Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 109038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
“I think that’s only good for us both.”
I take his hand as we walk.
I tell him about the neighborhood, and the other places I lived in LA when I was a younger actor who didn’t have much money. He asks about Santa Barbara, where I grew up until I was 18 and beelined to LA. Our childhoods couldn’t have been more different, and his reactions to some of my stories are cute.
He says I grew up with a “storybook childhood,” and I can’t really argue against that.
But the truth is that I hadn’t let loose since the day Daniel died. Ten years is a very long time to go feeling like there’s a part of you that will never come back. I thought I had grieved, and moved on, and even found success to finally make me happy. I thought the past was in the past.
But I didn’t remember who I could be until I met Chase.
I don’t have to spend every minute of my life trying to be perfect for the whole world. Wanting everyone to like me, and carefully controlling the way the media perceives me. Feeling like the sky is falling anytime I receive too much attention.
Chase reminded me that the real me is someone worth being.
No matter what anyone else in the world thinks about it.
We reach the cluster of palm trees that surround the corner store a few minutes later, and we step inside. I greet the man at the register, who I haven’t seen in a long time, now. We grab some fresh fruits and coffee beans to bring home, and Chase gets a pack of Starburst.
Before we walk back outside, I lean over to warn Chase.
“There’s a couple of people who saw me come in here, I think,” I tell him, nodding toward a few giddy-looking people holding their phones expectantly outside the door.
He nods. “Got it. Ready for action.”
I push open the door and I realize that they’re not just here for me.
They’re here for us.
“Logan! And I have to ask… are you Chase? His photographer?”
“Wow,” Chase says. “Yeah. That’s me. I’ve never been recognized before.”
The woman nods. “That photoshoot is like, the hottest thing that’s ever existed. Sorry if that’s too much to say. Chase, I love your paintings, too! I just followed you on Insta last night.”
“Logan,” someone else says from across the way. “Who’s the hunk?”
“It’s his photographer,” another fan says.
I shake my head.
“Chase is my boyfriend, actually.”
It’s like some cage buried deep inside me has just opened, and I’m allowed to fly.
I’m almost worried I might tear up, not from sadness but from raw joy, at saying that to someone for the first time.
He is mine, and I am his.
Isn’t it obvious?
I reach out and put my arm around his waist for the picture, and the look in his eyes just makes my heart soar again.
He didn’t expect me to say it.
Not in public, and not so soon.
And he’s looking at me like I just hung the stars.
“Oh my God, that is so cute!” a woman says. She turns to her friend and whispers, but not quiet enough that I can’t hear. “Brenna, I told you he was bi. Bisexuals always know, and I knew.”
It makes me smile.
We stop there for at least fifteen minutes, taking selfies and signing some autographs. And on the way home, Chase pulls me close, kissing me.
“I really liked that,” he says. “You didn’t have to do it, but I liked it.”
“I did too.”
When we get home, Chase turns to me with a thoughtful look in his eye before we get started making smoothies.
“I don’t want to just ignore what some people saw online about me,” he says. “I know the main awful post got taken down, but I’m sure a small amount of die-hard Logan Stone fans still think I’m that person. The person in the photo, holding pills.”
“Like you said, some people will always misunderstand things.”
He nods. “Yes. But I get to share my truth, too. I’m not going to post in response to that photo, but… I’m going to say something. About my past.”
I sit down with Chase over breakfast and he drafts out his next Instagram post.
In the days since my photoshoot went out, he’s been gaining tons of new followers, and I know this will be seen more than anything he’s ever posted.
A few hours later, he publishes it.
It’s a photo of him with his glasses on, hard at work while he lays a brushstroke onto an abstract painting.
The caption is simple.
Art has found me, over and over again, at the times in my life when I held the most anger, or pain, or isolation.
Sobriety, on the other hand, found me slowly. It’s taken years to get to where I am now, anywhere I feel like I have a voice in my own life, and the ability to choose how I want to spend it. In the past, I felt powerless. I no longer feel that way.