Page 51 of Fate Fiction

“No, but,” he stammered a bit, “I just—I didn’t think that this would be someone’s idea of a relaxing beach read.”

“Is the book freaking you out?” I teased.

“Honestly? A little bit.”

I didn’t remember exactly which killer the book covered, I had grabbed it on impulse off the sale shelf months ago when I was browsing a small local bookstore and felt bad that I wasn’t buying anything.

“I’m surprised, you give off the impression that you’re⁠—

Evan sighed. “A bit of a hero type? I’m definitely not.” He drew circles with his fingernail on the arm of the Adirondack chair. “I had something that felt like a close call a few years back,” he continued, focusing his gaze to the water.

This snapped my attention right back towards him. “Oh?”

“Sorry,” he scrubbed his hand down the side of his face. “That is an absurdly heavy thing to drop on someone out of the blue.”

Against my better judgment, against all the walls I’d been trying to build up, I wanted to be a safe person for Evan. Even for a few minutes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I expected a gentle rejection. He’d string words together that implied “no, of course not, we don’t know each other.”

Evan looked at me. Studied me, actually, like he was looking for any doubt in my expression. “Is there something in the air here? A truth serum coursing through the water? I don’t know what it is about this place that I have the urge to spill my guts to you over and over again. You must already be sick of me.”

“I’m not,” I said quickly. “If you want to tell me, tell me.”

I nodded at him gently, dog-eared the page of my book I’d been stuck on and shut it.

“Since you’re a fan and all,” he started, I rolled my eyes, “I’m sure you know I used to date one of my costars.”

Melinda Brass, dazzling blonde actress who played Lady Juperitus Premble. The two of them had intense on and off-screen chemistry that served as gossip page fodder on a near daily basis. I nodded at him again.

“She stayed on the west coast, while I lived in New York. We finished shooting part of the season and I was flying back to my apartment, where she’d meet me a few days later. My life was a little more…public then. I didn’t want it to be, but it’s hard when you’re linked to someone like her, you know? And I loved her back then, I really, really did, so I let myself be in the tabloids because that’s what it took.”

So Evan was also familiar with losing parts of his true self to a partner. Celebrities, they’re just like us.

He cleared his throat and scratched at his beard. “I didn’t notice the cab following us until we were a few blocks from my old apartment. I thought I was going crazy, like the whole celebrity thing finally caught up with me. It was New York, there were cabs everywhere and they all looked roughly the same. Then I caught a glance of my driver in the rearview. You know how there are moments when it hits you that you’re about to experience something that’s going to shift your reality, ever so slightly? That was this. Someone wiser would probably call it intuition or primal fear. But in the moment this driver and I both came to the realization we were about to go through some shit.

The driver made a sudden right turn without saying a word, throwing me across the back seat. The cab still followed us. It was like a full on action movie chase now. He asked if he should call the police and continue circling the block. I didn’t know. I had never been in a situation like this. I panicked. My building was secure, it had to be, obviously. The rough location had been more or less leaked thanks to a few poorly angled paparazzi photos, but only a handful of friends had my address. When the driver had stopped at a light, the back door of the cab behind us opened and this woman ran out towards the car.”

My blood ran cold.

I know this story. I’d heard it discussed in fan forums in a digital game of telephone. His hands gripped onto the arm of his chair, his foot was tapping anxiously, as though this all was unfolding before him again. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to hug him. And then I wanted to apologize for hugging him.

“I’m not a judgemental person,” he released his grip on the chair and waved his hands in front of him. “I was raised to be better than to make assumptions about someone’s character based on their appearance. But the moment this woman approached my car the very first thing that jumped into my head was that she looked like a typical Thorndown obsessed fan. I’d taken photos with hundreds of her clones at the few conventions I’d attended. She had a purse that I immediately recognized, the emblem of the Rospice clan. She pounded on the back window and for a few seconds I was relieved that she couldn’t see in. Her phone was pressed against the glass and her background was a collage of shirtless pictures of Sir Erwyn.”

“Jesus Christ,” I replied, a knot formed in my stomach. He looked so upset, so uncomfortable with fandom.

So uncomfortable with something that was only a few degrees of separation from me.

“The poor driver began to panic, the light had changed but traffic wasn’t moving. I was totally frozen. I didn’t think. I rolled down the window enough so I could speak to her. It’s like she wanted a real life interaction, proof that we had some sort of cosmic connection. Maybe I was giving her more fuel to her fire, but there was nothing I could do.

When I spoke to her it was…strange. I mean this woman was shaking, tears were welling in her eyes. She was stunned, like I wasn’t real. It was so bizarre, it’s still bizarre. I’m nothing more than a guy working a job, and here was this woman who had clearly dedicated her entire life to a fictional character that I played. I’m not Sir Erwyn, I never will be. But this woman didn’t understand that. Sir Erwyn wasn’t thinking about what takeout he was going to order because he’d been on a fitness regime for months and wanted to eat something other than chicken and broccoli. Should I have told her that? That beneath the catchphrases and muscles and fake dirt and blood that I was someone who just wanted the greasiest fast food meal of my life to forget months of shooting in freezing cold Germany?”

I nodded along, trying to keep my gaze away from meeting his eyes as shame skittered under my skin like thousands of bugs.

I knew what was next, but I asked him anyways, “what happened after?” My own hands were gripping on the side of my chair, just as anxious as Evan.

“She flipped her phone around and took a ton of selfies of us.”

The selfie. I knew these selfies. I’d seen them years ago. They were infamous in the fandom. They even became a cruel meme for a while, people altering the photos with text and different faces. Things like “me when I watch the season six finale” plastered over Evan’s stunned face in the original photo. People mistook the expression for surprise when in reality he was terrified.