The Broken Road - A Zac Efron Novel (18+)

Chapter 57 - Beautiful People

The night of the Golden Globes, I was, per usual, ready to go well before Jess was.  I'll never be able to understand what women have to go through to walk a red carpet, but it apparently involves four people just to get dressed.  Early that afternoon, her stylist Brad, along with a small army of individuals, invaded her house to do her hair, makeup and dress her for the event.  I knew my place was to stay out of the way and that I'd be called for if I was needed.

Every now and then, a "damnit" or "shit" would be hollered out, usually followed by some laughter.

I sat down in my tux pants and a white t-shirt, waiting until the last possible minute to put on my dress shirt and tie in order to avoid wrinkles.

With ample time on my hands before Jess would be ready to go, I balanced a glass of scotch on my knee while I scrolled through my phone, re-reading the latest developments in my personal life.

I had grown accustomed to being followed for my entire adult life.  I'd even grown accustomed to having things written about me that were totally untrue.  But, what I experienced when I was dating Jess was on an entirely different level.  We could not do anything without being followed.

We thought the paparazzi's obsession with us had dwindled, we thought we'd managed to get through our time in Hawaii together without being followed, only to return home and find out we had been followed and photographed everywhere we went.  When we returned home from our Disneyland trip, we were horrified to learn from both of our publicists that photos of her and I, taken while we were on a private beach at our resort, had been sold to the highest bidder - The Daily Mail - and published for the world to see.  I'd re-read the article a dozen times since it was published, and it got my blood boiling every time.

Every new couple goes through a phase in their relationship where they cannot keep their hands off of each other and Jess and I were no different.  One afternoon, while we were relaxing on that private beach, completely alone and out of view from any other hotel guests or staff, we let our guard down for the briefest of moments. 

Jess was wearing the sexiest, little black bikini and her bronze skin, slick with tanning oil, glowed as the sun beat down on both of us.  I couldn't keep my hands to myself.  I pulled her into my lap and she straddled my hips while she kissed me.  It was a playful, flirty, relatively innocent kiss- the type we'd exchanged hundreds of times before.  I sat up to kiss her harder while she let her hips grind against me.  My lips migrated to her collar bone and I licked down her sternum while I pulled at all of the ties on her bikini top and tossed it to the side.

I playfully bit at both of her exposed nipples and she moaned out my name as she threw her head back. 

"I wanna get you back to the room and into those handcuffs," I moaned against her chest.

That was it.   For all of sixty seconds, at most, her and I both forgot that we couldn't engage in a moment of passion with our significant other outside our home, even if we thought we were alone.

At that invitation, she reached next to her and pulled my white t-shirt over her head.  I gathered our belongings and she held her bikini top in one hand and mine in her other as we retreated back to our little beach bungalow.  By our standards, that was a fairly innocent interaction between the two of us.  Those 60 seconds turned into a series of photos and a tabloid story that made it appear like much more went down on that beach. 

I was furious. 

I was pissed at myself for putting her in that situation.  I was pissed at the world for thinking they were entitled to invade our privacy like that.  I was pissed because she was crucified on the internet.  I wasn't the one who was naked and exposed in pictures on the internet- ones that could never be erased.  As I read the comments on the article, I was pissed that everyone seemed to feel Jess deserved it.  "If you don't want naked pictures of yourself on the internet, don't take your bikini top off on a beach," seemed to be the general consensus.