well, you have to be on set in two days,” I reminded him.
He leaned over and rested his forehead on my shoulder. “No. I can’t go. Or you could come with me?”
“I’m not going to sit on your set all day, Chase. I am conquering the world, if you have forgotten. I am Forbes-list girl-bossing.”
“You go, girl boss!”
I scrunched my nose. “Please don’t ever call me that.”
“Well, you said it.”
“Yes, but I said it ironically.”
He nodded. “Very hipster of you.” He paused. “Hipster in designer threads. That’s what I think of when I think of you.”
I traced his jaw with my pointer finger. For no other reason than I simply could not resist touching him. “Alright,” I said.
“Alright, what?”
I got off the stool. He got up too and pulled me closer, so our hip bones were touching. He touched his lips to mine. “Alright, we have to leave my house, so we’re going to yours?” He kissed me between every word.
I sighed. Like a woman swooning in a Victorian novel. I was a woman swooning in the 2020s. He was magnificent. “You can stay until my children get home.”
What was I saying? Taking him to my place was going to make things infinitely more complicated.
It was like welcoming him into my real life, my real world.
It was admitting that this was something more than a weird, improbable fling.
It was getting my heart involved, although, honestly, it was kind of too late. Who even was I?
He pulled away enough to say, “Can I meet your children?”
I laughed. “Chase, no. You may not meet my children. I would never introduce my children to a man I wasn’t in a serious relationship with.”
Now he pulled back farther and looked at me seriously. “For sure. I get that. And that’s what I want this to be. A serious relationship.”
I took his face in my hands. “Sweetheart, we are running on oxytocin and ice cream right now. Let’s take a big step back.”
His face fell. “You don’t want to be serious with me?”
His face still in my hands, I kissed each of his cheeks, then his nose, then his mouth. “Honey, I want to be anything and everything with you. But you need a girl your own age. Or, better yet, a twenty-year-old with all those birthing years ahead of her.”
“You wouldn’t have a baby with me?”
Now it was my turn to pull away. “Chase, stop! You’re being nutty.”
He grabbed my arm. “Tell me you’ve felt this way about someone before and I’ll stop.”
I bit my lip. Because I could not tell him that.
“I need to go. I have so much to do. My sister’s house and my mom’s store and Emerson is having an issue and…”
He pulled me to him again. “You don’t have to take care of everyone all the time,” he whispered in my ear.
I shook my head. “I know that’s a line that’s supposed to be sexy and soulful, and that the woman is supposed to have an epiphany and fall into the man’s arms. But that is actually my basic personality, so I do. I am the fixer.” I snapped my fingers. “I am everyone’s Olivia Pope!”
“See!” he said. “There’s a cultural reference we share!”
His hands still on my back, Chase said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pack a bag. I’m going to have my assistant make us a dinner reservation somewhere totally ungettable, especially this last minute…”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Then I am going to take you back to your place because I want to see where the most intoxicating woman I have ever met lives. And then I’m going to…
” He leaned closer to my ear, but instead of saying whatever I thought was going to come next—I mean, I didn’t know exactly what, but I knew it was going to be dirty—he said, “Extract that embarrassing moment from you because I told you mine.”
He wrapped me in his arms and kissed me, and I melted into him.
And I should have argued, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Because I wanted to be where he was. I wanted to do what he was doing.
And, well, I would never have admitted it out loud, but it felt good, for once in my life, to let someone else make the plan.