“Oh, mine?” I said, feeling like a fraud. “They’re brown. But not this kind of brown,” I said, gesturing to my color contacts. “My real eyes are boring.”
“How could anything about you be boring?” he asked, staring me down.
There was a silence in the air that stretched out between us.
“I’m probably the most boring person you’ll ever meet,” I said, extending my hand. “Charlie, by the way.”
“You’re a liar,” he said with a grin, then shook my hand. “Crim.”
“So you’re the guy everyone’s talking about,” I said, riding the flow of our conversation like a waterslide.
“Oh, they’re talking about me already? Surely they have more interesting things to discuss…”
“Surprisingly not. There’s a cluster of people outside your hotel right now.”
His face fell, and the tone of our conversation shifted to something more serious. “Never become famous, Charlie.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. On the one hand, I wasn’t famous yet and there was a good chance I was going to mess everything up before anything extraordinary happened. On the other hand, if everything kept going as planned, I would be famous in a short amount of time.
“You don’t like fame?” I asked, leaning against the rock next to him.
Unlike the other stars, being around Crim was… it was normal. It felt comfortable; it felt like we’d already been friends for a long time. Was there such a thing as friendship chemistry? If so, I was lost in its fumes.
“It has its ups and downs,” he said elusively with a shrug. “Sometimes it’s great — I get things for free, people know my name, people like my music and some people even say it inspires them. Helps them out of hard times, you know?”
“I have an idea of what that’s like,” I said, thinking of the rush I got whenever a client would leave my salon happy.
“So you know how fulfilling it is to touch lives in that way,” Crim said, leaning his head against the rock and staring into my eyes.
Those violet eyes against his shock of red hair were mesmerizing.
“But there are other times when it’s not so great. Like today,” he said. “You can’t turn it off. People always want more from you, whether it’s music, photos with them, signing up for events… your attention gets divided into twos, threes, fours…”
“Isn’t that part of the deal?” I asked, looking into his eyes.
“A deal with the devil, for sure,” he said with a smirk. “I’ll be honest with you, just us two mirages talking to each other in this clearing: Every single day, I wish I could get out of it.”
“Get out of what? The fame?” I asked.
He nodded, his long locks sliding over his face. He raked one of his hands through it gently, his black fingernails shining in the sun.
“Then why did you agree to do this season of The Black Castle?” I asked, taking out a mental notepad.
He shrugged and said, “I owed someone a favor. But after this, I’m done.”
“What do you mean you’re done?” I asked.
“Done with fame. I’m going to rent a cabin in Iceland for a year, and go live like a nomad.”
I laughed long and hard.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, fixing me with his purple stare.
“It’s just—” I started, “—oh, you’re serious.”
“I’m never not serious,” he said with a smile. “And yes, I’m retiring from this lifestyle after my contract is fulfilled. I’m just going to blast my way through it, not going to give it a whole lot of effort. All I want is to be alone in complete isolation.”
“Wait, so you’re not even going to try?” I asked, crestfallen. That meant that he was going to be a bad actor. The fans of the show wouldn’t hate him; they’d hate me, a nobody, for ruining it.
“Nope. It’s not important.” He said, fixing me with a smile. He was so confident that I almost believed him.
Almost.
I scrunched up my brow. “But what about your costars? You’re just going to put on a sloppy performance for them to pick up?”
“What they do with it isn’t of concern to me,” he said, looking off into the distance. “I live for music and poetry. That’s my form of art; my medium. Trying to make me an actor is like the producers are trying to take air and convince it to be water for a day. It just won’t work.”
My mouth hung open. I was beginning to dislike this curious Crim more and more with each passing second.
“That’s selfish,” I said. “You could ruin the show.”
“Don’t worry, good old Reese Riley won’t let me ruin the entire thing. Though I have such a problem with authority that I’m going to do my best to try…” he said with a wink.
As I learned more and more about Crim’s intentions, I couldn’t help but see who he really was. That magical aura that I’d first felt when I walked into this clearing had vanished. In its place was a cocky, arrogant narcissist who thought rules didn’t apply to him.
He was just like Narcissist Guy.
Maybe he just needed to know that he was talking to one of his costars; maybe that would give him a nice little reality check.
“I’m new to the cast, but I’m an actor in the show, too,” I said as I crossed my arms.
“I know. You’re Charlie,” he said, looking at me lazily.
“S-so you know about my character and everything? How I was written in?” I asked with disbelief.
“The producers filled me in,” he said simply. “Besides, it’s obvious you’re an actor. You’re all shiny and everything,” he said with a wave of his hand.
Shiny. That’s what Hazel called me.
“What do you mean by shiny?” I asked suspiciously.
“I think you know what I mean,” he said with all the confidence in the world. “I speak in poetry and music. All this around you—” he gestured to everything in my immediate vicinity, “It's hard to translate to English. It’s a language that makes sense to me, but it’s difficult to
