by Ren Benton
When a man considered arrogant even by egomaniac standards saw failure as the only outcome, there was nothing more to say about the likelihood of getting her back.
She pulled into a parking space at the grocery store and shut off the engine. “I’ll meet you inside. I’m going to trot across the street to the post office.”
Protecting her was a much easier choice. “I’ll come with you.”
“One of us has to stay on store property so they don’t tow the car. I’ll be back in two minutes.”
“It takes longer than two minutes to tow a car.”
Two rebuttals signaled his determination and earned him a squint-eyed stare. “Do you think I forgot to how to cross the street without a grownup holding my hand?”
Wasn’t it her purview to imagine a van squealing to a stop at the curb and the door sliding open so a creep could grab her?
But he couldn’t wish more fear on her. Half the point of having a bodyguard was the peace of mind that came with physical safety, so he carried the burden of worry alone. “I’m scared of getting kidnapped from the grocery store if I don’t have an adult with me.”
“Call 911.”
“I don’t have my phone.”
“Did you lose it?”
“I know where it is.” He’d simply taken two months too long to figure out it was stupid to clear his voicemail only to have it refilled with abuse a couple hours later. If he left it at maximum capacity, Melanie would have to wait weeks until her last batch of unopened messages got purged before she could record more.
He’d stubbornly held onto that number for five years in case Gin had an urge to get in touch, but now she was right here to slip new digits to. Once he’d made up his mind to start over with a clean slate, he told everyone he wanted or needed to hear from to get in touch through Ethan or email until he got a replacement untainted by bad vibes, and the old phone became a thousand-dollar paperweight.
She reached across the seat. Her fingers curled around the edge of his hand, sending little electric shocks dancing across his palm. The stroke of her thumb unfurled his fingers.
She slapped her phone into his splayed hand. “In the event of stranger danger, you know what to do. See you in two minutes.”
When Gin emerged from the post office with the mail, including the stuffed overnight envelope Ethan had warned her about, Lex was leaning against the side of the SUV facing her.
She looked both ways twice before crossing the street, sashayed across the asphalt, and completed her journey with a twirl. “Look at me, crossing the street all by myself like a big girl.”
The sass bounced off him without leaving a scratch. “I had to sign an autograph. By the time I was done, I figured your two minutes must be up so I might as well wait for you.”
Did he really think she didn’t know Ethan had deputized him to hover? She enjoyed his company on their morning runs, but there was no way in hell Lex got out of bed before dawn for the love of jogging in the cold with a snarling, sleep-deprived she-beast.
She didn’t want a damn bodyguard. If he was with her when a gunman opened fire on the street or a cattle stampede tore through the town or whatever the future had in store, he’d only get hurt for being in the wrong place at the wrong time because she put him there.
If she couldn’t stop disaster from striking, she could at least prevent her share of it from splattering onto the people she cared about by keeping them at a safe distance.
Lex’s idea of distance, though, involved ushering her through the automatic door with his hand lightly grazing her lower back. He stopped by the cart corral. “Do you want to drive?”
She yanked a cart free by way of reply and used it to create a buffer zone. “Lead on.”
He headed for the overhead sign beckoning customers to the produce section.
What was wrong with her that she found it devastatingly hot that he no longer headed straight for center aisles that were out of bounds for her? An absence of Pringles in the basket didn’t make a normal woman’s insides gooey. Gin wasn’t far enough gone to be deemed sexually aroused by a man picking through a pile of onions — but close enough that another one of those big hands pressing into the curve of her spine would have her flushed and panting.
He side-eyed her across the six-foot gap she maintained between them but made no comment as he selected red, yellow, and green bell peppers. He placed them in the cart’s basket and headed for the lemons. He held one under his nose for a second before dropping it in a bag. “Makes me miss your lemon bars.”
She blinked in surprise. Those had been her childhood favorite, not something Lex requested. “I thought you’d crave chocolate, if anything.”
“Back in the day, yeah, but that bright pop of lemon stands out in retrospect. Chocolate’s easy to avoid — when Ethan’s not around,” he amended with a wry slant of his mouth, “but I’m triggered about the bars every time I squeeze a lemon over something. I never did understand how you got to be a baking wizard when you don’t eat sugar and flour.”
“I had twenty-five years of unrestrained eating,” she reminded him. “My best childhood memories are about baking with my grandmother. One of my favorite things about getting to set is breaking out her recipes to stuff the crew.”
“Do you ever sneak a taste?”
He just had to ask like he already knew she was a naughty girl. “I can get my fix smelling good chocolate, but lemon has always been my weakness.”
“Oh really?” He dropped two more lemons in the bag and dabbed his lemon-handling fingers behind his ears like perfume.
The tug in her chest urged her to pull him down to her level and lick that spot until she got to the flavor of Lex beneath the citrus.
He ruffled the selection of cilantro. “I’m shocked there’s a breach in your legendary self-control.”
Her face burned as if he’d read her mind. Good thing he was too busy browsing to notice she looked guilty way out of proportion for sneaking a little lemon curd. “Don’t get too excited. I’m still a pain in the ass at restaurants.”
“You made the best of the options available and never complained, which could never be said about me.” He claimed a bundle of herbs that met his approval. “Your willpower was like a toy I never had, so I wanted to smash it.”
Her resistance of temptation became more rigid as she sensed his control slipping. She told herself at the time it was an attempt to maintain some phantom equilibrium between them, to bring up their team score in overall restraint.
She’d been so caught up in making herself feel better about what was happening to him, it never occurred to her that making up the difference when he faltered looked like self-righteous virtue signaling from where he sat on the bench. While he struggled with an addiction that was killing him, she rubbed it in his face how easy it was for her to say no, to alcohol, to the dessert cart, to fucking Pringles.
No wonder he’d hidden from her.
She dug her knuckles into the sharp pain in her chest, trying to pop it so the shame and regret inside would burst through the blockade in her throat so she could tell him how sorry she was for being so awful to him, but the heavy lump only grew harder and more cutting.
Lex grinned and lifted a hand in greeting to a wide-eyed young woman standing by the celery bin. A tow-headed toddler kicked chubby legs in the seat of the shopping cart beside her. Her Lumpy Space Princess T-shirt had a familiar angular scrawl inked in black between her collarbone and shoulder.
He really had found a fan in this no-stoplight town.
Of course.
He’d never told her a lie.
Fajitas for five were more of a production than cooking for himself. Lex had four burners going so the steak and vegetables didn’t crowd in the pans and steam instead of sear. Though it was technically one project, it looked and felt like four, and multitasking wasn’t his strong suit.
He could use Gin’s organizational services to keep the process running smoothly, but she’d been withdra
wn on the way back from Grayson and hadn’t bounced back in the hours since. He hated to bother her for advice or another set of hands when her distant expression clearly said she had more important things on her mind.
Olivia had hauled her into the kitchen to be sociable, but Gin wasn’t giving her enough feedback to be a fun playmate. Bored, Olivia resorted to common labor. “Where’s the lime? I’ll mangle the juice out of it for you.”
Lex indicated the bag of lemons. “Gin doesn’t like lime.”
Olivia gasped in outrage. “You’re changing your recipe for her? When I told you I was allergic to shrimp, you told me to order takeout!”
He glowered. She made it sound like he’d been trying to poison her. Thanks for the “help,” Liv.
“So did I when you showed up unannounced at my door twenty seconds before I slid shrimp onto my plate.” Gin made a minute adjustment to the alignment of the salt and pepper shakers on the island that required all of her attention. “If you want to special order food, don’t show up unannounced at dinnertime.”
Olivia arched her brows at him in an I know what I’m doing fashion. “You two sound so much alike, I can scarcely tell you apart.”
Clever girl, herding him and Gin toward solidarity in ways beyond his comprehension, one anaphylaxis-inducing crustacean at a time.
He couldn’t help but notice Olivia hadn’t followed through on lemon duty, though.
She ignored his ahem in favor of flinging her arms around Ethan when he entered the kitchen. “Gossip with me. This pair is no fun.”
“Frankly, I’m disappointed in you, young lady. With all the fuss about this” — Ethan sketched a triangle with Olivia, Lex, and Gin at the points — “your hookup with your onscreen brother-in-law isn’t getting nearly enough attention.”
Lex gagged. “You have got to be kidding.”
“You’re only revolted because his character is such a bastard. In real life, Phin is desperately Canadian.”
That wrung a snuffle of laughter from Gin.
Lex was heartened by the sign of life. He kept his eye on her as he shifted the onions around in the pan with a spatula. “Help me out here. I’m not hip to the lingo of kids these days.”
Gin rested her chin in a cupped hand. “In this context, a Canadian is someone who will help you move and bring the beer and pizza because you’re under enough stress without having to cater the event, too.”
Ethan slid onto a stool. “It’s particularly laudable when the recipient of the title was born and raised in Tucson.”
Olivia looked aghast. “You can’t be serious. Then there’s no excuse for that sort of behavior.”
Now she made it sound like she wished someone had tried to poison her. “So you hooked up with him because you wanted a bastard like his character?”
“Darling, I literally had no choice. I respected all the women I was working with too much to compromise one of them, and he had the only penis available.”
Gin, staring at the neglected lemons, suggested, “You could have slept alone.”
“Where’s the fun in that? At least we didn’t have any sex scenes to ruin the director’s life.”
Lex furtively nudged the lemons toward Gin.
Her lips curved. “Juice and zest?”
“Please.” He moved out of the way when she came around the island to search through the utensil bucket. “So real-life close encounters of the naked kind don’t play well on screen?”
The question prompted a chorus of tortured groans from the film folk.
Gin applied a grater to the outside of one lemon, releasing a burst of bright fragrance. “For one thing, onscreen sex has nothing to do with real life. The sexier it looks to the viewer, the more physically miserable the actors were during shooting.”
Olivia grabbed Ethan’s arm for support, leaned back until she was parallel to the floor, and contorted her spine. “I had to be in a harness during the scene in that cowboy movie.”
“A lot of reenactment attempts end up in the emergency room because people don’t understand everything cool in a movie is a stunt.” Gin scooped the zest into a pile and selected a paring knife to cut the fruit. “You’d be better off going into shooting a sex scene not even knowing what sex is to avoid the cognitive dissonance. Other than interesting composition, the camera is looking for sexual tension, which is impossible to fake.”
Apparently, it was his night to receive mixed signals from women. “So... you do want your actors humping off the clock?”
“No!” they shouted in triplicate.
“Tension comes from uncertainty.” Gin cupped half a lemon in one hand and squeezed, milking the juice out of the tough core. The seeds plinked into a mesh strainer to emphasize each question that followed. “Does he feel it, too? Would she say yes? Will we or won’t we? When? Where? How? Will it be everything I’ve imagined?”
She effortlessly twisted Lex like a steel string, winding tighter with every plink, ready to snap.
“The moment the sex occurs” — she opened her hand and dropped the wrung-out lemon with a dull thud — “all those questions turn into known facts. Innocence and wonder are replaced with confidence and swagger. Want me to do anything else?”
“Yes, but I can’t think what.” He was a little preoccupied with visions of her capable fingers and a lengthy list of questions about them.
She rinsed her hands at the sink and surveyed his work so far while drying her hands. “Were the avocados for guac?”
“Salad. Chilling in the fridge.”
“Tortillas for the grain eaters?”
He thought for a second she was offering to make them from scratch because of course she would, then he remembered he’d grabbed a package at the store. “I can do that.”
While he wrapped the tortillas in paper towels and stuck them in the microwave, she picked up the dangling end of her explanation of sexual tension. “Experience breeds confidence. Confidence looks nothing like breathless anticipation. Once costars drink from the well of carnal knowledge, they have all the tension of overcooked spaghetti, and no matter how beautifully you plate them for the camera, their performance is limp and mushy.”
River Bound had no sex but an abundance of other forms of tension. “How does that translate to a murder scene?”
“Pretty much the same. I couldn’t have Liv and Tam looking like experienced killers, so we shot that the first day without rehearsing and stopped before they got comfortable murdering poor Phin.”
“And not one word of encouragement that might make us think we were doing well,” Olivia complained. “We were literally shaking the whole time because we were terrified the director hated everything we were doing. Tam was in tears toward the end.”
“Which made Liv want to bludgeon me with that lamp for making her baby sister cry. Every frame of that last take made it into the movie.”
The strain showed on film. The women handled their improvised weapons as if unfamiliar with the weight, balance, and damage potential, and they were visibly dismayed as they learned. Their fear was too ugly to be anything but genuine, their resignation as they persisted with the deed etching brutal lines into pretty faces. Without a word of dialogue, Lex knew the sisters agreed they’d made a terrible choice but could only go through with it because the consequences of becoming murderers were less awful than those of stopping what they’d started.
The scene was perfect — not because they’d practiced until the rough edges were polished away but because the raw emotions were real — exactly how Gin liked them.
His heart bucked against the ropes his head had bound it in.
He finished each pan with a shot of lemon juice and asked Olivia, “Are all directors like that?”
“Brilliant, you mean? In my twenty-five films, Gin is the first I’ve met. Half of the others would have kept going until we were having mad fun with it and ruined the tone of the movie entirely.”
Ethan leered at her. “The other half would have had you rip your tops a
nd make out. Murderous interracial lesbians would be so much more marketable.”
“Ugh. The thought of making another movie with men fills me with revulsion. You’ve ruined me, Gin.”
Gin only destroyed what didn’t work. Then she built something better. “Start a production company,” she advised. “Executive produce. Hire women.”
“Fuck the patriarchy,” Lex summarized.
Olivia scoffed. “You are the patriarchy.”
He’d suffered less at the hands of shitty dudes than anyone else in the room, but he felt no more warmly toward them for the harm they did to others. “You have my full support in burning it to the ground.”
Olivia clapped her hands. “Gin, you turned him into such a good feminist.”
“I can’t take credit. He arrived in this condition.” She took the tortillas he’d forgotten again out of the microwave and arranged them along the edge of a platter. “About an hour before he introduced himself, I watched him verbally pulverize a guy who was getting handsy with one of the servers. I had to apply a cool compress to bring my temperature down.”
He stalled holding a pan over the platter. “I don’t remember that at all.”
“It’s not a novelty for you.” Gin grabbed a spatula, scraped the pan clean as if that had been his plan all along, and spread the peppers into a steaming bed for the steak. “I don’t see that kind of thing every day, so it left an impression.”
He’d been medicinally drinking that night, preparing for the most important performance of his life — convincing Gin Greene he was worth knowing. There was an art to dosing, and the longer he practiced his craft, the closer taking the edge off his nerves moved toward the wasteland where blackouts dwelled. He might have lost count of his shots, distracted by his twitching guts and sweaty palms, and strayed into the zone of fragmentary memory loss, quick snips that sacrificed continuity to reduce running time on playback.
The longer he practiced, the closer that zone moved toward the border of complete shutdown, where he lost hours at a time. During those episodes, he was still able to carry on a conversation, belt out karaoke, fuck, or otherwise convince people he was present. Oh, the stories they told him later... But for Lex, those chunks of his life were gone — not forgotten, though. He couldn’t forget what his malfunctioning brain had never recorded.
