Step Wilde: A Stepbrother Romance (13 page)

I laughed. "Well, it doesn't have to be your type for you to have heard it."

Olivia took a deep breath like she was bracing herself.

"My radio's broken in my car, I don't go out shopping or to restaurants, and I still live with my aunt just outside of Burbank in a tiny little room that's nearly the size of the twin mattress that I sleep on. I've script supervised on five dozen films and I still can't afford my own apartment. I have a handful of loyal friends, including Lydia, and I can't afford to go anywhere fun on the weekends so I stay at home and watch movies on my aunt's Netflix subscription because I can't afford that either."

She finished this monologue and with it, her glass of wine. "And now, I need to get back to set. Jennifer told me to take some time for myself to brainstorm. And I think I've had enough of that."

I reached across the table and grabbed her wrist firmly. There were thin waves of electricity that seemed to rocket between the two of us. I was beyond happy that she didn't pull away from my grip.

"Don't leave. Please," I said. "Just stay long enough to eat. Then you can go."

She stared down at my hand.

"If you manhandled Hailey like that I'm starting to understand why she hates you enough to immortalize your doomed relationship in a song. And also, aren't you still dating her?"

I let go of her hand. "No," I replied. "Who the hell told you that?"

She shrugged, and her neckline fell a little bit lower as she did it. I had to reach down and adjust my pants at the sight of it. "The guy who picked me up from the airport."

I saw that she still wasn't leaving. I took the natural pause in the conversation as an opportunity to ask her the question I'd been wondering this entire time. "Did you know when you took this job that you'd be working with me?"

Olivia slumped into the booth.
Good. She's staying
, I thought to myself.

Then she spoke again. "No, not when I took it. But I did know before I came to set that you were the main actor. The driver who picked me up at the airport told me that, too."

I tapped my fingers on the wine glass. So she hadn't taken the job because of me. That was disappointing.

"Did you think I took this job just because of you?" she asked, laughing and finally digging into the bread basket. "Good Lord, you're even more arrogant than I suspected. Some of us plebes have bills to pay."

I thought hard about this. "When I saw you today, it was like it was seven years ago that night at the coffee shop," I said to her in a low voice. "You look amazing."

Olivia laughed. "Ah, fresh meat to fuck. Your co-star is old news, I guess, so time to move onto the new girl on the set? Just fresh pickings for Mr. Roman Wilder. Why Roman, by the way? You know that's bothered me for a while now. What was wrong with Nicholas?"

I was surprised at the swift change of subject, but I gladly took it over the alternative of discussing whether or not she was just my next conquest.

"My agent told me Nicholas was boring. So I chose Roman because...I like Italy." I felt a swoop of nerves go through my stomach. That wasn't the entire truth, but it was close enough. “I missed you, Liv. I’m trying to tell you that.”

Her face softened slightly, and she leaned forward toward me. She was maybe a foot away, close enough for me to reach out and bite those luscious lips of hers.

"You're pathetic. You're not having me, Wilder. No matter how badly you want it, you're not getting this." She motioned to her body, taking her middle finger and tracing it across her own collarbone and then down the line of her cleavage. Then she pulled her hand away and held up her middle finger straight to my face.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WILDER

The walk back from the restaurant, while short, was made substantially more difficult by the raging case of blue balls that I was carrying with me. Olivia had left shortly after finishing her plate of eggplant parmesan in record time.

The server asked me with a smile if Olivia was on fire, she'd fled so fast. I’d stayed behind to drink another three glasses of wine on my own. I paid my bill with a handsome tip and was relieved to see that the exiting sun had also encouraged the paparazzi to go home.

Unfortunately, as I walked into my suite upstairs, I could hear shrill giggling through the door. I turned around abruptly and rode the private elevator back downstairs to the lobby. I walked to the desk with the most winning smile I could muster plastered on my face.

Unfortunately, I was greeted not by the young, hot woman who had been at the receiving end of Hailey's machinations earlier, but instead by a man who looked intensely disgruntled at the prospect of manning the counter at all.

“May I help you?" he asked, his voice thick with his Italian accent.

"Yeah, I'm looking to book a completely different room for the night, actually. I'm Nick- sorry, Roman Wilder."

The man blinked but didn't type or attempt to look at the computer screen in front of him. I tapped the counter and tilted my head to the side.

"Oh, sorry, I think it's under James Brando," I said with a smile. "My pseudonym."

The man was still looking at me, unmoved by my request. "I know who you are," he replied simply.

"It's just a mash up James Dean and Marlon-"

"Yes, sir, I understand the reference. I also know who you are. But I'm afraid we are completely booked for the next few weeks. There is a movie filming in town and it is housing most of the cast and crew."

As he said these words, I knew that
he knew
exactly what he was doing. I nodded.

"Right. Of course. Well, if anything comes up-"

"I will ring your assistant, Harrison," he said. "I know where he is."

I nodded.

"Thank you so much for your help. You've really gone above and beyond here," I spat at him sarcastically.

I turned around and considered wandering over to the bar. Then I remembered that I’d already consumed an entire bottle of red wine with no assistance. I was on my way to being reckless once again, and I couldn't afford to do that with Hailey hanging around waiting to record my every sentence and thought so she could auto-tune it and lay it over a bass line.

Instead I went back upstairs and opened the door to the penthouse. The giggling in there had reached tinnitus-causing volumes.

"Fuck, Hailey, could you shut your groupies the fuck up for five goddamn minutes," I yelled to her. She spun around. She was wearing a short, white satin teddy.

"We're having a party, Wilde. Don't be such a downer!" She cranked the music even louder. I realized with sinking horror that it was my song. All of the women started singing along, pantomime microphones in their hands. I fled before I had to hear even one lyrics.

I went into my bedroom and slammed the door shut behind me. That's when I saw eight Louis Vuitton steamer trunks piled onto every surface. The Cat Guy - I could never remember his name - was bent over a wooden tray filled with litter.

"Jesus Fuck," I said. "This is my fucking room!"

The guy stood up, looking panicked.

"I'm so sorry, Ms. Holliday told me that I was fine to unpack her things in here."

I walked over to the closet and started pulling down my own carefully lined-up outfits. I shoved them into a pile draped over my arm.

"It's not your fucking fault," I said to him, sighing. "It's Hailey. And if I say anything, she'll find a way to make it worse."

The assistant was still frozen with a scoop of litter in his right hand. I felt sick to my stomach, and the music was exacerbating the alcohol headache that had started downstairs at the front desk.

Maybe it wasn't alcohol, but intense stress. I would go to an early grave and it would all be because of a skinny, blonde, ambitious bimbo who looked twenty-two but was closing in on thirty. I bent down and grabbed my black suitcase off the floor, dropping the clothes into it and zipping it up.

"Have a nice time with all that," I said to Cat Man, stepping over him with my suitcase in my arms. "She better fucking pay you well."

Back in the living room, the choreography had begun.

"Awww, Wilde, leaving so soon?" Hailey asked, batting her long, fake eyelashes at me coquettishly.

Every time I saw her making that face for the press I wanted to ask the paparazzi if they knew they were looking into the eyes of Satan incarnate.

"Fuck you, Hailey," I said, instantly regretting it. All of the women started singing the chorus.

You said you'd fuck me wild

But you knew I was just a child

So I say to you, arrivederci Rome

You won't be the last guy to make me moan

So fuck you, fuck you, fuck y-

I slammed the door on the last line of the chorus and banged on Harrison's door. He answered it in his pajamas, which were striped and old-fashioned just like everything else he owned. He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

"Mr. Wilder, what do you-" he looked at the suitcase I was holding in my hand. For the first time in our relationship, he looked annoyed. He'd broken character. "Oh," he replied simply. Then he recovered with a small smile. "Come on in," he said, motioning inside with his arm.

I saw with a sinking in my stomach that his room was a queen-sized bed with a small sofa in the corner. I'm an asshole, but I'm not that much of an asshole. I would be sleeping on the couch. I wasn't about to make my miserable assistant leave his own bed.

"I've got the sofa," I announced before Harrison could offer. I knew that he was relieved because he didn't even pretend to offer me the bed in his place.

He did rush forward to take my bag.

"I'll hang these up again," he said, slightly impatiently.

I reached down to the modern sofa with a dark grey twill upholstery and was relieved to see that at least it was a pull-out bed. I began removing the cushions as Harrison slid his own hanging clothes across the metal bar, the hooks of the hangers squeaking against the pole as he did so.

"Sorry about this," I said. "It's just that Hailey-" I thumbed over needlessly to the room next door. "She sort of pushed me out of my own place."

Harrison said nothing but continued to hang up my clothes in silence. Then after a moment, he spoke.

"You think they'll play the rap remix after this?" he asked. I realized this was the first time Harrison had ever made a joke in front of me. I laughed.

"Fucking hope not," I replied, walking over to the minibar and pulling out a bag of dark chocolate squares wrapped in cellophane.

I looked around the room and saw that half of the bedspread had been pulled back. On the nightstand was a copy of
Hamlet
, and a small glass of brandy sat next to it.

"Jesus, I interrupted the one hour a day you get to yourself," I said, running my hands through my hair and sitting down at the foot of the fold-out bed. The springs squeaked loudly under my weight.

Harrison continued to hang up my clothes, running his hands gently down the fabric to smooth each shirt. It was mesmerizing him watching him do it. I felt like I might nod off just from the care he was showing my clothes. "It's not a problem, sir," he replied.

"Call me Wilder," I said. "It's weird enough now that we're living together without you also calling me Mister."

Harrison turned around and looked at me as if attempting to figure out whether or not I was being serious. And I was being serious.

"Wilder," he replied. His voice relaxed by a millimeter as he said it.

"You ever meet a girl you couldn't have?" I asked him. It felt weird confiding in my assistant. But I didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Josh was shooting a documentary in Antarctica right now. I didn't even know what day it was there, much less what time. It would be a few more days at a minimum until our weekly call.

Harrison was all I had.

He finished hanging up my pants and zipped up my suitcase, sliding it into the bottom of the closet and shutting the doors. He wandered into the bathroom and I heard the tap run as he presumably washed his hands.

"No," he replied, coming back into the room.

"Oh. Are you..." the question hung in the air.

He laughed.

"No, I'm not gay. I'm just not ridiculous and self-flagellating enough to fall for a woman who isn't interested in being with me. Not since middle school, anyway."

I opened my mouth to respond to this - my first instinct to be angry flying right into my head. Then I just laughed instead.

"Can’t argue with that." I motioned to the bathroom. "You done in there for a while?"

"Be my guest," Harrison said. "I'll just be out here reading if you need anything."

There was an awkwardness for a moment.

"Hey. New rule: as long as we're in here together, you’re not my assistant. You can just be yourself. Say anything, do anything, just don't offer to help me. This is your space I'm invading. Just act like I'm a roommate, okay?"

Harrison stiffened.

"That's...going to be a little bit weird for me," he replied. "I hope you can understand that.”

"Just do your best. I'm not asking for perfection, just honesty and trust, okay?"

Harrison nodded. "If that's the case, then you need to know something."

I turned around from digging my toothbrush out of my suitcase.

"What's that?"

"You drink too much. You should cut back on that. People are starting to worry about you."

I contemplated this for a minute. I didn’t have a response. My body was starting to shake from anger. I walked into the bathroom, locking the door and turning the tap of the shower onto scalding.

Steam poured out as the jet stream of water hit the floor with a thundering roar. I stared at my slightly bloodshot eyes in the mirror, wondering if Olivia had noticed how much I'd had to drink.

I climbed into the shower, the hot water pummeling my body. I watched the body paint melt off of me, and couldn't help but think the scent of Olivia was washing down that drain with it.