Falling into Forever (Falling into You) Read online

  “So, where’s this Benjamin Ellison III? I need to meet the man who’s going to make me a fortune.”

  Nope. Not wrong.

  A drop of the creamer spills over the side of my cup. I’m frozen.

  I know that voice, musical and low and laughing and teasing, better than I know my own. Hell, half of America probably knows that voice better than they know their own. Of course he was here. Of course, he had to be here.

  The voices are scrambling for an explanation.

  “He’s not…”

  “He…”

  “The cowriter…”

  “She’s…”

  Everyone tries to speak at once, but his voice again silences them.

  “Cowriter?”

  “She’s his…his…”

  Eva’s searching for something to say and she’s going to pick the wrong word, the one I don’t want to hear.

  “His wife,” I say. I stir the coffee again and again, watching the milky white substance instead of his face as I turn around. “Benjamin Ellison III’s wife.”

  Chapter 2

  CHRIS

  Jesus goddamn motherfucking Christ.

  She’s stirring a cup of coffee over and over, and I can’t see her face. Eventually, after what feels like a lifetime of waiting, she looks up just for a moment. Muscle memory takes over and before I even know what I’m doing, I’m crossing the room. Instinctively, I need to be closer to her, to drink in her presence, so long absent. Only her blue eyes, seemingly made of ice, and the memory of her voice saying the word “wife” stop me in mid-stride.

  Of course. I should have made the connection. How many times did I listen to her tell stories about the amazing Ben Ellison, who came off as a combination of Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa? Apparently, her amazing Ben Ellison was the same person who had taken the literary world by storm with his book series the year before.

  I had blown through all three books in a week while I had a short break from shooting my latest movie in Thailand.

  I was less than three pages in to the first book when, unable to wait a moment longer, I tore myself away to call Jeff. I wanted the script more than I’d wanted anything in a very, very long time.

  It had been five years since I wanted anything that much. Five long, lonely years.

  Damn it.

  “I don’t care what it costs,” I told Jeff. “Get it for me. I want all of them. All three books. I’m going to make a fortune.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. It’s not coming fucking cheap,” he retorted. “Those fucking books are everywhere.”

  Jeff wasn’t cheap either, so I had full confidence in the fact that the trilogy was going to be mine. I expected a rant or a rave about the asshole agent or a competing studio, but he had merely called back the next day at the exact same moment as a brown envelope was delivered to the door of my hotel suite.

  “There’s a screenplay and it’s fucking good.”

  He didn’t say anything else. And he was right. It was fucking good. Usually, scripts made from books were crap, filled with rambling speeches and all of the lame parts and none of the good ones. This one was pitch-perfect and even more nuanced, layered, than the book had been. I was only ten pages in before I picked up the phone again.

  “If it’s not locked down tomorrow, I’m ditching this set and coming to New York and I’m not leaving until we have it.”

  Jeff had hemmed and hawed about impossible literati, but he got the meeting. Since that call, I had thought of nothing but how I was going to convince Mr. Ellison that I was the right person to make his movie. During the whole last week of shooting the stupid buddy comedy, another piece of trash in a long line of pieces of trash, I ran through my arguments in my head. This script? It was going to be my Mona Lisa. I wanted to see the writer in the flesh, to look into his eyes to tell him that I could make this movie, that I understood this character down to his very bones.

  Of course, I hadn’t realized that I had already met Ben Ellison, and that there was little I could say that would convince him that I was the right person to make his movie. I look around for him, but he isn’t here. No, he did me one better, sending his wife instead. That label catches my tongue and twists it, causing me to cough a few times. A blond intern rushes over with a glass of water and I take a long gulp. Damn it. I wish the glass contained something stronger.

  The other people in the room, half of whom I’ve never met before, are looking back and forth between Hallie and me, but thankfully, Jeff makes an asinine comment and everyone’s attention is at least temporarily diverted. As I settle back into one of the plush leather seats, I glance at her again. She’s twirling the little stick in her coffee back and forth, but her hands are shaking and her brow is furrowed when she glances back up. It takes a minute before I see that the ice in her eyes has melted into a desperate plea, meant for me. She doesn’t want me to say that we know each other, I realize suddenly. Part of me wants nothing more than to cross the room in two steps to demand answers to a thousand questions, but that wouldn’t help either of us now.

  Fine, Hallie. We’ll play it your way.

  “Chris Jensen,” I say, not taking my eyes from her. The effort of trying to make myself sound detached almost kills me.

  She relaxes visibly and nods. “Hallie Caldwell Ellison.”

  The sound of the last name cuts deeper than a blade.

  The tension in the room is palpable, and Jeff hurries to cut through it. He’s never been a fan of silence. But then again, Hallie isn’t normally, either.

  “Chris is planning to play the lead.”

  Hallie chuckles, but it sounds nothing like her laughter. Her cadence is all wrong, clipped and serious and harsh.

  “Of course he is.”

  I need to get out of here.

  “I, um, I…” Now, I’m the one who sounds nothing like myself. I look at her, the way I used to, for strength. But even though she’s looking at me dead in the eye, there’s nothing for me in her face. “I just came in case we needed a closer, you know to deal the deal, but I just heard the news, so I guess that’s it…”

  People are saying things to me, but I don’t hear any of it. I need to look at her, to stare, to inspect her face for any sign that she’s still the person I couldn’t imagine life without. The person who still occupies the first and last thought in my head every single morning and night. As people break into smaller conversations and lawyers start shuffling papers, I lean back in my seat and sneak a glance in her direction. She’s seemingly absorbed in a conversation with the woman in the red dress, but I do notice that the woman is doing most of the talking.

  I had imagined her at 25, at 40, at 60, at 100, but in all of those musings, she had been laughing and happy in my arms. This Hallie is neither laughing nor happy.

  Technically, she’s gotten more beautiful, I suppose. As she moves to speak with Jeff, I realize that the years have given her a kind of unconscious grace that’s normally associated with ballet dancers. There’s no chance that she’s going to fall off the edges of any balconies now. The flip flops are gone, replaced by a pair of black stilettos that make her legs look impossibly long. Her hair still defies any description of color, chestnut reds and autumn browns all mixed up together, but it’s pulled back from her face and highlights the fact that her cheekbones are standing out in sharp relief against the flawless, too pale skin. She’s lost weight that she couldn’t afford to lose in the first place, and it gives her an ethereal appearance, like she could just disappear into thin air. There’s no trace of the girl next door that I once met on a balcony overlooking Central Park. Even the most seasoned account reps, who deal with famous and impossibly beautiful actresses on a regular basis, are taking an extra moment to stare.

  Despite all of that, looking at her fills me with an incredible sense of loss. Everything that made her Hallie, her laughing eyes and animation and warmth and joy, is gone. Even her eyes, ostensibly unchanged by the passage of time, are
still the same shocking shade of blue, but they’re impenetrable, frosted over with a thick layer of ice.

  I had been able to pretend, for all of these years, that she hadn’t grown up, that she was still out there somewhere. I even managed to make myself believe that maybe when I’d gotten my shit together, I could find her. But even though she’s sitting right in front of me, I haven’t found her at all. This woman bears only a slight resemblance to the girl I remember.

  My Hallie.

  She doesn’t belong to you, I remind myself.

  And the fault for that was entirely mine.

  Before I can make a move to steal her away from the table, she shoots the woman in the red suit a murderous look and the pair of them stand up and start shaking hands with various people around the table.

  “Thank you, boys,” red suit says, giving Jeff a wicked little grin. “I think we got everything that we came for. I look forward to this. Certainly. I’m sure you’ll be in touch?”

  Jeff looks gleeful. “Now that the preliminary is signed, we’ll work on the full contract. Chris generally rules over these things with an iron fist, so we’ll probably have to go another couple of rounds before we lock down the details. But the deal’s done. Finito.”

  “We’re very happy to hear that.” She crosses the room to shake my hand briskly, pulling Hallie behind her. “Mr. Jensen. A pleasure.”

  Hallie’s arms are firmly glued to her sides.

  “Mrs. Ellison.”

  “Mr. Jensen.”

  I reach for her hand and she hesitates for a moment before offering it to me.

  My fingers brush against hers, and the shock runs through me.

  Lightning. Still. After all of these years.

  I glance at her face to see whether she feels it, but she’s already out the door.

  Jesus goddamn motherfucking Christ.

  Chapter 3

  HALLIE

  I’m still shaking my hand free from the feel of him as I step into the brisk air. The tingle is traveling up my skin, filling my entire body with little currents of electricity. Eva calls out a final goodbye and some last-minute instructions as we part ways on the sidewalk outside of the building, but I don’t hear any of it. She’s probably already sent an e-mail with copious notes and endless rows of figures that I’ll never look at. She’ll take pity on me and take care of the details, as she always does. I’m sure of that, if nothing else.

  My hotel is only a few blocks from FFG’s offices, but it’s an eternity before I reach my room. Even the elevator ride was interminable. There was a family, man and wife and a pair of perfectly matched little boys with enormous Statue of Liberty hats who were chattering away as I got on. I saw the look in the woman’s face as they shied away from me, probably scared that my twitching was a sign of some deadly disease. Or an impending zombie apocalypse. I’m scaring total strangers now. Awesome.

  I mindlessly pace back and forth across the carpet. I’ve been trying desperately for a year to put the broken pieces of myself into something that resembled the person I had been, and one look at Chris Jensen was all it took for me to fall completely apart. What’s worse, I must have known that he would be there. Subconsciously, maybe I even wanted him to be.

  I managed to stare at him for long enough to satisfy my sick curiosity. Of course, it wasn’t like I could escape Chris Jensen’s face entirely. In the five years since I had last seen him, he had become a bona fide movie star, his every move documented by the paparazzi. There was even a weekly column in one of the movie magazines solely dedicated to the trials and tribulations of whatever two-week relationship he was having with an up-and-coming starlet or supermodel or actress. I usually comforted myself with the delusional notion that the magazine pictures I surreptitiously looked at in the check-out aisle had been Photoshopped. It was practically my patriotic duty to examine him in the flesh, to make sure that the publishers weren’t perpetrating some sort of photo alteration scam.

  If I had to guess, not a single one of those pictures had been Photoshopped. It should be a capital crime to be that handsome.

  But if I was really being honest with myself (something I have tried desperately to avoid for a number of years now), the reasons that I stared far too long were much more personal. I wanted to find some trace of our old connection. Part of me had even hoped that he would start singing that line about pina coladas from the Jimmy Buffett song I loved, the one that always made me laugh when I was angry with him.

  It had hurt unbearably to look at him. His face had honed into sharper planes and some of the youthful innocence had hardened into masculine strength, but he looked basically the same as the day that I met him, standing on that balcony and asking me for a light. Hah. I had wanted to find a social recluse, someone to help me escape from the loneliness of crowds. But Chris Jensen, in all of his glory, had appeared instead.

  That memory begins playing a reel of a dozen other memories of him and me over the years we had been together. He’s flicking his fingertips over my hands and face and laughing with me in cafés and falling down on the ice and dancing on rooftops and brushing his lips against my temples and we’re making love on a beach in Spain while he whispers “I love you” into my hair.

  It kills me that he looks almost exactly the same as he did at eighteen. I don’t even recognize myself when I look into the mirror now. But even if Chris Jensen had never become a movie star, even if his face wasn’t on billboards and television shows and grocery stores, I still would have known him in the middle of any crowded street. Of course I would. His face is imprinted on my brain.

  Shoot. I ram my head against my hands over and over again, as if that could make the memories disappear. He shouldn’t have the power to affect me like this. I should have been prepared.

  But neither the glossy photographs nor the memory reel in my head had prepared me for the way he dominated a room with his presence, the way the air changed when he stepped inside it, the way everyone around him became more alive. Time and distance had eaten away at the edges of my memories, and I had let his physical presence take me by surprise.

  I hadn’t been the only one who was taken aback. He hadn’t known I was going to be there. I would bet my life on it, even if I make some minor adjustments for his prodigious acting skills.

  I shouldn’t have been there.

  When Eva had first mentioned the name of his company, I had thrown a fit.

  “No,” I told her. “Not that one. Any one but that one.”

  After days of pleading with me, she had finally said the only two words that would have gotten me to change my mind—creative control.

  Ben would have wanted that.

  Judging from the look on Chris’s face when I said the word wife, he didn’t know about Ben and me, either. It meant that he either didn’t know about it or he hadn’t made the connection. I wasn’t going to do it for him.

  I’m about to give up my pacing and throw the heels out the window when I hear a relentless knock at the door. I would know that knock anywhere. When he had given in to the plea of my eyes at the meeting, I had the faintest glimmer of hope that he wouldn’t try to hunt me down. Maybe he had forgotten what we had been, once. Enough time had certainly passed. He hadn’t tried to contact me in five years, not even after…

  The pounding is loud and insistent. I have two choices, really. I can curl up into my bed and pretend that none of it ever happened. Or I can go to the door and face him and do what I hadn’t done five years before.

  The first choice is infinitely more appealing. However, he’s a man with unlimited resources and he’s always had a penchant for dramatic scenes, so the chances that I’m able to escape without ever having to see him again are slim to none. Just like the stupid meeting, it’s probably better to get it over with.

  Maybe if I had looked away, if I had marched out the door the second I saw his face, Eva and millions of dollars and Ben’s wishes be damned, he wouldn’t be knocking at my door right now.

  The lit
tle voice inside my head whispers an alternate truth: All of this was inevitable.

  Him. Me.

  Like ripping a bandage from a still-fresh wound, I open the door hastily. He nearly falls into my arms, but I take a giant step backwards and narrowly avoid disaster.

  “Mr. Jensen.”

  I try to echo Eva’s brusque tone from earlier. Maybe it’s possible that we can both pretend that this is nothing more than a business meeting.

  “Hallie.”

  Nope.

  It’s been five years since I’ve heard him say my name and the sound of it on his tongue conjures a thousand memories that burn and tear at me.

  His mouth curls into a tiny smile, and he looks up at me. There’s danger there, and something else that I can’t quite read.

  “If you want to pretend like we don’t know each other, Hals, that’s fine.”

  He leans an arm against the door and gives me a long look up and down. I have no words, but he has plenty of them. And even if he didn’t, the look in his eyes is crystal clear.

  “I can be the stranger at the door and you can be the damsel in distress. It works for me, even though I seem to remember that you’re more of a tiger and not the girl in need of rescue. But people change. Sometimes, they even change their names. I get that.”

  “Chris.” My voice is filled with censure, but my body betrays me. Unconsciously, I’ve been inching closer to him, so that we’re practically touching. I take another step back, putting as much space as I possibly can between the two of us.

  There’s one major difference between the Chris Jensen I once knew and the Chris Jensen standing in front of me right now and I don’t know how I could have overlooked it earlier. The Chris I was hopelessly in love with was completely unaware of his power over women. Over me. It was an oddly endearing trait, especially given the thousands of screaming girls in those last six months we had been together.

  This Chris Jensen is well aware of the way he’s affecting me. A man. No longer a boy. I search his face for some specter of the person I once knew, but I can’t find anything. I can’t quite figure out how that makes me feel, whether I’m relieved or disappointed or somewhere in between.