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we made our way along a barrier crowded with people. He had to let go of me to sign a few autographs and I felt the absence of his touch keenly.
    A large blond girl with blue streaks in her hair was waving a photo frantically as he drew closer. “Mal, Mal! This is the photo we took last night! I got it printed!”
    He smiled graciously and looked at the glossy picture. “Our selfie. Well, now we have to take a selfie while holding it up, don’t we?”
    “Here, I’ll take it,” I said, and she handed me her phone. The two of them squished close together and held the photo under their chins. Mal had the same smoldering, serious look in both photos, the girl the same elated grin. An innocent grin, I thought.
    And he was a gentleman to her, too. I was still trying to reconcile the sexual animal who had dared me to use a beer bottle as a sex toy with this polished public persona. “Remind me how to spell your name?” he said to her as he picked up the pen to autograph it.
    “Aurora,” the girl said. “Like the Disney princess.”
    “I didn’t grow up on Disney, I’m sorry,” Mal said.
    “You know. Like the city in Colorado,” she tried instead.
    “I don’t think I’ve been to that part of Colorado.” Mal held up the pen. “Does it start with O ? A ?”
    She finally spelled it and he handed the photo to her. “Now, where’s my copy of it?” he joked. Or, no, he was serious.
    “Really? You want a copy?”
    “Yes. Would you e-mail it to my manager? Here, take down this e-mail address.”
    While he was reciting the address to her, another photographer elbowed his way in with a big flash protruding from his camera and nearly blinded me with it. Mal glared at him and got a flash to the face, too. At that point, Mal hurried us away from the barrier, his arm across my shoulders in an unmistakably protective gesture. He was tall, six feet easily, and no one else tried to stop us.
    “My apologies,” he said with a small bow once we were inside the theater. “I should know better than to let a feeding frenzy start.”
    “Oh. Um. I’m fine. It’s all right, really.”
    “You haven’t done many of these events before, have you?”
    “Not really. Just starting to.” I hadn’t been in the public eye much. Yet.
    “Let me get you something to drink.” There was a reception set up in the lobby. We had lost Ricki and Axel completely in the delay. Mal steered me to one side and up onto a raised part of the floor, slightly out of the way, and then waded into the fray.
    I stood there lost for a few moments, trying to compose myself. Be sweet, be nice: that was a role that came naturally to me. For a moment, though, I wondered if he had abandoned me now that we had passed the main gauntlet of photographers. No sooner did I start to wonder than he returned with two bottles of cold water.
    I couldn’t help grinning as he handed one to me. He couldn’t have brought me a more perfect choice and the choice surprised me.
    “Something wrong?” he asked.
    “No, no. I just somehow thought you were going to come back with champagne. Or Jack Daniel’s or something.” Mal Kenneally, I thought. What’s going on under the image you project? I started to wonder if maybe the suave gentleman was any closer to the “real” Mal than the backstage bad boy was, or if they were both hiding the truth.
    He raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather—”
    “No! Water is awesome, actually. That’s why I’m smiling.”
    He removed the cap from his bottle and said, “Cheers.” We tapped our plastic bottles together and I caught him smiling a little before he smoothed the expression away as he caught the eye of someone in the mingling crowd. “Is that Roderick Grisham?”
    I looked and saw an older gentleman with a distinguished streak of gray in his hair and deep laugh lines around his eyes stopping to greet another man. “Yes, that’s definitely him.” He was British and had played some of my favorite film villains—well,