Guilty as Sin? - Charles Leclerc

Chapter 12

== 🎞️🎭📽️📇 == 🏎️🏁🏆🍾 ==

< 'Cause I don't wanna fall in love >

< Slowly, slowly, you unfold me >

< But do you know me at all? >

< And baby, it's looks as though we're running out of words to say >

Say You Love Me - Jessie Ware

== 🎞️🎭📽️📇 == 🏎️🏁🏆🍾 ==

I had been chatting with Benjamin for the whole of FP3, barely noticing the time slip away. Conversation flowed effortlessly, a welcome distraction from everything else weighing on my mind. His charm was undeniable, and for a moment, it felt like the outside world—the media frenzy, Charles—didn't exist. It was easy. Maybe too easy.

Still, it felt like he liked me because of my life, not for me, he was interested in the award winning director, in the successful actress. Not in Aleksandra Rossi the human being.

And in that moment I realized that that's what I liked the most about Charles. He saw me as a normal person, as someone who just happened to come across fame, someone who had layers, someone with a different perspective of life, someone with feelings and values. Not just a pretty face for the cameras or a control-freak film director, no, an actual woman who was worth of getting to know.

Benjamin was superficial, like snow, always on the surface but never reaching down, Charles was like a torrential rain, strong and powerful, that slipped through the thick walls and flooded the inside. That even when I was trying to stop him from getting through, he still managed to do so.

And that scared me so much, scared me like a drowning sailor, pushing upwards and trying not to drown, but knowing his fate, knowing that at the end he will lose and the sea will swallow him whole. Knowing that love was close and creeping around, knowing that the only way to stay afloat is to leave before the storm comes, and that's what I needed to do.

I needed to run, fly off like a bird scared of the stone that would take him down. Because I have so much to live for, I have so many things to do, and I know that the moment that Charles reaches me, that would be the end of me. He would take me down and make me feel like I never felt before, he would make me need him and I would want to stay beside him forever.

But I can't, I can't, I can't.

My work is the only thing I want to focus on, my movies, my stories, my legacy, is to damn important for me to get distracted by a pretty face in a pretty body. I have to keep going, I have to write and direct more films, I have to win awards and fulfill my dreams, I have waited for this my entire life and I'm finally getting there, I can't get sidetracked by him.

So, I kept flirting and smiling at Benjamin, distracting myself from the tough decision I had to make. Making sure I was focusing on him, even when my mind wandered off to Charles.

"Hey, are you okay there?" Benjamin asked as he saw the inner conflict I was having. "Yeah, I'm fine" I replied, I gave him a confident smile "Sorry, I just got distracted by a work thing, but keep going" I added, and he did keep going. He was telling me about his vacation from last year and how he thought that the caribbean was heaven on earth.

And I heard him, I heard him until he talked my ear off, because the noise was blocking my mind from hearing what I actually had to, from hearing Charles and myself, from seeing us together and talking to each other.