Oh! You Pretty Things (10 page)

I
start the prep work for Scout's party on Friday night, chopping and simmering until I collapse after midnight, stinking of sweat and splattered with extra-virgin olive oil. I start again the next morning, producing industrial amounts of hummus in a non-industrial-size kitchen.

The party's on Sunday, so I don't leave the house at all on Saturday—not even for frozen yogurt—and I'm skewering marinated vegetables like a motherfucker when Megan gets home from Hawaii at three in the morning.

I'm shambling around in a culinary daze, wearing a stretched-out bikini top and a pair of men's pajama bottoms that have a gaping hole in the fly. I don't recognize the sound of her key in the lock at first, then she bolts into the kitchen and leaps onto me like a lemur. Tiny people do that.

“Boof!” she shouts. “I missed you.”

She smells like cigarettes and coconut oil, which for some reason makes me want to cry.

“What are you doing here? I thought you were gone for another week.”

“There's union drama. We're cut for at least a week.” She takes in the chaos in our tiny kitchen. “Did you open a catering company while I was gone?”

“Do caterers get paid?”

“Yes.”

“Then no. How was—”

There's a shuffling in the hallway, which we euphemistically call the foyer.

“Baby, get in here,” Megan calls, and in he comes.

He's not Ryan Gosling or Bradley Cooper, or even James Franco, but he's close: JJ Kelly.

I can't un-stare. He's too close. And un-staring is for public. This is way too private. So instead, I act casual—but not too casual—as if I'm used to celebrities on the level of JJ Kelly cluttering up my kitchen. I'm desperately trying to calculate the exact amount of offhand cool that proves on some cellular level that I have not, in fact, calculated any of it.

“Holy fuck,” I gasp, pulling up my sagging pajamas and throwing a dirty tea towel over my shoulder like a bandolier.

Not exactly what I was aiming for. But JJ Kelly, come on. His beauty is completely undiminished by the fact that he's wearing a godawful, multicolored Hawaiian shirt.

“I brought home a souvenir,” Megan tells me.

“Did you have to declare him at customs?” I ask.

Megan shoots me a look, like,
Don't even start
.

JJ plucks a cucumber from the counter as if he's standing at the craft services table and pops it in his mouth, looking me up and down with an amused smile.

“JJ,” Megan says. “Meet Jess.”

“JJ Kelly,” he says, extending a well-muscled arm in my direction. “Megan's told me so much about you.”

I hold my hummus-encrusted hands up in an apologetic wave. “I'm pretty slimed. You might not want to risk it.”

Also, I'm profoundly aware of my breasts bobbing against the slack fabric of my bikini top and the breeze blowing on my girl parts through my pajama pants.

“That's ridiculous,” he says, pulling me into a bear hug.

I really should enjoy this more, but all I can think about is my vast acreage of sweaty skin pressed against his body, which even through his goofy shirt feels as cool and hard as a granite countertop. When I raise my eyebrows at Megan over his shoulder, she just shrugs, like
Who, me?
and plunges two fingers into the vat of hummus on the countertop, swirling some into her mouth with a flourish.

I disengage from JJ's hug and cant my body away from his view. I mean, I try to practice a modicum of healthy body acceptance, but there are limits. I'm standing in front of Michelangelo's
David
wearing a clown nose and a fat suit.

Megan makes a little humming noise of food enjoyment. “Boof, are you kidding me? Is there crack in this?”

She scoops again, then extends her hand toward JJ. He opens his mouth like an agreeable baby bird to take the proffered mouthful from her outstretched fingers, which she immediately puts back into her own mouth.

They stand there for a moment in a little porny hummus bubble.

I flee to my bedroom and start throwing on layers of clothing. I mean, I know he's here with Megan and all, but I watched the hell out of every single episode of his sitcom, and now he's in my fucking kitchen.

A minute later, Megan slides into my room and shuts the door behind her, flinging herself against it dramatically and contorting her face into a silent scream. She's an actress. She pulls it off.

“This looks serious, Boof,” I say, throwing a knee-length batwing T-shirt dress with a ripped neckline over leggings and a tank top. “How did you guys even meet?”

I've seen the cast list for Megan's pilot. If JJ Kelly were on it, believe me, I would have noticed.

“He did a cameo.” Megan peers into my mirror to inspect what looks like a carpet burn on her left elbow. “The director is a friend of his mom's. I wasn't even supposed to be on set but I left my journal in my trailer, and I didn't trust a PA to bring it back without looking in it.”

My laserlike focus pinpoints the most important question. “Am I in your journal?”

“Whole chapters.” She piles her hair on top of her head and looks at me via my reflection in the mirror. “If I hadn't forgotten my journal, I'd never have met him. Meant to be, right?”

Megan knows I don't believe in “meant to be.” Meant to be implies there's a reason for every fucked-up thing that's ever happened—not just to me, but to Donna, to Gloria, telescoping all the way out to the world in general, Bosnia, the Gulf War . . . Come on. Everything most decidedly does
not
happen for a reason. And Megan knows that, which is why she loves to torment me about it.

“Yeah,” I say, deadpan. “It's fate. Like that hickey.”

“It's not a hickey.” Megan raises a self-conscious hand to her neck, then points at the door and stage-whispers: “
JJ Kelly!
”

I laugh. Even celebrities are awed by celebrities. Although, granted, Megan is C-list, at best, and JJ is on the cusp of A, even if he hasn't been all that visible lately.

I'm not going to pretend I'm not intimately acquainted with his résumé. He played the handicapped-yet-wise son in a dysfunctional oil family before the advent of competitive reality shows and acronymed cop shows. Then he had an awkward phase, which is where most child actors become restaurateurs or golf pros. Not JJ. He mined his dorky phase, landing a sitcom role where he wore wide-collared polyester shirts and danced wrong.

Then one day, he turned hot. Not in a he's-kind-of-cute way, but in a holy-shit-who's-
that
? way. And after that, he disappeared for years. Until he finally took a small part in an independent film. Just a cameo, but he threw himself into the role of the heroin-addicted hit man who falls for the daughter of a Russian crime lord. Sure, his character dies in the first scene, but those four minutes gave JJ a major Hollywood makeover.

JJ Kelly was back, on the edge of great things . . . and dating my roommate. I'm positive that I know more about him than Megan does, which kind of skeeves me out.

L
ate the next morning, I'm packing the last load of food to truck over to Scout's house when Megan and JJ come stumbling out of Megan's room. They look like they just finished fucking twelve seconds ago, which is highly probable. I wouldn't know, because I've had my headphones super-glued to my ears since they started going at it like wolverines an hour ago, all of which was perfectly audible through our thin apartment walls.

At first it was kind of cute—young love and all—but it eventually just got scorchingly hot, like listening to a particularly well-made porn flick. Except a porn flick where the actor looks like JJ Kelly. Then it turned creepy, like a porn flick where the actress is your best friend. Finally, it made me kind of sad and lonely. All that in the span of four minutes.

“Oh, good, you're still here.” Megan brushes past me with a hip bump to get to the refrigerator. “I'm craving a feta cheese omelet.”

“Already in the car, Boof,” I say.

“You made omelets?”

“No, the feta. It's in the car.”

She doe-eyes the empty cheese drawer. “This is a catastrophe.”

She's wearing a baggy tank top that reads
CARPE DIEM
in flaking silver glitter, and a pair of ruffled Agent Provocateur knickers that I know she stole from a wardrobe trailer because there is no way she paid $175 for underwear. She looks at me imploringly. Her mascara is smeared under her eyes and she's really working the whole orphaned kinderwhore thing.

“Don't look at me like that. I'm walking out the door right this instant,” I say. “Order it from Urth.”

“No,” she mock-whines. “I want it now.”

“
Daddy, I want an Oompa-Loompa,
” I mimic. “Come to the car, then, because the feta wagon is pulling out of the station.”

“I'll walk you out,” JJ says from the doorway. “Just let me find some pants.”

He stretches into a yawn and clasps his hands over his head in an ersatz yoga move that's more bodybuilder pose than anything else. He's wearing what I think for a moment is a swimsuit but is actually a pair of form-fitting, gray 2(x)ist boxer briefs. And holy crap, his abs are ridiculous. Seriously, I stop counting at six. Plus, his hair looks like he just came from a salon where he paid $275 for an artfully mussed bedhead, made all the more alluring because I know that's not the case.

“Back in a flash,” he says, striding toward Megan's room like a Greek statue come to life.

Megan takes a running start at his retreating form and leaps onto his back. He's completely unprepared and they stagger sideways and collapse onto the leather sofa, which skids a couple inches and bumps against the wall, rattling the oversize, glass-framed poster from
Jade Wolf
that dominates our living room.

They're gorgeous together, a tangle of long, lean limbs with her creamy white skin against his natural tan. They look like they're about to shoot the box art for a quirky indie rom-com. I should be thrilled for Megan. She's my best friend, for God's sake. But instead there's a roiling pit in my stomach that feels like I haven't eaten for a week.

“Okay, turtledoves,” I say. “I'll leave you to it.”

I pick up the tray of skewered vegetables and shoulder my canvas knife bag on top of my purse and my laptop bag, which I don't need for Scout's party, but I'm afraid to be away from my technology for three minutes in case one of the Kardashians breaks a nail.

“Slow down!” Megan calls from under JJ's torso. “He's coming, he's coming.”

“Good bounceback,” I say.

Neither of them responds. Actors are such a crappy audience. Well, if they won't laugh at my bawdy humor, I won't wait. Instead, I ratchet down the four stories to the street in our old rattletrap elevator. One thing about having a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica is that the common spaces look like you're living in a pre-glasnost Soviet tenement. Prices and prizes. For the record, I would have taken the stairs if I hadn't been so loaded down with party crap, because our elevator is just waiting for its moment of fame on the eleven o'clock news:
And, in other news, a woman perished today in Santa Monica after being trapped in the elevator in the One Life building for three days with only hummus and kalamata olives for sustenance. Her neighbors described her as ‘You mean that girl with the frozen yogurt?' Now here's Fritz with the weather.

On the other hand, the stairs are worn and slippery from years of use, so if you catch one wrong, it propels you downward like a waterslide.

By the time I reach the lobby, JJ is already leaning against the row of dilapidated mailboxes. He looks like he's just been air-dropped in from another planet, he's so resplendent amid the faded linoleum and plastic plants. As I step off the elevator, juggling my trays and bags, he trots forward to help. He seems to have forgotten his shirt, which is kind of surprising, though I'm not about to complain. His body is perfection, but he's not the kind of guy whose pecs are better-looking than his face. (You know the kind I'm talking about. Any excuse to strip down and flex.)

He grabs two trays and I follow him through the lobby. There are muscles in his back that I've never seen before. I mean on anyone. That's why I look so closely. Scientific interest.

Baja Santa Monica is pretty much a paparazzi-free zone. Rent-controlled apartments and tiny beach bungalows aren't exactly a hotbed of celebrity activity. But get a half mile to the south, on Abbott Kinney Boulevard, and it's a different story. There the paparazzi lurk in blacked-out SUVs, scanning the doorways of Gjelina and Shima and the Tasting Kitchen for their prey, or they sit across the street from the Farmacy in hopes of catching a celebrity buying his own weed.

When Lindsay Lohan was renting a house on Venice Boulevard, the sidewalk in front of the Brig—which is normally a low-key, albeit hipstery, local bar—looked like lunchtime at the Ivy. It really fucked up my late-night visits to the Kogi truck, which was tragic because they have the best Korean short-rib tacos with kimchi on the planet. And they're only two bucks apiece, which is the best deal you'll get for anything on Abbott Kinney, anytime, ever.

Anyway, our street is hardly a celebrity hotbed, with its hippie grocer and fratty Irish pub, which is why I'm completely surprised when a sweaty Persian dude with a backward ball cap steps into my path and starts clicking away. His camera has a lens so huge it could capture the license plates of the cars in the parking lot three blocks away, and it's pretty clear from the hardware that JJ is not his original target. He was probably hoping to get a shot of some fading B-lister heading into Planet Blue a block up the street. Stumbling into the scenario of JJ Kelly, shirtless and barefoot, trailing behind me as I plod along with trays of food is just a happy coincidence.

“Hey, JJ, how's it going, man?” His tone is jocular as he maneuvers for his shot. “Is this your girl?”

JJ ignores him and I angle away, but the guy holds his ground, his shutter clicking over my shoulder, and his lens so close that I could reach out and swat it if my hands weren't full.

“What are you doing down here?” he continues. “Hey, man, did you forget your shoes? Big night last night?”

He's wedged directly between me and Tyler's Carrera, which he let me take home, probably not expecting that I'd illegally park in the passenger zone in order to load my food. I glance over my shoulder at JJ, who has pasted a bland glaze of affability across his face and is still completely ignoring the rapid-fire questions.

“Hey, why you gotta be like that?” the pap asks, his tone getting increasingly antagonistic. “I'm just trying to say hey, you know.” He keeps clicking while he fumbles in his bag for a little video flipcam. “Who's your friend? She's a little thick to be your date, boss. Is she your sister? Do you have a chunky sister you're hiding from the world?”

“That's enough, bro,” JJ says, without breaking his expression at all.

Paparazzi are like schoolyard bullies, by turns obsequious and cruel. The money shots are the ones that involve high emotion. If they can provoke a shove or a swing or a gob of spit, all the better.

“Just go, JJ,” I say. “I've got this.”

“Not a chance,” he says. “I'm on a feta mission.”

I scuttle closer to the car and JJ reaches to open the passenger door for me. His bare body brushes up against me and he feels like marble wrapped in cashmere. I shiver involuntarily, even though it's already pushing eighty degrees.

I flinch away—must not lust for Megan's boyfriend—just as the pap swings his video camera into place and our arms collide in what would be a comical tangle if this were a Farrelly Brothers movie and not my life. The trays of vegetables go flying and my purse and canvas knife bag spew everything onto the pavement: my prized Wüsthof carbon-steel knives, my Henckels kitchen shears, my tampons and American Spirits all falling to the ground amid chunks of red bell pepper and mushrooms.

“Back up, fucker!” I scream into the pap's face. “Step the fuck off!”

He's a little taken aback, but he does just that, putting three feet of sidewalk between us without lowering his camera, which is blinking a little red dot that lets me know he's got this for posterity. I don't give a shit, because footage of some nobody screaming at him is less than worthless, just a waste of his time and battery life.

I kneel and survey the damage. Half of my marinated and skewered vegetables are ruined, and there's a gouge in the paint on Tyler's car where my chef's knife julienned it. I'm already ten minutes late for Scout's and now I'm going to have to come up with more food before guests start arriving and there's no time. And I'd wanted everything to be perfect for her. For me. And, I'm not going to lie, for Eva, too.

I shoot a glance at JJ. “Dude, just go. Tell Megan we had an incident.”

“I was going to make her breakfast,” he says, sort of forlorn.

“Grab the feta and run.”

“Don't be ridiculous.” JJ kneels to clean the mess. “Let me help you.”

I start scooping items into my purse. Bamboo skewers, my cigarettes, a chunk of zucchini. My hand brushes JJ's as we both reach for a cleaver, and a sizzle of electricity runs up my arm. Holy crap, I'm so fucking inappropriate.

The pap, who's been muttering into his Bluetooth headset, blurts out, “Hey, JJ, is it true you hooked up with Megan Campion? I hear she fucked her director on
Stones
.”

There's no truth to the pap's accusation, but it's exactly what it takes for JJ to snap. He leaps to his feet. “Why don't you say that again, asshole?”

The pap pales but keeps the camera steady.

“Go on, shitbag,” JJ says. “I fucking dare you.”

“I heard,” the pap says, “that she took it up the ass to get her first job.”

JJ raises his hand like he's going to shove the guy and that's when we all see—oh, holy shit—that he's still holding my Wüsthof Trident Classic 20cm cleaver in his right hand, the steel blade gleaming in the early afternoon sunshine.

“JJ! Just walk away.” I try to inject a calm tone into my voice. “Dude. Just walk away.”

JJ squares his shoulders, then turns and heads back inside, my best cleaver still dangling in his right hand. The pap keeps the camera running until JJ's gone, then sprints across the street to his Escalade and peels off with a tire-squealing flourish.

Disaster. I grab my phone from the debris on the sidewalk and call Megan.

“There was a shitstorm down here,” I say, and tell her everything.

She starts laughing halfway through, so I don't think she really gets what just happened.

“You need to tell JJ to call his publicist,” I say. “There's gonna be footage of him holding a fucking cleaver on YouTube in three minutes.”

“I know, Boof,” she says. “He's right here, he's already on it.”

“Here's the thing,” I blurt, then fall silent.

“What thing?” she asks.

“I'm going to need help at Scout's. That asshole tanked some of my stuff and I have to make more on the fly.” Like I said, Megan and Scout aren't exactly tight, so it's weird that I'm going to press her into service at Scout's party, but I'm out of options. “I'm doing a quick grocery run, then can you meet me over there?”

“You're killing me,” Megan says. “You know my kitchen skills are nonexistent.”

“I don't need you to make soufflés,” I say. “I just need some extra hands.”

“Fine,” she says. “But only if there's going to be feta.”

“Five pounds of it,” I say. “The good French kind too.”

“All right,” she says. “Text me the address.”

“Done,” I say. “See you there.”

“I'm bringing JJ,” she says. “He's good with his hands.”

“Tell him to keep his shirt on,” I say. “And bring my murder weapon.”