This is another actor fic.... takes place in Los Angeles 

            After months of speculation and planning on where we would spend our vacation, my friend and I finally decide on Los Angeles.  With a loosely defined itinerary in hand and enough money to get us by for about five days, we arrive in L.A. and check into a cheap but relatively safe-looking hotel, and after calling in to let everyone know we arrived safely we set out for a little fun.

            The sunset is ethereal and melts over the landscape like warm chocolate.  After doing a little window shopping, we see a club sandwiched in between stores – a rather nondescript exterior, but with music spilling onto the street.  It’s karaoke night!  I’m squealing with delight as I drag her into the bar, hoping I can get a couple of songs in before we call it a night.  After a few watered-down mixed drinks (which I paid for, since I was holding her captive at the moment), I’m still unable to talk her into joining me, but she agrees to stay long enough to listen to me rip through “Lady Marmalade” and “Maybe I’m Amazed”… hey, it brings the house down in Oklahoma City, so why not here? 

            After my second song, she cited jet lag as the reason for bailing out early, and I promised to join her at the hotel later… I just wanted to finish my glass of wine.  Just minutes after she left, as I’m flipping through the book and contemplating one more song, a rather surly waitress approached me with another glass of wine and a note.

            “Someone sends this to you with his compliments.”.

            You can imagine how puzzled I was… so I open the note, which was written on the back of a faded receipt.  The handwriting is a bit messy, but I can make it out:

            Your voice is amazing - you’ve captured my interest

            When the waitress comes back around, I ask her who sent this to me.  “Mr. Cage… he’s upstairs in the VIP lounge.  But you’re not allowed to go up there.”.

            At first, I’m not sure I heard her correctly – the bar was noisy as hell.  “Mr. Cage?  The actor?”

            She shakes her head a little and rolls her eyes at my obvious display of star struck behavior.  It seems that I just wasn’t quite cool enough for her, but she deigned to humor me further.  “Yes.  Nicolas Cage.  He comes in here quite a bit.”

            I ask her to please let him know that I appreciate his note and the drink, and she rolls her eyes and says she’ll tell him “when she gets around to it, because she’s kind of busy at the moment”.  Bitch. 

            I turn back to the book, but I’m not reading it at that point… I’m not ashamed to admit that my heart is racing with excitement.  I can’t believe I’m sitting in the same building as Nic!  I’m such a cornpone, getting all excited over a big-time movie star, but I couldn’t help it!!  He’s here, he heard me sing, and he liked it!  Unless it was a joke?  No, something like that wouldn’t happen.  No way.  I turned back and looked at the staircase leading to the lounge (or what I assumed was the lounge).  It was almost fully enclosed, with only a small balcony.  I couldn’t see inside, but DAMN I wanted to go up there so badly.  My knees were bouncing with the imagined antics that take place in that lounge… was there other people with him?  I’m sure there was.  Oh, well.

            A few minutes after – and I must have unfolded, read and folded that note again at least a dozen times – someone taps me on the shoulder.  I turn and find myself facing an towering, intimidating man dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans, a bit rough around the edges with thinning hair.

            “Good evening!”, he says, maybe just a little too cheerfully – the bartender sure as hell didn’t water down HIS drinks! – “I hope I’m not bothering you, but I just wanted to see if you had received the wine we sent you.”.  He looks at my glass and the note and grins a little wider.  “Ah, you did!  Awesome!”.

            After my initial shock, I realize that he must have came from the lounge, and after explaining that I passed my gratitude along to the waitress, he waved the whole conversation away with one sweep of his huge hand.  “Aw, **** her… oh, pardon my language, sorry.  You’re welcome to come up any time you like, as our guest.”. 

            The bitch waitress overhears us, and is more than a little disgusted and pissed off.  My mind is reeling with ideas of all the fun I’ll get to have in just a minute or so… is he still up there?  Will I really get to meet him?  My hands were trembling as I carefully slid off my bar stool, and I had to lean a little on his arm to balance myself.  Shit, he’s going to think I’m some drunk, pie-eyed hick, I thought as I followed the man upstairs.

            The lounge was bathed in deep red… the walls, the carpet, everything red.  At first I was a bit disoriented; the entrance was dim and rather smoky, and the ceiling seemed much lower than downstairs.  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that we shared company with several people, holding drinks, in various states of relaxation.  They were draped over furniture, on the floor… they reminded me of mannequins posed haphazardly here and there.  It was so strange… the room was filled with cigarette smoke, but nobody appeared to be smoking.  Off to the right there was another door, which was closed.  My guide rapped on the door with the back of his hand, then listened.  After a few seconds, he tentatively opened the door and peeked inside.  “She’s here.”.

            I heard a man’s voice mumble something in response, then my guide stood aside and motioned for me to come in.  My palms were sweating, I could barely swallow, and I felt a little dizzy… not just because I was about to meet a major celebrity, but because I’d had some horribly wicked fantasies about him, in varying degrees of lascivious detail.  Damn.  My thing for Nicolas Cage was an embarrassing little secret of mine, known only by a handful of people.  I was praying that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.