Chapter 1-2

 

CHAPTER 1

The bright winter sun was dazzling. The intensity of the cold afternoon and the everyday bustling noise of this mediocre little town immediately became a welcome relief of normality to my senses, after being submerged in a dark room, watching both intense tragedy and human resilience unfold before me over the past two and a half hours. Napkins from the popcorn was all I had on to deal with the tears and wipe away the mascara that I just knew was streaking my cheeks and inevitably made me look like a broken panda, and then I tried to tuck the mascara-streaked napkin I had in my hand away without anybody else noticing.  

I wasn’t usually any kind of sap at generic, formulaic Hollywood disaster films, but this one had rather managed to hit a little closer to the heart than I had ever expected it to. Oh, not the devastating plane crash or the outlandish pyrotechnics – I’ve thankfully never had the pleasure. But the turmoil of the film, the characters involved, the tragedy of the victims and the survivors – all people you came to know well throughout – had surprisingly overwhelmed me, this time.

       I was rarely moved by films, and I had to grudgingly put my reaction singlehandedly to the impressive, immense talent     of the actors involved – particularly the three key leads powering the story, because it certainly hadn’t been the storyline or script, which had been barely more than a generic Hollywood stereotype of a disaster movie. Iconic movie megastars identical twins Sebastian and Caspian De Carr, along with their co-star – the sublimely beautiful Hollywood favourite Kate Whittaker – had somehow transformed a mediocre script and shallow characters into genuinely believable people in a heart-wrenching disaster movie that seemed, at first, to start out as an adorable romantic comedy. It shouldn’t have worked – but their characters’ relationships with each other made the decent into catastrophic disaster all the more shockingly horrific and poignant, and finally, the key to their very survival

The characters and story arc spun around in my head in a way that usually only books could do. Movies rarely impressed or moved me enough to analyse, break down, dissect, and understand all its components, and somehow, this one had done just that. Authors of books or creators of any written word usually didn’t have the luxury of having a third party bring their words to life for them – unless you maybe counted their editor. 

The writer of this script seemed to have hoped for the best in writing what should have been drivel, but in the end was transformed into genuinely believable, even hard-hitting, words by three of the best craftspeople in film acting. Responses, unwritten physical actions and reactions, facial expressions, tone of delivery, silent reactions, all added to what the words had to offer – all so shockingly perfect and real, you couldn’t even question what they were saying. 

On paper, though, I knew it could not have possibly looked half as impressive, and mostly empty, regurgitated drivel, and that the predominant of writers would have to come up with things far more interesting and deep for such a story to have worked in any novel they were writing.

Being a lifelong obsessive bookworm and a newly-hopeful, aspiring writer myself, who was smugly about to finish my second degree, so I this time in English Literature, I always found books were a far more fascinating window into other people’s worlds and imaginations than the film industry ever did. After all, books were worlds of endless interpretation and boundless escapism, from the insightful and sharp prose of Shakespeare to vast extremeness of Hardy’s world of the Wessex countryside, and the sweet tongue-in-cheek existence of Austen’s characters.

I actually loved it so much, it was the sole reason I had jacked-in a very financially stable career as a specialist contractor in IT data analysis and database architecture in London to study the subject seriously, and also the reason I found myself walking out into the rather depressing half-hearted, meandering streets of Willowfall-by-Bough, instead of the hustle-and-bustle of Leicester Square, which I missed dearly, still, even after three years away from living there.

Escaping this mundane little town had once been my biggest achievement. Swapping its mediocre existence, the frmfor the world of IT in London, I had become a successful Database Analyst for many years for very good money. I’d had the dinkiest little studio apartment I almost liked and was very proud of  – read: a small room with a window, two kitchen cabinets with a sink and hotplate-oven combi thing, and a tiny bathroom – in Camden Town, and I’d had a good life. That was until the lure of the written word became too great, and I realised I wanted to desperately do the one thing that I was truly passionate about before I turned thirty.

It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, but in the end, I made it and diligently managed to save up enough to pay for my English degree without needing student loans – it was enough for a down-payment on your average small house, or a small studio apartment in London, but I wanted to get on with life afterwards, not have the burden of unnecessary debt around my neck if I didn’t need to. So, instead of finding a better place to live as I made more money, I paid my relative pittance for my studio and saved everything up instead.

After a few years, I had more than enough, and I gave up everything to go and get my degree – which then brought me back here, to Willowfall, to study full-time, and temporarily giving up my other passion of working with computer systems for a semi-lucrative income on a steep upwards trajectory... and possibly my sanity.

The Bottom line? I loved books more than I loved computers, so I made that sacrifice for them. I loved the fact that in books every character lived in my imagination alone – each image and voice was unique to my own mind, and only I could see and hear them in this way, with no one else sharing these im  ages or perspectives. In a film – this one and any other – it was simply a story told that you watched with a hundred other strangers who saw, heard and experienced exactly the same thing for the last two hours, and hardly the same. Sourprisingly, this one had pulled on heartstrings that were usually reserved for a really great novel – despite the fact it had been about a noisy plane crash with a death-defying ditch into an ocean in the dark night where, of course, all the ridiculously overpaid, albeit incredibly gifted, stars of the production had walked away from it, and the romantic pair – in this case, Sebastian De Carr and Kate Whittaker’s characters – bouncing off into the sunset with everlasting love.

In all honesty, the only reason I even went to see these films was from a misplaced sense of duty and loyalty to an old friend. Other than that, I really wasn’t generally interested in the whole Hollywood industry and what it egocentrically thought it had to offer. I didn’t even bother watching anything else each time I went to see one of these silly generic, predictable films and spent a small town fortune on tickets for a very uncomfortable seat. If only Willowfall-by-Bough had a decent theatre – I would much rather go and see a fabulous play anytime. Master Shakespeare and his cast of characters had a lot more to offer than some director of studio with a large production investment out in California.

    
Unfortunately, my cinema companion and much-younger university friend, Melissa, had very different ideas regarding the movie industry. As we walked back through the town, she was bouncing along beside me, chirping away as to how much she had enjoyed the film. She couldn’t stop talking about how fantastic she had thought the headline stars, Sebastian and Caspian De Carr, had been – rather to my irritation. The least said about those two incredible and flawless Hollywood entities, the better. It’s best not to ask why.3

.
“They are so brilliant!” Melissa gushed with unrelenting enthusiasm that only someone barely out of their teens could surely still muster, whilst I unsuccessfully tried zoning her out. “You just forget they’re not even real people – the characters, I mean. Sebastian De Carr and Kate Whittaker are just such amazing actors!”
“Especially since you really like Sebastian,” I teased with a wry smile, ignoring immediate touchiness I felt at the mere mention of that man’s name.
“So?” Melissa retorted, grinning inanely. “It would be abnormal if I didn’t – the man is insanely gorgeous!”
I immediately sidestepped the observation. “Well, Sebastian has always been a good actor. Fooled everyone every time.”
“Oh my God, that’s right – you knew them! It’s really quite exciting, you knowing a real-life movie star,” Melissa beamed. “You’re so lucky.”
What the hell, Lisa?
I’d been so busy sidestepping how gorgeous she though the man was, I veered directly into the path of the biggest thing I needed to never, ever mention.
My lips pursed together grimly and I inwardly groaned. Lucky was the last thing I felt. Actually, it wasn’t even on the list of things I felt. I kicked myself for abhorrently stupid throwaway comment, bringing attention to a fact pretty much no one in my current sphere of friends or acquaintances knew about me, whatsoever. It was one of the things in my life I really wanted to truly forget. Amnesia should be a pill you could just take sometimes, not something randomly bestowed on people who usually didn’t want it.
“Hardly lucky,” I grumbled. “Is it really that exciting?”
“It’s very exciting that you went to school with Sebastian and Caspian De Carr! It’s like such a huge claim-to-fame!”
I bit my lip and smiled tightly at her, definitely regretting ever mentioning knowing the De Carr twins whilst I had been in high school to Melissa. I was also desperately hoping that it wouldn’t go any further – I absolutely didn’t want anyone else to know.
Without warning, Melissa suddenly stopped at a shop, her attention clearly grabbed by a magazine with a picture of the twins from the film on the cover. The caption below made me inwardly wince when I saw it simply read, “No Crash Landing For De Carr Twins”, and right then I immediately made a mental note to remind myself to never, ever apply for Unfortunately, the lack of writing talent hadn’t deterred Melissa from reading it, or buying it. She excitedly picked up the magazine, and paid the young man behind the counter, before shoving her nose in it and reading the article. I shook my head in quiet despair at the woman’s delight and obsession with the home-grown Hollywood idols. Of course, the hypocrisy was that I wished I could say I couldn’t see the attraction – but I couldn’t do that, because if I did, that would make it probably be the biggest lie ever told in all of history, ever.  

The problem was that ever since I had first seen Sebastian De Carr on my very first day at Willowfall High School, I had been rather overwhelmingly smitten with the boy in my class with the charming smile and sparkling blue eyes. He almost immediately become the most popular boy by the end of our very first day – his adorable good looks were already clearly obvious, and his genuine, fun-loving charm and charisma left every girl who had any sense with a swooning crush on him. Even as the years went by, Sebastian didn’t lose that position, and he always had an endless trail of giggling and swooning girls who always sent enough Valentine’s Day cards each year to rebuild a Brazilian rainforest. He got away with murder when it came to the teachers, and they also had to get used to dealing with scraping the jaws of teenage girls off the floor because he had given them attention, a smile, or said something supposedly swooning.

Yet, despite the fact that Sebastian had no end of yearning admirers, he had – strangely enough – attached himself to the mousy, bespectacled, wild-haired, sensible book-geek of the class. Much to the jealousy of all the other girls, he had taken a shine to me, and somehow we had become best friends and completely inseparable by the end of our first year at school. I admit, at first I completely wrote him off as the air-headed pretty-boy who simply wanted a bland brainiac to copy homework from. But somehow he almost immediately became my absolute and firm best friend, which floored me – and everybody else – completely.
Unfortunately, as time went on and we got older, that little smitten crush I had evolved, and I ended up falling in love with him. I never mentioned to anyone, and always hoped I had managed to keep it a secret from him, as the last thing I wanted was to spoil our friendship by him finding out and having to let me down gently, before never talking to me ever again. But that happened anyway when Sebastian decided to leave for California in the name of his acting career when I was fifteen and he had just turned sixteen, right in the middle of our GCSE years. Both he. and his twin brother, had left for America and I never heard from him again, leaving me devastated and heartbroken. That was actually over a decade ago now, and most of the time now, I really would rather forget that I had ever known him, let alone been in love with him. It was just better that way.
I hadn’t even known what had happened to him, until he was in his first big film – he was still sixteen and in a movie with a cast list that read like a who’s who of Hollywood, and included a dolphin. After that, his face never left the big screen, gossip columns, or the internet, and he was now firmly established as one of Hollywood’s biggest names, along with his lovely twin brother Caspian. And here I now was, going to see their films, just to see him again. Possibly for personal torture, possibly because I was proud that they had achieved what they wanted – it was rather hard to tell. The sad truth was despite it being over a decade ago, and the fact I was definitely old enough to know better, I was still smarting from the fact he had absconded without another peep, and had unwittingly broken my fickle young heart whilst doing so. I hadn’t forgiven him for it, and the even sadder truth was I probably really never would. Despite everything else I had felt for him, he had been my best friend and I had felt completely betrayed by him. I still did.
To my dismay, I felt eyes well up as I thought about it all. I bit my lip as I forced myself back to my present moment, which was being tortured by Melissa’s chirping about the three stars and movie in question. Feeling very daft about it, I pointlessly tried to push those memories back out of my mind as she bounced out through the shop door with her magazine. She was flicking through the pages and showed me the article on the cast of Flight 101. After spending the last two hours watching him on a giant screen, the last thing I wanted was to see Sebastian again, even in a magazine.
“Listen to this,” Melissa went on eagerly. “This should cheer you up a bit. ‘Our very own home-grown Hollywood star, Sebastian De Carr, is now to return to his hometown with twin brother, Caspian, and co-star Kate Whittaker after promoting their latest blockbuster, Flight 101 in London. They will be taking a well-deserved break and returning to their family’.”
The breath was immediately sucked from my throat and lungs. I felt my blood go icy-cold and a frozen chill shot down my spine at hearing those words. A stunned panic started buzzing in my head as Melissa’s excited voice faded into obscurity, suddenly feeling somewhere between overwhelmingly nauseated and horrified. This was the news I thought I would never hear about my old friend – and being delivered to me via a gossip magazine article, no less – bringing cold dread along with it. The truth was that the one thing worse than seeing Sebastian De Carr again would be to actually not see him when he was back in the same town – that rejection just might shatter what little of my heart that was left, and answer the question I really no longer wanted the definitive answer to – that he really did never want to speak to me again.
It was easy to pretend that he was too busy, or too far away whilst he was living in LA, or filming in some exotic location, pr even in London for a premier. But it was rather hard to deny when he was staying with his parents three streets away.
 The harsh truth was that it was very doubtful he would actually want to see me again – I knew that, really. But it wasn’t like I needed it publically and officially confirmed. He hadn’t been bothered before, so why now? Not now he was insanely famous. Especially now he was one of the most famous people on the entire planet.
Not a letter, email or a phone call – not even a small postcard to say hello had arrived since he had assured me he would call as soon as he got there. And it wasn’t like my online footprint was non-existent either – like everybody else, I was signed up to everything that might be useful or interesting and I had even managed to Google myself with easy success relative to social networking and blog sites. It was a fact I had tried to ignore when it came to thinking about Sebastian, and whenever it came to thinking about him, it seemed like the minute I tried to put him out of my mind, he was back to fill it in again in some way or another.
Through my internal panic, I realised Melissa was still talking and continuing to chirp on about him. It really seemed like there never was going to be any way to escape the shadow he had left in my life. And for that, I now resented him a lot.
“You know, that’s really so fantastic,” Melissa was saying excitedly.  “It’s going to be really incredible to have a Hollywood star right here!  It’s really unbelievable, isn’t it?”
If only it was so unbelievable.
I sighed. Sometimes being a “mature” student amongst traditionally-aged ones was irksome when their over-excitable, optimistic teenage side was still a part of their personality, and the deep, dark cynicism of age hadn’t kicked in yet.  
“The only thing that’s unbelievable is your chirping about him,” I remarked wryly, nudging her gently with my elbow. “It’s not a big deal. This is his home. He should be able to assume he can come home and just have a normal life away from that mayhem.” 
“But he’s not just another normal person. He’s now one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, along with Caspian. See, look – it says so right there.”
Melissa pointed to the quote on the page with an inane, teasing grin. But it was hardly like I needed reminding. The rejection it had inevitably led to was still as raw now as it had been when I was fifteen and he disappeared. And I didn’t care if I was supposed to be old enough to know better now.
I firmly decided I was just going to make sure that I avoided anywhere he might be, and hopefully I then wouldn’t end up accidentally bumping into him and embarrassing myself. But, the reality was I did actually want to see him. I missed him – more than I would ever admit to anyone, especially him. I missed those nights we had camped out in his back garden in the summer, eating chocolate-chip cookies and ice cream whilst talking all night, and the races to school, and homework copying – which he always got away with, even though I know all teachers knew what he was doing. Even in interviews of his that I saw now, those same charms were put on to get everybody eating out of his hand.
Everybody except me, and to be honest, I always suspected that he had liked being friends with me because I never swooned over him, fell for his charms, or let him get away with anything. But it was hardly likely his famous ego could cope with such nonchalance anymore, was it? Probably another reason to avoid him altogether.
“Hollywood’s biggest stars are coming here,” Melissa rattled on with a ridiculous grin on her face. “Aren’t you excited?”
I threw her an unimpressed glance. “He’s also one of my oldest friends. I just can’t think of him like that. He’s never going to be anything but my old friend Sebastian who used to copy my homework because he couldn’t be bothered doing it himself.”
“Oh, my God! Yes, that’s right. You are his oldest friend…” Melissa suddenly had the biggest grin on her face I had ever seen. “And that makes you the luckiest girl ever – and my bestest friend in the whole wide world! You have to introduce me when he comes!”
I gave her a weak smile and didn’t answer. I didn’t have the heart to tell her there would be no chance of such a thing happening – mainly because the likelihood of my seeing him was next to nothing, and secondly because hell would freeze over before I voluntarily subjected Sebastian to the hyper-excitable chaos that was Melissa Weston.
I took a tentative glance at the magazine article myself. It was all praise for him, and accompanied by a page-sized poster of him posing with Caspian – clearly a promo shot for the movie. Further on in the magazine was a two-page poster of him with Kate, in a touching embrace, faces pressed into each other a little. Whatever else had happened between them, or not as the case was, I still felt that begrudging pride in him for getting what he had always wanted.
“Is he really twenty-eight?” asked Melissa incredulously, and Lisa nodded. “That seems so unlikely. He looks amazing, much younger.”
I threw her a withering look.
“Oh, not that you don’t, or anything,” Melissa amended quickly. She went back to studying the magazine, or maybe more like hiding behind it. “You don’t look old.”
Old? Twenty-eight was old?
I glared at her, but said nothing. Melissa carried on reading and offering quotes from the article as we walked. I tried zoning her out, hoping she would move on to another stupidly pointless article about some other pointless celebrity’s cellulite and this torture could finally be over. 
Thankfully, I was finally outside my parents’ home. I politely offered Melissa to come in and join her, on the silent proviso that I knew she wouldn’t actually take up the offer at all.
“I’m going to meet Cameron,” Melissa answered, referring to her boyfriend. “He’s meeting me at that Costa Coffee place. You know, I really don’t understand the fascination with that fancy stuff – coffee’s coffee. So, I’ll see you later then.”
I watched Melissa walk away for a few moments, hurrying off to get home in time to get herself ready for her boyfriend. Not that she needed to look any better. The woman had perfect olive skin, long and perfect jet-black hair, and big brown eyes that were depressingly bewitching. She was lucky she had a boyfriend as good as Cameron to run off for. He loved the ground Melissa walked on and certainly wasn’t afraid of showing it in public – a rare find in twenty-year-old mesmerizingly-stunning student that probably should have been a model himself. Of course it would be Melissa that would get him. Someone like Melissa would even have had no problem getting someone like Sebastian, instead of ending up being friends with him. The geek never gets the prince, no matter what those stupid storybooks tell you. The only thing the geeks get are the books they’re written into. 
Leaving the image of a happy Melissa trotting off, I let myself into my old family home that I had moved back into three years ago when I had returned to start my degree. It had been odd coming back to live in my old house, in my old room, after living in my own rented apartment in London for several years. Voluntarily giving up a well-paying career to finally follow the dream that I’d had since I was young had been a hard decision, but creeping up towards the big Three-Oh, I couldn’t face myself knowing that even though I liked – and was very good at – my job, it was not what I wanted to do with my whole life. I had a quarter-life crisis at age twenty-five, signed up to the university back home – as I couldn’t afford to study full-time and live in London, then swallowed my independence and my pride to go and live with my parents again for three years. It had not been easy, but now it was all very nearly at an end, and I was about five months away from graduating, I felt it had really been worth it.
The only big down side had to be what I always encountered whenever I walked into the house in the afternoons. I managed to get myself in the front door, but only to find my bratty little sister had left her school bag in front of it for me to trip over. The lounge stereo also blearing her terrible music was already a complete tip. The fact she was no longer in the room and was actually upstairs instead didn’t seem to have registered the general common sense synaptic leap that it was probably best to turn it off since you can’t really hear it anymore, either.
I took just one look at the room and groaned. My parents were not going to be impressed when they got home from work. I really couldn’t wait until the day I graduated and could finally leave this obscure little town, and my parents’ house, for something of my very own, once again. And some where that didn’t also house the human tornado that was Jamie Ryan.
I still couldn’t understand how, after fourteen years of being an only child, my parents had managed to curse me with a little sister. I loved Jamie, but now she was a teenager, she was nothing but an annoying headache of pure chaos and attitude. It was a shame that my returning to the family fold had coincided with the hormones, and – quite frankly – there were times that she was lucky I hadn’t thrown her out of the upstairs window.
“It’s amazing what you can achieve in fifteen minutes when you’re still just fourteen,” I grumbled irately, stepping over the junk littering the hallway. Somehow, I managed to get to the stairs without breaking anything, and retreated to my room to hide away for a few hours.
I also had a lot of work to start getting done. Unfortunately, English Literature didn’t study itself, and books didn’t write their own essays and dissertations for you, either. Now, there was something actually useful they could get the latest version of iPad to do to make people like me happy.
“Jamie!” I yelled over the loud music coming from her room.
“What?” came her sharp reply.
“Turn that noise off downstairs and clear your things before someone kills themselves!”
Jamie’s head popped round the door of my bedroom.
“It’s a foolproof burglar trap,” she retorted with a sarcastic smirk.
I gave her a cold stare. “As if a burglar would want to come within thirty miles of this place, with that noise blearing out of the window. Now, please clear that stuff away.”
“I think you just made my point for me.”
“I think you should clear that stuff up before I accidentally let slip about the time I had to come and get you when you got drunk and sick at your friend’s sleepover,” I retorted darkly.
Immediately shutting up and muttering bad words to herself about me, Jamie went downstairs to tidy up her things. I sat at my desk and proceeded to organise everything into a to-do list to get through. It was “Reading Week” now – although the percentage of students actually reading anything was probably in the single-figures – which meant I had a whole week to reorganise my insane workload and get a whole lot of extra assignments done before going back to scheduled lectures again. Fun, aren’t I? No one’s ever accused me of being able to let my hair down, and I’m not about to change that now. I’d already made an impressive career out of it and I was still planning to get that First to start off my next one. That was definitely all I cared about, as it was that which was going to get me back out of the teensy little town I was currently forced to live in and return to London, this time to be a writer and not just a database analyst and architect.
The problem about organising the disorganised was that the list of work seemed to become longer and longer. Then I also found two forgotten notes on random Post-Its at the bottom of my bag, and I felt my head threaten to explode. Somehow, even working up to my years in corporations with database fixes and coding, I had never felt as stressed as I had whilst trying to complete this course – probably because I didn’t care as much about their databases as I did about getting my coveted First. So, for the sake of my sanity, I then decided to leave the work and go downstairs for some food – if I could actually manage to get into the kitchen. I left my mountain climbing gear in my other skirt today.
“Jamie!” I yelled again. “I’d like to get to the kitchen in one piece, if you don’t mind!”
“No, I don’t mind how many pieces you get there in.”
“Jamie…”
Jamie came muttering out of the lounge and pulled a few things out of the way.
“Okay now, Mistress Wonderful?” my baby sister snarked, the wonderful teenager that she was. “Got a problem with doing it yourself?”
 I narrowed her eyes at her. “I wouldn’t if it were my mess. Now, if you’re quite through with the attitude, I’d like to make myself some dinner.”
“Ugh!”
Jamie rolled her eyes and walked away. I completely ignored her and went into the kitchen. Before the lounge door shut, Jamie called out again.
“Make me some!” she yelled. I didn’t answer.
“Why did my oh-so-wonderful-mother have to bestow on me a bratty little sister?” I muttered to myself as I poked around the fridge. There was nothing much in there, so I settled on taking out jam to make toast with. Then I re-limed my phone to the Bluetooth speaker in the kitchen and bopped along to the music whilst waiting for the toaster to do its job.
“Can’t you turn that noise down?” yelled Jamie from the lounge.
“No!” I retorted. Talk about the pot calling the kettle a hypocrite.
I sat at the kitchen table with my toast and put up my feet on the next chair to read my favourite and highly battered copy of Wuthering Heights whilst nibbling. Unfortunately, I was immediately interrupted by the doorbell chiming. As there was a risk of Hell freezing over if Jamie answered, I got up to do it instead. I certainly couldn’t have that on my conscience now, could I?
 I flung my legs down from the chair, got up and grudgingly wandered through the hallway to go and answer the door. When I opened it, I was pleasently surprised to find Sally, my best friend of forever, standing on the step, grinning up cheerfully at me. And for some reason, there was a little dog sitting by her feet.
“Sally, hi,” I smiled. It had been too long since I had seen her last, with us both being rather busy. I knelt down to pat the little dog. “And who’s this?”
“This is Nutter,” she grinned. “I rescued him from the local shelter. Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“He’s beautiful,” I cooed at him. I looked back up at Sally, her clear blue eyes sparkling with delight. “What made you suddenly get a dog?”
      “I’m frankly rather tired of being in my dull little place all by myself. I decided that until I can find myself a nice girl who actually likes me, too, the least I could do is get myself a dog for company instead.”
      Sally  was an incredibly sweet, kind-hearted and straight-talking girl – qualities that also made her a great friend. We had known each other since we were in primary school, and had stayed loyal, close friends ever since. She had also been close and firm friends with the Dr Carr twins when we were in high school, and as culpable for getting us into trouble as Sebastian was. Their relationship had been based on doing just that and as much sassing as they could come up with, inducing eye rolling, shaking of heads and laughter from me and Caspian.
I had been sincerely touched when she admitted I was her “most bestest friend in the world” and was the very first person she told when she decided she wanted to come out. I also unabashedly supported her immensely whilst she had trouble about it with her family. She was then there for me when Sebastian left, and we had become closer friends as we got older and became adults together.
      Despite the fact I had left Willowfall for university to get a degree in Computer Science in London, and Sally landed herself a job at the local hospital as a clinic administrator after we sat our A Levels, we had remained faithful and staunch best friends – even if it was hard to work to coordinate our schedules just to talk occasionally on another basis other than with online messages and email. Sally’s sporadic visits to London had been even more challenging. Even now, after moving back to Willowfall, we had to work hard to coordinate our schedules, and to see her this afternoon was a brilliant surprise. The puppy was an even bigger and better one.
The dog’s beautiful, big pathetic brown eyes were staring back up at me, and I smiled down at it. It was a scruffy looking mutt, a mongrel that seemed to have had husky in his DNA at some point in its clear mix-and-match genetic history. I ruffled his soft coat while he tried to lick my hand. Nutter gave a friendly yelp and nuzzled against me.
“Would you like to help take him for a walk?” Sally offered, smiling warmly at me.
Glad to have an excuse to get out of the house, I pulled on my coat, called to Jamie I was going out]t, and stuffed house keys in my pocket, before following Sally and Nutter down the driveway, glad to have a moment alone with the only person I trusted more than anyone.
“So, how are things going then?” Sally asked as we walked down the road. “I haven’t seen you for a few days. Have you been busy with studying?”
I shrugged. “Basically, that’s it in a nutshell. But things are all right. I have a life of complete boredom and constant study, but other than that it’s great. I’ll have so much nothing to write about, that I’ll have no problem getting work as a freelancer once I graduate.”
“Your course involves reading books. I can’t imagine it can possibly be that bad,” Sally retorted wryly. “You love reading – you can’t possibly be bored.”
“I am spending nearly all my time glued to my laptop trying to get a First,” I told her dully. “I’m brain-dead and actually bored of reading the same things over and over, and even writing now. I never thought that would happen.”
“I know what you mean,” Sally said sympathetically. “Some things just don’t live up to expectations. You know, when I took that job in the hospital, I thought there would be an abundance of intelligent doctors and caring nurses, looking all sophisticated and glamorous. Instead, I got a dingy little office, there were no cute doctors, and I see hardly anyone at all – unless they’re boring old, fat men who have come to fix my computer. That ER TV show should be banned for misleading information.”
“And speaking of misleading information, Sebastian and Caspian are supposedly coming home.”
Sally looked across at me in surprise. “Sebastian and Caspian De Carr?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you really know any other Sebastian and Caspians?”
Sally gave me a sly sideways glance. “They’re coming back?”
“According to a magazine article I was unfortunate enough to read.”
Sally gave me a sardonic smile and sorted derivatively. “Hm. I thought they’d forgotten where they lived.”
“The article said they’re coming back with Kate Whittaker, of all people, after promoting of Flight 101 in London.”
“When are they supposed to be here?”
“Soon, I suppose.” I simply shrugged. What else was there to do with that information? “But I doubt he’ll want to see anyone from here again.”
“Of course he’ll want to see you – it’s Sebastian,” Sally said assuredly, seeing right through me like shined crystal glass. She put her arm through mine and gave a sympathetic squeeze. “But you’d think he’d have said something.”
I gave a hollow laugh. “He hasn’t spoken to me in more than ten years, why would he do so now?”
Sally offered nothing but a compassionate look and said nothing. She was the only person who knew about my secret crush on Sebastian, and how upset I had been when he left. I was pretty sure she knew how deep my feelings had gone, despite the fact I’d never expressly or explicitly told her. It was the only thing I had ever refused to admit to her. But, in all fairness, I hadn’t ever thought I’d needed to – Sally could read me better than I could read a Jane Austen novel.
      “Well, he didn’t want to know me when he went LA, so he’s hardly going to want to speak to me now,” I muttered with a sigh. “So much for being best friends.”
      “He’s young and he’s male,” Sally remarked dryly. “You can’t expect much from someone who falls in both those categories.”
      That was the very moment Nutter decided to pull hard on his lead to go and sniff something or other on my side of the pavement. It sent me nearly over him, and Sally right into me.
      “What the— you are definitely aptly-named, Nutter!” Sally beReathlrssly laughed at his antics, whilst tugging him to her and onto her side of the pavement again. She then put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed it. “You OK, Lis?”
      I smiled at her and shook my head at the dog’s antics. “You two are going to be quite the little team,” I teased. “You already can’t walk in a straight line as it is!”
      “All right, laugh it up little Bookworm,” Sally grinned at me. “We’re going to be fine, aren’t, Nuts?”
      The dog had his nose to the ground. Sniffing happily, tail wagging, and paying no attention at all to his new mother.
      “Dogs are strange,” she then shrugged, before turned back to me. “Look, with this Sebastian thing... You never know. I mean, he might come back here and fall head over heels for you.”
      I snorted. “I don’t think so somehow.”
      “Then why don’t you try and find someone else? You’ve never had a real relationship with anybody, and half-hearted attempts at dating don’t count. Pining for him when he’s on the other side of the Atlantic and never talking to you isn’t doing you any good. There must be someone?”
      “I’m not interested in relationships. With anybody.”
      The expression on Sally’s face told me very clearly that she really didn’t believe me.
      “You can lie to yourself. But you can’t lie to me. You’re not very good at it anyway – I can see right through you.”
      “So, you can see right through to my fickle, broken heart?”
      Sally gave me a sympathetic smile, warmly murmuring, “Yeh, I can.”
I stared at the pavement and Nutter’s waggling backside as he trotted happily in front of us, his tail flinging itself about so much it was a surprise it didn’t fall off. The cold wind had started turning icy, becoming marginally stronger , and it felt like it was trying to slap me out of my delusional stupor. Sally hadn’t been too far off the mark with her remark about the fairytale ending she suggested – I suppose part of me had always fantasised about such a thing happening. But reality was not written by fluffy-fantasy trashy romance authors with “a guaranteed Happily Ever After” enshrined in their description, so there was never going to be any such outcome for me. His returning in silence was testament to that, if I had needed any further proof other than basic common sense.
      “So, have you seen the new film?” Sally broke into my thoughts and made me blink my desolate musings away. I shrugged nonchalantly
      “Yes. Well, Melissa wanted to go see it and Cameron obviously wasn’t going, since it’s not superheroes, Star Wars, or other geekland inspired blockbusters. So, I gave in and went with her.” And wished I hadn’t. “It was really good. He was good. They both were. They always are.”
      “Good enough to see again with me?”
      Well, I walked into that one.
      “I suppose,” I sighed. The thought of paying to sit through another two hours of him cavorting with the gorgeously stunning Kate Whittaker was making me feel a rather petty pang of twisting jealous nausea, but if Sally wanted company to see it, I wasn’t going to deny her that.
      By this time, we had also completed our little round-trip about the area and we were back at my door. Nutter started twirling himself around a lamp post and getting himself tangled, once we stopped at the end of my driveway, and Sally gave me a hug to leave.
      “Don’t forget to tell me when the guys are back,” she said with a wink. “I want to kick their tight little backsides for abandoning us for fame, fortune and Hollywood glory.”  
      “Come on, Sal, Sebastian’s not going to tell me he’s back,” I told her straightforwardly. “He never told me he was even coming home at all. He hasn’t spoken to me for years. He’s obviously not going to start now.”
      “Don’t assume things, Lisa Ryan. Being back here might remind him what a nonce he’s turned into and make him change his mind.” 
      I decided to say nothing further about it and just waved Sally and Nutter off. Then I went back into the house feeling even more empty and miserable than I had before.

 

CHAPTER 2

The first thing I did once I was back in the house was to try and get the man back out of my mind, so I went to turn on the TV and watch something to take my mind away from him. As Sod and his stupid Law would have it, the first thing I saw when the screen came to life was a close-up of Sebastian’s face. It filled the screen as he answered a question from the interview about making Flight 101. Just what I needed right now to make me feel even worse.

      “Actually, it was really fun,” he was saying, his easy and charming smile evoking a sad pulling on her heart. “When the plane crashes, we’re on a model simulator and it got flooded with freezing water when it was supposed hit the sea. I’ll tell you, it’s not much fun running around when you’re soaking wet. Kate really didn’t like it – she doesn’t like water much, and this didn’t make her feel any better about it!”

      The screen cut to the three of them sitting together, talking to the really beautiful female interviewer. Sebastian’s cheeky smile played up to the interviewer, and the woman was completely taken in and was openly flirting with him. Sebastian seemed quite happy for her to do so, all smiling and smouldering at her with his easy charm on full-throttle, and frankly I wished someone could just whack me on the head with a mallet and knock the crazy out of it.

      I so did not want to be in love with him. The Big Problem was that, if I ever did see him again, that just that fact alone was going to be a big problem. I was his old best friend, a computer geek and boring English Literature student – hardly up to scratch against such beautiful, exotic women who were quite ready to throw themselves at him.

      “Dream on, Lis,” I muttered to myself.  “You’ve definitely got no chance now.”

      I rubbed my face in desolate frustration at my own stupidity, and scowled at the gorgeous, familiar, smiling one on the screen. Refusing to watch the rest of the programme, I turned it off after yet one more person announced that Flight 101 was to be the “biggest hit of the year”, and I flipped over to a True Crime channel, instead. At least something on there would be classed with an IQ higher than the flirting bimbo, and they were definitely going to be having a worse day than I was, so I watched that instead.

      I booted up the laptop with a sigh and tried to focus my mind on doing some actual work on the damned Dissertation Thesis I needed to complete, which was mainly about dear old Master Shakespeare. I had noticed that, whilst his plays were enjoyable to watch with the RSC, he was rather a bugger to study – sometimes his characters were so involving or entertaining, I kept forgetting to analyse them and instead just carried on reading. So, really, I needed a lot of concentration and hard work to get this paper about him finally finished. I had a decent main body, a mass of notes, and more nicely workable paragraphs to incorporate into it, but I had been so far barely able to draft an acceptable first sentence and introduction to my direction on the set subject question, nor had any idea how to actually finish it off.

      “Lisa!”

      I groaned and hid my head in my hands. I didn’t even want to know what my little sister wanted next. It was no wonder, really, that my parents both had hard jobs that kept them out at all times – our mother was a nurse, father the area manager and key troubleshooter of a large retail company. I didn’t want to be home with a teenage tornado like Jamie tearing up the place, either. Yet, here I was. Unfortunately.

Jamie’s head poked round the door as I lifted my head from my hands. “Can I go out?”

“Only if you’ve done your homework,” I immediately replied. I gave her a stern glare and Jamie nodded to say that she – supposedly – had. In fairness, though, she had never been known to lie; she was blunt and straightforward, which was fairly reassuring to a certain extent. “Be back by nine.”

Jamie disappeared and then I heard the front door slam.

“Peace at last,” I gratefully muttered to the empty room, and I went back to trying to do some work.

              I yanked out my lovely Kindle tablet to read more of Shakespeare’s text. Shoving my ridiculously unruly, super-long auburn hair – no, not ginger! – out of my face, where it always fell when it wasn’t tied up and tightly controlled, I put my feet up on the footstool and leaned back to read more words of The Bard. I happily tapped out a few notes on the laptop as I read, and occasionally having to yank a pen out of my hair – I twisted them in there to make sure I didn’t lose them – to write a few other things into the real paper notebook on my lap, under the iPad. I typed and scribbled on real paper, as well electronic, finding that using both was better for my revision later on, arguing with myself about the values of doubling my workload versus actually passing my degree.

              As always, I was quite cheerfully muttering myself and telling the walls about how irritated I was. But despite that, I was always happy in my little bubble of concentration, when my mind was chattering away to itself, working out what it needed from the text and how it would work itself into the final draft. I never noticed when the time was slipping away, flipping through different texts through the Kindle to find what references I was looking for. Being able to have all the books I wanted in one place that also allowed me to highlight the passages and write notes on them as well, made me immensely glad I’d held out on going to do this degree later on, so I would be able to have the Kindle to work on.

              I was blissfully oblivious to anything other than focusing on getting those ideas down on my iPad, since my notes were better off on there – things written the Cloud was harder to lose or forget... A mistake I wasn’t going to make twice.

OK... Three times.

The shrill ringing of the house’s landline phone suddenly chirped shrilly and loudly, making me jump violently and startling me sharply out of my reverie. It immediately snapped my concentration levels, leaving me staring at it in stupefied shock – nobody ever called that anymore. Even the spammers had given up in it a couple of years back, and I still had no idea why my parents even kept it.

           I grimaced, wishing I could flush it down the toilet once and for all. Then convinced myself that I should probably get up to go and answer the useless thing, because otherwise it more than likely would never stop screaming.

      “Peace my arse – I obviously spoke too soon,” I muttered dismally to myself, still utterly oblivious to the amount of time that had passed since Jamie had left. “Sodding persistent cold-callers – they all need to be thrown in a hole and shot with a piranha cannon.”

      Very reluctantly, I put down the iPad and pushed myself off the couch, wandering over to the cordless handset, surreally ringing on its cradle. Irritably, I scowled at it and poked at the green answer button.

“Hello?” I barked impatiently, still expecting some sly cold-caller or spam robo-voice on the other end, using a different spoofed mobile number so that they didn’t classify as “unknown”.

“Uh, could I speak to Lisa Ryan, please?”

Taken by surprise, I nearly dropped the phone. Who the hell knew I was here, that would call on a number I hadn’t actively used in ten years? I frowned,  taken aback, and doubly concerned by the slightly familiar voice – one I just couldn’t place at that moment.

“Speaking,” I replied cautiously. I couldn’t imagine who could possibly be calling me, and on my parents’ phone. After all, I had a perfectly good mobile and I never gave my parents’ landline number out to anyone – why would I? It was pointless and arcane, and I didn’t really live here anymore – it was only temporary and cheap accommodation until I could finish with university and go back to London.

There was a short pause as I waited with some confusion for my answer.

That answer was not one that I would have ever expected.

“Oh. Hi, Lisa. It’s Sebastian.”

The world just stopped. I actually even stopped breathing.

What the hell...?

              I almost dropped the handset in true shock. It felt like the breath had been physically punched right out of me. My heart started pounding in my ears so hard, I thought I was about to either pass out or have a heart attack. Or maybe a stroke.

Oh. Dear. God. In. Heaven.

“Sebastian?” I breathed out, barely able to find my voice in shock. I leaned my back against the wall behind me and tried to control the feeling, screaming shock in my head.

              “Um, yes… Sebastian. From school? Sebastian De Carr? Do you... Do you remember me?”

              “Oh, my…” I whispered under my breath.

              I barely noted he seemed to be rather nervous and rambling. I was too busy rubbing my head in confusion, and wondering what kind of bloody stupid question that was.

              I also wasn’t quite sure that in fact I hadn’t fallen asleep in front of my iPad, and that this wasn’t just a very strange dream.              

              “Well… Ah… Yes. Yes, of course I remember,” I managed to ramble out in a bewildered staccato mumble.

              I quickly took a long, deep breath and managed to get myself onto the arm of the nearby armchair to sit down. I also managed to scrape my jaw off the floor to speak to him again.

              “How... Um. How are you?” I managed to ask, rather hoarsely.

              “I’m... good,” replied Sebastian uncertainly, that now familiar borderline American twang coming through. “Good. You?”

              “Fine. Yeh. Fine. Absolutely fine.”

Well, that was certainly the biggest lie I had ever told. Ever. I was so not fine. I was everything but fine.

              There was now nothing but silence. It was uncomfortable and screaming at me. So, I tried to make it go away.

“Where are you?” I finally asked.

“Well, actually, I’m... home. In fact, I’m at my parents’ house right now.”

“Oh…”

I really wasn’t expecting that.

“I didn’t realise you really were coming back,” I remarked quietly, this time only half-lying. I honestly hadn’t really believed he actually would return to Willowfall. Ever.

The butterflies of panic and nerves were suddenly starting to flutter more in the pit of my stomach – now, it was finally starting to sink in that this was actually real. After twelve years, I was actually, genuinely talking to my old best friend again.

“To be honest, I thought I’d surprise you. And hope you’d remember me, and want to hear from me again.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m surprised.” I found myself grimly contemplating the irony and wondering how he could ever imagine that I wouldn’t want to hear from him. I had been waiting many long years to hear from him. “So, I’d ask if you lost my number when you went over there, but you’ve clearly answered that question now. But it’s been more than ten years since you’ve spoken to me, so you can safely say I wasn’t expecting it.”

              “I know, I’m really sorry about that. In my defence I did only find it in my old journal when I went back up to my old room. And I honestly have been really busy. And it’s expensive.”

              This time I gave a harsh laugh.

              “Since when has money been an object?” I exclaimed indignantly. I then realised I wasn’t just shocked at him calling now. I was suddenly furious that he hadn’t done it before. “A phone call would hardly have put your bank balance in jeopardy.”

              “I really have been busy,” Sebastian repeated weakly, completely skirting the issue. “So, how are you?”

              “I’m fine.”

Still such a blatant lie, but it wasn’t like I was going to say anything else.

              “What are you doing now?”

I could still hear the uncertain tone in his voice, and it sounded strange – given we were once inseparable best friends who could virtually read each other’s minds. Suddenly, it seemed we were forced into the reality that we had somehow become adults who no longer seemed to know each other, and aware life had changed a lot since we were kids running about together in school.   

              “I’m about to finish a degree. What about you?” I immediately grimaced at the ridiculous query. “Although, that’s probably a stupid question, considering I can’t move for billboards of some random plane flick that’s apparently out now.”

              “Just open the internet, newspaper or trashy magazine, and you can even see the things I haven’t done too,” Sebastian retorted dryly.

              “Congratulations on Flight 101,” I ventured to mention. “It’s really good.”

              “Oh. Thanks,” said Sebastian, sounding a little surprised. “You, ah... You actually went to see it?”

              “Yes,” I admitted with embarrassment. “I’ve seen a few of your films actually.”

              Of course, I had seen all of them, many times. But wasn’t willing to admit that much. Not yet.

              “Why?”  

              I felt myself redden and was thankful he couldn’t see me. That was another thing I wasn’t going to tell him either.

              “Well, you used to brag about your wonderful acting talents, so I went to check out the goods,” I answered flippantly. “So, now I get to tell you you’re terrible with just cause, whereas before I’d never really had any proof.”

              “Thank you,” retorted Sebastian good-naturedly. “Already back to the good old days of insulting me. I’m glad to see nothing has changed.”

              “I didn’t pander to your ego before, and I’m not about to start doing that now,” I replied, aiming for nonchalant. But then the tone inadvertently slid off somewhere and ended up in snide land. “I’m more than certain there are plenty of other people who are willing to do that instead. There always have been.”

              Who did he think he was, anyway – disappearing from my life without another word after being my best friend for five years, then thinking he could pick up the phone and waltz back in when it suited him? Then on top of that, pretending that an entire decade hadn’t lapsed in the meantime? Well, that smarted – and showed blatant signs of typical Hollywood egocentricity.

              “Yeh, I know, I have to admit that, too – many people just don’t treat me now the way that they used to,” Sebastian seem to readily agree, nonchalantly. “They’re too busy trying to either make a quick buck out of me or sucking up so bad I don’t know where they end and I begin.”

“So, that’s how fame and fortune is treating you?”

              “It’s like you’d never believe,” Sebastian muttered, giving a slight sigh. “The tabloids are the worst. You know, it’s quite funny when someone you haven’t met for evem five minutes thinks they know more about me than I do. Like the other day according to the New York Times, I’d slept with some actress. The thing is, the closest I’ve ever got to her is watching her commercials on TV.”

              “More’s the pity for her, I’m sure.” I screwed up my nose and plonked my head in my hand. That hadn’t meant to come out. He was bound to realise by that I was acknowledging he was ridiculously lovely to look at. His ego didn’t need that.

              “Meaning what?”

“With their imagination, you’d think these people should be writing tawdry romantic fiction,” I remarked, ignoring his question.

              “It shows how desperate these people are for a sellable story,” Sebastian muttered.

              “Or just wishful thinking.”  

              “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question – what did you mean?” Sebastian asked again.

              I tried to breezily laugh it off whilst my cheeks reddened.

              “Do you walk round with your eyes shut?” I eventually answered him. “If I had a penny for every girl who wanted you, drooled about you, lusted for you, wished to be anywhere near you, I’d be almost as rich as you.”

              “That’s just not true.”

              “Bragging about just how rich you are now?” I half-teased.

              “That’s definitely not what I meant,” Sebastian huffed.

              “Come on, Sebastian, why do you think those films gross so much? Or why magazines print posters of you and Caspian? Why do those people scream and mob you? And why the hell do those stories get printed? It’s hardly because you look like you could be Shrek’s stunt-double.”

              “Well, I don’t know. I don’t question these things – I just take the money and say thank you very much, before I run away fast, so they can’t ask for a refund.”

              I laughed quietly in amusement the mild attempt at modesty. “You know damn well it’s because you look like a Greek god. If I hear from one more person that they think you are the best thing in the world, I’ll scream.”

              “Well, well, little Lisa,” Sebastian teased with mock surprise. “I’d say you were jealous.”

              I almost dropped the handset again, for a second believing he was serious.

              “No!” I forced a surprised and mocking laugh. “Hardly. But I am tired of hearing it.”

              “Yeah, right.”

              “Yes! Clearly you’ve let it all get to your head.”

              “If you say so,” Sebastian continued to tease.

              “I do. Not everyone thinks you’re an idol to be worshipped. I’ve known you too long.”

              Sebastian laughed lightly and then changed the subject. “So, I take that you’ve heard of Kate Whittaker, since you’ve seen the movie?”

              I raised my eyebrows in surprise at him mentioning her, specifically.

              “Yes, her name has come up a few times, whenever I get on the internet, or in every magazine I’ve walked past,” I remarked dryly. I screwed up my nose and pursed my lips at the mention of her name, the images of her cavorting with him on the screen still vividly in my mind after watching it just a few hours ago.

              “Well, she’s here too, and I’m pretty sure you two would really get along great,” Sebastian added, much to my surprise and unease. “Why don’t you come round and meet her? She could do with a girlfriend to talk to while she’s here, instead of just me and Caspian. You could come over sometime… Or, you know, whatever you want. If you want.”

“Oh, sure. No problem. I could do that,” I replied, quite blithely and without thinking.

Then I did think about it – and panicked.

What the hell, Lisa?

What was I even doing, blithely agreeing to be a mega famous Hollywood A-Lister’s girl talk chat-buddy? What in god’s name was I supposed to say to her?

              Only just then did it suddenly dawn on me what that ultimately meant – that I would actually have to go and see him again. The thing I thought that would never happen was actually happening, and it now seemed like I was getting an invitation from him to meet up and see him again.

Oh, lord. What had I just agreed to? I couldn’t see him again – especially with her – it might just break whatever was left of my heart that still remained.

              “Oh, OK.” Sebastian sounded rather taken aback by the easy agreement he had received from me. Then there was a pause. “Uh, Lis, I know it’s been a while, and I don’t have a right to ask, but could I ask a favour?”

              Oh, hell, I immediately thought. My initial reaction was to tell him “no” without even asking what it was – I felt nothing but dread at that tone. I still wasn’t even sure that I didn’t have my face in the iPad and actually dreaming it all. But the truth was my heart skipped a little beat at hearing him call me the old nickname he had given me once again, and I couldn’t say no.

              Life had suddenly become surreal with just a five minute phone call. Sebastian De Carr, Hollywood’s Elite Megastar Actor, had just called me out of the blue to ask me for a favour, and for me to meet Super-Megastar Hollywood Actress Kate Whittaker. To keep her company, of all things, which surely, was en “What is it?” I asked my old friend – or was it former friend? – with suspicious trepidation. Whenever he had asked for a favour in the past it had never boded well, and that was obviously my first instinct now.

              “I was wondering – hoping – that maybe you might come out with me, for a walk? Now. Well, whenever you’re ready, I mean. I just wanted to go to a few stores, in the town. I’d love to see you – we could talk more and—”

              “And you will get mobbed to death,” I immediately interjected dryly, a horrified chill of dead crawling down my spine at the mere thought of being dragged into such madness. I was only too aware what kind of effect that Sebastian De Carr would have on the mediocre population of Willowfall town centre. It didn’t matter who he used to be, he was now a very famous Hollywood film star, and that was the only thing that would matter to them these days. My own health and sanity certainly wouldn’t. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not subjecting myself to that. You want to be killed by being trampled on by the masses, that’s your funeral. Don’t drag me into it.”

              “I live here, and if I want to go out, I will,” he said stubbornly.

              “You don’t live here, you live in LA. You haven’t lived here for well over a decade, and you are not just the charming schoolboy the shop assistants loved and all the teenage girls liked to flirt with.”

              Sebastian huffed down the phone. “It’s still my hometown. I should be able to do what I want in it.”

              Sighing in exasperation, I tried to push away the rising panic screaming away in my head. “It doesn’t work like that, and you really should know it.”

              Sebastian huffed again. Apparently not everything had changed in the last twelve years. It sound so familiar to me it made me want to smile and cry at the same time. I’d missed my friend every moment if everyday since the moment he’d left – his voice, and even that little huff, were things I thought I’d never hear again, and to hear them both was some sort of balm to that wound in a way I’d admit to no one else but myself.

              “Why can’t Ms Whittaker go with you? Or someone else?” I asked him. Someone – anyone – other than myself.

              “Are you trying to diplomatically tell me you don’t want to go?” Sebastian asked suspiciously. “Anyway, Kate’s sleeping, Caspian is annoying and somewhere else, and you’re currently not any of those, so I thought you’d do an old friend a favour and come with me?”

              “And clearly I’m just a big softy with a death-wish,” I grumbled. Whilst a lot of things had changed in the past decade. My ability to say no to Sebastian had apparently not. “All right then, I’ll go.”

              “Oh, really? Wow, thanks, you’re great! See you in a few minutes then in Bye!”

              As soon as I hung up on him, I lowered the handset in shock and stared at it still clutched in my hand, unable to quite believe the last five minutes had really been real. Every part of me seemed to be trembling from the astonishment of hearing his voice again, and my poor nerves were now very much on edge at the realisation that I had also just agreed to also see him again. Right now, in just a few minutes.

After eleven long years of both desperately missing and utterly resenting him, I was finally meeting him again.

The problem was I really didn’t think I actually wanted to. This time when I saw him he wouldn’t just be “my” Sebastian. He would be Sebastian De Carr, world-renowned famous Hollywood superstar A-List actor. The man I saw on the cinema and television screens, in the brightly-coloured magazines, entertainment news, front pages of anything printed, and everywhere online. Neither of us were fifteen anymore, but how much would he have changed? Would there still be enough of the old Sebastian left to even recognise the boy I had once been in love with and adored – or, in person, would he have morphed into a stranger that I simply no longer knew? Despite the fact it had felt like I had just had my old friend on the phone, I frankly didn’t hold out much hope that was who he was really going to be now.

              My mind was still swirling as I picked up my own phone to call Sally, swiping through to the number with shaking hands, taking controlled and measured breaths to try and calm myself from completely being overcome with trepidation and shock over what had just transpired, and was still ongoing.

It felt like a ghost from the past  remerging

This wasn’t something I could process on my own and I needed a sensible friend to help talk some sense into me. 

              “Oh, my word, what’s the matter? What’s happened?” Sally’s first reaction to my panic was concern when she answered her phone and heard my voice.

              “Christ, you’ll never guess,” I breathed out, pushing my fingers through my hair, distractedly. “Sebastian actually just called me.”

              “Whoa, he did?”

              “Called the old house landline, of all things. It was very lucky no one else – and by that, I mean Jamie – was home. I didn’t even recognise it was his voice.”

              “There, see, I told you,” Sally cheerfully replied, completely oblivious to the internal war and panic attack I was suffering. “What did he say?”

              “That he was back, and that he’s got Kate Whittaker, of all people, with him. He asked me to go and surely endure mobbing and screaming crowds by accompanying him into town. He clearly doesn’t realise that jealous freaks will rip my head off and I have no inclination to be all over the internet and social media, under the banner of Mystery Girl Seen With Film Star.”

              “Oh, so it was nothing much then,” Sally retorted flippantly, laughing. “Boy, do you know how to be dramatic, don’t you? ”

              I snorted derivatively. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

              Amazingly, Sally actually laughed at me. “Oh, definitely not dramatic at all! And you said he wouldn’t want to know you! Why would he phone you up and ask you out – alone?”

              I scowled and rolled my eyes. “I’m going out to the shops with him, Sal, not on a date.”

              “Not yet…”

              “I’m going now,” I said firmly. “I’ll go and see him and I will tell you what happened when I get back. See you later.”

              Sally was still laughing as I hung up. Slowly, I got up from the arm of the chair I was still perched on, and placed the handset that was still next to me back in its charging dock on the windowsill. I then wandered across to where my bag was, its contents were strewn across the couch and floor, and stared at it for a second, wondering if I was really going to do this. Even after nearly a decade, I was still dancing to Sebastian’s tune, and I could almost feel the clock spinning backwards – leaving me feeling like a fifteen-year-old hopeless geek again.

              Somehow, I had completely forgotten I had been a real adult, successfully adulting, since I was twenty-one and out on my own after graduating from university in London. Had impressed big corporate businesses and NHS bosses alike for complex data handling contracts worth a lot to both me and them. Successfully delivered virtually impossible success at a speed they – for some reason – didn’t expect. Ran my own tiny home and my enjoyable life well. Made my own decision to chase my dream of writing, planned it all meticulously, and also done that just as successfully.

              Yet, somehow, with one damned phone call, I was regressed to being a child in my parents’ house, rattling in my bones with stunned numbness and confused by immense nerves, now I going to meet a ghost from my past that I had thought of as long gone.

              Utterly dazed and wrong footed, I found myself repacking my giant satchel bag in a reflective trance, returning my mobile phone, iPad and notebooks to it, feeling guilty at packing them away so as to meet Sebastian the second he clicked his fingers again. The work still needed to be done, and this was supposed to be a much-needed study week. But I was finding myself trying to convince my conscience that it was only going to be one afternoon, and that I owed myself closure so I could finally move on from him. I almost managed to convince myself that it was the right thing to do.

              Picking up my coat from the back of the couch where I had flung it, I pulled it back on, threw the big satchel bag across my body, and went trotting straight out the door before I had enough time to talk myself back out of it again.

              I kept walking quickly down the road and onwards, across towards his parent’s house, striding purposefully enough to not overthink everything. Although it was barely a five-minute walk, it seemed to take forever – long enough for me to nearly turn back five separate times. Nerves jangled somewhere around the pit of my stomach, and with every step I took I wondered what on earth I was doing. I knew I should have just turned about, gone home and returned to Master Shakespeare and my current life. Stupidly enough, I didn’t.

              But still, I hesitated as I turned the corner to make it onto the street where his parents still lived. With a calming breath, I carried on, my head down and my heart pounding in my ears. It was then that I suddenly realised, for some unfathomable reason, I had not even given a single thought to how I looked before propelling myself out of the house like my backside was aflame. It slowly started to dawn on me that I was going to meet up with a massive movie star who now resided in Los Angeles, with absolutely no makeup and my hair in a major flyaway tizzy. I barely wore any makeup in the first place as a norm, and had probably already rubbed off all the mascara – well, what little I had bothered to put on this morning – all over my face. It was my usual habit, because it tended to irritate my eyes and contact lenses, which then made my eyes water and made the mascara run down my face anyway.

The sad truth was that my looks were just never anything I really thought about – books, computers, Kindles and iPads didn’t care what you looked like, and it hardly mattered what my appearance was when I all I did was go to lectures and otherwise stay at home to work. The very least the university generally asked for was that you were dressed and handed in your work on time, so, I rarely bothered to put much of an effort, given the only thing messing around with my insane hair and makeup did was waste my time when trying to get out the house, when I had inevitably got up late.

Today was very different, though. Today should have called for effort, no matter how unnatural it was for me these days. I wasn’t even wearing anything half-decent. My current attire consisted of my usual basic uniform of a long, flowing black skirt, an easy short-sleeved blouse, and a long, oversized cardigan under an old belted winter coat. Feet were happy in their favourite worn-and-scuffed, traditional black Doc Marten boots. It was hardly a work of glamorous fashion art, and the exact opposite of what Sebastian De Carr would be used to seeing on the women he met now. Not that I ought to care. After all, I was only going to put my old, ancient crush to bed once and for all.

No... Really. I was.

              Honest.

I pushed my maddening long, annoying hair back from my face, just as the wind kept insisting on blowing the wild mood of fluff that sat on my head absolutely everywhere, and for the first time I began to realise the awful reality that I probably looked a complete mess, and immediately wanted to find a hole to jump into.

Quite suddenly, I really cared about what I looked like – quite possibly for the first time in my life. I didn’t even have a ponytail band in my bag or pockets to tie up that unruly pile of uncontrollable fluff on my head to make it at least look vaguely presentable, especially now it was being blown all over the place. This was not the way to look when meeting an old–crush-come-best-friend-turned-hot-movie-star.

By the time I had completed this conversation of rising panic with myself, I was closing in on the once-familiar house. Then I made the mistake of looking up from my feet.

Immediately, the vignette around my sight threatened to engulf it entirely in a hypoxic panic, as my breath caught in my lungs and closing throat – because to my shock and horror, I was looking up to see one-half of Hollywood’s biggest megastar duos walking towards me, blond hair styled with wax and swept back, hands shoved into the pockets of a long, heavy-looking black military coat of Cashmere that clearly cost more than a souped-up power-horse PC, and long neck wrapped up in a black Cashmere scarf.

              I stopped in my tracks, a deer in headlights, and stared. I was entirely unsure I was actually seeing what I thought I was – it felt like it should have been more of a hallucination, or maybe a mirage in front of me. But then the penny dropped that he really, truly was actually there and not a mirage, my heart skipped straight into my throat – Sebastian De Carr really was here, in front of me, walking towards me.

         I nearly turned on my heel and ran away before he saw me.

        Oh, bugger, bugger, bugger, I thought in nervous panic, just as he looked up.

          Familiar and intense blue-green locked onto mine and he instantly gave me that devastating smile that had everyone with a pulse falling at his feet. He was even more beautiful than he looked in all those silly pictures and the over-hyped films I kept watching him in. Memories suddenly bombarded me of how beautiful I’d always thought he had been before, when he had been my best friend, and how I had thought that mainly because I had known what a beautiful, genuinely sweet and fun person he was above anything else.

        For a moment I took a second to really wonder if he had come back anything like that boy who had left that I had loved.

        Fighting the urge to flee as fast as my feet could carry me, I forced myself to try to at least try to smile and keep going towards him, feeling my legs slowly go weak with cold nerves as I got closer. Unnervingly, I it was also becoming clearer with each step just how much like the old Sebastian he still looked up-close – which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The last thing I needed was to be in love with this stranger simply on the memory of who he used to be. I also hoped – strongly – that now wouldn’t be the time that I fell over my feet for the first time in twenty-five years, since I learned to walk properly.

              “Hey, Lisa!” Sebastian cheerfully called out. He sauntered towards me the second he spotted me, giving me a warm, musing smile that made my heart bounce – which in turn then made me want to kick myself. “Wow, you look… smaller!”

              I opened my mouth to say something nice to him, but then I quickly shut it as my attempt at a smile turned into a scowl.

        “Thank you,” I grumbled instead, giving him a tight smile and trying to calm my tingling nerves. I looked up at him from my rather miniscule height and resented how much extra he seemed to have grown after he had left. Unfortunately, my own height gene had run off to hide in a corner once I had managed to scrape an inch over five-feet. “That’s what every girl wants to hear. But I’m not smaller. You’re just taller.”

              I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets as he grinned cheerfully down at me. He was way over six feet tall, his blue eyes sparkling, his perfect blond hair shorter and more styled than on that TV show I’d seen just before. He looked even better than that, now he was standing right in front of me, and I looked back at him nervously as he smiled warmly at me. I felt all those old feelings for him come rushing back, nearly overwhelming me, but the one feeling that was stronger than most was the one where I realised how much I had missed him.

              “Hey, you don’t have glasses now,” he suddenly remarked, smiling wider. I noticed the American twang I had started to get used to when he was doing interviews was not quite as strong and speaking more like his old self. “I can see your eyes and face now without having to steal them. You have contacts?”

              “Yes, and hopefully you won’t try and steal and wear those, too,” I retorted dryly. The times he had stolen my thick glasses and put them on himself, leaving me blind and stranded, had not been amusing in the least for me, and he always used to tell me that he did it to see my “beautiful eyes and pretty face”. However, I always believed that he used that excuse to steal them without me hitting him too hard afterwards.

              “It’s nice to be able to see your eyes, they’re still really beautiful.”

              I threw him a withering look. It was the same old line, still.

“I would hardly have changed them,” I remarked dryly.

Sebastian laughed lightly and met my eyes slightly bashfully.

“Got a hug for your old friend?” he then asked, opening his arms out.

To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard correctly. But I then realised he hadn’t put out his arms to fly, and decided I shouldn’t pass up what he seemed to be offering. I smiled weakly and moved closer, and he put his arms around me. Something like relief began bubbling in my heart as I realised that it meant I had not completely lost my childhood friend, despite all that had happened in the eleven-year gap since we had seen each other.

              My heart was thundering in my ears again as he pressed me up close, and I found myself closing my eyes and giving a small sigh of relief as I leaned my head against him. Even with the tick coat on, I also found out that body was certainly not CGI special effects.

              “You know, you’re supposed to call your friends,” I said quietly into his chest. Sebastian pulled away a little and looked down at me. He smiled and his charm had been turned on to try and get himself out of trouble.

              “I really am sorry. I told you that,” he apologised again. He focused those intense aquamarine eyes on mine imploringly. “Please forgive me.” 

              I gave him my old Sebastian look and snorted. “You know that charm is not going to work on me.”.

               “It never has,” he answered pragmatically. That charming smile morphed into a pleased grin. “Worth a shot, though, right?”

              I rolled my eyes. “Some things haven’t changed.”

              We looked at each other for a moment, his grin to my wry stare. Sebastian broke it after a few seconds, letting me go and started walking, with his arm immediately going around my shoulders and drawing me both to him and with him, wherever he was going.

              “Look,” he started again, with a sigh. “I know I should have called, but I really have been really busy, doing movie on movie. Good ones not to be passed up. It’s really hard being in demand, you know.”

              “I’ll bet. It must be such a hard life.” I threw him a look of disbelief and shook my head. “But then, I suppose you did all right for yourself, really…”

              I looked up at him slyly as he pretended to be insulted by the nonchalance of the sentence.

              “Well, I’m glad to be home now, to see my friends.”

              “Friends that you never called, wrote to, or even sent a postcard.”

              Sebastian shot me a pointed look. “Do you want me to grovel? I can do grovelling, I’ve had lessons. I’ve played grovelling before.”

              I snorted. “If you grovel, I want a genuine one.”

              Sebastian squeezed my shoulders; I assumed as a pathetic attempt as an apology.

              “I promise I’ll make it up to you. And anyway, it not like you ever wrote to me.”

              “I didn’t know where you even lived, and it’s not like you go around publishing your email address and phone number,” I snapped back irately, immediately annoyed that he was trying to make out like it was my own fault and not his. “You can write to me first. I’m not the one who left.”

              The words were out before I realised, surprising myself greatly at the sudden burst of vehement anger that seemed to come from nowhere. Sebastian was immediately hit by the vitriol in my tone and stopped dead, probably even more surprised than I was, since I had never said even a really cross word to him the whole time we had known each other.

I looked away as he pursed his lips and rubbed his head, and it occurred to me that perhaps it was the first time he had actually realised that I had cared a lot about the fact he had absconded without a backwards glance. I inwardly groaned at letting my feelings out and stared at the floor. Obviously, I had never told him how much his leaving had hurt; I’d never had the chance. However, neither had I admitted i was      to myself before now, meaning I left reeling by my own truth as much as he was.

Now, barely a few minutes after seeing him again, it had come crashing out of me, and I felt guilty for it.

              To my utter surprise, Sebastian turned and pulled me into a bear-hug. Pressed up against him, all I could do was continue to feel guilty and so remained quiet.

              “I’m sorry, you’re right,” Sebastian said softly. “I got caught up in everything that was there and was too busy having a good time to make any effort in keeping in touch. And I should have made the effort. You were always my best friend, and I didn’t bother trying, and I don’t blame you for being mad at me.”

              “I’m not mad at you,” I mumbled into him.

              Sebastian pulled back and looked me directly in the eye. “Yes, you are.”

              “All right, I was mad,” I admitted. I pressed my hands against his sides, grasping his coat, and looked up at him. “You were supposed to be my best friend and you hurt me when you never bothered getting back in touch. You just seemed to clearly prefer to forget about me and get on with your new life, but I was happy for your success, so I decided that was more important. But I was, I am, hurt. You left – you did what you had to do to get the success you have now, but you did not have to ghost me after.”

              “It’s no excuse, but it really did feel like there wasn’t enough time to do the things that I should have done,” Sebastian stated sincerely. “It was insane when we got there, never enough time to catch your breath, even for a minute. By the time I had what I felt like was at least some breathing space, I was too scared to write or try and contact you. I’d left it too long.”

              “You called now, and it’s been even longer.” I shrugged, tried to play off everything I felt as nonchalant. I struggled to imagine anything scaring Sebastian, let alone simply contacting me. He was always confidence personified back then and most certainly was now.

              “I was right here - I wasn’t not taking a chance.” Sebastian held my gaze fleetingly before glanced away and offered a self-deprecating smile. “Was about the scariest thing I’ve ever done, too.”

              My eyebrows nearly made it all the way up to the thick, overhead clouds. “To contact me?”

              “In eleven years, anything could have happened,” Sebastian replied, making sound as if it were so obvious. “You could have left. Your parents could have moved. Other.... things. So many possibilities went through my head, and Kate pressed the call button before I’d even realised what she’d done, because I was hesitating too much.”

              I felt a shocked jolt at the sound realisation that Kate Whittaker knew who I was and had dialled my old home number for him.

              “I’m actually only here for my degree,” I let him know, trying to distract myself from even thinking about her, and what he had just told me. “I’ll be graduating by summer, then hopefully going back to London after. You’re lucky you caught me.”

              “London? You were in London?”

              “In Camden, specifically.” Constantly having to talk myself out of going to every big movie Premier he attended and living so very close to each one.

              “What was in London?”

              “My life.” I shrugged. “I was a computer geek, specialised in corporate databases and data analysis. But I decided I really wanted to do a degree in English Literature and be a writer, and I should do it sooner rather than later. I can easily go back once I’m finished.”

              “Wow, that’s amazing.” Sebastian smiled that smile at me again. “You really were always super-smart.”

              “I didn’t go and be a world-famous actor or anything, but I did all right.” I offered a slight smirk to take the off the jibe. He still met my eyes forlornly.

              “Do you forgive me for that?” Sebastian asked, sincerely. He looked down at me imploringly, and with some shocked realisation, I realised we’d been holding onto each other our entire conversation. “I will make it up to you.”

              I looked back at him in quiet contemplation, keeping his gaze for a few moments. Then I tried to smile as I decided I really had to try and let it go.

              “If you promise not to do it again, I will forgive you,” I told him honestly.

              “You can have a definite deal there.” Sebastian returned the smile with clear relief. He let then me go and offered me his arm instead. “Come on then, let’s go and take a walk down memory lane.” 

              With a side-smile of nostalgia, I slipped my arm through his – just like we had back in our teenage days, and we wandered off to the miniscule shopping area of Willowfall-by-Bough – which, in all honesty, hardly counted as a shopping area at all. It was barely a few interconnecting streets with some random high-street names and essential shops that together scraped together the little town that there was. As teenagers, we had enjoyed hours of walking arm-in-arm through the pathetic offering of shops and wandered around the streets, just as we were now, whilst talking utter rubbish and enjoying finding reasons not to do homework. The rest of the time Sebastian would be trying to convince me to let him copy mine, so he wouldn’t get in trouble the next day for not bothering with it.

              After years of doing everything together, it had come as a huge shock when I had found myself suddenly alone, without my partner-in-crime. I had barely known what to do with myself, but I was fortunate that Sally had been entirely dedicated to helping me survive that first year without him, which was to be our last year at school. After sitting our exams, we headed for the local college to sit A-levels, to remove ourselves from the haunting shadows of the De Carr twins and try to re-write ourselves a new existence without them.

Over a decade later, and here we were again, in a strange déjà vu, recreating our past after both leaving and returning to Willowfall again. We were doing what had done almost every day for four years, and this time with a very big fundamental difference of being successful professional adults and my companion being a worldwide megastar celebrity.

This point was, unfortunately, driven home quite clearly when Sebastian became the immediate talk of the town the moment we walked onto the High Street. It was something so instantaneously obvious, I was borderline cringing on their behalf as they gossiped and openly stared at the real-life Hollywood star so inexplicably in their midst.

              Walking past the shops, I was really becoming increasingly aware of the open stares of people as we passed them. It was getting to the point now where I was squirming with self-consciousness and feeling inevitably judged on how we must have looked together – making me wish all the more I had refused to come out with him. Given I was hardly anywhere near his league, I felt I had no place even walking alongside Sebastian, especially given I was in my trusty old winter coat and multi-coloured fingerless gloves, unglamorous long skirt, uncontrollably dishevelled and blown-about{ loose auburn hair, half-grey and translucent complexion, and worn, scuffed, black Doc Marten boots on my feet. I wasn’t even wearing any makeup.

The more they talked and stared, the more I tended to want go and crawl in a hole until it was dark and I could sneak off home, unseen.

              The worst offenders of the stares and sniggers were the teenage girls and young women. I could clearly hear their whispered words and squeaks as they went past, and I increasingly wished I had never answered that damned phone.

              “Oh, my God – that’s one of the De Carr twins,” I heard someone say, in a loud stage-whisper. “What’s he doing here?”

              “That’s him from that film Flight 101!” whispered another.  “That’s Sebastian De Carr. The Sebastian De Carr!  Who’s that with him? Why is she with him? Does anyone know who she is?”

              Phones were coming out. I heard camera snap sound effect noise enough times as we wandered through. Phones being held up aloft, clearly filming.  It was like a literal nightmare I’d already had more than once, and I felt cold inside that I was actually having to live through it, right now.

              From nowhere, I suddenly, felt my foot trap on something and I tripped and fell, fortunately or not, right into Sebastian’s arms. Behind me, some snorted laughs and somewhere there was a stupid giggle. I didn’t need to watch it back on social media to know that, quite clearly, it had been no accident.

              “Are you OK?” Sebastian immediately asked, looking down with concern, whilst I quickly tried to right myself and back away from him.

              “I’m fine,” I muttered through tightly pursed lips, trying to calm my rising anger and mortification at having being caught by him like weak little damsel. At having to be that close to him.

I offered a grim smile as he helped me properly back onto my feet. I also soon realised that he hadn’t let me go and was still holding me up, hands on the top of my arms and holding on firmly. Reddening, I pushed that thought away, because doing anything about it would bring attention to it. Which would have been worse.

              “What the hell did I ever do to them?” I demanded hotly, breathing the words under my breath, not even sure myself whether it was rhetorical or not. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never been treated like that.”

              My old friend was still leaning forward into my personal space enough to hear me, anyway, obviously looking far more intimate than it was, which made me squirm, inside even more.

              “Come on, leave it, Lis,” he responded quietly in my ear. His comforting tone turned darker when he added, “Don’t rise to anything and ignore what they do. Trust me, there’s nothing else for it. It ends up so much worse if you do anything else.”

              I dared meet his eyes at hearing that very unfamiliar tone from him. His expression was set in a way I had barely seen before – not outside of a playing a part on-screen.

              Sebastian moved to put his arm protectively around my shoulders and walked me away. I was so annoyed by what had happened I almost didn’t notice.

              “You are a hazard to my health, De Carr,” I grumbled, throwing him a glare. “And you were saying before that girls didn’t like you. I think I beg to differ.”

               “Obviously, here they’re strange,” retorted Sebastian, and I rolled my eyes at his theatrics. “Oh, here, let’s go in to see this.”

              He propelled me into a retro-style music shop that sold vinyl records and CDs of just about anything, and went to see the new releases on the shelves. Sebastian looked through the CDs with interest, whilst I glumly stood next to him trying not to be bored.

              “Hey, look, they have the soundtrack from Flight 101,” he suddenly announced, shoving it unceremoniously in my face. I took it from him and rolled my eyes. I did not need to be reminded exactly why I was getting the Stupid Treatment and being tripped up in the street for social media giggles.

              “Ugh! Look at me there,” Sebastian complained, looking at the CD cover over my shoulder. “Why do they always pick the really stupid pictures to go on these things?”

              I raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet you don’t think Caspian looks all that bad”

              “That’s Caspian, though,” Sebastian muttered. “He looks fine.”

              I couldn’t help me giving a short laugh, and Sebastian’s face looked rather bemused.

              “What?” he demanded.

              “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but you and Caspian are actually identical twins,” I remarked dryly. “I know you’re not the sharpest knife in the draw, but you should at least work out that if Caspian looks good then you’re bound to so you look exactly the same?”

              Sebastian shrugged and made a face. “That still doesn’t mean I have to like these photographs.”

              I shook my head in amusement. “So, I take it you don’t like any photographs of yourself?”

              Sebastian shook his head and I couldn’t help but wonder how one of the most photographed people in the world could hate pictures of themselves. I rolled my eyes at him, and he wandered off to find something he actually wanted to buy.

              When he finally went to pay for his things, the woman on the counter gave Sebastian a hard look and could barely take her eyes off him. Sebastian fidgeted uncomfortably as she beeped through the barcodes and he almost had to snatch his hand away from hers as they lingered for longer than necessary when physical money exchanged hands. I tried to smile sympathetically as I waited for him to finish, then we left the shop to look around some others.

              “I realise part of the positives of living in LA now is not just the weather,” he muttered quietly to me after he escaped the cashier. “Nobody there bats an eyelid at you.”

              “Well, you’re not in LA anymore, Toto,” I retorted with a grimace. “I did try to warn you.”

              “I suppose it’s not just the shops that have changed here in ten years.”

              “No,” I said quietly, looking at him pointedly. “The people change, too.”

              Sebastian looked back at me. “I may have been away for a while and got an interesting and high-profile job, but I have not changed, my dear.”

              No. No he actually hadn’t, and for a little while, even after all this time, it really felt like I had my old friend back, like he had never been away, and I was very happy. It was something I thought that I would never experience again. But the surreal quality of it was something that was not lost on me – it may have felt like we had somehow travelled back in time, but the reality was that we weren’t fifteen anymore and he was no longer “just” Sebastian. The truth was that I had to accept the fact was the more I was with him in public, the more I’d being “that mystery girl with celebrity icon and home-grown Hollywood star, Sebastian De Carr.”

               I was really beginning to wish I could just go home and hide away in my iPad and computer, and return to the mundane normality of my life, where Sebastian was more of a sad memory and not a hot megastar wandering Willowfall High Street instead of Rodeo Drive or 5^th Avenue. However, when we started wandering off towards home, I had to admit to the overwhelming feeling of disappointment that my time with him was actually over.

              We arrived at our corner where we had always parted ways, the same as we had over a decade ago, almost every day for over four years, and stopped to say goodbye out sheer habit, before really realising we had even actually done it.  

              “I’ll see you again sometime then,” Sebastian murmured quietly, offering a weak smile. “Thanks again for coming with me. It was fun doing this again.”

              I managed a smile of , and nodded, feeling a little awkward and saddened we were now parting. Heaven knew if, or when, I would see him again now. At least I knew now my old friend really was still my friend, and that we’d managed to carry on where we’d left off so quickly buoyed me, soothing a decade of hurt I’d experienced since he’d left. Now my life could just go back to ticking along as usual, and maybe that Thesis could finally get finished.  

              “OK then.” I tried to sound nonchalant. I probably failed, though. Only one of us had an army of Golden Globes and three Oscar Nominations in their résumé, after all. “I’ll see you around.”

              I shrugged and stuffed gloved hands in coat pockets, staring at the floor as I turned to leave.

              “Lisa?”

              Sebastian’s uncertain voice halted my action and I turned back to him with some surprise. I had expected him to turn on his heel and walk away very quickly, with nothing but regrets that he had asked to see me again. I met his eyes and he tried to offer something that may or may not have been a smile.

              “Would you like to come and keep me company tomorrow?” he asked, looking back with what could have been some hopeful uncertainty. “Everybody’s going out and leaving me alone. We could catch up on stuff.”

              I cocked my head and raised my eyebrows curiously. Pushing away hair that was blowing into my eyes, I tried not to look completely floored at the request.

              “Why aren’t you going?” I managed to ask, after I momentarily lost my voice to shock.

              “They’re going to see Flight 101 and I really don’t want to see it again.”

              “Why are they seeing it again?”

              Sebastian smiled. “So Mum and Dad can watch it.”

              “Is Caspian going?”

              “Yes.” Sebastian shrugged. “So, it’s just me on my own tomorrow. I didn’t want to be home alone and bored if I didn’t have to be.”

              “What about Kate?”

              I had to ask.

              “She’s going with them.” Sebastian shrugged. “She actually hasn’t seen it yet. She has so far refused to actually sit through any of the premiers, because she doesn’t want to hear what the audience has to say about it quite literally behind her back. She never sits through any of her premiers, it seems.”

              I considered his request, pausing for a few moments to wonder what exactly I would get myself into if I agreed to it. The likelihood was I was setting myself up for more unrequited heartache with this man, and that wasn’t an option – not now. On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to turn my back on my old best friend, and his friendship had always meant more to me than anything else. Eventually, it was loyalty that won the argument in my head.

              “All right, then,” I reluctantly replied. “I’ll come round tomorrow to keep poor little you company so you don’t get all lonely on your own.”

              There was a slight half-second pause before Sebastian blinked. His eyes bore into mine with some surprise.

              “Really? That’s great,” he smiled. “They’ll be going out about eleven, so anytime will be fine.”

              About a second later, that realisation of what I had just agreed to sank back in again.

              You’re going to Sebastian De Carr’s house alone all day, my mind started immediately screaming at me. And you’ll have to take your work, or that will never get in on time… It really is like nothing’s changed. And he’ll think you’re such an idiot… What are you doing?

              I was smiling sweetly at him, forcing the mask whilst these thoughts raced through my mind and panicked wildly.

              “Fine, then… Fine,” I mumbled, the panic monologue inside my head carrying on by itself. “Right. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

              After saying goodbye, I walked home in almost a daze. My head was spinning as I walked back home, still unable to quite believe that just like that I had Sebastian back in my life after so long and I was less than twenty-four hours away from spending a few hours home alone with him. The reality was that many thousands of women and teenage girls would love to be in my shoes at that prospect also swam within my head, and that was something I was very uncomfortable with. Once again, I was back to realising he wasn’t the same Sebastian as he had been before, when all I wanted was my old friend back exactly how he was.

There was also the fact that it made me feel worse, knowing that I would never get what I really wanted from him, and spending more time with him would just probably end up breaking my heart more each day I was with him. After all, that had been the original plans to meeting up today. And perhaps at fifteen I could manage those feelings, but not now. I was no longer a naïve child – I was a grown woman and, unfortunately, one that was still pathetically in love, and there was nothing I could do about that except be utterly miserable and accept my fate to be and old, pining spinster. There also was no way of moving on if he was in my life – after over fifteen years of yearning after him, there was no way I would even look at anyone else as long as he was around. Or maybe just ever.

               I had created a life for myself after Sebastian left. I still had the rest of that life to lead, and it clearly had never – and was never – going to involve Sebastian De Carr. It was a shame life wasn’t a movie, though. I really would have loved to re-write this script.

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