Pierce staring at Artie, love all over his face.
Damon smiling down at me from my porch, pizza boxes in hand.
Tim’s angry eyes, fist descending—
I blinked, caught the tail end of Maggie’s sentence
“. . . and so then I threw all of his underwear out of the window,” Maggie said. “God, I’ve seen them do that in movies, but actually doing it in real life was so satisfying.”
The image of cool and collected Maggie launching underwear out her window made me laugh, made the past fade back away.
“Please tell me they were tighty-whities.”
“Unfortunately, Ben was strictly a boxer brief man.”
“Disappointing.”
“In so, so many ways.” Then she sighed and shifted back to business, promising to touch base with me about the shoot on Monday or Tuesday, wishing me luck for rehearsals, telling me I was going to kill it.
Supportive. Sharing. Funny. Caring.
All the things a friend would do.
By the time I thanked her and hung up, I realized that maybe I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d thought.
A Month Later
Rehearsals were completed, filming had started, and I’d quickly gone from being beyond excited to begin shooting to absolutely dreading showing up to work every day.
My male costar was . . .
An ass.
Grant Seagurio had been the hottest thing in town about five years before, lead billing on every movie he’d made, films hitting the top of the box office, paparazzi trailing his every move.
And now . . . a little of that star power had dimmed.
He’d headed a few busts, but that wasn’t what he was struggling to overcome. Nope, what had really shuttered his fandom was the video of him yelling at a valet. Okay, not so much as just yelling, but screaming, throwing things, kicking over a trash can, and then running over the foot of the poor valet.
All for grinding the gears of his Ferrari.
Oh, man. He had it so tough.
I snorted to myself as I watched him on set. I’d been reticent to work with him after the incident, but it had been several years without anything else happening to make headlines and so I’d hoped he’d grown up, grown out of the asshole-ness, especially when jobs had begun to dry up. Clearly, I’d been wrong. Nothing seemed to faze him. Grant’s ego was something to behold, and I felt like I’d been around Hollywood and the model world long enough to have seen some huge ass egos.
Grant’s was . . . on a whole other level.
He yelled at the makeup artist for having made him look too shiny in one shot, never mind that he’d batted the girl away when she’d come in to touch up. He screamed at the boom operator for having had the nerve to shift positions and distract him. He’d argued with the director about the shot list and been late to set when he’d disagreed.
And he’d . . . barely spoken a word to me, even though we were supposed to somehow be creating chemistry on screen.
I’d heard him rage into his cell that first day after rehearsals about how his agent had forced him to work with a former model.
As though it were the lowest thing that could possibly happen to him.
Meanwhile, it was going to be my name as top billing because my agent was good and because . . . well, I’d become the bigger star over the last year.
Normally, I didn’t give a damn about things like that.
But with Grant being the way he was, wreaking havoc and ejaculating his ego all over the set—
I bit back a chuckle.
Ejaculating his ego?
I’d been watching too many Netflix comedy specials of late, apparently. Though it didn’t seem like much of it had rubbed off on me if I was passing the time by making internal jokes about ejaculating egos.
Or maybe, too much of it was rubbing off on me.
First stop, rom-com. Next, comedy tour.
Yeah, right. Stifling a snort, I continued watching the scene unfold in front of me. So ejaculating egos might not be the best metaphor, but I got a few extra points for alliteration.
Hey. No judgment, okay?
Sometimes there was a lot of downtime on set, and since I couldn’t rip the microphone out of the boom operator’s hands, cross over to Grant, and then use the long metal rod to beat Grant senseless, I had to satisfy myself with imagining the pleasure.
And ejaculating, rods, and pleasure.
Heh.
But speaking of ejaculating, rods, and pleasure, I was horny. Like really horny. In fact, if I were being honest about the amount of my horniness, I was more pent-up than I could ever remember.
Or maybe a more apt description was that I was more pent-up than my early twenties addiction to all things Chris Hemsworth.
Okay, not gonna lie, I still had that addiction.
I was just slightly more addicted to a certain chocolate-eyed photographer, whose quiet and velvet-lined voice never failed to make me shiver and who’d been perfectly friendly while somehow making me want him even more.
And speaking of ejaculating, Damon’s cock had been—
“Absolutely not!” Grant exploded. “I will not do it again. That was perfect, and I will not let some two-bit director tell me how to do my job . . .”
My cell was in the pocket of my chair, and I felt it buzz.
Thank God.
Not only that I’d remembered to put it on silent, because imagine the conniption that Grant would have had if it wasn’t, but also that because I hadn’t left it in my dressing room and now I had something to distract me from the disaster that was unfolding in front of me.
My phone vibrated again, and I saw that Damon had texted.
Then immediately felt my lips curve up into a smile.
Things had gone back to the way they were before, well, almost exactly like they were before. Damon had returned to being my friend, randomly texting me throughout the week, though our standing Thursday
