Instead, I swallow back the taste of impending doom. It tastes a lot like a really good burger and a perfect sour beer. It tastes like Jell-O shots and popcorn.

It tastes like expensive mint toothpaste.

I know that by accepting this assignment, I’ll get the answers to every unasked question I’ve had for the last ten years.

No matter what, everything that Gabe and I started that weekend a decade ago in December will finally get a proper ending.

Friday

(Gabe Parker: Shaken, Not Stirred—Part One)

BROAD SHEETS

GABE PARKER:
Shaken, Not Stirred—Part One

BY CHANI HOROWITZ

Gabe Parker is shoeless, shirtless, and holding a puppy.

“I’m sorry,” he tells me. “This place is a rental. Do you mind holding her for a moment while I deal with this?”

The her in question is his ten-week-old black rescue mutt. The this is the mess she’s made on the floor, which he’s now mopping up with his T-shirt.

I’m standing in his kitchen, holding a squirming fluffy dog, watching Hollywood’s biggest heartthrob clean up puppy pee.

It’s not a fantasy. It’s real life.

Usually, I’d have to pay twenty bucks (plus another forty for popcorn and a soda) to get this good of a look at Gabe Parker’s abs and lats. Today, however, I’m the one getting paid to spend a couple of hours with those body parts—as well as the rest of him.

“Gabe is just so likable,” his co-star Marissa Merino has been quoted as saying.

“A guy’s guy,” Jackson Ritter, another co-star, claims.

That’s the company line—that Gabe Parker is exactly as gregarious and charming as he appears on the big screen.

I know you’re reading this secretly hoping that I’m going to tell you it’s all a lie—that it’s the Hollywood machinery working overtime—that Gabe Parker is a womanizing creep who has an exceptionally effective PR team to build this image of a man so good that he can’t possibly be real.

But he’s real. And he’s spectacular.

He finishes cleaning up after his pooch, dropping his shirt into the trash before coming over to me, taking the puppy’s face in his hands, and cooing at her.

“It’s okay, honey,” he says. “It’s not your fault. I love you so very much.”

Have I mentioned I’m still holding her? And he’s still shirtless? He smells amazing, by the way. Like lumber, and peppermint, and the backseat of the Ford Focus where you had your very first kiss with the guy from Jewish summer camp who you knew had already kissed all of your friends, but had an eyebrow piercing and turned out to be really, really good with his tongue.

We’re only five minutes into our interview and I’m already at a disadvantage.