Colder than Ice

by Jane Galaxy

  “What’s up?” he murmured in reply, partly glad to have an interruption and partly wishing he could go back to daydreaming about the way Sophie’s skin would look in morning light against his sheets.

  “Do you—” Joanna leaned over to look at Sophie, still fast asleep, and chuckled. “God, she’s lucky she can sleep on planes. I could take elephant tranqs and be awake the whole time.” Joanna gave him a crooked smile. “You’re the only other person awake, and I’m losing my mind. Do you want to come sit?” The blonde gestured back over at her own pod, with the chair sitting fully upright. She didn’t have a seat partner.

  Tristan was reluctant to leave Sophie behind, but whatever she’d done to make herself fall asleep—more like whatever you did to her, said a velvet voice inside his head—was clearly working, because Sophie hardly seemed to register him leaving, shifting to nuzzle against the other side of her seat.

  When they were sitting, Joanna tilted her head back over to Sophie.

  “How’s all that going?”

  Tristan looked across the cabin at his fake-but-not-fake-girlfriend and had another momentary flash of her writhing back among the pillows while he circled his thumb over her core.

  “Er,” he said.

  “It’s probably different from having to hire a professional,” Joanna said mildly—the practice was common in Hollywood, mostly for people who wanted the public to believe their projected brand of being definitely straight and not at all anything else, ever.

  “Oh,” she continued quickly over his reflective silence, “I didn’t mean to suggest that you—”

  “No, no,” Tristan replied, waving it off, “I know what you were going for.” Of course, sometimes actresses who were tired of the tabloids haranguing them with stories about how lonely and childless and meaningless their lives were, would hire fake partners to be seen and photographed with. It was an efficient way of flying beneath the “tragic radar” and maintaining a steady baseline of relative normalcy. But that was relatively minor.

  He studied Joanna’s profile for a moment, wondering what experience she’d had with the Hollywood beard system and what sort of private life she led. For all their time together as Lucius and Morganna, she was still something of a mystery, someone who listened more than she talked between takes.

  “What about you?” he said. Joanna glanced up and he caught the momentary surprise on her face. “How’s filming going on your end, sis?” That earned him another of her half-grins.

  “You know, I don’t think any of my roles have ever had a brother,” she remarked. “Tomorrow’s a Mystery is the closest I ever came.”

  “Well, don’t worry, you might not have a brother for much longer,” he said, and added in a mysterious voice, “If Mordred gets his way now that Lucius’s dark plans have been discovered.”

  She tossed her hair to one side as if it was arranged in the classic Morganna fishtail braid and said in her most imperious voice,

  “The Toluma’a stands eternal, brother, but nothing withstands my fists.” They looked at each other, and both snorted into a fit of hushed laughter.

  “You do her justice, you know.”

  “It helps to have solid lines,” Joanna replied. At his silence, her expression changed. “Oooh, I get the feeling you have an opinion about the dialogue you don’t want to share with the class.”

  “Oh, it’s not that at all—”

  Joanna laughed quietly in the hum.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Prasad.”

  “No, he’s my best friend, he wouldn’t be too badly insulted if I told him his work wasn’t up to par.”

  “Ah, so you’re allowed to be his critic?”

  “Well,” Tristan tilted his head back and forth, debating whether to tell her. “To be perfectly honest with you… they’re not his lines.”

  Joanna frowned slightly, confused, and Tristan muttered out the side of his mouth.

  “He wrote the script based on the comics, but was getting pressure from the studio and asked me to polish it up because I knew the original stuff so well. I do it on the side sometimes for people—you know what I mean. Anyway, I made some of the changes—just to tighten things up—and added a bit of punch to the classic lines.”

  Her eyes widened in understanding, and she nodded again at where he’d been sitting.

  “What does she think?”

  Tristan opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.

  “Oh boy,” said Joanna.

  “You guys aren’t running lines, are you?”

  Tristan whipped around so fast he felt it ringing in his neck. Sophie was standing right behind him, a few wispy strands of hair sticking out from her bun, rubbing at one eye.

  Had she overheard their conversation?

  “Hi,” he said, a bit too brightly as it turned out, because Sophie took a step back and a moment of blinking before she could answer.

  “I have no idea how you’re still awake,” she said. “Or this chipper.”

  “We have no idea how you can sleep like this,” Joanna said behind him. Tristan glanced at her, suddenly fearful that she’d spill everything, but the careful expression on the blonde gave him the slightest hope that she would have the good sense to be discreet. Maybe she was good at that sort of thing. “What did you take? I might have to bum some off you, whatever it is. CBD? L-theanine? Prescription-level drugs?”

  “Hmm? Oh, I just didn’t sleep well last night, I guess.” The corner of her lip curved when she looked down at Tristan, and he felt himself flush very hot when she turned and ambled back over to their seat.

  “Hmmm,” said Joanna, and the tone of her voice told him she’d already guessed everything. Tristan passed a hand over his face, mostly to cover the way he’d turned red.

  “You’re not going to do what Jax did, are you?”

  Joanna’s eyebrows shot up almost into her hairline.

  “What’d Jax do? Oh God, was it something disgusting? If it was something disgusting, definitely tell me.”

  Tristan sighed, remembering.

  “The first time we ever met, he told me that accent would definitely be dropping panties all over the only zip code that matters. I think he genuinely thought it was morale-boosting, or something. I guess he’s gotten better since.”

  Joanna snorted.

  “I like him better these days. It was weird for a bit, with that paparazzi girlfriend,” she wrinkled her nose a bit, “But they’ve grown on me, from what little I’ve seen of them in the past year.” She hesitated a little. “Did you get invited to the wedding?”

  “Did you?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “I asked you second.”

  Tristan shook his head, smiling as Joanna crossed her arms over herself.

  “Fine, be a jerk, jerkface.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have siblings? You talk like you’re one of a set of several,” Tristan replied.

  “I can promise that being an only child doesn’t mean I don’t know how to get on people’s nerves. In fact, it probably contributes to it a little.” Joanna eyed him. “So, did you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, thinking of the woman in the restaurant. Cathy from Los Feliz. One wedding brings on another, she’d said, raising her eyebrows at both him and Sophie significantly, as though she could make it happen. He’d always liked weddings, but had never really had much opportunity to watch close friends be brought together. Tristan was usually invited to weddings of university friends, or he’d be invited as a coworker to an assistant director’s wedding.

  He’d missed his sister Julia’s wedding for his audition to the Royal Shakespeare Company. The gift of a sterling silver platter had gone unremarked upon, with no thank you card, or acknowledgment of his heartfelt letter apologizing profusely for not being there. Tristan hadn’t spoken to her in three years—she and her husband were busy staging plays in one of the smallest theaters in London, down by the riverside, with only bleachers for the audience to sit on. Reviews
always mentioned how the audience would wait in the lobby just next to the dressing rooms, and how you could reach out and touch the actors.

  Tristan was certain his oldest sister was enjoying herself, but likely with a great deal of fussing about it all. It had been her way as a child.

  He still needed to ask Sophie about the wedding, he realized.

  “There’s a look about you,” remarked Joanna, bringing him back to where he was sitting on the airplane.

  “Hmm? Just thinking,” he replied. “I haven’t asked Sophie if she wants to go with me—d’you think I should?”

  “What, like inviting her to prom or something?”

  Tristan gave an honest shrug, and Joanna grinned.

  “God, no wonder the ladies like you—you’ve still got a schoolboy charm to you. Somebody’s gonna grab those dimples and that chin and just never let go.”

  “Spoken like a genuine older sister.”

  Joanna huffed out a laugh, sounding shocked.

  “Don’t look at me like that! Morganna’s older than Lucius by several thousand years.”

  “Of course you would know that, Tristan. I bet you know the exact number.”

  He did, but Tristan pointedly did not answer, and Joanna laughed.

  “I think you should ask her. You two are cute together—whatever you’ve got going, keep it going. Trust me, if you can find someone who you genuinely have something in common with, and you can stand each other instead of everyone else, it’s worth your while.”

  They talked for a while longer, and then Tristan thanked her and rose to return to his seat. It wasn’t until he got there and found Sophie asleep once again that the temporarily absent ache in his lower half twinged again, reminding him that it was only a few hours until they would land at Heathrow. Soon he’d be back in the city he hadn’t been able to face almost two years ago.

  Perhaps this time, with Sophie, he could relearn to like it. He could like his flat, find something new and beautiful in the furniture, be able to put his childhood collection of comic books on display instead of whatever some anonymous assistant from his agency decided was snooty and intelligent enough. He was tired of heavy old leather-bound volumes with gold lettering on the spine. They were important pieces of Western culture, sure, but they weren’t his passion, and he couldn’t possibly spend another minute doing things he wasn’t in love with.

  Tristan looked down once more at Sophie, relaxed and curled up in her seat, having nudged closer to him as he’d sat thinking.

  He hoped she’d enjoy London. The orderliness all tangled up with the sheer chaos of a large city. His house, his bed, his affections and love.

  It was with a mixture of heady realization and a surge of adrenaline that Tristan realized he hadn’t heard from that small voice in the back of his head that had kept him company while he’d been in Bali. It had been warning him about not getting too close to Sophie, not losing his head over some girl when he didn’t have a real sense of perspective on her.

  But it all fit together so closely—the two of them both writers, enjoying the same things, her down-to-earth nature and refreshing and stubborn refusal to be starstruck by his celebrity, insisting on treating him as a normal person—that the voice seemed to have gone silent.

  Maybe as a kind of permission.

  Even when he grew drowsy and began to picture himself at the wedding he’d been invited to—there was Sophie, too, dressed in a flowing frock and with her hair beginning to spill beautifully from a chignon as he spun her around the dance floor. Laughing into a glass of champagne.

  He closed his eyes and let his head sink down onto the top of Sophie’s.

  Neither of them would be able to eat a single bite of the food that had been chosen so carefully, so deliberately, because they’d spend all their time talking with guests. Cutting cake. Listening to toasts.

  Helping her place the train of her dress into a car at the end of the night, clouds of bubbles floating in the night air as everyone said goodbye to the newlyweds.

  And finally, sitting in the backseat, alone and together at the same time.

  Tristan finally fell asleep to the sound of the airplane’s hum.

  Chapter Twelve

  It started right around the time they gathered their hand luggage and went through pre-disembarkation, before anyone in coach: Sophie’s hands went numb.

  Well—not totally numb. She could feel them tingling, but it was like the moment they descended to Heathrow she’d lost her more sophisticated motor skills, and couldn’t fill out the customs paperwork. Tristan leaned over, and the scent of the cologne he’d refreshed while preparing himself for being in the public eye wafted over her, not overpowering but just intriguing enough to make her want to lean in and brush her lips over his throat.

  And then take him home.

  That was a perfectly innocent thing to think, and there was definitely no double meaning to that.

  Right.

  “The most tedious thing to wake up to,” Tristan had said while kindly filling out the most basic details for her. She still had to sign at the end, and give the day’s date, but he seemed intent on doing everything himself—or maybe his ulterior motive was getting it all done as quickly as possible. Grabbing her bag out of the overhead compartment, gathering up her coat, and then his own things as well. And he did it effortlessly, as though it was no big deal.

  Like he was her boyfriend, and he did nice things for her like this all the time.

  She tried to give herself a little zhuzh before touchdown. Well, she’d wiped the day-old mascara from beneath her eyes and applied a little powder gel to her shiny nose, but Sophie had looked over and seen Joanna removing two halves of a hydrogel face mask while looking glowy and plumped, and wished she’d gotten some kind of special training for this.

  Because the press in London were mean.

  Way more aggressive than in the United States. Even Los Angeles.

  At least that was what Sophie had read about celebrities overseas. She was relieved to see just the usual crowds of people waiting to board at the terminal—looking blasé and as though they were simply going about their days.

  It wasn’t until they got through customs and outside to the waiting town cars that she saw it was all true.

  “Tristan, are you and Sophie engaged!” A man in a safari vest jostled against them, and Tristan tucked his chin into his navy peacoat and walked faster, his grip on Sophie’s hand practically dragging her along.

  “Sophie, what do you think of Gabriella’s showing at the red carpet in Trafalgar last night!” Of course—a touchy subject designed to set one of them off and capture some tossed-off angry soundbyte that would be in the afternoon headlines of every trashy tabloid the newsstands were hocking.

  “Have you picked out an outfit to Jax Butler’s wedding yet? Who are you wearing?” God, there was no end to these people, they were everywhere and had zero rules about leaving a polite or even safe distance between themselves and their poor subjects. It was like being caught in a mosh pit, all the elbows and knees digging into her thighs and hips as they squeezed their way along the sidewalk.

  “How is filming going? Is it true that the script needed multiple rewrites and script doctoring before it could even pass as legible?”

  Someone was laughing at that last question, and Tristan’s grip grew strong enough to make her gasp for breath. Sophie had to make herself not turn her head to look at the man who’d spoken. Script doctoring? They managed to load into a waiting SUV, and made it into morning gridlock traffic without further delay.

  Sophie flexed her hand, feeling her fingers slowly come back to life.

  “You alright?” Tristan said, slightly breathless. She could feel her body finally catching up to the adrenaline rush; he was used to all this, but he was looking a little shaky himself.

  “I’m fine,” she said, squeezing her fist into a ball. It was quiet inside the car, no shouted questions or even the hum of an airplane.

  And
then she remembered that she was in a car with Tristan Eccleston, going to his flat to stay there. With him.

  Her hands began tingling again.

  What was it about being alone with him lately that had this effect on her? She wasn’t shy by nature, wasn’t ashamed of her body or sexuality. It just seemed… well, normally she’d say that she wasn’t the type to just go jumping into bed with anyone, but the other night would make a liar of her for that.

  God, she was getting wet in the car just thinking about it. Was he waiting for her to bring it up? Would they just jump each other in the apartment? She wasn’t even sure he’d slept the whole flight—the one time she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom he’d been talking with Joanna. But Sophie could swear she dreamed that he came back over to curl up next to her, all warm and with huge limbs circling her, safe and loved.

  She blinked. That was a new realm of thinking. Sophie gently set that to the side, not content to dismiss it, but not really willing to think too closely given that the car had stopped outside of a townhouse with a black door and white painted trim. The driver was already helping Tristan carry their bags to the front door while she lingered on the sidewalk.

  A car door closing across the street made her turn—was that person walking toward her? Another paparazzi? They didn’t need people following them. She hustled herself inside just as the driver was making his way out.

  And then they were really alone, standing in the foyer of his house, looking at the maple hardwood floors and light gray slate tile.

  “What d’you think? I can make us some tea,” Tristan said, and disappeared through a doorway. She passed a living room with tall and narrow windows, one little area at the far corner a half-hexagonal window seat. The staircase went up into a darkened area. She kept going, and found Tristan in a classic black-and-white-tiled shotgun kitchen, already flipping a switch on the electric kettle in the corner.

  He smiled.

  “First things first,” he said, gesturing to the pair of mugs in front of him. One of them had a stylized graphic of the Protectorate logo, and as she looked closer, Sophie realized it wasn’t official studio merch: it was fan art that someone had done.