Trace leans back in his chair, tapping his fingers against the magazine in front of him. He looks incredulous. His eyebrows almost meet in the middle where he's bunched them together and his tongue darts in and out of his mouth to constantly smack his lips together. That's a really annoying habit of his.

"I think it's really weird that if you got the cash to pay for Cochran you can go kill somebody and still walk, but then people call for your blood in the papers because you double parked or some shit. That's really fucking twisted."

"Some might call it karma," I smirk.

"Huh?" He looks blankly at me. The dude is a good business man but he's not much of a philosopher.

"We get away with the big shit so the universe balances it out buy having people over-sweat the small stuff."

"Right," he says slowly, drawing out the I. The longer Trace makes his syllable last, the more fun he's making of you - they're directly proportionate.

If you're wondering, I haven't double parked recently. I gave Trace this week's pile of 'not good enough for toilet paper so they printed magazines on it' because there's a lengthy discussion on me in one of them. Needless to say it's not flattering. It's basically every bad rumour ever printed about me regurgitated and served on a bed of vitriol and supposed concern for the kids who look up to me. Apparently I'm a bad role model. Yep, that's right kids. Having a successful multi-faceted career and staying off the drugs (well… except for the odd joint) is a bad, bad thing to do, kids. Stay in school.

Though of course that's not the shit this asshole's focussing on. Apparently my voice is whiny and I make my name off of boning women more famous than me and I'm a misogynist. This is supposedly clear from my lyrics and all the sexual references. On top of the woman beating, there's a truck load of new allegations in there about how I'm supposed to have treated Monica and how awful our relationship was. If only he knew - that relationship was emotionally abusive but it was totally mutual. I'd even go so far as to say she was better at it than me: not because she's somehow a worse person than me, but just because she's smarter and thus better at spotting the weak points.

You know what the really irritating thing is? I can't even sue. There's enough 'allegedly' and 'reportedly' in there to cover this bastard on the rumour side of things, and the rest is all protected as fair comment or opinion. Somebody needs to tell me what the fuck is fair about some pretentious asshole I never met judging me from a variety of notoriously unreliable print sources instead of on my work, but this is my life. I might have been joking about karma, but sometimes I honestly think the press and paparazzi are the karmic pay off for wealth.

I think the drug addictions and the going crazy some people suffer from are the karmic fallout from not dealing with it too good, but then I guess if I go too far down that route it makes me a judgmental hypocrite. I don't know; I just wish tabloids would shut up. I'm on vacation.

"They got the knives out for you, man," Trace breathes with a sigh. "I don't understand where this backlash is coming from."

"It's the same as after the Super Bowl," I tell him. "You get too high and they start trying to pull you down."

"Yeah but dude, you gave them an excuse last time and what the fuck have you done now?"

"Which just proves I was right when I said if it hadn't been the Super Bowl they'd have found some lame ass excuse somewhere else."

"I suppose you got a point."

"Mmm. It'll blow over, I guess. Probably a good thing I was planning to lay low anyway."

I get up and walk over to the refrigerator, pulling out the necessary ingredients for a kick ass ham and cheese sandwich. Those, if you didn't know, are top quality ham and some good cheddar that's mellow but still mature enough to have a little kick. I'm not particular about my peanut butter and jelly or my chicken salad or whatever: just throw everything in and I'll take it as it comes. But when it comes to my ham and cheese I'm telling you it's got to be right. It needs just enough toasting to melt the cheese and to bring some crispness to the bread, but if your bread goes too far to becoming toast then you've blown it.

I would have made a Philly cheese steak instead, but that sounds far too much like effort right now.

"Don't you ever feel like doing a Britney?"

"Umm… how? Barefoot in bathrooms, hitting people with umbrellas… what?" Trace looks at me disapprovingly, but he clearly wants to laugh. I didn't mean that against Britney, I swear, I just have no idea what he's talking about.

"Just giving a big blow out interview with your side of things?"

"And what did they do to her for that?" I point out. "They blasted her and twisted everything she said to make it sound worse than before. You're fucked if you do and fucked if you don't, so I figure not bothering saves me some wasted effort."

"True. But you never even thought about just laying that Monica shit out there? Just to shut them up about the woman beating thing?"

"The truth makes me sound like just the kind of guy who would beat a woman."

I am totally ashamed to say that, might I add. Monica and I… we were so awful to each other. It was the most destructive relationship I've ever been in and to this day I don't know why we held out so long. In a way it was almost like a contest; it was like we were trying to see who could break first. Leaving meant that you were too weak to deal with it, that you couldn't come back and face a little more or that you weren't mature enough to be able to take a joke or some teasing, even though we both knew it went well into bullying territory. Of course that's really stupid logic because the whole thing was totally immature and if we had been mature we'd have both been in a big hurry to cut the other loose, but this is how fucked up it all was.

It was like some weird endurance test, like in those Army Brat Camp shows you see on TV where they take the delinquent kids and put them into boot camp. I remember seeing one where after this awful long exercise with like ten hours of running cross country and dragging trucks and stuff, the leaders of the two competing camps had to hold full buckets of water for as long as they could stand, when their muscles were already burning. It was painful and you could see how much they both wanted to quit, but it was pride that kept them going. Neither of them wanted to lose, and I think after a time me and Monica viewed being the one to call everything off as being the loser.

Sometimes I think the most irritating thing about these magazine articles is that occasionally, when they manage to hit on something slightly grounded in truth (it's never the actual truth), they can really strike a nerve. This whole woman beater issue is just awkward because though it's not true, I know I treated my last girlfriend like shit. She treated me like shit too, but that doesn't get me off the hook.

"Hmm." I bet you anything Trace is going to change the subject in five… four… "So where's Chelsea today?"

Told you. Any time he doesn't like a conversation he changes the subject. In a confrontation he'll be all up in your face and won't back down from anything, but in general life he likes to avoid the heavy shit if he can.

"She and her sister have gone to some chocolate spa."

"What's a chocolate spa?"

"I know they serve a lot of chocolate in the restaurant, but I think all the treatments and facials have something to do with cocoa beans or cocoa butter and shit, I guess. I think she told me but I wasn't listening."

"Staring at her ass?"

"Like you weren't. And actually it was her legs."

You may remember that I mentioned a suspicion of mine: one about Trace having a thing for her. Well, as usual, I know him too well. He totally liked her to begin with, but he said somewhere around month two on the movie set he quickly worked out that he was in the Friend Zone. Trace being Trace, he's not one to sit around and mope after a chick so he just got up and got on with it. I mean, of course he still has the hots for her a little, but it's not like he's got a huge crush on her. He did, but now he doesn't. Some might consider this bull, like he's just trying to downplay it, but I know when Trace is bullshitting me and he wasn't when he said that.

Also, the fact that he openly and honestly told me he was as annoyed as fuck that I slept with her gives me confidence that he hasn't withheld feelings of any kind. You might think this would be a problem or cause issues with us, but this is just how we are after twenty something years of friendship. We don't fuck around with small talk and denials we're just honest about shit. It works way better than pretending everything's fine; sure we might get mad on occasion, but it always blows over quick instead of simmering under all that repression. He said it wasn't my fault or Chelsea's, he had no claim on her and he wouldn't have any problem if it turned out she liked me and wanted more, but that it just pisses him off sometimes when all the girls he likes wind up with me. Except Elisha. Elisha didn't give two shits about me, but then in the end she didn't work out so great for Trace so I guess she's not an example to bring up.

For my part, I told him that his relationship with Chelsea annoys me too. He asked why, like I was worried he'd try and fight me for her or some stupid shit like that, but I told him not to be so stupid. It's just for all this being in the Friend Zone, I think she's a lot closer to him than me and I think he's got more insight into who she is than I do, because she lets him in more. Despite having slept with me, she's way more comfortable with him. Trace tried to make me feel better, say that maybe it was because she liked me I scared her or something, but I don't buy it. That woman seems scared of nothing and no one, Enrique notwithstanding.

Hmm. I wonder if going to a chocolate spa would make you taste of chocolate. Maybe I should try it - I'd be irresistible. Well, okay, it'd be the chocolate that was irresistible but I'd still be getting the benefit.

"Good that she's going to a spa anyway, she needs the break."

"What, you saying I overwork her?" I joke.

"Dude, haven't you noticed?" He snorts at me like I'm a total dunce. "She's been stressed as all hell since we got back."

"She is?" I pale slightly. I thought I was being pretty reasonable, she's just done some grocery shopping and picked up some dry cleaning and shit. Have I been Mr Diva? "Why?"

"Kennedy thinks it's because of Sophie."

Hmm - I didn't know he was chatting with Kennedy. Intriguing. "Why?"

"Because she's totally self absorbed and insensitive?"

"Huh?" God I sound really dumb right now. Polysyllabic words are my friend. Come to think of it, it's funny the word monosyllabic itself has so many syll…. Never mind.

"Dude, I like her and all, but Sophie treats Chelsea like a maid and now they're back in the same city she's still treating her like a maid despite the fact Chelsea's not on her time right now. It's driving her nuts. She keeps watching that phone like it's a rattlesnake."

"She tell you all this?"

"No, I was just able to pull my eyes off her tits long enough to notice."

He got a playful-but-slightly-too-forceful punch in the arm for that. "Seriously? She hasn't told me, what's Sophie been making her do?"

"Favours. The kind of whiny 'if it's not too much trouble' favours that you know you have no real choice in."

Okay, I have expressed some displeasure before at Sophie attempting to monopolise my assistant (even if she is hers… you know what I mean) but if it's causing Chelsea stress then enough is enough. "You think I should step in? Like I should have it out with Sophie?"

"Enrique will have swiped her back before you can even breathe if you go around telling his daughter too many home truths."

"True." I let out a large and slightly feminine sigh. "Maybe I should just give Chelsea more to do? Like, so she's too busy?"

"Wouldn't stop her. You'd just wind up making Chelsea suffer with extra work."

"Fuck, true. She does that anyway. What if I just take us all off on a trip somewhere? Where's good for snowboarding this time of year?"

"Dude," Trace asks sceptically, "just to get her away from Sophie Lumos? And more to the point, when you know full well that I can't go, ass?"

"Oh I get it, he's just bitter he'd be left at home," I joke.

Actually, the more I think about it, snowboarding sounds good on its own terms. I haven't hit the slopes for a while and if a bunch of us go… we always have a great time and we laugh, and I love the cabins. There's something oddly cosy about them that as a guy I shouldn't find quite so appealing. We always take a ton of alcohol with us and we ski or board by day and by night the cards and the board games and the booze come out. It's awesome. I always gain a ton of weight between that and all the hot chocolate and fondue and all those really big meals they give you to warm you back up, but that's what I got a personal trainer for.

Of course, while this would get Chelsea away from Sophie, it would also get her away from the nieces and nephews I promised her she'd have plenty of time with. I know Sophie had her attached to the hip but I told her that when I'm on break all I really need my PA for is to keep touching base with the label and production company, to arrange my business meetings (those, sadly, never pause for vacation) and to manage any scripts that come through. She's definitely got the film side of things covered; she does all that for Sophie anyway. The most any of that takes is maybe a few hours every other day, and maybe the odd hour here and there for some errands. Other than that, I told her that she was on her own time and while I'd probably ask her to hang out a lot I wasn't going to be all Nazi about it. I said that if she had shit she wants to do she can do that first and hang with me later.

I'd consider it a really fucking sad indictment on myself if I had to order somebody to hang out with me, so my PA always gets a choice.

She made this joke about wanting to quit with Sophie and work for me permanently… I'm not so sure she was joking about the first part. It's weird, but her coming to work for me seems to have put a wedge between her and Sophie and I'm not sure why. I sure as heck know she spent a lot of time on that tour avoiding Sophie's calls, and now Trace tells me this… hmm. I guess I don't know too much, but I find the whole thing weird. It doesn't help that I'm kind of confused by the way she acts towards me - we've had two very hot flushes and then a lot of lukewarm, from time to time a little cold. I don't get her, at all.

"You know…" Trace says slowly, having stolen half of my perfect ham and cheese. I would have just made him one if he'd asked. "Maybe a vacation is a good idea. Not because of Chelsea…"

"Not?"

"J, you'd have to be a total fucking pussy to run off to the mountains just to hide from some actress." It's a fair comment, I can't deny it. "But you did do three back to back movies and a club tour. Maybe you could use the chill time."

"I'm at home doing jack shit, doesn't that count?"

"It's not the same as actually going somewhere on a trip though. Holiday vibe is different."

That also is a fair comment. Home is home and you just do your everyday shit, even if it doesn't add up to much. When you're kicking it in Hawaii or Europe or some shit like that, you kind of feel a little more liberated. You can do whatever you want at home, it's still a free country, but you don't get that same sense of it like you do when you're away. When you're away you just feel… yeah, freer. Is that a word, freer? Or are you supposed to say 'more free' or whatever?

Ahh, who cares? I really want to go snowboarding now.

"Do you think if I asked Chelsea she'd manage to find somewhere the paparazzi… well, I won't say 'can't find us' because that's just asking for it, but somewhere we might have a shot at going unnoticed?"

"She'd sure as hell try."

"Cool." I nod furiously to myself, thinking about how many people I should invite and where's got good snow at this time of year. "I'll do that."

"And I will stay home and run your fucking fashion label."

"Funny how when it's going good it's ours and when you're pissed off with it it's just mine."

"I am the glory, you are the problem. That's how our friendship is balanced."

"Huh. I thought it was balanced with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a bottle of Coke in the other."

"That too."