Grin and Beard It (Winston Brothers #2)

by Penny Reid

  Sienna: You have no selfies on your phone? Seriously? None at all?

  Jethro: Nope.

  Sienna: You are the only human in the world with a smart phone and no selfies.

  Jethro: I’m pretty sure Drew has none on his phone either.

  Sienna: Drew doesn’t count. Ashley said he reads poetry to her. He gets a free pass.

  Jethro: Is this your way of telling me to read poetry to you?

  Sienna: No! Not at all!

  Sienna: I want you to read poetry to me. this is my way of telling you to read poetry to me.

  “Who are you texting?” Marta asked from behind the couch, startling me.

  I glanced over the back of the sofa where I was sitting. She was at my shoulder reading my screen. I immediately pressed the phone to my chest.

  “Marta. Don’t read my text messages.”

  “Why can’t I see? Who is it?”

  “You can’t see because it’s an invasion of privacy, you weirdo.”

  She gave me a patronizing look. “You know you have no privacy.”

  Marta was referring to my Cloud backup account being hacked three years ago and how hundreds of my pictures had been made public. Unfortunately for the gossip pages, the most risqué image they found was me in a two-piece bathing suit one of my college friends had taken and texted to me. The media—we’re talking CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, et. al.—had spent months debating whether or not my waistline was healthy or attractive.

  Meanwhile, I was turning down dicks—both figurative and literal dicks—left and right. I should note that some of the literal dicks weren’t attached to figurative dicks, which was nice. I went on a number of promising dates, but work always got in the way, and then my movies were hitting records. Finding dates with non-figurative dicks became increasingly difficult after that.

  I don’t know what the media ultimately decided about my chances of dying alone and sexually starved because my tummy lacked a six-pack. I was too busy being happy with my body and making blockbusters.

  You know, crying myself to sleep on my big pile of money.

  “Just because it’s happened in the past,” I continued to clutch the phone to my chest, “invasion of privacy is never okay. Would you want me looking at your personal messages?”

  “No. But I’m not a household name. You can’t expect the same level of privacy as everyone else. People are interested in you. If you want to maintain this level of success, you have to expect some invasion of privacy. You know this.”

  We’d had this conversation one hundred times, but it had never started with her being the one spying.

  “Yes. I understand that. But you’re not just my manager. You’re my sister, and I expect more from you.”

  Marta had the decency to look mildly ashamed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have looked. Now, are you going to tell me who you’ve been texting?”

  I smiled, unable to stop myself, because I’d been texting Jethro.

  Too happy to think about how Marta might react, I announced, “I met someone.”

  Marta’s eyebrows bounced high on her forehead. “In Tennessee?”

  “Yes!”

  She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes losing focus like she was going through a file drawer inside her brain. “Is it Tom? Are you two back together?”

  “No. No, no, no.”

  “Ken? Because that could work, especially with the promotional tour for the film coming up.”

  “No, Marta. My guy isn’t an actor.”

  “Is it Joe?”

  “Who?”

  “The junior executive producer. You met him at the casting event.”

  “No.” I had no idea who she was talking about. I knew the producing team, because they’d stopped by the set last week, and none of them were named Joe. “I don’t even. No. It’s nothing like that. He’s a park ranger.”

  “Who is?”

  “My guy. He’s a wildlife ranger. He works at the national park.” I scrolled through my text messages until I found the picture of him next to the cage and showed it to my sister.

  She stared at the image like it confused her, and then suddenly she laughed.

  I watched her loss of composure for a full minute, because now I was confused. I even checked the picture to make sure I hadn’t zoomed in on the bear. Nope. The screen displayed Jethro’s handsomest face.

  “Oh, Sienna. You’re hilarious.” She was holding her stomach, shaking her head.

  “What? Why is this funny?” For once I didn’t like the sound of someone laughing.

  Marta wiped her eyes, her laughter becoming short bursts of chuckles. “What?”

  “I said, why is this funny?”

  My sister blinked at me, waited, like she expected me to deliver a punchline. When I didn’t, all humor fled from her features. “Oh my God, you’re serious.” She grabbed the phone and looked at the screen again, her face grimacing in horror. “You’ve got to be kidding me with this. Oh . . . Oh my God. What is this picture?”

  She turned the phone toward me and pointed at Jethro’s avatar, the photo I’d taken with his phone of us making out on the porch. He’d sent it to me so I could make it his avatar as well.

  “It’s us. Kissing. You see, Marta, when a boy likes a girl, it’s this thing they do with their lips—”

  “He is all over you. Who took this picture?”

  “I did.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. I took it with his phone and then he texted it to me.”

  She stared at me blankly, in a way that reminded me of a bomb about to detonate. But when she spoke she did so in an eerily calm tone. “You’re telling me that the park ranger has this picture of the two of you on his phone? And you took it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Marta stared at me like I’d lost my mind. “Are you trying to ruin your career? What is going on here? Do you need a vacation so badly that you’re sabotaging yourself?”

  “You need to calm down.” I swallowed past a thick knot of something uncomfortable in my throat. Marta’s assessment was mostly wrong, but part of it rang with uncomfortable truth. Maybe part of me—a very small part of me—saw Jethro and a life with him as an escape from everything I hated about being a celebrity. Maybe.

  But so what? If being with a man I adored gave me the impetus to change my life for the better, gave me the strength to plot a new course, then where was the harm in that?

  “Calm down? When he sells it to TMZ along with all the sordid—fake—details of your love affair, don’t expect me to clean this up.”

  I snatched the phone away, a weird mixture of embarrassed and angry heat slithering up my neck. “What is wrong with you?”

  “What is wrong with me? You think you’re dating a park ranger. In Tennessee! How do you think people are going to feel about that?”

  “Who cares?”

  “You should care.”

  “No. I shouldn’t. I absolutely shouldn’t care.” And I believed this. My mantra since the success of my first film had been: Never care about media opinion. Work hard. Do what’s right.

  But Marta cared. And more frequently than I wanted to admit, her caring had the habit of affecting my career choices. Her caring was why I hadn’t yet taken a vacation. Ultimately it was my decision, but the thought of letting her down had been unbearable.

  Until now. Until I had something other than myself to fight for.

  I wasn’t sure whether I was more concerned about disappointing my eldest sister or my manager. Sometimes I forgot who she was most to me. Perhaps she forgot, too.

  “How can you say that?” She looked like she wanted to strangle me.

  “Because if I allowed myself to care about what the talking heads were saying, I would be horribly unhappy and nowhere near as successful as I am now.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she ground out angrily, marching away from me toward her desk.

  “It’s not ridiculous. It’s true.” I followed her acr
oss the room. “They call me the fat funny lady, Marta. I’m plus-sized at a size fourteen, which—whatever, I don’t care about the label, plus-sized is fun-sized—but this business hates that I’m average-sized and successful. They hate that I’m a woman and write funny movies.”

  “We are not average-sized for film, Sienna. We are big. We are fat. Pretending we’re not fat doesn’t make it so.”

  I ignored her spiteful comment. My sister had always struggled against her natural shape and I knew her size—our size—was a sore spot for her. I’d always hoped to show her through embracing my gifts that she didn’t need to measure herself against society’s silly mandates.

  “But we are average for the US. Size fourteen is the average. You can’t read an article about me without the writer bringing up my audacity for not caring, criticizing me for not starving myself. So you think I should listen to that crap?”

  Marta lifted her voice over mine before I finished speaking. “You think you’re successful because you don’t care? Well guess what, you’re successful because I care. Because I push you. I am the only reason you are taken seriously. You would be nothing if it weren’t for me.”

  I flinched, my ears ringing in the sudden silence. I couldn’t be more surprised if she’d slapped my face.

  Seeing my expression, or maybe realizing what she’d just said, Marta covered her hands with her face and released a loud exhale. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

  I ignored her apology and presented the facts as I saw them. “You’re wrong. I am successful because I don’t care about media opinion. If I cared then I wouldn’t be writing comedy film scripts, because women aren’t as funny as men.”

  “Sienna—”

  “I wouldn’t be acting in film, because actresses are a size zero and five foot two.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “I wouldn’t have won an Academy Award for best actress, because only white women—usually named Meryl Streep—win that award. And never for a comedy role.”

  “You’ve made your point.”

  “Every step of the way I’d been scolded for being happy with myself. How dare I be happy with who I am, my size, the color of my skin, that I can make both men and women laugh. So you think I’m going to let you or anyone else make me feel ashamed about Jethro?”

  “His name is Jethro?” Her tone held a worried edge. “Really? Couldn’t you at least have messed around with a park ranger named Chris or Carter? It has to be a Jethro?”

  I slow blinked because I was angry. I waited a full five seconds, simmering in my temper until I had control over it, before responding with forced calmness. “Yes. It has to be Jethro. And I love his name. And we’re not messing around. We’re falling for each other. I’m halfway in love with him already.”

  Marta looked at me, just looked at me, her expression one of frustrated helplessness and begrudging acceptance. So I looked at her in return, daring her to push me on this. I understood she believed she had my best interest at heart. But she didn’t. My best interests, my career, my success? Of course, yes.

  My heart? Obviously not.

  “Fine. We will . . . I guess we’ll talk about this later.” My sister glanced at her watch, then leveled me with a dispassionate glare. “You’ll be late for your flight if you don’t leave soon.”

  I met her stare straight on. We engaged in an old-fashioned stare down. I half expected a tumbleweed to blow across her office.

  She broke the silence and eye contact first. “Sienna, it’s time for you to go. You can glare at me later.”

  “Okay. I’ll go.” I nodded but needed to clarify one point. “However, you should know, the only way we’re talking about Jethro later is if you’re ready to apologize and be excited for me. Otherwise we’re not talking about him at all.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.”

  ― Mahatma Gandhi, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World

  ~Sienna~

  On Monday morning, when Jethro picked me up, he was distracted.

  And not a good, happy distracted. He was troubled. I sensed it in the way he smiled as he approached the porch, swiftly kissed me good morning when I met him halfway, held my hand tightly as we walked to his truck.

  He opened the door for me as usual. I climbed up, worried something new had happened since we’d last texted, something that had him rethinking the progress we’d made on Friday. Unlike all last week, Cletus wasn’t present. It was just the two of us. I spotted my Hello Kitty mug in the cup holder, but when I reached for the mug I found it empty.

  And so I worried my lip, feeling gun-shy because the last time we’d been alone in the car on the way to the set he’d broken things off.

  As soon as Jethro pulled onto the main road I blurted, “If you’re going to break up with me again I wish you would just say so, but I wish you wouldn’t because—as I’ve already established—I really like you and think you’re making a mistake.”

  Jethro turned wide, confused eyes on me. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Are you going to call things off again?”

  “No . . . why? What happened?”

  I hesitated. The argument with my sister happened, but it didn’t affect my relationship with Jethro and wasn’t really pertinent to this conversation.

  Being happy with oneself and pandering to no one was the quickest way to scare the hell out of people. And right now, Marta was scared of me. I endeavored to shrug off the persistent weight of unpleasantness that had been plaguing me since leaving my sister yesterday. She would come around, mostly because I would give her no choice.

  I answered honestly. “Nothing happened. Did anything happen with you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So we’re still in agreement? We’re still a dating couple who are not temporary?”

  “That’s correct.” He grinned like he enjoyed hearing the words out loud.

  I released a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness. Because I was about to get Mexican mad.”

  “What’s Mexican mad?”

  “Same as regular mad, just with me speaking in Spanish so I could call you an asshole without you knowing. You would suspect, but you wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh.” He nodded as though digesting this information. “Then why don’t you just call it Spanish mad then?”

  “Because Mexican Spanish is different than Castilian Spanish—Spanish from Spain. Just like Dominican Spanish is different than Cuban Spanish, or Venezuelan Spanish, or Costa Rican Spanish. The Spanish I would use to curse you, should the need arise, would be of the Mexican variety.”

  “Ah, I get it. In Tennessee we have our own way of speaking, idioms that don’t make any sense to the rest of the English-speaking world.”

  “Like what?” I was all ears. I loved this kind of stuff.

  “Well, let’s see . . .” He shifted in his seat as we stopped at the light, his eyes moving over me. “My momma used to get mad and say, ‘Well that just dills my pickle!’”

  This made me grin. “Did she really?”

  “Yep.” Jethro nodded once, a rumbly chuckle making his shoulders shake. “Cletus also says it sometimes.”

  Now I laughed. “That fits him somehow. My new goal in life is to get your brother to say those words.”

  “He plays banjo in a band and is real judgmental of people who can’t sing. This one time he said, about a fella who was trying to jam with them, ‘He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.’”

  I snort laughed. “See that one would translate well in any language. Speaking as someone who can’t sing, that’s mean, but it’s also funny.”

  “It is mean.” Jethro turned his attention back to the road and made a right. “But then, Cletus is kind of mean.”

  I studied Jethro’s profile, thinking about his assessment of his brother. Cletus didn’t strike me as mean. Clever, perceptive, odd—yes. Mean? No.

/>   “I don’t think he’s mean.”

  Jethro gave me a sideways look. “Yeah, well, you didn’t grow up with him. When he was a kid, he was really mean. Used to make other students cry.” He paused, obviously lost in a memory, and then added, “He use to make his teachers cry, too.”

  “But that was when he was younger.”

  “So?”

  “So, don’t you think it’s a little unfair to judge your siblings now for labels assigned to them when they were kids?”

  Jethro’s easy smile morphed into a thoughtful one, and he raised an eyebrow at me, like he found this concept intriguing but didn’t quite understand enough to agree or disagree with my point.

  So I explained. “Growing up, I was the funny one.”

  “What?”

  “I was the clown. That’s all I was. My oldest brother was the artist. My other brother was the disappointment. My sister Maya was the beautiful one, and Rena was the smart one. Marta was the serious one. I was the clown.”

  Now he looked vaguely dismayed. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means people expected me to be funny, because I was funny when I was a kid. But they never expected me to be anything else—smart, serious, beautiful, creative, or disappointing—I was just funny. And if I wasn’t funny, well then they assumed I wasn’t feeling well.” I glanced around our surroundings, realized he’d taken us on a detour. “Where are we going?”

  He must’ve been absorbed in our conversation or his resultant thoughts on the matter, because he blinked a few times and glanced at the road like he was surprised by where we were.

  “Oh, I wanted to pick up coffee before we went in. We have plenty of time.”

  “Good plan.” Now I understood why my mug had been empty. “Anyplace in particular?”

  “Daisy’s.” He paired the single word with a sly grin.

  Immediate and thrilling anticipation had me smiling like an idiot and leaning forward in my seat. “Really?”

  “Have you had a doughnut yet?”

  I shook my head vehemently. “No. No, I haven’t. I’ve had none of Daisy’s doughnuts.”

  “Then this’ll be a treat.”

  I stopped myself from bouncing in my seat. Since relating my Daisy doughnut fantasy to Jethro some weeks ago, where I imagined he would lick the smudge of frosting from the corner of my mouth, the fantasy had grown more delectably scandalous. Frosting on nipples—both his and mine—may have been involved. It wasn’t even about the doughnut or the frosting.