Chapters (55)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Cast of Characters
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Part Two
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Forty-three
- Forty-four
- Forty-five
- Forty-six
- A note on the Author
His hand gave off such heat, my knees started to shake. His hand didn’t move and he resumed his cobweb trance. The heat traveled up my arm, down my stomach and, as the sound of Sean yelling at a prop boy wafted into the hall, I felt myself come. I didn’t know if Aslan could tell what had happened. After it was done he stood up and walked away. I waited for him. I waited and ten minutes later I went to see what had happened. Aslan had left the building and would not return to the set until they dragged him out of the guitar store from whence they had first plucked him.
“Ruby,” pleaded Sean, as we waited for him to return so that we could shoot our first scene together, “try and be nice. You may even learn something from him. You might have spent time on the West Coast, but Aslan has spent time on a different plain.”
By lunchtime I was kissing him. Again and again, with a gun in my hand. They had to keep cutting and starting again because Aslan couldn’t be persuaded to kiss with his mouth open. Eventually they decided to position my head so that the audience couldn’t see what a cold kisser Aslan was, our kiss implied but never seen, as though we were Hays Code lovers.
That bad kiss sealed it for me: I was infatuated with him and I hadn’t even got through the first day yet. I was consumed with the need to know how he really kissed, so certain was I that he was faking. When I put this to Sean he didn’t even bother pulling his coffee cup from his lips.
“Well of course he’s faking. This isn’t real.”
And yet with each day that passed—admittedly our romance was shot out of sequence—I got further and further away from ever getting to kiss him “for real.” He would arrive on the set, do his scenes, and then leave without saying good-bye. If he had not said good-bye only to me, I would have taken it as a sign. But he didn’t say good-bye to anyone, so I couldn’t pretend to feel singled out.
We didn’t have any scenes together for a couple of days and I felt disconsolate. I had gotten used to his silences—they were never sullen—and his constant smile. Finally I called him late one night. “Hey, you,” he said as if it was the third time we had spoken that day. He was easy-going and giggly, unconnected to the space elf that I had starred with over the last few weeks.
“Uh, do you want to come over and listen to music?”
“Yes,” he pondered briefly, “I do.”