18. Chase #2
“Quit feeling sorry for me,” I say quickly, heat rising in my skin. “I don’t want you to see me as someone to feel sorry for. Because I’m fucking not. I love my life. I’m proud of what I do, and who I am. I was born a fucked-up mess, but I’m sure as hell making the best of it.”
“You are not a fucked-up mess. Well, maybe in a fun way, but come on, Chase.”
I move on the couch, gripping him and nudging him over so that I can move onto the long portion of the couch. I put my feet up and wrap my arms around his body, yanking him over so that he’s lying on me in the way I like best.
His back rests on my chest.
His head is just below mine, in a spot where I can bury my nose in his hair.
“I like you like this,” I murmur just above his ear as I wrap one arm around his torso. “I like holding a big, strong, fucking muscled-up man in my arms as he’s draped across me.”
“Like I’m a weighted blanket?”
“Yes.”
We’re silent for a while, listening to pieces of firewood gently snapping in the air. I let my hand roam over his body, stroking over his chest, and he eventually puts his palm on my thigh.
“No wonder you said you’d never watch a show like Yard Line,” Logan says. “Did you hate it when you saw me in that football uniform?”
I snort. “I was fine. Just because I had an abusive dad doesn’t mean I’m going to crumble from seeing anything related to football. Honestly, I thought you looked hot.”
“You sure?”
I slide my hand upward, resting it near his collarbone. “Maybe I liked the idea of conquering a football player. Flying in the face of every guy who bullied me, and the guy I could never be. Having a man in a football uniform get on his knees for me is a very different thing.”
Logan laughs softly and soon I’m laughing too. It’s like a small miracle. He turns his head backward, looking up at me as he rests on my chest.
I lean over and capture his lips in a kiss.
Fuck, I can just do this, now.
Shouldn’t bombard him with it as much as I have been doing, probably, but…
I can kiss him.
It’s hard not to put my mouth on his when he responds to it the way he does, too. Half of me always expects him to get a little skittish and tell me we can’t get more physical, but I keep kissing him and he opens for me, leaning back further to give me a deeper angle.
I slide my tongue along his, hot and slick.
And as I kiss him, any feeling of doubt about what I should and shouldn’t tell him fades away into the distance.
The same way that substances used to erase the rest of the world, but… better. More real.
I wake up suddenly to a horrible grinding sound.
I gasp as I look up to see a hand with purple painted fingernails reaching over me, grabbing something from the coffee table.
It’s Emily. She glances over and gives me a polite smile, completely businesslike, as if she doesn’t question for a moment why I would be here. I’m shirtless on the couch, but luckily I’m wearing pants.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi, there, Chase.”
How the fuck did I fall asleep?
I had plans. Big plans. I wanted to get Logan naked, to cater to his cock all night and edge him until he couldn’t take it anymore, then to make him come again a few hours later, reducing him to a pile of cum and sweat and… somewhere along the way we just cuddled each other to sleep?
Which was also good.
Really, really fucking good, actually, and it was making me hard, too, but—
“Fuck,” I groan as the awful buzzy grinding sound starts again, coming from the kitchen, and afterward a different sound starts up.
Emily is organizing different paperwork on the table and then she picks up Logan’s laptop, bringing it over to the long dining room table.
I stand up and look over toward the kitchen. I walk over and find Logan in there, freshly showered, wearing a lavender colored shirt with white slacks.
“Morning,” he says in his deep, soothing voice. “You sleep okay?”
“Until you started up a construction site in the kitchen, yes.”
“I’m making green juice and espresso, if you want some. I have to call in for a morning show in five minutes. I tried to wait as long as I could before making too much noise.”
My heart feels a little too big in my chest.
Again, Logan wasn’t being thoughtless at all. Who knows how long he’s been awake, wanting to grind his espresso beans but being too polite to wake me up.
“Do you have any energy drinks?”
“God, no,” he says. “You’re blasting your adrenal gland, drinking those first thing in the morning. Can I make you a coffee instead? Promise you’ll like it.”
“I don’t know what an adrenal gland is, but it’s cute that you want me to be healthy.”
He hums. “Just want you to feel good, to be honest.”
“I’ll take a cup of the green juice and a coffee, then. Um… Logan?”
“Yes?”
“When did I fall asleep last night?”
He puts his hand on the palm of my back as he reaches past me to grab some drink glasses, and my cock throbs just from that touch.
“Somewhere after the hundredth time you kissed me, I’d guess,” Logan says, a twinkle in his eye.
I groan. “Mm. Oh, shit. Did I fall asleep while you were telling me about the production assistant who always bakes cookies?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry. I want to hear that story. I want to hear all of your Yard Line stories.”
He squeezes my shoulder, then starts pouring the drinks. “Trust me, I didn’t mind. I liked it. I run my mouth all day in interviews talking about my career, and when I saw you sleeping soundly it just made me happy.” He glances up at me. “You fall asleep a lot more easily these days.”
“I do. No liquor means my sleep is deeper, actually.”
I don’t ask if Emily walked in to see me lying on the couch with Logan this morning, or if he was awake before then.
“I’ve got the webcam set up for you over here,” Emily calls over to Logan from the dining table. “It’s a great shot of Central Park through the windows behind you, so it’ll look good on TV.”
“Got it,” Logan says. He squeezes my waist gently before he walks over to sit in front of his computer.
Only a minute later, the sound of a screaming crowd starts to come from the little laptop speaker in front of him. Then the morning TV show host starts to talk over the crowd.
“Well, good morning everybody out there waiting to hear from everyone’s favorite TV fantasy boyfriend, Logan Stone! As you can see, we’ve got a sea of Yard Line fans here waiting to see the actor who plays Damien Vance, or Big D, on the award-winning show. Logan, can you hear me?”
I lean on the counter in the kitchen, looking over toward Logan, watching him morph into Logan Stone, the superstar.
When he answers the TV host, the crowd in the background goes nuts all over again. They proceed with the interview, and first the host asks him some questions before moving on to invite a few audience members to come up and ask things.
One fan asks him if he always knew he wanted to be an actor.
“Yes,” Logan says. “There was never a question in my mind. I was in a play when I was six, where I had a tiny part where I played an orphan kid by the seaside selling taffy. My only line was strawberry, vanilla, or orange cream, get your taffy here!”
The crowd erupts into laughter as he tells the story.
Another fan asks him about his hobbies, and he says he doesn’t have enough of them, because he’s always busy with work, but that he used to build Lego sets all the time.
Didn’t know that.
Very cute.
Another comes up, and with a nervous voice, asks what he loved about the Yard Line script when he first read it.
So many people are nervous to speak to Logan.
I get to be here, in his hotel room, anytime I want, and when I first met him I didn’t even know who he was.
Lucky, lucky.
Seeing Logan the way the rest of the world sees him always throws me off.
It’s like he’s part of this bigger thing that fame threw him into, and somehow I slipped behind the curtain. Logan nods thoughtfully at the woman’s question about Yard Line, and I’m amazed at how he’s taking every question seriously, not just tossing off canned answers to please the crowd.
“I loved that the show focuses on the transformative power of football,” he says.
“A lot of football shows focus on the masculine bravado of the sport, or the glory of winning a game. But Yard Line is more personal. I get to play a man who seems perfect out on the field, but inside he’s struggling so deeply.
It meant a lot to me to have that nuance. ”
The final fan who asks him a question actually begins to cry as she speaks to him.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s really you,” she whispers, trying to collect herself. “Okay. Wow. Well, I wanted to ask if you ever see yourself doing theater again? A Broadway play?”
Logan nods. “Thank you so much for your question. I would love doing theater again. I won’t be able to while I’m still starring in Yard Line, because I have to be in LA to film. But if I was cast in a Broadway play, I’d happily spend time in New York.”
I look down at the kitchen counter. I swirl the espresso in my cup and pick it up, tossing it back and letting the bitter coffee hit my tongue.
My heart’s doing a little backflip in my chest, and as the TV host wraps up the segment with Logan, I tune out, looking out through the windows toward Central Park.
It was just a question.
A one-off thing, about a hypothetical world, where one day, Logan might go for a Broadway play and spend time in New York.
Spend fucking time in New York.
Somewhere in my mind, I’d always assumed Logan would be in LA forever. He’s an actor, and that’s what actors do. Keeping that mental distance always seemed important.
Without it, I’d get too greedy.
If you lived here, how the fuck would I ever be able to stay away?