Heartthrob (27 page)

Jed took a deep breath. “Okay. You’re right. I was hoping we’d end up in bed together—but Christ, Kate, I’ve been hoping that every day since the shoot started! I thought it was a good opportunity to face up to this attraction between us.” He looked up at her, praying that she
would understand. “I didn’t know how else to do it. I thought if I could just get you in my arms …”

“And the hell with integrity,” she said sharply. “Get me in your arms any way you possibly can. Lie if you have to, right?”

“It didn’t start as a lie,” he told her. “I thought what I asked was for you to pretend to be my lover at the
party.
When we got to David’s, I realized you assumed what I meant was for you to pretend in front of him and Alison. I was going to tell you the truth, I swear, but …” He took another steadying breath. “But then you kissed me before you went in to change. And I thought … what harm will it do? And then, in the limo, you were sitting so close and … I should have told you. You’re right, I was wrong not to tell you that you’d misunderstood. But I couldn’t do it. I … couldn’t. I wanted you too much.”

Kate sat down on the couch as if all of the life had been deflated from her. “Your number-one goal in your career is to win an Oscar so that you can stand there, on national television, and tell your father to go to hell. I was wondering why you felt you needed to lie to get me in bed, and it occurred to me that you seduced me as some kind of revenge.” She looked up at him. “I fucked you with that contract—that’s what you said, your word. So you figure you can get back at me by doing it to me—literally—in return.”

Something must’ve flickered in his eyes, because she looked away from him. “Oh, God. I’m right, aren’t I?” She exhaled sharply, as if she were suddenly having trouble getting enough air. “Well, isn’t that perfect?”

Jed realized that what he said right here, right now, in these next nanoseconds was either going to save this relationship or kill it for good. “It might’ve started out that way—me wanting to get back at you—”

“Might’ve?”

“All right. The truth. It
did
start out that way. And for
maybe a day or two, that’s where I was coming from. But then everything changed. I started to like you.”

“Great. So then you didn’t want to fuck me—as you so elegantly put it—because you hated me. Then you wanted to do it because you
liked
me, right?” Kate stood up. “Maybe you should just shut your mouth before you make things worse.” She dug into her briefcase and pulled out the familiar plastic-wrapped urine test kit. She threw it at him. “Fill it”

Jed caught the container, then stood, too, feeling sick to his stomach. “Kate, I don’t want our friendship to end.”

She was already dialing her cell phone. “What friendship?” She turned away from him speaking into the phone. “I need Jim in carpentry. I know it’s late, but I need a door installed, and I need it now.”

Jamaal ran one finger lightly over the screen in the back room of Susie’s trailer.

The curtain moved, and her face appeared—a pale blur temporarily catching the dim streetlight. And then slowly, achingly slowly, and very quietly, she pushed open the window and took out the screen.

“Catch me?” she whispered.

He nodded, checking to make sure that, in the darkness, no one was watching.

Jamaal always caught her. It was one of the two parts of the evening that made his mouth dry and his heart pound. And it wasn’t just because Daddy Pit Bull might hear his baby daughter sneaking out. It was because for about thirty seconds, Jamaal got a chance to hold this girl in his arms.

She came out of the window feetfirst as usual, and he helped her by taking hold of her legs and giving her something to cling to as she shimmied the rest of her out. She was such a little thing, it was hardly a workout.

He held her, trying not to think about the way she locked her legs around his waist as she pulled the curtain
closed and carefully reshut the window. He tried not to think about how smooth her legs felt, how firm the tush was he held in his hands. And he definitely didn’t focus on the fact that, as she strained to shut the window without making a single noise, she’d leaned forward slightly and managed to stick her breast directly in his eye.

He was learning quite a bit about himself this summer, and one of the things he was learning was he had willpower and restraint unlike any other human male on earth.

He’d also learned he was completely out of his mind because he had a serious jones for a fifteen-year-old girl.

He was Jamaal Freakin’ Hawkes, and he had grown women, seriously mature women, throwing themselves at him all the time. Mindy the makeup woman. Tara the PA. Gloria the script supervisor. Mindy, Tara, and Gloria all wanted some. Mindy, Tara, and Gloria all had made that more than clear.

Yet here he was, six nights in a row, risking certain death from Pit Bull bite, just to hang with this scrawny little underage child that he dare not so much as touch.

Except for the times he helped her out of, or back into, her trailer through the window.

“Got it,” Susie whispered.

He made himself let go of her butt, and she slid down him as if he were a fire pole. Damn, he was starting to live for that sensation.

They moved quickly, heading away from the trailers and the town, heading down a path through the nearby woods, toward a small pond. And once there, surrounded by the shadows, away from the lights of the tiny town, lit only by the hazy light from the moon, Susie relaxed.

“One of these days, I’m going to have a heart attack from doing that,” she told him.

“Ditto.” Although his was going to be for an entirely different reason.

“You were great today, by the way.” She picked up a
rock and skipped it across the surface of the water. “I saw the dailies. You rocked.”

Jamaal picked up a rock and threw it. It sank to the bottom. “Shit.”

She laughed. “You’ve got to think lighter.”

“I can’t skip stones because my thoughts are too heavy, is that what you’re saying?” Jamaal smacked the back of his neck. The mosquito that had been feeding on him was the size of a bird. He peered at his hand in the dim light. “Oh, man, would you look at this? This thing has fangs.”

Susie took a bottle from her back pocket. “I brought some of that bug repellent I was telling you about. Wanna try it?”

He took the bottle from her. “What, I smear this stuff on myself and then I die of cancer in ten years?”

“I’m wearing it. Do you see any bugs bothering me?” She twirled around, doing a graceful dance at the edge of the water.

He let himself watch her. “That wasn’t what I asked. I didn’t ask if it worked—I asked if your ass was going to be
dead
in ten years.”

“If I am, sue them for me.”

Another mosquito took up where the first had left off. Jamaal opened the bottle and squeezed a minuscule amount of the lotion into his hand.

“Do you have another project lined up, after this one?” Susie asked, coming back to watch him gingerly apply the lotion to his arms.

“Actually, my agent’s been calling. Said there’s a couple scripts I need to read. He’s sending ’em down, but I’m feeling kind of … I don’t know.”

“Kind of ambivalent?” She took the bottle from him and squeezed out a healthy blob into her own palm. “Lean over, I’ll get the back of your neck.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Ambivalent. That’s the word.”

He leaned over, closing his eyes as she gently rubbed
the lotion into his neck. She had no idea what her touch did to him, and because she had no idea, it wasn’t a bad thing, right? She was being a friend.
He
was the one who needed therapy. What did she just say?
Think lighter.
He was the one who needed to start thinking way lighter.

She was just a girl who had no clue that she set his world completely on fire. But he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. No way. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to touch her, no matter how badly he wanted to. He liked her too much to start something she couldn’t possibly be ready for.

“If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?” she asked, slipping her fingers under the collar of his T-shirt and rubbing in the lotion.

It took him a minute to realize that she was talking about movies. Acting projects. “Shit, I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve got a really huge choice. I mean, I’m not Harrison Ford, you know.”

“Oh, my God, you’re not?” She wiped her hands on her shorts as he straightened up.

“No, smart-ass. I’m not. Basically I choose between movies where I play an addict stuck in the ghetto, and movies where I play a member of a gang, stuck in the ghetto.”

“You need to do a Will Smith.”

He snorted. “What, become a rapper on the side?”

“He was a rapper first. But no. Think about
ID4
and
Men in Black.
In both of those movies, Will didn’t play a black man. He played a man who just happened to be black. Both of those movies would’ve worked with a white actor playing those parts. Yeah, the dialogue would’ve had to be reworked for a white guy, and the movies probably wouldn’t’ve been so funny—but that’s just because Will’s so good. Anyway, that’s what
you’ve
got to do next,” Susie decided. “Don’t take a movie unless the part that you’re offered could be played by someone white.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “Those kinds of offers are just rolling in.”

“Get your agent to work for you,” she told him. “That’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Tell him what you want, and tell him to go find it. Or go after the scripts yourself. Make friends with someone huge like Leo DiCaprio and ask him to pass anything your way that he likes but doesn’t have time for.”

Jamaal sent another stone straight to the bottom of the pond. “All right,” he said. “I’ll call my agent later tonight. I love waking him up.” He turned toward her, brushing the dirt off his hands. “So now are you going to let
me
pick
your
next project?”

She skipped another rock. “I think I’m going to have to do
Slumberparty Three
next, just to keep my father from having an aneurysm.”

Jamaal laughed. But then he realized that she was serious. “Oh, no way!”

Susie was pretending to be engrossed with finding the perfect skipping stone in the hazy moonlight. “Here, try this one. It’s perfect.” She held it out to him.

Jamaal didn’t move. “You can’t honestly go from
this
movie to—”

“Yes, I can. It’s not that big a deal.” She stood up and reached for his hand, positioning the stone between his thumb and first finger. “Now, throw it kind of like a Frisbee.”

But he didn’t throw the stone. He just looked at her.

“I had to promise him I’d do it,” she said quietly. “I thought it would help get him off my back.”

“Did it?”

She turned away, slapping her arm. “These bugs are really getting bad.”

“What’s he do to you?” Jamaal asked. He’d asked her about her father before, but never point-blank like this. She was always evasive, never giving him a straight
answer. But the thought of that man hurting this girl made his blood boil. “Does he hit you?”

“No.” She answered too fast. “Jamaal, I don’t want to talk about him, okay?” She slipped the plastic bottle of lotion into the back pocket of her shorts. “We better get back.”

Jamaal caught her hand. He’d vowed never to touch her unless it was necessary, but this was definitely necessary. “Susannah, we’re friends, right?”

She nodded, staring down at her feet.

He tipped her chin up so that she had to look him in the eye. In the moonlight, she looked like some kind of angel. A tense angel. She was strung so tight, he was afraid she was going to snap in half. He lowered his voice, trying hard to sound as gentle as he possibly could. “You can trust me enough to tell me anything, you know. There’s nothing you can say that would stop me from being your friend.”

“It’s not what you think,” she said, but her eyes filled with tears.

“What
do
I think?” he asked quietly.

Again, she didn’t answer him directly. “He loves me,” she said, her mouth trembling. “He just … forgets sometimes.”

“No,” Jamaal said. “It doesn’t work that way, baby. When you love someone, you don’t ever ‘forget.’ There’s no exception to that rule.”

Susie was watching him with those big, wide eyes, listening to what he was saying. He liked being with her, because she listened. She listened to what he had to say, and she thought about it, and she discussed it as if it had merit. She was smart, and she made him feel smart, too. She made him feel as if every word out of his mouth was a precious gem to examine and treasure. He prayed that she would listen double hard to the words he was saying now.

“If he’s touching you,” he continued, “it’s wrong. If
he’s hitting you, it’s wrong. And if he’s using words to hit and hurt, that’s wrong, too.”

She was silent, just gazing up at him. “We better get back,” she said again, finally pulling away.

Jamaal followed her into the woods, along the trail to town. She didn’t say much, and then as he helped her back into her trailer, she couldn’t say much. They both had to be quiet. He boosted her up, then waited until she gave him the all-clear signal.

Still, he waited even longer, as had become his custom. He sat there in the darkness alongside Susie’s trailer, and he waited to make sure that her father hadn’t discovered she was gone. He waited to make sure that if the Pit Bull
had
found her out, he didn’t attack her in his rage.

He waited until the light went off in Susie’s room, and then he waited a little bit longer.

And then he went to his own trailer, and picked up the phone. It was after midnight, but this was one call that couldn’t wait.

“You’re lucky I’m a fan of ‘Politically Incorrect.’ What’s
your
excuse for being up this late?”

Jamaal smiled, just the sound of her voice gave him faith that this was going to be all right. “No excuse. I’m definitely up past my bedtime.”

His mother could read him like a book, and her voice softened. “Baby, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He took a deep breath. His mother was a social worker who dealt with stuff like this all the time. He’d grown up with books on physical, emotional, and sexual abuse all over the house. His mom had made him read some of them, too. “But I’ve got a friend, and I think she’s being abused. Except she won’t talk to me about it. I’m not sure how hard I should push this.”