Fifteen steps to the door. Why were those lofts so damn big? What was I thinking?

Five steps, and I heard a shuffle behind me, the scrape of a chair. I picked up the pace, and I knew he was behind me. By the time I got to the door, his chest was against my back and his hand was over the door jamb.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“I’m going to get between you and this. I don’t like anyone knowing where you are. I don’t like you walking around at night unprotected. Especially because of me.”

I turned, putting my back to the door. “I haven’t seen you in ten years. Now this?”

“I should say it’s that I feel responsible for what’s happening. But you’re in this business as much as I am, so it’s not that. It’s you. I was up half the night thinking about you in those bleachers. The things you told me. The stuff I told you. How I felt. Back then, I was so confused, and I left you without a call or checking on you for reasons that…” He shook his head. “The reasons were pathetic. No one would have approved of you, and I lived on approval.”

He touched my hair, and those long strands became nerve endings for desire. The little hairless spot on his chin shifted, and I wanted to touch it so badly that I did so without thinking.

“Whatever it was I felt before, I’m not hiding from it this time. This time, I’m not going to worry what anyone else thinks,” he said.

“What if I’m worried?”

“I’ll make you not worried.”

His breath warmed my cheek, and I believed he could change things, even as I knew he couldn’t. He could only drag himself down. This could only go bad. But I turned my face until my lips touched his, and he stopped being a movie star. He was the boy in the bleachers, the one who worked too hard and cared too much, and I became the girl who could be anything she wanted, the one who was accepted and whose life was about to turn around.

But I’d wanted it then. I’d wanted his hand in mine to be the warning bell for change. In the penthouse loft, with his lips and tongue growing more urgent and his hands on the sides of my face, I didn’t want my life to change. I’d done everything I’d set out to do since he’d left, and there he was again, ready to destroy everything I’d built in exchange for a mouth that fit mine like a palm curled over a fist.

I turned to face the door, still trapped by his arms, and opened it a crack. He slapped it shut.
“If you’re not busy, I want to take you somewhere.”

“I’m always busy,” I said, leaning into him.

“Doing what?”

“Taking pictures of Hollywood royalty.”

“Bring your camera then.”