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For a few minutes, they lay there, listening to the night. Beast wasn’t a nature buff, but even he could tell that the majority of the calls going out through the forest belonged to bats and owls. Night predators searching for prey.
“I know I should pretend to be all tough and everything,” Belinda said softly, “but I want you to know I’m scared out of my mind.”
He tightened his arms around her. “We both are, Hollywood.”
“Really? You are too?”
He almost smiled at the incredulous tone. “They’re blowing stuff up and firing machine guns. We’re lost in the middle of the jungle and I’m a city boy. This is not in my realm of expertise.” Hand-to-hand combat—that he was good at. Give him one opponent, in a ring, and he’d turn him into hamburger. But this? This was something else entirely. “You going to tell me where all your jungle skills come from?”
“You won’t laugh?” She sounded vulnerable, and Beast hated it.
“I won’t laugh.” Even if she told him it was another Daniel Radcliffe movie.
“There’s a lot of downtime on movie sets, and I spend it watching the natural history channel or reading books on the military, survival, bush craft, that kind of thing.”
She paused, waiting for him to laugh. Mainly, he felt a little confused at her choice of subject matter, and grateful he was benefiting from it.
“Why those topics?” He couldn’t stop from curling his hand back into her silky hair as they talked. He missed having her weight, as light as it was, on top of him. Even with her wedged against his side, it somehow didn’t feel close enough.
“It was Bear Grylls. I told you I’d met him on a chat show?”
He nodded.
“Well, he was fascinating. He’d done all this exciting life-and-death stuff—things I’d only pretended to do for movies. I went away and read his biography, then the biographies of other explorers and adventurers, then I moved on to how-to books and became obsessed with wilderness shows.”
She stopped talking, and from the tension in her body, he got the impression she was debating whether to tell him something more. She waited so long to speak that he almost believed she’d fallen asleep again.
“I’m not smart like my sister,” she said at last. “Julia is practically a genius. I have a good memory and I can act. I love to act. Not because of the attention, but because I get to be someone else for a little while. It’s like living lots of different lives in one. You know? But sometimes, I wonder about packing it all in. Giving up the dresses and the shoes, and the senseless interviews where I answer bubble-gum questions about my hair and what it’s like to kiss Leo.”
Beast stiffened at the thought of her kissing anybody at all. Other than him. He wasn’t sure who this Leo guy was, but he had the sudden urge to introduce him to his fist.
“I sometimes wish I could be anonymous and travel the world having adventures, pitting my wits against nature, taking hours, days, months to watch all the fascinating things out there,” she said in a rush, as though making a confession, one whispered into the small, still hours of the night when peop
le say things they would never say in daylight. “I’m grateful for my success. I worked hard for it. But sometimes, I’d like to be nobody famous, living life by the seat of my pants and hoping for the best.”
“Like now.” Beast felt shame that he’d never taken into consideration what it must be like to constantly live your life in the limelight. The pressure of being available for everyone. The constant scrutiny. The endless, mind-numbing questions and desperate pleas from people who only wanted a piece of you. “You act in your interviews too, don’t you?” Of course she did. She wouldn’t survive otherwise.
“I have a celebrity persona. It’s my brand. Imagine that I’m a company. The company of Belinda Collins is always bright, happy, funny, a little bit shallow and eager to talk about nothing at all. I’m the non-threatening girl at the party who guys want to dance with and girls want to gossip with. That’s my brand. But it isn’t who I am. Do you understand?”
“I’m beginning to.”
They lay in silence, listening to the night. The overwhelming sounds were a wall of white noise that wrapped around them. Beast knew they were exposed, with only a shabby net and a thin sheet between them and the rest of the jungle, but he didn’t feel that way. With the darkness, the blanket of sound and the sheet wrapping him and Belinda tightly together, he felt hidden. Secure. Apart. As though they’d stepped off the world for a moment and it was only the two of them in this place together.
“Can I ask you something, without you getting mad?” she whispered as she traced circles through the dusting of hair in the middle of his chest.
“Not sure.” He wanted to be honest with her. There, in that place together, it felt like there should only be honesty. “But I’ll try.”
He felt her take in a shaky breath. “Why do you hate being called John?”
Yeah, that wasn’t the question he’d wanted to hear. He took a minute to control his reaction, aware that his fingers had tightened in her hair. He let out a long, slow breath.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”
His arm tightened reflexively and he cleared his throat. He’d never told anyone the story behind his name, but for some reason—maybe the intimacy of their predicament—he wanted to tell Belinda. He stared out into the blackness, but the images he saw in his mind were clear as day. Memories. A childhood no kid should experience.
“My mom was a street worker.” His jaw clenched and he swallowed hard. “A hooker.”
Belinda stopped playing with the hair on his chest and wrapped her arm around him, holding him tight.
