One Hot Secret (Love on Fire)

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say.

Morgan Morris is a lanky man with gray hair and a friendly manner. He also has sharp, intelligent blue eyes that miss nothing. Now, he comes over to me and shakes my hand.

“Thank you for doing this, Kyle,” he says.

“My people trust you, and so do I, Morgan,” I tell him and shake his hand.

He smiles and sits down on the seat arranged for him. He takes me through a few things, like the questions he’ll ask. I’m okay with all of them, especially the ones that deal with the new movie we’ll start shooting soon.

Above us, the sun disappears behind the clouds leaving orange streaks of color in its wake. It’s a beautiful evening. An evening I wish I could share with Grace. The show is going to be live, and they are expecting millions of viewers to tune in. Grace won’t be among those people. She’s not a TV person. During her free time, she’s either reading or in her studio, creating magic with her gifted hands.

Lights placed in strategic spots come on, momentarily blinding me. I blink several times to get my eyes used to the glaring light. The makeup artist brushes my nose again, and the producer counts down, and the interview begins.

I watch Morgan do his thing, smiling for the camera and making the viewers believe that he’s a close friend. A part of the family even. He introduces me, and I smile for the camera.

“I’m sure most of you are thinking that I must have made a mistake, and this is not Kyle Bryce,” he says with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. “I’m not mistaken. I promise you that this is Kyle Bryce.”

A monitor out of view of the viewer shows my previous face. I look at it expecting to feel pangs of nostalgia, but nothing comes. Grace knew and liked the face I’m wearing now.

“Kyle, can you tell us the journey that led to the drastic change we see in your looks now?” Morgan says.

“Sure,” I say and launch into the tale of the accident.

I’d been driving my SUV along the road, and then I made a turn I’d made countless times to get to my place. A blue truck came flying at me from nowhere, and the next thing I knew, I was flying into the windshield. The airbag never went off. My face took the impact of the windshield and the steering wheel. I broke most of the bones in my face as well as having a punctured lung from broken ribs. My body was broken, but thankfully, I was unconscious most of the time I was in intensive care.

“When did you first see your face, and what was your reaction?” Morgan asks.

“A month after the accident when they finally removed the bandages. My reaction was, who the heck is that dude staring back at me? I had completely changed.” I chuckle when I remember my friends’ reactions when they first saw me.

“When the bandages were removed, a visitor would enter my hospital room, take a look at me, apologize and then leave.”

Morgan laughs before he grows solemn and asks me the next question. “I heard that you refused to have cosmetic surgery to return your face to how it was before the accident. Did you not worry about the impact it would have on your career?”

I contemplate his question for a few seconds before answering, “Everyone was pushing me to get the surgery done, which was understandable as that was how people recognized me.”

“What led you to make that decision?” Morgan asks.

“Our looks and bodies are the vehicles with which we come into this world. That can change in an instant. A disease or an accident can turn your face to a pulp. But what will never change is the person you are inside. I knew that by now, my fans knew who I was, and it didn’t matter that the vehicle I came in had changed. I’m still Kyle Bryce.”

“That’s deep,” Morgan says. “Tell us about being unrecognizable and how that has been?”

I laugh. “It’s been an experience and being at the fire station and seeing what those brave men and women do every day was beyond humbling.”

“Did you actually fight fires?” Morgan asks.

“I did, and it was scary as hell.”

We talk about the fire station experience for several more minutes.

“I have two last questions to ask you. First, what did you dislike about that experience?”

“That one’s easy. I came to care a lot about people who knew me as Jack, and I hated that I had to lie about who I was. It got worse by the day but admitting to my real identity would have meant compromising their privacy. Yeah. That haunted me.”

“That must have been tough,” Morgan says.