Starstruck

Chapter Seven

"All a big misunderstanding. Right. Can you believe that man? Does he think I don’t know what’s going on in my own classroom?"

"The nerve!" Stephanie McKinney exclaimed.

"He should be horsewhipped," Marcy Weller agreed.

Her two best friends looked at each other and grinned, and Ashley fought the urge to bean them both with the wok she was setting up on the stove top.

She should be grateful they were there, she told herself. They had both agreed to her last–minute invitation so she wouldn’t be consumed with guilt for lying to Jason Williams.

She hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth — that she had no plans other than lesson prep work — but she also hadn’t been ready to turn around and drive back to the Blue Sage that night, not without a little more time to psych herself up to facing him again. As salve to her conscience, she had called Stephanie and Marcy over for an impromptu party watching movies and making Chinese food and venting about the man himself.

"You should have seen the way he looked at me, like I was some deranged fan come to steal his boxers or something. Good grief."

"Well, you did climb over his gate," Marcy pointed out from the sink where she was washing vegetables. "You can’t blame the man for being a little suspicious about you."

"If I were going to become a stalker, why would I pick a washed–up recluse of an actor?"

"Because he’s a big hot bundle of yum?" Stephanie suggested.

Marcy made a face. "Yum factor aside, you know perfectly well he’s not washed–up, Ash. He walked away at the top of his game. I bet right this minute he could still step into any role he wanted and find himself back on the A–list. He just doesn’t want to be there."

She had to admit, Marcy was right about that. Jason had the intensity and range of a truly great performer. And the cameras had loved him.

"I still cry every time I watch him in Laughed Until We Cried ," Stephanie said.

Ashley didn’t want to admit that she did, too — and that she’d watched the video just the other night.

"How many times did we watch  Laughed Until we Cried when it came out?" Marcy laughed. "At least a dozen. Remember how you used to have that picture of him in your locker with his shirt half ripped off and his sexy black Stetson and that hard look in his eyes?"

Stephanie  snickered as she twisted another egg roll. "If there was ever an obsessed stalker fan back then, it would have been you, Ash. I seem to remember you writing Mrs. Jason Aldean (Aldean is his stage name) on everything from your algebra homework to the pizza napkins at Stoneys."

"Will you two just forget about that? For heaven’s sake! It was more than a decade ago. Marcy’s already given me a hard time about my stupid crush."

She loved her friends dearly. They had been friends since they were all in kindergarten and she found great comfort in that kind of continuity. She just sometimes wished they didn’t know every single detail about her life.

"You’re supposed to be sympathetic here. I was a silly teenager. What did I know about what to look for in a man? All I cared about ten years ago were dreamy eyes and six–pack abs."

"Two things Jason Williams still has," Stephanie  pointed out with a slightly overheated gleam in her own eyes. "He came into the hardware store last week for hex screws and I just about drooled all over his cowboy boots."

"Dreamy eyes are fine but not when they come as a package deal with a man willing to abdicate his responsibility to his child."

"That’s unfair," Marcy spoke up as she drained the vegetables. "He invited you to come back and talk to Kendyl about her behavior, didn’t he? I wonder if you would be so mad at him right now if you hadn’t had such a crush on him back in the day."

"Yeah," Stephanie warmed to the theory. "Maybe you built him up in your wild little fantasy world for so long that finding out the real man is just a struggling father with the same problems as the rest of us has left you heartbroken and disillusioned."

She had to admit, there might be some truth in what they said. She had this image in her head of him as the hard–driving, hard–living hero he played so well. It was a little hard to reconcile that with the father of her biggest behavior problem.

She sighed. She was not looking forward to dinner the next night. How did a girl dress to have dinner with her teenage crush?