Tall Dark & Handsome

by Wilde, Amelia

  “Hey!”

  “Shhh,” he says, putting a gentle finger to my lip with one hand and swiping across the screen with his other thumb. It’s a physical feat I would be impressed with under any circumstances. “If it’s really dailies, then you have nothing to…”

  The last frame I watched appears on the screen, and Cannon’s voice trails off.

  It’s him and Chloe, his hands on her face, his mouth on hers like there’s no tomorrow.

  Cannon’s face is still in the light, and then he flickers out of view. I hear the tablet hit the surface of the sofa a moment later.

  “Listen,” he begins, and his hands are on my shoulders, as solid and real as anything in the world. “If you like to get off to watching me in the movies, you don’t have to do it in secret. It could be hot if—”

  I shake him off. “That’s not what I was doing,” I tell him flatly. “I was reviewing dailies. It’s my job.”

  “Is that all it is?” Cannon doesn’t back down. He reaches for me again, stroking my face like I’m a precious object.

  I climb back into the bed and yank the comforter up. It’s my only armor against the stinging in my chest. “Yes. What’s your point?”

  “You didn’t look... casual, Juno. You looked sad.”

  “I was screaming. I think I looked terrified.”

  “Before that, when you didn’t know I had entered the room. Which, really, you should be more aware of your surroundings.” His tone is light, teasing, but there’s a certain weight to the words that presses down on my chest. I turn over in the bed. Cannon goes around to the other side and the mattress bends under his weight. He stretches out with a sigh and reaches for my face. I can’t summon the will to bat his hand away. “Professional question,” he whispers.

  “God, I’m sick of professional questions,” I say into the dark.

  “Unprofessional question, then.”

  “What is it?”

  I close my eyes, the heaviness of the day sinking in with every breath. Now that he’s here, it seems both absolutely reasonable and completely ridiculous. And even though I just mistook him for an axe murderer, my body responds to the fact that he’s here. In more ways than one.

  It’s a real battle. I want to pounce on him, but the bed is so soft....

  “You know it’s not real, right?”

  My heart leaps into my throat, and I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to see even the outline of his face, so instead of opening my eyes, I squeeze them shut. “What’s not real?”

  He moves his hand softly over my shoulder, down my arm, and traces the line of my body beneath the blanket. “What you saw on the screen. It’s all fake. Chloe is nice, but she’s... not you.”

  “Yeah,” I reply, perfectly casual, as if I’m not humming with the fact of him beside me in bed. Even the brief stint in adrenaline-land wasn’t enough to shake the fatigue from behind my eyes, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Cannon isn’t here to sleep with me. He’s here to sleep with me. “Of course I know that. I’m not an idiot.”

  “No,” Cannon says, and I start to drift away.

  He says something else in the quiet, in the dark, but I’m too far gone to hear it.

  27

  Cannon

  Two days.

  Two days, and Homefront is a wrap.

  I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. There’s too much to love about it.

  About making this movie, I mean.

  Matt and I sit in the restaurant set, filming a scene where we’re supposed to be eating burgers. Mine has been cold for five hours now, but I’ve officially honed my skill in pretending to almost take a bite to get the shot and never actually doing it.

  “Did you get another one yet?” We’re between takes, waiting for notes from Juno.

  “Another burger? Hell no. I’m not a magician,” I retort.

  He laughs, leaning in close, and honestly I can’t tell if we’ve become friends from having to pretend like we’re friends for the movie, or because we’ve actually become friends. It probably doesn’t matter, in the scheme of things. “Another movie. Do you have another offer?”

  “I... do. I should.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that….” I stare down at the cold burger and sorry excuse for fries on my plate. “Do you ever want to get one thing sorted out before you start another one?”

  He looks at me like I’ve beamed down from another planet. “I’d throw out this burger before I ordered a new one, so....”

  I rock my chair onto its back legs and let it hit the floor again. “It’s hard to make a decision at a time like this.”

  Matt snorts. “You’re too much. You know that? You’re one of those guys.”

  “What?”

  “You have offers.” He forgets himself and picks up the burger then drops it back onto the plate. “My agent has had a single call so far. You’ve got choices.”

  “That’s classified information.”

  “Bullshit.” He laughs. “How many?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “More bullshit. The cameras aren’t rolling, Cannon.”

  “I really don’t know. I told my agent to hold them until after we wrap.”

  Matt shakes his head. “Why? Don’t you want to know where you’re going next?”

  “I’m going home, old buddy.” This, at least, is true. I’m going home for at least a week before postproduction starts on the movie, and then God knows how often they’ll call me back for random fixes. This film is light-years beyond the low-budget romantic comedies I started out in. Back then, we filmed in a week and what we got is what we got.

  I’m standing on the edge of a new world, is what I’m saying, and I’m not sure I want to open the door.

  “Back in sixty,” calls Juno from the side of the set.

  I’m not sure I want to close every door, either. What Juno wants is a mystery. Either she was already asleep when I said what I said last night, or she pretended not to hear me. She never did get back to me after the dinner at the inn.

  We run the scene one more time, and it feels for all the world like two friends sitting at a burger joint. A very shitty burger joint, for sure, but we fucking nail it. This is one of the key setup scenes for the sequel, and Wes pulls it off.

  The sequel.

  I won’t let myself think about that. That would be too much to ask. But I spotted the clues in the script a long time ago. I’m not even sure if Matt sees it, but that doesn’t matter. That door is open, if Juno ever wants to take it. She’s crafty like that.

  “Cut,” she calls, and before she can say anything else, the cameraman for the bonus features bursts onto the set.

  “Is it a good break?”

  Juno blinks at him. “We’re going to set up the next scene, but—”

  “We’ve got to send in the bulk of what we have so they can start post,” he says, excitement brightening his eyes. “Can we get a couple quick interviews? It’ll only take ten minutes.”

  “Sure,” Juno replies, waving in our general direction. “Take whoever you want. Ten minutes.”

  “You,” says the camera guy, and she snaps her head up, surprised. “You and Cannon. Leading man and director. We’ve already got footage with Chloe, so she and Cannon can sit down after you. If that’s okay.”

  Juno looks at me across the set, a strange mixture of sadness and hope in her eyes. “I don’t have much time,” she tells him in a clipped voice. “Let’s go.”

  Three minutes later, the makeup team has swarmed us both, and we’re sitting next to each other on a couch in a corner of the studio that has a painted wall. The wall isn’t the same color as anything else in the building; it clearly was made just for this purpose. Juno stares straight ahead into the camera while they fiddle with settings.

  I lean back, one arm on the back of the couch. “Hey.”

  She glances toward me without turning her head. “Hey.”

/>   “Professional question.”

  “Oh my God, don’t.” She blushes, her lips pressed together.

  “Aren’t you excited for this?” I barrel on. “This is the whole reason we got together in the first place.”

  Now she does look. “Is it?”

  “Yeah. You went with me to the fondue place, because Maggie told you that everybody hated you.”

  Juno rolls her eyes. “She did not say that.”

  “That was the spirit of her advice.” I nudge her with my knuckles, even though I want to grab her hand. Nobody would be able to see it in the frame, and we don’t have much time. We don’t have much time at all before our schedules are going to take us to opposite sides of the country. “I think it worked out for the best.”

  She turns and looks at me, and I have an honest-to-God flashback to that first day of filming, when she couldn’t remember how to put things in motion.

  That’s fine. I can steer her right into this next step, too, if that’s what she’s afraid of, and I’m sure that’s what it is.

  “Okay,” says the camera guy, and for the life of me I can’t remember his name. “Juno, we’ll start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of making Homefront? You can start with repeating the question, if that makes it easier.”

  Juno smiles into the camera, and I catch the tiniest quiver of her chin. “The experience of making Homefront...” She looks down into her lap then back up into the lens. “It’s been a dream come true.” She’s a little choked up, and it makes her laugh. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  “That’s great,” states the camera guy, who should probably be in front of it for his career. He’s a fucking natural. “What specifically made it so dreamlike?”

  “You know, I—I always wanted to make movies that mattered,” Juno tells him. “When I saw the script for Homefront, I knew this could be a movie that really stayed with people. What I wanted to do was communicate a unique experience that’s also, I think, more common than people might realize. We’re not quite finished yet, but I think we’ve pulled it off.”

  “Was there anything else about your time with the cast and crew that you especially appreciated?”

  “Oh, everybody.” Juno’s smile widens. “This is the most amazing group of people I could ever have chosen to work with. It has not always been easy to get to the end of the day, but everybody showed up and went above and beyond, every single day. I don’t know how I’ll live without them.”

  I’m about to get misty myself when the camera guy turns his focus on me. “Cannon, what’s your experience been? You came from a different film background, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve made a lot of movies about love,” I start out, and even though I’m not looking at her, I feel Juno with every inch of my being. I can’t be without her. Why would I ever live without her? “And honestly, I didn’t expect that to be one of the themes of Homefront.” The crew for the bonus features has gone quiet, I realize, and we’ve attracted a bit of an audience. Maggie, Matt, and some other cast members are hanging back. “We deal with a lot of topics in this film, but love is one of the major themes. It’s love that keeps these guys together through the war, and it’s love that brings them home.”

  Camera Guy is beaming, absolutely beaming, and he should be, because I’m giving him the best sound bites the world has ever seen. These bonus features are going to be legendary. He tries for a slam-dunk. “Have you seen any parallels to this film in your own life?”

  Every muscle in my body tenses. This sit-down interview has body slammed the door wide open, and on the other side is the rest of my fucking life. It’s a risk. It’s jumping out of a plane and hoping I have a parachute, but I go for it. What else can I do?

  “I came here expecting to do a job.” Is it dead silent in here, or is my heartbeat really that loud? “But I found a love of my own, too. We went through the crucible together—a bit differently from our characters, but in the end, the outcome is the same.”

  “Who’s the lucky lady?” asks the camera guy.

  I turn to her then. “I love you, Juno.”

  “Yeah!” shouts Matt from somewhere behind the camera. “I knew those two were hooking up.”

  Then it all registers.

  The horrified look on her face.

  The way she’s pulling herself all the way to the side of the sofa.

  The cheering from the assembled cast, because it hasn’t hit them yet. Oh, it will.

  Juno stands up, face chalk-white, and opens her mouth. Nothing comes out. She snaps her lips shut then tries again. “This interview is over,” she says, her voice as sharp as the first day I met her, and then she turns and walks out of the studio.

  28

  Juno

  I don’t know where I’m going, only that I have to get the hell away from unblinking camera and the crowd of people I was trying to…

  God, I was trying to tell them how much they came to mean to me, how much I worried about them, and how much they pulled through. The words weren’t enough. I can fucking see that now. They weren’t enough to get across the squeeze in my heart at the sight of the people gathered around me. They weren’t enough to get across how tenuous all of this is. In a matter of days, we’re all going to be flung to the far reaches of wherever our careers will take us, and we will never be in a group together again, barring a sequel that may or may not be made.

  And they clapped.

  They clapped from that completely insane, inappropriate announcement that Cannon made. While the camera was filming us. In front of everyone. And then Matt—

  Holy fucking shit.

  I could throw up. I could die. I might do both at once. I wish I could disappear into a puff of smoke that would probably whisper this is what I was trying to avoid, as it danced into the air.

  “Juno, stop.”

  I don’t stop. I’m headed across the parking lot, which connects to a highway, which might eventually get me back to either the ranch or the hotel if I walk far enough. Or who knows? Maybe I’m lost forever, and all of this is forgotten.

  “Juno!”

  I pick up the pace, but he’s faster. Of course he’s faster. He’s tall, and he’s in amazing shape, and it seems to take no effort for him to jog up next to me, in front of me, wearing that half-bemused grin that makes part of me melt right into my shoes.

  The other part is a churning, roiling, furious mess.

  “We had a professional misunderstanding back there.”

  “The hell we did.” I try to step around him, but Cannon moves in front of me, the muscled lines of his body graceful.

  “That’s what happened. The signals you were giving—”

  “I wasn’t giving signals,” I snarl. “I was describing the experience of directing this film, just like I was asked. And you took that as permission to—”

  “You said, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to live without them.’ And maybe I’m mistaken, but we’ve both been feeling that same thing.” He jabs a hand toward his chest. “I feel it every night. Is that not the case for you?”

  I’m too angry to tell the truth. I’m too angry to admit I do feel that way. It’s always been wrapped up in other fears, other doubts, other people, and admitting it is so dangerous. “You know who pulls shit like that? My parents.”

  Cannon shakes his head, totally confused.

  “They’d do that, too. They’d only show up when there was a reason. A camera to record how fucking great she was. Sometimes not even then. They’d probably do it now, if they knew we were doing interviews for the extra material on a feature film that’s going to be a hit.”

  “That’s not—”

  “And you were wrong.” My voice is tight. “I don’t feel that way. Not now.”

  Cannon’s face is masked with a hurt so pure I can’t see past it. “I know you’re pissed,” he says slowly. “But you don’t have to take it this far.”

  “I’m not taking anything any distance.” Jesu
s, it all sounds so stupid coming out of my mouth, but I can feel them slamming back into place—the walls. The walls I’ve built to protect myself. And what am I going to do, tear them back down with my bare hands? No. They were there for a purpose, and Cannon has shown me exactly what that purpose was. To prevent disasters like this. Let someone in, and they’ll take you for all you’re worth, and they’ll make it feel so good while they do it. “I’m… I’m done. This is not what I wanted. What you did—”

  “What I did was honest,” he shoots back. “I get that it was better for you to sneak around. It was easier to keep things behind closed doors. But I don’t get it, Juno. If you’re so fucking courageous, if you’re such an Ice Queen, why the fuck would you care if people know about us?”

  “Because it’s embarrassing.” I’m too loud, too furious. “It’s a fucking cliché, sleeping with the lead. And I can’t be that way. I wasn’t going to be that way. I have too much else to do in my life.”

  Cannon chokes out a bitter laugh. “I know you don’t give the slightest fuck, but…” He laughs again and the sound tears into my soul. “You’re not the only one with a shitty parent. You’re not the only one who has goals.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “Here’s what my mother would have done, in case you want to know. You probably don’t, because you’re the most selfish fucking person I’ve ever met, but maybe you can use it in a movie someday. That’s what you do, right? You get close to people, you chew them up, and you spit them out.”

  My throat closes, and I have to force the words through my lip. “That’s not what—”

  “My mother,” Cannon interrupts, his voice deadly, “would have bolted the minute the check cashed. She was a sucker for money. Be charming, she’d tell me. Be fucking charming, so that you can make money, and I can have it. You never bothered to ask why none of my family wanted to visit the set.”

  My stomach turns. “I thought… I thought if you wanted to talk about it—”