by Lucy Lambert
When I arrived at the trailer Linda stood at the door.
My breath caught. I thought about slipping away between the trailers, but she heard me.
She spun around. When she saw me she smiled. She wore these enormous, cat’s eye reflective sunglasses.
“Oh. Emma, isn’t it?” she said.
I couldn’t tell for certain because of the glasses, but it sure felt like she was running her eyes up and down my body. Looking for weakness? I thought, even though it was ridiculous.
She was beautiful as ever. Breasts perky and high with a tasteful yet seductive amount of cleavage showing. Pants tight enough around the hips that guys probably stopped for a second look when she walked by.
Her lips were full and ruby in color, and her long, golden hair had that perfectly wind-tousled look to it despite there being no breeze that day.
A goddess, in short. And she knew it.
“Erin, actually, Ms. Campion,” I said. What are you doing here? I couldn’t actually ask the question out loud.
She could, though.
“Whatever. If you’ve come to save Vance from me again, don’t bother. He’s not here yet.”
She doesn't know.
“I didn’t,” I said.
She stepped down off the stoop. “Then why?”
I smiled, “Mr. Tracker requested me as his new assistant. I’m just here waiting for him to give me something to do for the day.”
“You?” she asked. She slipped those cat-eyed glasses down the perfectly-shaped bridge of her nose and regarded me with her grey shark’s eyes.
I wanted to reply with a snide yes, me, but I didn’t want to rock the boat so much right away. Instead I nodded.
“You’re not his type,” she said.
For some reason, that boiled my blood. I kept the smile up, though. I’d thought of something that I could say.
“If you’d like, I’ll see if Mr. Tracker can fit you in sometime today. He’s very busy though, so I doubt it. May I ask the reason for your visit?”
I had no clue if Vance wanted me to set appointments for him. Probably not. But Linda didn’t know that.
Linda’s pale cheeks became two ripened tomatoes. She shoved her sunglasses back up her nose so that I saw twin reflections of myself.
“You tell Vance that if he misses another reading we’re going to have a big problem.”
“Okay, thank you. Now, if you don’t mind…? Mr. Tracker values his privacy.” I said, stepping aside to invite her to get the hell out of there.
Reading? As in rehearsal? Why would he miss that? I thought. I kept my smile up.
Linda’s jaw worked, the muscles in her temples practically vibrating. I figured she’d just realized that her chances of having me dismissed had crashed.
She left, though. Thankfully.
My heart hammered and my mouth went dry. The messenger bag strap dug into my shoulder and I hardly noticed until my arm went numb.
Did that really just happen?
It had, though. I’d had a quick verbal sparring match with a woman who continually trended in the top ten on Google Image Search, who went regularly on The Tonight Show, The Late Show, and a bunch more I didn’t want to list.
And I think I might’ve won. That bout, at least.
I took a breath. Then I shook my arm out until I could feel my hand again.
Sensation once more in my fingers, I tried the latch on the trailer door. It didn’t move. Locked.
Of course he’d keep me waiting, I thought.
So I sat on the stoop, dug out the script, and started reading it again.
I’d just reached the part where Vance’s Damien character sneaks into Berlin aboard a cargo train when something blocked out my sunlight.
I looked up, saw Vance looking down at me.
Ever been in a car that doesn’t accelerate smoothly? How it bogs down, almost stalling if you really step on the gas? That was sort of how I felt.
“You’re early,” Vance said. “But I see you remembered the script. Good.”
I stood up, not sure if my knees might just buckle again under my weight. They didn’t. The top of my head barely came to Vance’s shoulders, so I craned my neck back to look up at him.
“Yes, I remembered. Maybe I’m not early, maybe you’re late. Think of that?” I wanted to put my hands on my hips, but resisted. I didn’t want to look the scolding schoolmarm.
However, my irritation only seemed to amuse him. His lips traced a smile through which I got the glimpse of square, white teeth.
“I save your ass from getting canned, and you talk back to me on your first day?”
I wilted a little. I guess you could look at it that way.
Still, I couldn’t let it go completely. “Let’s not forget that I’m only in danger of getting fired because of your… indiscretion with Ms. Campion.”
He chuckled. It was a deep and pleasant sound. “Ms. Campion? Call her Linda around me. Call me Vance around me, too. None of that Mr. Tracker stuff.”
“Okay, well, Vance, Ms… I mean Linda, she was just here. She said you missed a reading. She seemed pretty…” I searched for the right word, trying to feel out this new position and its responsibilities.
“Pissed?” Vance supplied.
“Yeah, that. Speaking of that reading, I think that in order to do this I’m going to need quite a bit of info. Your schedule, the shooting schedule, any other phone numbers you have, emails… That sort of thing…”
I trailed off when I saw him watching me. When I thought about it, I didn't think he’d actually looked away from me since arriving at his trailer.
“How about we start with this?” He said. He fished something out of his jacket pocket and dangled it between us.
It was a key on a keychain. It was a simple dog tag chain, and when I took it from him I saw it had an E engraved on one side.
“So we know which one’s yours. It’s for the trailer. You can find all that stuff you asked for on the laptop in there. Speaking of the trailer, why don’t you see if that key works?”
I was speechless, for once. My lips parted like I wanted to say something, but nothing came out. I kept looking at that engraved letter.
“Hey, now I know what’ll quiet you down,” he joked.
Ass, I thought, clawing back some self-respect. I turned and shoved the key into the lock. It worked. The door swung outward and I took a step back out of the way.
Then Vance put the flat of one hand against the small of my back.
“Come on, I’ll show you around.”
He guided me inside. I remembered the bed, the little kitchenette, the beige walls and all that from the first time I had been there. Going deeper, I saw a flat screen mounted to one wall, a big entertainment center beneath it.
I turned to face him, and also dislodged his hand from my back. “Vance, this is just work, right? Nothing else? I’m telling you now I don’t want anything else. So don’t… don’t try to kiss me again or anything, okay?”
I felt ridiculous even saying it, even hearing the words coming out of my mouth. But I thought I needed to say it.
“That would be totally inappropriate behavior, seeing as I am now your boss,” Vance said.
He went over to a narrow desk and pulled open a drawer. He took out his own copy of the script from that drawer.
“Vance, you didn’t actually say that you weren’t going to do anything,” I said.
I kept myself by the trailer door. I told myself I could escape pretty quickly that way if anything happened.
He put the bound script down on the counter, and I got a good look at it. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t what I saw.
He caught me looking, and a surge of embarrassment went up from my stomach.
“I do take my job seriously,” he said.
His script resembled the most well-thumbed book ever borrowed from a library.
One that an overzealous graduate student might also have used for notes on a dissertation, as well
.
It looked like nearly every page was dog-eared (some on the top and bottom corners) and little yellow Post-It notes overflowed from the gaps. So many that I think his script was almost twice the thickness of mine.
He’d written on all those notes, I saw.
Mine looked absolutely pristine next to his, and that flush of embarrassment continued when I dug my copy out of the messenger bag, which I set on the floor by my feet.
My shoulder thanked me for removing the weight.
“Was I supposed to take notes?” I said.
He gave me that half-cocked smile again. “No, not yet.”
I was off my guard, out of my league, green behind the ears. However you wanted to put it. And I didn’t like it.
I liked knowing my job, knowing my stuff, doing it all as well as I could.
“If you take your job so seriously like you say, why did you miss that reading? Linda probably isn't the only one worried.”
Of course Linda is worried, I realized, there’s almost as much riding on this movie for her career as there is for Vance… But why isn’t Vance worried?
He always seemed so confident. Too confident. Hubris, Ms. Gatwick, my old high school English teacher, might have said during our unit on Greek plays.
Pointing out this flaw in Vance didn’t banish those hot, uncomfortable sensations in my stomach, though.
Especially since his smile only widened a little.
“Is something funny?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
Then it really hit me that I stood there completely alone in Vance Tracker’s private trailer. Just him and me.
Just remember what he’s done, I thought. I recalled the shocked silence of the studio audience, the way the smile melted off Sandra’s face when she realized that Vance wasn’t joking about what he’d just said to her.
It could be hard to tell with Vance sometimes.
That helped a little. It brought me back down to earth. Or at least down out of the stratosphere.
Damn it, just get a grip!
“If you want me to do this job right,” I said, “you should tell me.”
“Should I?” he replied. He strode towards me, picking up that tattered script as he did. It looked about ready to fall off its binding.
“Yes,” I said.
“And what if I told you that I was with someone, a beautiful woman?”
“What if you did?”
He came closer, “Or maybe the traffic was unusually heavy this morning and I just got stuck in gridlock like any other person? Sounds a bit mundane, I guess. Which one would you believe? Which one would you want to believe?”
“I don’t want to play any games,” I said. “If you were late, you could have called. If… if you were indisposed you also could have called. Or texted. Or something.”
“Or something,” he repeated. “It was the traffic one, by the way. But if somebody asks, it was the first one.”
My shoulders slumped with relief.
Relief? Why relief? Why should I care whether he was stuck in traffic or stuck in bed?
Except that I did.
I blamed having my head spun by these last few days.
“Turn to page sixty-seven,” he said. “We’re shooting that scene next.”
“Okay…” I said, biting my lip while I thumbed through the pages. I did a quick scan of the scene in question. It took place inside an abandoned farmhouse after Vance's character Damien gets Linda’s Abigail safely out of Berlin. It was a scene that I thought was supposed to be loaded with tension.
“I did miss that reading,” he said. “But I already know all the lines. All of my lines in this script, actually. And everyone else’s, too.”
He didn’t say that in a bragging tone, but more matter-of-fact.
Funny thing was, it was a fact I already knew about him. One that he gave in interviews, at least. I’d sort of put it down in my head as a humble brag type of deal, one to make him even more impressive.
But then I saw that run-ragged script and I wondered.
“So what is it you want me to do?” I asked.
“Read Linda’s lines. I’m late, like you said, so they’re probably going to call me to makeup and costuming in a few minutes. But I need to get into the headspace for the movie, and you’re going to help me.”
He shrugged out of his jacket and tossed it on the bed. He wore a long-sleeved V-neck underneath, the sleeves rolled up to just before his elbows. The shirt hugged the muscled contours of his body in a way I found quite uncomfortable.
“O…okay,” I said.
“You have the first line,” he prompted, and I realized that I was just standing there all glassy-eyed.
I shook my head, feeling my hair whip against my cheeks. I scanned the page.
“What the hell were you doing?” I said, reading off the script. I didn’t know whether he wanted me to act at all.
He lowered his script to his side. “Saving your life, in case you missed it. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met a more ungrateful woman in my whole life…”
I had scanned ahead and saw in the notes that I was supposed to interrupt him with a laugh. I did, or tried, at least. My voice sounded suddenly tinny and false to my ears.
“Ha! You call that saving my life?”
“You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“I would say more in spite of you than because of you.”
He stepped forward until our feet almost touched. I looked up into his face and my breath caught. He looked furious, his face all flushed and his lips set in a thin, scar-like line.
“You’re the most ungrateful woman I’ve ever met!”
After a couple seconds he waggled his eyebrows at me, still somehow maintaining that expression of anger.
Oh, it’s my line! God, I’m a terrible actor.
“Sorry…” I muttered, glancing down. I read my line and then did my best to meet his eyes with mine. “Then I guess you haven’t met many women! Least of all given any of them any hint of reason to be grateful!”
He turned away then, rubbing at his eyes like he was trying to banish a tension headache.
“I should’ve just left you in Berlin. Lord knows I could’ve. Could’ve just told them you were dead or turned.”
I glanced down at my next line. The note beside it in the script said, {With Venom}. Whatever that meant.
“Then why the hell didn’t you?” I thought that actually didn’t sound too bad. I just tried channeling some of the anger I felt at him for putting me in this mess in the first place.
He whirled around and shoved a finger in my face, his lower jaw jutted out. “Don’t tempt me. I can put you right back where I found you. I don’t give a damn what you found out.”
Again, I found myself standing there entranced by his performance. This time he waggled his fingers instead of his eyebrows.
“Oh!” I said, looking down at the script again.
I’m terrible at this. He’s going to fire me, I thought.
Then I thought that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst outcome.
I was supposed to read the line and then turn away from him. “Of course you wouldn’t. Don’t think I don’t know your type. Can’t wait to get back to the States so you can drink and smoke and womanize while real men come over to do the real fighting.”
I turned my back to him.
He grabbed my shoulder and spun me back hard and fast enough that my hair whipped against my face again. My breath caught, and I did my best to stifle a squeal of surprise.
“You forgot one thing,” he said, his eyes boring into mine.
I tore my eyes away to look at the script. It took more effort than I thought it should. I glanced at the script. “What’s that?”
“I’m the one with the gun,” he said.
Then he held up his other hand, his fingers and thumb pointed in a child’s sham pistol.
I imagine the line would be much more menacing with a real, blank-firing prop gripped i
n that fist.
I bit my lips against the smile starting there. I didn’t think he wanted me taking it as a joke.
I looked down at the script again. I should have read a little farther than I did, should’ve seen what was coming.
“You don’t have the guts,” I said.
“Keep tellin’ yourself that, girl.”
Then the hand holding my shoulder shifted. He wrapped his arm around my waist, fake finger gun still pointing at the trailer’s ceiling.
He wrenched me against him. My mouth dropped open.
He kissed me, hot and hard, right there. His stubble prickled at my cheeks.
For those heart-stopping moments all I could sense was him. The hard muscle under his shirt pushing against my body, the leathery musk of his cologne, the minty taste of his mouth while his lips writhed against mine.
Out of reflex, I closed my eyes. Starburst patterns exploded against the backdrop of my eyelids.
Except then I noticed that I kissed him back, too.
At some point he’d dropped the sham gun and wrapped that arm around my body, too. His hands clasped at the small of my back, his fingers pushing the boundaries of propriety at the swell of my hips.
I pushed my hands up in between our bodies and then shoved against his chest.
He relaxed his grip on me and I shuffled back a step, putting a cushion of air between our bodies.
“That was good,” Vance said. His lips looked redder. I could feel my pulse in mine, and realized just how flushed in the face I must look.
Scratch that, my lips didn’t just pulse. They throbbed. That throb rushed throughout my body, igniting heat low in my stomach.
“What was that?” I said, finding my voice. It sounded breathy to me, like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs.
“A great rehearsal.”
I picked my copy of the script up off the floor. I’d dropped it when he grabbed me. The fall creased a few of the pages.
I found my mark again, and saw that yes, he was supposed to kiss me.
Well, he wasn’t supposed to kiss me, Damien was supposed to kiss Abigail. That was an important distinction to make.
I thought I saw something in his eye. A glint, maybe. I’d agreed to help him rehearse, after all. In my rather nebulous position as his assistant, that fell under the category of assisting.