Excessive - The Complete Series Box Set (A Single Dad Romance (X Series #1)

by Claire Adams

  Epilogue

  Synchronicity

  Emma

  “Things don’t always happen as we plan,” I tell Brock Emsley, host of Late Night with the Stars, one of the five or six top late night talk shows currently out there. “Sometimes, it’s all you can do to take the leap and see what happens.”

  “Well,” Brock says, “it looks like that philosophy’s been working pretty well for you so far. I want to thank you for coming to see us and chat for a little bit about what you’ve got going on,” he says, and turns from me to the hot camera. “After these messages, we’ll be back with a very special live performance by Sons of Anatolia. Stay with us.”

  The red light goes off and Brock leans over, and shaking my hand, he says, “Thank you so much for coming. It’s always nice to have an Oscar winner on the set.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” I tell him, and when directed, I follow a man in a blazer off the stage.

  The Oscar, that wasn’t for Flashing Lights.

  After all the hell and tumult that went on during the filming of my first major role, the movie opened to a modest reception. The first couple of weeks saw huge numbers, but after everyone subconsciously realized that they’d seen that film a hundred different times and the immediacy of my world of scandal began to fade, Flashing Lights slowly sunk into the distance.

  The reviews weren’t too bad, though.

  The award, I won for a role I played as Margaret Thatcher. One of my reviews even went so far as to say that I managed to make my character likeable, which, according to the author of the review, was a feat that he didn’t even imagine possible.

  I’ve never been that interested in politics, myself.

  It’s been a long time since Flashing Lights and it feels like it’s been even longer.

  After his role as the English-tutor-turned my-character’s-lover in Lights, Damian Jones took another long break from making movies, and when he came back, he was a different man.

  For the first time in his career, Damian wasn’t just the eye candy with the nice smile. He started taking roles that not only challenged him, but were new, different. He started taking roles because they were outside of his comfort zone instead of sticking to the world of summer comedies.

  Things haven’t been all upside for Damian, though, as his former-would-be-father-in-law, Ed, passed away waiting for a new heart. That was one of the reasons Damian stayed offscreen for so long.

  The two had made their peace, although, from what I’ve heard, the two of them never stopped talking shit to one another even until the very end.

  Penelope lived for another year, but without her husband and her daughter, she just didn’t have the will to fight when she got splenic cancer.

  Probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to deal with since Lights was Ben’s trial. I had to testify about everything that had happened, and that took more out of me than I thought I had to give, but in the end, the jury came back unanimously: guilty on all counts.

  He tried to play our entire relationship as if I was constantly pursuing him, and he said that the bruises I got, I had asked for as part of some ultraviolent roleplay. I kind of wanted to go up there and give him another face full of my forehead, but the presence of the judge and bailiff sufficiently convinced me to reconsider.

  He can rot in prison for all I care.

  As for me, well, the job offers are still coming in. I’m just waiting for the next script that’s going to have that spark—Damian likes to call it “heart,” though he always seems to laugh after using the word.

  Right now, though, I’m heading home.

  The house is quiet when I get there and I just sit out back with a nice, tall Long Island iced tea. I’m hardly settled when some invasive prick decides to move his filthy shadow directly between me and the sun.

  What most people don’t understand is that Damian and I don’t do so well with labels. Well, really, it’s just him that seems to have the issue with it.

  If someone asks if we’re still together, I say yes. If they ask if I’m still Damian Jones’s girlfriend, I say no.

  In the end, really, it was my choice.

  After that day in the front seat of my car when dumbass couldn’t find his fucking tongue to speak, I insisted that we stop thinking of or referring to each other as boyfriend or girlfriend or significant other or any of that. Even the term “relationship” is used a little sparsely around the house.

  Once the words changed, Damian stopped having such a problem when it came time to move on to the next level. His presence here and now is testament enough of that.

  In normal people terms, Damian and I are about the equivalent to people in a serious relationship who live together, but in our terms, we’re roommates.

  “Saw the show,” he says, “you did great.”

  I sigh. “You know,” I tell him, “if you’re going to blow smoke up my ass at least do the legwork beforehand.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asks.

  “The show doesn’t come on until 10 o’clock,” I tell him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “but I’ve seen enough of your performances that I’m going to stick with what I said. Call it a preemptive compliment.”

  “Where’s Danna?” I ask.

  “She’s off with some guy,” he says. “I don’t remember his name, but he’s the one with all the tattoos and the piercings.”

  “Uh…” I’m trying to think. “That would be Carl, right?”

  “I don’t even know anymore,” he says. “After she decided to take her ass off of layaway, it’s gotten impossible to keep track of all her guys.”

  “He seemed like a pretty nice guy when I talked to him,” I tell Damian.

  “I’m sure he is,” Damian says. “I’m sure they all are.” And now I don’t know if he’s joking or not.

  When Damian and I first talked about moving in together, Danna was the first thing that we talked about.

  She and I had gotten off to a bit of a rocky start, but after that day and after that talk show, she and I finally started getting along. Now, whenever shithead (Damian) is out of the house, it’s the two of us, Danna and me.

  I think all she really needed was assurance that I didn’t think I was, neither did I think I would or could, replace Jamie. That was never my goal.

  I never knew Jamie, but I know enough about her to know that she meant a great deal to Damian and Danna, and I have no reason to feel I need to replace her in their memories, not that I could of I had wanted to anyway.

  “What are we doing tonight?” I ask.

  “I thought the three of us might go out tonight,” he says. “I heard about this new seafood restaurant that just opened up downtown and I got us some reservations for later. Does that work?”

  “I hate seafood,” I tell him. “What else do they have?”

  “I think that’s it,” Damian says.

  Damian’s been living here for over a year now and Danna’s been here just as long. At first, he was considering keeping his house as a getaway for Danna, but after the first four months of her never going back to Damian’s old place, he finally decided to let it go.

  In some ways, I do resent Jamie, though I’d never say that to Damian or Danna. She was Damian’s first great love and that’s a hard act to follow, especially considering the horrible tragedy of her death and that of the baby.

  Maybe it’s not resentment so much as it is a wish that Damian had allowed himself to keep some doors open for the future. For one thing, I wouldn’t mind knowing that I might someday get married, but until or unless something drastically changes in the wiring of Damian’s brain, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

  I find myself wondering a lot what Jamie must have been like, and if she’d survived, would she and I be friends? Judging on how Damian and Danna have talked about her in the past, it seems unlikely that Damian and Jamie would have gotten divorced and so, if she’d lived, my arrival on the set of Flashing Lights would have been a lot
different.

  I’m not sure if Damian and I would have hit it off as friends if he was married, but that kind of pondering is simple curiosity.

  “What about Rodolfo’s?” I ask.

  It does bug me when people are late, and Danna has a penchant for forgetting the time when she’s out with someone. Those are about the only spats she and I have anymore, though. I just think it would be good to see her. I feel like she’s been gone on a date for at least the last few weeks.

  “I’ll call her,” he says, “but she’s not going to be too happy about you overriding her restaurant pick.”

  “Oh, so the new seafood place was her idea?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “All right,” I tell him, “let’s go there.”

  “Were you just saying no because you thought I’d picked the place?” he asks.

  “Do you remember what happened last time?” I ask.

  It’s a long story involving a restaurant with experimental food and an eel that wasn’t quite dead. Yeah, after that, he lost the privilege to have an opinion on where to go for dinner.

  “Just because I’ve picked a couple of bad places,” he says, “doesn’t mean that every place I’m going to tell you about is no good.”

  “Granted,” I tell him, “but going with your pick is a gamble, and I could really use the meal. I haven’t had anything to eat today.”

  “Sounds like bad planning,” he says and starts walking away, his phone in his hand, ready to call Danna. “You know,” Damian says, turning around, “I got an interesting call today.”

  “Yeah?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he answers. “It was Dutch. He wanted to know if the two of us would be interested in doing another movie together.”

  “Did he mean the two of us as in you and him or the two of us as in me and you?” I ask, praying for a misunderstanding.

  “The two of us,” he says, “as in me and you.”

  “No,” I answer quickly. “Sorry, and please tell Dutch I say ‘thank you for the offer,’ but I really don’t think I can work with you.”

  “We seemed to do all right the first time,” he says. “It got us together.”

  “Yeah,” I tell him, “and it just as easily could have torn us apart. It almost did, if you remember.”

  “This movie’s different,” he says, as if that has anything to do with anything. “It’s a period piece. They want you to play a woman named…” and he goes on to describe the movie.

  It’s an interesting enough plot, filled with romance and suspense, but with a cerebral, modern edge to it.

  The longer Damian talks, the more excited he seems, and I do feel kind of bad when he gets to the end of his spiel and I simply repeat my answer, “No.”

  We haven’t worked together since Flashing Lights, and as much as I love the man, I really don’t think us working together and living together would end up being a good idea.

  “Okay,” he says. “If you’re not into it, you’re not into it. I will say, though, that my agent called Academy Awards for the leading male and the leading female roles, and if we were to do this thing together, that would be—”

  “Yeah,” I interrupt. “That would be us, I get it. I remember the last time someone in your family called an award, and if I’m not mistaken, you didn’t even get nominated for Lights, did you?”

  “I was just trying to get in your pants,” he says.

  “Well, it worked, I guess,” I tell him. “If you ignore just about everything else that’s happened since we’ve met, you can absolutely thank your calling your award for our relationship.”

  “It wasn’t that bad of a movie,” he says.

  “I never said it was a bad movie,” I tell him. “I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s a good idea for the two of us to work together.”

  “Fine,” he says. “I’ll let my agent know.”

  Damian and Danna found it useful to compartmentalize their relationship so that, for anything work-related, Damian talks to her and refers to her as his agent. For everything else, she’s still his twin sister.

  You know, the funny thing is that the two of them really don’t look all that much alike.

  Damian walks off and calls Danna and I just take another sip of my Long Island iced tea. By the time he comes back, I’ve almost finished the drink.

  “So, I don’t know if you remember my old assistant Kieran,” Damian says as he nears me again, “but he just got his first director job.”

  “Good for him,” I reply.

  “I guess,” Damian says. “I always thought the guy was kind of an idiot, but maybe he just hadn’t found his calling yet.”

  “Is Danna going to be joining us for dinner?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Apparently, her date isn’t going so well, so she’s on her way home now.”

  “Oh no, trouble with the pincushion?” I ask.

  “She didn’t say exactly what happened,” Damian says. “She just said that she left him rolling on the floor after she gave him a knee to the groin.”

  “Your sister kind of scares me,” I tell him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “me, too.”

  I finish up my drink and we head inside.

  I’ve grown to really care for Danna, but there’s a very specific reason that I’m eager to talk to her. Along with being Damian’s agent, she’s my agent, too.

  The idea was Damian’s, originally, but Danna and I both rejected it then out of hand. It wasn’t until we got together alone a few weeks later that we actually started to take the arrangement seriously.

  There are still offers coming in all the time, but I have, very recently, been informed about a job that I think would fit my abilities remarkably well. The trick is going to be getting Damian to leave the two of us alone for five seconds so Danna and I can talk about it.

  I pop into the bathroom and take a quick look at myself in the mirror, but Late Night with the Stars did a pretty damn good job making me look absolutely sumptuous.

  Danna gets home and I try to talk to her, but Damian walks in, interrupting us. When I tell him that it’s professional business with my agent, he pulls up a chair.

  He’s not dumb, but sometimes Damian isn’t very smart.

  Danna and I agree to talk later, but that doesn’t happen until we’re at the restaurant and Danna “accidentally” spills her water on Damian’s lap. He goes off to the restroom to dry off and Danna leans toward me.

  “This is what you really want to do?” she asks. “They need a firm answer pretty fast or else they’re going to start making other calls.”

  “Yeah,” I tell her, “let’s do it. I heard the synopsis and I just knew that I had to be in this movie.”

  “Save that for the interviews,” she says, spearing a piece of broccoli with her fork.

  Danna’s not big on enthusiasm.

  “You don’t think there’ll be any fallout if I take the part?” I ask.

  “How should I know?” she asks.

  “Well, you’re my agent,” I tell her. “Isn’t that part of your job?”

  “That,” she says, “is most certainly not part of my job.”

  “Remind me what I pay you for again?” I ask.

  “I get you exposure, give you a bargaining chip, and I’m easy on the eyes,” she says. “I think any one of those is worth my fee. You people really don’t pay me enough.”

  “We’re both paying you 15 percent,” I tell her. “That’s really not bad.”

  “I guess,” she says, and Damian comes back to the table.

  “I always get a little nervous when I leave the two of you alone to talk,” he says.

  “What do you think we’re going to do?” she asks. “Do the end around and scam you out of a role—ow!”

  My toes hurt a bit and I feel a little bad about kicking her, but without any calls having been made yet, I’d really like to wait before I tell Damian the news.

  I wonder if we’ll celebrate tonight the way we usu
ally do when one of us lands a hot role.

  Dinner is reasonably uneventful, but Damian keeps shifting his gaze between Danna and I as he tries to figure out just what we’re up to.

  “Why don’t I make that call so we can talk about this?” Danna asks.

  “Fine by me,” I tell her.

  “Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Damian says.

  Danna excuses herself and takes a walk outside to make her phone call, and I’m running my foot up Damian’s calf, wondering how far he’s going to let me get before he scoots back.

  He doesn’t.

  When I get up to his knee, I use it to slip my shoe off my foot and I give him a touch of quick, covert pleasure before I pull my foot back and kick my fallen shoe toward me.

  “You know,” I tell him, “that might be a pretty long phone call.”

  Damian smiles and says, “You think?”

  “It’s hard to say,” I tell him. “Sometimes she’s quick like a bunny. Other times, she’s on the horn for hours trying to work out the details, but either way, I bet we could slip into the ladies’ room and back before—”

  “So I talked to Chet,” Danna says, startling me as she returns to the table, “he said the role’s yours if you want it.”

  “Congratulations!” Damian says.

  And this is where it gets a little awkward.

  “Yeah, about that,” I tell him. “Listen, I took that role you told me about by the pool.”

  “You’re in?” he asks. “That’s fantastic! I’m telling you, it’s going to be a good thing, us working together.”

  “That’s the thing,” I tell him. “I still feel really strongly that the two of us should keep our projects separate.”

  The childlike excitement drains from his face.

  “You’re telling me that you’re taking a role in the movie that I told you about and I’m not allowed to take the role that I was offered in that same movie because you want to keep our projects separate?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I tell him, “pretty much.” I turn toward Danna and ask, “Have either of you had the dessert here? I’m not totally full, but I’m close enough that if I’m going to have anything else, it’s going to have to be really worth it.”