Starlet's Web - #1 {Exclusive Read}

Starlet's Web - Uaries - BROKEN UP

~    BROKEN UP

I heard a door close behind me as I gazed out the windows. I glanced to see if it was Sage, my manager, coming early to fetch me for the Golden Globe Awards. Only people I trusted had the code to the front door. I flew off the couch when I saw that it was Evan Pasteur, my loving boyfriend and gorgeous co-star in Romeo & Juliet.

Evan was a wonderful person. His dad was American and mother was French. His actress-aunt, Renee Dupree, was Mom’s best friend and my co-star. His father was a professor of literature in Paris so he grew up around the performing arts.

Evan starred in several plays and musicals in Paris, New York and London, but Romeo & Juliet was his first Hollywood project. He and I were both surprised that the movie was such a huge hit and had fun promoting it. We shot the movie the summer after I turned sixteen. He was eighteen.

We dated during the February premiere tour before I turned seventeen and while I filmed Jefferson’s Muse with Matthew Thorne and Grant Bell. Evan and I continued to date all of last summer when we could see each other. We often double-dated with either Manuel and Kate or Mitch and Beth, my childhood friends. We rarely saw each other in the fall when Evan filmed his spy thriller and I started my latest drama with Renee.

He grinned at me, arms extended. “Hey, sweetheart! I have a minute before I have to get to the Globes.”

Evan was a presenter for the Golden Globe Awards that evening in Beverly Hills. He chuckled as I stopped his words with my lips. I flung my arms around his neck and continued to kiss him.

“I missed you so much, Evan!” I smiled as we separated.

I had not seen him since his twentieth birthday, which was in December, before the holidays and the start of the grueling “UARY” months. January and February were the award months where good dramas became more profitable dramas based on the recognition they received. Cast and crew reputations, royalties, distribution, and return on investment all relied on the credibility of the movie awards to get viewers to download or buy DVDs for years to come and get investment for future projects. I used my sarcastic acronym: Use Awards to Reward Yourself in referring to the most political time of the year for we dramatic actors.

Evan’s face had thinned but his chest and arms were more muscular. I liked his new haircut. He started his role with un-kept hair and an unshaven look. He played a college student turned international spy in his latest project and had just wrapped the film. Surely the director and producers must have thought he needed to transform into a frat boy-type spy instead of the unlikely hero scholar-type they had first envisioned.

I asked, “You look all GQ?”

“Yep. I didn’t tell you? Crazy.”  He laughed and hugged me again. We talked everyday but rarely about our jobs. He had been reading sonnets to me. “We re-shot the whole third act of the film after the new haircut. It follows formula now; so much for breaking stereotypes. Social media changes everything. The movie is judged before it’s even screened.”  He held my hand as he walked me to the windows. “Beautiful.” He exhaled while he admired the view and then explained, “The ladies hated the hair. They thought I was too pretty to look ugly.”

I didn’t see Evan as an action hero because he was the best dramatic actor I knew. He was better with scripts than I was because he actually knew what he was saying. He rocked each take in Romeo & Juliet, and even made his Shakespeare lines flow like he was singing them. But he was incredibly good looking, my number two on the Hollywood hotness list, so his agent pushed him into a heartthrob role. He was six feet tall with a runner’s body. He wasn’t really muscular, just thin with a nice chest for the screen. His shoulders were narrow and he had a large head which I noticed in person but not on film.