“If I wasn’t a celebrity,

“I swear, if I hear that song one more time, I’m gonna murder somebody,” Chris grumbled.

“Such is the price you pay as a first-class singer, Chris,” said Joey with a grin that Chris longed to wipe off. “You have to listen to your songs more times than anybody else in the world.”

With a sound between a sigh and a growl, Chris bent forward and put both hands over his head. “Play something else, guys, please, before my ears start bleeding all over the place.”

Justin obligingly switched stations on their wireless radio, but asked Chris with a frown, “What’s your problem, anyway, dude?”

“Who says I have a problem?”

“Well, for one thing, you’ve been one heck of a grouch lately,” said JC, thumping Chris’s shoulder on his way past the couch.

Chris rubbed his shoulder and regarded JC with a dark scowl. “I am not a grouch!”

“Oh, sure,” Joey countered, “and Oscar the Grouch is the captain of the Good Ship Lollipop.”

“That’s very funny, Joe.”

“Is something wrong, Chris?” asked Lance, regarding him with genuine concern. “Anything serious on your mind right now?”

“No,” said Chris in a tone that insisted otherwise.

“Nice try, Pinocchio,” Joey said, placing the tip of his finger on Chris’s nose and pulling that finger away in a slow horizontal line; Chris slapped him away.

“I think we’ve known you long enough to know when something is or isn’t bothering you, man,” Lance said. “Come on, you can tell us.”

“Yeah, you’re among friends,” said Justin as he scooted a little closer.

Chris sighed, but eventually gave in. “If you must know, it’s Allie.”

“Your Allie?” said Joey with one eyebrow cocked above the other.

Rolling his eyes at the ceiling, Chris replied with the most incredible sarcasm, “No, Allie Reynolds, the big baseball star. Of course, my Allie.”

“Well, what about her?” JC asked.

“I don’t know what to do with her anymore, guys.”

“Oh?” Joey remarked. “Isn’t that funny? In the year and a half you’ve dated her, you could never get enough of her and everyone says you two go together better than cookies and milk.”

“More like cookies and ketchup if you ask me.” Chris shook his head. “Sure, everything was great between us for a while…but now everything’s so different.”

“How so?” questioned Lance.

“You probably wouldn’t see it on the outside, but I can feel it. It’s hard to put in words, really. I love Allie, as much as I’ve loved any woman, but she’s become a stranger to me. I don’t know what she wants from me or how I can—” Chris trailed off, then shook his head again as if to snap himself out of it. “Oh, why am I even telling you this? This is my personal business, not yours.”

Now it was Joey’s turn to roll his eyes. “Well, ex-cuse us for trying to show a little sympathy,” he retorted.

“Thanks for the sympathy,” said Chris without looking or sounding the least bit grateful. “But I’d like to handle this my own way, thank you very much.”

“You know what I think, Chris?” JC broke in. “I think you’ve been working way too hard for way too long; you need to blow off some steam.” To everyone else, he said, “Lace up your bootstraps, boys. We’re going out to dinner and a movie tonight. My treat.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Justin.

“Me too,” said Joey. “Just promise me we won’t have to sit through ‘Shrek’ again.”

“Naw. I’m finding myself leaning a little more toward ‘Moulin Rouge,’ if the rest of you have no objection.”

“Better bring a truckload of tissues, then,” Justin said, “because I hear that one stabs your heart, tears it out by the seams, mashes it into a pulp and blows it to bits.”

“What do you say, Chris?” Lance asked. “You game?”

Chris didn’t appear particularly interested, but he smoothed back his short brown hair and murmured, “Yeah, sure. I need to get out and do something normal.”

While Joey, Justin and JC trotted off to get ready, Lance clasped Chris’s shoulders for a moment and said softly, “Hey, listen, Chris, whatever’s up with you and Allie, don’t let it get you down. I’m sure it’ll work out somehow, some way.”

That’s easy for you to say, Lance. She’s not your girl.

“So, what movie are we aiming for tonight, James?”

Jamie smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. We could try ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ or ‘Serendipity.’ Possibly ‘On the Line’ again.”

Nat stuck out her tongue. “Anything besides a cheesy chick flick?”

“Yeah,” said Jamie, still smiling, “we could skip the cheese and go for the real deal. I hear they’re playing ‘Moulin Rouge,’ too. It’s supposed to be a beautifully tragic story that would give Shakespeare himself a run for his money. Would you believe that, just when everything turns out all right in the end, the girl succumbs to tuberculosis and dies in her love’s arms? Man, and I thought ‘Romeo and Juliet’ made me bawl buckets.”

For a few seconds, Nat stood still, giving Jamie a funny look. Then she rolled her eyes skyward and shook her head, causing her dark curls to bounce jauntily about. “Jamie, honey,” she declared, “you are the most hopeless romantic of anyone I’ve ever known.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to be a bad thing.”

Nat shook her head again, but a smile played on her russet face all the same.

As the two girls and close-knit friends left their apartment and set off down the dusky street together, Nat commented, “The boys must be nuts about you.”

Jamie’s pale, round face turned wistful. “I’ll be lucky if a guy even looks at me for more than five minutes,” she said softly. “You stand a much better chance at landing a man than I do, Nat. You’re the one who’s genuinely pretty.”

Nat gave her a playful shove in the ribs. “Well, you ain’t half-bad-looking yourself, girl. Besides, there’s more to a pretty woman than just good looks. A whole lot more.”

After that, Jamie kept quiet for the next ten minutes or so.

The truth was, she had never considered herself ugly, but she knew she wasn’t movie-star material, either.

She thought back on her high school days; she had never been asked to the prom and had only attended homecoming once as a senior, and even then, that had been a mostly-friends date. She’d never held hands or kissed a boy, not in the way she saw it done in movies and books.

Most of the time, her inexperience with the opposite gender didn’t bother her, at least too much. Still, she wondered what it would be like to have just one man give her the time of day, if only for one day.

Maybe that’s why I love love stories so much. If I can’t have a real romance right now, I can still get my romantic thrills somewhere else.