Lose Me: (New Adult Billionaire Romance) (Broken Idols)

by M. C. Frank

He’s the actor Rosie was talking about.

  He’s the ‘special person’ that changed everything.

  The Academy was the ‘prestigious school’ he was hoping to get into, the one he was telling me about when we were together in Corfu, in another lifetime.

  “We haven’t got all day.” That familiar British accent sends a sharp pain ripping through my chest. It wakes me up with a vengeance. Then he finally lifts a hand and picks up his glass, downing a huge gulp. The water reflects the white glow of the lights as it sloshes around. “Any Ophelias back there?”

  The other ‘casting directors’ muffle their laughter. Matt presses my arm, urging me on.

  “I’m so damn sorry, Ari,” he repeats. “I had no idea.”

  proposal

  To: Pan , Vanderau

  Fr: Wes Spencer

  Subject: Proposal

  Sent 3:45 am 10/12/. . .

  Sweet Prince (working title)

  Time: Post-apocalyptic, 200-250 years in the future, maybe a bit more, no less. Last day on earth.

  Place: London

  Scenery: a theatre stage

  Plotline: Hamlet

  Length: anything from ten to twenty minutes (short film)

  Twist: Hamlet discovers his uncle’s betrayal in the middle of the last World War on earth. War has started the domino effect on destruction: waking volcanoes, acid waste rain and fun stuff like that—special effects, Teddy, CGI, that’s where you come in. Hopefully.

  His dad isn’t a ghost, he’s data protocol.

  His mum is the reigning force, state secretary or something, and she’s the one who starts the war.

  Ophelia is a soldier. She and Hamlet fall in love during the war, but she catches an airborne virus of the ‘mad sickness’ that travels along the lines of the army, a mutation the opposite side has developed in their labs as chemical warfare. He almost gets sick too, hovers between madness and sanity, like the bard’s Hamlet does, but never leans too far in one direction or another.

  That’s it.

  Moral: None. As man destroys man in the bard’s original work, here we also have man destroying nature and the planet that used to be his home.

  The end.

  I’ve already written about three quarters of the final script (which I’m attaching), so send me your thoughts, but I’m not sure I’ll take them into account. Teddy, please try to have some thoughts, anything, I know you generally prefer not to use your brain if you don’t absolutely have to. Well, you actually have to now. This is your chance. Pan. . . Mate, try not to have too many thoughts, all right? I’m just a mere mortal.

  If all goes well I’ll be sending you the final draft by the fifteenth of November.

  Cheers,

  Wes.

  FOURTEEN

  “I didn’t—I thought you two were. . . talking,” Matt says, looking uncomfortable and wary. “I had no idea things were like this.”

  “Yeah,” I just reply. “They are.”

  It’s a couple of hours later and I have only just found my voice.

  “You. . . ” He has to stop to clear his voice. “You don’t want to quit, do you?”

  We’re eating burgers. It’s past midnight, but he wouldn’t let me go home. I think he’s scared of leaving me alone.

  I swallow. The bite tastes like dust and it takes me back to the first few days at the hospital.

  “Does he—? Wait, was that what all the yelling was about? Was that. . . was that him?” suddenly the table begins to sway in front of me. “Does he want me to quit?”

  It was his voice yelling when I came in, I realize that now. My brain must have refused to register that it was him, and of course I’d never heard him yell before, so there’s that. Was he yelling because he found out I was coming here?

  Matt shakes his head. “No.”

  “Then I won’t.”

  “He did yell,” he says after a few seconds of silence. “I had no idea he felt that way. I’d never have invited you here if I did; I just thought you two were. . . well, that you both knew. I can’t believe I got you into this mess. After all you went through, you don’t need to deal with this.”

  “Hey, it’s fine.” I’m trying to make myself sound breezy—not sure how that’s working out. Matt looks serious as always, but his eyes are searching mine anxiously, and that definitely isn’t how I wanted to start this new job with my director. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  He nods and gestures towards my half-eaten food in a fatherly way, getting up to pay. “Eat up.”

  He insists on driving me home afterwards. I get into his Alfa Romeo and gratefully lift my frozen fingers towards the air conditioning vent.

  “Oh and one more thing,” he says as he turns on the ignition.

  “What?” I close my eyes in dread and exhaustion.

  “He. . . um. . . ”

  Matt never stammers. Never. I turn to look at him in horror.

  “What.” I whisper it this time, freaked out.

  “Wes is also the leading actor,” he says in one breath. “He plays Hamlet. But that doesn’t mean you’ll have to interact with him,” he finishes lamely.

  “Of course not,” I say past a lump in my throat.

  He has to wake me up when we finally reach my hotel, because the jet lag has finally kicked in. I get out of the car groggily and thank him. I may have not been the best company during the past half hour, but at least I haven’t been thinking.

  And that can only be a good thing.

  ◊◊◊

  The next morning, shooting begins right away. Wes gathers all the actors and explains how there will be minimum rehearsals, so everyone has to be ‘at the top of their game’.

  Matt and I spend the greatest part of the morning in a rehearsal room with the stage manager, poring over a scale model of the set we’ll be using, going over every single detail.

  When we return to the main stage room, there are three cameras set in front of the stage, and Wes is talking animatedly to the camera crew and the protagonists. Behind him, the two other guys are going over production details.

  Finally, Wes climbs on the stage and gets everyone’s attention.

  “This isn’t amateur theatre,” he simply says to the twenty-something pairs of eyes that are glued to his. “If you haven’t memorized your lines yet, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t have, open your scripts right now and get to work.” People start looking confused, because they’ve had their scripts for about twenty-four hours, and he’s expecting them to know their lines by heart already. Oh, great, he’s gone and turned into freaking Tim. I wonder whether I should be scared or amused.

  Wes fixes his audience with a steely gaze. “Now, let’s see. Who here can act?”

  Scared it is.

  After that, things go on much as I expected them to. We all work hard. From day one there are struggles and mistakes and many many more takes of the same scenes than there really should be. But there’s a feeling of optimism in the air that makes us all want to work even harder, be better, in spite of all our inexperience. We’re all learning, and that unites us more than the hard work and the need to succeed. There’s a kind of magic in trying something that has never been done before; something that makes us all work like a team, as one person. I’ve never worked with such talented, humble, dedicated people before.

  Wes stays out of my way and I stay out of his. I work out during the day at a gym in Camden, five minutes from my room, and then I take the bus to Chenies Street and walk down to Gower.

  I work hard, train even harder, and talk to Rosie a little bit while we wait in the wings. When I get home at night, past midnight, I’m too exhausted to even call home.

  If I had the time to stop and think, it would all seem unreal to me. Seeing him again, being again in the same room and not exchanging one single word. . . the way his cold eyes looked just a hair away from my face, as if he hated the sight of me so much, he couldn’t even
be bothered to look at me. It’s worse than if we’d been perfect strangers, and he was just the guy who had compared me to a gaffer, like he did back in Corfu. But thankfully I’m so busy, I don’t have the time to think about it.

  I’ll fall apart when I get back home, I tell myself every day. But when I get back I’m so exhausted I pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow.

  And that’s how it goes for the first few days.

  ◊◊◊

  Three days later, it’s the last day of the year.

  Shooting is well under way, and it demands much more grueling, hard work than First Sentences ever did, but I’m enjoying every second of it. All the waiting around could be getting on my nerves, but whenever I’m not warming up I’m hanging out with Rosie, handing her costumes and stuff, and so time flies. Wes hasn’t been present during my stunt sequences—I’m doing Ophelia’s stunts as a soldier, and there’s a lot of shooting at things and being shot at by other things and flying about the stage hanging upside down from things involved. He might be somewhere in the back of the dark theatre watching, but I highly doubt it.

  The two days Wes gave me are already over, and I’m in no way done, in fact I’ve barely started. We’ll see if he throws me out, after all. But for now, everything is put on hold: there will be no shoot this evening.

  Tonight it’s New Year’s Eve.

  It’s Christmas break, so the school is empty anyway, except for the students that are participating in Sweet Prince and the director slash producer dudes. And me, of course. We’ve all been invited to the Royal Albert Hall for a fundraiser charity concert. I’m not sure exactly what the cause is, because I wasn’t paying attention; all I know is that it’s a super posh event. Yeah, I say ‘posh’ now.

  Since I’ve been hanging out with Rosie I’ve been picking up all sorts of English expressions like ‘cheers’ and ‘sodding idiot’ and cool stuff like that. She mostly does the talking, as her fingers work on the sewing machine with superhuman speed, and I do the listening. It works.

  Anyway, it’s Rosie who tells me about the invitation.

  “I’m not going,” I say, snorting. Yeah, it wasn’t even necessary to say that out loud. Like it was ever a possibility that I’d. . .

  I freeze. Rosie’s eyes are full of tears. We’re sitting on the fire escape, taking a small break as they wrap up the shoot on the stage behind us.

  “Rosie. . . What is it?”

  “Do you even know where we’re going?” she asks me, her lips trembling.

  “The Royal Albert Hall?” I say, tentatively and she shakes her head.

  “We’re invited to one of James Pan’s concerts. Do you know how rare that is? To get an invite to one of those, I mean. The guy is going to be a bigger deal than blimmin’ Beethoven, that’s what they say at least. When he was seventeen he got into the most prestigious art college, up in New York. His performances are packed tighter than a Rolling Stones performance; newspapers have dubbed him ‘the rock star of classical music’.”

  “Wow.” That’s all I can say for a moment. I haven’t known her long, but she’s told me a lot about herself these couple of days, and I know that she’s a grounded, down-to-earth person. She wouldn’t exaggerate, at least not that much. And she was definitely the last person I’d expect to start fangirling over a tall, rake-thin teen with a slouch and a permanent scowl on his face.

  “That. . . black-haired guy who was at the auditions?”

  She smiles. “Isn’t he the most gorgeous guy you’ve ever seen? He’s half Chinese, actually, on his mother’s side, you know Lin Jiang, the famous pianist?” I just look at her. Name doesn’t ring a bell. She sighs. “Gosh, don’t you read anything? Anyway, if you’re into this stuff,” she says, “she’s like world famous. But Pan is even more so. Everyone knows him. He plays the cello, the violin, the guitar, the piano. . . I don’t think there’s an instrument he’s not good at. He’s a prodigy. He’s well on his way to becoming a conductor, and he’s only eighteen. Can you imagine? I mean, that school of his has all sorts of music geniuses and professors, and he’s gotten ahead of all of them.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “So he invited us. It’s an honor, I get it. But it’s all right if I don’t go, right? Nobody would miss me.”

  She looks down, hiding her expression from me. Her cheeks have gone flaming red.

  Everyone else is gone, and we’re backstage, cleaning up the costumes and threads and buttons that are randomly strewn about. It’s warm in here, but I’m starting to get chilled from having sweated during the shooting. I need a shower badly.

  “Everyone fancies him,” Rosie says, her voice going quiet. “The girls, I mean. He’s just so fit and tall and. . . And those brown eyes. . . Just imagine how they’d look if he smiled.”

  “Not that he ever would,” I mutter under my breath.

  “I know he would never look at me, but. . . ” Rosie’s eyes are pleading.

  The idea of someone being infatuated with that arrogant kid is kind of ridiculous to me, but I can’t deny I know exactly how she feels. I steal a glance at my watch. There go my plans to skype the new year in with my dad, Katia, grandma and grandpa and everyone else who would be gathered by now in our little apartment in Corfu. At another time zone. Their new year will start hours before mine.

  “All right,” I tell her and immediately her face lights up. “But I need you to do something for me as well.”

  “Anything,” she says immediately.

  “What ha—?” I start saying something out loud, which wasn’t meant to be said out loud, and stop myself in time.

  “Huh?”

  I take a deep breath. “Okay, if I’m to come to this. . . thing, I need to not be left alone before then. Could you do that? Cause if I start. . . getting inside my head, I’ll bail.” She frowns, but doesn’t ask me anything. “But I need a shower first, so fancy a Tube ride to my place?”

  She’s smiling so hard at me her cheeks must hurt.

  “I’ve got a better idea.”

  What have I ever done to deserve people like you and Ollie and Jamie in my life? That was what I almost asked her out loud.

  Her ‘better idea’ is to take me to her home. She just shows me to the bathroom and gives me fresh towels as though it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to take a shower in her house, with her mom and dad and little brothers downstairs.

  I start to protest, but she lifts her eyebrows and says that we only have an hour at most and that’s pushing it, because Pan hates it when people are late to his concerts. Then, before I have time to open my mouth and reply, she proceeds to announce that she’ll start letting out one of her dresses for me to wear and to hurry up, come on.

  “Wait, you’ll let out a dress?” I ask her, looking around her pink, vintage room, confused.

  She looks up at me and laughs. I tower half a head above her and it suddenly dawns on me that I wouldn’t have anything to wear to a concert like that even if we had stopped at my place, which would have been a half hour detour at least.

  “It doesn’t take a genius of Pan’s level to figure out you don’t have anything to wear,” she replies. “I do, but it will need some serious stitching if it’s to come anywhere close to your knees.”

  “Sh-shoes?” I stammer, feeling like a little kid in front of the teacher.

  She looks at my feet.

  “Seven, seven and a half?” she says to herself. “Same as mum.”

  At least I have a decent wig with me, the one with the long, wavy brown hair that most resembles my natural hair before the operation. I wore it to work. That’s something at least, I think, and then Rosie comes at me with a lip gloss.

  And that’s the last thing I remember.

  ◊◊◊

  An hour and five minutes later, we’re standing in the foyer of the Royal Albert Hall. The place is packed with performers, producers, sponsors, reporters and celebrities, all making their way past the photographers’ flashes up the wide, red-carpeted staircase,
the sounds of musical instruments being strung drifting from upstairs.

  I catch a glimpse of Wes’ buzz cut at some point—I still haven’t gotten used to seeing him with it. My first—idiotic—thought on seeing him at the audition was, he’s gone and cropped that glorious golden mane of his. But now I see that the buzz cut makes him look more like a man than a wild boy. He’s wearing a tux and his cheeks are clean-shaven. He looks a bit thinner, and a bit more tan than he was in Corfu. He smiles at the reporters, but the smile is more of a grimace, never reaching his eyes. His jaw looks sharp, clenched. Dammit, Ari, look away.

  Soon enough, I find myself seated at a row of velvet seats in a huge auditorium. This is a majestic place. There are painted cherubs overhead, framing the enormous chandeliers that are bathing us in warm light. The walls are decorated with huge wreaths of holly and mistletoe and on the stage there are sparkling red and black candles giving a modern, kind of funky touch to the austere structure of the building.

  On the stage, the orchestra is settling down. As the audience quiets down among the sound of rustling sheet music and tuning instruments, I notice something remarkable: every single instrument is played by a teenager. They all look serious and focused, their instruments lifted gently in their elegant arms, their hair swept back, their black shoes tapping along to the rhythm, but the oldest among them can’t be older than eighteen. Rosie presses a program into my hand and I see that they are high school seniors from a private music school from America, but I don’t get to read its name, because next to me Rosie lets out a deep sigh, and hangs limply on to my arm, as though she’s about to faint.

  I turn to ask her what’s wrong, but she’s not even looking at me. Her eyes are glued to the stage, where the conductor is walking up the three little stairs to the podium. It’s him. The black-haired, obnoxious kid. Pan. He turns around and flashes a glorious smile at the audience, then he takes a deep bow.