“But I can’t do that in front of you!”
Um, did I really need to point out that he was going to be doing exactly that even before this whole cockamamie plan? And besides, it wasn’t as if this would be the first time I’ve watched him with other women.
“Cameron Samuel Scott, do you know how many women you’ve kissed in front of me over the years, all the while wishing it was me instead?” With each word I spoke, the volume of my voice rose exponentially until I was screaming. “I’ve done it before, so knowing this needs to be done, I can do it again now.”
He winced and looked away. I wondered if he was remembering all the times he’d brought other women around throughout the years.
“And I’ve watched as you played husband to all sorts of different women, all the while wishing you loved me. But now you’re mine and I don’t have to wish any more. I know when you kiss me it’s for real and what you do on screen is just make believe. It’s just your job.”
Facing me, he said, “I don’t know if I can do it Sarah. I can’t ask you to sit back and watch while the world thinks I’m with someone else. Not when all I want to do is shout from the rooftops how lucky I am to have you.” He rubbed the heel of his hands over his eyes. “I finally have you and now you’re asking me to keep that a secret.”
My heart broke for him. For me. For us. He wasn’t alone in those desires, and while it would be simple if we were other people, we weren’t. We lived in a world where if he defied the studio’s mandate, spell the end of any career he might after this movie. If my eggs were shriveling up, he wasn’t getting any younger either and the reality was there weren’t a lot of leading roles for unknowns. He couldn’t live on commercials or bit roles in made-for-TV movies. If he played this awful game, he could have more money and fame than he’d ever dreamed and we would be set for life.
“I see this playing out two ways. If you give up on this role, because that’s what you’d be doing, you can move home to Ohio and help your dad run the farm. I’d go with you. Or you can do this movie their way and when you eventually do go home, it’s with your head held high. Your dad won’t have to break his back well into his 70s running the farm. The money you get from this trilogy will set your parents up for life. It’ll set us up for life.”
I hated myself for playing dirty like this, but it was for his own good. Once I’d decided to sacrifice my pride for the good of his career, that had been that. He’d accused me of not wanting to fight for us, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I was just playing the long game.
“If you do this, you won’t ever have to compromise again. You’re going to be a huge star and once that happens you can tell Broderick or any other director how it’s going to be, have stipulations built into your contract that prevent them from meddling in your personal life.”
As the words tumbled from my lips, I watched him work through what I was promising in his head.
Sealing the deal for Broderick – and in a roundabout way, our future – I continued. “Once this movie wraps, we’ll go public. We just can’t do it now. They’ll cut you loose and hire the other guy and then it’ll be gone, just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “They’ll do it too, don’t ever doubt that. Broderick is ruthless as hell. He’ll ruin you if you ruin this movie. But don’t think of it like that. This is an opportunity. A difficult one, yes, but in the end, it can work. I promise, I’ll be by your side the whole time. You won’t be alone.”
I felt his resolve weakening as I laid it out.
Once he’d established himself as a leading man, we could be together publicly and he could knock me up and buy all the damn farms in Ohio if that’s what he wanted to do. I was offering him the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and all he had to do was do what he did best: play a part.
When his shoulders slumped in defeat, I knew I’d won, if that’s what you could call this. Because in the short term? I was the loser.
This is all for him, I reminded myself. My sacrifice now ensures our future.
He dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. “I know I’m going to regret this,” he whispered.
And that, my friends, is how I became Cameron Scott’s best-kept secret.
I sat at the far end of the table, only half paying attention to the conversation going on around me. I missing important details I’d probably be asked about later, but Broderick would just have to deal with my distraction since it was his fault for putting me in this position in the first place.
My earlier conversation with Cameron swam through my head. As I’d spun the tale of him skyrocketing to success and setting us up for life, I’d bought into my own bullshit. Now, away from the heat of the moment, I was less sure of what I’d done. I had to remind myself of the end game: a big old farmhouse on acreage in Ohio somewhere (close to his family but not too close), Duke romping through a field dotted with fireflies at twilight while our red-headed kid raced after him, and me sitting on the porch with my easel painting the idyllic scene, while Cameron rocked on the porch swing while he read through a new script.
The more I pictured this fantasy version of our future, I realized I wasn’t only tempting Cameron with visions of what our future could be. I wanted it as much as he did. I was tired of the rat race, so over L.A. and everything we both had to deal with on a daily basis. Once we left, I wouldn’t miss the assholes or the ass kissers. I looked forward to interacting with real, honest people whose sole mission in life wasn’t to wind up on the cover of Us Weekly or People Magazine. People who cared about their neighbors and looked after their own instead of tried to cut them down in an effort to get ahead.
I wanted to see if I had it in me to be an actual artist, not whatever it was I pretended to do with the fits and spurts of painting I did now. And yeah, I wanted those damn kids too. At least I thought I did. Something that was the best parts of the both of us, a part of him that no one else could lay claim too. If that meant a little mini-me or him within a few years, then sign me up.
And that’s what this meeting was about – laying the foundation of Cameron’s career so that all the things he wanted most in life could come to pass. So here we were, the leads on Broderick’s production team, as well as Cameron and Jillian and their agents. Everyone was engaged in idle chit chat and I let the noise wash over me. The lead costumer, Thelma, was telling her assistant about a trench coat she saw in a boutique in Venice that would look great for the scene in the rain storm, while to my left, Broderick was telling Rory, the location scout, about a restaurant he should visit once we were in Vancouver. He was saying the food was great, but the space might also work for a particular scene they’d discussed earlier. Rory remarked he couldn’t wait to get to Canada and it reminded me that his girlfriend, a woman he’d met on Broderick’s last movie, lived just outside the city.
It wasn’t just Rory who’d be happy to get away from L.A. I couldn’t wait to leave this place behind. Once we were all up in Canada I’d be so busy that I wouldn’t have time to think, much less obsess about my personal life. When production got under way, my days would start at five and go until midnight or later if we had a night shoot. Experience told me I’d be so completely exhausted by the time I rolled into bed that I wouldn’t any excess energy left to dwell on the fake romance between my fiancé and his co-star. The downside of being that busy was I didn’t really know how much time I’d have with Cameron once the cameras started rolling.
When the head of PR, Aerin Shandly, walked into the conference room on a noxious cloud of perfume, I almost started choking. It wasn’t that I hated the smell of her perfume, she just wore so damn much of it that I wondered if her nose didn’t work after all her nose jobs. That might have sounded uncharitable but I didn’t like her or the way she treated most of the people in this office. After the stunt Broderick had pulled by not looping in her PR team her ire had turned to me once again, her number one persona non grata. She’d told Broderick numerous times, both via email and phone, that I should never have ha
d anything to do with the casting announcement because as his lowly assistant, I simply wasn’t qualified to handle the task. I didn’t disagree with her, just with how she’d said.
When she breezed past Cameron, I glanced up from my laptop and saw him shift uncomfortably low in his seat, his eyes fixed firmly on the scrap of paper he was folding and refolding on the table in front of him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and I felt his lack of acknowledgement keenly. He was still pissed, but taking his anger out on me wasn’t entirely fair. I was hurting just as bad as he was, if not worse. After all, I’d been the one labeled “unsatisfactory.”
I shifted my gaze and caught Broderick staring at me. As my eyes met his, he tossed a rueful smile my way, followed by a slight shrug of his shoulder that seemed to say, “what are you gonna do?” I was going to punch him in his smug face, is what I was going to do, if he didn’t cut the whole c’est la vie attitude.
“Great, everyone’s here,” Aerin drawled as she situated herself in the chair at the opposite end of the table, and wrapping herself in a false of air of control, as if she owned the room and everyone in it.
I lowered the lid on my laptop and Broderick rolled his eyes. Around me, my colleagues snickered and averted their gaze.
“The meeting was supposed to start twenty minutes ago. Of course we’re all here,” Broderick said, pointing out the fact that she wasn’t the person we’d all been waiting for.
Even though I was pissed as hell at Broderick, I wanted to give him a high five for putting Aerin in her place. She had a habit of acting as if hers was the only opinion that mattered, her schedule the most important. If anyone did anything that could be (mis)construed as gainsaying her, she took great joy in proverbially squashing them like a bug beneath her Jimmy Choos.
“Yes, well, the line at Starbucks was out of control. I finally gave up and just came in. I figured I could send your assistant out for coffee.” She looked at me and raised her right eyebrow.
I slid my eyes to Broderick and waited for him to give me the go ahead. I was not going to jump to her commands, not any more. She might be the conductor for this orchestra of lies, but I had some power too. If I didn’t go along with everything they laid out, all of her planning and scheming would be for naught. Yeah, that’d mean giving up my job, but if I decided that was a price I was willing to pay, I could very easily set fire to her house of cards. Strangely, she hadn’t seemed to realize that yet.
When Broderick nodded almost imperceptibly, I leaned back in my chair and smiled at her. “Sorry, no can do. We ordered coffee for everyone already. The early bird gets the worm and all that.” I smiled at her insincerely and then dropped my face into a mask of indifference that told her in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t impressed with her late entrance or her demands. I wanted to high-five Broderick again for allowing me this small moment of rebellion, passive aggressive though it may be. The best part of it was she’d never be able to say I’d been outride rude.
She blinked and put on her own false smile. Turning to face my boss, she spoke in a whiny, sing-song voice meant to be playful and coaxing. “Broderick, can you please have your assistant run out and grab me a coffee? I was up all night putting together this emergency plan and I’m running on fumes.” She bared perfectly white, perfectly aligned teeth under Restalyne lips and the gesture meant to be a smile came out as a grimace. That confirmed it. Since the last time I’d seen her she’d had both her lips and her nose done, as well as a recent visit to the Botox man.
Broderick punched a button on the intercom. “Cassie?”
“Yes Broderick?” came the disembodied voice of my cube mate.
“Can you bring Ms. Shandly a coffee please?” He turned to Aerin. “Cream? Sugar?”
“Yes, both. Thank you.” She looked at me with confusion.
Broderick swiveled his seat to face Aerin. “Cassie will bring you coffee from the kitchen. I hope that will suffice because it’s all we’ve got at the moment.”
I lifted my special order extra hot triple grande white mocha and took a long, glorious drink as Aerin shot daggers at me. In a moment of pure insolence, I winked at her over the lid of my cup and her forehead almost twitched in surprise, likely the only movement it was capable of making. I stifled a snide laugh.
Despite her shock, Aerin recovered quickly enough. “Oh, I thought you’d just send … Stacy, is it?” Pointedly, she looked in my direction with a smirk of her red lips. She damn well knew my name but this was her way of making me look unimportant. Everyone here knew it as much as she did.
“Sarah,” Cameron said out of nowhere. He’d been so focused on folding that damn piece of paper and not meeting anyone’s eyes that I wasn’t even aware he’d been paying attention to the exchange. “Her name is Sarah.”
“Oh, right. Sarah.” She turned back to Broderick. “Stacy, Sandy, Sarah … whoever she is, I thought you’d send her. Isn’t she your assistant?”
Several people in the room glanced from Aerin to Broderick and then to me, wondering why she was being so overtly antagonistic toward me. Broderick was known for being anti-authoritarian and therefore not always good at playing well in the sandbox with others, but the studio’s publicity group was the only one he’d ever openly defied. He didn’t like it when people he claimed didn’t understand movies told him how to run his set and over the years that recalcitrance had led to a certain reputation with the agencies the studio regularly worked with. He and Aerin had been butting heads long before I entered the picture, but she seemed to have taken an instant disliking to me, having been openly hostile toward me on more than one occasion. The only difference was today she’d decided to do so publicly and it didn’t appear she was going to pull any of her punches.
“Actually,” Broderick responded, a look of intense concentration crossing his face, “she’s not.”
I knew that look. He was up to something, but I didn’t know if it was good or bad. Suddenly I worried it was bad even though he’d pretty much assured me if I got Cameron on board with the PR plan, my job would be safe. The undertone of that conversation had been if I couldn’t, then it wasn’t. I’d done what he’d asked, hurting the man I loved in the process, so why the hell was he saying I wasn’t his assistant? Shit. Had Cameron gone to him after all and said he wouldn’t do it? Was Broderick going to fire me in front of everyone? My hands started shaking so I gripped my coffee tight, hoping no one would notice now that all eyes were on me. When the cup visibly trembled, I set it down and clasped my hands in my lap.
At least now Cameron was paying attention to something other than that fucking paper triangle he hadn’t stopped staring at since he sat down. Now he shot straight up in his chair and stared at Broderick a menacing glare. And then, after a few seconds, Cameron’s eyes darted to mine for clarification.
I had no more idea of what Broderick was talking about than he did. Quickly, I shook my head to let him know I was just as confused. We weren’t the only people in the room startled by Broderick’s pronouncement. My co-workers shifted in their chairs as they shot questioning looks between me and our boss. I shrugged my shoulders and waited for Broderick to get on with it, my heart racing. Either I still had a job or I didn’t. I was about to find out.
Broderick tossed me a shit-eating grin and winked. I didn’t know what he was about to announce, but at least it meant my job was secure. That reassurance, however, did nothing to slow my beating heart. In fact, in that moment, I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing.
“I was going to wait to make the announcement later this week, but Aerin has forced my hand.” He looked around the room, capturing his audience’s attention while Aerin squirmed in her chair. “I don’t think anyone in this room is brave enough to deny how valuable Sarah has been to me since I stole her from my wife.” He grinned, this time nothing wry or rueful in the gesture. He and I both knew when his wife Shanna was feeling particularly overwhelmed by her various foundations, she openly cursed the day he’d convinced her to let me com
e work for him instead. “Every task I give her, Sarah does with aplomb, even when it’s not technically part of her job description.” He shot a look at Aerin that dared her to countermand that statement. “In fact, I couldn’t do my job nearly as well if it weren’t for her. So, effective immediately, I’m promoting her to Associate Producer.”
He sat back with a satisfied smirk as silent shock passed through the room. Then, covering for my colleague’s stunned surprise, calls of congratulations echoed in the conference room.
I should have been happy to have been promoted, but I couldn’t find it within myself to muster the emotion. Perhaps if the announcement had come in a few weeks after I’d done something noteworthy, deserving of the recognition, I would have been, but I couldn’t help being suspicious of Broderick’s intent. Was this my payment for having talked Cameron into the distasteful PR bargain? If I accepted it, was I complicit in the bribe?
I was good at my job, yes, but Associate Producer good? I didn’t know. Then again, I didn’t actually know what the job entailed since no one at Gramalkin actually had that title. Not to undermine the value I brought to the team, but if Aerin could crow about my lack of PR qualifications, others in the company could just as easily say I wasn’t qualified to do this job either. Since Broderick was part owner of the studio no one would question him publicly, and as the majority share holder, he could pretty much do what he wanted anyhow, but this was a bold maneuver, even for him.
I looked to Cameron and wanted so badly to be able to say all of this to him. I tried to communicate with my eyes how confusing the announcement was, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Instead, he stared down at the paper in his hands as he rotated it end over end in an endless circle, a mean, cynical downward tilt of his lips telling me he was angry. At first I wondered why he’d be angry and then I understood, all too well. Instead of wondering whether this promotion was my payment, he assumed that not only had I accepted the bribe, but that I’d done so willingly. Our relationship in exchange for our careers. My heart sank to my stomach and then both plunged somewhere around my ankles. Ever since Broderick had pulled me into this farce, I’d tried to do right by Cameron but now my boss had inadvertently made me look like scheming bitch. How Cameron could think I’d be party to something like that was a mystery. He knew how I felt about him; how this situation hurt me as much as it hurt him. How he could think me so mercenary broke my heart.
Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story Page 15