That’s how we’d come to be sitting at a small table in front of the oversized front window at Maya, a Yucatan style Mexican restaurant in Topanga Canyon. It being one of Sarah’s favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants, I never would have suggested it for our fake date, but it turned out The restaurant we were heading to now was one Jillian had been going to for years. She knew the owners so it ended up being the perfect place for our fake dates. This was the third time we’d been back since that initial meal a couple of weeks prior. One blogger had taken to calling it our “secret hideaway in the hills.”
Jillian took a sip of her beer. Smiling for the cameras we knew were hidden just out of sight, she said, “Murray asked me to ask you to be a little less hands on during these dates.”
I legitimately laughed out loud because her hand currently rested atop my open palm, while her fingers rubbed small circles over the pulse point of my wrist. Taking a drink of my own beer, I responded, also smiling, “Pot meet kettle.”
She dragged her hand away and raised her arms to wrap her hair in a messy bun. She used the movement as an excuse to scan the parking lot to see if we were still being watched. “Only two left,” she remarked, arching her back and tossing her arms out in a wide stretch. “That little exchange should make for some lovely photos.”
“Yeah, photos that are going to make the sainted Murray want to break my fingers or shoot off my kneecaps.”
She waved her hand away. “Don’t even worry about it. He wouldn’t know how to shoot a gun even if you put it in his hands and gave him instruction.”
“I notice you don’t say anything about my fingers.” I shoved a tortilla chip topped with scallop ceviche into my mouth.
“That’s just Murray. He’s actually okay with all this. I just think he’d feel guilty if he didn’t say something about how often you’re photographed touching me.”
“The man has impeccable knife skills. Since I’d prefer not to test your theory that he’s okay with it, I’ll try to be a little less handsy.”
Jillian cast a shrewd look my way. “Speaking of significant others …”
I liked Jillian well enough and barring anything dramatic, we’d probably stay friends once the series wrapped, but as a rule I didn’t talk much about my private life with people I didn’t know. Even though we’d spent practically all our waking hours together the last couple of months, we were still feeling each other out. I didn’t know if I was ready to admit to her that things weren’t too hot between Sarah and me at the moment.
“Yeah?” I shoved another chip in my mouth. If I was chewing, I figured, I wouldn’t have to speak.
She raised an eyebrow, totally catching on to my stalling tactic. “Well, spit it out. How is she?”
“Sarah’s …” I exhaled scratched at my abs, uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was heading. “Let’s just say things are tense right now.”
Jillian took another sip. “I wondered. She seems tense.”
Her stare was guileless but I didn’t know if I could trust her. When she didn’t continue, I realized she was waiting for me to fill her in on why Sarah was so stressed out. Instead I employed evasive maneuvers. “She’s pretty busy, working a ton of hours. I think Broderick had her driving all over the three different counties on Wednesday. She said she didn’t get home until after midnight.”
Jillian’s eyebrows twitched and she notched her head to the side, scrutinizing me. That’s when I realized what I’d inadvertently revealed. Shit.
“And she had to tell you this because …?”
I blew out a breath and chugged half my beer before answering. “Like I said, things are tense.”
Setting her bottle on the table, she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m just going to say it and if that pisses you off, then so be it.”
I looked out the window, hoping she would just drop it. “I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“That’s obvious, but is also why it needs to be said.”
I dragged my eyes back to her. “Fine, out with it.”
“Am I to assume the reason Sarah had to tell you she didn’t get home until after midnight is because you weren’t home when she got in?”
Mimicking her body language, I crossed my arms as well. My eyes hard and my jaw clenched, I nodded.
“And this was on Wednesday?”
Another nod.
“I know for a fact you were done by 10 p.m. on Wednesday. I know this because that was the night we walked the press line for the opening of that photography exhibit and at ten-oh-five you told me you were heading home. Now, it might not be any of my business where you went afterward, but that means you lied to me and it sounds like you’ve been lying to Sarah too. Personally, I couldn’t care less if you tell me tall tales from now until the end of time, but I like Sarah – she’s a sweet girl who’s getting a raw deal – and if you’re fucking around on her, you need to stop.”
We engaged in a challenge-filled staring contest for a few heartbeats before her eyes softened and she reached across the table, entreating me to listen. “She loves you Cameron. If you’ve found someone else or are having second thoughts about asking her to marry you, you have to tell her.” Her eyes took on a momentary, faraway look before zeroing in on me again. Dragging her hand back to her side of the table, her voice assumed a frosty air. “Trust me, if you’re cheating on her while she’s planning on marrying you, you’ll destroy her.”
I gave her a few seconds to settle her emotions and then asked, “Murray?” I wondered if that’s why after five years together they still hadn’t gotten married. Then again, I’d asked Sarah to marry me after less than seventy-two hours together so what did I know about what the correct amount of time was to date before you popped the question?
“God, no!” When she laughed her eyes cleared. “Actually … Murray’s best friend. Well, former best friend.”
“Sounds like an interesting story,” I remarked hoping to focus the conversation on her love life instead of mine.
“It is,” she answered, “and I’ll share it with you some time but right now we’re talking about you.”
Shit. So we were.
“It’s nothing like that,” I admitted. Draining the rest of my beer, I added, “The fact is it’s all this.” I gestured between us. “The only people I can talk about this with are my parents and my best friend, Mike.” I dragged my hand through my hair and, letting it drop to the table in front of me, looked out the window. “About Sarah orchestrating this whole charade.”
Jillian cackled and broke in. “That’s absurd. She didn’t orchestrate anything.”
“I assure you, she did.”
“And I assure you she didn’t.” The hard glint in her eyes dared me to challenge her. Which of course I did.
“Look Jillian. I have no idea what you think you know, but before that meeting with the PR team, Sarah called me into the office early to convince me to go along with Aerin’s proposal. We’d just gotten engaged and there she was, willingly signing us up for this whole farce without even trying to convince Broderick there was another way.” I blew out an angry breath and rolled my eyes. Then, shaking my head, I spoke with a somewhat more subdued tone, “She didn’t just go along with it. She fucking extorted me to as well.”
To Jillian’s credit, she didn’t bat an eyelash at that one. Undaunted, she continued, “I’m not going to ask about that because that’s between Sarah and you and I don’t need to know those details, but I am going to tell you something else and I need you to listen until I’ve finished.”
“Yeah, fine. Whatever.” As far as I was concerned she could talk until she was blue in the face. I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would make me change my feelings.
“This whole fauxmance wasn’t Broderick’s idea. It was mine.”
Well, anything but that.
I glared at her. “Explain.”
She huffed. “I was about to but you interrupted, which you
said you wouldn’t do.”
I gnashed my teeth to keep from telling Jillian to fuck off. While my first inclination was to storm out, there were two irrefutable truths staring me in the face. One, she’d driven us out here which meant I had no way of leaving and it’d take Uber forever to come get me, and two, I needed to hear the rest of her story. It wouldn’t change the fact that Sarah had agreed to this farce before talking it over with me, but I’d spent the last several weeks fearing she’d been in on it from the beginning. I hadn’t been sure what was worse: that she’d gone along with it or that in doing so she’d made me doubt so much about her. About us.
When I kept my mouth shut, Jillian inhaled and spilled her story.
“So, some of my reasons for concocting this scheme in the first place are my own and I don’t think it’s imperative that I share them with you as they don’t impact the situation outside of the fact that they served as my initial inspiration.” The sentence came out in one rushed speech, her words streaming together without pause or break. “Suffice it to say, it was my agent who approached Broderick a couple of days before the meeting with the idea to have us fall in love during production. Naturally, he loved the idea.” She used her fingers to make air quotes around the “fall in love” part of her statement. “You and I have been at this long enough to recognize that so many relationships in Hollywood are nothing more than cleverly arranged PR opportunities, so I didn’t think there’d be any harm in us doing the same if it meant we’d get better publicity out of it. The studio can only pump out so many behind-the-scenes teasers or trot out the author for Q&A’s before the fans clamor for something more, something personal about its stars. And if their wanting more means wanting more of me, I didn’t think that’d be a problem.”
“Except it was,” I remarked. “A huge one.”
“Alright, look. I concede this has had unintended consequences for you, but I honestly didn’t know you were in a serious relationship when we approached Broderick with the idea and he never once said a word about it. Not to lay the blame on you or anything, but you don’t exactly have a lot of information out there to draw from. Your Twitter handle is more Seinfeld and Star Trek retweets than anything, and you never, not once in any of your Instagram pictures, referred to Sarah as your girlfriend.”
That was true, but only because she hadn’t been. “Do the words ‘my best gal’ mean nothing to you?” I asked instead because even though I hadn’t wanted to tip my hand, I’d always been more effusive toward Sarah than my other female friends. I’d taken to calling her “my best gal” one night when I’d almost slipped and called her “my love.” It’d been a garbled, awkward save but people had been drinking so it’d gone unnoticed.
“Come on Cameron!” Jillian exclaimed. “You were giving her a noogie in that picture. That hardly screams, ‘this woman is the love of my life and I’m banging her senseless.’”
I chuckled because yeah, I had been giving her a noogie. At least in the photo Jillian referenced, but there were plenty of other photos I’d used the phrase to describe Sarah. And while I hadn’t so much as kissed her before that night of margaritas and shots of tequila, I’d definitely fantasized about “banging her senseless” for several months by that point.
Instead of sharing any of this with Jillian, however, I said, “She didn’t know how I felt about her then.”
She rolled her eyes so hard I worried they’d get stuck up inside her skull. “You two with all your angsty secrets. How you managed not to explore the whole friends-with-benefits thing is beyond me. It’s clear to anyone with two eyes in their head you want nothing more than to sequester yourself away with her and have crazy hot monkey sex all day long, stopping only to eat and maybe not even for that.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d taken my fair share of cold showers over the past year in order to keep my lust firmly in check. Up until this nightmare situation came to be, the idea of having Sarah all to myself for days on end sounded like my idea of heaven.
As she continued speaking, Jillian’s eyes went hazy and a slight blush crept up her neck, her cheeks pinkening with what looked like an aroused glow. “I wanted Murray that same way from practically the first moment I saw him,” she muttered, almost as if she hadn’t meant to say the words out loud.
“Wait a minute,” I said, putting two and two together and realizing it didn’t add up to four. “You said he was your fiancé’s best friend? How could you have wanted him while planning on marrying someone else? While mourning the loss of that someone when you found out he was cheating on you?”
The longer this conversation went on, the less I thought Jillian was someone who could be trusted. Between this tidbit and the revelation that she’d been behind the plan to hatch this fake relationship that had basically ruined my life, I believed she was someone well worth steering clear of. How could she have said yes to one man’s proposal while lusting after the poor bastard’s best friend? I didn’t know how they did it in London, but if that was the norm, it sounded just as bad, if not worse, than Hollywood. Actually, scratch that. It sounded exactly like Hollywood.
My accusation coming across loud and clear, Jillian glared at me. “It’s not what you think. I loved Aidan and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but he was my first love – my first everything—” she placed extra emphasis on that one word so I wouldn’t miss her meaning “—and I was young. Too young, probably.” She shook her head to dislodge some hidden thought and continued. “When I met Murray we had an instant, indescribable connection and even though I thought he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen, I never let it be more than just a fantasy. I absolutely never would have acted on my desire for him. Aidan changed that though when I walked in on him having sex with a waitress who worked at his restaurant. Stunned, I showed up at Murray’s flat in the pouring rain, crying my eyes out. He opened the door, took one look at me, and kissed the sad right out of me.” She smiled a satisfied little grin. “What can I say? We’ve been together ever since.”
“And that was five years ago?”
She hesitated before answering, stared at me as if trying to discern if there was some hidden “gotcha” behind my question. There wasn’t, I was just curious.
After a few prolonged moments, she spoke. “I’m 28 years old and in ten years I’ve been in exactly two relationships. So you see, I do know a little something about friends with hidden secrets and desires.” She shrugged and her eyes turned sad for a moment but they cleared just as quickly. “If it hadn’t been for my relationship with Aidan, I probably would have shagged Murray the first chance I had. In the end, it’s probably better things transpired the way they did since if that had happened, we probably wouldn’t still be together.”
She paused, lost in thought. “Come to think of it, maybe it is better you and Sarah didn’t act on your impulses either. You’ve been able to build a relationship that’s so much stronger than it could have been if sex had been on the table from the beginning.”
Jillian exhaled, smiled broadly, and changed the subject. “Anyway, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend and Broderick didn’t say anything about it either when we had our meeting. Given both those things, I assumed – clearly mistakenly – that being an unknown yourself, you’d want to get as much extra publicity from this job as you could and, me not being a hideous beast—” she batted her eyelashes playfully “—you would be down for a little Hollywood fauxmance.”
When she explained it that way, our “relationship” sounded harmless. Too bad it had proven anything but.
“That’s all well and good, but I wasn’t single and this has had very real consequences for me. You might be okay with pretending to be with someone other than Murray, but every minute sitting here with you is one more minute I’ve gone against everything I believe it.”
Jillian’s eyes went dark and her lips flattened. “Remember that whole ‘I have my reasons for doing this that have nothing to do with publicity’ thing I mentioned at the beginning o
f this conversation?”
“Sure. What of it?”
“Despite what you must think, this isn’t a game to me.” She closed her eyes and exhaled. “Okay, maybe it is. But not how you think. Let’s just say I’m not exactly loving being your fake girlfriend either when my own very real boyfriend is back in London perfectly okay with sharing me with another man, even if it’s just make believe.”
The fierce glint of her eye told me there was much more to her story than she’d let on. That’s when it hit me. “You’re doing this to make Murray jealous!” I laughed cynically. “Holy Christ, you’re a fucking piece of work.”
Shaking my head at my stupidity and willful ignorance, I pulled out my phone to order an Uber. It might take them an hour or more to get out to Topanga, but I didn’t want to sit here with Jillian for one more minute pretending to be on a romantic date. I’d fulfill my end of this devil’s bargain since it technically was good for my career, but I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the sick game she played with her own relationship. As it was, my own was already in the shitter because of the bargain we’d all made; I didn’t need to be party to the denigration of Jillian and Murray’s as well. They could do that on their own, thankyouverymuch.
“Fuck Jillian,” I said, waiting for the app to tell me how much longer I’d have to stay with her. Shit. Thirty minutes. Shoving the phone into my pocket, I leaned over the table and whispered angrily, “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
When several other diners’ heads pivoted our direction to see what all the commotion was about, I realized I was coming dangerously close to yelling at her so I took a few quick breaths and lowered my voice. “Do you know Broderick has Sarah calling bloggers to feed them fake stories about our blossoming romance?” I clenched my fists and then slowly loosened them, counting to ten as I released each finger. “Because of your bright ideas my fiancé has to pimp out stories about how I can’t keep my hands off you.” I ran my hand angrily through my hair. “Fuck, that bastard probably has her coming up with that shit when she’s not running across kingdom come for him.”
Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story Page 20