by Lucy Lambert
And the kiss had been in the script.
And what a kiss!
He saw me ticking all these gears over in my head.
“Don’t worry. Strictly professional.”
I supposed if there was such a thing as a professional kiss and a professional kisser to give them out, that had been the first and he was the second.
My lips kept buzzing. I could still taste a hint of his mintiness.
“And that’s all?” I said. I was angry, but not as angry as I thought I would have been. It was a good kiss.
“What else would it be?”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. And in my self-righteousness I didn’t realize that he still rested his hands on my hips.
When I did, I jerked back out of his grip. He let me go.
Then my phone went off, buzzing in my messenger bag on the floor. Eager to break my gaze away from him, I knelt down and pulled the phone out. I frowned, not recognizing the number.
I answered. We spoke for a few moments and I hung up.
Swallowing, trying to set myself straight, I turned to Vance.
“That was Mr. Sanders’ assistant. They need you in makeup ten minutes ago.”
“Right. Better get used to calls like that,” he said.
He brushed past me on the way to the door. I stepped out of his way, giving him a wide berth like I might give a large, unfriendly dog.
“Don’t forget to lock the place up when you go. Wouldn’t want any tourists stumbling in and taking a few keepsakes. Those would come out of your paycheck.”
“I’m not getting paid. This is for school credit.”
He opened the door and looked back at me. “Now it’s for both.”
He started away.
“Vance?” I said, knowing I shouldn’t.
He looked back at me without replying.
“You’re going to kiss Linda like that?” Jealous, Erin? Really?
“Not like that,” he replied. “I haven’t kissed anyone like that in quite a while.”
He looked almost wistful for a moment. Before I could say anything else, he stepped out of the trailer and shut the door. The latch clicked into place and left me standing in the quiet.
The shock of it all wore off and I sat down heavily on the foot of his bed. When I realized that, I shot back to my feet.
What does that mean? I wondered, hugging the script to my chest.
I also realized he hadn’t told me what he wanted me to do next. I supposed that I should also go to the set, in case he needed anything.
Not like that, I heard him say again. I licked my lips absently, tasting him again.
I liked the way he tasted.
Chapter 11
VANCE
I’d been building that moment up in my head for a couple days.
Of course, I didn’t quite intend on it being part of a reading like that. Sometimes serendipity is a thing.
When I’d been stuck on Santa Monica, I should have been grinning and smiling and thanking every one of my fellow drivers who decided that rubbernecking at the Chevy sedan pulled over by the cops was more important than getting where they were going on time.
She tasted sweet somehow. I couldn’t quite pin it down. And every time I licked my lips that taste became a little fainter.
I thought about the way she felt against me. Her body first going stiff with surprise and then melting in my arms. The way she started kissing me back.
And that fire in her eyes after, barely caged.
I wished that maybe Sanders might get sick and cancel shooting for the day.
But I took my job too seriously to really want it that badly.
They got me into makeup and costuming. I put on a nicely tailored charcoal suit of a cut popular back in the forties, a shoulder holster on under the jacket with a prop .45 automatic shoved into it.
The construction and carpentry guys did a good job on the set of the inside of the abandoned farmhouse. Green screens at the windows where they’d edit in the outside in post. The place still smelled of sawdust.
“Action!” Sanders called out.
I pretended Linda was Erin.
Funny, I always used to pretend they were Sandra.
That was when I knew things were different from before. That maybe there might be a way to make a comeback on a personal level.
We got the scene in one take. Unusual even for Troy Sanders, who always liked to do at least three or four so that he and he editor could take their pick of the litter.
We’d been doing a few more shoots that day, moving between a few different sets, jumping around the chronology of the film.
Many newer actors found that disconcerting - shooting say, a scene near the beginning of the story and then the very next shoot taking place in the middle or the end.
I never had any trouble transitioning. It was one of the reasons I liked memorizing the script. Wherever I went, there I was.
Except this time I had Erin with me.
“Principal on this is three months, right?” Erin asked. She’d found a yellow legal pad somewhere and had been asking questions of me at every chance.
At that moment, we sat in the well-lit makeup room. I sat on a swiveling barber’s chair. The artist, small Asian man named Chris in a very tight black shirt, tickled at my cheek with a fine-tipped paintbrush.
“Three months, give or take any reshoots the studio wants after they see the first cut.”
Principal meant principal photography, the actual shooting of the movie with the actors. Editing, special effects, and various post-production processes could easily add up to six months or more as the film shaped into the movie audiences would watch on the silver screen.
Chris leaned over me, his nose almost touching my cheek while he squinted at his handiwork.
Then he went behind the chair and gave the pedal a few pumps, jolting me up a few inches higher before he rotated me to change the lighting.
“You know,” I said, “I could’ve just had Erin here sock me one in the eye. What’s more realistic than a real bruise?”
Chris did me up for a fight scene. Black eye, bruised cheek, cut lip. The works.
He’d been at it about an hour at that point.
I was just happy this wasn’t one of those superhero flicks. The makeup for some of those costumes could take ten hours or more to properly apply.
“Not good for the camera,” Chris said. He scrutinized the cut on my cheek and then grabbed a palette and began dabbing at it with a pad.
I glanced at Erin, who was writing something on her yellow paper.
There was a lot in this industry where fiction seemed more real than reality.
For night scenes outside, they had the fire department wet the road so it showed up better on camera. You’ll never un-see it now, like the FedEx arrow.
Sometimes rain was milk instead of water. Again because the camera picked it up better.
It was a bag of magician’s tricks.
I studied Erin while she couldn’t see. A lock of her curly black hair hung down, almost touching the legal pad.
How’s it going with the girl? Rudy asked me earlier. He’d called me on a break in shooting a couple hours earlier.
Erin had handed me the phone, saying it was my agent. My heart had lurched and I made and excuse to speak privately.
With Erin? Good so far, I’d told him.
Good, good. Amp it up, ramp it up, whatever you wanna call it. You gotta be seen with this chick, you get me? Take her out to dinner or for a drive or to a show. I don’t care. What I do care about is whether I’m going to see you on TMZ or Yahoo when I open up Firefox tomorrow.
A whirlwind, that was what Rudy wanted. That was what everyone expected.
A whirlwind romance with the bad boy. A bright, hot flame that gutters and dies quickly.
Rudy wanted it. The media wanted. The tabloid and gossip-reading public expected it.
“Tell me I look good,” I said.
Erin looked up. She brushed tha
t lock of hair back behind her ear. Almost automatically, my lips twisted into that trademark cocked grin.
“It looks like you told Mike Tyson something he didn’t like about his mother,” Erin said.
Chris chuckled at that, pleased and preening at the compliment to his work.
“But in a sexy way, right?” I said.
The light in the makeup room was very good. Not too sharp or soft. I saw the blushing triangles in Erin’s cheeks before she looked down at her notepad to hide them.
The thing was, I didn’t want a whirlwind romance this time. Or any of the other times, really. I relished the thought of taking things slow, getting to know Erin.
What movies did she really like to watch? What was the last story, whether in a book or a movie, that made her cry? Maybe just spend all night talking.
Maybe even a few real dates.
But Rudy made me the star I was. He found me the roles that catapulted me into the A-list. Got the sponsors that made me look the man other men wanted to be, and that women wanted to be with.
Told me which women I should be seen with to get the best buzz going, really capitalize on my reputation.
And right then, that woman was an earnest film student named Erin, who was pretty in that girl-next-door way that Hollywood could never really capture.
If I was a better man, I would have told Rudy to shove it, that I couldn’t do that to her. But Erin fascinated me, and I wanted her, and perhaps I wasn’t such a good person after all.
I think maybe it was also how much she disliked me when we first met. All because of that stuff with Sandra.
I wanted to show her that maybe I wasn’t the guy skewered on social media for being such a jackass.
But if I follow through with this, with her, won’t it be the same?
I told myself I wouldn’t let it be the same. Not this time. Not with her.
“But seriously though,” I said, “I look beat-up in a dashing way, right?”
She looked up from her notes, “Are you able to do any look other than dashing?”
A little flush of excitement ran up and down my stomach. She’s flirting! Or trying to, at least.
At least, I thought she was. She looked away from me again and confirmed it.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
The set photographer came in then. Not a reporter, just a guy assigned by the studio to take some shots of production that could appear in “Making Of” documentaries and books in case they wanted to merchandise the film that way.
Though over the last few years, such pictures often came up in the ever more elaborate pre-shows before the trailers hit at the theater.
I grinned and gave the camera a thumbs up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Erin smile and wave.
He left.
I turned back to Erin while Chris continued buzzing about my face with his collection of makeup pads and brushes.
“Do you think there’ll be any on-location shooting?” Erin asked. She couldn't quite hide the hint of excitement in her voice.
“Probably. Big budget movie like this? A few shots in the UK definitely, for that last scene. Maybe a few over in Germany or France if the studio can wrangle the rights. Labor laws and taxes and whatnot are different. I try not to pay too much attention.”
This time when she wrote she scribbled a bit faster, letting her excitement out with the ink. I wondered if she’d ever been overseas before and doubted it.
She looked up again, ready with another question.
“No,” I said.
“No?” She replied.
“I have a question for you.”
“Okay,” she said, straightening up in her seat. She folded her hands over the legal pad.
“Shooting’s going to end early today. Union-mandated weekly hours exceeded and all that. I want you to come out with me after,” I said. I grabbed the padded handles of the barber chair and squeezed them.
I wasn’t certain I could convince her to come. That excited and scared me all at once.
“That wasn’t a question,” Erin said.
“That wasn’t an answer,” I shot back.
“You want me to come with you as your assistant?”
“No,” I shook my head. Chris frowned in irritation but said nothing.
Erin couldn’t look at me. Her eyes darted around the room like a nervous bird, never lighting for long on any one thing. Those triangles of blush appeared in her cheeks again.
“I shouldn’t,” Erin said.
“But you will anyway,” I said.
I knew I should let her beg off, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want her to. I only wished we could go somewhere privately, not for the purpose of being seen, being photographed.
I widened my grin. “You’ll have a good time.” I could guarantee that much, at least.
No one ever had a bad time with me. Why do you think so many people showed up to my parties?
“You sound pretty certain.”
“I do, don’t I?”
She crossed her ankles and leaned back in her seat. I could see the scales swaying behind her eyes. Go with him and Don’t go with him, they were labeled
Chris dabbed the fine strands of a brush in a small pot of fake blood, much darker than real blood (it showed better on camera) and then dabbed gently at the fake cut on my cheek.
If he had any opinion on the matter, he stayed quiet about it. Of course, he’d been working on movies for years and knew not to get involved in this sort of thing.
Unlike Erin.
She looked down at herself, at the black pants and shirt. “I can’t go anywhere like this. Nowhere you go, anyway.”
“And I’m not going anywhere like this,” I said, gesturing at my face. “We’ll each go and do some cleaning up. Then I’ll come get you. Just text when you’re ready.”
She bit her lower lip between her teeth, lightening the delicate flesh where the edges of her teeth pushed into it. She looked off pensively into the middle distance.
I wondered if she still tasted sweet, like she did earlier.
“Okay, but just this once,” she said.
“You don’t have a hot date or something lined up, do you?” I said, suddenly realized that I hadn’t even bothered to find out if she were single or not.
Not that that sort of thing usually mattered to me. But this time it did.
“Only if my hot date didn't tell me about it,” she said.
Good, I thought.
Being who I was, I’d discovered that “the List” was a real thing. For some people, anyway. It referred to that list of people that you could supposedly sleep with without experiencing any of the normal repercussions of sleeping around.
A sexual bucket list, sort of.
At first it had been exciting, but not anymore. There was no such thing as cheating without consequences.
So it relieved me more than I thought it would, finding out she was single.
I couldn’t wait for the day to end.
Chapter 12
ERIN
I didn't remember the bus ride home.
After sitting with Vance in makeup, the day faded into an opaque haze. Punctuated by moments of sudden, electric panic when I remembered what I’d agreed to do with him.
I got back to my apartment with my brain scattered in a million directions.
I passed by the kitchen and Sam saw me. “Hey, good day today? Seems kind of early.”
“Fine. Labor union hours, blah blah,” I muttered. I still hadn’t told anyone that my job at the studio had changed.
I went into my room and sat on the foot of my bed and then just sort of stared at the sliding door to my closet.
I wanted to get lost in that stare, just let my mind drift freely for a while, maybe get some of this stuff processed.
But then I thought of the time, and how I didn’t have much of it until Vance expected a text from me.
I did some quick calculations. I thought it was only a few miles from Santa Monica, wher
e I knew Vance lived, to my place in Brentwood.
Of course, that didn’t take into account LA traffic in the evening. I figured I’d have the on the outside only half an hour after I texted to when he arrived to get me.
Just get out of it, I thought. I could text him with an excuse.
He’ll see through it, I thought.
Quit. Get another co-op from the school to finish the program.
However, I knew that might mean staying on at least an extra semester. Possibly longer. The fact was, I couldn’t really afford more school. And I just wanted to be done.
There was also the incredibly surreal thought of going out with Vance Tracker. Who in their right mind would pass up an offer like that?
My mind twisted into knots so strange and complicated I doubt even the saltiest sailor out there could untangle them.
But Vance would cut right through them.
Someone knocked on my door. “Erin? I’m going to shower. You need the bathroom first?” It was Sam.
Shower! I thought.
My day at the studio hadn’t been as physical as usual, but walking around in the California sun still made me sweat. I couldn’t go out with Vance if I smelled. The idea horrified me.
Quick as I could, I tore off all my clothes.
“Erin? Hear me?” Sam said. She knocked again.
I pulled my bathrobe on, cinching the belt down at my waist. Then I ran over to the door and pulled it open, hoping I didn’t look too red in the face.
“Hey, yeah, actually I was just about to hop in myself. Hope you don’t mind,” I said.
Sam looked at me standing there in my white terrycloth bathrobe. She still wore her street clothes: a knee-length skirt and a baby blue blouse.
It would be weird of her to deny me, and we both knew it. I felt bad for doing that to her, but I thought under the circumstances it was okay. Circumstances I didn’t yet feel like sharing with her.
“Sure, I guess,” she said, her eyebrows knitting together over the spray of freckles across her cheeks.
“Thanks!” I said.
I didn’t have time to waste. I practically ran to the bathroom, hoping that Mandi or Jasmine weren’t already in there.
They weren’t. Some luck at last!