You are the Story (The Extra Series Book 7)

by Megan Walker

  He glances up at me and back down again.

  That’s what I thought. “Let me give Anna-Marie a heads-up. But I’m sure you can stay with us.”

  “Yeah?” he asks. “I know you guys are going through stuff. I’m guessing the treatment still isn’t working?”

  “No,” I say. “We’ve decided we’re going to try IVF.”

  “I thought she was all pumped up about the surrogacy thing.”

  Even Ben knows this. We really should have talked about it a while ago.

  “She was, but I hate the idea. So I know something about not being able to change how you feel even when it hurts the person you love.”

  “Damn. That sucks.”

  “Look,” I tell him, “if Anna-Marie isn’t okay with it, I’ll check with my parents. You know they’d be happy to have you stay with them.” My mom would be hurt if he didn’t think of asking them. “But really, I think she’ll be fine with it. We have a guest room. And hopefully you and Wyatt will work this out soon.”

  He toys with the cardboard sleeve on his coffee cup. “But if we don’t, I’ll get an apartment. I won’t overstay my welcome.”

  I hate the idea of him doing that, like having a more permanent place to stay might discourage him from feeling like he needs to fight to save his marriage.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I say. “You can stay with us a while if you need to. Our house is big. It won’t be a problem.”

  “Thanks, man. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner.”

  “I get it,” I say. “But I wish I’d been a better friend, so you felt like you could have.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ben says, but I still feel like it is. If we’d been talking before, maybe I could have helped him figure it out, so it wouldn’t have gotten this bad. It’s Ben and Wyatt. They can’t break up. But hearing Ben sound so discouraged—

  I don’t want to believe that a marriage like theirs can’t be saved. I don’t want to think about what that might mean for my own.

  Five

  Josh

  I walk onto the set for my eleven o’clock meeting with Axel Dane feeling like I’m all wrung out. I keep thinking about the pain on Anna-Marie’s face last night when I said I didn’t want to use a surrogate, and the pain on Ben’s face today as he told me his marriage might be over. I’m having a hard time focusing, which isn’t great when meeting a new client. But given that this client is ten years old, I probably don’t need to be incredibly worried.

  Felix meets me toward the front of the set. “Hey. Thanks for coming.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” I say. “I haven’t decided if I’m doing this.”

  “But you’re here. Which I already appreciate.”

  I sigh. The truth is, I know I’m going to sign this kid on a temporary basis. Knowing that his mom is willing to sign him on with another predator after what happened last time—I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t do something to protect him.

  Felix shows me to a large and surprisingly empty dressing room. I wonder if this is part of what needs fixing—most kids have toys and a TV in their dressing room so that they can have some opportunity to be children, even when they’re working.

  “Axel,” Felix says. “Meet Josh.”

  Axel’s mom is standing right behind the kid, but it’s Axel who looks me up and down, appraising me. The kid has dark hair slicked back like he’s five years older, and it doesn’t appear to be because he’s been to makeup already today.

  Axel eyes me. “I like your scarf. Give it to me.”

  “No,” I tell him.

  He stares at me. The suit I’m wearing has an ascot thing that tucks under the jacket. It’s a nine-hundred-dollar suit, and if he thinks I’m going to give it to a bratty child just because he demanded it, he’s wrong. “But I like it,” he says. “And I want it.”

  “And it’s mine. I’m not giving it to you.”

  Axel looks so aghast at this that I assume he doesn’t get told no very often.

  As I suspected, Axel turns to his mom. “He likes your scarf,” she says expectantly.

  Oh, god. This is why I don’t work with show parents. I might not ever get to be a parent, but even I know you don’t give a kid everything they ask for. “Look, I’ll give you the brand of the scarf, and you can buy your own.”

  “Oh, that’ll be perfect, won’t it Axel?” Mom says. She looks desperate for him to accept this, like her very being is wrapped up in keeping this little monster happy.

  Axel shrugs. “Okay.”

  Okay. He is okay with having to find his own scarf. I’m pretty sure this one only comes with the suit, so he’ll probably have to pay nine hundred dollars for it, but he’s Axel Dane. He probably will.

  I look over at Felix, hoping I’m telegraphing to him that I already regret considering this job.

  “So,” I say to Axel’s mom. “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”

  “No,” says the mother of the child whose agent just got arrested for child porn. “No, I think what’s good enough for Kim Watterson is good enough for Axel. Don’t you think, Axel dear?”

  I try not to show my disapproval of her letting her kid make this decision after their last disastrous agenting experience.

  “Sure,” Axel says. “You’re going to make sure I get a bigger dressing room?”

  “First I’m going to give your mom my hourly rate,” I say, writing a number down on a piece of paper. This number is two and a half times my usual hourly, which is not small. If I’m going to do this, then Axel and his mom are going to pay for our first round of IVF, at a minimum. “Since I didn’t negotiate your contract, I didn’t get a commission, so for the remainder of this film I will represent you at this rate per hour. Then, when the film is over, I’ll help you find an upstanding agent who regularly reps children, and will be an appropriate fit for Axel’s talents.”

  “All right,” Mom says. “Whatever your number is, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” She doesn’t seem at all surprised when she looks at the paper. This is probably not the first time she’s been charged an irritation markup, even if she doesn’t know it.

  “Great,” I say.

  “Where is my bigger dressing room?” Axel asks.

  “First I need to see your contract. And then I will make sure it’s enforced to the fullest extent. Right after you sign—” I open up a document with the usual terms and my increased hourly rate highlighted in yellow. “Here.”

  Axel’s mom signs without reading it, of course. It could say literally anything. If it was just her who could be hurt by it, I’d walk now—which the contract says I can do at any time—and let her get taken advantage of by the circling sharks.

  “Thanks,” Felix says. I’m pretty sure he’s mostly thankful that he’s not in this alone, but really, he’s going to spend a lot more time with the kid than I am. I’m just going to read his contract and either make the studio fulfill it, or explain to Axel and his mom why his old agent didn’t actually negotiate for them the contract they thought they had. Obnoxious, yes, but easy as pie.

  “Yes, thank you,” Axel’s mom says. “Say thank you, Axel.”

  “Why?” Axel says. “He hasn’t done anything yet.”

  His mom, of course, doesn’t respond. “Here,” she says. “I’ll email you the contract so you can get started right away.”

  “Speaking of getting started,” Felix says. “Are you ready for your first cello lesson now?”

  “No,” Axel says. “I need my quinoa. My blood sugar is dropping.”

  Axel’s mom cringes. “Perhaps after lunch?” she says to Felix.

  Felix looks at me like he wants me to tell the kid that he has to take the cello lessons, but I shake my head. I may not like the kid or his mother, but I represent him now. Which means that I have to make other people
do things for him, but it’s not my job to tell him he has to make nice. I’ll leave that to the director.

  And, unfortunately, Felix.

  “Yeah, okay,” Felix says, running a hand through his hair.

  Axel and his mother make their exit to go bother craft services about quinoa, and I shake my head at Felix. “Quinoa?”

  “Apparently,” Felix says.

  “What have you gotten me into?”

  “Thank you,” Felix says again, in lieu of an explanation. “Hopefully once you get started, things will go smoother.”

  “I hope so too,” I say grimly.

  Felix looks concerned. “Are you okay? I know Axel’s a pain—”

  “It’s not Axel. I’ve just had a long couple of days, that’s all.”

  “Anything I can help with?”

  He looks like he actually means it, which I appreciate, but, as Anna-Marie pointed out, Felix and I aren’t friends. Just acquaintances, really.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Yeah? Do you need to talk about it?”

  Obviously I do. And I want to say that I’ll talk to someone else, but really, who am I going to talk to? I still haven’t called Anna-Marie to warn her about Ben, probably because I know this is going to bother her at least as much as it does me. Whenever someone else’s marriage is on the rocks, we both tend to get anxious about our own—and in the past, those marriages have always been celebrities’, not even people we personally know.

  And I definitely can’t talk to Ben about it.

  “Yeah, actually,” I say. “But if you’ve got other things to do—”

  “I think by definition I have nothing to do until after lunch,” Felix says. “And that’s if Axel actually wants to work after he eats his quinoa, instead of going scarf shopping or something.”

  “Okay. Lunch sounds good.” I haven’t had anything to eat today but coffee, which probably isn’t helping my mental state.

  Felix and I go to the deli on the studio lot. It’s got classic movie posters on the walls, as if people who work here need constant reminders of the industry they work in.

  At least this deli doesn’t go so far as to give its food clever movie names. I still haven’t recovered my dignity from the last time I was forced to order a bowl of “Forrest Gumbo.”

  I order a respectable turkey and avocado sandwich, and Felix gets something similar for himself. I’m oddly not hungry, but I figure I probably need to force down some protein if I don’t want to be an emotional basket case by the end of the day. A bigger one, anyway.

  “So,” Felix says when we sit at a table under the knowing gaze of Sean Connery as James Bond. “What’s going on?”

  He seems weirdly comfortable asking me personal questions. I’m used to being the one asking the questions, making sure my clients are okay, filling everyone else’s needs. I mean, yeah, I talk about my feelings with Ben and Anna-Marie, but even then, I don’t love feeling . . . needy. “Have you met my best friend, Ben?”

  “A couple of times, through Gabby.”

  Ah, right. I sometimes forget all the weird ways our group of friends is connected. Gabby and Will bonded with Ben and Wyatt when Anna-Marie and I were off in Wyoming figuring out our relationship years ago, and they’re still closer to each other than I’ve ever been to Gabby or Will. I vaguely remember Anna-Marie suggesting that she invite Felix and Jenna to a barbecue we all had like a year ago.

  And then I remember why I told her it was a bad idea. “Yeah, okay,” I say. “But aren’t you . . .”

  Felix waits for me to finish, but I don’t. I’m not looking to outright accuse him of being homophobic. Felix seems like a cool enough guy. But he also belongs to a church that I’m pretty sure has been lobbying against gay rights for decades.

  “Related to Gabby?” Felix supplies.

  I sigh. “A Mormon.”

  “Oh,” Felix says. “Yeah, I am.”

  I take a small bite of my sandwich. Talking to someone who doesn’t approve of gay marriage is the opposite of what I need right now, but I don’t know how to extract myself from the conversation gracefully.

  “But I don’t have any problem with Ben and Wyatt, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Felix says, finally putting it together. “There are a lot of homophobic people in the church, but not all of us are like that.”

  “Really?” I know a lot of people who think they aren’t homophobic who definitely are, and—

  “Yeah,” Felix says. “I support gay rights, and Ben seems like a cool guy. I don’t have any problem with him, and I don’t see that his sexuality is any of my business.”

  I’m always suspicious of people who say it’s none of their business. I mean, it isn’t, but often it’s covering up the attitude that if it was their business, they’d have a lot to say on the matter. “But you belong to a church that hates gays, don’t you?”

  “No,” Felix says. “I belong to a church that is struggling with prejudice. So is a lot of America. Just because I find a lot of good in it doesn’t mean I agree with everything that every member of my church believes.”

  “That makes sense.” I rub my eyes. “Ben told me this morning that he and Wyatt are separating.”

  “Oh, shit,” Felix says. “Are you serious?”

  He looks genuinely concerned about this, so I decide to give him a temporary pass on his dubious religious affiliation. I hope I don’t have to revoke it. “Yeah. Apparently Wyatt really wants a baby and Ben doesn’t, and they’ve been fighting about it for a while.”

  Felix whistles. “Wow. No wonder you look like your dog died. I was afraid it was something with Anna-Marie.”

  I slump back in my chair. I’m wrinkling my suit, but for once I don’t care. “Yeah, she’s going to be a mess when I tell her. She—we, I guess—tend to freak out whenever anyone breaks up. We just don’t ever want it to be us, you know?” This is an incredibly selfish way to be processing my best friend’s relationship crisis, but if I’m going to have this reaction, I might as well have it while talking to Felix. It’s not like any of this affects him.

  “I get that,” Felix says. “At my house we freak out about overdoses and car wrecks. Everyone has their things.” He shrugs and eats some of his sandwich.

  “You’d think overdoses would be one of my buttons, after what happened to my brother.”

  “I heard you weren’t that close.”

  It’s true. Adrian had always been kind of an asshole, even before he left his wife and kid for a life of clubbing and cocaine. He’d tried to get me to party with him, back in the day, and it became rapidly clear to me that he thought my “fast Hollywood lifestyle” was a hell of a lot faster than it actually was.

  It caught up with him six months after Anna-Marie and I were married. The last time I saw him was at the wedding.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That was actually what I was upset about, when he died. How much I should have been upset, but I wasn’t.”

  “Makes sense,” Felix says.

  I still feel like a shitty brother, but if it makes any difference, Adrian was a shitty brother first.

  “But this isn’t what you’re upset about today,” Felix says. “You’re worried about how Anna-Marie is going to react to the news about Ben.”

  I pause to take a sip of water. “Do you know what’s been going on with us the last few years?”

  “Yeah,” Felix says, almost apologetically. “When Gabby worries, she blabs. I know you guys have been trying to have a kid, and having a hard time.”

  “Yeah.” I remember again why I don’t hang out with Felix Mays. The guy with the six-week-old baby isn’t exactly the person I want to talk about this with, either. “Last night we had this whole conversation about surrogacy and adoption and IVF, and it sucked. I mean, neither of us wants to do any of those things. Adoption wo
uld be fine if it was easy, but the reality is you wait for years and might have many of them fall through before you actually get to adopt a kid. And IVF is a lot of medical stuff that also might not end in a baby. And I’m really not okay with surrogacy.”

  Felix wrinkles his nose. “Yeah, I get that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sure. It would be weird to have someone else involved in your pregnancy, right?”

  I stare at him. “Yeah, exactly. It feels like cheating, even though it isn’t. And I just don’t want anyone else involved in our personal business like that.”

  Felix nods. “You and Anna-Marie are really private people.”

  I don’t usually think about it, but he’s right. We are. Which is why I can’t believe I’m sitting here spilling all this to Mormon New Father Felix Mays.

  Felix seems to sense how dubious I am. “It isn’t like Gabby tells all your secrets,” he says. “She’s just been worried about you guys. And I know that she’s worried more lately, because Anna-Marie hasn’t been talking to her as much as she used to.”

  “I think we’ve both been focusing on work and trying not to think. It’s so weird, trying to get pregnant. You feel like as soon as the test is positive, all the stress will be over, so you just knuckle down and try to get through, which is fine for a couple of months, but when it stretches into a year, and two years—”

  “You can’t sustain that forever,” Felix says, brandishing a potato chip. “I think Gabby doesn’t want to push her, but maybe she should. You’re obviously overdue to talk about this.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Am I? Because this conversation is seriously weird.”

  Felix laughs. “Is it?”

  “Yes. I don’t talk like this with very many people. And definitely not new people.”

  “Yeah, well,” Felix says. “I don’t usually talk to new people outside of twelve-step meetings, either. But maybe I could use someone to talk to who isn’t my sister and doesn’t live in my house.”

  Maybe he’s not wrong about me. I am clearly overdue to talk about this. “You really don’t think I’m being weird about the surrogacy thing?”