by Lisa Ferrari
The valet guys open our doors for us.
I look up at the front of the building. Brilliant purple and red lights spell out CROW BAR, and there is even a black and purple bird.
Did I mention that I’ve always hated clubs? Hated them. They’ve never been my scene. I don’t really drink. Or dance. Or do blow. Or E. Or rave. Or any of that stuff.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
I hear the sarcasm and distaste in my voice, even though I tried to sound neutral.
“You don’t like clubs?”
“I kinda hate them.” I don’t even want to think about the night I met Warcraft Tommy in that dumb little goth club and what happened a month later.
“You’ve never seen a club like this,” Kellan replies. “Besides, we’re not actually here to party. I have a business meeting.”
“Here? Now?”
“Yep. Business deals happen in lots of weird places. It used to be they always happened on a golf course. These days it seems they happen in the gym a lot, too. And in clubs.”
Kellan leads me toward the entrance.
There is a huge, long line of beautiful people waiting to get in, all of them dressed to the nines and all of them stuck behind a red velvet rope.
Kellan and I walk right up to the door.
There is a huge man blocking it. He’s dressed in black and wearing sunglasses. He reminds me of The Mountain from GoT. He smiles, does a cool-bro-handshake-shoulder-bump-no-homo-hug with Kellan and opens the door for us. He flashes me a beautiful, warm smile as we go in and I realize instantly that he’s a giant teddy bear.
Inside, the club is a paradise of beautiful bodies. Guys with their shirts off. Women in bikini tops. No one is drinking alcohol. Everyone seems to be drinking protein shakes and sniffing coke and smoking weed, which I guess are indeed non-caloric drugs.
There’s a swimming pool and a DJ and a beach volleyball pit where four sweaty, hard-bodied guys are playing volleyball. They all have white tape on their fingers.
It’s like Top Gun.
Kellan leads me to a back room where a guy in a bright red suit is guarding the door. He and Kellan chat for a moment, but I can’t hear them over the music.
Red Suit opens the door and we go into a little room. When the door closes, it’s rather quiet. The music is reduced to a thumping bass note. We can actually talk.
There are two guys sitting at a table, talking.
Kellan says hello and introduces me to them. They’re both in the movie business. Rami Levi is a writer-slash-producer and Aaron Abraham is a writer-slash-director, but mostly a director. He says he is an auteur, or at least hopes to be seen as one, hopefully while he’s still alive. They’ve written a script and they want to talk to Kellan about him starring in it.
Wait, what? WHAT? Kellan…a movie star?
Oh wow.
As if he weren’t hot enough already. I don’t think my libido can take it.
Or my ego.
What the F am I doing here?
Calm down, Claire. You’re fine; you have every right to be here.
We sit down on a plush red sectional.
A cocktail waitress comes in. She’s wearing a little black dress and matching heels. And a black bowtie around her bare neck. I feel for her. It’s sexy; but I feel for her.
Rami hands her his credit card and orders a bottle of Dom Perignon.
Wow. This is no ordinary business meeting.
But the club and all the perfect, sexy people already told me that. Good one, Claire.
I’m checking out the room while Rami and Aaron are chatting with Kellan about their script. They’re talking about hiring a writer when I hear my name.
“Claire is a writer,” Kellan says.
“No kidding?” Rami asks. “Maybe we’ll just hire you. How many screenplays have you written?”
“None.”
“Wrong answer,” says Rami.
“But she’s written 13 novels,” Kellan counters. “Writing a novel is a hell of a lot harder than writing a screenplay. We all know that.”
“That’s true,” says Aaron. “I once tried to write a novel. It was utter shite. I had flashbacks and flash-forwards and even a flash sideways. Utter shite.”
“You never told me that,” says Rami. “What was the name of it?”
Aaron looks bashful. “Horny Little Turtle.”
Everyone bursts into laughter.
“Do you have representation?” Rami asks. He’s looking at me.
“You mean, like, an agent?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Hmm. Because with your face, and your caboose, I think we could do something. It’s like the second coming of Kim Kardashian.”
“You should see her shoulders,” Kellan adds.
I’m suddenly mortified. I thought we were talking about writing.
“She’s beautiful,” says Rami, smiling at Kellan. “She has a fresh look, she could be a fresh face. Maybe she’s your costar. We were thinking maybe Michele Rodriguez, Ronda Rousey, Pink, Gina Carano…. But maybe Claire. We need someone tough, you know? Someone authentic, with tattoos and sad eyes, so you really believe that she’s been to hell and back.”
“I’m not tough,” I say. “I studied English Literature. I read all the time. I didn’t grow up on the streets. I grew up in the suburbs. My dad is a dentist and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who worked part time doing demos in grocery stores selling Juicy Juice and Pop Tarts and Bagel Bites after my sister and I got old enough to be left alone. She lost a bunch of money in MLMs and now she makes ten grand a month selling old postcards on ebay. She makes almost as much as my dad does doing drill-and-fills four days a week. And I don’t have any tattoos.”
“Maybe our heroin should be sweet,” says Kellan. “That way, her arc is more profound. She starts out innocent and sweet and comes out the other end hard as nails. If she’s already hard as nails and she winds up hard as nails, there’s no arc. She’s the same at the end as she was at the beginning.”
“That’s true…” says Rami.
“Let’s do a screen test,” says Aaron. He opens a black bag on the floor and pulls out an expensive-looking video camera.
“Wow, that’s a nice camera,” I say.
“Four-K video, babe,” says Aaron. “Set me back about 70 grand but it’s worth it. And it was a tax write-off.”
Suddenly a horrid idea pops into my head. “This isn’t one of those cheap porn movies where you guys pretend to be a casting agency and I have to blow you, is it?”
Kellan sprays Dom Perignon out of his mouth and starts laughing. Aaron and Rami laugh out loud as well.
“No,” says Rami, “but that’s a good idea. No, no, I’m kidding; that’s a horrible idea. No, this is on the level, babe. This is real. We have money. We have financing. We have a script. We have all that stuff. Now we just need principals. Actors. Hopefully, it’s you guys, right? Hopefully, everything works out and we make this picture and you guys are the new ‘It’ couple and everybody makes a pile of dough, maybe some trophies, awards, stuff like that, and everybody’s happy, right?”
Rami pulls two scripts out of his bag and hands one to Kellan and one to me. The edges are curled and the pages well worn.
“Just read the highlighted lines, Claire,” says Rami. “Aaron, you ready?”
Aaron is walking sideways around the room, holding his expensive camera in front of him and watching us on the attached LCD monitor. “Ready.”
I turn to Kellan. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You know how to read, don’t you?” Kellan asks.
“Of course.”
“Then you can do it.”
“I’ve never acted before. I’ve never read a screenplay.”
“It’s okay to be scared,” Kellan says. “Here, we’ll do it together.”
Kellan and I turn to page 75 as instructed. Kellan takes my hand and holds it tightly.
We take turns reading our lines.<
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When we finish, we both turn to look at Rami and Aaron. I thought it was crap; stilted and beyond amateur. But we wait for Rami’s opinion.
“That was a good start. I believed you,” says Rami.
“So did I,” says Aaron. “Let’s try it again. But I want to feel you this time. Scare me. Wow me. Make me believe you are in danger. Here’s the story: You guys have been on the run nonstop. Thousands of alien cannibals are chasing you.”
“Alien cannibals?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Aaron. “It’s like Surviving the Game meets Predator.”
“It’s a couple hundred years into the future,” says Rami. “You two are on your honeymoon, okay? You got married and your honeymoon is on another beautiful planet in Alpha Centauri. But something goes wrong, right? And your space ship ends up on an uncharted planet and you guys crash land, right? But you’re an ace pilot, Claire. And you manage to land the ship without both of you dying horrible gruesome deaths. And it’s like, way sad because now here you guys are on this weird, uncharted planet and your ship is fubar and the radio is jacked and you’re all alone and you don’t know what you’re going to do.
“But then the natives find you and they’re terrifying so you guys go on the run and they’re hunting you, right? And there are all these weird creatures and strange plants and trees, and you guys have to negotiate it without dying. And these super-scary predator-like creatures are hot on your heels, like those scary things who come out of the ground in that time machine movie with Guy Pearce. And they want to eat you. They want to eat you alive. So you guys are running for your lives. And you come across a scrap yard full of ships. You realize they’ve been luring humans here for decades and they’ve been eating them, and there are bones everywhere. Human bones. Skulls and whatnot. And you guys find a ship that still has power and you find a video log distress call by the occupants recording their last will and testament, right, and they got interrupted by these… these THINGS, right? And they ate the people in front of the camera, ate them alive, man, and it was horrible, okay, it was horrible, it was the most awful thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life and you can’t get it out of your head and you’re scared, man, you’re really, really scared. You guys have been on the run for three days and you’ve barely slept and you haven’t eaten because everything is weird and you don’t know what to eat and all you had is granola bars but they’re long gone, and now you guys come to a gigantic waterfall and there’s nowhere else to go, and you guys have to jump. You’re on a cliff and you’re surrounded by these monsters and there’s no other way, right? And you’re looking down at the water below and you know it might kill you but at least it’s like Romeo and Juliet, right? It’s you guys deciding your fate together, rather than letting those alien things eat you alive feet first, right? It’s like Viktor Krum in Hostel Two, right? Where that guy was eating his leg and he was still alive. Did you see that?”
Kellan says he didn’t but I say that I did.
Rami and Aaron both get excited that I’ve actually seen it.
“No one ever knows that scene,” Aaron says. “It was like no one bothered to notice that the one-and-only Viktor Krum was in this movie and instead of flying a broom and hitting on Hermione, he’s getting eaten alive.”
“With a smile on his face,” I add.
“What?” Aaron asks.
“If you watch closely, he’s smiling.”
“Really?” Rami asks.
“Yeah. Go back and watch it again.”
“Okay, for sure,” says Rami. “So, anyway, you two are there, on the cliff, running for your very lives. You’re ready to jump, and you’re huffing and puffing and your heart rate is through the roof and you’re panicking because you know this is it, right? You could totally die right now. Ready?”
Kellan quickly does 20 pushups and then jumps around a little.
I start doing jumping jacks. I still have the script in my hand and the pages flutter and make a bunch of noise. I stop jumping and open the script to page 75 again. I focus on my lines. All of a sudden I climb up onto the table.
Kellan, Rami, and Aaron look up at me like I’m crazy.
I offer Kellan my hand.
He takes it and climbs up on the table, too. I look at my lines once more.
“Okay,” says Rami, “you guys ready?”
“Ready,” I say.
“Ready,” says Kellan.
“And… action,” says Aaron.
I think back to last night, to doing cardio with Kellan at the hotel gym, when he cranked up my treadmill’s incline to 15 and I thought I was going to die. I start breathing the same way.
I look over my shoulder, and up at the ceiling, pretending there are vicious, disgusting-looking alien cannibals chasing me so they can eat my feet off while I scream. I think about the scene in Jaws when Robert Shaw slides down the boat and into the shark’s mouth.
I look down at the floor and imagine we’re up on a cliff a hundred feet high. I get close to the edge of the table, trying not to fall off. The table is wobbly, though, and I nearly do.
Kellan grabs me and pulls me close.
He presses the full length of his body against mine.
It’s the first time I’ve felt him like this. He’s so warm.
Focus, Claire.
Alien cannibals are chasing you.
I look over my shoulder, imagining freaky red eyes and alien jaws dripping smelly saliva. “They’re coming.” I look down. It must be hundreds of feet down. We’re going to die. But we have to jump. “I don’t…know…if I can…do this.”
I’m so worked up, I can feel tears pricking my eyes. My voice quivers with heartbreak. Married less than a day….
I continue looking down at the perilous depths, then up at the aliens closing in. I wait for Kellan to say his line. He doesn’t.
Finally, I look directly at him, eyes wide, expectant.
He’s just staring at me in awe.
He snaps to. “You can.”
I look up at the aliens. I can hear them now, grunting and making their inhuman noises. I turn to Kellan again. “I’m scared.”
My voice cracks. My lips are shaking.
I channel all the emotions I’ve been feeling with Kellan for the past week, all the awful shit I’ve had to deal with at the show with Stacy and the gorgeous people and my fatness and those dildos on Instagram saying mean, horrid things about me. The awful, dark, self-loathing rage it ignites deep within me.
Kellan puts his arms around me.
“It’s okay to be scared.” He looks deep into my eyes. “We’ll do it together.”
I look up, into Kellan’s eyes. Those cornflower-blue eyes that make me ache.
My heart melts.
I’m not in a club, standing on a table in a back room auditioning for two-amped up, slightly crazy but very sweet showbiz guys.
I’m with Kellan.
And only with Kellan. Lost forever in those eyes.
Relief comes, knowing I’m with him. A tear pours out of each eye and I smile.
Kellan smiles back.
He kisses me. Hard, with passion, and suddenly I’m scared. But I want him. I want him badly. This overrides the fear, conquers it, and I kiss him back; hard. For a long time. Our hands move up into each other’s hair and find one another’s face. My lips part and our tongues meet. Tentatively at first. Understanding and desire is communicated silently between us and our mouths open wide. Kellan thrusts his tongue into my mouth. I moan as I accept every bit of him.
Finally, at last, but all too soon, we part.
Kellan presses his forehead against mine and closes his eyes.
He takes my hand, we approach the edge of the cliff we’re standing on, and we jump.
KELLAN AND I land on the floor.
We face one another. We’re both smiling. Huge, exuberant smiles.
“And…cut,” says Aaron.
I’m vaguely aware that he was circling us with his camera all that time, and that he
was walking on the sofa, very nearly stepping on Rami, desperate to get close to us, to get the shot while we acted our brief scene.
“Did you get that?” Rami asks.
“Yes, I got it,” Aaron replies. “That could be a teaser.”
“Holy fuckin shit,” says Rami. “Pardon my French, boys and girls, but wow.” He jumps up. “That was awesome. I mean…. I don’t even know what to say. That was awesome. You guys do that on set and it’s little gold statuettes for both of ya’s.”
Aaron is busy watching us on playback on the little monitor atop the camera. Kellan, Rami, and I crowd around.
It looks okay. It looks like two people standing on a table.
But then Aaron moves closer. It’s just us against the dark ceiling. We could be standing on a cliff at night, lost on an alien world.
Aaron basically shoves the camera in our faces as I say my lines. The thumping bass coming through the walls adds a primal background score, almost like a heartbeat. There’s a moment when Kellan looks at me and says “We’ll do it together.” It’s almost a whisper.
And then we kiss.
Wow.
It occurs to me that I’ve never seen myself on camera kissing anyone before.
But mostly my eyes are glued to Kellan.
Oh my goodness.
His lips are on mine.
His hands are fisted in my hair.
And then our tongues meet.
Wow.
And then our mouths open all the way and it’s as if we’re trying to devour one another.
And then we jump. Aaron held the camera up above us, so we seem to actually fall. It’s fairly convincing.
When the playback concludes, we all gaze at one another.
“Well….” says Rami. He sets down his glass of Dom and adjusts the front of his pants. “I don’t know about you guys, but I definitely have lift off.” He grins sheepishly and slams the rest of his champagne.
“Yeah, that was hot,” says Aaron. “I didn’t realize it at the time because I was so busy framing it up, trying to get something. But the playback doesn’t lie. That was excellent. Wow. You guys…. Kellan, you son of a bitch.” He hugs Kellan. “And Claire, sweet little sexpot Claire. That was something. Clearly you have done some acting. Where did you study?”