Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3)

by Helena Newbury

  Six hours, fourteen bars, three coffees and a street vendor hot dog later, I got lucky. A fat, balding guy in a stained tank top stared at the photo on my phone for a long moment before looking back at me.

  “He owe you money?” the guy asked.

  I took a deep breath and wrote my phone number on a scrap of paper. “He’s my brother,” I said. “It’s time we talked.”

  Chapter 19

  Ryan

  I’d finally gotten to sleep at about 4am, only to be woken by the heavy thump of something hitting my doormat. I rolled over and tried to cling onto sleep for just a little longer.

  I was just dozing off again when my phone rang. I groped for it and answered it without opening my eyes.

  “The script’s arrived,” said Jasmine.

  I sat up so fast I got a headrush. “Uh huh?” I said, trying to sound awake.

  “Is yours there?” asked Jasmine.

  I remembered the thump. “Wait,” I told her, and padded in my jockey shorts to the door. Sitting on the doormat was a padded envelope an inch thick. “Yeah,” I said.

  “We should get together and go through it,” she said.

  I felt the first, distant pricklings of hope. She sounded eager, for someone who thought I was an idiot. Maybe she did like me.

  Or maybe she just wanted to see how bad things really were. My stomach tightened. She was about to find out that I couldn’t act at all.

  “I’m sort of busy,” I lied. “Gotta call in at the station. Check on a...car.” I winced.

  “No problem,” she said. “I’ll catch you there.”

  At any other time, just the thought of seeing her would have made me dance around the goddamn kitchen. But now, all my lies were catching up with me. “Uh…”

  She ended the call, probably so I couldn’t back out. Great. Now what?

  Chapter 20

  Jasmine

  I stabbed the “end call” button and sat there glaring at the phone. I knew exactly what was going on: he’d got the script and was panicking because he knew he couldn’t act and he thought I was about to find out. The question was, just how bad was he? Was I going to be able to coach him, or was this whole thing doomed?

  It worried me, and I clung onto that worry like a life preserver. I wanted to focus on Ryan and the script and whether he could act, because it stopped me thinking about that morning.

  The reason I’d been awake when the mail arrived was that I’d screamed myself awake from a nightmare at a little after 5am, and hadn’t dared go back to sleep. I’d turned on the TV and cooked a big breakfast and then cleaned the entire apartment—anything to keep my mind off my dad’s face and the feeling of his fists slamming into my stomach, his boots kicking my ribs.

  People think of violence and they think of physical wounds. But the real damage is on the inside. It’s the change in self-worth that kills you. It’s coming to believe that you’re so worthless, you’re only good for kicking.

  The nightmares had faded, since I’d been in New York. Hearing Nick’s voice, or being around that world of cops and criminals again, had brought them back to life. Hence me wanting to stay busy. I’d counted the minutes until it was a respectable time to call Ryan. Then, as soon as I’d done that, I made myself a travel mug of coffee and headed out.

  I started reading the script on the subway, and focusing on it calmed me a little. Reading the script for the first time is a big deal. Until that point, you don’t really know your character...or the limits of what she has to do.

  First impression: the series was good. Right up there with Foxtrot Company, Dixon’s previous show. He’d obviously hired the best writers and they’d polished the dialog like hell. The plot was good, too. It was an ensemble piece, with a good mix of cops and “civilians,” several overlapping plot lines about drugs, corruption and loyalty, and some romance.

  Oh yeah. Romance.

  I’d known that my character—Isabel—and Ryan’s character—Tony—were going to be the main couple in the series, but I hadn’t figured on how much the pilot would focus on them. We had a lot of lines and in most of the scenes we were either kissing or nearly kissing or yelling at each other. My character was meant to be all fiery and passionate and hot-headed—yeah, didn’t see that coming when they cast a redhead—while Tony was supposed to be an ice-cool bad boy who slept around. I was going to have to let go, the one thing I never did, and Ryan was going to have to learn how to control himself.

  There was more kissing as the episode went on. Almost as if they were building toward—

  I flipped through the pages. There it was. Three pages from the end.

  Shit.

  ***

  I nearly missed my stop, I was so wrapped up in reading. I grabbed another coffee on the way to the police station, thinking hard.

  It was fine. It would all be fine. It would be like filming any other scene.

  At the station, I asked around until someone pointed me in the direction of the motor pool. They didn’t let civilians wander around out there, so an officer escorted me.

  “So you’re acting with Kowalski?” the guy asked my breasts.

  “Yep,” I said. The staring thing didn’t bother me too much when I was being Jasmine. It was kind of reassuring that, in the midst of everything that was going wrong, some things didn’t change.

  “Well, I hope it works out. It’d be good to have him back.”

  I frowned at that. If—by some miracle—we made it work and the pilot went well, surely Ryan wouldn’t be coming back to the force? But then the guy was pointing me toward Ryan, who was bending inside a patrol car, and I was thanking him and running over.

  As I reached him, Ryan turned around. “Hey,” he said, sounding pleased to see me and terrified all at the same time. “I was just, um...cleaning.”

  I looked at him and then at the inside of the car. It was spotless, and there was a distinct lack of cleaning chemical smell. “You were cleaning your car?” I asked. “That’s what was more important than going through the script?”

  He ran a hand through that gorgeous, thick hair, which almost made me forget my anger. “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t look dirty.”

  “Well...that’s because I’m done, already.”

  I folded my arms. “Well then I guess we can go through the script now, huh?”

  Ryan looked suddenly ill. “Sure.”

  The poor guy was terrified. There was something incredibly cute about seeing a six foot-something, broad-shouldered beast like him nervous at the thought of running lines. I melted a little inside. “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Have you skimmed through it, at least?”

  “Uh...yeah. Sure.” He picked up his envelope. Still sealed.

  “You haven’t even opened it yet?”

  He bristled a little. “I was in a hurry.”

  I bit my lip. “I have to warn you about something. You and me—I mean, our characters—we…”

  “Get close?”

  “No. Well, yeah, but—”

  “Kiss?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “What?”

  “Page 39.”

  Ryan flipped through the script. “Isabel kisses Tony,” he read, nodding slowly. He was unable to stop a smile twitching at the corners of his lips, and the thought of that, that he was looking forward to that bit, made something deep inside me twist and throb.

  But then he got to it.

  “Isabel, in her underwear, leaps into Tony’s arms,” he read. “He lays her down on the bed. Removes her bra. Strips off her—” His voice was strained and he dropped into silent reading. There was a whole half page more to go—I knew because I’d read it repeatedly on the subway. “On camera?” he asked at last. “We have to—on camera?!”

  “Well, not for real, obviously.” I could feel how red my face was.

  “No. Obviously.”

  “But, you know, we’d be...no clothes. Or sometimes they give you this flesh-colored underwear—”

  “Yo
u’ve done this before?” he asked sharply.

  “No.”

  We both stared at each other in silence. I could see the battle going on in his mind. Half of him was thinking I’m going to be butt-naked on national TV. The other half was thinking, I’m going to be butt-naked with her.

  I know this, because I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking of Ryan’s muscled pecs rubbing against my bare breasts as he lay on me. Just because it would be faked, didn’t mean it wasn’t the same smooth, hard, warm flesh against me. And was it really faked, if I wanted him?

  Nipples. I couldn’t get the word nipples out of my mind. He’s going to be rubbing against my—

  “It’ll be fine,” I told him, my voice an octave higher than normal.

  He nodded madly, his face as red as mine. “It’s not till near the end,” he said. “We’ll know each other better by then.”

  Will we? I wondered. Will we know each other that well?

  “How about we just run some lines?” I asked.

  I paged through the script looking for a gentle scene to start with. Not easy—in every scene that had us together, we seemed to be either at each other’s throats or sucking on each other’s faces. I finally found something tamer.

  “Okay,” I told Ryan. I sat down on the hood of the car. “You’ve got to tell me that the guy we caught—”

  “What guy we caught?”

  “The guy we caught mugging the old lady a few pages back.”

  “Okay…”

  “...that he’s in interrogation room one, and do I want to sit in on the questioning?”

  Ryan’s brow furrowed. “See, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “That’s more a detective thing.”

  “Artistic license,” I said. “Let the writers worry about that. Now: go.”

  He looked at me blankly. This is not going to be easy. “Say the line,” I prompted.

  He looked at me and then looked at the script and then read “That guy we caught is in interrogation room one.” As if he was reading the assembly instructions for a flat-pack wardrobe.

  “Okay,” I said patiently. “But, see, the point of this scene is, you’re trying to get close to me.”

  “Close to you?”

  “You’re trying to get me into bed.”

  “By offering to let you sit in on an interrogation?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s not...I mean, that’s not what I’d normally do.”

  What would you normally do? I wondered. Part of me really wanted to know what his seduction routine was, or if he even had one. I liked to think that he didn’t. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d just say what he was feeling. Just as he had at the screen test—

  Don’t be stupid, Jasmine. Back to the scene.

  “But Isabel’s young and naive,” I told him. “She’s all wide-eyed and eager and you’re playing her, using her enthusiasm. Sitting in on an interrogation is a big deal to her, so you know she’ll be grateful.”

  He thought for a moment. “So I’m a jerk?” he asked.

  I looked up at him. God, he was big anyway but with me sitting down and him standing up, he was enormous. Big and powerful in a way that made me go weak inside.

  “No,” I said. “Yes. A little bit. You’re a bad boy.”

  “A bad boy?!”

  “That’s a good thing. All women like a bad boy.” He just looked blankly at me. “Ryan, don’t tell me you’ve never exploited someone or something, just a little bit, or twisted the truth, just to get someone into bed.”

  He looked almost ashamed for a second and I thought he was going to nod and admit that yes, of course he had. And then he just blinked and looked down at me with those big, honest eyes.

  Oh my God.

  He wasn’t ashamed because he had. He was ashamed because he hadn’t. For all his bottled-up anger and brooding about Hux, he really was a good guy. And now he felt like an idiot, or unsophisticated, or something, because of it.

  “Have you?” he asked.

  I blushed. “No. Well...maybe occasionally. But not in a bad way.” Wait, how come I was suddenly under the microscope? This was all going wrong! I felt angry, and not with him. I was angry that his honesty had shone a light on what I really was. I wanted to tell him that he was the one who had it right, not me. I wished I was that straightforward and honest. I wanted—

  I wanted to be more like him, I realized.

  “Try it again,” I said. “But this time imagine...imagine you’re offering a treat to a dog.”

  “A treat?” he asked slowly. “You’re...the dog?”

  “Isabel is the dog, yes.”

  He studied me closely for a second and I felt a wave of heat creep up me, from deep down inside to my stomach, my breasts, my face. “Any time you’re ready,” I said.

  “That guy we caught is in interrogation room one,” he said, and leaned forward. He was so close that I could smell the cool, clean scent of him, feel his body heat. “Would you like to sit in on the questioning?”

  I swallowed. Yes, I thought. Whatever the question was, yes. I wanted to lean into him and slide my arm around that tightly-muscled waist, pull myself to him and never let go. But instead I said, “Too much. Too obvious. See, she wants it, and you know she wants it, but you can’t let her know that you know she wants it.”

  He frowned. “What?”

  I sighed. “If Isabel thinks you’re doing her a favor, she’ll know you want something in return. It’s got to be casual, as if you’ve only just thought of it, and then she’ll think she’s putting one over on you, and subconsciously she’ll feel guilty and then she’ll want to repay you and she’ll throw herself at you instead of you having to seduce her”—Ryan was staring at me—”what?”

  “I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” he said.

  “You’ll be fine,” I told him. “Maybe we should have started with something easier. My bad. Let’s find another—”

  “Jasmine!”

  “What?”

  “I can’t act.”

  We stared at each other. “You’re just nervous,” I said at last. “Self-conscious. You must be able to act a bit—”

  “No.”

  I was getting frustrated, now. “You must have aspirations at least—”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  I slid off the hood of the car and stood up. “Then why were you even at the goddamn screen test?”

  He closed his eyes and took a long breath. “They fired me.”

  I blinked. “They what?!”

  “They fired me. I’ve been having some...problems. Since Hux died. Getting angry and jumpy. Not sleeping.”

  I just stood there in shock.

  “Dixon saw me, the day I was fired, and offered me the screen test. My captain says I gotta stick at it for the pilot. Basically it gets me out of his hair while I...I don’t know. Heal, I guess.”

  “What happens if you don’t stick at it?” I asked. “What happens if you quit? Or they axe you from the pilot?”

  He opened his eyes and gave me a long, steady look.

  “Shit.” It was all I could manage.

  “Yeah. I guess I screwed both of us, marching into your screen test.” He stared at me. “I’m sorry, Jasmine.” He took a deep breath. “Look. I—”

  “It’s okay,” I told him quickly. I had to think of a way to defuse the situation or he was going to tell me the truth about how he felt. “I mean, I get why you did it, now. You were so desperate to get a part, you figured you’d go for broke...right?”

  He stared at me and then nodded. “Yep. Exactly. That’s exactly why I did it.”

  See? I thought. You can lie, when you want to. Acting was basically just lying. If I could teach him to lie, I could teach him to act. Make him more like me, even when I wished I could be more like him.

  I took his hand. The instant our palms touched, I felt a jolt go down my arm, every tiny hair standing on end, right up to the back of my neck. I looked into those clear blue eyes and I felt something shi
ft inside me. I’d been thinking about myself, this entire time, about my big break and how I was going to avoid screwing it up. I hadn’t known that his entire career was on the line. And I could see the fear in his eyes. He was a muscled ox of a man, but he was vulnerable, in that second. Being a cop, to him, was as important as being an actress was to me.

  I couldn’t give him what he really wanted—what we both really wanted—which was to just lean forward and kiss him and tell him how I really felt. He was smitten—maybe more—with a woman who didn’t exist, who was no more than lipstick and lies. I couldn’t give him that...but I’d be damned if I was going to see him lose his dream. “We’ll make this work,” I told him. “You teach me cop stuff and I’ll teach you how to act.”

  He gripped my hand and I almost lost it right there, currents twisting down my arm and dancing around my heart. I could see the hope in his eyes. “Really?” he asked.

  “Really.”

  ***

  I left Ryan with orders to learn the script—I couldn’t usefully help him much until he’d done that. Also, I needed time to process.

  I walked, barely looking where I was going.

  They’d fired him! I couldn’t wrap my head around that. I mean, sure, I worried about being kicked out of Fenbrook but, even if something as apocalyptically bad as that happened, there were always other colleges. I didn’t even want to contemplate messing up Blue & Red and blowing my big break but, if that happened, I at least knew that there were other acting jobs. But as a cop, once you were fired that was it. I was pretty sure that once you’d been fired from one force, no other force would take you...even if Ryan wanted to move to a different city. His career would be over.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen. I’d help him stay in the pilot and then get back to being a cop. And... Oh, what was that other thing? I thought bitterly. Oh yes. I’d do that while pretending I hadn’t fallen for him. And then, when he was done with this acting thing he probably found so stupid and lightweight, he could go back to his real life and find himself a nice, normal girlfriend—maybe another cop, like Sierra—and they could settle down and raise rug rats.