The Real Baxter (The Baxter Chronicles 1)

“Your chili-chocolate-chip-cookie friend would be proud of you,” he snickered.

“Very true.”

The mischievous spark in his eyes was proof if I needed it that he’d pushed the worst of his demons behind him. He reminded me of the guy who insisted on making me avocado toast. Seb was a powerful man with complex armor and coping mechanisms. But underneath his Hollywood wolf in designer duds persona, he was warm, occasionally sensitive, and fiercely loyal.

He leaned over to pull my ragged copy of Thoreau’s Walden from the shelf.

“This must be a favorite of yours,” he commented, idly flipping the pages.

“It is. I had to do a term paper in high school on Walden for an English lit class. I sat through so many lectures about the brilliance and poetry behind the messaging of renewal and rebirth that I’d convinced myself I hated it. A few years later, I was moving some things out of my old bedroom at my parents’ house and this one fell off my bookshelf and opened to Thoreau’s great quote, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.’ ”

Seb pulled a “yikes” face. “That’s heavy.”

“At seventeen or eighteen, I didn’t get it. But at twenty-five, it hit me in the gut. This book”—I tapped the cover—“is why I moved back to Cali. I’d stayed in Boston after grad school, workin’ as a bartender and occasionally doing regional theater gigs and tried New York out for a few months. I moved to LA with a girl soon after, but came home to lick my wounds when I didn’t get a part I wanted. And…when my personal life went sideways.”

“What happened?”

I froze, then shook my head and waved dismissively. “Meh, nothin’ I want to rehash. The point is, I reached a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and I said to myself, ‘Trent, you gotta grow the fuck up and let go of bad shit.’ I wasn’t ready to give up and I didn’t want to be resigned. And I didn’t want to be quietly desperate for the rest of my life, stuck in the past.”

“So you moved back to LA instead.”

“Something like that.” I spread my arms wide and made a goofy face of my own. “As you can see, I’m killin’ it.”

Seb smiled. “You will someday.”

“That placating bullshit doesn’t work on me. The thing is…I’ll probably never be a household name. I’m okay with that. Making the effort is what matters. That’s what’ll keep ya from feeling desperate.”

He cocked his head thoughtfully. “You’re right. Never give up.”

I smacked his wrist and pulled the book from his hands when he fiddled with the corner of a page. “Hey, that’s a relic. Show some respect.”

“I have the utmost respect for books. They give me ideas for movies.” He chuckled when I rolled my eyes and reached for another book. “How about this one? When did you buy it? Did you like it?”

We spent hours talking about film and literature. Okay, that sounded stuffy and pretentious, but it wasn’t. First of all, I didn’t do pretentious well; and second, Seb didn’t respond to it anyway. He was used to people bending over backward to impress him. He didn’t care if I could quote Yeats and Shelley ad nauseam. He was interested in the stories.

We kicked our shoes off, rolled up our sleeves, and whiled the hours away with books, trading our melty milkshakes for Kahlúa with club sodas on ice. We sipped languidly with our feet touching under the table as we dissected characters, plot points, and storyline plausibility. And it was surprisingly…easy.

Or maybe not so surprising ’cause Seb was fun.

He was lighthearted, naturally gregarious, and he could talk about any topic whether he found it interesting or not. And let me tell ya, having Seb Rourke’s full attention was a heady thing indeed. He made me feel a little smarter than I really was and though I was well aware that he had that effect on everyone, it felt nice to have him to myself. Regardless of the odd circumstances.

Very odd circumstances.

I’d invited a famous Hollywood producer to sleep on my sofa.

Was this real?

8

SEB

Someone was snoring.

My head hurt and my mouth tasted funny…like coffee and toothpaste. On the bright side, the bed was warm, the covers were soft, and the pillow was the right amount of fluffy.

But someone was definitely snoring.

My eyes shot open.

Oh. Shit.

I turned my head ever so slowly to check out my surroundings. The small room was furnished with a bed, two nightstands, and a tall dresser tucked in the corner next to a mirror. I waved at my reflection as if testing that it was really me here with…

I rolled to my side, studying his profile in the shadowy semidark as threads from last night’s epic meltdown wove into a clear picture straight out of a horror flick.