Chapter 4 #4
“Just ‘okay then’?” Sue crossed her arms and cocked her head. I hadn’t given her this much attitude since I was a teenager.
I needed to take a few breaths before calmly offering opposition to the proposed plans, “Sue, I really feel like he planned the trip to be alone and you may be forcing him to not be alone. That’s all.”
“Oh no, he suggested it,” she grinned at her own reply, some odd self-satisfaction in proving me wrong. “I offered to bring him dinner to his cabin. He said he’d like to eat with us in the kitchen, not even in the dining hall.”
The dining hall was attached to the front of Sue and Randy’s house.
“Hall” may have been an understatement, it was a log structure with two long rustic wooden tables and benches for the guests who’d typically sit family style.
An image crossed my mind of Evan and I sitting at opposite ends of the long table as though we were in some castle’s grand dining room.
No. I could not think of him in the context of Thorndown.
I shook away the thought and muttered some agreeable reply before slinking back to my cabin. I’d count down the minutes until the inevitable second meeting between Evan and I.
Out of the corner of my eye there was another strange motion from the shadow in his cabin that looked like a half wave. I hung my head low and reminded myself that I was still likely going crazy. My subconscious was fabricating illogical scenarios.
Someone of his fame and status shouldn’t have found the camp to begin with, how had he even managed to book the cabins?
Did he force his assistant to find him the most remote place he could get to?
Why had he shown up without a security team or at minimum an assistant, didn’t most celebrities travel everywhere with a right-hand man?
Maybe it was all a bizarre method acting ritual, he was working on a movie that required him to go off the grid and integrate himself with people on the fringes of society, much like Sue and Randy. And supposedly me. At least that had to have been how he perceived me.
Another mortifying thought.
What had Sue told Evan about me, and what was her explanation as to why I stole his precious alone time from him? Did he know anything about me at all?
Did he ask for a background check on me before agreeing to let me be here?
It was probably a strange blessing that I knew far more about Sir Erwyn the character than I did Evan McLeod the actor. My fandom ended with Thorndown.
I didn’t know any behind the scenes facts about his life, save for the fact that he was from a small town in Scotland, which was incredibly apparent from his accent alone.
Aside from what he’d post on his curated Instagram—likely run by a social media manager—I had relatively limited awareness about him as a person.
There was no random trivia I’d have to pretend to not know when overhearing conversations between him and Sue or Randy, and for that I was grateful.
Maybe in a way it was sad that I had invested so much time into the character he played, but he was little more than the voice and ridiculously handsome face behind it.
He was his own person, with his own interests, that existed separately from Sir Erwyn.
I could do both of us a favor and work to separate him from his character.
Being a rational adult of sound mind I knew all of this, but it was still difficult to look at him or think about him and not see pieces of the character I was so fond of.
I’d have to fight it all. For the next seven days I couldn’t be a fan of Sword of Thorndown. I couldn’t even know it existed.
My mind kept flashing to when I first saw him from the beach. Was I going to be as dumbfounded every time I saw him? Would I ever get used to it? Would I slip up and call him Erwyn on accident and ruin not only the week but my entire life?
Avoidance would be the best course of action here.
I had a clear agenda for the week, and I could very well stick to it without his interference.
Running into him every so often would be inevitable, and now there was the forced joint dinner, but I certainly didn’t need to interact with him.
It was clear that he didn’t want that anyways.
He could do his meditation or training routine or whatever celebrities did, and I could go off on solo hikes and scream into the woods a bit.
Being invisible would be the goal, and I’d work tirelessly to achieve it. If I turned into someone distant and aloof then I wouldn’t need to think about what his impression was of me for the rest of my life.
After the trip ended I could forget him entirely, chalk it up to some crazy coincidence.
Maybe even a fever dream forged in isolation.
I may not be able to watch another episode of Thorndown without it being weirdly ruined by him breaking the plane between celebrity and regular person.
But that was a problem for future me. Present me was focused on self-preservation.
Present me would avoid Evan McLeod like the plague.