Age Gap15 min read
“I’m Not Yours to Keep” — A Reborn Actress, a Dangerous Offer, and the Man Who Refused to Let Go
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“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and my voice shook even as I tried to make it steady.
“Kaia,” Sofia hissed, “you don’t have to do this.”
I pushed off the chair and stood. My face still burned from a handprint, and my cheek throbbed, but my eyes felt sharp in a way I hadn’t felt before.
“You don’t decide for me, Sofia,” I said. “Hand me that script.”
She stared like she’d seen a ghost. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious.” I held the thin stack of pages like a paper shield. “I want the next scene. I know how it goes.”
A PA called “action” and a tiny part of the past rose up like steam, but I kept breathing slow. I had been dead once. I had woken up on a stage that had wanted to bury me. I had been slapped, walked out on, kept like a pet. Now I had the script of my life in my head. I was not the same Kaia who had bowed and swallowed insults.
The other actress, Petra, only smiled like she already owned the set.
“Kaia,” Petra said later, when the cameras weren’t rolling, “you should be thankful we didn’t get into real trouble. You should be grateful.”
“You hit me,” I said. I kept my hands on my knees to stop them from trembling.
“You asked for it,” Petra shot back. “You walked in like you owned the place.”
“Then watch,” I said. “Watch.”
We did the scene again. Petra raised her hand like a queen. The slap that would have clobbered my face the first time never landed. I let her swing and slipped, a small move that put the line right on the sweet spot for the camera. My head turned; my eyes widened. Then I did what I had done once before and will never forget.
Two quick slaps, hard and true, landed on Petra’s face.
Silence fell. Then a howl. “You hit her!” someone shouted. “Who let you—?”
The director, Graham Bloom, stood up like someone who had seen the unexpected on a stage and loved it. He did not shout orders. He stared at me as if something new had arrived in the room and might change everything.
Sofia grabbed my arm. “Get out,” she said low. “They’ll cancel you.”
I looked at Petra, red and stunned and furious.
“I’m sorry,” I said in a voice that sounded small, and tiny tears slid down my cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she would—”
People believed tears. People believed a woman who looked hurt. I let them believe. I should have run. Instead, I let them take the story my way.
Sofia moved fast. She sent one controlled message that turned the narrative: “On set today, Kaia was hit. She insisted the next take be truthful. The scene was real. Kaia is professional.”
Photos of my bruised cheek were online before I finished the sentence. The spin worked. Petra’s team posted their own messages. The world picked a side and then threw its weight.
I had a choice: leave the industry, or fight in a place where everyone knew how to bite.
I picked the fight.
“Don’t be a fool,” Sofia warned again that night as we drove away from the studio. “You can’t take on Petra’s fans and the studio at once.”
“I know,” I said. “I have a plan.”
Sofia pressed her lips. “If you follow through, I follow. But Kaia—be careful.”
When I arrived back at the dorm, the old world—college halls, classmates, small talk—was waiting like a safe shore. I wanted a safe shore. But safety tastes like nothing after you have had one life slip away.
I slept and no sleep. The past kept pushing in: hands that had wrapped around my whole life, a man whose face I could not recall the first time we met, and yet who had lived in my bones like a cold stone.
I told myself: don’t look for him. Don’t let him see you.
But fruit falls even when you think the tree is behind you. Two days later, I saw him in an elevator.
He was a man whose name I knew from the gossip rags and the old, half-forgotten circles: Nolan Arellano. The room seemed to contract around him. He had that same quiet you could feel in your bones—still, cold, and waiting. His eyes were gray-blue and too honest. They held no small talk. They read like laws.
When he looked at me, I felt something skitter under my skin. Sofia made a noise I could hear like a small warning. People around him tried to smooth and glower and be useful. He did not belong to them. He stepped into the elevator and said, “Come.”
I did not know whose voice rose in me, remembering or inventing. I said, before I knew I would say it, “My name is Kaia Lehmann,” and added one small lie: “I’m a fan.” I handed him a card I had found on the table. I heard the people around him breathe in surprise and amusement.
Sofia grabbed my sleeve afterward. “Why did you say that?” she asked.
“Because if he remembers me, I don’t want pity,” I said. “Because he should get a wrong first impression. Because I wanted him to think I was harmless.”
“It’s a stupid thing to say,” she muttered. “He hates false things.”
That night I sat with the memory of his eyes like a bruise. They held disappointment, curiosity, and a kind of dangerous appetite. He shrugged off my card and walked away. I thought maybe that was the end.
It was not.
Two days later, the phone at the studio beeped in a dull, slow rhythm that made everyone look up. Someone from the company rushed in and said, “Nolan Arellano is here.”
“Why would he come?” Graham said. He was good at hiding terror under mockery.
Soon, Nolan walked in. He did not announce himself. He did not need to. He found me with an effortless rule—the room made a path.
“You left,” he said when he found me. His voice had the cold edge of a place that kept to itself.
“I wished to,” I said.
He came close and looked at my face with the same attention a jeweler gives a gem. He said, slow, “I remember you.”
“I lied,” I said, because my heart had a habit of tripping. “I said I was someone else.”
He turned to me like a hand closing. “Not true.”
I flinched. That one word felt like a judge’s command. I did not know whether to laugh or to run.
After that day the world narrowed to a line between my own breath and Nolan’s attention. He could appear like stormlight—sudden, precise, and blinding. He would be in the place I least expected him, as if he had built routes in the noise just to reach me.
He asked my name properly on the third meeting—this time with no game. “Kaia,” he said, “what is your name?”
“Kaia Lehmann,” I said, and he said it like he was learning an instrument.
He began to order people to bring me things. He sent a car once and then another. He called very specific people. He had a place called Arellano Estate, a quiet white house with long walkways and gardens, and he said, “Come to the estate.”
“No,” I said once, when Sofia asked me, and then I said, “No. I will not."
I should have stuck to that. I did not.
I told myself I wanted to play the part of a younger woman who refused him flatly. It felt safe. But the world has a way of testing resolve.
I went to a meeting with a director who smelled of overripe promises. He told me to come to a hotel room. He thought I would be soft. He thought I would be alone and frightened and easy.
I walked in with my head up and my phone in my hand.
“You can sign,” he spat when I refused his hand. “You can be anyone’s now.”
I smiled and said, “Wrong person.” Then I took his robe, tied it around him so it looked like someone had played an ugly joke, and left.
He called men after me. They chased. I ran faster than I thought I could and slid into a room and found a small, angry thing licking its paws—an animal as rare as a child with no fear. I wrapped it in my arms and tried to get out.
And then the man who always seemed to appear where storms formed stood in the doorway, like a cutout from an old life.
“Nolan,” I said in a voice that wanted either to plead or to stab.
He stepped in and rested his hand on my wrist like an order. He listened as I babbled excuses. He said, “You are careful.”
I did not know if he said it gently because he admired me or because he had plans for me. I did not want to be used again, not like the way I had been before—kept, ordered, owned. I had learned to fight, to make bargains that would keep me moving.
So I made one.
“Don’t make me a thing,” I told him at the estate. “Don’t think you can own this life.”
He smiled a little, and it did not reach his eyes. “I never thought I would own you,” he said. “I thought I would keep you near.”
That line would push like a rope through my ribs for months to come. I said no. But when weeks stacked into work—and when Graham Bloom called and said, “You are perfect for the role”—I could not refuse the pull of greatness.
Graham’s set was a place that smelled of paint and coffee and strange, fierce brilliance. My role, the woman called Annika in The Comeback, had a heart that flickered. She was a woman who survived betrayals by sharpening her smile.
Phoenix Acevedo was cast as the male lead. He was warm and messy and quiet in a way that made room for me. Phoenix was generous with his eyes. He once wrapped a handkerchief around my trembling fingers on set and said, “Trust yourself.”
When the cameras rolled, I learned to make small storms happen on cue. I used the slaps, the turns, the pauses, the quiet accusation. The audience wrote messages about the energy between Phoenix and me. Graham called me to the office one afternoon and said, “You are better than the page.”
“I read it before,” I told him. I had the memory of the old script in my head like a map. “I just know how she moves.”
Graham’s eyes were wet. “You were right to come.”
My life began to move in a new rhythm: early calls, makeup, lines, lights. I learned the stagecraft of being seen and not eaten. I answered questions in interviews without crying. People started to call me brave. People started to call me by my name like it meant something big.
And always, somewhere in the edges of this life, Nolan watched. Sometimes he stood on the edge of a parking lot or a doorway, and when I saw him, my heart did little skips that were not all fear. There was a storm and a shelter in him. He protected with a force that could break doors, and he expected to be obeyed.
One night after a late shoot, Nolan waited in the dark for me outside the studio door.
“Why are you here?” I asked. My breath came out in white puffs.
He moved close enough that I could smell the cold sharpness of his cologne. “Because you went to a man’s room and then left with a story,” he said. “Because you fought a director instead of letting him touch you. Because you have the wrong kind of luck and the right kind of nerve.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“It is now,” he said, and his hand brushed my cheek like a question.
My skin remembered being caged. I remembered the old bargain that had been made for me once before by someone else, the cost paid with the hours of my days. I pulled back like I could break his fingers. “You are the last person who can decide my life,” I said.
Nolan stared like he was listening to a puzzle, and then he laughed, soft and strange. “No,” he said. “I will not decide it. I will guard it. I want to be the only person who may break it.”
“You will break it.”
“I will not break you,” he insisted. “I promise you I will not hurt you.”
Promises from men mean little if they come with control. I knew the difference between care and containment. I had been contained. This time I drew a line.
“Then do not watch me with the same eyes you use to own,” I said. “Do not make rules for me. If you want me near, earn it every day.”
He nodded once, like a man making an agreement at a bank. “I will earn it.”
I returned to the set and to Graham’s quiet encouragement. The scenes came faster, the cameras harsher, the lines sharp. The show took its first breath and then another and then crowds began to speak. The internet split in the old ways: fans and critics, lovers and haters. Petra made a small war. Someone from her camp slipped a photo to the press, a photo with a sloppy caption. The studio went white-hot with gossip.
I could pretend to be small and let it pass, but I had learned to convert noise into motion. I had learned to use a lie as a ladder. I called Graham into a small room and said, “If someone tries to dig up dirt, make it useless. Give me the truth.”
He looked at me like I had offered him a blade and he took it. “You are not just an actor,” he admitted. “You are something else.”
“What else?” I asked.
“A storm,” he said. “A storm that knows how to read weather.”
It was the most honest compliment I received in weeks.
Nolan showed his hand in other ways. He would appear when an older producer sniffed too long at me. He would write checks to replace the favors some thought they bought with a bed. He would step into a room with a single person and make them fold like paper. I hated being given shelter by someone who loved to own it.
“You think the world will stay safe if I let you,” Nolan said one night when we were on his land and the sun set like a coin. The wind frayed the trees. “You think the sea does not want a shape.”
“I want choices,” I said.
“You will have them.”
“You will not shape them.”
For a long time, Nolan did not change the ways that made me uncomfortable. He watched, he protected, he scowled at men who should have kept distance. He did not ask permission; he took action. And slowly, as weeks blurred into months, something shifted. He did not own my day. He learned to wait. He learned that I—Kaia—did not belong to a shelf.
“Name someone you want to talk to,” he said once, sitting opposite me in his study, where the lamp made two pools of light.
“Why?”
“Because you will need people,” he said. “Because I cannot be everywhere.”
I named a writer I liked. I named a choreographer. I asked for an honest director. He called each and left messages that seemed to open doors.
“Do you think this is control?” he asked later, when we stood in a greenhouse watching a plant unfurl.
“No,” I said. “This is what I asked for. Keep people close but ask me if I want them.” I put my hand against the plant’s young leaf, feeling its fragile green like a promise.
He watched me with an attention that was always a little like love and a little like hunger. I did not know where to put it sometimes. I kept my life moving fast enough so that his hands could not close.
On opening day of The Comeback, the world noticed me. Phoenix and I had good chemistry; the press liked the way we pulled something honest from the script. Nolan attended the premiere, unsmiling, in the back row like a shadow with a tailored suit. People leaned forward to watch me. I felt Nolan at the edges like a tide.
After the premiere, the world wanted more. Graham asked if I would accept a certain festival. I said yes. My phone filled with messages that wanted to be my story. My email filled with offers. I had to make choices.
Nolan sat beside me once in a city hotel, under a sky that felt like glass. He said, “You can choose any direction.”
I turned to him, and the person who had once crawled under his skin while frightened and small looked back at me. “Then I choose myself,” I said. “I choose work that scares me. I choose people who see me, not the idea of me.”
He reached out and tapped my knee. “Then I will see you,” he promised.
The public thought we were a story: him, the older, wealthy man, and me, the bright young actress. They wrote headlines and made jokes. Some said I had been claimed. Others said I had been used. I answered everything with this: “I am not owned.”
Nolan wanted to show me something that winter. He drove me out of the city and into the box of land that belonged to his family, an old house surrounded by a small woods. “I want you to know where I am from,” he said.
The estate—Arellano House—was a place where men grew old and secrets settled under thick rugs. He showed me a library that smelled of paper and lemon oil. He showed me a small room with a piano and a window like a watchful eye. He pulled an old photograph out of a drawer and said, “This is where I learned to listen.”
I saw a younger Nolan in that picture, not older and dangerous, but bright and hungry and awkward. I watched him show the man he used to be. I reached across and laid my hand on his—an act small and large at once.
That day we made no rules. We walked, we argued, we sat near a fireplace and spoke of work. I told him things about the characters I wanted to play that surprised him. He listened as if my words were a map.
At night, a snow fell that made all the edges soft.
“Will you tell me the truth?” I asked in the dark.
He breathed like a storm moving over glass. “Ask.”
“Do you think of me the way you thought of the other women you kept?”
He did not answer at once. When he did, his voice was a low instrument. “I thought I could keep them. With you… I want to be the reason you stay, not the jail.”
“You will have to work for that.”
“I will.”
And he did. Not with chains. With small things that mattered. He stood in the rain at a small café when I forgot my lines. He left warm coffee in my dressing room before I arrived at a midnight shoot. He asked how I wanted the lights and then left the design to me. He defended me with a force that made enemies scatter—those things were tied to his old nature—but then he stepped back and let me take the stage.
The world kept throwing stones. Petra tried a last attempt to smear me by saying my role had been bought. An old director tried to spread insinuations that I had slept with men for parts. The old cycle tried to come back as if it were a tide.
That night, at a small awards event, a man from Petra’s side stood up and called my name in a voice meant to break a window.
I walked to the podium wearing a simple dress and felt the eyes.
“You are a liar,” the man shouted. “You took things that weren’t yours. You ruined careers.”
I could have left. I could have done the polite Hollywood thing and smiled and looked small. Instead, I raised my head and let the truth come through my mouth like a bell.
“You are right,” I said into the mic. My heart was a drum and my hands were steady. “I did take something.”
The room took a breath.
“I took the choice to be myself. I took the right to work hard and be seen. I took the risk of doing something people said I could not do. That is my theft.”
There were gasps. Then someone in the crowd made a noise like laughter, sharp and unbelieving. I turned to the man who had shouted and looked him in the eyes.
“You cannot own me,” I told him softly. “Neither can you the work I do. The only thing you can change about me is what I let you. The only thing I owe you is the truth.”
A small sound broke inside the room like a window cracking. People around me started to clap. The clapping rose like a tide and then filled the place. Petra’s people scowled. The man shrank back. He had been given a public mirror and did not like what he saw.
After the awards, Sofia hugged me so hard I heard the bones in her ribs play a little tune. “You were blazing,” she said.
“You owe me dinner,” I told her. “You sat through a storm.”
She laughed and then looked serious. “Are you sure about Nolan?” she asked.
I looked at the night and then at the dim skyline and said, “He wanted me to be his, once. He is not like that anymore. He is learning.”
That night in the car, Nolan was silent. I watched the city pass by. I reached out my hand, and his fingers closed around mine like an old cat’s paw.
“You did what I ask: you stood without asking me to protect you,” he said. “I am proud.”
“I am not your thing,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and his words were a weightless thing. “Yes. And you will not be.”
In the months that followed, my life unspooled like a ribbon—some parts taut, some loose. I signed with a small studio founded by a man named Abel Buchanan, who had scars and humor and a hunger to build something clean. Abel gave me freedom. He let me pick my scripts. He trusted me to save him, and I saved him in the secret way that actors often save studios: by bringing their art honest and costly.
Nolan and I found a rhythm that did not mean possession. He taught me how to drink bad tea and make eggs in the morning that did not taste like failure. I taught him to head for the garden when he was unkind to himself. We sparred, laughed, and, sometimes, I slapped him—not in a way that hurt but in a way that woke him up.
“Stop saying we,” he muttered once, when I hugged his arm in front of a mirror, and then he kissed the inside of my wrist like a man sealing a promise.
We had struggles. We had fights that left marks like weather. He wanted to keep me safe. I wanted to be free. We had to build something that had room for both.
One night, as the snow turned into the first nights of spring, I stood on the stage of a small theater to accept an award for a role that had broken me and built me back. I felt the wood beneath my boots and the lights like summer. People cheered. My speech was short.
“Tonight I learned that freedom is not the absence of trouble,” I said. “It’s the right to choose the trouble you will meet. I choose mine.”
The crowd laughed and clapped. Nolan stood in the back, hands folded, and for once his smile was not the thing that smothered me. It was the thing that set a boundary: his hands were not my prison; they were my anchor.
After the applause, when people spilled into the night and the cold smelled of wet streets and late coffee, Nolan took my hand and walked me to the car. He paused by the trunk and handed me a small black velvet box.
I laughed because the heart is a silly thing and it likes to be surprised. Inside was a small key on a chain.
“Why?” I asked.
“To the greenhouse,” he said. “Not a lock. A place. For seeds. For things we will grow and never own.”
I looked at him. I slid the chain over my head. I let the small metal warm on my skin.
“You could have given me a ring,” I teased.
He smiled with a slow, private smile that only belonged to him, and then he kissed me—not to keep me, not to chain me, but to make me remember that a kiss could be a map and a medicine.
“Then I would have asked you to promise things,” he said. “I want you here because you want to be here.”
“I want to be here,” I said. “By choice.”
He took my hands and let me show him again and again what I needed—space, work, honesty, and the right to walk away if I wanted. He gave me his trust in return. He gave me the small key and the greenhouse and a willingness to earn every day the gift of me.
Sometimes at night, when the house is quiet and the snow is a hush on the grass, I sit at the window and look out at the rows of small plants we've started. Nolan sits in the chair across the room, nursing tea. He watches like a man who still wants to possess the small pieces of the world, but now he also tends them.
He came back to me in a way he could not before. He held me and asked, and did not demand. He used his power to clear paths rather than build cages. He learned the difference between keeping and caring.
“Do you regret anything?” I asked him once, tracing the line of a leaflet.
He thought hard. “Only that it took me so long,” he said. “Only that I did not learn to listen sooner.”
I smiled because we grow with our mistakes if we choose to. I had taken my life back once. In taking it again, I learned not to give it to anyone who would bottle it up and set it on a high shelf.
“Promise me an honest thing,” I said finally.
“What?”
“Promise me you will never make me small to make your life larger.”
“I promise,” he said, and the word came like a chord.
We both knew promises are not seals. We both unearthed the truth that love was not a claim so much as a daily action.
Years later, when we are older and the world still throws stones, we will stand side by side in front of people who would tell me how I should be and say, together, “She decides.”
I plant a small seed in the greenhouse each spring. Nolan waters carefully. We argue about how much sun it needs. We laugh about his thick hands being clumsy with tiny leaves. I keep the little black key on a chain near my heart.
I am not his to keep. I am not anyone’s to keep.
But he keeps me near, and he earns it every day.
The End
— Thank you for reading —