When Ginger was gone for good, Zac was upset. He was definitely getting used to having her around all the time. He was used to waking up with her there, and coming home from the studio and she was still there. He was getting used to the idea of having a new girlfriend. Despite living in a hotel and that he was still in school and working at the same time, it felt like they were married. It scared her a little bit when he told her about it but by the end of the day she was back to her normal self and they were talking again.
He found out more about her than he knew before. He had to admit, when she was talking to him about her life he'd already heard a lot of the stories but most of it was new information. When she'd use the name Laura he wasn't comfortable with it. She was Ginger to him and he thought she always had been Ginger, but it turned out he was wrong. She told him he could call her Laura or he could call her Ginger, it was all up to him. He continued to call her Ginger because that was the way he'd known her and he didn't want to know anything different.
Her preteen and early teenage life was something he would have never expected out of her. She went to Catholic school all but one or two years of her life and she was generally a good kid, but when she was eleven and in sixth grade until about the end of her freshman year in high school, she was a terrible kid. She didn't get along with her parents, she ran away from home, and she hung out with the wrong kind of people. At this time her and Kris were friends but they were drifting apart because of Ginger's new crowd. The people she hung out with were a lot older than her and one of them had an older brother in the tattooing business, which is where Ginger's tattoos came from. When she was a freshman she lost her virginity to someone twice her age at a party, while she had a boyfriend who wasn't the wiser, and she felt so dirty she turned herself around and didn't do anything remotely close to that until she met Zac and she allowed herself to actually be a bit naughty again. This time, she told him, was different, though, and when she was with him she didn't feel dirty anymore.
Zac didn't see Ginger again for another three weeks. It turned out she had a free day before he did; he was stuck working in Miami when she was off. She lived in Tampa, which was still a five-hour drive from Miami, but she was all the way on the other side of the country. She flew into Miami in the morning to see him and would be flying out the next morning, giving Zac enough time to see her.
He faked a headache and got out of work at noon. He was still in his own room and gave the concierge his extra key to give to her when she showed up. By the time he got back to the hotel room she was already there and waiting for him.
"Zac!" She got off the bed and ran over to him, giving him a big kiss hello. "I missed you."
"I missed you too," he said.
"What are you doing back so soon? You said you wouldn't be finished until six," she said, pulling him back to the bed with her.
"Well I faked a headache and got out at lunch," he said. "I can be very manipulative when I want to be." She looked up adoringly at him. It made him feel uncomfortable but she was so lost in him, she didn't even notice. He rolled away from her to break her stare and walked to the other side of the room.
"What's up?" she asked.
"I'm not entirely used to someone looking at me with that much attention," he told her, openly. He wasn't afraid of the truth around her because it seemed that there was no truth without her.
"You play concerts for thousands of people all the time and you're not used to attention?" she asked, a hint of laughter in her airy voice. "You have all of those people staring at you, watching your every move, and you're not used to attention?"
"It's different," he said, sneaking a glance back at her. "There's so many of them, you can't concentrate on just one. You can hardly see most of them and the ones you do see, there's too many to think about. It's never just one person, inches away, staring straight into your eyes like they don't have anything to hide." Ginger smiled.
"I don't."
"Everybody has something to hide," Zac said. "Everybody's got a secret they don't want anybody else to know. I do."
"I thought you said you could tell me anything," she said, giving him a look.
"I said I could. That doesn't mean I have," he told her. "Do you want me to tell you? I will."
"No," she said, shaking her head. "No, it's your secret. You don't have to tell me." He smiled and walked back over to her, sitting next to her on the bed.
"So you don't have anything?" he asked, this time peering into her eyes instead of her peering into his. "Not a single thing you haven't told a soul, something you never want anybody to find out?" She flinched and he knew she had something. "You do."
"I don't," she said again.
"You do! I can see it in your eyes." Her pupils narrowed. "That's okay. I don't want to know." He stood up again. "Do you want to go somewhere?"
"Yes," she said, her voice slightly exasperated. He ignored her tone.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Can we go to the beach?" she asked, her eyes lighting up. He nodded.
"Sure. Do you have a bathing suit or do we have to find a naked beach?" When he spoke his eyes lit up mischievously and she groaned.
"Zac, this is Miami. Of course I have a bathing suit! Now I know how much you would love a naked beach, but you're just going to have to live with it." He rolled her eyes and she dug around her bag for her bathing suit. He did the same. After they changed, he looked at her and froze in his tracks. "What?" she asked, looking down at her body. "It's not too revealing, is it?"
"No," he immediately said. He scratched his temple absently and looked away. "Where'd you get that?"
"I wore it in a photo shoot and they let me keep it," she said. "Why?"
"No reason." He knew that bathing suit. In the poster he had hanging in a frame on his wall at home she was wearing that bathing suit. If anything, that should have made him smile but he didn't care for the feeling at all. He'd gotten used to her being his girlfriend over the past few weeks. He'd gotten used to talking to her on the phone and forgetting that she was a particular somebody, but suddenly he'd remembered who she really was. He had a poster of her on his wall. He was sure he wasn't the only one. Other people were idolizing her, falling in love with her and he didn't like that one bit.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"No, you're not."
"It's just," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Before I met you, the guy at the video store gave me a poster of you because I kept going in there everyday to re-check out your movie�" She blushed. "�and you're wearing that."
"Is that the one where I look like I'm taking off my top?" she asked. He nodded. "I didn't ever want that picture out but it looks like it's in poster form now. But, Zac, I don't understand why that would make you uncomfortable."
"That just makes me realize that I'm not the only one who thinks about you all the time. There are people everywhere who think about you." She sighed.
"Zac, you're, like, ten million times more popular than I am," she said. "I'm not the only person idolizing you either."
"It's just weird."
"Why?" she asked.
"Because I've never known what it was like before," he said. "I guess now I know how you feel." She nodded.
"Do you still want to go to the beach?" she asked. He nodded, standing up and waving his hand as if dismissing their entire conversation.
"Yeah, let's go."
"Come in the water with me," Zac said to Ginger. They'd been at the beach for about an hour and so far nobody had even looked their way. Ginger was trying to tan and Zac was getting bored. They bought a tiny radio on the way so they could have something to listen to.
"No," Ginger said.
"Ginger! Come in the water with me. You're so boring." She tipped her sunglasses and looked up at him.
"Are you calling me boring?" He rolled his eyes at her. "I want to get a tan, Zac! Do you know how long it's going to be before I see a beach again?"
"Um�the next time you go home?" he asked.
"Shut up. Getting a tan here." He sighed.
"Where are you going next?" he asked. He was stuck in Miami for at least another week; then they went back home to Tulsa. He'd be back at home, but he'd still be working for quite a while. He wouldn't have a free day for at least a month.
"Well, tomorrow I fly to Paris to start off the gobs of publicity I have to do overseas," she said, pushing her sunglasses back up on her nose. "I'm going to be gone for about two months."
"Then what?" he asked, laying down next to her. The sun was bright and he dug around in her purse for the sunglasses he'd put in there earlier.
"No more," she said. "I'm done."
"Really?" he asked. "I'd like to be done."
"Well movies are a lot different than music, Zac," she said. "You've got to record, then you have to do publicity, then a tour, and when you're done with the tour you've got to get another album out and start the whole thing over again."
"Are you going to do another movie?" he asked.
"I don't know," she told him. "It all depends. I'm always writing, but it just depends on if I feel like doing anything with it. There's the book that they want me to publish, but I'm not going to do a lot with it. It's going to take me a long time to write it."
"I thought you said you were done," he said, looking over at her.
"Oh, I'm done," she said, shaking her head. "I'll write the book, then I'll send it away and they can do whatever the hell they want to do with it. They can release it, they can promote it�they can do it all. I'm done."
"All right," he said. "So say this is it. Say you're done. The book is released and you just let it sit there, and you don't do another movie. What are you going to do?"
"There's always school," she said. "I can go to school, find a good job, and have me a nice career. I'm only eighteen, I have a long time to think about what I want to do." A smile came across her lips and Zac couldn't help but smile as well. It didn't matter what it was for, it was there and she was so beautiful when she smiled. "I want to get married. I want to have kids and a family�I want to be happy for the rest of my life."
"That's simple enough," he said.
"Yeah, it sounds simple," she said, sitting up. "But it's getting there that's hard. You've got to find someone, someone who you just know is going to be there forever and loves you back." Zac pursed his lips together and looked away. He was sure. She obviously wasn't. He was only seventeen but he was sure that she was it. At first it seemed a lot like infatuation; he was just infatuated with her, but now he was sure. He could see them together forever. He could see them in a house in the suburbs with lots of kids. He could see them growing old together, but she obviously wasn't thinking about that just yet.
"You're still young," he said, making himself feel old. "You've got plenty of time to mess around before you think about that. You never know, we could end up getting married someday." The hint of smile that had been on her face now spread like it had the first time he met her and she looked over at him.
"You think so?"
"You never know," he told her. "It could happen. It could be you and me."
"Yeah, I guess it could," she said. "I wouldn't mind that."
"Neither would I."
"Oh my God, dolphins."
"What?" She pointed out to sea and he saw what looked to be a dolphin out past the restriction buoys jump out of the water and disappear again. "Wow. Are there really dolphins this close to shore?"
"Looks like it," she said. She looked over at him. "Zac?" He looked over at her, away from the dolphins that had randomly captivated her interest. "You have a poster of me?" He smiled.
"It took you this long to comprehend that?" he asked.
"Well I didn't really ponder on it until now," she said. "Where is it? Is it in your room, on your wall, staring at you?"
"Yes it is," he told her. "The video store guy gave it to me and I put it up on my wall so I could see you whenever I walked into my room. Taylor even commented on it a few times."
"He did?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. He nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "My mother wanted me to take it down because she thought it was indecent, but she's just full of it. She doesn't know what she's talking about most of the time."
"It is rather indecent," she said. "I can't believe they actually distributed that photo. I told them not to."
"They probably wouldn't have unless you mentioned it," he told her. She shrugged. "Don't worry about it, Ging. It helped me go to sleep every night." The look of disgust on her face was so prominent that Zac couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"Don't even laugh, Zac," she said, hitting him in the arm. "If you did it don't you think there's someone else out there who does it too?" He stopped laughing. "Yeah. Think about that. There are other guys out there whacking off to your girlfriend."
"Ginger!"
"It's true," she said. "Disgusting, but true."
"So will you come in the water with me?"
"No."
"Ugh," he said, huffing. "You're so boring."