Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (8 page)

“What do you have in mind, then?” I ask.

“First off,” she says, “we’re not staying
in the same room. Call me back after you’ve booked another room for yourself.”

“Emma, you’ve got to see how unreasonable
all this is,” I tell her. “There are lot of things we’re going to have to
cover, and we really don’t have time to go over the things we’re not even going
to need to—”

“You know what the problem is with your
movies, at least the romantic ones?” she asks.

“What’s that?” I return.

This should be fun.

“Whenever you’re with your onscreen
significant other, you just come off as fuck buddies,” she says. “There’s
nothing beyond the physical, though I will give you credit for making that
pretty damn on the money. Why don’t we try things a little differently this
time?” she asks. “Why don’t we branch out a little and see if we can bring
something new to the screen?”

“You keep saying ‘we,’ but I’m getting the
feeling you really mean me,” I answer.

“Good, you’re catching on,” she says. “Now
here’s how the night is going to go…”

She goes on to describe just about the
opposite of everything I had planned for this weekend with the exception of
having dinner together nightly. So that much, it seems, we agree on.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “My method has
worked for me on almost a dozen films.”

“Yeah,” she says, “it’s worked well enough
to get you passed over time and time again for more serious roles. Ever wonder
why people don’t take you seriously enough to offer you those period characters
or the troubled geniuses that win all the awards? Maybe it’s because anytime
anything serious comes along, you make a joke out of it and just go with your
instincts.”

That’s a little close to home.

“Look, I get that you’re trying to do the
whole overhaul the Hollywood bad boy thing,” I tell her, “but just because
you’ve got some fairy tale wet dream going on in your head doesn’t mean that
it’s got anything to do with reality, much less with acting.”

That may have been a bit harsh.

“I’ll see you at dinner,” she says and she
hangs up.

Well that could have gone better.

I don’t know what the hell we’re doing
here anymore. I don’t even know why I thought it was going to be a good idea in
the first place. Dutch suggested it, sure, but I’m the one that filled in the
details.

This kind of thing can make an onscreen
performance sizzle, but whatever’s going on here, it’s personal and because
it’s personal, we’re both fighting it in our own special way.

Why’s it personal, though?

I’ve been here, to this very hotel, for
this very purpose, at least five times and I’ve never had so much fucking
hassle right from the start.

Come to think of it, the whole blackmail
thing’s probably got her pretty freaked out.

I pull the phone out of my pocket and dial
the number.

“I don’t really want to talk right now,”
Emma answers. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“It’s been seventy-two hours, hasn’t it?”
I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. She’s crying.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I wrote him a check,” she says. “What do
you think I did? He sent me texts with the pictures. He’s definitely got them.”

“
Wanna
talk
about it?” I ask.

She sniffs and takes a deep breath. “If
there’s any way we could get through this weekend without mentioning it again,
I would be very happy,” she says.

“Okay,” I respond. “Do you want to come
out and maybe just talk?”

I’m halfway down the hall, but in the
distance, I can hear a door unlatch and Emma opens up, her hair still pristine,
though her mascara’s running.

“Yeah,” she says into the phone and hangs
up.

Tofu.

My stalker carved tofu, covered it in
raspberry sauce, and left it in a black garbage can on my gated driveway.

Right now, everything’s complicated and
everything’s absurd.

Out there somewhere is a woman who thought
the way into my heart was a way too familiar letter and that thirty pound bag.

Right in front of me is a
soon-to-be-A-list, not to mention gorgeous actress with perfect hair and the
saddest eyes. In that doorway is a woman who’s in one of the more ridiculous
situations the world can throw at a person, just trying to find a way to focus
on the job that’s going to make or break her career.

Maybe it’s time I throw her a rope.

I walk toward the room, but Emma shakes
her head.

“We’re just going to dinner a little
early,” she says. “That’s all. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Maybe I should tell her about Jamie.

That really couldn’t serve a purpose here,
though. The way that Emma described intimacy, I mean, it wouldn’t be out of
line, I don’t think, but then again, how could it possibly be relevant?

I guess if the only point is to be
vulnerable, that’s the story to tell, but I don’t think that intimacy,
especially fake intimacy demands complete vulnerability.

At the end of the day, two people are
still two people, right?

The door opens and Emma walks out, saying,
“I realized that without you knowing when I was going to be ready to go, it
didn’t make much sense for you to come to the door. Either you’d be early, in
which case making you wait at all becomes a useless exercise, or you’re late
and I’m stuck waiting there when you’re right on the other side of the door.
All of that being the case,” she says, “I am ready to go to dinner.”

With all the uncertainty, the awkwardness,
and the general reign of miscommunication, yeah: This is starting to feel like
a relationship.

Chapter Seven

Backyard Carnivals

Emma

Dinner last night was all right, but we
were both still very much in ourselves. What was better was brunch this
morning. That’s when I really got Damian to stop being the cardboard cutout of
himself and start actually being himself.

He seemed pretty uncomfortable doing it.

Right now, I’m standing in the locker room
of the hotel spa. Damian and I are getting a couple’s massage.

I don’t know exactly how far down to strip
in these places.

I’ve always heard that the general rule is
that you don’t need anything but the towel, but having never actually been to a
spa, it feels a little weird.

Just to be on the safe side, I leave my
bra and panties on before I wrap the towel around my body and make my way to
the next room.

Damian is already face down on one of two
massage tables.

He turns his head far enough to glance at
me and then puts his face back in the little hole. He doesn’t say anything, but
his hands are moving down his body and—yep, he’s mooning me.

Well, I guess that answers the question I
had in the locker room.

“Will you put that away?” I ask,
pretending like I’m not sneaking a peek when in reality, I’m a little turned on
by getting such an up-close-and-personal look at such a famous and, if I may,
well-formed ass.

“This is exactly the kind of thing I would
be doing to you if we were in a new relationship,” he says. “We’re still doing
new relationship, right? When do we move on to the petting and necking portion
of the weekend?” he asks and then makes some kind of noise that I can only
equate to a cat growling.

“We’re moving from new to established
relationship,” I tell him, “and there’s not going to be a petting portion of
the weekend. We will be practicing our kissing, but only after you prove to me
that you can handle it like an adult.”

“But
mom
,”
the still bare-assed, world renowned actor whines through the hole in his
massage table.

I approach the side of my table and just
stand there for a moment.

Apparently, I don’t need the underwear,
but I’m not so sure about dropping my panties when Damian can see it through
his hole.

I’m really not a prude, I swear. This is a
unique situation.

I finally decide to go back to the locker
room, but of course that’s when the masseurs come in the room.

“Everything okay?” the short one with the
bald head asks.

“Did you forget something?” the taller one
with the hideous man bun asks.

“I just need to go back for something,” I
stammer.

“We can have someone bring it in here to
you,” Man Bun says.

“Please, lie down,” Bald Guy says in a
soothing, almost cult-inspiring voice.

“Really, I should grab it myself,” I tell
them. Now, even if I succeed in leaving the room unescorted, I’m going to have
to pick something I brought with me to be that thing I couldn’t possibly get
massaged without. This is some killer planning. “I’ll just be a second,” I tell
them.

Bald Guy shrugs and Man Bun is rubbing his
hands together over Damian’s back.

You know, from this angle, massage is the
strangest thing…

I get into the locker room, drop my towel
long enough to completely disrobe, unintentionally flash an older woman who’s
coming out of the showers in what looks like a night gown with legs and feel
through my pants for something, anything I can take back in there with me to
explain why, oh why, I would delay the healing powers of massage, but all I
have are my keys and my room key. Everything else, even my cellphone, is back
in the room.

Room key it is.

I go back into the other room and set the
room key under the hole in my table so I can look down at a constant reminder
about how I wasn’t quick enough on my feet.

Finally bare—with the exception of the
towel—I lie down on the massage table and skootch into position.

This is actually pretty nice.

“Everything come out all right?” Damian
asks.

“What?” I respond.

“Never mind,” he laughs. “So,” he says,
“tell me more about what it is to be intimate with someone.”

“Well,” I start. I start, but I don’t
continue.

Last night, I was basically listing off
qualities that were opposite to my experience with Ben. Now, I don’t know, I
guess I really don’t know what intimacy is.

“It’s not something you are,” I tell him,
“it’s something you find in the other person.”

“That tells me absolutely nothing,” he
says. “Come on, you were so spirited about it last night. What’s next? What is
it that we’re really looking for here?”

“Tell me a story,” I tell him, “something
real, you know, something that’s happened in your life.”

“Like what?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I tell him. “What is your
best memory of your childhood?”

“That’s boring,” he says. “Ask me
something harder, something closer.”

Something harder, something closer.

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever
happened to you?” I ask.

“Maybe something a little softer,” he
says, “at least for now.”

“Fine,” I say. “Have you ever been in
love?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been in love a
bunch of times. It’s never really the same, though. Everyone talks like love is
one set emotion that everyone experiences the same way, every time,” he says.
“For me, love is when you don’t know what to expect, but that’s not a bad
thing. I guess if there is one single thing I can tie to my experience with
love, it’s being able to let go of all my shit and just be Damian Jones without
all the actor shit even coming into it. Being able to do that and not have a
nervous breakdown is a pretty good indication that I’m in love.”

“So being able to give up control of your
image is what tells you that you’re in love?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “Why? What is it that
lets you know that you don’t just like a person, you love them?”

“I don’t know,” I start. “It’s hard to
describe. I think love is simple. It’s just that perpetual wish to be around a
person. Love is what happens when you only care if one person takes you
seriously. Everyone else just doesn’t matter quite so much.”

The room’s quiet a moment except the
sounds of hands moving over oiled-up celebrity.

“That was very nice,” Man Bun says.

“Thank you,” I answer.

“The last time I knew I was in
love—probably the only time I
really
knew was with my high school sweetheart, Jamie,” Damien says. “With her, it
wasn’t just the swirl of emotions, but a full-blown tempest all the time.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” he answers. It’s a
stall and a pathetic one at that. “She got pregnant,” he says. “We were going
to have a little baby girl. We’d even started picking out names for her and
everything. When Jamie went into labor, though,” he sighs, “there were
complications. Neither she, nor the baby survived.”

I’m trying to do the right thing and brush
my first thought aside, so I give the quick response. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he says, “me, too.”

There’s something almost sadistic in
having this talk while getting a massage. It’s not an unwritten rule as far as
I know, but it just doesn’t feel right for anything pleasant to be happening
right now.

“When did this happen?” I ask, that
question being the first thing that popped in my mind.

“Are you asking me when it happened or are
you asking me how it is that you never heard about it?” he asks.

“Both, I guess,” I respond, though I’m more
interested in the second answer.

“It happened when I was about twenty,” he
says. “That would be, what? Nine years ago? Anyway, the reason you never heard
about it is that you’re forgetting I was just a normal guy for quite a while
there.”

“Yeah, but you were on that show when you
were a kid,” I tell him. “Child stars who never worked again wouldn’t be able
to keep something like that out of the public eye. I guess I’m just curious how
you did.”

“We weren’t engaged or anything,” he says.
“When Jamie died, I wasn’t the next of kin. The paperwork that was going to
have my name on it was going to be the birth certificate. When there was no
more need for that,” he says, “there just wasn’t anywhere else for my name to
go. Her dad took possession of her remains, told me he didn’t want me anywhere
near the funeral or his family, and that was the last I saw of any of them. The
bastard even filed the baby’s death certificate without my name.”

“Why was her dad so pissed at you?” I ask.
“It doesn’t sound like it was your fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he says, “but that didn’t
change the fact that his daughter was dead and if it weren’t for me, she’d be
alive.”

“Okay, now that sounds like it
is
your fault,” I say.

“If she weren’t pregnant,” he says, “she
wouldn’t have died in labor. I didn’t have anything to do with the blood clot
that ended up killing her, but her body wouldn’t have been under that stress if
it weren’t carrying a baby. She probably would have been fine if we’d never
gotten pregnant.”

“It sounds like you blame yourself,” I
tell him.

I can hear the sound of Damian moving and
I lift my head to look at him. He’s looking back at me with a completely
helpless expression on his face.

That expression—it may not be what we’re
looking for on film, but it’s certainly intimate. A person doesn’t have to be
completely vulnerable to build, maintain and experience intimacy, but it
doesn’t hurt when vulnerability is there.

“I’m not kissing you this weekend,” I tell
him and put my head back down.

“What?” he asks. “What are you talking
about? We’ve got our first kiss scene this next week. We go in there cold and
I’d hate to see what we look like. Seriously, you need to screen test that
shit. What feels good isn’t always what looks good.”

“We’ll kiss on screen because that’s what’s
in the script,” I tell him, “but there aren’t going to be any extra-curricular
activities. I just thought I should let you know that before too much time
passed.”

“Raymond,” Damian says, “you’ve got the
hands of a master.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man Damian called
Raymond (even though we all know his real name is Man Bun) says. “Is that going
to be all for you this afternoon?”

“Yeah,” Damian says. “That’ll be all for
now.”

I look up at Bald Guy, but he seems less
engaged in the world outside his massage performance. As I’m trying to get up,
he just presses back against me as if it’s all part of the massage. It actually
feels pretty cool, but that’s not the point.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Bald Guy, looking
for a name tag but not finding one, “I have to follow him.”

“Your massage isn’t finished,” Bald Guy
protests.

“I know,” I tell him. “I’m very sorry
about that, but I’ve got to go after him.”

Bald guy scoffs loudly and throws his
hands up in the air. It’s a pretty petulant scene, but it does allow me to get
to my feet and hurry back into the locker room.

I’m quick to get dressed, but when I get
out to the waiting room, Damian’s not there.

“Excuse me,” I say, walking up to the
counter, “has my friend, Damian, come out yet?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the woman behind the counter
says. “He walked through about a minute ago.”

Stupid tangled bra strap.

I finally track Damian down as he’s
walking back toward his room.

“Where are you going?” I ask. “I thought
we were doing the massage and then we were going to go down by the beach.”

“Yeah, I’m really not in the mood right
now,” he says.

“I’m sorry I brought all that up,” I tell
him. “I was just trying to get to know you better.”

“I know,” he says. “It’s fine. It’s just
that, earlier, when you asked what the worst thing to ever happen to me was. It
was that. Nobody knows because nothing between her and I was ever official, at
least as far as public records were concerned. Add to that a grieving father
who’d much rather forget my existence completely and a staff of doctors that
are bound by confidentiality and you have the perfect storm it takes to have
something like this slip by everyone’s radar. I think it goes without saying
that I’d prefer you not talk about this with—”

“Yeah,” I interrupt, “of course. It’s
nobody’s business and it’s sure as hell not my business to tell anyone.”

I may have gone a bit over the top there.

Damian eyes me and just says, “Yeah.
Anyway, if you don’t mind, I think I’m going to cancel our trip down to the
beach. After that massage, I just kind of want to lay down for a bit.”