“You need to get one of those heavy-duty electric massagers,” Cosmo told her. “Press it against the ball of your foot, right here, and let it run for a while.”
“I will,” she said. “I’ll get one.” Once she signed that distribution contract with HeartBeat, she’d have some extra money. She’d spend some of it on herself this time before dumping the rest into Hero’s production.
“Or you could stop wearing the crazy shoes.”
Or she could make sure he was here in her kitchen, every night for the rest of her life, when she got home from work.
“I made a choice,” she focused hard and told him, “about how to get noticed in this business. Cos, I was a has-been at twenty-two.” It had actually been her noisy breakup with Victor Strauss that had brought her back into the public eye. She’d taken the description the tabloids had given her—Party Girl Producer—and developed a whole persona to go with it.
“I got HeartBeat interested in backing a World War Two gay love story,” she continued. “Do you really think they would have given me so much as a meeting if I hadn’t made myself the person to be seen having lunch with? If I didn’t dress the way I do?”
“How many meetings do you get with men who don’t really want to have a meeting?” he countered. “At least not the kind with a spoken conversation.”
She waved that away. “That happens to everyone in this business.”
“But probably more often to you,” he guessed correctly. “What do you do, Jane, when you show up at someone’s office, and the man you’re meeting with expects you to follow through with the fuck-me attitude and actually put out? Pardon my French, but I’m tired of dancing around what it really is. It’s dangerous, what you do. What if you meet with someone who can’t hear you say no because everything you’ve done up to that point has been a great big yes?”
“I don’t do private meetings,” Jane explained. “I always bring Robin. Always.” She tried to sit up. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that my so-called fuck-me attitude is really just confidence? Yes, I walk around trying to give off a vibe that says ‘You want me.’ As a producer, as a writer, hell, yes—I want to be wanted. But because I combine that confidence with clothing that shows off my body, you interpret my message as a purely sexual one. It’s classic male thinking—if a woman so much as smiles at a man, he thinks, ‘Yeah! She wants to have sex with me.’ News flash: She might only be thinking, ‘Gee, I like the color of that tie.’ ”
“You do more than smile,” Cosmo said.
“No, I don’t,” Jane argued.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You use eye contact to—”
“Oh, that’s nice! What? Would you prefer I demurely avert my gaze when speaking to men?” She was pissed, and she pulled her feet away, which wasn’t particularly smart because now she wasn’t getting them rubbed.
“There’s eye contact, and then there’s eye contact,” he said. “You know damn well what you do. You crank the sex to eleven.”
“I crank the confidence,” she countered. “You know, if I were a man you’d think, ‘Ooh, he’s commanding.’ Or ‘Wow, he’s charismatic.’ And you wouldn’t think twice if I wore a wife beater or snug-fitting jeans. But because I’m a woman, you see the confidence combined with the outer package. And by the way, if I wore the exact same clothes but I had a different body, you’d think, ‘Whoa, she’s hip.’ But because I have breasts and a butt, you see me and you think it’s all about sex. That’s pretty sad, isn’t it? What, do you think I should wear a muumuu—cover myself completely? How about a veil while I’m at it? Oh, but even that’s not enough, is it? God forbid there be eye contact. Better put a paper bag over my head!”
He was silent for a moment. But then he said, “Sorry if I offended you. I hear what you’re saying, and, fair or not—and in my experience, life’s not fair—I think you go too far. That’s my opinion. But whether you’re right or I am doesn’t really matter. Bottom line, I’m concerned for your safety.”
Was this guy for real? Thoughtful, sensitive, honest, intelligent, he actually seemed to listen to what she said. So, of course, instead of thanking him for his very genuine-seeming concern, Jane tried to turn it into a joke. “With two guards around me day and night, I think there’s a good chance I’m safe.”
“We won’t be here forever,” he pointed out.
“It just seems that way,” she quipped, hating herself for not being brave enough to say what she really wanted to say. So, hey, yeah, you won’t be working here forever, but do you maybe think that there might be a ghost of a chance that when this job is over, provided things don’t work out between you and perfect Sophia, you might be interested in kicking this friendship we’ve got going up to a higher level?
Because, God, what if she said that and he said, I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken my polite concern for friendship, and when I’m gone, I am never, ever coming back.
“Have you noticed how we’ve talked about everything except the Legend of Chief Cosmo Richter?” Jane asked, because, please, God, maybe hearing the truth about exactly what happened to those eighteen very dead people would make her a little less interested in being this man’s friend.
“Not quite everything,” Cosmo deadpanned. But then she realized he wasn’t kidding when he added, “I wanted to ask you about this night shoot you’ve got coming up. When does it start? Tomorrow?”
“Yeah, after dark.” They were scheduled to start shooting the scenes from the beginning of the movie, where Jack first joined the Twenty-third. Robin had the night free—he wasn’t in those scenes. Jane had been tempted to give Patty the night off, too, but she needed her intern on set. “I know what you’re going to say. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go out there and put my cast and crew in danger.”
“Good.”
“I’m not happy about it, though.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but it’s the right thing to do.”
“I have to go shopping,” she told him. “I thought I could do that tomorrow night. I need a new dress to wear to the premiere of Fool’s Gold, and it occurred to me that the safest time to go is late at night, when stores are usually closed. There’s a shop I like—the owner won’t mind opening up for me after hours. Do you, uh, want to come? I thought maybe we could pick out something for you to wear to your dinner with Sophia.”
Cosmo gazed at her, clearly trying to decide whether or not she was making a joke.
“I’m serious,” she said. “You’ve been in the Navy for how long? Since high school, right?”
He nodded.
“I’m guessing the number of nice suits you have hanging in your closet would be . . . close to zero?”
“Suits?” Cosmo laughed. “Zero would be close, yeah. Not having to wear a suit and tie to work was at the top of the pro column when I decided to enlist.”
“Yeah, well, wearing a suit to work and wearing a suit to impress the woman of your dreams and maybe even get laid as part of the deal are two entirely different things.”
He wasn’t wearing sunglasses. They were sitting indoors and it was night. But she recognized the look he gave her. Had he been wearing sunglasses, he would have been looking over the tops of them. He didn’t say anything. He just gazed at her.
“Oh, sorry,” Jane said. “I didn’t realize we were pretending that your life was a Disney movie. Maybe she’ll hold your hand.” She batted her eyes as she smiled sweetly at him. “Better? I know you don’t like the idea of dressing up, but if you want my opinion, a man with your height and build in a well-cut dark suit . . .” She fanned herself.
Elbow on the table, he closed his eyes as he rubbed his forehead. Then he looked up at her from beneath his fingers. “If you want to know the truth, it’s not about like or dislike. I don’t have the money right now for new clothes, no matter how badly I want to get . . .” He cleared his throat. Sat back in his chair. Crossed his arms. “Well, I have money, I’m just saving it for . . . See, Medicaid would only cover care for my mother if she we
nt into a nursing home.” He shifted in his seat. “That wasn’t an option. I was going to do it myself. You know, take care of her. But she was mortified at the idea and . . . She doesn’t know any of this, and you know, I am going to bring her onto the set after she gets back from San Fran—thank you for offering that—so I’m, you know, trusting that you won’t tell her that . . . you know . . .”
“That you’re paying for her at-home care out of pocket,” Jane finished for him, her heart in her throat.
Cosmo nodded. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so until she gets the casts off and starts therapy, I’m not buying anything.”
Game over.
There was no denying it any longer. Jane was totally crushing on this guy—whose life was a Disney movie. He was spending his savings to keep his mother out of a nursing home, and he said things like “Pardon my French,” and couldn’t even manage to utter the phrase “get laid” in front of her.
“You can borrow a suit from Costume,” she told him past the lump in her throat. “Retro’s in—you’ll look amazing.”
“I don’t know—”
“I do,” she said. “Don’t argue. God, for a guy with a rep for being silent and deadly, you argue about everything. And speaking of that rep . . . I believe the question was, ‘That story’s not really true, is it?’ ”
Time stood still as he gazed at her, as she lost herself—just a little bit—in his beautiful eyes.
Finally—she had no idea how long they just sat there like that—he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not true.”
She knew it. She knew it.
“So what really happened?” Jane asked. She intended to sound matter-of-fact, but her words came out as little more than a whisper.
Cosmo looked down at the table, but she knew he wasn’t seeing his book and her mug. He was millions of miles away. She held her breath for what seemed like forever. And when he finally looked back up at her, the haunted expression on his face was one she knew she’d remember for the rest of her life.
He nodded very slightly, as if he were answering his own internal question, giving himself permission to tell her something that she instinctively knew he didn’t talk about often—if at all.
“You’ve heard The Story, so you know about the villagers,” he said. “The bloodshed was—” He stopped. The muscle jumped in his jaw as once again he stared at the table, seeing what, God only knew.
Jane just waited, not daring to move, not even to reach across the table to take his hand.
“They didn’t waste their bullets on these people,” he told her quietly, not looking up. “It was all done with swords and bayonets and . . . I was helping with cleanup. Burials. The villagers who had been spared were overwhelmed—and some of the dead had no family members left alive to care for them. Some of them had only one and . . . I helped this old man whose entire family had been killed. Three sons and his daughter-in-law, his two grandkids—Christ, they were babies, Jane, and they—” He met her gaze for only the briefest moment before he looked away, shaking his head.
She leaned forward. “You can tell me,” she said. “I’m pretty tough, you know, and it might help to talk about it.”
“It won’t.” He was convinced.
“How do you know?” she asked, just as convinced that Cosmo had never told this story to anyone before.
He met her gaze. “They didn’t kill them quickly. They took the time to be particularly brutal with the children,” he told her, and she shut her mouth.
“The old man’s daughter-in-law was still alive,” he continued after another of those seemingly endless silences. “I don’t know how, with her throat cut like that, but she opened her eyes and looked right at me, and it was, you know, Jesus God.” He shook his head. “It was unreal. I shouted for Lopez, our corpsman—medic, you know—but he’d gone with the others. It was just me and good old Frank O’Leary at that point. So Frank gets on the radio, calling in a helo to medevac her out of there, and I’m doing first aid, and oh my holy God, Jane, I don’t know why she hasn’t bled to death already—she’s barely got a pulse. But then she starts fighting me. To this day I don’t know where she found the strength, but she’s trying to get to her kids. Trying to . . .” He faltered, briefly closed his eyes. Pushed the words out. “Put them back together. Like she doesn’t realize it’s way too late.”
“Oh, God,” Jane breathed.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. Rubbed his hand across the lower part of his face. “And the old man is begging us not to let her die, like we’re God or something. O’Leary goes, ‘Helo’s coming, Cos, but the closest they can get is back at the insertion point.’ ” He stopped himself again, sensitive to the fact that the military jargon was lost on her. “We inserted into the area—fast-roped down from a helicopter, you follow?—about seven miles up a steep mountain trail. That’s as close as the helo would come to pick us up. This village is right in the middle of a terrorist hot spot—the helo can’t come this far east into the valley without providing an opportunity for undesirables to test-drive their black market grenade launchers.”
Jane nodded because he was looking at her as if he wanted some kind of response. She was following him, but a nod was the best she could do. Words were failing her. Seven miles. Up a steep mountain trail . . . ?
“O’Leary’s going, ‘She’s not going to make it, man,’ except we’ve got a medical kit with the right equipment to . . . Well, see, I’m Oh.” Unlike insertion point, he didn’t explain what that meant. Clearly he thought she knew. “My medical training is pretty limited, but I’d seen Lopez do it before—”
“Hang on.” She had to interrupt. “You’re Oh?”
“Universal donor,” he said, and she still didn’t realize exactly what he meant until he added, “She needed blood and I’m type O. Technically, yeah, we’re not supposed to do that. When we go overseas we get shot full of all kinds of shit—” He winced. “Sorry.”
“Whoa—back up. Are you telling me that you . . . ?” Her mouth was hanging open.
“We didn’t have any plasma. Some kits are equipped, but this one wasn’t. So we hook up a tube, a direct line, you know, me to her and . . . Stop looking at me like that. It’s no big deal.”
Like hell it wasn’t. Still, she managed to shut her mouth because incredulity bordering on hero worship was clearly something that made him uncomfortable. This story was hard enough for him to tell as it was. She didn’t want to make it harder.
Or make him think she’d heard enough.
Indeed, Cosmo was looking at her again, muscle jumping on the side of his jaw, and again she got the feeling he was deciding just how much of the details he was going to reveal.
“We can tell it’s helping because she starts fighting harder,” he finally continued, so quietly she had to hold her breath to hear him. “She wants her kids. And the old man’s telling her, ‘They’re dead,’ but I stop him, because I know it’s what’s keeping her alive. You know?”
She nodded. That and the blood that he was giving her, directly from his veins.
“So I’m lying to her,” he said, and Jane realized that his decision wasn’t so much about how much to tell her, but how much he could bear to say. “Right to her face. I get the old man, who has some English, and he tells me the words for ‘They’re all right, they’re going to be all right,’ and coming from me, the almighty American, she buys it. She’s hanging on to me, believing me, and I’m thinking, Christ, she’s thanking me for saving her children.”
Dear God, he had tears in his eyes.
“O’Leary picks her up, he’s going to carry her because I’m, you know, a little shaky.” Cosmo shook his head. “Only she doesn’t want to leave her kids. We’re afraid to give her morphine because even though her pulse is stronger it’s still so low, and now I’m telling her that the kids will be safe with their grandfather. And she goes, ‘My baby, my baby,’ and she starts pleading with me. I don’t need to speak the language to know what she
’s saying, but the old man tells me she’s not going to leave without her two-month-old and . . .”
He stopped again, this time putting his hand over his eyes.
Jane couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
“So I carry her baby. ‘Is he all right?’ She can barely speak, but she keeps asking that. And I’m all, ‘Yes, he’s great, he’s fine.’ For seven fucking miles.” His voice broke. “And I’m holding the pieces of him together. In case she looks back at me.”
“Oh, God,” Jane said. “Cosmo—”
“Don’t!” He said it so sharply that, startled, she stopped short almost before she’d even realized she was out of her chair and heading toward him. He softened it by adding, “Please . . .” and she slowly backed up and sat down.
But she couldn’t keep herself from leaning forward. “Cos . . .”
“Sorry. Just give me a—”
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