Teo makes the call and gets the ok from Eli for the interview. Even though I don’t really believe it, and fully expect Eli to back out or kick us out of the shop when he realizes what he’s actually agreed to, I start putting everything in place, directing the whole office and the production department to prepare.

Teo loads the stuff from Ginger’s truck back into my office, and then starts taking down some of the equipment to bring to Mandala for the filming. Since Mandala isn’t big, I decide to take just a single light kit, a skeleton crew, and one trusty cameraman (Vince) with me (as well as Jenny, of course), and then settle in for a brief meeting with Jenny and the other writers in order to go over some of the stories buzzing around about Eli, and potential questions to throw at him.

Time flies, and before I realize it the work day has gone by in a blur of fast meetings and logistical preparations. Even though the tattoo is arranged for shortly before midnight, when Mandala is closed to the public and the last drifters will probably be gone, the decisive moment speeds toward us with a sense of forceful inevitability.

At around ten in the evening, with Vince and Teo already waiting at Mandala, the crew setting up light, sound, and camera equipment, I finally head downstairs with Jenny to get in my car. As we sit at some lights, I watch her stare ahead with a dazed look on her face, arms folded, lip-biting and jogging her heels.

“Don’t be nervous,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder.

Jenny looks at me like I surprised her and exhales loudly.

“I feel like I’m tripping balls right now. This is a crazy way to start a new career.”

“He’s just a guy, and this is just a conversation. And I can do amazing things in the edit bay, so don’t worry about screwing up. Just be your usual badass self, ok?”

Jenny exhales heavily again.

“I just can’t help thinking…this is such a scoop. There are, like, a thousand ways this could end in disaster. What if I ask something too personal and he walks out? Or I piss him off and he won’t let us air the interview? Or if I just can’t get anything interesting out of him?”

“Just relax and start talking—you have time. The tattoo will take hours. Think of it like meeting someone new, someone interesting.”

Jenny tries to smile, but it looks more like a puppy dog face, and I laugh.

“You’ve got way too much confidence in someone who’s never done an interview before,” she says.

“I’ve got a lot of confidence in you.”

Eli Compton came from Australia in his twenties, and began his career in action movies. Tall, muscular, absurdly good looking, and with a powerful, gravelly voice that only emphasized his powerful stare. Typecast as the strong, silent type, his name became synonymous with brutal heroes bordering on the psychopathic. He looked and sounded tough enough for audiences to actually believe he could kick several asses without getting hit. You knew what you were getting with an Eli Compton movie. War films, ex-cops dragged back into the fray, astronauts who risked their own lives to save the crew, and TV interviews where he’d scowl and smirk at the interviewer like he knew something they didn’t.

While his blockbuster action flicks were guaranteed hits, Eli began working with some more esoteric directors on the side. Quirkier, more subdued films in which he displayed a range of emotion that was almost an affront to the audiences who loved him as the emotionally-stunted ass kicker they secretly wished they could be. In response, he grew reclusive, started making films fewer and farther between, attaining cult status practically overnight and racking up critical acclaim and awards twice as fast.

But despite being one of the biggest stars around, Eli rarely sits for interviews—even for promotional purposes. And when he does, they’re usually strict affairs. The only thing most people know about Eli is that despite his genius IQ and incredible talent, he has a temper, a short fuse, and is very low on patience. Stories abound of him walking off sets or disappearing midway through Hollywood meetings, or cursing at interviewers he deemed not up to scratch. So even though I’m encouraging Jenny as much as possible, I know her fears aren’t unfounded.

As soon as we get to Mandala, we rush about in the cramped space to finalize the set-up. Vince and I go over camera angles while the crew finishes up the last touches on the sound and lighting. Meanwhile, Teo arranges his tattooing equipment and Jenny sits in a couch as a young hipster from the hair and make-up department puts a braid in her blue hair that reveals the line of studs running up the outline of her ear.

When Eli arrives, it isn’t with the large entourage that we’re expecting, but alone. Casually, he steps inside the back room and greets Teo warmly.

“Hey mate,” he says, with his Melbourne drawl, clasping hands and pulling him in for a hug. “Long time no see.”

He’s bigger and more handsome than even the big screen makes him look, effusing a powerful charisma that makes the world around him seem like merely a stage.

“You good?” Teo asks him.

“Great,” Eli says, then turns his eyes from Teo across to the rest of us, the way I’ve seen him do to a thousand bad guys in films.

“What the hell did I let you talk me into,” he mutters, shaking his head.

Teo laughs, slaps Eli on the back, and gestures toward me. “This is Ash, who I’ve told you about. She’s the one running this whole thing.”

“Hi, Eli,” I say, stepping forward decisively. “Thank you very much for agreeing to do this interview.”

The actor shakes my hand, silent for a second as he holds my gaze.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got no problem talking. There’s just usually nobody worth talking to. If Teo says you’re cool though, I trust him.” He scans the tattoo chair. “Anyway, doing it like this—kinda interesting. And who’s gonna be grilling me, did you say?”

“Um. Me. I’m Jenny,” she says, blushing a little as she steps forward to shake his hand. “I’ll be doing the interview.”

Once again Eli takes a second to look at her before speaking.

“I like your hair,” he says, and they share a warm moment that I know everyone in the entire room can feel. It’s in that instant that I know this is going to be sensational.

The interview goes like a dream, so good that I panic at several moments, making sure we’re getting it on tape, making sure the mics are picking it all up, convinced a last minute Hail Mary couldn’t actually be this good. Visually it’s amazing, Teo etching the eagle onto Eli’s chest while he tells the real story of why he walked off the set of his last blockbuster film and never looked back—something people have speculated about for years, but that he’s never come close to opening up about. The close, intimate surroundings of the shop making it feel almost cinematic, Eli displaying both vulnerability and strength, a complexity that most directors spend a lifetime failing to capture.

It’s difficult to even remember Jenny being nervous now, as she talks with Eli confidently, so that the interview feels less like one, and more like being a fly on the wall at a late-night conversation between two old friends. She makes him laugh, asks questions that he has to think about, trades quips, and compels all kinds of emotions and stories out of him.

We’re a million miles from the PR-prepped, pre-scripted interview-cum-advertisements of Hollywood Night, now. There’s something unique and magical in the air, and every single one of us can feel it, and just lets it happen. Almost everything Eli says feels like a secret—important and insightful.

Even Teo gets in on the act, bringing the whole crew to hysterics as he tells Jenny the story of how he and Eli first met while skiing in Germany, both of them falling down almost an entire black diamond trail after Eli tried to pull off some insane stunt turn, all the while cursing the air blue at each other the whole way down. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon drinking the pain of their bruises away in a beer hall and finding out they actually had a lot in common.

Most of all, though, Eli opens up in a way that’s rare for any actor—least of all the most infamously guarded one.

“Hollywood needs you to act off-screen just as much as on it… If you pretend to be someone long enough, you start to forget who you were in the first place…” This is gold.

The interview only ends when Teo finishes the tattoo, and even then Jenny and Eli continue on for another quarter-hour after Jenny’s made her final remarks and the cameras have turned off.

At around four in the morning, Eli leaves, embracing all of us warmly, and taking his time over goodbyes. In particular Jenny, whom he pulls aside to have a private word with before leaving, whispering something in her ear that has her blushing all over again. Vince rounds up the crew and they break everything down and then take the equipment back to the studio, and Teo cleans up at Mandala, leaving Jenny and me outside, breathing in the cool air and trying to regain some sense of reality, still coming down from the high of what just happened.

“God…”

“I know…”

I turn to her with a sly smile. “What did Eli say to you? When he was leaving?”

“Oh, nothing…” she says casually. “He just invited me out for coffee.”

“Seriously?!” I grab Jenny by the shoulders and we just laugh.

“What was that, two hours?” she asks.

“Nearly three.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to edit that down to fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not,” I say. “I’m gonna run it for the whole hour of the show.”

“What?” Jenny says, dubiously. “They’ll never allow it.”

“Who’s ‘they’? The show’s mine now.” I put my arm around her shoulder and pull her in for a buddy-hug. “Ours.”

Three days after the interview airs, people are still talking about it. About Eli’s charisma, about where the hell Jenny came from, about how Hollywood Night is so much better than they’d previously thought. The Candace-Carlos story is old news now—but it couldn’t have come at a better time, the scandal bringing in even more new viewers for the show. The network decides to air the interview again at a primetime slot on the weekend, and numerous shows and blogs are now approaching Jenny herself for an interview. Teo half-jokingly complains about how many new people are now coming into his shop for tattoos, and I keep a running list of the dozen or so actors virtually begging me to be interviewed by Hollywood Night, hoping to emulate the organic, open charm that Eli gave off.

Jenny even meets Eli for drinks a few times before he jets off to Europe to do an indie film with a hot new avant-garde director, and she tells me that Eli said as soon as the interview aired, he was offered more roles than he had even before he first broke out.

Somehow I even find it in me to talk to Grace about what happened, about my father and Teo, about the past and all the things that still hurt to think about. We spend hours on the phone, Grace sympathizing, and struggling to believe it about our own father almost as much as I do. I tell her I’m done, that I don’t ever want to see him again, but Grace resolves to fix things, to talk to him, to bring our family back together again. Ever the diplomat.

But even all of that seems unimportant, incidental. The real news happens on a Sunday morning, when Teo, Duke and I are finishing off a run at Runyon Canyon.

I rub Duke under his chin, making him waggle his tail and get a funny kind of loose-lipped, toothy smile when I do.

“Should we stop at a store on the way back and get some dog food?” I say, pulling faces at Duke. “Since you’re both probably coming back to mine.”

“I have some at my place,” Teo says.

I glance up at him.

“No offense, but that’s pretty much all you have. I don’t think I can handle another lunch of beer and whatever frozen burritos you picked up at the mini-mart.”

Teo laughs as I stand up in front of him.

“How would you feel about fixing that?”

“Fixing what?”

Teo looks away like he’s struggling with something, then speaks slowly, as if having to reach for the words.

“I was just thinking… With you staying over all the time, you’re hardly ever at the place you’re renting…and me with this big, empty luxury condo that I don’t even know what to do with… I mean…it kinda seems a little silly, right?”

I shoot him a playful look.

“You’re asking me to move in with you?”

“What would you think if I was?”

I laugh gently.

“You sure? Think you can stand a woman’s touch? Fresh flowers on the kitchen table, framed photos in the hallway, throws. I always kinda figured you liked having your own space. Lone wolf, fortress of solitude, all that.”

Teo half-smiles but he puts his hands around my waist and pulls our sweaty, sun-soaked bodies together, and I know he’s serious.

“Yeah, fuck all that,” he says. “I don’t just want you—I want you. Everything. I want to live somewhere that feels like you even when you’re not around. I wanna come home to you, have you come home to me. I wanna make a home.” He pauses, but only to kiss me softly for a second. “I can’t promise I’ll be good at it—shit, I ain’t had much practice—but I want it more than anything, and I want it with you. In fact, if you want, we can go shopping for throws together.”

I gaze up at him, squinting a little in the sun.

“How can I refuse an offer like that?”