by Zoey Dean
He popped a chunk of melon in his mouth. Sam felt suddenly self-conscious about the mountain of fattening food on her plate. She set it on the table behind her.
“So, my turn,” Shayne said. “You’re an actress, right?”
“God, no,” Sam said, though she was flattered. “Actually I’m a director.”
His eyebrows went up. “Yeah? Have I seen your work?”
Sam shrugged nonchalantly. “I’m working on a new film now.”
“Wow.” He looked impressed. “I would’ve thought you were still in college, maybe grad school or something.”
Sam took another sip of her martini, feeling as sophisticated as the drink. This was cool. She really must be looking more mature these days. “Not college,” she told him. Which was true enough.
“So how’d you end up at this party?” Shayne asked. Sam shrugged again. “Friends.”
He nodded and leaned toward her, studying her face. “Man, you have the greatest eyes.”
“I do?” Sam was taken aback. No guy had ever complimented her eyes before. They were brown. Big deal. She’d tried colored contact lenses but had only succeeded in looking like a brown-eyed girl pathetic enough to wear fake blue eyes.
“Oh yeah. Guys must tell you that all the time.”
Sam tried a noncommittal smile. His face was so close to hers. He smelled of some subtle, spicy cologne. Okay, this boy was seriously hot. It almost made her chuckle to think that not very long ago, she’d worried that she might be gay. No girl could make her feel this kind of heat.
“Hey, I’d really like to get to know you better,” Shayne went on. “Maybe we could have lunch, catch a movie. Or am I moving too fast here—?”
“Uh-uh.” She took her MAC Spice lip pencil out of her purse, wrote her cell number on her napkin, and handed it to him.
“Great.” Shayne tucked it in the pocket of his jeans and got up from his seat. Sam watched as one of his drunk friends came lurching toward him.
“Hey, Shayno Bane-o! How’s it goin’, bro?”
“Hey, Greg,” Shayne said back. “You been hittin’ the juice a little too hard, bud?”
The drunk guy loomed over Shayne. “They’re fuckin’ great,” he slurred. “You should definitely try one.” He took a long sip from his martini glass. “So Shayno Bane-o, you find Jackson Sharpe’s daughter like I tol’ you?”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Sam could see from Shayne’s face that his wasted bud had just busted him. He’d known all along who she was. That was why he’d tried to pick her up. Because he was under the false impression that dating Jackson Sharpe’s daughter would help his talentless ass. It had happened to her so often; how could she be so stupid as to fall for it again? Well, screw both of them. Sam stood up, glaring at the two guys. Then she used her impressive lungs to make sure her voice would carry across the hotel’s lobby.
“I don’t care about your gay porn videos, Shayne. I don’t call that a reel of your work. Sorry!” She could see heads swivel in their direction; exactly the reason she had done it.
“You bitch,” he hissed at her.
“Fuck you very much,” she spat, and walked away.
Danny Bluestone was in the middle of telling Anna a truly hilarious story about Clark and the producers locking the writing staff in the room one night until they came up with new beats for a story line when Anna saw Sam bolt down the hall toward the production offices.
“Danny, could you excuse me a minute?” Anna stood and followed Sam, who ducked into one of the two restrooms at the end of the corridor. Anna entered to find Sam in one of the stalls, her chin in her hands.
“We can’t go on meeting like this,” Sam joked, since the first time she and Anna had spoken had been in the ladies’ room at her father’s wedding. Sam had been in tears then, too.
“Anything interesting playing in here?” Anna said with a smile.
“Actually, my entire fucked-up existence. I just can’t decide if it’s a tragedy or a comedy.”
“What happened?”
“Am I a stupid girl?” Sam demanded.
“You know the answer to that.”
“Right. I’m smart. Very. So would you please tell me why I fall for some putz with a line and believe he likes me when all he wants is access to my dad?”
Ah. So that was it. Anna knew it happened to Sam all the time. But to be fair, Sam traded on her father’s name all the time, too. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk,” Anna suggested.
“It’s raining.”
“We’ll take umbrellas. There’s a back way out; we don’t have to go through the party.”
Anna got the umbrellas from a utility closet and led Sam to a rear door, which opened into an alley. They followed it to the asphalt walk that paralleled the beach. Though everything was still wet, the rain had stopped, so the umbrellas weren’t necessary.
Save for the two of them, the walk was empty. They strolled for eight or ten minutes in silence before Anna spoke. “So, some butt head in there tried to take you for a ride… .”
Sam nodded. “A very hot one who temporarily made me forget the real world where my thighs suffocate each other every time I take a step.”
Anna bit back a laugh, sure Sam was in no mood to have her sense of humor appreciated. “You can’t go by Beverly Hills standards. Everyone is crazy here.”
“Please.” Sam snorted. “Only thin chicks ever say that.”
“Sam, you’re not fat!”
“But I’m not thin. And not beautiful. And I never will be.”
“Sam, you’re judging by crazy Hollywood standards. You’re in the wrong city. In New York, I know a dozen guys who’d be all over you. Because you’re the whole package.”
“Great. I’m a three-thousand-mile mistake.”
Anna had to laugh at that one. “There’s got to be something that’s more important to you than obsessing about your looks.” They turned off the walk and onto the Strand, passing Dublin’s and the other rollicking nightspots. Music wafted out of open doors.
Sam nodded. “Yeah, there’s more important stuff. Making movies, maybe.”
“Like the one we’re allegedly working on together?” Anna teased.
Sam had the grace to look chagrined. “I might have overstated the situation in class. But did you see how excited everyone was?”
“Yes. But that’s not why I want to do it with you.” Sam’s face lit up. “You do?”
“I don’t love being Clark Sheppard’s intern. But I did love writing those monologues. So if you think I have any talent—”
“Hell, yes!” Sam exclaimed. “Any ideas for a plot?” “Now that I know we’re really going to try, I’ll think about it, okay?”
“Absolutely, partner.” Sam stopped walking and turned to Anna. She held out her hand, and Anna shook it, with a solemnity that made Sam smile. “You take this stuff seriously.”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. They started walking again. “I want to do something important. Does that sound pretentious?”
Anna shook her head. “Not to me.”
“Me neither,” Sam mused. “I’ve lived here my entire life and I haven’t met anyone who’d agree with me about that.” She stopped again to peer at Anna. “Except you.”
Mo Bad
Adam felt slightly ridiculous sitting next to Cammie in the passenger seat while she zoomed at eighty miles an hour south on the 405 toward Hermosa Beach. But both of his parents were out, which meant there was no family car to borrow.
Just get over it, he told himself. Feeling like you have to be in the driver’s seat is some macho thing left over from another century. When he and Anna had been together, she’d almost always been the one to drive, and—
Anna. It was like she was constantly hovering on the edge of his consciousness. His eyes slid over to Cammie, who was softly singing along to the Beck CD on her awesome sound system.
Why she’d suddenly gotten interested in him—if, in fact, she really wa
s interested—was a question to which he had no answer. She’d called him an hour earlier and invited him to a party on the set of Hermosa Beach, the new TV show that her father had packaged. She’d caught him in his room, staring at a blank computer screen. He was supposed to be writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter. Adam had found it a monumentally depressing novel: Hester Prynne had done the deed with Dimmesdale and gotten marked for life. It was the moral equivalent of an incurable STD. Maybe that was why he’d jumped at the chance to hang out with Cammie, who apparently was missing the guilt gene altogether.
“So, am I Mr. January?” popped out of his mouth. Cammie’s eyes flicked to him, then back to the road. She turned down Beck’s wail. “Pardon me?”
Adam shrugged. “I figure you have a different guy every month.”
A smile played on her lips. “Maybe I just like you. Can’t it ever be that simple?”
“With you?” Adam asked. “My guess is: rarely.”
She laughed and gunned the car to ninety. Which caused Adam to give himself another mental: what the hell. If January was his month, he might as well sit back and enjoy it.
As for Cammie, her mind worked overtime as she motored her car down the narrow streets that led to Hermosa Beach. Adam presumed he was her flavor of the month. Well, maybe he was. All she knew was that being at the set with her dad and Mia, and watching her father fawn over Anna Percy, was not her idea of a good time. So she’d called Adam and invited him to the party, then gotten her dad’s driver to take her home so she could get her own car. And then she’d gone to get Adam—who didn’t have a car of his own—and then driven all the way back to the hotel again. It was so not her style.
Whatever. She liked Adam. There was no reason to be coy about it.
By the time they arrived, the party that had been meandering an hour and a half before was in full swing. Mo Bad, an up-and-coming hip-hop star—and another Apex client—was doing his thing on a small stage that had been set up during the time Cammie had been gone. Mo wore twelve heavy gold chains around his neck instead of a shirt; his muscles rippled under ebony skin and his boxers showed a good two inches above his pants. Cammie knew for a fact that Mo wasn’t from the streets; in fact, he’d grown up rich in Santa Monica and had attended Harvard-Westlake, arguably the snootiest private school in Los Angeles.
Dancing behind Mo were two women who wore nothing but thongs. They had been dipped, head to toe, in chocolate. Bor-ing. Cammie had already seen the choco-chicks at two holiday parties that season. They were so five minutes ago. Out on the dance floor a girl with choppy dark hair lifted her Bebe T-shirt to expose a pair of perfect breasts. Yawn. Like having perfect tits in Los Angeles was something special.
“There’s Sam,” Adam said, bobbing his head toward one side of the dance floor, where Sam was dancing with the writer Cammie had met earlier, the one she’d dubbed The Notebook. Cammie glanced around. No Anna, which made her mood improve appreciably. But she didn’t feel like talking to Sam, or Mia, or her father. All she felt like doing was being in Adam’s arms.
Mo gave her a chance when he took a break and another young singer took the mike. She crooned a husky ballad as she accompanied herself on guitar. Several couples began to slow dance. Cammie took Adam’s hand and led him to the dance floor and then slinked her arms around his neck. His arms snaked around her waist. He moved really well—had to be the athlete in him.
“We fit,” she purred, smiling up at him.
“I bet you said that to Mr. December,” he replied. “No, actually I didn’t.”
His smile was endearingly crooked. “Come on, Cammie. I know you. You go for those bad-boy types. And that isn’t me.”
“Maybe you just never had enough motivation,” Cammie teased, her voice heavy with innuendo.
“Maybe I don’t want to play those little games you thrive on,” Adam replied.
She pressed closer to him, both annoyed that he refused to flirt with her and impressed that he could resist it. “You think you know me, but you don’t, Adam. I barely know myself.”
Suddenly Cammie felt Adam stiffen. Now Cammie saw why: Anna was slow dancing with The Notebook and looking really happy about it. She heard Adam curse softly under his breath. And suddenly she felt uncharacteristically protective of him.
“Did you know she was going to be here? Is that what this is about?” he asked.
“No, Adam. Not at all. Anna’s interning for my dad, so she and I are bound to be invited to the same functions. But I didn’t want to let her get in the way of my seeing you tonight. I hope that’s okay with you.”
“Of course it is. I didn’t mean to wig out on you.” “Don’t worry about it. And whatever you do, do not worry about Anna’s new-new-new boyfriend,” she counseled.
“What happened to Ben?” Adam asked, a muscle jumping in his jaw.
“Beats me.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t get her. First she wants to be alone, then she wants to be with Ben, now she wants to be with this dude… .”
At that moment Cammie saw Anna staring at them over The Notebook’s not-very-tall shoulder. So she narrowed her eyes in a way that said, “Guess who’s with the better guy?” then rested her head against Adam’s broad, muscular shoulder.
Danny reached a hand out to Anna and helped her into one of the horse-drawn carriages that were lined up on the street outside the hotel—a special touch for the party. Giddy from two martinis and Danny’s sense of humor, Anna had readily agreed to a carriage ride. It would be fun. And it meant she wouldn’t have to look at Cammie with Adam. The sight of them together had come close to ruining her evening. He was a great guy. She was a scorpion. Anna knew that it was only a matter of time before Adam got stung.
The carriage driver gave them a cashmere throw— Danny and Anna settled under it as the coachman urged his two horses forward. Horseshoes click-clocked against asphalt.
“Warm enough?” Danny wrapped an arm around Anna.
“Fine,” she replied. The apple martinis had a powerful kick, and Anna wasn’t much of a drinker. “Right now it’s probably absolute zero in New York. But here in La La Land, you can eat oranges off the tree in January.”
“I hate New York. I’m such a California guy, I’d turn into the Iceman in that kind of weather.”
“Ah, yes. But would the Iceman cometh?” Anna teased, impressed with her sudden bawdiness.
Danny raised one eyebrow. “That, my dear, has yet to be determined. And did Anna Percy just let fly with a risqué pun?”
“It must be the air in California. Or the martinis,” Anna allowed. “Or both. They’ll never let me back in New York City again. Anyway, I never liked that play. All those drunks nourishing illusions and wasting their lives.”
“You know a better writer than Eugene O’Neill?” Danny asked.
“You!” Anna said, a bit drunk herself. “Let’s talk about your novel.”
“The one I haven’t started? Let’s talk about yours.” The carriage turned south, heading toward the pier. “A woman goes to battle against a giant eunuch of a white whale,” she began solemnly. “I call it: Moby Dick-less.”
Danny laughed really hard. Which got Anna laughing, too. She turned to him, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. His hand lifted her chin. Then his lips were on hers in the sweetest of kisses.
I don’t love him, Anna thought. But right at this moment, I’m happy. What’s wrong with that?
So she pulled Danny close and kissed him back.
Mo-Theo
“Yo, I know you from somewhere?”
Cammie was just returning from the ladies’ room when Mo Bad called to her from his perch on a thronelike yellow wicker chair.
“Yo, no,” Cammie replied, and kept on walking. Adam was out there alone, which made Cammie nervous. She wouldn’t put it past Anna to blow off The Notebook and go back after Adam.
“Seriously,” Mo said, sidling up to Cammie. “I seen you somewheres, you know what I’m sayin’? You lookin’ hot, girl.
”
“They teach you to fake that ghetto crap at Harvard-Westlake?” Cammie asked with a sweet smile.
Mo scowled. “Where you be thinkin’ I’m from, girl?”
“Whatever.” Cammie stood on the toes of her Jimmy Choo boots and scanned the area for Adam.
“You lookin’ for that tall dude you was grindin’ on befo’?” Mo asked.
“Actually, I’m looking for Jesus,” Cammie replied. “I just had a spiritual epiphany. Not that you have a clue what that is.”
“Shee-it,” he drawled. “Sudden awakening, like that. You be judging me by my speech and shit.”
Cammie folded her arms and stared him down. “Do you have any idea who I am? My father’s firm is your agent.”
Mo grinned. “For real? That’s cool. You got a name?” “If you’ll drop the I’m-Tupac-reincarnated routine, I’ll tell you.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me,” he said in a perfectly normal voice.
“It’s Cammie.”
“Nice to make your acquaintance, Cammie. My name is Theo, but don’t let it get around. And you really are one beautiful girl.”
“Thank you, and no, I’m not interested.”
“Too bad. I was going to invite you and your boyfriend to a rave.”
Cammie almost laughed out loud. “Excuse me? A rave? What would you know about that? And hello— 1999 was a few years ago.”
“Not this kind of rave. Take my word for it.” Mo-Theo was a good head taller than Cammie. “An’ I see your guy.”
“Where?” she demanded.
“Near the front door. Talking to some tall, skinny blond chick.”
Tall, skinny blond chick? It had to be Anna.
“In a T-shirt?”
“Affirmative,” Mo-Theo said. “Why don’t you ditch him and come with me to this party?”
Cammie made an instant decision. She wasn’t going to allow Adam to get reeled back into Anna’s poisonous clutches. “The second half was right,” she told Mo. “Lemme get my boyfriend. We’d love to come.”
Mo put on his oversized leather Fubu jacket and they headed for Adam. But when they got there, Cammie was relieved to see that it wasn’t Anna at all— just a tall, skinny blonde with bad skin who she’d never seen before in her life. Adam introduced her as Sherrie, one of the production assistants on Hermosa Beach. And Sherrie proceeded to launch into a long and involved story about her upcoming wedding in Houston to a guy she’d known since kindergarten.
