A Side Effect of Celebrity

Twelve

I think that's the thing. I don't want to date a celebrity. I want to date a normal person. So I'm looking for a normal person – Ashlee Simpson

"Have you heard from him at all?" Ellie asked Claire. There was a hollow sound to her voice, distant, as if coming to Claire through a wind tunnel. She sounded as if she were waiting for the subway.

Claire pressed her phone a little tighter against her head to try and hear Ellie better as she walked down the avenue towards Jay's apartment. They were meeting up at a local park to take Scout for a walk and to talk. "No. I've called him a few times but he hasn't answered. It's going straight to voicemail so I figure that's answer enough. He doesn't want to talk to me. Where are you headed, anyway? Your voice sounds strange."

"To Gavin's. He just got back from Boston so we're grabbing lunch. Anyway, don't fret too much about Griffin. He'll come around. It's only been days, he probably just needs some time."

"You're probably right. Did you talk to him?"

"No, he's dodging my calls too. I think he wants space so that's what I'm giving him."

A pit settled in the depths of Claire's stomach. Something hard and cold like stone. Impossible to ignore its presence, especially when it made her feel slightly ill.

Not that she knew what she would say to Griffin if he bothered to pick up the phone when she called. For days, Claire had been wracking her brain about what to say to him. Hell, she'd even gone as far as writing a few scripts. Lines of safe dialogue.

'Hey, Griffin. How are you?' she'd ask.

He'd reply simply, no awkwardness to be found. Like that conversation outside of her apartment hadn't even happened. 'I'm doing really well, thanks for asking. Want to grab coffee?'

'Sure,' Claire would respond and then everything would go back to normal as if he'd never uttered those words.

She's not you.

I'm in love with you.

I needed you to know.

Of course, the more time Claire spent going over that pending conversation in her head, the less sure she was that it was the conversation she wanted to have. For the last three days, she'd been struggling to figure out what it was that she felt for Griffin.

There were moments when Claire's heart thundered erratically in her chest when she thought of Griffin. Moments when her palms began to sweat and she found herself a little bit captivated by the twist of his smile or the bright glint in his moss-green eyes.

Yet there were still times when she looked at him and saw only her best friend. The guy she'd grown up with who'd been there for every phase of her life. From eating dirt and picking up worms to broken-hearted marathons of Grey's Anatomy. Griffin had been there for it all.

Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the thought of a Griffin who was her best friend and the Griffin who was in love with her. They didn't seem like the same person, somehow. It was as if, along the way, Claire hadn't noticed when the path had split and the goofy, intelligent guy she'd known as a kid had become the young man that now dreamt of working for NASA and dating her.

"I talked to Tracie on the phone yesterday," Claire told Ellie then. She was a block away from Jay's place and knew that she had only a few sparse minutes before she had to go.