Off-Limits Box Set

by Ella James

  “I would never wreck you, Ammy. I’ll sneak over to see you or we’ll meet somewhere tonight. You have my word.”

  By that night, his truck is gone. His word is worthless. And my heart is broken.

  Six

  Amelia

  Summer 2016

  It can’t be. It can’t be him!

  My body feels electric; at the same time, numb. I can feel my fingertips trembling, feel my pulse gallop so fast my head feels like a balloon that might float off. When I try to breathe, my lungs don’t seem to expand fully.

  I feel frozen like Lot’s wife—a pillar of cold, bloodless salt—as I behold his older face. His gorgeous face. With his dark hair long and straight, pushed off his forehead and falling around the collar of his shirt; his hazel eyes framed by stylish hipster glasses; and a coat of scruff over the hard lines of his face, Dash looks every bit the gorgeous artist.

  My eyes meet his for just a fraction of a second before I jerk my burning gaze down: over his shirt—slightly tight, a charcoal Batman tee—and then his knee-ripped, old and busted jeans. Where someone fashion conscious might wear Chucks or Velcro-strapped designer sneakers, Dash is sporting black flip-flops.

  I note a pencil tucked behind his ear and how damn wide his shoulders are before I have no choice but look him in the eye.

  I know my face is flawless and impossible to read.

  That knowledge is the only way I’m able to stay standing as I peer into his equally impassive eyes.

  We look at each other past one blink, then two. Dash’s face is carefully neutral: lips and chin set still, his big body immobile in his office chair. It’s his stillness that melts the block of ice inside my chest, that lets me know he’s affected by my presence in at least some way.

  I get the sudden feeling that he’s waiting for me to make the first move. Waiting for me to speak or react. Even as my neck and face flush, I refuse to give it to him. When our mutual stillness becomes too much for my poor, twitchy nerves, I square my shoulders, and Dash stands smoothly, his face tightening almost imperceptibly.

  “You must be the writing intern I’ve heard so much about.” He holds out his hand as his mouth tugs into a frown, and, unbelievably, I shake it.

  “Yeah,” I manage.

  Damn, he’s big. His hand is warm. His face is close. Too close to me. And still, I stand in my façade. I release his hand at the appropriate millisecond. I step back and give that formal sort-of smile, a brightening of the eyes and shifting of the mouth that signifies polite intentions. “Amelia,” I say in a lilting tone.

  Dash turns, grasping another high-backed office chair by the spine and pushing it toward me.

  “Sit. Please.”

  His voice is low—and almost angry. So I pretend it doesn’t tickle my insides, it doesn’t make me want to grab him by his jaw and kiss him bruised and dig my fingertips into those thick muscles.

  I want to ravage him, abandon him. I desire to make him bleed. Do to Dash what he did to me.

  Eviscerate.

  And so I pride myself on my demeanor. Like a character from Pearl S. Buck, I tell myself as I sit coquettishly in my chair, beside his, and listen to him introduce me to the others in our studio.

  Dash sits, too—and I can smell him. Same warm skin, perhaps some product: deodorant or aftershave, shampoo.

  I smile for the others—animators Adam and Ashley, writers Meredith and Bryan, a props person named Amber, an assistant named Mallorie, and of course, the other writer, Carrie. There is a friendly chorus of hellos before they turn back to their work, with Carrie settling in a cubby beside Meredith and Bryan.

  I straighten my posture. Glee trills through me as Dash’s gaze dips to some papers on the desk in front of us, then lifts to mine.

  For a heartbeat, I perceive uncertainty. Or maybe not. It’s gone so fast, there’s no way to be sure.

  Dash blinks, frowning like he just remembered some annoyance. “Are you ready to get started?”

  “Sure.”

  My voice is a corporeal thing, a crisp veil in the too-warm air between us. Evidencing my travels and a fair amount of intention, I’ve shed the worst of my Southern drawl. My tone is still soft—that’s just my voice—but I know how to put a point on it when needed.

  “I know you worked at Dreamworks last summer,” he says as I pull out my iPad and stylus. “I got your CV this morning, also an assessment of your strengths by our department head, Weiss, who must have hired you—and your own assessment of potential areas of improvement.”

  I watch his Adam’s apple bob along the column of his tanned throat, and I can’t help wondering what he did to get the tan. Does he still water ski? Does he have that motorcycle he wanted in eighth grade? Does he have a girlfriend floating in the pool beside him?

  NO, Amelia. STOP IT!

  “We do things a little differently than Dreamworks. I’ll explain our process and both of our roles. We’ll be in the lead this time, with smaller teams than full production staff. Weiss has fleshed out all the teams’ projections so we’re aiming for about a reel, as are the other teams with interns. I’m sure you’re familiar with the next few months’ timeline, but we’ll go over that too. Did someone let you know potential themes?”

  I’m tempted to shake my head, but I feel the need to use my voice. I tell him, “No.”

  His hand, slightly curled beside his notepad, spreads, showing me his long, familiar fingers. He taps them lightly on the desk as he lifts his head and projects his voice, so the others in the room can hear him.

  “Quick discussion of potential themes,” he says, and they nod, pulling out notepads and tablets. “We’ve got little critter on the move. Think flea on a coat, hopping around New York. There’s fairy tale with light intrigue, and hapless zoo animal tours the city. Think the cast of the children’s book Goodnight, Gorilla.” I inhale slowly, nodding slightly, my shoulders still squared, my back still politely stiff. “I have several twists on these, and you can spend today brainstorming some as well.”

  My heart is beating so unsteady, I think I might faint, but Dash would never, ever know as I ask, “What are yours?”

  He looks around, acknowledging the rest of the staffers, then at me. His eyes are hard. “The flea is one of them. Marketing might shoot it down in prelims, though.” His lips curl slightly for the first time, causing brain-melt for me. “Nobody likes fleas.”

  “That’s true,” Carrie says.

  “Little, itchy fuckers,” dread-locked Bryan puts in.

  Mallorie shakes her frizzy, red bob, giving Bryan a small smirk.

  “We could try a frog, a green tree frog—one of the thinner ones you see on windows sometimes.” Dash taps his fingers once more. “Or…” he says, sitting up straighter. I notice his pencil in his hand before he flips to a clean page in his pad. “We could go bird.” I watch Dash’s skilled strokes of lead on paper turn a bird into… My throat knots up. “Something like a dove. A bird that can live out in the wild or as a pet.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s stopped speaking and is looking right at me. I hate myself as I swallow, barely steadying my voice enough to keep my façade intact as I ask, “What happens to the dove?”

  “She’s small and not very well cared for. Maybe in a busy household. One day, someone leaves her cage open. Someone comes to clean the house and leaves the window open. She flies out. She’s scared at first, but she has an adventure. Kind of Finding Nemo.”

  “Why a dove?” I bore my gaze into his and keep my mouth firm.

  “Why not?” He lifts one shoulder. “Doves are beautiful, unique. Also, they don’t screech.”

  “What do you mean?” Ashley, with the black braid, asks.

  “They make a cooing sound, doves. It’s pleasant.”

  I blink a few times.

  “Okay,” Carrie says. “I like a Finding Nemo vibe.”

  “But not too Nemo,” Meredith says. She’s small and slender, almost child-sized, with a fluff of natural curls and a go
ld nose ring.

  Dash sketches a ring around the bird’s neck, then does something to its wings. “Ring-necked doves are sometimes pets. They don’t like a whole lot of interaction, but they can be trained to eat from someone’s hand.”

  “I like a girl who’ll eat out of my hand,” Adam drawls. I flick my gaze over his UT ball cap and his short moustache.

  I can feel my cheeks flush, even as I keep my breathing even and my shoulders back.

  “So…what do you think?” Dash asks, staring at me.

  I want to slap his face for suggesting our film feature a dove. Instead I ask, “Do you have any story yet?”

  “That’s your job.”

  “Yes—it is.” I turn away from Dash, glancing from Bryan to Meredith to Carrie. “We’ll get working on a story arc if that’s what you think should be our focus right now.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” he asks rudely.

  My throat tightens: that stinging feeling right before you cry. My face is so hot, I think I might be steaming. “No, that sounds just fine. We’ll go get started.”

  I start to roll my chair away from our shared desk space, and Dash stops me with a hand on the chair’s arm. “Let’s let the others start—” his gaze roves over them— “while I go over all the boring stuff with you.”

  He says it like it’s something awful. My cheeks throb with heat, and for a too-long second, my eyes sting, too.

  Then I tell myself to put my big-girl panties on. I’m an officer in my sorority, damnit. When my dad and Manda divorced last year, following us finding out she’d been cheating on him with the entire city of Atlanta, I called her a whore and told her if I saw her face again, I’d slap it. I’m not Ammy anymore. I’m an adult, by God, and if Dash thinks he can treat me like a child, he’s got another thing coming.

  He casts his eyes down to his pad, where he fills in some of the bird’s feathers.

  I don’t say a word, just sit there with my lips pressed tightly together, then trying to look more neutral so none of the others notice our weird tension.

  I struggle to behave normally over the next hour, listening to Dash go over protocol and details. Every time he shifts, it’s as if he’s pulling on a string to something anchored deep inside me. I start sweating. I can’t keep my eyes from roving all the contours of his body. He’s filled out a lot. His body is a man’s now, forearms hair-dusted, his hands wider and thicker, nicked with small scars. I notice a scar on one temple.

  Even his voice is different, I think, as I listen to him talk in boring work terms. Like me, I guess, he sounds less Southern. More confident. Like he’s used to being in charge.

  Despite everything, I find myself a little lulled by his low, familiar voice, even as I keep my posture rigid and my face blank.

  So I’m surprised when he stops speaking, looks down at a phone he’s cupping in one hand, and stands up.

  “Did you get all that?” he asks me, in a way that makes me think he thinks I didn’t.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good.” He casts his gaze around the room. “I have a meeting for another project, folks. Adam and Ashley, if you could work on prototyping doves and other pre-production stuff.”

  “Yessir,” Adam says.

  “You writers do your thing,” Dash says, lifting an eyebrow in the direction of Carrie, Meredith, and Bryan.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Bryan says.

  I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but it’s not Dash striding to the door and opening it without a glance my way. “I’ll see you all tomorrow,” he says flatly.

  The door shuts with a sharp click.

  All the air has left my lungs. I can’t move. Belatedly, I clutch my iPhone, thinking of hurling it at the door. In the end, of course, I pull myself together. I sit there for a tiny moment, dying inside, until I’m calm enough to roll my chair across the room.

  Seven

  Dash

  “Shot of Jameson.”

  “All-righty…”

  The pig-tailed blonde turns to pour my whiskey, and I try to let my breath out.

  “Here ya go.”

  I slam it back while she watches from beneath her eyelashes. A small smile plays along her lips.

  “You need another one?”

  “Please.”

  She’s turned her narrow back to me again, and I decide to make it easy on her. “One more and an Irish Car Bomb.”

  She slides both drinks over the pocked wood bar counter, and I nod. “Thanks.”

  I down the Jameson, drop the car bomb shot into the glass of stout, and slide off the bar stool, palming the drink. A quick scan of The Wasted Quarter Horse reveals nothing but strangers’ faces.

  Good.

  The Quarter Horse is in an old warehouse. The room you walk into is a little on the narrow side—booths on the left, bar on the right—but if you head toward the back wall and hang a left, it opens up into a larger pool room.

  I let my gaze caress that big wall as I head toward the pool room. It’s a spray of color, sporting a whole mess of warring faeries. Why the fuck a bar called The Wasted Quarter Horse would want a mural of fighting faeries, I don’t fucking know, but when I got the commission two years ago, I didn’t ask.

  “Hey, Dash!” My head turns as I step into the wider pool room. It’s Poppy, a wispy, red-haired girl who’s not much over 21 and always over-friendly when I’m here for Trivia Tuesdays. “It’s not Tuesday night,” she calls over a full tray. I take in her dimpled smile and try to return it.

  “Got here a little early.”

  She winks, and I find an empty booth to drain my drink.

  I live in Burbank, but since Disney acquired Imagine last year, I’ve been in Nashville enough to have a company-paid penthouse at Birchwood Towers down the block. When I fly in, I’m here Sunday through Wednesday, so a couple of us always hit up Trivia Tuesdays. Winning team gets free tabs, and we usually win.

  An aproned guy I recognize stops by the table, offering a menu, but I shake my head. He takes my glass.

  “Another drink?”

  “Pint of Guinness.”

  “No prob.”

  I watch the flat-screen on the wall till he returns. Then I pull back half of the drink. I can feel my knotted shoulders deflate, feel my eyelids tug a little in that good, relaxing way. I give a little laugh and sink my fingers into my hair.

  Fuuck.

  I take another long swallow and laugh.

  Made it to the Quarter Horse—still breathing, so that’s something.

  I finish the drink while my thoughts drift around like dust motes in a sunny window: real, but barely. None of this feels real yet. That’s a good thing, I think, as I tabulate my bill and leave some cash under my empty glass.

  With a brief glance around the Horse—for what? Amelia?—I head toward the door. It’s hot as fuck on Broadway, all that thick-ass, sticky Southern air. I never miss this shit in Burbank, I think, as I amble toward the river.

  My car’s still at the Horse, but I can’t drive now, on account of my usual teetotaler status. Since I never drink, it goes right to my head, and that’s a good thing; I don’t drink unless I want it that way.

  Distantly, I know I’m going to have a headache by tonight, but I don’t give a fuck. I almost want it. Homage, I think with a miserable smile.

  I cut down Ryman Alley, listening to country music drifting through the doors somewhere. Sounds like a Rascal Flatts cover.

  I pull out my phone as I move toward the sound.

  I tried Alexia earlier this morning, and I didn’t get her. Maybe now. Even drunk, I worry when it rings three times—but then she answers on the fourth.

  “Brother!”

  I’m so relieved I stop and lean against the brick wall of a restaurant.

  I chuckle. “Lex. How ya doing?”

  “Just fine, and yourself?”

  “How was the shoot?” She had a photo shoot for a swimsuit designer in Puerto Rico this past weekend.

  “Good. No
one asked why I pushed it back last month, like what the family emergency was.”

  “That’s good.” Alexia spent three weeks in rehab, her second time there since last October. The first time, she stayed all of November and December, telling her social media followers that she’d be taking a break while she visited family and spent time at an ashram. I did some globe-trotting, snapping landscape shots in Switzerland and India for her Instagram account. The clinic wanted her to stay more than eight weeks, but she didn’t feel like she could leave her work that long, so she left early. She had a relapse this spring. “So—you feeling okay?”

  “I am, Captain Obvious. Keeping clean and healthy, thank you. Where are you? I think I hear some Nashville in the background.”

  “Yep.”

  “You there now for the summer?”

  “Yep.”

  “And? How’s it going? Do you like the writer intern?”

  I clamp my teeth down on my cheek, then let my breath out. “The intern is Amelia. Frank,” I bite out.

  “Welllllll…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn, that’s wild. So how’s it going?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Fucking weird?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Fucking weird.” I rub my hand over my face.

  She laughs. “Are you drunk?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you out somewhere? I hear a horn honking.”

  “Was at a bar.”

  “Goddamn, Dash.”

  “You’re like a sailor, Lex.”

  “I wish.”

  I frown down at my shoes. “You wish you were a sailor?”

  “Sure. It sounds like fun. Maybe I should call her up… Amelia. Tell her not to wreck my big brother.”

  That earns her a snort. “No way. You should definitely not call Ammy.”

  “Aw, that was her nickname, wasn’t it? Ammy or Dove. How cute.”

  “Shut up, Lexie.”

  “Are you going to keep working with her?” she asks.

  “Yes.”