Lead Me Back

by Reiss, CD

  New York could suck a bag of dicks, but Brenda? I missed the way she could set me straight, and I was sure she would have given me an earful about being Justin Beckett’s personal message taker.

  I flipped a hanger tag. JB21 was the actor’s initials and the scene number. I found the pants where Evelyn said they’d be and brought them into the fitting room for my test.

  The fitting room.

  Where the trouble back home had started.

  I slid the stuffed blue tomato with pins sticking out of it onto my wrist and laced a tape measure around my neck.

  This was my job, not just today, but for my life. What had happened would never happen again.

  The fitting room at the end of the trailer was shielded from prying eyes by covered windows and a locked door. Two mirrors were set at a right angle in one corner.

  Francine sat in a little folding chair by a table with her legs crossed. I could see Justin’s bare feet under the changing room curtain. They say famous people put their pant legs on one at a time. Not Justin. He sat on a chair and shoved them both through.

  “Do we measure them first?” I asked.

  “We go fast,” she said. “We’re not making hundreds of these. Alter for fit and for the camera.”

  I pushed the hanger past the curtain, and when he took it, his hand brushed mine for a second. A totally unnecessary touch that sent a wave of shudders through me.

  “Okay,” I said, pulling my arm back as if I’d been caught in the middle of a sexual fantasy.

  “The machine’s in the rack room. You can use it?”

  “Yes. No problem.”

  Justin came out of the changing room in nothing but trousers, as if he wasn’t somehow bending light toward him looking like Michelangelo’s David. The definition of his body was exactly that sharp. Marble carved to the shape of every muscle and vein and painted with tattoos on his right shoulder and arm, with a relaxed posture of defiant arrogance.

  It was my job to look at him, but I turned away for my own sanity. I had to get it together. He was still an ass, and his looks made it that much more likely he was always going to be an ass.

  He got on the platform in front of the mirrors. There was work to do. He was just a form, and his waistband was sagging where his lower back curved.

  “Okay,” I said more to myself than anyone else. “This is easy.”

  “Good,” Francine said, picking up her vibrating phone.

  I could feel the heat of his body and the weight of his eyes on me in the mirror. His back bowed above the swell of his ass, with a soft, sueded matte I had to make an effort not to touch.

  I pinched the back of the waist. “Is this comfortable?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” He watched me kneeling behind him. I pinned the back rise carefully from the bottom.

  “I have to go on set,” Francine said, standing. “Kayla, do the alteration. Finished by ten fifteen. If I’m not back in time to see it on him, take a picture.”

  “Okay.”

  Before I could ask another question, she was gone, and I was alone with Justin’s stare and the magnetic pull of his shape.

  “This is a lot,” I said, pinching out the waist.

  “I stopped partying.” He crossed his arms to get them out of the way.

  “After the Roosevelt Hotel thing?”

  “Yeah.” I adjusted the excess from the rise below, feeling the firmness of his butt under my fingers. My face went hot, and I hid behind him so he couldn’t see me in the mirrors. “But it changed my life.”

  “Was it hard?”

  “Of course it was hard.”

  I stopped at the last bit of fabric. While I loved a good double entendre as much as the next girl, I was already too close to nervous giggling. Or maybe he was still on the subject, and I was being silly.

  Looking around him, I checked his expression in the mirror.

  Smirking. Was he trying to make me uncomfortable?

  Fine. Two could play at this.

  “I bet it’s quite hard.” I pinched the last tiny bit of excess. “Every time you look at yourself in the mirror.”

  My fingertips, informed by the delight of my eyes and the need to experience the smooth perfection of his skin, thought they could get away with something inconceivable. Before I could override the decision, they brushed the indent of his lower back.

  He jumped with a quick laugh, spinning to face me.

  “I’m sorry!” I cried, confused by the laughing and the sharp twist away.

  He’s ticklish.

  “Are we done?” he asked.

  “We’re done.”

  “Good.”

  He stormed into the dressing room and shut the curtain.

  I didn’t care if he liked me as a person, but I didn’t want him to think less of me as a professional. And yet I could still feel the softness on my skin. Part of me—the nonsense animal part—wanted to see just how ticklish he was.

  “I’ve never done that before,” I called. “Really. I’m so sorry.”

  “Forget it.” He kicked the trousers under the curtain. “It’s not that big a deal. Just make sure my pants don’t fall down when I’m in scene, okay?”

  I picked up the costume.

  “Okay.” I hated being wrong, especially in opposition to someone I thought so little of.

  My phone rang, and Justin snapped the curtain open, fully dressed. I took it out of my pocket and looked at the screen.

  Unknown number from Las Vegas.

  I handed it to him, and he answered as if it were his phone.

  “Hey,” he said. When he heard the voice on the other side, he shooed me away as if I were a child, and I hated him all over again.

  I left to make the adjustments on the dinky machine we had in the trailer. I could hear his voice on the other side of the wall. The words were too muffled, but the tone was sober. He wasn’t making dinner plans or trash-talking. He was serious.

  The alteration didn’t look great, but I kept the mess to the back, where his jacket would cover it. It took seven minutes, but when I went to the changing room to have him try the pants on, he was gone.

  Thank God. Now I could work.

  The assistant director, a woman named Renee with a constantly attached headset, came to bring me on set for a quick steam on a petticoat, then Francine needed a slip stitch to keep a lapel down so the light didn’t shine on it. I managed to gobble down lunch before I was sent to makeup so I could remove a foundation stain from Eddie’s shirt.

  “How’s your first day?” he asked, chin pointing up so I could rub his collar with a bar of soap. People were constantly in and out of makeup for adjustments. The chatter was constant except when a scene was shooting upstairs. Then it was quiet as a church.

  “Eventful.”

  “Never a dull moment,” Hector, the makeup guy, said as he screwed a cap on a pot of blue. “Not when you’re living the dream.”

  “Is that what this is?” I said, trying to do the impossible without a bleach stick.

  “If your dream is watching the Beckster lose his shit,” Eddie grumbled under his breath.

  “What happened?” I asked, wondering if it was the phone call.

  Eddie just shook his head as if he’d said too much. Hector cleared his throat as if changing the subject.

  “One minute!” Renee called to the far corners of the house.

  “Good enough.” I stepped back. “I hope.”

  “It’s fine,” Hector said. “We’re not selling it at Nordstrom. We’re selling it to America.”

  Eddie took off to get to set. I sighed and folded the packaging over the soap.

  “You haven’t been doing this long.” Hector arranged his table. He was in his late thirties and already bald and jowly, as if he were born old enough to know when someone was new.

  “First day.”

  “Let me give you a hair and makeup tip. If you want to keep working, your job is to listen and let it go. Don’t ask questions if the answers might be
of value to someone.”

  “Okay. I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “Kayla?” a handsome guy in a suit asked. I recognized him as one of the men who had come on set with Justin.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Carter, Justin’s security.”

  “Hi.”

  “He asked me to get this to you.”

  He handed me my phone and was gone before I could thank him. Hector looked at the phone with a raised eyebrow. I expected him to ask about it, but he was a man who took his own advice.

  “We’re going out Friday,” he said as an actress plopped herself in his chair. “Makeup. A few of the girls in hair. You should come.”

  “Sure.”

  He’d already turned his attention to the actress. I headed for the costume trailer and opened my phone. I had a text from Justin.

  —Thank you—

  —And yeah. It was hard.—

  CHAPTER 6

  JUSTIN

  There were four of us. Me, Chad, Shane the Pain, and Gordon.

  Echo Park was our kingdom, and the Beckett house on Valentine Street was the castle.

  I had an Xbox, a PlayStation, and a fraternal twin brother, Justice, who wound up on a minor league team in Florida. Mom and Dad let us run all over the neighborhood from the time we were in kindergarten at the Montessori school around the corner. Justice and I were wild animals. Gone all day and home for dinner covered in dirt and scrapes. Chad, Gordon, and Shane started coming over around third grade, right about when Dad made us take piano and play a team sport—because balance was a thing with him. We could climb fences all over Echo Park as long as we did those two things.

  Justice begged me to join the Wilshire Warriors with him, but those baseball uniforms with the stirrups in the pants were humiliating. After one season, I couldn’t do it anymore. So Mom talked Dad into letting me take guitar instead.

  My father making a compromise meant I had to prove he’d made the right choice. So I practiced like a madman, and I got over the hump of learning how to read music and play my instruments before I realized it was hard.

  He owned a restaurant in Silver Lake, so he was out at the markets at the crack of dawn, home between lunch and the first seating, then working all night. So he was around but only sometimes. If the guys were over after school, when I was supposed to be practicing, they had to wait on the porch until four o’clock while Justice was at baseball practice with Mom.

  That one day, in the spring of seventh grade, I could see them through the big front windows, killing fifteen minutes. They laughed about a thing I wasn’t included in, and I snapped.

  I turned my keyboard amp up and let her rip. I played the stupid Beatles song I was learning. “The Long and Winding Road.” And my friends stood on the other side of the window and sang it with me. We’d never sung together before. That wasn’t a thing. But we landed on some kind of harmony, maybe because the keyboard wasn’t so loud on the other side, and the guys could hear each other.

  Dad came up the steps, holding a paper bag with baguettes sticking out of the top. I stopped playing because even though I wasn’t officially breaking the rules, I wasn’t obeying the spirit of the thing either. The guys were facing me, so they didn’t see him and went on another verse until I stopped and pointed behind them.

  In unison, Gordon, Chad, and Shane stepped away from the glass and greeted my father. Gordon called him Mr. Beckett, which he hated. Chad and Shane waved and said, “Hey.”

  Dad flicked his wrist at our front door. I read his lips saying, “Get inside.” He could get a pit bull to back up and roll over, so my friends obeyed. Dad followed them in without a word and brought his baguettes to the kitchen.

  “What now?” Gordon asked, throwing himself on the couch.

  “If he calls my mom . . .” Chad finished the thought with a quick shake of his head.

  Shane sat at the piano and played a cadence pattern. He took piano, but his parents weren’t militaristic about it.

  “Just chill,” I said. From the kitchen, I heard the bag land on the counter. “He won’t call.”

  He wouldn’t rat on them for distracting me or tell their parents to keep them away before four. Raising kids took a village. He’d rag them out himself, which would suck.

  Dad came into the living room and crossed his arms.

  “I’m sorry—” I started to explain but shut my trap with a hard look from him.

  “You three,” he said. Chad chewed a nail. Shane stopped playing. Gordon straightened up ever so slightly. “You taking music at school?”

  “Nah,” Gordon said. “Got cut last year.”

  “Of course,” Dad said. “So where have you sung before? Together?”

  We looked at each other. Had we sung before? What kind of question was that? Was it good or bad? Why was my father such a dick?

  “Thought so,” Dad said, checking his watch. “All of you go home. I’m calling your parents.”

  Wide-eyed, they shuffled out, and I was left alone with my father, whom I’d never really hated until that moment.

  “I’ll clean the toilet,” I said, turning off the keyboard amp.

  He let me go do the adult thing even though I wasn’t in trouble.

  Hot Phone Girl left the fitting room, and I answered the call.

  “Chad?” I said, pacing across the tiny room.

  “Yeah. It’s me.” Trucks rumbled in the background. Wherever he was, it was windy.

  “Where are you?”

  “A pay phone. Dude. I’m fucked. So fucked.”

  “You’re not fucked. You just have to get out of Nevada.”

  “And go where? Dude. This is federal, okay? I brought my stash over state lines.”

  I pressed my forehead on the mirror as if I were trying to double my brain. It didn’t work. I wasn’t any smarter, but my head was cooler.

  “You need to come back.”

  “Why?” He wasn’t asking, really. He was accusing. This was going to get weird if I didn’t give him a good reason to come home.

  “Because everyone who gives a shit about you is here.” I snapped a little too much, but the revisions I had to memorize were on the floor, and convincing Chad to come back to LA could take an hour.

  He didn’t answer right away—as if he was trying to decide between believing me or the voices in his head.

  “You all want to put me away,” he said, siding with the voices. “You think that’s giving a shit. But you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what they do to me. They’re trying to steal our songs. Right out of my head. Before I even write them.”

  “No, dude. That’s impossible.”

  “They did it already! Why don’t you listen?”

  “Chad. Just come home and we can talk about it.”

  “I have it under control.”

  “Are you taking your meds or nah?”

  “They make me stupid.”

  Chad was a bright guy, which was the problem. If I focused on the meds the doctor was giving him instead of his self-medication, he’d bolt.

  The sewing machine on the other side of the wall started pounding. That would be Kayla doing the alterations. I didn’t want her or anyone to hear me, so I left the trailer, talking low so my voice would get lost in the chaos of the closed-off street.

  “We can write new songs,” I said. “Better ones.”

  “You got a solo deal.”

  “I had to take it. But if you came back, we can work together. I promise.”

  “That’s why you want me to come home.”

  “It is. Dude. Listen.”

  “No. You listen. I’m not safe there. Not around you or anyone. I know you. You’re just a vacuum sucking my energy out of me. You want me dull and stupid so you can tell me what to do. And I called to tell you . . .” He drifted off.

  “What?” I stood in the middle of the street with my head bowed. Carter’s feet were in my vision and not much else. “Tell me what?”

  “I know
why you did what you did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You think you covered for me. But I know it was all so you could break us up and go solo. That was your plan from the beginning. We all know it.”

  The sound of the trucks and the wind cut off. I’d lost him. Again.

  CHAPTER 7

  KAYLA

  Francine gave me the job. My first week on set went okay. I did another fitting on Justin where I managed to keep my fingers off him. He texted every day to ask if I’d gotten a call from Vegas. Late Friday, the texts started the way they usually did.

  —Anything?—

  —Nothing—

  —K thx—

  I pocketed the phone and took in Caroline Bingley’s stays, like a corset but more comfortable.

  “You coming out tonight?” Evelyn asked as she tagged a hanger. She was wearing baggy jeans from the nineties and a blue T-shirt with rectangle-cut sleeves.

  “Sure. Who’s going?”

  “Hector and Jenny from makeup. Susan, maybe? Hector says he can get us into NV.”

  “What about Eddie?” I asked. The tension between them had been thick enough to touch.

  She pushed her glasses up and kept her eyes on her work. She’d denied anything was going on with her and the actor, but refused to talk about it further.

  “Maybe,” she muttered, snapping hangers on the rack. “The big shots hang in the VIP room anyway, so whatever.”

  “He doesn’t seem like a big shot,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. That all just depends on who you’re seen with.”

  I had a hundred questions about who Eddie was seen with that she may have answered, but my phone buzzed again.

  Justin.

  —If you get a call this weekend you’ll let me

  know?—

  —Yes—

  —Thanks—

  —You hitting NV with the BTL?—

  “What’s BTL?” I asked Evelyn.

  “Below the line. You. Me. The grips. Camera. Movie grunts, basically. Why?”

  “Nothing. Just heard it around.”

  I tapped out a quick answer to Justin.

  —Yes—