Ione Skye had steamy shower with Keanu Reeves before he stopped it: ‘Even the way he’d rejected me was charming’

Ione Skye found Keanu Reeves “hard not to stare at” when they were making the 1986 movie River’s Edge, she writes in her new book, Say Everything: A Memoir. The actress described having a “huge crush” on the set of her first film, and she began “stalking” him in his trailer.

Once, she visited him at his studio apartment because she sensed he felt the same way, but he gave her a clear no, she wrote. When she tried to kiss him, he told her he was going to shower, and Skye followed him.

“Keanu turned on the water and stood with his back to me, hand in the stream, staring up at the showerhead. I maneuvered between him and the open shower curtain, water spraying my back,” she wrote. “His beautiful neck was right there, so close I could lick it, so I did. I zeroed in on his beautiful throat, sucking and making out with it. He made a low, growly noise and I felt my stomach turn nicely. ‘Oh,’ I heard myself say. The room was thick with steam, my wet T-shirt sticking to me, wanting to be peeled off.”

When she reached for his buckle, she wrote, he grabbed her wrist to stop her and said he didn’t think he wanted to.

“I broke out with a quick, shocked laugh. ‘Sorry!'” she wrote. “‘No, don’t be,’ said Keanu, releasing my wrist. We were still stuck together, breathing hard. I pressed my face, red from the kiss and now embarrassment, into his chest.”

Reeves, who was six years older, treated her kindly.

“‘Let me, ah, get you a dry shirt,'” he said to her.

“Damn,” Skye thought. “Even the way he’d rejected me was charming.”

Skye said things were “only a little awkward on set the next day. Without saying anything, Keanu let me know he didn’t blame me for trying.”

The encounter outside the shower followed several others that made her heart race.

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In one, they were working together on a sex scene, which got off to an awkward start. He told her he had forgotten and had eaten a few bites of raw onion beforehand.

“Careful not to let my hair fall over my face, I straddled Keanu and kissed him for real, moving around, parts to parts, missing sometimes and grinding on his leg or stomach,” Skye wrote. Afterward, they “pulled apart, a little bashful, a little breathless. ‘You good?’ said Keanu, and I sensed by the husky edge to his voice that it wasn’t just me who wanted more. Tracing my lips to the side of his face, I whispered, ‘Can I come to your place after wrap?'”

That visit ended abruptly, too, when Reeves suddenly stopped kissing her and offered to drive her home.

By the time she was filming her signature movie, Say Anything, a few years later, she had come to a realization: “I’d thought I loved Keanu, but that was just a crush, in retrospect.”

EW has reached out to Reeves’ rep for comment.

Say Everything: A Memoir is in bookstores now.