Rob's eyes darted, from the flashing emergency light, to the doors, back to Seren. He wondered if she was bluffing. Perhaps she was pretending not to know him so he didn't feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she knew who he was, and didn't like his work. He hadn't met anyone in a while who hadn't known his name. If she was pretending, he didn't know whether to be touched by the gesture, or offended. Or, perhaps she truly had no idea who he was. And in that case, here was a girl he could relax with.
Seren was puzzled by the way he looked at her. She decided to move the bag and stretch her legs out, paranoid about the position she had been sitting in. It was more than she could take, wondering what he was thinking.
"So." She began. "Not exactly how you planned to spend your evening."
Her remark caught Rob off guard. He hadn't expected her to speak again. But he was glad.
"I guess not." He replied, checking her face.
She looked down, tapping a finger on her clutch bag. He felt brave enough to test the water.
"I guess since we are stuck here, It would be rude not to..." He said, taking a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
There was a no smoking sign above their heads on the wall. But Seren took the cigarette he offered to her, and decided the hotel couldn't expect them not to break the rules in this situation. They had every excuse in the book at their disposal. Stress...Anxiety.
"The smoking laws are a joke in England." Rob said, taking a long first drag. "You can't smoke in pubs, clubs. You can't smoke in work places."
Seren was genuinely shocked. She recalled the freedom of the commune, and the first time she had ever tried a cigarette. There had been so many at her disposal. Smoking was almost a way of life for her.
"Really? Isn't that the point of pubs and clubs? To drink and smoke?" She surmised.
Rob nodded in full agreement. "It used to be. Now it's all about freezing your knackers off in the smoking area."
Seren smirked at his English words. She liked them.
"I like your accent." She confessed, lighting her cigarette and suddenly wondering where she was going to flick the ash.
She opened her clutch bag. There was nothing inside it, except a small bottle of perfume and a purse with some money inside. She'd never had a cell phone, never needed one. She took the contents out and placed the bag between her and Rob, flicking the ash inside. He looked at her, perplexed.
"You don't like this bag?" He asked, almost laughing.
"It's not mine." She confessed.
Rob could tell it was an expensive bag, and he wondered if Seren knew. She seemed unaware of everything. He found himself being drawn to her.
"You like my accent." He said, repeating Seren's words. He seemed pleased with himself. "You should come to England. You'd be spoilt for choice."
Seren almost choked, the laughter rising in her throat as she took another drag. Rob laughed too, and for the first time she saw him smile. It was strange to her, that she should feel the way she felt when saw it. His smile was entirely ordinary, the corners of his mouth turned upwards and his teeth on show. But his smile did something to her no other smile had done before. She felt a warmth between her chest and her stomach.
"Where are you from?" He asked.
It was a simple enough question, but Seren had to think about how she would answer it. To be honest? Or just say where she was born and leave it at that?
"Well...It's complicated." She said," We moved around alot."
Rob shrugged. "Ok...so where are you mostly from?"
She decided to just go with the place of birth. "California."
Rob raised an eyebrow. "It's nice there."
But Seren shrugged. "I can't remember it, really. I haven't been there since I was a little kid."
She seemed to be far away in that moment, looking at the elevator doors as if they held the entrance to her past. Rob noticed this, and decided not to ask again.
"So what brings you to New York?" He asked instead.
Seren's face lit up. "Everything." She said.
Her positivity was contagious. Rob found himself touched by the light in her eyes. She seemed to grow more beautiful when she was happy. And it struck him, almost like lightening, that he should notice this about her so soon.
"How about you?" She asked, and he noticed she had dodged answering his question again.
But now it was him who needed to dodge. But he found he didn't want to. She had no idea who he was, he was certain of that now. What difference would it make if she knew? He couldn't change who he was, or what he did. And he didn't want to either.
"I'm here for a couple of months, to do a movie." He said casually.
Seren stubbed her cigarette out in the clutch bag and sighed heavily. "You're lucky." She said wishfully.
He couldn't argue with that.
"I don't even know where to start." She confessed. "All I know is...this is what I want to do."
It took Rob a few moments to realise what she was talking about.
"You're an actress?" He asked, pleasantly surprised.
Seren shook her head. "No, I'm not an Actress. I'm not anything yet."
"Is that what you want to be?" He asked then, taking another cigarette out and offering it to Seren.
"If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have said no. But then again, a year ago I never watched TV. It's all so new to me. And I love it."
Rob was floored. He wondered who this girl was, that she had not watched TV. His interest in her peaked, and he realised he was intensely attracted to her. And not just for the way she looked. She was a mystery.
"Seriously? No TV at all?" He asked, lighting up his second cigarette.
"Some. There was sometimes a TV around. But I never took an interest to watch it much. And then we ended up in a Motel just outside Arizona. My brother was sick so we had to stay there a while. Pretty much the only thing to do was watch TV. That's when I decided what I wanted to do."
She couldn't read Rob's face. He was looking at her peculiarly. She wondered what she had said, wished she hadn't said so much. And then there was that smile again, and she wondered why she had worried.
"You really did move around alot, didn't you." He said, as if it was no big deal at all.
Seren recalled the one bag she had with every earthly belonging she owned. She was afraid to put the things inside it on the shelves of her new room at India's apartment. But knew she would, eventually.
"Yeah, understatement of the century." She said, imagining her things sitting in one place for the first time.
"So where've you been?" Rob asked, as he leaned forward towards her.
She sensed his body more than she should have. She noticed how he inched towards her, listening to everything she said. Wanting to know more.
"California. Arizona. Florida. Ohio. Indiana." She said, reeling off a list of states.
Rob was engrossed. "Where did you live?"
Seren took a deep breath. Just like he couldn't hide who he was, she couldn't hide who she was either. The space was too small for hiding.
"My grandparents were real big on the hippy scene. My Mom was born in a commune in San Francisco. She never left until she met my Dad."
Rob seemed genuinely surprised. "A hippy commune? They still exist?"
Seren laughed at his naívety. "Sort of. You've heard of Greenpeace, right? My Mom's a campaigner for them. They live off the land in communities all over the world. There's hundreds in north America. You didn't know that?"
Rob took a long drag off his cigarette. "Not really. So why would you give that up?"
She wanted to scream. But he didn't know what it was like. She looked at him and saw in him the sort of person she'd always wanted to be. Settled. But he looked at her in the same way. He wanted to be like her. He wanted to have lived in a world away from the god forsaken media.
"I've only ever been to one school. For senior year, I went to a High School in Ohio. The rest of my time was spent being educated with my brothers and my sister and cousins by our parents. I never made friends. Not ones outside the communes anyway. Then my brother left and settled down, and my sister. One by one we all started to drift away. I thought it was my time."
It seemed, to Rob, that she had never said these things to another person before. Perhaps she had no intention of telling someone she was close to. He was glad, even though it had at first been a huge inconvinience, that he was there now with this girl. Seren felt better for telling him, and wondered what he thought.
"That sounds nice." He said quietly, nodding his head in thought.
Seren was almost horrified. "Nice? It's hard to know what's nice when you know no different."
He agreed with that too.
"Well, I went to private school in London. My parents had good jobs, my sisters always had friends coming and going. I think our lives were so ordinary they could have been straight from a text book."
She liked the sound of that. "So how did you end up being an Actor? If your life is so ordinary. Shouldn't you be sat in an office right now?"
"It's only a recent thing. Believe me. I'm still the same person I was...before."
Seren picked up on the bittersweet tone in his voice. "So you've had some success?" She asked.
"Yes, you could say that." He replied, almost laughing.
Seren sighed. "What...are you a Hollywood movie star or something?!" She joked.
But Rob's face fell. He'd not wanted to say it, but here it was. The biggest thing about him, and yet it had only just come up in conversation. He looked at Seren in the eye. She looked back sincerely, and he knew he could tell her and that she wouldn't even flinch.
"Yes." He said, dead pan. "I am now."
She blinked once, but never moved.
"Well... " She said. "You'll be my muse then."
No comments:
Post a Comment