Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (5 page)

“And where does it end?” I ask. “I do this
and you hold this over my head for the rest of my career or the rest of my life
or what?”

“I’m not talking about anything like
that,” he says. “I think we can call it quits after seventeen years.”

“That’s a really specific timeframe you’ve
got there,” I tell him. “That would be when I’m what, past my prime? Is that
how long you think I have left in this business?”

“I have no idea how long you’re going to
be in that business,” he says, “though I’m sure it won’t be anywhere near
seventeen years. I just thought that asking you for a million dollars upfront
would sound too pushy. I figured a monthly payment plan would be the more civil
approach.”

“You’re a humanitarian,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “So, what’s it
going to be? Do we have a deal, or are we going to be waking up with an eyeful
of you on every website in the galaxy?”

“First off,” I tell him, “I’m not that
famous. This is my first big role, and I don’t know how much you think they’re
paying me, but it’s probably a lot more than the reality. You let those
pictures out and I’ll get a little embarrassed, sure, but all that really happens
otherwise is that more people are going to find out exactly who I am, which
helps my career in the long-term, and more people are going to see this movie,
which is going to help my career in the short-term. Do you really think I’m
going to give up a million dollars just to keep my nipples out of the zeitgeist?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I really do.”

“Knock yourself out,” I tell him, giving
my play at indifference one last shot at working.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. “I was trying
to think of who to send it to first, but I guess it won’t really matter.
Everyone’s going to have a copy of it by morning.”

“You really think you’re going to bully
your way into a million dollars, don’t you?” I ask.

“It’s actually a million and change, but
that wasn’t really your question. Yeah, I really think I’m going to get what I
want,” he says. “I know you. You weren’t even that comfortable with just me
having these pictures—”

“Looks like I had pretty good reason,” I
interrupt.

“Whatever,” he says. “Look, I know that you’re
not going to want anyone to see you like that unless it’s for some big role or
something, and even in that case, you wouldn’t want to saturate the market with
too much of your naked body, otherwise, people are going to start thinking
you’re a porn star.”

“Well,” I sigh, “if that happens, at least
it looks like I know just the guy to go through for advice.”

Maybe Damian
will
come in handy for something.

“What?” he asks.

“Five thousand a month?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll give you the
account number so you can transfer the money and this can be the last time we
ever speak to each other, assuming you keep up with the payments, of course.”

There are two possibilities in my mind
right now. The first is that I can stand up for myself, inform the world of
these pictures, myself, in order to control the story and then turn Ben in for
blackmail.

I like the idea of him being removed from
society. Hell, I like the idea of him being removed from just about anything.
The problem with this route, though, is that the pictures are going to get out
there.

The same thing happened to Pamela
Anderson.

The second possibility is that I keep my
public sense of dignity intact, but give a horrible person a horribly large
amount of money.

“Can I have some time to think about it?”
I ask.

“I’ll give you seventy-two hours,” he
says. “By the way, if you’ve got some idea that you’re going to call the cops
and that they’re going to stop me before I can release the pictures, let me just
tell you that I’ve got an email set up to send to the LA Times and E!
with
all of those pictures attached. If I don’t put in a
password on a regular enough basis,” he says, “that email goes off on its own
and that decision is no longer yours.”

“You do realize that everything you’re
saying will happen to me is still nowhere near as bad as everything that would
happen to you,” I tell him.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says, “but I have a
feeling the way we experience the consequences of our actions—I think you’d
have a much harder time with that than I would. I go to prison for something
like that, I’m still the guy that hooked everyone in the world up with naked
pictures of a hot, young actress who, by the way, I was dating at the time and
you know how that sort of thing turns into interviews and the eventual apology
for doing something so ‘outside my character’ that allows me to take a greater
role in the public eye. Who knows where all that could lead? Really, all things
considered, this could work out pretty well for me. The question you’ve got to
ask yourself is how famous do you want me to be?”

Right now, I’d be pretty happy if neither
one of us were famous.

“Three days?” I ask.

“Three days,” he says, “starting now. I’ll
call you when your time is up and we’ll see what kind of a future we’re going
to have.”

He hangs up the phone.

There is actually a part of me that’s
actually excited to know that I’m influential enough to be blackmailed, but
it’s a small and rather crazy part.

Chapter Four

Refilling the Well

Damian

“You’re losing it,” Danna says as I pour
my fourth glass of milk.

I know I’m not the first adult who tries
to find comfort at the bottom of a homemade chocolate milk glass, but that
particular escape can be somewhat hard to hide.

“You didn’t see them,” I tell her. “They
honestly couldn’t give a shit that I was in the room. Even the woman I talked
to that recognized me just called me ‘that actor guy’ and did everything she
could to pry herself out of our conversation.”

“The problem,” Danna says, “is that you’re
just a great big pussy.”

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“I know that’s not the answer you were
looking for,” she says, “but that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Danna’s been staying with me for the last
six months. She’s been getting run down a lot lately, but with her here, at
least I can
try
to get her to slow
down.

When I told Emma that family’s important,
I meant it.

If there’s one way in which I’m boringly
normal, it’s my attachment to my twin.

“You know,” I tell her, “keep talking to
me like that and I’m going to have to ask you to start pitching in around
here.”

“What are you talking about?” Danna asks.
“I’m the only one that ever does shit around here. You just pop by every once
in a while to check your bank account and make life difficult for me. If anything,
you
should start pitching in around
here.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I tell
her, “but this
is
my house.”

“Whatever,” she says. “Look, people are
not going to be interested in you every moment of every day you’re an actor. This
sort of thing ebbs and flows. After your movie comes out, I bet that you’re
going to be swamped with people trying to get close to you. We both knew that
taking that extra time between movies was going to make things dip for a little
while, but you’re already filming. You just need to get over it. I’ll make a
couple of calls and get you set up with a couple of feel-good gigs to get you
back in the public eye, since it’s so fucking crucial for you to feel that
salty stare moving over your body at all times. Maybe you can christen a boat
or something.”

Danna, apart from being my sister, is also
my agent.

“I’m telling you, Danna,” I answer, “this
wasn’t just ‘we haven’t seen you in a while,’ this was ‘oh hey, you’re that guy
who used to be famous.’ I really think my career’s on its way down.”

“Oh, we’re years from that,” Danna says.
“With my skills, I should have you working well into your late-thirties,
possibly your forties.”

“Thanks,” I tell her. “You’re really
giving me a long career to look forward to.”

“Well, I hear that a lot of women go
through menopause in their forties, and I think it wouldn’t be fair to you to
make you work during the big change,” she says.

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is
to process when a woman calls a man a woman?” I ask. “You’re using your own
gender as something derogatory.”

“Don’t care,” Danna says. “What you need
to do is quit being scared of every little thing. This is going to be Emma
Roxy’s breakout movie, and I know how you pout when you’re not the big dick on
campus—”

“Seriously?” I interrupt.

“Don’t worry about that, though,” she
says. “You should be able to ride her coattails all the way to your next film.”

“You’re not helping,” I tell her.

“I didn’t think I was,” she says. “I was
just trying to get through your little bitch session so we could get back to
more important things.”

“You’re my agent,” I tell her. “What am I
supposed to do?”

She says, “If it was something we could do
anything about—even if it was something we couldn’t change, but was an actual
problem—I would jump right in and cheer you up, but you’re throwing a fit
because people who were at a TV station for someone other than you didn’t
immediately drop their drawers when you came into the room. I’m just trying to
decide whether it’s more annoying or more pathetic.”

As twins, Danna and I have always been
close, but we’ve never been the ones that make up their own language or wash
each other’s hair or anything like that.

For all intents and purposes, Danna is
just another sibling trying to tell me how to run my career.

Okay, she’s also my agent and thus
actually has the right and responsibility to do that, but still, it gets
frustrating.

“I’m going to go grab the mail,” she says.
“You stay in here and think of ways to hide the fact that you’ve got a big
vagina or turn it into a promotional thing.”

She leaves the room, and I’m just
irritated.

I got Nick the autographs, but the
confusion and hesitantly uttered thank you hardly brightened my mood at all.

I can see the end coming, but I don’t know
when or how it’s going to happen.

There was never any misconception on my
part that I’d end up one of those lifelong actors who’s doing their thing on
the screen until they’re dead. No, unless I die in the next few years, I’m
going to live a good portion of the rest of my life as an ex-celebrity.

I just don’t have the drive anymore for
things to end any other way.

Even knowing that, though, doesn’t make
that downward tilt any easier to accept.

“Damian?” Danna calls as she opens the
front door.

“What?” I call back.

“You need to see this and I need to call
the police,” she says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask and
make my way into the other room to meet her.

She’s standing in the doorway, holding a
letter, her eyes moving back and forth as she reads over it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s not good,” she says.

“Let me see it,” I tell her and she hands
it over to me.

She’s pulling her phone out of her pocket
and walking into the other room as I read over the first words of the letter.

“
Dami
,” the
letter starts, “I know that you’ve never seen me, but I’ve been watching you
for so long now. I know you in ways that I don’t even know myself. So much of
my life, I’ve wanted to write this letter, to tell you how much I love you now
and how much I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you on Kids’ Quests.
You’ve turned into quite a handsome man and a remarkable actor. I think it’s
time that you know who I am, because one day, I know that you’re going to be
asking me to be your wife.

Yours always and forever,

Rita”

“What?” I ask. “It’s a love letter. I get
those all the time.”

“You used to get them all the time,” Danna
says, “but this isn’t a love letter. This is the first stage of a manifesto.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask. “She
came off pretty strong, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, this is a little more than coming
on a bit strong,” Danna says. “You didn’t see the package outside.”

“There’s a package?” I ask.

“That’s the only thing I know to call it,”
Danna says and then presses the phone harder against her ear. “Yeah, I’m at
28153 South Willow Banks with Damian Jones and he just received a threat.”

“Oh, it’s not a threat,” I tell her.

She mouths the words, “Look outside,” and then
turns and walks deeper into the house.

The letter was a bit creepy, but not
everyone knows how to best put their thoughts and feelings down on paper. Rita,
whoever she is, probably just got so nervous writing me that she forgot to
leave out the crazy in the letter.

It happens all the time.

I’d rather have it be an adoring fan who
just isn’t that great with words than a psycho for obvious reasons, but I’m not
going to deny the ego boost I’m really hoping to hold onto here.

I’ve got a lot of justifications running
through my head until I walk out the front door and see what Danna was talking
about.

Sitting just outside my front door is a
black garbage bag full of something I can’t see, though the top is open. Around
the bottom of the bag is a dark red liquid that I’m really hoping isn’t what it
so very clearly is.

I take a few steps toward the bag and
almost choke from the stench.

Whatever’s in the bag, it’s dead.

That’s not the most comforting thought as
I move forward and nudge one side of the bag over to expose the contents
inside.

*
                   
*
                   
*

“No,” I tell the officer, “I don’t know
anyone named Rita. When are you going to be able to tell me what’s in the bag?”

“We’ve got to run some tests,” the officer
says dismissively. “Have you recently made enemies with anyone?”

“No more than usual,” I tell him.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“Just bad reviews in the press,” I tell
him. “Nothing I’d really worry about.”

“Were any of them threatening, violent?”
the officer asks.

“Nothing like that,” I tell him.

There was one op-ed that called for my
crucifixion because, in my last movie, my character wore a hat with a star on
it the writer of the piece apparently mistook for a symbol of Baphomet and she
thought that I was trying to send a secret message that children should start
worshipping Satan.

One of the many gripes I have with the
whole “hidden messages” conspiracy nonsense is where exactly do these people
think kids learn these secret codes it would take to interpret the messages
they’re accusing me of hiding in my performances?

If I’m wearing a star on my hat, hell, it
could be a hat sporting the goat’s head in the middle of the inverted pentagram
with the Hebrew letters for Leviathan around the edges and I’m willing to bet
you a million dollars that not one single kid would see that and think it’s
time to take up Satanism.

How many kids did they really think
were
playing Judas Priest albums backward to look for
secret commands, and even if they put the words “do it” backward in a song,
just how the fuck would kids know what it was they were supposed to do?

Idiots!

Sorry. It’s a pet peeve of mine.

Anyway, I’m not worried that the woman
that wrote the article is plotting to kill me or even go any farther than she
did in the article.

“All right,” the officer questioning me
says, “well, I’ll give you over to Detective Tompkins here. He’s got a few more
questions for you.”

I answer everything the man asks, but
there’s nothing I can really give him to point him in the right direction.

You know, as I think about it, being
stalked, especially by someone who’s this willing to get right in there close—I
mean, she got past my gate with a bag full of what looked like chopped up meat,
after all—is kind of its own form of adulation.

“Sir?” the detective asks.

“Yeah,” I answer, shaking myself out of my
thoughts.

“Was it you that found the bag or did
someone else find it?” the detective asks.

“My sister,” I tell him, “Danna. She’s the
one that found it.”

“All right,” he says. “We’ll give you a
call when we find out more. Until then,” he reaches into his coat pocket and
pulls out a business card, “give me a call if you can think of anything else
that might be relevant or if you receive anything else from this individual.”

I take the card and say, “Thank you. By
the way,” I add. “Nobody calls me
Dami
. I mean
absolutely nobody I know has ever called me that.”

“We’ll keep you posted,” the detective
nods and walks away.

Danna’s on the other side of the driveway,
talking to another cop when the detective walks up to her, and I’m starting to
think I’ve jumped ship and lost my mind: I actually find it kind of flattering
that I have a stalker.

I’ve really got to start dating again.