Ashton was pretty sure he knew what was coming before he stepped into the room. The previous night, he had bailed on a scheduled appearance to meet up with a few friends. As much as he was probably going to be genuinely fascinated with whatever function he was supposed to attend, he felt he needed, nay, he deserved, a night off.
He ignored the stares and whispers from cubicle dwellers as he strutted down the hall to his manager's office. He flung himself into a chair as casually and as fucks-given-zero as possible. The comfort the chair offered, however, was the exact physical manifestation of how uncomfortable Ashton was to even be in the room.
His manager, a sad, stressed man with perfectly parted hair called Luke Hemmings, worked his thumb over the permanent crease between his eyebrows, his Ashton Wrinkle, as it was known. There were a few moments in their relationship when Ashton considered feeling empathy for the poor sod—the middle man between a reckless little shit and an overbearing management company that, for some strange reason, did not enjoy the stunts Ashton pulled in order to maintain his self-given reputation as a reckless little shit in the past year.
"I know what you're going to say," Ashton said.
"Oh?" Luke replied, finally locking his eyes on Ashton.
"I shouldn't have gone with the orange trousers. They were a right disaster. I really should have listened to you; orange really isn't the new black."
"It's not so much that you wore the orange trousers; it's that you took them off." Luke clicked a few times on his computer and threw an image to the large television screen on the wall to his left. It was TMZ's website. Bright and center was a blurry (yet completely recognizable) photograph of Ashton, shirtless, trouser-less, holding onto an unidentified woman and kissing her like his life depended on it.
"Well. Shit," was all Ashton managed to say. Because that wasn't quite what he had expected. Ashton considered offering a CPR-spin for the picture but he knew better than to say. He had a vague memory of the kiss, an even vaguer memory of the abs, a very strong memory of confusion, and an even stronger memory of arousal.
"Modest is losing its mind. We've been flooded with phone calls from the press all morning. Mikey is considering suicide. I have grown three gray hairs this morning alone. Would it even occur to you that you are not only going to jeopardize your entire career but also my career, really Ashton, think of me, think of my career. I don't have any other marketable skills and, honestly, neither do you," Luke snapped.
In his reckless youth (which continued into a reckless adulthood, if you could even consider him a capital-A Adult), Ashton had signed an unimaginably binding contract, essentially selling his soul, to his management company in return for the biggest break of a lifetime. At the tender age of 17, he moved to Los Angeles and joined a television series that catapulted him from obscurity to household name-ity.
Nearly ten years later, his ultra conservative management group is still doing everything in its power to present Ashton as the squeaky clean vision of every mom's dreams for their daughter, the quiet Australian boy next door, the heartthrob with a heart of gold and a throb for the ladies, and every other sickening trope Ashton could imagine. Ashton really genuinely tried hard (some days) not to be ungrateful. But. He honestly couldn't figure out how he hadn't gone mad before now. It was probably because his team, Luke as his manager and his publicist Michael Clifford.
He certainly wouldn't admit that. He'd go to his grave denying his dependency on those two idiots.
The triumvirate had been undergoing a rough patch lately as the professionals attempted to keep Ashton in the same tired career path and Ashton attempted to mold himself into a troublemaker.
He had moved away from television seven years ago and was attempting to break into a Serious Film Career. Nothing came his way but shit romantic comedies (modern and period alike) and even shitter action comedies, which Ashton diligently phoned in while secretly hoping one day Martin Scorcese or Kathryn Bigelow or David Fincher would phone him for a life changing opportunity.
That's what he was telling himself. Every change he'd made to himself, he made in the name of marketability. Who he talked to, what he looked like, what he ate. Even what he sounded like, working with a vocal coach for years to morph his accent into something less unique, removing certain parts of his vernacular that weren't easily understood by American audiences.
Lately he did what he could to try new things and talk to new people. Or just do whatever the fuck he felt like doing. Because on some levels, he wasn't even sure who he was anymore.
But that was never a thought he entertained for too long.
"It's just a photograph, Luke," he deflected in an attempt to ignore the bigger issue.
"No. No. It's another piece pulled out the wobbling Jenga tower that is your acting career at this very moment. We had literally just got people to stop talking about the stunt you pulled at the Oscars. You are well fucked."
"We didn't actually go that far, unfortunately. It's been a while for me," Ashton said, stretching out his arms and yawning.
Luke gently knocked his head against his desk. "File that under things I don't need to hear about."
Ashton turned in his chair at another knock, this time at the door. It was Mikey, who always looked like he had just woken up five minutes ago but still managed to look like an artful disaster.
"I've just been on the phone with your agent," Mikey said by way of greeting the room. "The studio is suddenly feeling hesitant about your ability to carry You and I."
"What?" Ashton said, for the first time feeling even the tiniest amount of real worry that he couldn't compartmentalize and extinguish. His next shit romcom was the only offer he had gotten for the year. He hated to admit that he needed it.
"They need your image."
"More than they need my talent? I've trained, you know, I'm an actor first. I've been to drama school. For at least two whole years."
"Mildly impressed though they are at all two years of your training, you do actually have to think of yourself in terms of marketability," said daddy Luke, happy to endlessly discuss responsible things like finances and marketability and residuals and-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
"Lads. It's one photograph. And it's not even a thing, like," Ashton practically pleaded. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't. He promised. Totally not a thing. He was drunk and he was horny and he latched onto the first thing he could. Nothing else to it.
Mikey closed the door behind him and sat down in the chair next to him. He exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Luke as he considered his words. "Is it nothing?"
He dated who he was told to and slept with who he was told to and generally felt nothing about almost anyone. "I am a disreputable drunk. And that is exactly what you're witnessing there."
Luke pursed his lips. "Okay," he sighed.
"Am I to be relieved that being a disreputable drunk is less detrimental to my career than not having one?"
It was Mikey's turn to sigh. "We're with you, Ashton. We hate the idiotic standards here as much as you do, but we do what we have to do to work."
"What a steaming pile of bullshit," Ashton snapped, standing up with the intention of leaving.
"Ash. As far as the two of us are concerned, what you get up to in your personal time is exactly no one's business. But publically, we have to consider the consequences. We have to consider your career. And we have to consider how easily you can get blackballed from anywhere Modest has reach," Luke explained, all practical and responsible and stupid.
"This is much ado about nothing," Mikey said. "We just have to reinforce that to the studio. You need a little bit of goodwill. I've been thinking-"
"I talked to you about how dangerous that was, thinking," Ashton interrupted.
Mikey fought back a smile, but he didn't fight hard. "And I think I've found a solution." He nodded at Luke, who was already hard at work on his computer and threw another graphic onto the television screen.
Ashton' eyes widened as he digested what was on the screen. "Never in a million fucking years," he argued fruitlessly.
"Oh. My. God," came a shout from the break room of the Hillsborough Tesco. "Oh my great giddy aunt. Oh holy shit."
Sophie perked up at the expletive. She set down the loaf of bread she was slicing and wandered over to the break room, most conveniently located next to the bakery, which is likely why she and her coworker Hannah never got any substantial work done.
Hannah was seated at the employee computer—which technically existed for training purposes and not for internet browsing—gawking at the website onscreen. She was pulling at her hair anxiously and furiously squinting at a long paragraph of impossibly small print.
"You're scaring the customers away with the high pitch of your screeching," she said, not entirely convinced she'd actually hear her. She didn't acknowledge her existence until she finally lumbered over and touched her shoulder.
She turned to him with eyes wider than formerly thought humanly possible. "Sophie. Sophie. Sophie. This is big. This is. Monumentally big."
"Have the scientists finally cured cancer then?"
She grabbed ahold of her blonde curly hair and pulled her in close to her face. "Bigger than that." She turned back to the computer and scrolled up the main graphic on the page.
Big, bubbly, color-changing letters read out "Win A Date With Ashton Irwin!" Four exclamation marks seemed mildly excessive to Sophie. A crinkle-eyed, tight-smiling Ashton Irwin stared up at him.
Sophie always sort of pictured him as a Labrador personified, a sort of chaotic neutral frat boy. He had a reputation as a quiet, mysterious, earnest, good ole chap from merry ole Sydney. But if you paid real attention, he recently seemed far more interested in doing everything he could to ruin the lives of members of the press everywhere, whether it was refusing to appropriately answer (or even pay attention to) interview questions or constantly making rude gestures to paparazzi, which would make publishing their pictures of him a little bit harder.
So that's what made her reread "Win A Date With Ashton Irwin!" four or five times before she actually believed someone like Ashton Irwin would condescend to such a competition.
"This can't be real," she muttered, taking control of the mouse from Hannah and reading.
"It's confirmed by every major entertainment magazine. All I have to do is enter. About fourteen thousand times. And I could win a date with Ashton Irwin."
Sophie mentally added four exclamation points to the end of her sentence. "Are you going to?"
"Of course I'm bloody going to enter," Hannah said. "Aren't you?"
"No." Sophie's eyebrows quirked up, momentarily amused by the idea of winning before quickly destroying that line of thought. "Why is he doing this?"
"Something to do with charity. For every entry he gets, he donates like a penny to starving children in Ghana," Hannah said and then paused. "Pretend I said that like I care about that, because I do care about Ashton Irwin giving to charity. It's admirable and I was just in the headspace of a fourteen year old girl just now."
"Thank god there's an age minimum," Sophie said, squinting at the fine print that all girls had to be over 18.
"I have to describe in 140 characters or less why I want to go on a date with Ashton Irwin."
"He's fit."
"Everyone will say he's fit."
"Everyone would be telling the truth," Sophie said. "Although I guess there are probably more factors involved in dating beyond, like, fitness. How is anybody supposed to know if they'd want to date Ashton Irwin four exclamation marks when nobody knows him?"
"If Ashton Irwin walked into this room right now and said, 'Sophie Pashley, I know I don't know you and you don't know anything about me other than my fitness, but I sure would like you to go on a date with me,' would you go with him?"
"I don't know."
"Oh, come on." Hannah gave the biggest eye roll known to mankind.
"Okay, okay, I would definitely go on a date with Ashton Irwin."
"Me too. But why?"
Sophie put her finger to her lips as she considered. She didn't have any interest in Ashton being famous, because that sounded more like a hassle than a perk. "I don't know. He seems all right, I guess."
"He seems all right, I guess. Fucking useless. He seems like a prince."
"He's played one once, at least." She stood straight, squeezed her shoulder, and walked for the door. "May the odds be ever in your favor," she called out to her.
She returned to his abandoned loaf of bread. She halfheartedly sliced perfectly thin slices as her mind drifted to a dangerous place of daydreaming. She wondered what it would be like to Win A Date With Ashton Irwin! She wondered whether his carefully constructed Prince Charming hair was stiff as cardboard with hairspray. She wondered a lot.
Sophie was mildly fascinated by him, as most people were. He was a small town success story, and every citizen of Sheffield under the age of 25 had at one point thought if Ashton Irwin could get out of his own small town in the suburbs of Sydney (Sophie could never quite remember which town it was or even if it was small, as everyone else in the world considered Not-Sydney, Australia to be a small town) and fall into millions of dollars, pool parties full of scantily clad ladies, and casual speaking terms with George Clooney, well, just about anybody could.
Sophie had begun to lose hope when no announcement had been made for at least three weeks following the close of the competition. Sophie enjoyed how happy the possibility of winning had made Hannah. Hannah however always sort of laughed it off, as though it didn't matter. And it really didn't seem to matter to her. Sophie spent more time thinking about it after the fact, though she didn't care to admit it. Then they were both convinced it would never happen.
Sophie was downright floored when Hannah got a phone call at the store saying she had won the competition and in just two days' time, a limousine would take her to Heathrow, and she would be flown out to Los Angeles. And now that their dream, against all odds, was a reality, Sophie was ashamed to say she was incredibly nervous about the whole thing.
"Well, fuck me," Sophie said softly.
"I've tried, but you said you weren't interested," Hannah said, a years old inside joke between the two of them. She was barely containing her excitement after initially exploding quite loud as she took the phone call in the break room that customers complained and a manager came to censure her.
"You actually won a date with Ashton Irwin four exclamation marks."
"I prefer to think that Ashton Irwin won a date with me four exclamation marks," she said.
"He's a lucky man." Sophie pecked a kiss on her forehead. "Go home and start thinking about what to pack. I'll cover for you."
"This is the second best thing to ever happen to me," she sighed, falling dramatically into her arms.
"What's the first?" she asked, although he knew her answer.
"I'm keeping that space open for the future." She tugged on her hair and winked at Sophie, both actions that incidentally annoyed the hell out of Sophie, before dancing back to the break room. She would dutifully return to their townhouse tonight and assist her in making some of the most important decisions of her life, as far as packing was concerned. And she would be perfectly supportive. And she would worry about her, but only silently.
Hannah texted her constantly on her hours long drive from Sheffield to Heathrow. Radio silence fell as she turned off her phone in an attempt to sleep during her direct flight to Los Angeles. Sophie, however, continued to text her stupid things she could read to help ease her nerves once she landed. She had never flown in a plane before and she had never been to America before and she had never had a date with an international celebrity before. So Sophie was feeling for her. And she sent her one last idiotic selfie (with her hair twisted into little horns and the most mischievous look she could muster) before going to bed herself.
The next day, Hannah texted her pictures of some Hollywood landmarks she saw before returning to her incredibly swanky hotel room to spend the next five hours stressing over how she was going to look.
"I'm sure anything you wear will be fabulous and I think actually Ashton Irwin four exclamation marks is contractually obligated to think you're beautiful anyway," Sophie said, with her cellphone sitting between her ear and shoulder as she was closing up the bakery at work.
"I'm not going to look good for him, I'm going to look good for me. I want to feel like a pretty pretty princess and I want to wear something for once in my life that isn't smeared with flour or drenched in the sweat of a working girl." She sighed audibly as she ruffled through her case. "Also what if there are paparazzi. I don't want to embarrass him."
"Why would you care about embarrassing him?" Sophie said, reacting immediately to her fear that Ashton Irwin is a complete twat. "He's not more special than anyone else."
Hannah sighed again, even more exasperated, but this time at Sophie. "Wouldn't you do anything you could to avoid embarrassing a perfect stranger who has done nothing but be kind to you? Honestly, Sophie, what has gotten into you?"
Sophie's cheeks flushed with shame. She admitted to herself that had been picking on her in a lame attempt to keep her from becoming too invested in Hannah's date with Ashton. She wanted her to maintain perspective. Hannah was too excited about the whole thing for Ashton Irwin to spend the entire night on his mobile or who knows what else. She wanted her to remember he wasn't actually going to publically hold a randomized competition to find a girlfriend. If he wanted that sort of thing, Ashton would have been on The Bachelor a long time ago.
"You're right. I'm sorry. I just don't want you to get hurt by him, Hannah."
"Soph, I am completely in control of the situation and my feelings. I am not a senseless little girl, I'm a sensible lady with half a university education and a date with a very good looking famous man. He's not going to get in my pants and I'm not going to fall in love. Will you please get ahold of yourself?"
"You're right. Sorry. I know you'll have a great time. So long as you don't puke from your nerves."
"I'm hanging up now because I'm going to get naked and I feel weird being naked on the phone with you."
"I hate to break it to you, but I'm naked on the phone with you all the time."
"Fuck off. I love you." She hung up. Sophie artfully slid her cellphone from her ear down into her apron pocket, a practiced maneuver that didn't get any flour or stray dough from her hands on the phone. She would go home later, pop in the first Ashton Irwin film she could find out of Hannah's giant pile of DVDs, and wait anxiously for any text messages from Hannah or any hits to the Google Alert she had put on her name two days ago. Just in case she needed her.