The Actor: Celebrity Romance based on a True Story PREVIEW

Chapter 2

[RECAP: Two years ago Eloise was kissed by the famous Actor, even though she was only fifteen. It's now two years later and she's nearly eighteen]

London, 2001

It was two years before I saw the Actor again.

Of course I'd enjoyed plenty of bragging material from our first encounter. Even if most girls didn't believe that we'd really French kissed, they could just about believe he might have pecked me on the cheek or similar. Certainly that I had met him and spoken to him at least, because they knew about my uncle.

"You are lucky," my best friend Milly had said, sighing with envy because she did believe me about the tongues thing. She knew I wouldn't lie to her, anyway. And if I had wanted to lie to the others she would have been totally on board, because we never liked Claire Bennett to get the better of us. "Tell me what he was like again. Exactly every moment!" Milly insisted.

And so my approximately two minutes in the drunken company of a famous actor had to be spun out into an involved romantic drama. We all read romances back then, so it wasn't hard to embellish with a few phrases about "magnetic attraction" and "unquenchable thirst" and "rising surge of passion". I don't know if Milly truly believed it had been exactly like that, and I was pretty sure I didn't. But it was a fifteen-second kiss that became a fifteen-minute wonder and it permanently elevated my status at school as a girl who mingled with famous people in the holidays.

Once, and only one famous person, but it was enough.

Now, two years on, we were all in the Upper Sixth and in the midst of university applications, offers and rejections, mock A-levels and revising for actual A-levels. I was doing English, History and French which naturally meant I was going on the school sixth form trip to see Hamlet in London. Starring the Actor.

Amanda Trent and Claire Bennet, two girls we didn't much like but always seemed to end up getting thrown together with, started digging at me.

"I expect you'll be getting free tickets, won't you, Eloise?" Amanda said, giving a nasty smirk to Claire. The two of them were members of the in crowd at school, and Claire had never forgiven me for outdoing her cricketer. Claire had blonde hair in a short bob and always attracted loads of boys. Amanda was chubbier and didn't get so many, but she did alright with Claire's rejects.

"I shouldn't think so," I said.

"But naturally you'll be popping around to the stage door with a sprig of mistletoe?" They caught one another's eyes again and started laughing at me, but it gave Milly an idea.

"You should try going round to the stage door. Why not? He's bound to remember you."

I doubted this. I also doubted that one could pop around to the stage door anyway, even if I knew where it was which I didn't. There was probably loads of security.

Unfortunately Claire and Amanda leapt on the plan. "Of course you've got to visit him! I bet he'd be quite insulted if you didn't, given how close you claim to be with him. Or don't you dare? Perhaps you haven't got the nerve?"

I hadn't claimed any such thing, but a challenge was a challenge. Refusing to try was almost to admit that I'd made the whole thing up, or at least to deflate one of our school's greatest ever myths. I had benefitted from the kudos of being "the girl who once kissed a famous actor" which was an even greater wonder to girls in younger years. Now I had to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

"I might well do so," I said, and hoped my further silence on the subject would appear enigmatic, rather than evasive.

After the play was over and we filed out of the auditorium into the crowded lobby, where people were spilling out from the warm fug of the theatre into the chilly night air, they were on my back about it again. I was hoping that Mrs Padstow would hurry us all onto the coach so there wouldn't be time. Unfortunately she was giving us ten minutes to go to the bathroom and so on. "We won't be stopping at any motorway service station, so take your opportunity now."