The woman in the Lululemon dupes had one last clear thought as she arced through the air: This hurts more than I thought it would.
To be fair, she was struck by a $250,000 Mercedes G-Wagon, a car built to forge rivers, impress wealthy neighbors, and, apparently, hit joggers in crosswalks late at night.
When she opened her eyes a minute later, she was face up on Sunset Boulevard. A silhouette hovered over her, backlit by a pair of headlights.
“Oh God,” the man uttered. “Say something.” His hand rested on her knee.
“Did I land in heaven or hell?” she quivered.
“Hollywood,” he said. “So a little of both.”
She could hear the concern in his English accent. As her eyes adjusted, she could see it in the shadow of his green eyes. Even his bangs stretched toward her with an unmistakable empathy.
The woman in the crosswalk managed a half smile, then started to fade off again. Just my luck, she thought. Killed by the last perfect man in L.A.
“Stay with me,” he begged.
She wanted to.
“What’s your name, love?”
She rallied just long enough to let out a soft “I don’t know.”
The man swore under his breath, then crossed off. In his absence, a billboard filled her vision. A summer blockbuster starring the world’s biggest actor. She closed her eyes before she could realize… the man who hit her was the same man on the poster.
The only thing Collin Wright had set out to hit that night was an empty bar. He thought he had found one, too. Tucked away from the tourists a half-block down Sweetzer, it had one boarded up window and a pair of naked hooks where a sign once hung. The dive was so unloved that even the hipsters stayed away. And so, to the actor’s delight, he had planned to sit there for hours with a bourbon and his thoughts and never be bothered.
“You doing good?” the bartender asked.
So much for that.
Collin stole a glance at the voice through the dim light. The bartender was young. Maybe twenty-three. Curly hair. Kentucky accent. Some stubborn acne around the nose. He’s using the wrong face wash, Collin thought. No. Best not to engage.
“Dandy,” Collin responded with a smile, then stared back down at his glass like he was waiting to receive an important transmission from somewhere under the ice.
There was a time when Collin longed to be noticed. Early in his career, five thousand miles from home, he fed off it. But with success he learned that attention is shallow. Having just turned thirty with an ex-wife, no kids, and more money than he could ever spend, all he wanted was depth. He could buy once-in-a-lifetime experiences and he had. But they only provided a temporary relief from the gnawing fear that nothing he did had any lasting value.
“My name’s Jonas. I’m an actor too,” the bartender piped in.
Collin sighed. “Hi Jonas.” There was no stopping this now. The kid had seen the yellow light and blew right through it. Which meant a question was coming. A dumb question. “So what’s the secret of making it here?” Jonas asked.
And there it was. Collin especially hated this one. It attempted to reduce fifteen years of self-sacrifice into one magical “secret” that would explain how he succeeded while so many others had failed.
Collin looked up but said nothing. He let the tension build, leveraging the look that had made him the highest-grossing star worldwide for the last five years. And when it was clear Jonas finally felt uncomfortable, Collin finally spoke:
“Discernment.”
Downing the rest of his drink in one gulp, Collin pivoted off his barstool and headed for the back door. “Are you gonna be here every Wednesday?” he asked.
“And Thursdays,” the kid answered with a smile, mistaking the question for a compliment.
Collin slid into his denim jacket. “Good to know,” he said. Then he pushed open the door and was gone.
Back on Sunset, Collin grabbed his phone from the G-Wagon and made the rare phone call. Sheryl Dolan was an A-list manager and a Hollywood savage who wouldn’t even wear a dress to the Golden Globes. Pushing sixty, there was no crisis she hadn’t already navigated twice.
“Is she alive?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is she underage?”
“No.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No!” He paused, reconsidering. “But I did just come from a pub.”
“Collin—”
“She came out of nowhere! Truly. I was driving home and turning left and then—”
“Has she seen your face?”
“What?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“I’m not leaving her in the street, Sheryl!”
This was the problem with celebrities these days, Sheryl thought. They start off cutthroat, willing to hurt anyone to make it big. Then once they get there they turn soft. And introspective. It was a liability. “Do not call 9-1-1. Do you understand? It will be a big scene and the paparazzi will show up…”
A block down Sunset, a light flipped green and fifty cars rolled their way.
“I don’t have much time!”
“…plus you already have the DUI from last year—”
Collin hung up and ran to the nameless woman. He scooped her into his arms and carried her to his passenger seat. By the time the wave of cars reached the intersection, his G-Wagon had vanished into the Hollywood Hills.
Collin Wright’s home at the top of Marmont Avenue was considered “architecturally significant.” He just thought it looked cool. It had mostly glass both inside and out with views of downtown and the westside and everything in between. The drawback was a lack of privacy and the never ending struggle to keep windows clean. There was Windex hidden in a dozen different cabinets. A 5,000-square-foot home that should have brought serenity was usually filled with the sound of someone, somewhere… squegee-ing. As a sick reward for all the effort, the house claimed the lives of a good thirty birds a year.
“You shouldn’t have brought her here.” That was the non-medical assessment from Collin’s personal doctor on the current situation.
“But she’s okay?” Collin replied.
Best the doctor could tell without doing a CT scan, she was fine. No nausea. No blurred vision. Good balance. No broken bones. Just some memory loss which should come back over the next few hours. “She needs to rest. And you need to pray she doesn’t sue.”
Collin showed his doctor out and made the long walk back to the den. The woman was sitting with her feet up on his leather couch. Awake.
She was pretty. About Collin’s age. If she was wearing makeup, he couldn’t see it in the low light. She reminded him of the kind of girl he would have fallen for in an earlier lifetime.
“Well, this is the fanciest hospital I’ve ever seen,” she said.
Collin nodded and sat on the couch near her feet. He gathered his thoughts. “I am genuinely sorry,” he began. “This is a unique situation. Obviously, everything I do is under a microscope. Bringing you here saves us both a lot of unwanted attention. The good news is you’re not broken, just… rattled.”
“Am I supposed to know who you are?” she asked.
Now it was Collin who was rattled. “You don’t?”
She didn’t. Truly. She still didn’t know who she was. All she had was her phone, locked behind a code she also couldn’t remember.
“I’m an actor,” he explained. “Collin Wright.” He waited, sure that hearing his name would spark something. It didn’t.
“Are you any good?” she said.
Collin laughed. It was absurd. Of course he was good. He didn’t have any Oscars but he had everything else. A star on the Walk of Fame. A wax figure in Madame Tussauds. This ridiculous house. Plus three or four others.
“I’m not bad,” he answered.
She wasn’t convinced. “Show me something. Whatever you think is your best work.”
“You’re serious?”
She shrugged. “I mean, it’s kinda the least you could do after trying to run me over.”
He couldn’t believe he was having to prove himself. And yet in a world where he hadn’t had to work for the interest of a woman in ten years, he found the challenge refreshing.
“All right. Fine,” he said.
He grabbed a remote and pushed a button. A cabinet slid open to reveal a 100-inch flat screen. “Couldn’t find a bigger one?” she quipped. Collin shook his head and began scrolling Netflix. A slew of action films filled the screen. “Okay, so not a serious actor,” she noted.
“I see you also lost your sense of humor,” he shot back without looking at her.
He stopped at his most critically-acclaimed film. “Here we go. This one’s called Dark Feud. A cat and mouse thriller. Opposite Brie Larson. This was right before Captain Marvel.” The woman stared back blankly. “Well, this was an awards contender,” he noted, then pushed play and settled in.
For as much as she enjoyed keeping his ego in check, his talent was undeniable. His performance was commanding but still likeable. It felt like an authentic reflection of the man Collin Wright seemed to be in real life. It would have been natural for her to assume the worst about the rich celebrity who hit her with his Mercedes then abducted her to his house. But the more time she spent with him, the more she found herself giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“Not bad, I guess,” she said as the credits rolled.
“Not bad?”
She smirked and picked up her phone. She tried another password. Nope.
Collin shook his head. “People don’t realize how hard acting is until they try it. First there’s the technical side. Knowing where the camera is, knowing where the lights are, hitting your mark… And if you mess that up a hundred different people are mad at you. But then there’s the artistic side. To do it well you have to develop the ability to become a different person on command. Sometimes it feels almost like a possession. And as much as you try to leave that person behind, a little part of every character stays with you. It messes with you.”
“So stop doing it,” she said.
He chuckled. “Obviously I can’t do that,” he said.
“Why not?”
The safe answer was to smile and say “Because I love it.” But he wasn’t talking to an entertainment reporter or 6,000 fans in Hall H at Comic-Con. Collin Wright was sitting in the dark on his couch, talking to a woman who didn’t even know who he was. He could be completely honest.
“Because too many other people need me to keep going,” he said. The list was too long to list them all. The short version included agents, lawyers, Sheryl Dolan, theater owners, studio chiefs, car detailers, landscapers, a masseuse, a private chef, two personal trainers, a hairstylist, not to mention his ex-wife, his own parents, and his deadbeat pot-smoking brother back in London. “I used to be an actor with a dream,” he said. “Now I’m a machine that’s never allowed to stop.”
He was worried she would laugh off his vulnerability as the most privileged of problems. Instead, he caught the lights of Los Angeles reflecting off the a tear in her eyes. She stretched out her hand to his. He took it. Then, feeling a connection that had been missing from his life for years, he pulled her close and kissed her.
She woke up with the sunrise. Her head felt clearer. Collin was still next to her, sharing a one-person blanket.
They hadn’t gone beyond the kiss. Which meant she woke up with all the hope of what could be and none of the regret. Riding that wave of optimism, she grabbed her phone and closed her eyes. She entered some numbers. No. Still locked.
She slipped away from the den and went in search of a bathroom. She found seven of them, each more grand than the previous. At last she made it to Collin’s room. Floor to ceiling glass with an original Vivan Maier photograph above the bed.
She wandered into the bathroom. The shower was carved from a single block of granite, with a tinted pane of glass that looked out on the Hollywood sign. The shower head was not a head at all, but a hundred small spouts drilled into the rock that dropped purified water from above like a downpour in the Amazon rain forest.
She couldn’t resist. As the water heated up, she happily slid out of her tank top and leggings and, for the first time since the previous night’s accident, inspected herself in the mirror. She had some scrapes on her forearm. Some road rash on her left shoulder. Below it, she caught sight of something else. A tattoo. She leaned in closer.
It was two words. Backwards in the foggy mirror. She wiped it clear with her hand, then screamed.
The two words were “Collin Wright.”
Part 2 of “Starstruck” available later this month. Become a subscriber and have all SILVER CORD STORIES sent directly to your inbox.
Whoa!!!!!!!!
Also, section I laughed out loud at: “A 5,000-square-foot home that should have brought serenity was usually filled with the sound of someone, somewhere… squegee-ing. As a sick reward for all the effort, the house claimed the lives of a good thirty birds a year.” 😂
Um, what!? The way my jaw dropped at that ending was epic. 🫢 Ok, hold on... How long will I be waiting for the next part? 😅 I'm unhinged... Congrats on flooring me...Well done. 👏🏽 Like I said unhinged...