Untangling The Stars (17 page)

“This is Guy’s phone. He’s in wardrobe. I’ve watched this number ring half a dozen times, figured it might be important.”

“Oh.” Andie was suddenly on information overload. Wardrobe? Did that mean he’d left Denver? Scott swiveled in his chair, setting his face on the hook of his thumb and forefinger, eyebrow arched. “Thank you. Who is this?”
Do I really want to know?
What if it was that phantom girlfriend that she’d worried about before?
I probably shouldn’t ask questions that I don’t want answers to.

The woman gave a short, almost derisive laugh. “I would ask you, but since I picked up someone else’s phone—this is Jennifer.”

Jennifer? Oh,
Ginifer
. It had to be. That was the voice. Ginifer Stamos was Guy’s costar—the altruistic, almost angelic spirit of Moira Casey, the girl he’d once loved and who had been haunting him ever since his transformation from man to immortal. For a ghost and an undead guy, the two had a weird romance—one of those will-they, won’t-they impossible couples that everyone was rooting for. Andie knew logically that it was a purely fabricated romance, but that didn’t stop it from punching her in the stomach.
Great, jealousy
and
insecurity.

“This is Andie.”

“Andy.” Andie could hear Ginifer misspelling her name, which she supposed was fair since she’d basically just done the same thing. There was hushed mumbling for a few minutes as Ginifer put her hand over the receiver and talked with someone in the background. When she came back on the line, her voice was noticeably friendlier. “Wait, is this Alessandra? The girl from Denver?”

Cue the vomit feeling crawling up her throat. “Yeah.” Andie’s voice was a croak.

“Listen, Andie. I know you’ve got to be freaked out about what the media is saying, but it’ll pass, I promise. We all go through this at some point. It’s not personal—just business.”

Oh God, what is she talking about?
“I just opened my door this morning and there was this woman standing there. She just started firing questions. I didn’t answer anything, I just ran.”

Ginifer’s voice leapt from friendly to sympathetic. At least, Andie thought she sounded sympathetic. It was suddenly hard to tell when the voice was coming from a woman who was paid for her ability to put on any emotion at will. It felt harsh, but true.

“I’m sure it was overwhelming. Just try to ignore the headlines, nobody pays attention to them, and half the time they’re all bullshit anyway. Never give the reporters a straight answer, smile for the cameras, and they’ll get bored and move on. Listen, I’ve got to go—I’ll tell Guy you called. Hang in there.”

“Okay. Thanks. Oh—and nice to meet you.” Andie meant it. Fake or not, Ginifer had given her some measure of calm.

“Look, I’ve worked with Guy on this show for over a year now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look remotely happy about it. I’m pretty sure I actually saw him smile this morning. It’ll be fine.”

***

Guy called right as Andie was stuffing her third slice of pizza into her mouth. Something about the day had made her ravenous and eager to carbo-load. She still hadn’t found the courage to Google her name or Guy’s, and if Scott had read anything, he was keeping it to himself. Actually, since she’d hung up the phone with Ginifer, there’d been a sort-of moratorium on the whole thing. Nobody had even said anything that even remotely rhymed with
guy
.

She had thought she would jump out of her skin when—or if—Guy’s name ever popped up on her phone again, but then it rang. Andie found it was a surprising effort to answer the phone when his name appeared on the screen. “Hi.”

“Andie.” Guy’s voice was thick, like he’d recently been emotional. The line stayed silent while Andie counted heartbeats.
One, two, three, four
. “I’m so sorry.”

At least seventeen questions piled up the queue of Andie’s mind. Everything from “where are you?” to “what the hell is going on” was clamoring to be the first thing out of her mouth. But none of them seemed the right one to ask.

“So, what now?” When it finally came, her voice was surprisingly flat. She wanted to scream a little, yell at him for abandoning her, or demand he tell her what unflattering smear was flying around about her on social media. But she didn’t.

“You’re mad. I don't blame you.”

Mad? She had been mad three hours ago. It was too late—literally and figuratively—for mad.

“You left. Reporters came. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Instead, I find out that you’ve taken off and left me to fend for myself while you went back to work. So, I guess you could say I’m
upset
.” Could he hear her being reasonable? She could feel herself being reasonable. “I can’t believe you just took off on me.”

“I didn’t take off, Andie, I promise you. I had to shoot today, but thought I’d make it back to Denver tonight. I had no idea about the reporter. I thought we were safe.”

We?
It was the right thing to say—
too
right. Reassurance, logic, references to “we.” He was trying to smooth this over before she got upset. Too late.

“Nope.” Okay, “reasonable” was starting to slip.
He doesn’t just to get off that easy.
Guy seemed awfully cavalier about the situation, seeing as how he was the one initially so worried about what would happen if the cameras got a hold of them on their first “date.” Did being a couple suddenly make it better for him, even though her feelings had never been consulted on either of those accounts? Wait,
were
they a couple? Andie felt her temper start to rise if for nothing else than the frustration of it all.
Keep your calm, girl. Don’t overreact and make either one of you feel worse than you already do.

“That student you saw must have tipped—”

“Don’t blame him.”

“I’m not
blaming
, Andie. This is how these things go. Someone sees something, says something to a friend, and before you know it, your face is on the front page. I checked before I left and didn’t see anything—”

“But you still left. You didn’t even warn me!”

Guy sighed heavily. “Andie, please believe me that I didn’t think this would happen. I would never intentionally put you in this position.”

“Okay. I believe you.”

“But you’re still mad.”

“I’m still mad.”

More heartbeats.
Five, six seven
. Whatever Guy was thinking, he wasn’t saying it. But, maybe that was for the better. She was glad they were on the phone and not face to face. It was a lot easier for Andie to keep her frustration firmly anchored without Guy’s striking blue eyes peering at hers, or peeking out from behind a curtain of fallen hair… Okay, even thinking about it made her thaw a little. Andie ate another bite of pizza, clamped her eyes, and tried
not
to picture Guy’s perfectly chiseled cheekbones or the way his t-shirt clung to his washboard abs when he peeled off his soft leather jacket. It didn’t work.

When he spoke again, it was like he was sitting right next to her. He cleared his throat. She could picture him running his hands through his hair and his characteristic glower. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I’ll fix it.”

“You’ll fix it?”

“I will fix it. I’m not going to lose you.” Guy’s words were so fierce that his words were almost a growl. The line went dead before Andie could respond.

She looked blankly from the dead phone to Scott. He looked back at her, mouth frozen in mid chew, with a face as full of questions as hers had to be. “He hung up?”

“Yeah. He said ‘I will fix it’ and hung up.”

“Well,” Scott said, looking strangely impressed as he swallowed his bite of pizza and grabbed the remote. He tossed a couple of pillows on the floor beside her and settled down onto one. “Guess that means he’ll fix it. Now,
Goonies
or
Pretty Woman
?”

“
Goonies
, definitely
Goonies.
”

***

Apparently, good news travels fast—and personal humiliation existed definitively at the intersection of freedom of the press and total privacy invasion. The tidal wave of calls, texts, emails, and social media pings had forced Andie’s phone into some sort of anaphylactic shock. It seemed to buzz endlessly without stopping. She would turn the thing off (or maybe stomp it into a million pieces) if she weren’t holding out for Guy’s call. Oh, the irony—hating the phone and not being able to escape it. Actually, that kind of felt like the theme song for her whole relationship with Guy. They always said nothing worth having came easy, but still. This was borderline ridiculous.

By the time Andie made her way to campus the next morning, she’d already seen her face plastered all over the Internet. No matter where she looked, from Buzzfeed to Facebook to Yahoo! News, she was either kissing Guy or looking shocked and tousled in her own doorway.

She could probably live with all that. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be known as the girl held with her toes barely brushing the ground while she was locked in Guy Wilder’s passionate embrace, which is what the earlier of the headlines were focused on—the “girl who’d melted the heart of the dark and troubled star.” It was the
other
headline that stung.

In the span of a few headlines, she’d gone from Alessandra Foxglove, beautiful blonde girl-next-door, to some kind of conniving anti-Hollywood tyrant who was gold-digging her way into trying to steal away Hollywood’s hottest up and comer. It wasn’t long before she was painted in the headlines as the home wrecker that had blown up Ginifer Stamos and Guy Wilder’s torrid and as-of-yet disclosed behind the scenes romance. If she saw one more tri-fold picture of her face sandwiched between Guy and Ginifer, she was seriously going to puke.
It’s just business
, Ginifer had said. Yeah, sure—whose business? That was easy to say when you were the hero, not the villain.

By the time she mustered up the courage to step out on campus, she’d tried to do it as incognito as she possibly could. Wearing dark-wash denim jeans, a button up cotton white shirt, and tailored black blazer, with her hair hidden under a wide-brimmed tan felt hat and covered her face in her biggest shades, she barely recognized herself. Unfortunately, her disguise was not nearly as anonymous as she’d hoped for because it seemed no matter where she turned people were pointing and staring.

Andie kept her head down and made it safely to her locked classroom door. She unlocked it quickly, stepped in, locked the door behind her, and let out the breath she’d been holding since she had first opened her apartment door.

But her classroom wasn’t empty.

Dean Susanna Kelley—beautiful, brunette, and brilliant—had been Andie’s biggest supporter and mentor since she’d first come to the university. Now, she was standing in Andie’s empty classroom with her face inked with that telltale “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” look that was reserved for parents’ faces when you tried, unsuccessfully, to sneak in, smelling like booze at three a.m. Needless to say it, was not a look you ever really wanted to see—especially not when you were Homewrecker of the Week and it was your boss’s face.

Andie’s feet somehow became glued to the floor.

“Alessandra.” To her surprise, the dean’s voice was far more comforting than her face. Susanna moved forward and gave her a quick, semi-stiff hug. Dean Kelley was a woman married to the university and well past her childbearing years, which she referred to as the years she’d “given up that other business” and built a school instead. But, as far as hugs went, Andie was willing to take just about anything right about now. She hugged Susanna like her life depended on it. “Please tell me this is some bizarre—and totally unsanctioned—research you’re up to. This whole business with that TV boy, it’s ridiculous.”

“TV Boy.” That was a weird way to put it.
Maybe Dean Kelley had taken on more of a maternal role than she’d realized.

“It all happened so fast. Honestly, I haven’t even gotten my head wrapped around it.”

Susanna took Andie’s hand and led her into the small classroom office. “So, start from the top. Walk me through.”

“Well, Guy was on campus a few days ago—actually I’m not sure why—and, anyway, he ended up slipping into my class a few minutes before the session and sat up back and audited. We talked a little, no big deal. Then, we bumped into each other the next day, he asked me on a date, and the rest is—” Andie waved her hands in front of her. “How this went from a first date to some crazy headline news is just … I don’t know.”

Dean Kelley looked empathetic. Or sympathetic. It was hard to tell which. Susanna Kelley was not a woman to waste time being emotional. “Listen, Alessandra. I’m not here to lecture you. Your business is your business. But, you should know that because of your unique subject matter expertise and the nature of this Guy Wilder, we have to tread somewhat carefully. My office was asked for and answered an official statement this morning to the press.”

Andie put her hand over her mouth.
Holy shit.
Dean Kelley patted her hand reassuringly and continued on, “It was boilerplate stuff, Alessandra.” She finished her sentence in air quotes. “‘The university does not make it a policy to meddle in the personal lives of its faculty members. Dr. Alessandra Foxglove is a well-respected academic at our institution, and we trust her personal and professional judgment in managing her affairs outside of the university.’ Quite simple.”

“Dean Kelley, I am so sorry. I can’t tell you how mortified I am about this. I never would have imagined—”

The dean waved away Andie’s apologies. “Don’t worry about it, Alessandra. The university has your back, as do I personally.” She paused at the doorway. “However, if I may, to speak candidly, consider this situation an
Enemy of the State
situation. In time, it will blow over. You have managed to tap into the insecure paranoia of Hollywood PR, Dr. Foxglove. You are an outsider that no one knew about, and all they can seem to find out about you is that you teach college kids to separate themselves from the reality distortion field of entertainment. Add to that the fact that Mr. Wilder tried to pull out of his contract today, and try to understand how insecure the powers that be have become to think that you are trying to steal away their golden boy. If I were you, I believe I would actually be impressed.”