Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
"For the work."
"I'm a professional."
He folds the paper. He looks at me for a long, level moment, and I can see him seeing straight through the whole flimsy production, all the way to the girl behind it, and I hold my breath and wait for the no I've earned.
"Come here, then," he tells me, and I'm not gonna lie—I nearly fall off the stool in my haste, and just like that, we're meeting in the middle of the kitchen, and this time there's no chin-turn, no arranging. This time his hands find my waist and stay there, spanning it, drawing me in until there's nothing left to close, and he kisses me like the first lesson was the polite version and this is the truth of it.
It lasts. That's all I'll tell you and all I can stand to remember at once. It lasts, and his hands tighten at my waist like he's decided to stop pretending for the length of one kiss, and I forget the fake note and the real reason and my own address.
When he finally lifts his head, I'm holding onto his shirt with both fists and breathing like I ran here, my borrowed heart going so hard I can feel it in my teeth. Slow down, I don't tell it. For once I don't want it to.
"So," I manage, aiming for casual and coming in somewhere near unhinged. "Did I pass?"
"No." I blink. "No?"
"No." He unhooks my fists from his shirt, one finger at a time, and sets me back from him with the terrible gentleness of a man closing a door he wants to leave open. "You need a lot more practice."
And then he walks off to take a call that I'm fairly sure doesn't exist either.
That's twice now I've felt him decide to stop pretending, and twice I've watched him take it right back the second it's over, like wanting me is against some rule he wrote himself, like I'm forbidden and he keeps almost forgetting to mind. But I stay right where he left me, wrecked and delighted and absolutely certain of one thing.
I'm going to need so, so many lessons.
Chapter Sixteen
I GET CAST. NOT A CALLBACK, not a maybe. A real part in a real film, with a name and lines and my own chair with my own character taped to the back of it, and on the first day of the table read I discover that my scene partner is Ricco Enriquez.
Which would be excellent news, except that Ricco Enriquez remembers me.
"Callback girl." He drops into the seat beside mine, grinning like we share a secret. "You got it. I knew you would. I told my agent, watch that one."
"You didn't."
"I absolutely did. Ask her, she'll deny it, but I did." He leans in, easy and warm and entirely too handsome for a Tuesday. "So. That guy from the soundstage. The one who owns the sky. Tell me that's your brother and make my whole year."
"He is..." I hunt for the word and come up with none of the true ones. "Complicated."
"Complicated." Ricco beams. "I love complicated. Complicated means available."
And he flirts. All the way through the read he flirts, generous and funny about it, sharing his water, stealing my margin notes, making me laugh in the exact loud way that gets us shushed twice. It's nice. It's uncomplicated. It's the kind of attention a smart girl would water and grow.
But this smart girl spends the entire afternoon thinking about a man who folds his smiles away in a vault.
When they break, there's a car at the curb that I didn't order and would know anywhere, and a man leaning against it with his arms crossed, watching Ricco walk me out with the focused calm of a storm deciding where to be.
"Enriquez," Maximo says.
"We've met?"
"No." A beat. "She's expected home."
Ricco looks at me, looks at him, and does the math faster than most. "Right. Complicated." He squeezes my shoulder, unfazed, and saunters off whistling. The car door shuts. The city slides by, and the back seat is suddenly the size of a shoebox.
"Were you jealous?" I ask the hard line of his profile.
"No." He doesn't turn his head. He watches the road like it might bolt.
"You looked jealous."
"Irritated." His hand rests on the seat between us, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off it, and he doesn't move it, and I don't move mine.
My borrowed heart is going loud enough that I'm half afraid he can hear it, which is exactly the sort of excitement my last checkup asked me, very politely, to avoid. My heart, as usual, has other ideas.
"They're extremely similar looks, on you."
"They're not." But his voice has dropped, gone low and a little rough, and his jaw is a straight line, and the whole car has gone warm in a way the heater has nothing to do with.