Post by xsweetnightmare on Jan 3, 2008 8:46:00 GMT
Okay, so I have one of my current fics posted on here. This one I finished in October, it's nineteen chapters long and I wanted to see if anyone here is interested in it.
Well, here's the first chapter.
Summary: Ryan Atwood is a 24-year-old famous actor. When he accidentally meets the beautiful and down-to-earth college student Marissa Cooper, he discovers there’s definitely more to life than fame. AU RM SS.
Marissa Cooper was having a normal day.
She woke up to the early September sun filtering through the windows of her small L.A. apartment…actually, it was the drunken argument downstairs that was her real wake-up call. She then had breakfast, showered, got dressed, and went into her bedroom again, gathering her things for the day’s activities. It was a Saturday, and Marissa was barely back in her junior year at college when she was promptly buried in homework of any and every kind. Assignments, reports, essays, you name it, she had to do it.
Marissa was a highly organised person. She wasn’t a complete, paranoid geek, but she rarely took risks unless they were calculated. She guessed it had began with her childhood. She lived in Newport Beach, California, rich and very privileged. Her father Jimmy was a financial advisor and her mom Julie…well, Julie was just the average Newport trophy wife. Things had started going downhill when Marissa was sixteen.
It had began with the death of her then twelve-year-old sister Kaitlin. Her friend’s mother was taking her and her friend Alyssa home from pony club, when their car collided with a truck. The mother survived – but eventually committed suicide, having lost her only child – but Alyssa and Kaitlin both died on impact. Marissa had never been that close to her sister; she was too preoccupied with her dimwitted boyfriend Luke, popularity and partying, and when Kaitlin died she felt terrible. Her parents began fighting, then divorced four months after Kaitlin’s death. Jimmy was arrested for embezzlement less than two days after the divorce was finalised.
Marissa’s boyfriend of six years, Luke, cheated on her, and Marissa’s mother became unbearable. As did her life. She became addicted to alcohol, and if she wasn’t passed out she was badly hungover. Marissa attempted to kill herself, but her best friend Summer found her just in time. Without talking to her daughter properly, Julie sent her one surviving daughter to rehab.
Marissa was in the expensive rehab centre for six months. She learned a lot, and to this day she was still completely sober. However, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t despise her mother for doing what she did. Julie didn’t even tell Marissa she was going to rehab until the papers were signed and the place booked. She didn’t call her daughter more than twice in the whole time Marissa was there. Marissa got back to Newport, graduated Harbor High, and promptly left. She couldn’t stand the town anymore. Her best friend Summer had become a complete brat, while Marissa had once seen the heart of gold in her. Julie was simply too much to handle, and Marissa had gotten into UCLA and moved to this apartment in Los Angeles. It wasn’t much, but it was home. Marissa had made some new friends, but had no best friend. She hadn’t had a boyfriend since Luke, and hadn’t slept with anyone but him, and that (rather unpleasant) experience was almost five years ago.
Despite all this Marissa liked her life. At the moment, a library session was in order, so she gathered her books and proceeded to the local library, avoiding a few homeless, a suspicious-looking pair of guys who appeared to be dealing drugs, and a vaguely familiar crazy woman with a fluffy ginger cat on a leash.
“Marissa,” said Alicia Thomas, an elderly woman who was the head librarian. “If you don’t mind, would you be able to take over for the next two hours? My granddaughter’s wedding is in a week and apparently something went wrong with the dresses….”
“Yeah, sure,” Marissa replied, having done this before. She sat around behind the desk, having nothing much to do at the moment. She loved libraries, and observing the other people who used them. Old men who read the variety of newspapers, teenagers needing immediate aid for forgotten exams, college students with a thousand things written in their homework planner, middle-aged women who read things like Slimming and Good Medicine and the latest ‘hot book’ by a fifty-times-married author, little kids with picture books. People were interesting if you just watched them once in a while.
Ryan Atwood was annoyed. He was rushing around his mansion like a chicken with its head cut off, highly confused, his agent on one line, his mother on the other, filming schedules and scripts all over the place.
“…I don’t know man, yes, I’ll get back to you…Mom, I can’t. Sorry.” Ryan tossed the Blackberry onto the table, causing it to slide down the highly glossed wooden surface. His life was a disorganised paparazzi-decorated state of complete confusion. Ryan had once wanted to be an architect, but fate had different plans for him. It always had.
At the age of five, Ryan’s father Frank was sent to jail for armed robbery. When Ryan was ten, his mother Dawn overdosed on heroin. Ryan was sent to a group home, to be adopted by the wealthy Berkeley-based family the Cohens. He referred to Sandy and Kirsten as his parents, and Seth as his brother. Or he once had considered Seth a brother. Ryan was in senior year and had plans to go to Berkeley for college with his girlfriend of two years, Theresa Diaz. On graduation night, he walked in on her and Seth. Seth vaguely tried to explain. Theresa eventually found out she was pregnant – with Seth’s kid.
Sandy and Kirsten had been beyond angry. Ryan was beyond angry. He went to Berkeley, alone, for a semester, when he suddenly found himself on a guest role on the boring though extremely popular teen drama The Valley. Meanwhile, Theresa and Seth got engaged, then Theresa lost the baby and for no apparent reason cheated on Seth. Seth went to Brown, and he was now a comic book rep for Marvel. No-one had heard from Theresa since she dumped Seth, and Ryan couldn’t care less. He thought he was in love with Theresa, that he had their future planned, though now he thought about it maybe it wasn’t love. High school lust? Maybe. He had no idea. The principle got to him. The fact Seth tried blaming it on Ryan and never even apologised made it worse.
Meanwhile, Ryan’s character on The Valley – Ross – got expanded to a main role and he stayed with that until he was twenty-one, when he was offered a part in a major film. It was odd, really. Before that, he'd never acted. Ever. In high school he tended to stick to the academic stuff, sport when he could be bothered. He would rather brood or read (which he never had the time to do for fun anymore) or, admittedly, hang out with Theresa or Seth. Actually, he had been in a musical in elementary school - You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Ryan tended to cringe just thinking about it, and he prayed the video wouldn't leak.
From The Valley he’d just gotten more famous…and here he was, in an L.A. mansion with god knows how many paparazzi hanging around, lying in wait for a photo opportunity. Ryan despised them. He also didn't get how people could spend all day, every day following the rich and famous and photographing them, not to mention the tabloid writers who fabricated one story and denied it the next issue. He decided to go for a drive, but barely had his car around the corner when he found himself surrounded by the stupid paparazzi. Assholes were going to cause an accident. It wasn't like he hadn't before. He drove for a while in an attempt to escape, which didn’t work, and he came across a library in a shadier part of the city. Surely they wouldn’t follow him here. It worked. Miracles did happen.
Ryan walked into the library, which was surprisingly noisy. He noticed a bunch of under-fives in story time, a variety of perfectly normal people browsing, however, there was one person that caught his attention. She looked a little younger than him, maybe twenty-one, and she was in Ryan’s opinion flawless. She was tall and thin, with long, dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes. She looked bored. Ryan was getting a lot of stunned looks from people, which he was accustomed to. A pair of teenage girls came running up to him a hundred miles an hour, looking like mini Paris Hiltons with the slightly grating voices to go with the image. “Oh my god! Can we have your autograph? Please? We’re like your biggest fans!”
“Sure,” Ryan replied automatically, his gaze still mostly on the mystery girl. Post autograph-signing he wandered off to a section of horror novels. He really didn't have time to read for his enjoyment anymore, unless it was a script or something. Marissa had noticed none other than the famous Ryan Atwood in the library, and while she wasn’t one to follow every article in every tabloid, and drool over actors, he was still hot, and still famous. And besides...her friend's reactions would be priceless. She noticed he looked rather lost, and she grabbed a bunch of books and approached him, putting away a couple of Stephen King novels.
“So what’s Ryan Atwood doing around here?” she asked. That was a good question, too.
“Photographers,” he replied, wondering why she was talking to him. She didn't look like the usual stand-there-and-gawk, astonished by his presence type. “Pain in the ass.”
“Not that I’d have any idea, but yeah, that would be annoying.”
Ryan watched her graceful movements for a moment. Thank god she hadn't said 'I loved you on The Valley.' “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Marissa Cooper.”
“You in college?” Ryan questioned.
“I’m a junior at UCLA. English major.” Marissa wondered why a movie star found her so interesting. He, on the other hand, was oddly intrigued. Everyone he knew outside of family was famous; stuck-up brats, actors and actresses, pop singers, rock bands, heirs and heiresses, even the occasional royal, yet this completely normal college student was more of a fascination then they were.
“I heard you were doing a new movie,” she was saying. He snapped out of his trance; she offered him a shy smile that made his heart skip a beat, cheesy as that sounded.
“Yeah um, it’s a thriller. One more to add to the list.” Ryan’s Blackberry dinged with a new message from Sandy, successfully startling the hell out of him. Could you come to Newport tonight? Great, just great. “So…anyway…I’d better get out of here.”
“Right,” Marissa said, thinking of what her friends would say when they found out she’d had an actual conversation - not a 'can you sign this?' moment, but an actual conversation, with Ryan Atwood. “Maybe I’ll see you again somewhere. Other than a screen or a poster or a tabloid, that is.”
“Maybe.”
It was that night when Marissa found herself in Newport Beach again. Her mother wanted her to meet possible-stepdad number 121928194. Jimmy was in trouble and to be honest Marissa was sick of the constant replacements for him, replacements she was supposed to accept immediately. Luckily, Julie tended to get bored rather quickly. Marissa wondered who owned the house next door. She rarely visited Newport, and hadn’t seen them. They had moved there just before she first left for college. Sighing, she knocked on her childhood mansion’s door.
“Marissa!” Julie exclaimed as if she was enjoying her daughter’s company. “It’s so good to see you!”
“You too,” Marissa replied flatly.
“Well, we’re going to the Yacht Club for dinner. I’ve got you something, it’s in your bedroom upstairs, we’re going to be meeting Rick at the club.”
“Right.” Marissa went upstairs to see a brand new, cream-coloured Chanel dress. She changed into it as she looked around her room. A lot of memories were contained in the pale pink walls. She sighed. Someone might ask what the hell her problem was, because she looked perfect, but that didn't mean she had the same confidence her looks should have given her automatically. She grabbed the matching Chanel bag her mother had provided, threw her stuff in and headed back downstairs.
“So,” said Sandy Cohen, watching his adopted son absently play with the edge of the tablecloth. “How is everything?”
“Good,” Ryan replied. He didn’t see his parents much, and knew he should be more attentive, but he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Marissa Cooper. She was three years younger than him, still in college, living in a bad part of L.A. and had no celebrity status whatsoever, yet there was something Ryan liked about her beyond looks. He had only talked to her once and met her that morning, so why was she stuck in his head like this? He'd dated plenty of girls before and they hadn't quite had this effect on him.
“Still there kiddo?” Sandy enquired.
“Huh? Yeah,” Ryan replied vaguely. Himself, Kirsten and Sandy were at the Yacht Club for dinner.
Kirsten watched him with interest. “So what has you so distracted?”
“Nothing,” Ryan answered. “Just…work.”
“Come on Ryan!” Sandy said brightly. “Surely a famous young guy like yourself has something interesting to talk about?”
“Not really.” That was true. Ryan's life was actually surprisingly dull for a celebrity. He went to red carpet events and he did the box office hits but it was a rather boring existence all in all. Eventually the repetitive roles melted into each other and when someone mentioned The Valley he felt like throttling something.
“So…” said Kirsten, nervously changing the subject to much icier waters, “Uh…Seth is doing pretty well…just signed a comic book that’s apparently going to be the next legend.”
“That’s great,” Ryan said, tone dismissive. He knew exactly where Seth should shove that comic book deal. He then noticed something – or someone – that really caught his attention and broke his hostile thought process. “I’ll be back in a second.” He got up and went over to the bar.
Marissa thoroughly disliked ‘Rick.’ He was a forty-year-old, extremely rich real estate mogul, and had all the warmth of the Antarctic Ocean. She said she was going to the bar to get away from him and Julie – to get a non-alcoholic drink, of course. She stared into an unappealing cranberry juice, thinking about how she’d be back in her apartment on Monday. A voice surprised her.
“I didn’t know you lived in Newport.”
She looked to the celebrity who she admittedly couldn’t stop thinking about. Her friends had gone berserk when they found out Marissa had met him.
“I did…then once I got accepted into college I left as fast as possible.” Marissa observed Ryan for a moment. “I didn’t know you lived here either. I'm pretty sure I would have seen you around.”
“I don’t, my parents moved here when I finished high school, I’m having dinner with them actually…”
Julie suddenly approached. “Marissa, what’s taking so -” She noticed Ryan. “Hello there,” she said to him with a flirtatious smile. Marissa rolled her eyes and shook her head at her mother’s antics. Ryan caught her eye and struggled to keep the amusement off his face.
“This is your mother, Marissa?”
Julie looked from Marissa to Ryan, evidently shocked. “You two have met before?”
“This morning at the library,” Marissa replied. “We can’t have your boyfriend waiting, Mom.” She half-dragged her mother back to their table.
“Well,” said Julie, floored by the exchange she had just witnessed. Her daughter needed a decent boyfriend, and... “When I said find a decent man, I didn’t think you’d do this well!”
“Mom!” Marissa exclaimed, flushing. “God, I only met him this morning, it’s just coincidence. Besides, he’s a celebrity.”
“Please, the way he was looking at you?” Julie rolled her eyes. “I may be getting more Botox injections lately but even I could tell there was something there. And his parents being the neighbours?”
“Wait,” Marissa interrupted. “What?”
“Sandy and Kirsten? His parents? They live next door.”
“And I didn’t know that.” Marissa was puzzled. Julie was as much into the lives of other wealthy people as anyone in Newport. Surely she would have mentioned...
“Well you never asked,” Julie retorted. “And if you visited more often…”
“Mom, please, not that again.” Marissa rolled her eyes. She noticed Rick staring stupidly into space and used him as a distraction. “So Rick. Tell me about your business.”
Meanwhile, Kirsten was saying, “You’ve met Marissa? Her mother lives in the house next door.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“Well maybe if you visited more often…”
“Mom, please,” Ryan sighed. He let his gaze stray to Marissa Cooper again.
Maybe he should visit Newport more often.
Well, here's the first chapter.
Summary: Ryan Atwood is a 24-year-old famous actor. When he accidentally meets the beautiful and down-to-earth college student Marissa Cooper, he discovers there’s definitely more to life than fame. AU RM SS.
Marissa Cooper was having a normal day.
She woke up to the early September sun filtering through the windows of her small L.A. apartment…actually, it was the drunken argument downstairs that was her real wake-up call. She then had breakfast, showered, got dressed, and went into her bedroom again, gathering her things for the day’s activities. It was a Saturday, and Marissa was barely back in her junior year at college when she was promptly buried in homework of any and every kind. Assignments, reports, essays, you name it, she had to do it.
Marissa was a highly organised person. She wasn’t a complete, paranoid geek, but she rarely took risks unless they were calculated. She guessed it had began with her childhood. She lived in Newport Beach, California, rich and very privileged. Her father Jimmy was a financial advisor and her mom Julie…well, Julie was just the average Newport trophy wife. Things had started going downhill when Marissa was sixteen.
It had began with the death of her then twelve-year-old sister Kaitlin. Her friend’s mother was taking her and her friend Alyssa home from pony club, when their car collided with a truck. The mother survived – but eventually committed suicide, having lost her only child – but Alyssa and Kaitlin both died on impact. Marissa had never been that close to her sister; she was too preoccupied with her dimwitted boyfriend Luke, popularity and partying, and when Kaitlin died she felt terrible. Her parents began fighting, then divorced four months after Kaitlin’s death. Jimmy was arrested for embezzlement less than two days after the divorce was finalised.
Marissa’s boyfriend of six years, Luke, cheated on her, and Marissa’s mother became unbearable. As did her life. She became addicted to alcohol, and if she wasn’t passed out she was badly hungover. Marissa attempted to kill herself, but her best friend Summer found her just in time. Without talking to her daughter properly, Julie sent her one surviving daughter to rehab.
Marissa was in the expensive rehab centre for six months. She learned a lot, and to this day she was still completely sober. However, she couldn’t pretend she didn’t despise her mother for doing what she did. Julie didn’t even tell Marissa she was going to rehab until the papers were signed and the place booked. She didn’t call her daughter more than twice in the whole time Marissa was there. Marissa got back to Newport, graduated Harbor High, and promptly left. She couldn’t stand the town anymore. Her best friend Summer had become a complete brat, while Marissa had once seen the heart of gold in her. Julie was simply too much to handle, and Marissa had gotten into UCLA and moved to this apartment in Los Angeles. It wasn’t much, but it was home. Marissa had made some new friends, but had no best friend. She hadn’t had a boyfriend since Luke, and hadn’t slept with anyone but him, and that (rather unpleasant) experience was almost five years ago.
Despite all this Marissa liked her life. At the moment, a library session was in order, so she gathered her books and proceeded to the local library, avoiding a few homeless, a suspicious-looking pair of guys who appeared to be dealing drugs, and a vaguely familiar crazy woman with a fluffy ginger cat on a leash.
“Marissa,” said Alicia Thomas, an elderly woman who was the head librarian. “If you don’t mind, would you be able to take over for the next two hours? My granddaughter’s wedding is in a week and apparently something went wrong with the dresses….”
“Yeah, sure,” Marissa replied, having done this before. She sat around behind the desk, having nothing much to do at the moment. She loved libraries, and observing the other people who used them. Old men who read the variety of newspapers, teenagers needing immediate aid for forgotten exams, college students with a thousand things written in their homework planner, middle-aged women who read things like Slimming and Good Medicine and the latest ‘hot book’ by a fifty-times-married author, little kids with picture books. People were interesting if you just watched them once in a while.
Ryan Atwood was annoyed. He was rushing around his mansion like a chicken with its head cut off, highly confused, his agent on one line, his mother on the other, filming schedules and scripts all over the place.
“…I don’t know man, yes, I’ll get back to you…Mom, I can’t. Sorry.” Ryan tossed the Blackberry onto the table, causing it to slide down the highly glossed wooden surface. His life was a disorganised paparazzi-decorated state of complete confusion. Ryan had once wanted to be an architect, but fate had different plans for him. It always had.
At the age of five, Ryan’s father Frank was sent to jail for armed robbery. When Ryan was ten, his mother Dawn overdosed on heroin. Ryan was sent to a group home, to be adopted by the wealthy Berkeley-based family the Cohens. He referred to Sandy and Kirsten as his parents, and Seth as his brother. Or he once had considered Seth a brother. Ryan was in senior year and had plans to go to Berkeley for college with his girlfriend of two years, Theresa Diaz. On graduation night, he walked in on her and Seth. Seth vaguely tried to explain. Theresa eventually found out she was pregnant – with Seth’s kid.
Sandy and Kirsten had been beyond angry. Ryan was beyond angry. He went to Berkeley, alone, for a semester, when he suddenly found himself on a guest role on the boring though extremely popular teen drama The Valley. Meanwhile, Theresa and Seth got engaged, then Theresa lost the baby and for no apparent reason cheated on Seth. Seth went to Brown, and he was now a comic book rep for Marvel. No-one had heard from Theresa since she dumped Seth, and Ryan couldn’t care less. He thought he was in love with Theresa, that he had their future planned, though now he thought about it maybe it wasn’t love. High school lust? Maybe. He had no idea. The principle got to him. The fact Seth tried blaming it on Ryan and never even apologised made it worse.
Meanwhile, Ryan’s character on The Valley – Ross – got expanded to a main role and he stayed with that until he was twenty-one, when he was offered a part in a major film. It was odd, really. Before that, he'd never acted. Ever. In high school he tended to stick to the academic stuff, sport when he could be bothered. He would rather brood or read (which he never had the time to do for fun anymore) or, admittedly, hang out with Theresa or Seth. Actually, he had been in a musical in elementary school - You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown. Ryan tended to cringe just thinking about it, and he prayed the video wouldn't leak.
From The Valley he’d just gotten more famous…and here he was, in an L.A. mansion with god knows how many paparazzi hanging around, lying in wait for a photo opportunity. Ryan despised them. He also didn't get how people could spend all day, every day following the rich and famous and photographing them, not to mention the tabloid writers who fabricated one story and denied it the next issue. He decided to go for a drive, but barely had his car around the corner when he found himself surrounded by the stupid paparazzi. Assholes were going to cause an accident. It wasn't like he hadn't before. He drove for a while in an attempt to escape, which didn’t work, and he came across a library in a shadier part of the city. Surely they wouldn’t follow him here. It worked. Miracles did happen.
Ryan walked into the library, which was surprisingly noisy. He noticed a bunch of under-fives in story time, a variety of perfectly normal people browsing, however, there was one person that caught his attention. She looked a little younger than him, maybe twenty-one, and she was in Ryan’s opinion flawless. She was tall and thin, with long, dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes. She looked bored. Ryan was getting a lot of stunned looks from people, which he was accustomed to. A pair of teenage girls came running up to him a hundred miles an hour, looking like mini Paris Hiltons with the slightly grating voices to go with the image. “Oh my god! Can we have your autograph? Please? We’re like your biggest fans!”
“Sure,” Ryan replied automatically, his gaze still mostly on the mystery girl. Post autograph-signing he wandered off to a section of horror novels. He really didn't have time to read for his enjoyment anymore, unless it was a script or something. Marissa had noticed none other than the famous Ryan Atwood in the library, and while she wasn’t one to follow every article in every tabloid, and drool over actors, he was still hot, and still famous. And besides...her friend's reactions would be priceless. She noticed he looked rather lost, and she grabbed a bunch of books and approached him, putting away a couple of Stephen King novels.
“So what’s Ryan Atwood doing around here?” she asked. That was a good question, too.
“Photographers,” he replied, wondering why she was talking to him. She didn't look like the usual stand-there-and-gawk, astonished by his presence type. “Pain in the ass.”
“Not that I’d have any idea, but yeah, that would be annoying.”
Ryan watched her graceful movements for a moment. Thank god she hadn't said 'I loved you on The Valley.' “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Marissa Cooper.”
“You in college?” Ryan questioned.
“I’m a junior at UCLA. English major.” Marissa wondered why a movie star found her so interesting. He, on the other hand, was oddly intrigued. Everyone he knew outside of family was famous; stuck-up brats, actors and actresses, pop singers, rock bands, heirs and heiresses, even the occasional royal, yet this completely normal college student was more of a fascination then they were.
“I heard you were doing a new movie,” she was saying. He snapped out of his trance; she offered him a shy smile that made his heart skip a beat, cheesy as that sounded.
“Yeah um, it’s a thriller. One more to add to the list.” Ryan’s Blackberry dinged with a new message from Sandy, successfully startling the hell out of him. Could you come to Newport tonight? Great, just great. “So…anyway…I’d better get out of here.”
“Right,” Marissa said, thinking of what her friends would say when they found out she’d had an actual conversation - not a 'can you sign this?' moment, but an actual conversation, with Ryan Atwood. “Maybe I’ll see you again somewhere. Other than a screen or a poster or a tabloid, that is.”
“Maybe.”
~~~~~~~~~~
It was that night when Marissa found herself in Newport Beach again. Her mother wanted her to meet possible-stepdad number 121928194. Jimmy was in trouble and to be honest Marissa was sick of the constant replacements for him, replacements she was supposed to accept immediately. Luckily, Julie tended to get bored rather quickly. Marissa wondered who owned the house next door. She rarely visited Newport, and hadn’t seen them. They had moved there just before she first left for college. Sighing, she knocked on her childhood mansion’s door.
“Marissa!” Julie exclaimed as if she was enjoying her daughter’s company. “It’s so good to see you!”
“You too,” Marissa replied flatly.
“Well, we’re going to the Yacht Club for dinner. I’ve got you something, it’s in your bedroom upstairs, we’re going to be meeting Rick at the club.”
“Right.” Marissa went upstairs to see a brand new, cream-coloured Chanel dress. She changed into it as she looked around her room. A lot of memories were contained in the pale pink walls. She sighed. Someone might ask what the hell her problem was, because she looked perfect, but that didn't mean she had the same confidence her looks should have given her automatically. She grabbed the matching Chanel bag her mother had provided, threw her stuff in and headed back downstairs.
“So,” said Sandy Cohen, watching his adopted son absently play with the edge of the tablecloth. “How is everything?”
“Good,” Ryan replied. He didn’t see his parents much, and knew he should be more attentive, but he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Marissa Cooper. She was three years younger than him, still in college, living in a bad part of L.A. and had no celebrity status whatsoever, yet there was something Ryan liked about her beyond looks. He had only talked to her once and met her that morning, so why was she stuck in his head like this? He'd dated plenty of girls before and they hadn't quite had this effect on him.
“Still there kiddo?” Sandy enquired.
“Huh? Yeah,” Ryan replied vaguely. Himself, Kirsten and Sandy were at the Yacht Club for dinner.
Kirsten watched him with interest. “So what has you so distracted?”
“Nothing,” Ryan answered. “Just…work.”
“Come on Ryan!” Sandy said brightly. “Surely a famous young guy like yourself has something interesting to talk about?”
“Not really.” That was true. Ryan's life was actually surprisingly dull for a celebrity. He went to red carpet events and he did the box office hits but it was a rather boring existence all in all. Eventually the repetitive roles melted into each other and when someone mentioned The Valley he felt like throttling something.
“So…” said Kirsten, nervously changing the subject to much icier waters, “Uh…Seth is doing pretty well…just signed a comic book that’s apparently going to be the next legend.”
“That’s great,” Ryan said, tone dismissive. He knew exactly where Seth should shove that comic book deal. He then noticed something – or someone – that really caught his attention and broke his hostile thought process. “I’ll be back in a second.” He got up and went over to the bar.
Marissa thoroughly disliked ‘Rick.’ He was a forty-year-old, extremely rich real estate mogul, and had all the warmth of the Antarctic Ocean. She said she was going to the bar to get away from him and Julie – to get a non-alcoholic drink, of course. She stared into an unappealing cranberry juice, thinking about how she’d be back in her apartment on Monday. A voice surprised her.
“I didn’t know you lived in Newport.”
She looked to the celebrity who she admittedly couldn’t stop thinking about. Her friends had gone berserk when they found out Marissa had met him.
“I did…then once I got accepted into college I left as fast as possible.” Marissa observed Ryan for a moment. “I didn’t know you lived here either. I'm pretty sure I would have seen you around.”
“I don’t, my parents moved here when I finished high school, I’m having dinner with them actually…”
Julie suddenly approached. “Marissa, what’s taking so -” She noticed Ryan. “Hello there,” she said to him with a flirtatious smile. Marissa rolled her eyes and shook her head at her mother’s antics. Ryan caught her eye and struggled to keep the amusement off his face.
“This is your mother, Marissa?”
Julie looked from Marissa to Ryan, evidently shocked. “You two have met before?”
“This morning at the library,” Marissa replied. “We can’t have your boyfriend waiting, Mom.” She half-dragged her mother back to their table.
“Well,” said Julie, floored by the exchange she had just witnessed. Her daughter needed a decent boyfriend, and... “When I said find a decent man, I didn’t think you’d do this well!”
“Mom!” Marissa exclaimed, flushing. “God, I only met him this morning, it’s just coincidence. Besides, he’s a celebrity.”
“Please, the way he was looking at you?” Julie rolled her eyes. “I may be getting more Botox injections lately but even I could tell there was something there. And his parents being the neighbours?”
“Wait,” Marissa interrupted. “What?”
“Sandy and Kirsten? His parents? They live next door.”
“And I didn’t know that.” Marissa was puzzled. Julie was as much into the lives of other wealthy people as anyone in Newport. Surely she would have mentioned...
“Well you never asked,” Julie retorted. “And if you visited more often…”
“Mom, please, not that again.” Marissa rolled her eyes. She noticed Rick staring stupidly into space and used him as a distraction. “So Rick. Tell me about your business.”
Meanwhile, Kirsten was saying, “You’ve met Marissa? Her mother lives in the house next door.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“Well maybe if you visited more often…”
“Mom, please,” Ryan sighed. He let his gaze stray to Marissa Cooper again.
Maybe he should visit Newport more often.
