by Ren Benton
But people with the power to hurt his heart had every gesture, every word, every tone put on trial. His judgment gave him something to be angry about, a shield to guard the inner cringing child who would do anything to avoid being betrayed — even drive away anyone close enough to betray him, until only those who got paid to put up with him remained.
For instance, his psychiatrist. “Don’t slide back into old habits because they’re more comfortable than responding genuinely to what’s happening in the present. Extend your policy of living in the moment physically to your emotional life. Experience each feeling as it happens, without weighing it against the past or imagining a future built on it. Accept it for what it is: a response to one moment in time, no more, no less.”
Easier said than done. How was he supposed to learn from his mistakes without historical context or resist unwise impulses without thinking ahead to the consequences? People had been telling him all his life to think before acting, but now that he was finally ready to try that approach, the goalpost moved to the top of another Everest. You’re thinking too much. Go with your feelings. The past and future are imaginary.
Sessions like this that forced him to question not only how far he was capable of climbing but whether he had any interest in reaching a summit where the past and future meant nothing felt like he was being goaded to drop out. Because he usually believed Dr. Ogawa wanted him to succeed, he allowed for the possibility of misinterpretation on his part. “Is that what people are supposed to be, momentary?”
“A temporary emotion is not representative of a person, only your response to your perception of that person at a given time. In any relationship of significant depth, you’ll experience many emotions daily, some of them negative. When you care or have cared deeply for someone, you’re still allowed to be hurt, disappointed, angry.”
He stared at the phone like he’d been handed a test made entirely of trick questions. His irrational anger was a known problem he was supposed to overcome, not indulge. Not being face to face with the doctor was giving them both weird ideas about their relationship. “Why would I be angry with Gin? She thought I came here to ruin her movie, and now you want me to be pissed at her.”
“All I want you to be is honest. If not with me, at least with yourself, and if it bothers you that Gin misinterpreted your intentions, being honest with her is your best recourse for being understood.”
Lex knew his unsavory qualities. He’d spent years trying to drown them. When he stopped drinking, new concealment techniques had to be learned. The last thing he wanted was for those ugly, rotten parts of him to be understood by the one person whose approval he coveted.
Dr. Ogawa detected his silent resistance even at a distance. “You pour your heart into your music and share it with millions of strangers. Why is it so difficult for you to expose how you feel to the person who inspires the feeling?”
By the time his heart made it onto an album, it had been edited into the form of his choosing. Calculated. Perfected. When millions of strangers consumed his heart, it was cold.
For a full year after they met, he’d served Gin the Lex Perry he wanted her to eat up. She admired him like a beautifully decorated cake containing every ingredient on her do-not-touch list — a treat for somebody, but never for her.
She accepted him only when desperation drove him to raw, unprocessed truth, or as close to it as a liar like him could get. For the next year and a half, he struggled to give her what she wanted from him while hiding the sickness in his soul.
It wasn’t a sustainable model.
But he couldn’t explain that to Dr. Ogawa without telling her things Gin deserved to hear first, unrehearsed, straight from his twitching, bleeding heart. She’d prefer the wrong words to poetry he’d been coached to say. “It’s complicated.”
“Feelings always are. Don’t use complications as an excuse to repeat patterns that haven’t worked in the past.” Papers shuffled on the other end of the line. “I’d like you to touch base with me in a few days, even if it’s just for fifteen minutes.”
In other words, she expected him to get overwhelmed.
As clumsily as he’d handled himself so far, she might be right. “Text me the date and time.”
Maisie checked in at ten after nine — eight on the coast — which was an hour late for her to arrive at the office. “Childcare drama. Don’t ask.”
Gin’s attention whipped from the computer to Ethan’s phone speaker. “Is your mom okay?”
“Don’t make me curse in front of the baby or I’ll ask about your mom.” The baby in question burbled in the background, and Maisie cooed in response before elaborating. “Nobody’s sick or injured, just a pain in my firm, round assessment.”
Relief about one mother’s welfare was surpassed only by eagerness to leave the other undiscussed. Gin gladly set that topic aside. “When you get settled, Mr. James is allegedly in possession of a talent release. The sooner somebody squeezes it out of him, the sooner we can cry over the terms and put Lex to work.”
“I hope that’s not what’s on my desk. I burn to squeeze Big Jim.”
Gin and Ethan exchanged a wide-eyed look and said in unison, “Eww.”
“You’re only saying that because you two value personality over raw animal magnetism.”
“I love animal magnetism as much as anyone,” Ethan said, “but the knuckle-dragging buffalo thing is hotter in a Disney movie than in real life.”
“Blasphemy,” Maisie declared. “I’ve been searching since 1991 for a grumpy bison prince and a spell to keep him cursed and studly after he falls in love with me.”
The mention of a curse provoked an angry buzz of unknown origin. Gin leaned away from the electronics. “Did a warranty expire?”
“As if we can afford warranties.” Ethan jabbed a pen toward the shelving and the charging pad from whence the buzz originated. “Lex’s phone.”
Of course. The man went through cables like they were made of spaghetti. He used to wish he could lose the phone, too, but even Lex had a hard time misplacing something that incessantly clamored for his attention.
Maisie landed at her desk and got down to business. “Let’s see what we have. Ooh, it is a love letter from Big Jim, special delivery. I hope it’s spicy.” The sound of a paperboard mailer being torn open seemed paltry fanfare for the reveal of the fate of their movie, so Maisie added her own dramatic sound effects. “Boom! We have permission from the label to use their talent.”
Gin crossed one item from her long mental list of things that could go wrong. “Usual conditions that we give them the soundtrack or a cut of the profits in exchange for borrowing him?”
“No conditions at all. It’s a one-page thing of beauty. I’ve never seen its like.” Maisie’s tone swung toward suspicion. “Is Jimbo playing a practical joke?”
It sounded more like Lex Fucking Perry doing whatever he wanted. “The talent probably exerted some influence.”
Ethan deepened his voice an octave in imitation of Lex. “Sorry about that big tour you booked, but I feel a raging case of laryngitis coming on if you give my girl a hard time.”
Gin’s face heated, but pointing out the obvious — that she hadn’t been his girl for a long, long time — would attract more attention to the offhand remark than it deserved, followed by allegations of excessive protest she’d already heard dozens of times since informing her partners she’d asked Lex for music. Now that he officially worked for her, allusions to their personal relationship were unprofessional, potentially exploitative, and to be avoided at all costs.
Not making a big deal about things she wanted forgotten always worked better than asking people to forget, so she kept her mouth shut.
As intended, Maisie coasted right past the personal sidetrack. “What does Lex want for rights and royalties?”
“He declined to demand.”
“That’s nice, since the budget is down to petty cash. You’re thinking percentage?”
“That or a coup
on book for housekeeping and lawn maintenance.”
Ethan upped the ante. “A tube top and booty shorts would make that worth something.”
“On you or Maisie? Either of you would fill out a tube top better than I can.”
“You also have insufficient booty for the shorts, yet somehow you managed to get a man who has access to more pussy... cats,” Maisie adjusted for the benefit of her child, “than Tampax.”
Despite Gin’s best effort at avoidance, she’d stumbled into a loop that brought her back to the edge of personal quicksand. She tiptoed around it again. “Which brings us back to percentage.” Every penny of movie money was spoken for in perpetuity, but they hadn’t doled out shares in music that didn’t yet exist. “A large one, since he’s writing, performing, and recording everything himself.”
Ethan raised both hands. “Slow down, moneybags. The key benefit of hiring one self-sufficient, non-union expert is he’s cheaper than the twenty other pros we’d ordinarily have to pay to get the job done. That extra soundtrack revenue will help us recoup so we can pay off our investors sometime this century.”
For all his complaints about Maisie’s tight grip on the checkbook, Ethan won every capitalist tyrant competition. If he had his way, everyone GemGam hired would work for exposure so upper management and bankers could keep a few extra pennies — which was why he wasn’t allowed to have his way. “Since every bit of that revenue will come from Lex Perry’s name on the music, we are not grabbing the publishing rights so we can cut his mechanical royalty in half.”
Even Maisie — the reasonable middle ground between Ethan’s goal of paying nothing and Gin’s insistence that every check reflect the recipient’s real worth — was in a penny-pinching mood today. “You’re not going to go for a three percent recording royalty, are you?”
Panhandlers in certain areas of L.A. would be insulted by three percent, but this pair had the gall to offer it to a man with seven Grammys. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear any of these predatory sleazeball suggestions.”
Maisie sighed. “It was worth a shot. I hope his name puts butts in seats. We need ten percent more box office than usual this time just to break even.”
“Liv is an international draw. We’ll clear that easily.” That had been the justification for the inflated budget, anyway. If the draw of every other movie Olivia White-Church had been in proved to be astronomical production costs and millions of dollars in advertising the studios could afford to throw around, Gin had made a catastrophic error in judgment.
On the bright side, in the face of professional ruination, no one would have any interest in the screenplay she hadn’t written yet.
When Lex returned to the office, the air temperature had borrowed a couple of degrees from the electronics and the room’s occupants. Ethan, still fully clothed, was engaged in long-distance negotiation regarding exclusivity of movie clips with an opponent undeserving of the privilege due to some previous slight. Gin huddled close to her computer as if its meager warmth alone stood between her and an icy death.
Lex leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb and took advantage of their distraction, testing Dr. Ogawa’s advice to examine what he felt in the moment, untangled from memory and anticipation.
Ten seconds later, he wanted to call the good doctor back and tell her she was full of shit because what he felt was certainty that if he walked into another office and saw a cold stranger sitting there, he wouldn’t feel the urge to hold her hands in his until they warmed or to read all the online reviews for space heaters in search of one with no safety hazards and same-day delivery. His feelings in the moment existed only because the past made Gin’s comfort matter to him and he wanted the future to provide that comfort for her.
Whatever lesson he was supposed to learn today had missed the mark.
His lurking finally got her attention. Green eyes examined his face. “Bad news?”
“Was I ranting out loud?”
“No, but you look like you spent the past half hour answering questions about your underwear preferences and skin-care regimen. Since that esteemed journalist would have been a pile of smoking ash twenty-nine and a half minutes ago, there must be some other grievance.”
Gin could probably explain how feelings were supposed to work in a way he would understand, but if fixing his emotional incompetence was too much of a challenge for a doctor with a wall full of degrees who got paid two hundred dollars an hour to try, it was unfair to dump the task on her. “What you see is my naturally sunny disposition.”
Ethan ended his call and raised his hand. “I have a grievance.”
One of them should have an outlet. Lex gave it to him. “So I gathered. What did they do to piss you off?”
“They act like I don’t know they buy ambush pics from Darth Ghoul and then have the nerve to call me unreasonable for penalizing them for dealing with scum.”
Lex moved his tent over to the grievance camp. Garth Houle was a celebrity stalker who called himself a photojournalist. He’d been targeting the Greene twins the night of Ryan’s murder. He made the phone call that probably saved Gin’s life — and rewarded himself for the good deed by helping himself to a half million dollars worth of crime scene photos while awaiting the arrival of the ambulance and police. “Hasn’t anybody accidentally punched that asshole into another line of work yet?”
“No, dammit. Where’s the next generation of Alec Baldwins and Russell Crowes? I had high hopes for Tom Hardy and Charlie Hunnam, but they’d rather cuddle puppies than assault the paparazzi. Kids these days are too soft.” He leveled a finger at Gin. “Do not make the obvious joke. You’re better than that.”
“No one is above a Hardbody Hunnam joke... or the subsequent above-Hardbody-Hunnam joke.”
Ethan snort-laughed, temporarily appeased, and lifted his chin at Lex. “Are you going to return that phone before it disappears?”
He’d forgotten the handset while his fingers were still wrapped around it, which had to be a new record. He restored it to the base before he wandered off and it was never seen again. “You were brave to lend it to me.”
Gin defended that dubious decision. “You never lose other people’s property.”
He never lost her property. Others didn’t receive the same level of obsessive care. “Angry hordes would disagree.”
Ethan raised his hand again. “Angry horde, reporting for duty. He once lost my car.”
“The police found it.”
“In the meantime, he lost my keys.”
“I paid for the locksmith.”
Gin’s wide eyes bounced back and forth between them throughout the exchange. “In light of the trend, I’m afraid to ask what happened to the locksmith.”
He couldn’t ignore such a beautiful setup. “They were never able to prove that was my fault.”
Ethan snickered. “He’s like a human Bermuda Triangle.”
He had a tattoo to that effect. Ethan had never seen it, but Gin had. Her gaze slid over his right upper chest as if she remembered the map of his body.
Lex remembered the confessions she’d whispered against his skin to make them vanish. He never lost anything of hers.
Her eyes met his. The collision splashed a band of pink high on her cheeks.
His phone buzzed and stole her attention away from him. “Must be urgent. That’s the eighth time.”
“It’s not urgent.” The few people who might contact him with a legitimate emergency had Ethan’s number and would go through him rather than bombard Lex’s unresponsive voicemail. He knew without looking there would be eight different numbers to get around call blocking but the same woman’s voice in every seething message.
He reclaimed his phone and powered it off as punishment for interrupting what could have been a moment. “Sorry about the irritant.”
“I’m the producer. Irritants tremble before me.” She asserted her dominance with a yawn followed by a sleepy owl blink, and he felt like an ass for doubting her fatigue. “You we
re right about Maisie, by the way.”
“Bummer. I was looking forward to being punished. Is she okay?”
“Minor babysitting snafu.”
He cupped a hand around an ear. “What? Maisie has a kid?” He pulled the vacant chair away from its desk and plopped down in it. “Tell me everything.”
Ethan took a deep breath. “When the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina...”
“Unless you plan to turn on some music with a lot of bass and light a few candles for ambiance, fast forward from conception. Boy, girl? How old? Too soon to buy a pint-sized Ferrari for him or her to cruise around in?”
By the time he finished, Gin was staring at him like he’d barfed up the long-lost locksmith. “You’re really... excited.”
Hell yeah. “Ask me whether I’d rather do any activity or shop for toys, and then come find me in the Lego aisle to get my answer. Bring a couple more carts.”
Ethan sighed. “It’s the little clothes that get me.”
That too. “I’ve been shopping like Matt and Piper are having boy/girl sextuplets. It will take a caravan of semis to haul it all to the baby shower. I can spare a few tons for Baby Mandel if you tight-lipped sadists would give me some specs.”
“You did say you wanted to be punished.” Gin rolled her chair close to his and handed over her phone, photo app open. “Her name is Reina. She just had her first birthday.”
“She has her mother’s everything.” He made polite noises about the cuteness of people’s kids when required, but most of them looked like amorphous blobs waiting to develop character. Maisie’s daughter set an unfair aesthetic standard with enormous dark eyes framed by enough lashes for a mascara commercial, plump little cheeks, and a wide, contagious smile showing off an impressive number of pearly teeth. Every picture was more overflowing with personality than the last. He tilted the screen to share a particularly angelic one with Gin. “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me she wasn’t lab created. This level of cute can’t be natural.”
