Lovestruck in Los Angeles (2 page)

“Seriously, Lizzie. I want you to love it, wherever we end up.”

I felt the familiar dopey grin on my face that usually accompanied Thomas being sweet like this. It was still hard to get used to, the idea that someone cared so much about my happiness. Harder still to get used to the fact that my perfect-in-just-about-every-way boyfriend was now a majorly famous and highly in-demand actor and we were about to relocate to Los Angeles for several months. I’d barely gotten used to him being one of the most famous actors in London.

“Does that grin mean you love it?” He ran his hands up and down my bare arms.

My instinct was to tell him we should settle on one of the places we’d viewed in the Hills. It would be easier for him to get to work, and I had a feeling this place was busting the budget, studio-paid-for or not. It seemed like my opinion shouldn’t matter—wasn’t I just along for the ride here? But I was trying to work on being a little more assertive, at Thomas’s request, and being honest about what I really wanted. So I smiled, instead, and nodded. “I love this house.”

His face broke into another grin. “I knew it. This is going to be fantastic.”

I allowed myself a little jump of joy as the reality of our decision washed over me. We had to head back to London for a few weeks to tie up lose ends, but after that, we were going to be living here. In that gorgeous, modern, bright house filled with marble and white linen. Steps away from this amazing ocean. In Malibu.

“Let’s go tell Blake,” Thomas said, still grinning from ear to ear. “Then we can go out for lunch to celebrate.”

“You don’t have to go to any meetings?” I asked as we walked back up the beach toward the house. Since we’d been in L.A. Thomas had spent the majority of his time attending meetings with the director, the writer, and various other studio people associated with the movie. I’d spent most of my time at the hotel, aside from the time we had spent house hunting.

“I’m yours for the rest of the day,” he said, and I didn’t try to hide my smile. I had missed him the last few days.

A thought struck me. “Ooh, do you think we’ll meet some celebrities, living here? Don’t a bunch of them live in Malibu?”

Thomas pinched my waist. “Am I not an exciting enough celebrity for you?”

“Psh, some celebrity. You still buy your socks from Tesco. What’s so glamorous about that?”

“Hey!” He faked outrage. “I was on the cover of
InStyle
magazine last month!”

I gave an exaggerated yawn, and he laughed. “What celebrities were you hoping to meet?”

I shrugged, searching my mind to come up with someone. The truth of the matter is that I’ve never been much of a celeb worshiper. Callie, my best friend, always bemoans this fact, saying it is totally unfair that I‘m the one who ended up with a famous boyfriend. “Uh, Brad Pit?”

“I don’t think he lives around here. But I’ll try to get us invited to a party with him, or something.”

“Oh, God, don’t,” I said quickly. “I was just joking. I have no idea what I would say to Brad Pit.”

“You could ask him for directions to the ladies’ room.” A smirk played on his lips.

“That was one time,” I cried, hitting his arm. How was I supposed to know that the man I’d mistaken for a waiter at one of Thomas’s studio parties was actually some famous actor? He’d been dressed almost identically to the wait staff. Besides, I never watched sappy romantic comedies.

We reached the spiral staircase that would lead us back to the house, and Thomas paused to wrap me in a big hug. “Never change, Lizzie,” he whispered, laughter still evident in his voice. “This would all be such a drag without you here to share it with me.”

“I won’t,” I promised, squeezing him back. I didn’t need to ask him to give me the same assurances; if I was sure of anything in the world, it was that Thomas would never be tainted or changed by his newfound success.

Not even here in the bright lights of Los Angeles.

***

We decided to make a picnic out of our rare opportunity to share lunch together. Thomas drove us to a market we’d passed on our way in, and we picked up fresh baked bread, chicken salad, and plump strawberries bigger than any I had ever seen before. I couldn’t stop looking at Thomas as we shopped—he looked carefree and excited in a way I hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d been working such long hours, trying to get his London responsibilities finished up before the new movie started shooting in L.A. I could tell it had been grating on him. The pain of our recent separation while I was back in the States was an issue as well; though we were more in love than ever and desperately happy to be reunited, there was still an underlying thread of worry in his eyes when he looked at me sometimes, as if he thought I might up and disappear all over again.

Not a chance
, I thought, grabbing a package of napkins from the shelf. Leaving him had been the biggest mistake of my life. I had no intentions of ever doing something so stupid again.

We paid for our loot and headed back out to the car. Thomas insisted on driving everywhere with the top rolled down. He complained bitterly about driving on the wrong side of the road, but still refused to let me drive. I didn’t really mind—sitting next to him in leather-seated comfort while the wind mussed his normally neat brown hair was just fine by me. He looked good in L.A., I realized. He was dressed that day in long plaid board shorts and a tight-fitting blue t-shirt. Thomas did the whole casual- but-together look better than anyone I knew, and that look definitely worked out here in the sunshine.

He drove us to Point Dume, a beach he had heard about from the director of the movie. It was nearly deserted, and I realized that even though Malibu felt like a fantasy to me, it was still a place where most people had to go to work on a weekday just like the rest of the world.

I carried the beach towels we had snagged from the hotel while Thomas lugged the shopping bags. We found a flat spot to spread out the towels, and Thomas popped open the cheap sparkling wine.

“We don’t have glasses.” I pointed at the wine. “So we can’t toast.”

“Screw that,” he said, holding the bottle high. “To our new adventure in Los Angeles. And to us.”

“To us,” I echoed, before rising up on my knees to kiss him. He took a sip of the wine and passed it to me.

“There,” he said, while I drank. “That totally counts as a toast.”

“Agreed. We are super classy.”

We ate chicken salad on still-warm bread, and the ocean formed a perfect backdrop to our picnic. “It’s crazy,” I muttered. “How did we get here?”

Thomas shook his head. “I keep asking myself that same question. It seems like yesterday I was running to get on the tube so I wouldn’t miss my audition for some shitty, two-line part.”

“It seems like yesterday that I was sitting alone in my bedroom in Detroit, depressed as hell, wondering why I had ever gone home.”

His face tightened a little, so I reached out to take his hand. I shouldn’t have brought it up—I didn’t like thinking about that time any better than he did. “But we’re here now,” I reminded him. “Whether it feels real or not. We’re going to be living here in just a few weeks.”

We finished eating and stretched out on the towels, my head on Thomas’s chest. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” he said, his fingers idly playing with my hair. “Sarra called me this morning while I was on my way to that meeting.”

“She did?” A strange rush of homesickness for London passed over me, even though we’d only been away for a few days.

“Yeah. She said it was pissing down there. Apparently it hasn’t stopped raining since we left.”

I laughed. “Surprise, surprise. Did you tell her what it was like out here?”

“Of course.” His voice sounded gleeful. “She called me an evil tosser.”

“Poor Sarra.” I sighed in spite of the sunlight. “I’m going to miss them.”

“We’ll be back for the holidays. It’s only a few weeks, really.”

I breathed through my nose, taking in the briny scent of the ocean, trying to focus on the positive aspects of that fact so I wouldn’t think about the other implications. I didn’t fool him, though.

“Unless, of course, you change your mind and decide to stay in the States for Christmas.”

He was trying to be vague, but we both knew exactly what he meant when he said “the States.” He was talking about Michigan. My parents’ house.

“I’m not going to show up somewhere we aren’t welcome,” I said, my voice tight.

“Your mother invited us.”

“Over the objections of my father. He hasn’t talked to me in months, Thomas. I’m not going to show up there in the hopes that he might forget about it in a swelling of Christmas spirit.”

Thomas sighed, running his fingers through my hair. “I’m sorry, Lizzie.”

“You aren’t the one who should apologize.”

“He’s not speaking to you because of me.”

I shook my head against his chest, feeling tears threaten. I was sick of crying about this. It felt like I had done little else since I made the decision to leave home in August. “It’s because of me. Because I defied him.”

“Yeah, defied him to come back to London to be with me.”

I pushed myself up on my elbows so I could see him. “Are you under the impression I came back to London for you? Oh, Thomas, I’m sorry. The truth is, I just couldn’t live without Smarties and Aero bars.”

“They are far superior to American candy,” he said seriously, then his face softened. “I mean it. I hate that things have to be so rough with your family because of our relationship.”

“And I was serious when I said it wasn’t your fault. If we had tried to keep doing the long-distance thing, I would still have problems with my family, because I wasn’t willing to go along with their plans for me.”

I wasn’t just saying it to appease him. I came from a loud, bossy, always-in-each-other’s-business kind of family. My parents had planned out my future long before I was old enough to have any dreams of my own. I was supposed to become a teacher, just like my sisters, so I could have a stable job with good benefits. For my hard-working, immigrant father, the promise of a stable, middle-class life was like the holy grail. All five of my siblings—Carlos, Maria, Laura, and the twins, Matias and Samuel—had gone along with those plans, starting careers in teaching and skilled trades, buying homes in the same town where we had grown up, the girls marrying into other Mexican families we had known our whole lives.

When I told them I wanted to go to London to do a postgraduate program, they had been shocked and disbelieving. And that was nothing compared to their reaction when, at the end of that program, I told them I was giving up my teaching certificate to go back to London and be with Thomas.

Neither my father nor my oldest sister, Maria, had talked to me since.

“So long as I wasn’t going to become a teacher like my sisters and live in that house until I got married, they weren’t going to be happy. You just gave me the incentive to actually go for what I wanted. I’m not going to fault you for that—it was a gift.”

“I love you, Lizzie,” he said, his voice suddenly intense. “You know that, right?”

I looked down into his familiar green eyes. “Of course I do.”

“I just hope it’s worth it, you know? I know what you gave up, leaving home. And I know it was asking a lot, for you to leave London after all that to come out here with me. I just…I don’t ever want you to have a reason to regret it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Um, excuse me, did you see that house? Do you see this beach?” I gestured around at the stunning landscape. “You hardly asked a lot of me, coming out here to slum it up in all of this.”

He grabbed my hand. “You know what I mean, Lizzie.”

I leaned down so our lips were only an inch apart. “I made my choice a long time ago. I want to be where you are. That’s all there is to it.”

His mouth turned up into a smile for the briefest moment before my lips met his. Lying there with him, the sun hot on our backs, the sounds of waves crashing feet away from us, I forgot about the knot that had formed in my stomach when he mentioned Christmas. I missed my family, of course I did. My mother had been nothing but supportive since I made my decision, and my brother Sam, sister Laura, and cousin Sofia also took my side. I wanted to see them so bad it felt like a physical ache sometimes. But I refused to give up Thomas or our life together to go home and grovel for my dad to let me back in the house.

I spent a long time being scared of what my family would think about my choices. I couldn’t say that had completely gone away. Maybe it never would. But I
was
done letting that fear determine how I lived my life. I loved Thomas, and we were going to be together. That’s really all there was to it.

Chapter Two

Returning to London was a shock to the system. We weren’t even gone for a week, but it felt longer, almost like we’d been in a completely different world. The jet lag didn’t help. I headed out to work a full half hour late the first day after getting back, feeling thankful that I’d spent the night at Thomas’s flat in Bayswater. The tube ride over to Heidi’s office was much easier to make from there than it was from my flat in the East End.

Okay, it wasn’t technically my flat. I was subletting from our friend Charlie, who was currently living in New York with Callie. I was grateful for the apartment, as I would never have been able to afford a place on my own, and moving in with Thomas in London would have made the situation with my parents even worse. But I missed my friends desperately. Callie and I had come to London together as part of the postgraduate program. We’d shared a wonderful little place together in Kentish Town, going to class, hanging out with Thomas’s friends, and enjoying the city together. It still didn't feel right to be there without her.

Before I climbed down the stairs to the tube, I paused by a bench to connect to email on my phone. It would give me something to read on the train, but I knew from experience that my service would cut out once I went below street level. I waited while the email loaded, knowing I was only making myself later, but reminding myself that Heidi knew we just got back from L.A. and wouldn’t be expecting me to be too early.