by Jayne Denker
AN UNSCRIPTED ATTRACTION
There was a moment’s silence, and I realized that Mason and I were a ridiculous six inches away from each other—ridiculous because we’d leaned in close to one another, but then what were we going to do with that proximity? From here I could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, his dark amber lashes, a small mole by the bridge of his nose, the sweep of his wavy hair. His usual light stubble was back, dusting his chin, circling his smiling lips.
So I did the only thing I could, under the circumstances.
I sat back.
Oh, I didn’t want to. I had to. Because suddenly my only other option was to go flying across the counter at him. And I really wasn’t sure how he would take that. Hell, I wasn’t sure howIwould take that. I mean, this was Mr. Professor Mason Mitchell—wasn’t there some sort of rule against throwing oneself at one’s co-teacher? Or . . . something? I wasn’t about to risk it. That would have been insane on my part . . .
Books by Jayne Denker
BY DESIGN
UNSCRIPTED
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
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Copyright © 2013 by Jayne Denker
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ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-084-5
ISBN-10: 1-60183-084-X
First Electronic Edition: August 2013
For Clover, who taught me priorities:
food, pettings, roaring woodstove fire.
Everything else is just details.
RIP, fuzzball.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who helped with the creation of this book:
As always, Jordy Albert of the Booker Albert Literary Agency (xoxo) and everyone at Kensington Publishing, especially the ever-patient John Scognamiglio.
Owen, who gets it.
Chris, who goes to school even when he doesn’t want to (which is five days a week), so I can write.
John, Carolyn, and Nicole Aquilina, for schlepping me all over Southern California in the name of research (and for Roscoe’s chicken and waffles and Sprinkles cupcakes).
Robert S. Mellette, author, scriptwriter, and all-around entertainment guru, for sharing his insider information about “the biz.” If I got anything wrong, it was because I was nose deep in a yummy fruit plate and trying to unobtrusively spot celebrities in the vicinity.
All my friends and family members who have congregated on Facebook, for their enthusiastic support and a constant opportunity to waste time online.
Chapter 1
Usually, grabbing a man’s balls can take you far in this business. I mean, the Hollywood entertainment industry? Please. Far worse has gone down in the name of getting ahead. (No pun intended.) (Okay, maybe a little.) But that particular move came close to ending my career; I just didn’t notice at the time.
But then, I wasn’t really thinking rationally, let alone considering the “consequences of my actions,” because I was having my usual knock-down, drag-out argument with my boss, Randy Bastard (real name: Randy Barstow). And, as usual, we were out of our chairs and nose to nose—well, figuratively, at least; in what I preferred to think of as my don’t-fuck-with-me-or-you’ll-get-a-stiletto-in-your-ear heels, I was half a head taller than he was. So it was more nose to bald spot as I attempted to “explain” myself. That was pretty tough, because I just wanted to slap the smirk off his face instead of using my words like a grown-up. Plus I was finding it pretty difficult to make a cogent point when I was all up in his aura, which reeked of caramelized onions and stale gym sweat.
I did try.
“Okay, let’s put it another way,” I said, exhaling in short, quick puffs. “All that stuff you just brought up? Not happening. Modern Women’s ratings are doing fine without some ass-backward ideas about what constitutes ‘entertainment’ that were outdated two decades ago. So you can keep the donated outfits from your cousin’s lingerie shop, because my female characters aren’t parading around in them for your jollies. And there will be no bouncing-cheerleader scenes for no apparent reason. My characters—and the women who portray them—will never, everbe anything less than three-dimensional individuals. These characters are not just strutting life-size Barbie dolls, and their story arcs will most definitelynot focus only on sex. Have I covered everything to your satisfaction, you perv?”
I probably shouldn’t have called him a perv, but hey, if it walks like a duck and all that—and Randy definitely walked like a duck. He was also president of the unfortunately abbreviated EWW (Entertainment Worldwide) channel, a second-tier cable network that was home to my hit dramedy, Modern Women. The network wasn’t half bad, but Randy? He was another story. Dude made me see red even on my best days. And today was hardly one of my best, with Randy—yet again—challenging me in a meeting with a dozen other suits about creative control, making idiotic recommendations about my show. Mine. I created it, I exec-produced it, I wrote every episode. I knew what direction it was going in; I had every bit of the story planned out for the next three seasons, and longer, if it came to that. Not to mention Modern Women rocketed to success in its first season and saved his lame-ass network—I mean, literally kept it from turning into a 24/7 syndication- and infomercial-fest.
He knew all that, but he conveniently forgot it. Why? Because I was a woman—and, even worse for this type of job, halfway decent-looking, with my chestnut hair often in out-of-control-waves and blue eyes that could pin any slacker on my staff to the wall at twenty paces—and he was one of those dinosaurs who still thought it was cute when women try to be in charge of anything besides baking pies and popping out babies. You couldn’t win with those guys. I knew I should have gotten out of the situation. I knew I should have just sat back down at the conference table, among his startled toadies—I could see their wide eyes, each mouth in an identical “O,” out of the corner of my eye—and thanked my lucky stars that my Little Show That Could was about to complete its third season on his network.
Yep, that would have been the smart thing to do. But then he said it. All the arguments about story arcs and character development we had been hurling at each other for the past ten minutes vaporized as I focused on the one phrase that issued from his fleshy lips, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “Look, sweetheart—”
It was like my appendage had a life of its own. Although if I had known in advance what it was going to do, I’m not sure I would have stopped it. Honestly, I thought I was dreaming—you know, like in those TV fantasy sequences where you see the main character do something outrageous to his or her nemesis, but then the main character blinks, and reality kicks back in with a zoosh sound effect, and you realize it was all going on in her head? This was like that. Except it actually happened. No life-saving zoosh.
I only realized I had his nards in a vise grip when I saw
Randy Bastard’s face get small. It was as if all his facial features congregated in the middle of his face, close to his nose, as if they were huddling together to protect and comfort one another.
Everything froze. In all my thirty-eight years on the planet, my senses were never as heightened as they were at that moment. The midafternoon L.A. sunlight coming through the meeting room’s windows was brilliant and blinding. Randy B.’s rank onions-and-sweat odor burned my nose. I fixated on his navy track pants. I never was able to figure out how he could make expensive clothes—in this case, Givenchy—look cheap. On him, even Armani suits look like they came off the rack at Kmart. I remembered thinking that somebody should have told this network emperor that the stripes on the sides of his pants worked about as well as after-market go-faster stripes on the hood of an ’89 Yugo. And that he probably should have just given up and gone for the Pajama Jeans.
It occurred to me that the track pants were a perilously thin barrier between my hand and his nether regions. And that completely skeeved me out. Because it finally sank in, what I’d done. I’d gotten even closer to him, my nose nearly touching his, and . . . grabbed his ballsack. Right through the damp fabric of his track pants and whatever passed for underwear beneath them (I didn’t want to know). And yeah, I squeezed, but only a little. Just to make my point. Which was . . . how did I put it? Oh yeah.
“My show? It’s about women. And you have no right to tell me how to run my show. You know why? These.” And I gave another squeeze, making sure the sharp tips of my manicured fingernails made themselves known to his, er, boys. Of course, a silent scream of revulsion was ricocheting around in my head, and the rest of my body was recoiling with disgust. But my clawlike fingers held on. “They mean you have no opinion. None. Don’t forget that.”
The instant everyone else in the room realized what I’d done, they all sucked in a horrified breath at the same time. It was kind of impressive, really. If it had been a scene for my show, it would have taken several takes and a whole lot of yelling through a megaphone to get a bunch of extras to all gasp on cue like that. But this reaction was spontaneous.
In the silence that followed—miraculously, not even one cell phone chirped or vibrated on the table—it occurred to me that all those people, from the execs down to the assistants to the assistants, figured I had just dug my own grave and jumped right in.
Point made, I let go of Randy Bastard’s moist and, not surprisingly, suddenly quite small package. One glance at his face, which had gone from parchment white to get-him-his-blood-pressure-meds purple once he knew his boys were safe, and I knew what I had to do next. I resisted wiping my hands on my skirt, fought down the bile rising in my throat, squared my shoulders, and grabbed my expensive leather portfolio bag off the floor. Before Randy B. could find his voice—and before any of us could find out if it had gone up an octave—I muttered, “Yeah, yeah. I’m going,” marched to the door, yanked it open, and strode out.
He didn’t need to shout after me “You’ll never work in this town again;” it was implied. And he didn’t. So he gets points for not succumbing to one of the millions of clichés that ping around L.A. like so many annoying gnats. Or Mini Coopers. But that didn’t stop him from spewing a few choice epithets at my back, as well as some threat about my being “done” and another tidbit about “charges for assault.”
I wanted to march triumphantly out of the building, with inspiring music swelling in my wake. But I had to make a brief stop at Randy’s assistant’s desk. I smiled as naturally as I could at the poor waif, who was staring at me, saucer-eyed, terrified of what I had done to set her boss off, and said softly, “Heather, please tell me you have some hand sanitizer in your desk.”
* * *
The late-spring California sunshine hit me full in the face when I burst out of the office building at the outer edge of the studio lot. I crossed the road to my reserved parking space near the anomalous clump of pines that were used for many of our forest scenes. I just wanted to get into my Porsche Cayenne, crank up the AC, and put some distance between me and Randy B.’s balls.
My phone rang as I drove through the gate. I glanced down at the screen. Jaya, bless her. I hit the speakerphone button.
“Anybody else and this would have gone to voice mail,” I said as I pulled out into heavy afternoon traffic on Melrose.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“What?”
“What happened just now?”
“Hey, I know we have a psychic connection, but this is a little spooky.”
She sighed, a whufin my ear. “Twitter?” she said, the “duh!” implied. She never wasted words.
Jaya was the greatest. She had started out as an associate producer three years ago on the show, but even before Modern Women hit the big time, I had promoted her to full producer—and my second in command. And why not? She was smart, clever, intuitive, bold, classy—“sharp,” as my mother would say. I admired her, I relied on her. She was my best friend.
“Wow. I’ve always believed in the power of social media, but that might be a record.”
“Tell me you did not actually grab the Bastard’s nuts.”
I paused. “They can get all that into 140 characters? Ooh, let me try: ‘Guess who grabbed . . .’ No, wait, there must be some way to shorten ‘grabbed.’”
“Shut up and tell me!”
“You realize the contradiction in that.”
“Argh!Did you or did you not actually touch his . . . his . . . you know.”
“Er . . .”
“Oh my God.” A call-waiting bip cut into Jaya’s voice. I ignored it.
“And yes, it was as nasty as you’d think.”
“I’m sure. But I meant ‘oh my God’ in the sense of—”
“Is he going to take it out on the show?”
“Something like that, yes.”
Another bip. I ignored that one too. Jaya wasn’t kidding—the word was out, apparently, and everyone was trying to call me to get the scoop.
I scooted through the side streets of West Hollywood just to avoid the 101 freeway. The late-afternoon commute probably hadn’t started yet, but I didn’t feel like chancing it. I’d had enough stress for one day. I decided to take the slow route to my home in the canyon.
Bip. Ignored.
“Look,” I said, “don’t worry about it. It’s EWW’s top-rated show. Randy would be a damned fool to kill it just because he’s pissed at me.”
“If you say ‘the show must go on,’ I will reach through this phone and throttle you.”
“I was thinking of serenading you with the Titanictheme song, actually. ‘My heart will—’”
“Stop it right now.”
“Okay, okay. Seriously? Yeah, the Bastard wants me dead, but just for the moment. It’ll pass. I’ll lie low for a couple of days. In the meantime, save yourself. Launch the lifeboats. You had nothing to do with it, you’re completely innocent, you don’t even know me—”
“I get it.”
“Tell the crew too. ‘Near, far, where-eh-ver you—’”
“I said stop it!” Silence from Jaya for a moment, although I could just about hear her brain working, analyzing the situation. “Are you sure he’ll calm down?”
“Yes, Ms. Singh,” I assured my friend with more bravado than I actually felt. “Totally sure. Can you just, you know, keep things running for a little while, while I hide out in my bunker and wait for the Wrath of the Bastard to pass? When he summons me in a few days, I’ll dutifully beg his forgiveness and we can continue on like nothing ever happened. The only thing we’ll have sacrificed is a little of my pride. Okay? It’ll be fine.”
* * *
The rest of my drive home was punctuated with text pings and my phone ringing nonstop. I ignored it all, especially once I started climbing the twisty road toward home. I loved my little rental off Mulholland Drive. I was always a little too nervous to actually buy a house; I was afraid I’d jinx the success of the show if I forked over a huge
amount of money. Turned out I might not have been too far off the mark. But still, my rental was great—a long, low, “mod” affair set back from the road (which was something in that area), built in the 1950s, with lots of clean lines and angular spaces. Plus it had a fireplace in the living room with a slate facing; you could just see the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Ava Gardner sipping manhattans in front of it. It was my haven—nice and quiet, with a beautiful view of, well, okay, other neighbors’ fences and rooftops. But good enough for me.
I pulled my SUV around the semicircular drive in front of the recessed front door and climbed out, eager for only the twitter of birds, not the gossip of Twitter, and got . . . AC/DC thumping and screeching from every pore of my poor old ranch. That could only mean one thing: Jamie, my stepbrother, was in town.
When I went to turn the handle of my front door and found it about six inches ajar, I knew he was in there. My irritating but, lucky for him, basically lovable stepbrother, son of my mother’s second husband (of four, and possibly counting), had this irritating habit of never closing anything he opened—doors, cabinets, drawers—as though he just didn’t have the minuscule amount of energy required to finish any job.
I dropped my bag in the foyer. I couldn’t announce my presence or call his name; “Hells Bells” was effectively drowning out anything within normal hearing range. For about a mile. This part of the house was always in shadow, so I figured a few flicks of the recessed lighting would get his attention. It did; within seconds my stepbrother slouched into view, shirtless, his slight potbelly jutting out above his pajama pants, a half-mangled sandwich in his hand. Lovely.
He said something, but I could tell only because his lips were moving. I shouted back, “What?!” but I couldn’t even hear myself. I mimed a remote, slamming my thumb on the invisible device. After a second he figured out what I was trying to communicate, grinned, and produced the remote in his other hand. AC/DC was reduced to a dull roar.
