IMAGINES: Celebrity Encounters Starring You (32 page)

Nick let his head fall back.
“Fuck!”

You stepped back and curtsied. He daggered you with his
gaze as you spun around the boxing ring, rubbing it in that you’d won. You sashayed back to him and poked him teasingly with your bo staff.

“Co-owner, co-owner,” you sang over and over.

“At least I didn’t rub it in when I won,” he growled.

“Are you holding up your end of the deal?”

“Of course.” He looked miserable. “A deal’s a deal.”

You laughed, dropped your bo staff, strutted over to him, wrapped your hands around his neck, and kissed him. He was tense at first, but then he relaxed, tilting his head at a better angle to deepen the kiss. His hands fell to your waist and held you possessively. Your teeth nipped at his bottom lip before you pulled away.

“Perhaps we should have dinner to celebrate our new partnership,” you said. “I have this new dress and heels.”

Slowly, Nick’s mouth lifted into a smile. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

N
o one else has recognized him yet—only you.

You’ve always been amazed by how easily he’s able to blend into a crowd. Maybe it’s because the paparazzi pictures of him walking down the street make him look like just another London hipster. . . .

Except he’s not. The closer you are to him, the more you realize there’s an innate perfection to him that’s hard to capture, as though he’s been handcrafted from some precious mineral you can’t pronounce. He has sunglasses on and his hat pulled down low, covering most of his face—he’s almost unrecognizable.

Almost. You’d know him anywhere. Even sitting across from you now on the subway.

With his head down, he keeps his eyes on the screen of his smartphone and scrolls lazily.

Is he googling his own name?
You wonder how often celebrities actually do that—the vanity search. It must be beyond tempting. You hope he isn’t, though—for his own sake. You’ve searched his name a thousand times before (more than he’s ever done himself, no doubt), and often the things that popped up made you feel physically ill. Lies, most of it, anyway—most tabloids were just reams of paper consisting of undistilled bullshit—but still. He can’t be doing the vanity search, anyway, because
there’s no reception down here in the bowels of the London underground. Whenever your husband caught you doing it, he’d roll his eyes but hover slightly over your shoulder, morbidly curious and making noises of barely disguised exasperation:
That’s complete rubbish for a start. And that. Seriously? Where the hell do they get this stuff? Why do you read this crap?

You twist the silver band on your ring finger and think about him—your husband—the man you love, the man who you sometimes daydream is the man sitting across from you now. The man who every woman seemed to be daydreaming about these days: Jamie Dornan. Or as the papers referred to him:
Married Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan, 33
 . . .

As if he knows you’re thinking about him, Jamie’s mouth, partially hidden by a slowly returning beard, tilts up into a small half smile before it settles again, his whole body returning to its natural state of relaxed nonchalance.

When did he get on? Before you? After you? At the same stop? Your body thrums with something hot and needy as you let your eyes linger on him.

The carriage smells like it always does, a familiar thick marinade of engineering, earth, and people that settles over your clothes and permeates your skin. You gaze around to check if anyone else has noticed him yet, imagining the inevitable flood of requests for selfies and autographs that will follow if they have. Your body tightens in dread. You can’t be a part of that if it happens; the very idea of it makes you coil and tense with nerves. You don’t blame them for their fascination with him. You understand it because you have a similar fascination yourself, but the idea of Jamie being harassed and surrounded by strangers who all want a piece of him makes your gut feel like it’s filled with living eels and like your skin is crawling with a thousand tiny burrowing creatures. Thankfully though, he has his jacket
buttoned to his throat and his collar up, managing to stay well below the surface of recognition. It’s possible they’re all far too distracted with virtual farm games on their phones to notice him anyway.

The Central line isn’t packed, but the carriage is still fairly crowded with shoppers and the few commuters who’ve decided to stay late to avoid the rush-hour squeeze. As the train begins to slow, you stand up from the orange seat, hook your oversize tote bag over your shoulder, and steal a final glance in his direction. You’re farther away now, but somehow you know he can sense you looking at him, and to prove you right he slowly lifts his head and looks at you over the top of his clear-rimmed Wayfarer glasses. The depth of his eyes has always stunned you; they seem to have the ability to catch you in a snare and keep you there. So much seems to be in the look he’s giving you now—cold and indifferent, with the smallest hint of malignancy—it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck and goose bumps prickle down the bare skin of your arms and legs. You wonder momentarily if you’ve done something to upset him. Maybe staring at him this hard is what’s making him angry. God, he must be tired of being stared at by now.

Outside, the evening air of Holland Park is warmer and more enveloping than the drafty platform. You’ve gotten out one stop before your normal one. Your “me free day”—as your husband had taken to calling it—had started with a meander down Portobello Road to your favorite vintage bookshop. You’d spent almost two hours running your fingers across the spines of well-worn, well-loved books; reading your favorite sections of
Gone with the Wind
and
Wuthering Heights
while speculating about the people who owned them before and what
their
favorite parts were. After buying a battered second edition of the latter, you’d taken the tube to Covent Garden for the facial and massage your husband
had booked for you. Emerging relaxed and rejuvenated, you’d soon berated yourself for not arranging to have lunch with your old friend
before
the relaxation and rejuvenation—mainly as it had ended up being a terse affair in which you’d dodged questions about your husband’s new job. You hadn’t seen her for ages, but she’d spent the entirety of two courses and a cocktail questioning you about the job, which she seemed abnormally concerned with. In the back of your mind you wondered if this was the real reason she had been desperate to arrange something. You tried to change the subject, but she kept steering you back to it, wanting to know how you both were going to cope with the move and the life-altering effect of it all.

Why on earth was she so interested, anyway? Her prodding and prying had felt particularly unseemly. It wasn’t out of
genuine
concern, of that much you were certain. You’d known her a long time, and whenever she’d talked about any of her other friends’ predicaments, she hadn’t shown much empathy. Sarah was unmarried and continuously lamenting how alone she was now that all of “the old crowd” had settled down and married, and yet at the same time asserting how perfectly content she was in her singledom; she seemed oblivious to the irony.

Finally, you had relented and given her the briefest overview and the vaguest details possible. You loved your husband and supported him in all of his career decisions, but when you broke it down and analyzed what this particular job might come to mean for your lives together, it wasn’t something you enjoyed thinking about—in fact you’d become a master at avoidance thinking. She had merely pursed her lips and nodded gravely in a way that confirmed all of your worst fears about everything. As you’d said good-bye to her outside the vegan restaurant she’d chosen, you’d decided that your next “me free day” would be “Sarah-free” too.

You take a turn you haven’t taken before, but you know the
area and you know that if you walk the length of the road to the very end, it leads to the large Whole Foods three streets from home. The noises of people enjoying the last of the sun drift up and over the rich, dark brown fences that encase their expensive homes from the prying eyes of outsiders; the whole area was
designed
around that goal. The smell of barbecuing meat rouses your stomach from its postvegan slumber and floods your taste buds with want.

A noise of shoes shuffling lazily along behind you startles you, and you turn your head.

Jamie
.

Your heart freezes and everything in your body screams for you to stop walking, but you don’t. You can’t. He’s a little way behind you—not close enough to seem to be walking with you, which is maybe why you didn’t notice him before, but close enough to feel like a presence. He walks more slowly than you, and the sound of his feet landing on the concrete echoes after yours, creating a rhythmic tenor between his sneakers and your sandals. As a test, you speed up the pace of your steps, and after a short lag he does too. He’s going to call out in a minute, surely?

You wonder what he might say—you’ve fantasized about what he might say if this ever happened. Ask for directions perhaps? Say he’s lost? You’d pretend you didn’t know who he was. Then maybe he’d say that he saw you looking at him on the train, and that something propelled him off after you, and then this thing would develop from there. Maybe he’d say he felt drawn to you in some way. . . .

Okay, this is ridiculous.
You should stop and turn around. This is crazy—exciting and new—but crazy. He has followed you from the train and along a street you almost never walk down. He’s stalking you.
You.
Jamie Dornan didn’t follow random women he saw on the train. The headlines if something like this ever got
out—you almost laugh as you imagine telling the story to your friends. To the friend you had lunch with, perhaps—
of course
she’d love to hear something like that.

You’d hate her to hear something like that.

You can feel Jamie’s eyes on you as you walk, maybe even tracing over the same parts of you that your husband does . . . the back of your neck, the crook of your shoulder, the length of your spine, the bare skin of your legs.

You need to keep walking. You can’t stop. You can’t turn around.

You enter the Whole Foods, which is busy with sunburned Londoners, and head straight to the back of the store to grab your husband’s favorite beer. You don’t see Jamie anywhere around, and it occurs to you that maybe you’ve imagined the entire thing. Putting three hazel-colored bottles in your basket, you move along the aisle to pick up some red wine for yourself—wine that your husband will help you drink when he’s finished his beer. Then you’ll lie together drinking on the couch and laugh about how Jamie Dornan stalked a woman he saw on the train all the way to Whole Foods.

From the corner of your eye you spot something, a movement so fleeting that you almost miss it. Yet the colors are the same as those he was wearing, the light blue jacket and the darker hue of the baseball cap, which you remember has an orange badge logo on the front that reads
ELECTRIC
. The heat starts to creep and tingle over your body, and you swallow slowly, crossing hastily to the girl at the counter.

As you give her your basket, she recognizes you and asks how you are, but you’re too distracted to respond right away, busy scanning the heads of the taller men to see if any fit his silhouette. You take the beer bottles from her one by one and pack them into your bag, folding them inside the vintage argyle sweater you’ve bought your husband. As she hands you the wine,
you apologize and smile back politely before furtively casting your eyes around the shop again.

You’re far more excited than you ever thought you’d be at the idea of Jamie doing this: following you,
wanting
you. You’d fantasized about it too many times to count. You stifle a laugh then because that surely makes you just like every other woman who’d fantasized about him, and you didn’t want to be that to him: you always wanted to be more. You didn’t care to think too much about the
other
women who wanted him. Your avoidance thinking extended to them too.

You thank the polite girl behind the counter again, shove your purse back into your bag, and head out into the slightly darker evening. As you glance around the quiet street, you see no sign of your
stalker
hovering nearby, and you sense no eyes on you beyond the nondescript glances of strangers. Perhaps you only imagined him in the store. Your body deflates slightly as you brush a hand through your hair and let your thoughts drift purposefully to your husband. So different from him—from Jamie—the man idolized and swooned over by millions.

Swooned.
What a ridiculous word. An image forms in your mind of teenage girls fainting at Beatles concerts, and you concede it’s not that ridiculous. They couldn’t be more different, your husband and him. Your husband liked sports more than you thought anyone ever could, sang loudly in the shower, cried at books and those TV animal-abuse charity advertisements, made love to you like he couldn’t quite believe that you were real, often held your face in his hands and told you how you were the best thing that ever happened to him. That man was your strength and who your heart and body belonged to. The man whose heart and body belonged to you.
That
is the man you are in love with.
Married Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan
is just a fantasy.

Home isn’t far now. Two streets and then a left turn onto
your own, a pretty tree-lined stretch of Georgian houses that all look alike. You like this street. You’ve always felt at home here, and you’ll be sad to say good-bye to it, to move to a country you have visited a few times and liked but aren’t overly fond of. The only alternative is to stay here without him, and that isn’t an option at all. Plus, he wanted you with him, he’d said. He needed you with him, he’d said. He couldn’t do it without you, he’d said.