Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (26 page)

Emma asks, “How so?”

“It was that interview you did on Ida,”
Danna says. “That’s what finally stopped seeing you as the ghost of Damian and
my past, but as the person you are.”

“Really?” Emma asks. “I never saw the
tape, but I would have thought there would be nothing but partially-veiled
contempt for pretty much everyone in the room.”

“Oh no, that came through pretty well in a
lot of places. Not
gonna
lie,” Danna says,
“hilarious. That’s not what did it, though. It was your smile and what you said
about it in those pictures. I see pictures of myself all the time after our
parents died and after my diagnosis and I want to just tear every last one of
them up. I know they’re different things, but I always felt the same way about
those pictures of me. Seeing that smile on my face made me feel like a liar.
When you described that in your own life, I don’t know if it was just the
knowledge that we had something in common or what, but I finally started
listening to you as you were speaking. You may be a bit of a scandal magnet,
but I think you’re someone I’d like to have around. Besides,” Danna says, “I
heard about how you broke that fucker’s nose when he tried to confront you
after the show. That is just so fucking hardcore, you have no idea.”

Emma laughs and, though I’m still
skeptical about my sister’s newfound pair of angel wings, I permit a smile to
come over my face.

We sit and we talk for hours and it not
groundbreaking or particularly important for any reason other than the fact
that it’s happening. The words themselves don’t matter so much; it’s just the
fact that they’re being spoken at all.

After a while, the moving truck carrying
all of Danna’s crap arrives at the house and they lug her shit into her room.
She goes off to unpack while Emma and I sit down to dinner.

Things are quiet for the most part. We’re
just enjoying each other’s proximity.

Dinner comes to an end and Emma helps me
with the dishes. It seems like things are starting to wind down when Emma asks
if I’d like to go for a ride in her car.

I shrug and give my consent and so we
drive, Emma at the wheel, me looking for reasons why this moment isn’t just
about perfect and only coming up with a few.

“I have some news,” Emma says.

“Yeah?” I ask. “What’s that?”

“My dad left town,” she says. “He gave me
a call today to let me know that he’s back in Illinois, safe and sound, and
that I don’t have to worry about him coming around anymore. Do you happen to
know anything about that?”

“Me?” I ask. “How would I even know how to
find your dad, much less convince him to go home?”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “Danna was
staying at that same hotel and she denied even knowing that my father was in
town or, for that matter, living.”

“There are a couple of possibilities,” I
tell her. “One possibility is that he realized what he was doing was wrong and
he decided to stop before he made things any worse.”

“Try again,” Emma says.

I chuckle. “Okay,” I tell her. “Maybe he
caught wind of what you did to Ben and he decided that if he didn’t get the
hell out of Dodge, he’d be next.”

“As great a fantasy as that is, I really
don’t think that would do it, either,” she says. “I think he’d have gone on a
killing spree before he’d admit, even to himself, that he was scared of his
daughter.”

“Well, it’s a mystery then,” I tell her.

She doesn’t need to know that I ran into
the guy one night after Danna started staying there and I asked him what it
would take for him to leave and never come back.

Maybe I should have learned from Emma and
maybe he’s just going to end up coming back for more, but I may have intimated
that if we had any further trouble from him, I had some “friends” who would
happily “deal” with the situation.

That seemed to do the trick.

We pull onto Emma’s street and her
motivation to take a drive becomes clear.

“You know,” she says, “things taking a
turn for the better after they’ve been bad for so long has a way of making a
person feel pretty damn alive.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I’ll give you a choice,” she says after
entering the code for her gate, “car or front lawn.”

I laugh, but she doesn’t seem to be
joking.

“Front lawn?” I ask.

“It’s not totally private,” she says, “but
it beats driving for three hours only to end up with ants all over your body.
I’m asking you to choose between the car and the front lawn, because honestly,
I don’t think I can make it much further than that.”

I smile and laugh and, because I’m a
little worried about ants, myself, I answer, “Car.”

The gate’s closing behind her and Emma’s
parking in her garage. She’s barely pressed the button to drop the garage door
before her seatbelt is off and she’s halfway out of her seat, kissing me.

I manage to unfasten my own seatbelt
before Emma’s halfway out of her seat and into mine, tearing my shirt open as
she moves from one side of the car to the other.

“You’re in a good mood today,” I tell her.

“I told you I was,” she says between hot,
hard kisses.

She’s ripping her own shirt from her body,
and I’m undoing her bra, allowing her perfect breasts to breathe.

I coyly tongue her nipples and she’s
lifting her body to allow herself better access to undo my belt and my pants.

Before I even know it, she’s facing away
from me, sitting on my lap and she reaches over to the side of the seat and
leans it back all the way.

“There,” she says and turns back around to
face me with more ease than one would think possible given the limited amount
of space we have to work with, “that’s better.”

“You know,” I tell her, “you could have
just asked.”

“I know,” she says, “but I was trying to
stay in the moment.”

That seems fair enough.

“Put your hands flat on my sides, fingers
pointing down just above my waistline,” she says.

I tease her specificity, but I do as I’m
told. Emma unbuttons her pants and unzips the zipper.

“Slide your hands down my legs,” she says.
“My pants should come right off.”

“You’ve done this before,” I muse, and per
her instructions, I slide my hands down the sides of her legs, taking a moment
to grasp that movie star ass of hers.

I slip her pants down as far as I can and
she kicks her legs out from there. When she moves her bare gorgeousness toward
me again, she places one knee on the outside of each of my legs and, without
another moments’ hesitation, she lowers herself onto my hard and waiting
erection.

Instinctively, I grab my shaft and, as I
slip out of her just a little, I start working my tip over her already swollen
bud when she grabs my hand and stops me.

“I think we can spare the upholstery a
deluge,” she says and, replacing my hand with hers on my penis, she puts me
back at the mouth of her entrance and lowers herself onto me again.

We kiss and our bodies writhe together,
every intentional and unintentional touch of her skin against mine only taking
me more completely into the sensuality of right now.

She presses her body into mine, and I hold
her close, running my fingertips over her upper back as she rides me.

Her hips are churning over me and I lift
my butt just enough to add that extra bit of momentum as she falls completely
onto me.

“That’s it,” she tells me. “Now grab my
hips,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of room to move, so you’re going to have
to help me if you want me to fuck you harder.”

“I can’t believe I used to think you were
a prude,” I tell her, putting my hands on her hips.

“All right,” she says. “Do it hard and
with my rhythm,” and I let my hands move with her body to familiarize myself
with her pace before I strengthen my grip enough to guide her body with greater
drive up and down my erection.

Glancing out the rearview mirror, I see
how the car is rocking and I chuckle with a pretty decent amount of immaturity.

Emma kisses me on the mouth and, although
I’m not sure whether it’s because she’s in the moment or because she just want
me to shut up, I’m happy to focus my attention back on her.

I move my hands from Emma’s hips and place
one hand across her back onto the opposite shoulder and the other around her
lower back, my hand resting just above her hip on the other side, and I pull
her even closer as I continue bringing her down faster and harder onto me.

“Oh god,” she says, “oh yeah. I’m going to
come, baby,” she says and a moment later, she’s quivering in my arms.

We’re kissing and there’s not a sliver of
air between us as the tempo increases and the feeling begins to crescendo and
it’s all I can do to keep enough air in my lungs.

“I’m going to…” she trails off and the
next sound from her is a loud, enthusiastic moan that seems to stretch on
forever as a single note of the most perfect symphony.

I’m getting close myself seeing, hearing,
feeling, smelling, and tasting this woman. She’s immaculate and that’s when she
says it.

She’s still coming hard on top of me and
her hips are moving furiously, though the rest of her body is comparatively
still and in a long whisper, she says, “I love you.”

A few seconds later and Emma’s slowing her
pace and she opens one eye to look at me because I haven’t said anything yet.

After another half minute, Emma’s
motionless with me still inside her and she’s looking at me with those wide
eyes, saying, “I love you, Damian,” and I could swear that before she says the
words, I had the ability to speak, to respond, to
say
something, but that’s gone now and getting only further away
with every breath that passes with me not saying anything.

More seriously now, Emma looks hard into
my eyes and repeats, one last time, those words, “I love you.”

I know the worst thing I can do here is
not answer, but I’m incapable of anything else at the moment.

Whether it’s that so much has happened
over so few months or whether it’s all that stuff Danna said about Emma still
rattling around in the back of my head or whether I’m still a little resentful
that she didn’t say it back to me that first time, I haven’t a clue, but she’s
starting to lose her patience and I’m just sitting here.

Epilogue

Synchronicity

Emma

“Things don’t always happen as we plan,” I
tell Brock Emsley, host of
Late Night
with the Stars
, one of the five or six top late night talk shows currently
out there. “Sometimes, it’s all you can do to take the leap and see what
happens.”

“Well,” Brock says, “it looks like that
philosophy’s been working pretty well for you so far. I want to thank you for
coming to see us and chat for a little bit about what you’ve got going on,” he
says and turns from me to the hot camera. “After these messages, we’ll be back
with a very special live performance by Sons of Anatolia. Stay with us.”

The red light goes off and Brock leans
over and, shaking my hand, he says, “Thank you so much for coming. It’s always
nice to have an Oscar winner on the set.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” I tell him and,
when directed, I follow a man in a blazer off the stage.

The Oscar, that wasn’t for
Flashing Lights
.

After all the hell and tumult that went on
during the filming of my first major role, the movie opened to a modest
reception. The first couple of weeks saw huge numbers, but after everyone
subconsciously realized that they’d seen that film a hundred different times
and the immediacy of my world of scandal began to fade,
Flashing Lights
slowly sunk into the distance.

The reviews weren’t too bad, though.

The award, I won for a role I played as Margaret
Thatcher. One of my reviews even went so far as to say that I managed to make
my character likeable which, according to the author of the review, was a feat
that he didn’t even imagine possible.

I’ve never been that interested in
politics, myself.

It’s been a long time since
Flashing Lights
and it feels like it’s
been even longer.

After his role as the English-tutor-turned
my-character’s-lover in
Lights
, Damian
Jones took another long break from making movies and when he came back, he was
a different man.

For the first time in his career, Damian
wasn’t just the eye candy with the nice smile. He started taking roles that not
only challenged him, but were new, different. He started taking roles
because
they were outside of his comfort
zone instead of sticking to the world of summer comedies.

Things haven’t been all upside for Damian,
though, as his former-would-be-father-in-law, Ed, passed away waiting for a new
heart. That was one of the reasons Damian stayed off-screen for so long.

The two had made their peace, although,
from what I’ve heard, the two of them never stopped talking shit to one another
even until the very end.

Penelope lived for another year, but
without her husband and her daughter, she just didn’t have the will to fight
when she got splenic cancer.

Probably the most difficult thing I’ve had
to deal with since
Lights
was Ben’s
trial. I had to testify about everything that had happened and that took more
out of me than I thought I had to give, but in the end, the jury came back
unanimously: Guilty on all counts.

He tried to play our entire relationship
as if I was constantly pursuing him and he said that the bruises I got, I had
asked for as part of some ultraviolent roleplay. I kind of wanted to go up
there and give him another face full of my forehead, but the presence of the
judge and bailiff sufficiently convinced me to reconsider.

He can rot in prison for all I care.

As for me, well, the job offers are still
coming in. I’m just waiting for the next script that’s going to have that
spark—Damian likes to call it “heart,” though he always seems to laugh after
using the word.

Right now, though, I’m heading home.

The house is quiet when I get there and I
just sit out back with a nice, tall Long Island iced tea. I’m hardly settled
when some invasive prick decides to move his filthy shadow directly between me
and the sun.

What most people don’t understand is that
Damian and I don’t do so well with labels. Well, really, it’s just him that
seems to have the issue with it.

If someone asks if we’re still together, I
say yes. If they ask if I’m still Damian Jones’s girlfriend, I say no.

In the end, really, it was my choice.

After that day in the front seat of my car
when dumbass couldn’t find his fucking tongue to speak, I insisted that we stop
thinking of or referring to each other as boyfriend or girlfriend or
significant other or any of that. Even the term “relationship” is used a little
sparsely around the house.

Once the words changed, Damian stopped
having such a problem when it came time to move on to the next level. His
presence here and now is testament enough of that.

In normal people terms, Damian and I are
about the equivalent to people in a serious relationship who live together, but
in our terms, we’re roommates.

“Saw the show,” he says, “you did great.”

I sigh. “You know,” I tell him, “if you’re
going to blow smoke up my ass at least do the legwork beforehand.”

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“The show doesn’t come on until ten
o’clock,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says, “but I’ve seen enough of
your performances that I’m going to stick with what I said. Call it a
preemptive compliment.”

“Where’s Danna?” I ask.

“She’s off with some guy,” he says. “I
don’t remember his name, but he’s the one with all the tattoos and the
piercings.”

“Uh…” I’m trying to think. “That would be
Carl, right?”

“I don’t even know anymore,” he says.
“After she decided to take her ass off of layaway, it’s gotten impossible to
keep track of all her guys.”

“He seemed like a pretty nice guy when I
talked to him,” I tell Damian.

“I’m sure he is,” Damian says. “I’m sure
they all are.” And now I don’t know if he’s joking or not.

When Damian and I first talked about
moving in together, Danna was the first thing that we talked about.

She and I had gotten off to a bit of a
rocky start, but after that day and after that talk show, she and I finally
started getting along. Now, whenever shithead (Damian) is out of the house,
it’s the two of us, Danna and me.

I think all she really needed was
assurance that I didn’t think I was, neither did I think I would or could
replace, Jamie. That was never my goal.

I never knew Jamie, but I know enough
about her to know that she meant a great deal to Damian and Danna and I have no
reason to feel I need to replace her in their memories, not that I could if I
had wanted to anyway.

“What are we doing tonight?” I ask.

“I thought the three of us might go out
tonight,” he says. “I heard about this new seafood restaurant that just opened
up downtown and I got us some reservations for later. Does that work?”

“I hate seafood,” I tell him. “What else
do they have?”

“I think that’s it,” Damian says.

Damian’s been living here for over a year
now and Danna’s been here just as long. At first, he was considering keeping
his house as a getaway for Danna, but after the first four months of her never
going back to Damian’s old place, he finally decided to let it go.

In some ways, I do resent Jamie, though
I’d never say that to Damian or Danna. She was Damian’s first great love and
that’s a hard act to follow, especially considering the horrible tragedy of her
death and that of the baby.

Maybe it’s not resentment so much as it is
a wish that Damian had allowed himself to keep some doors open for the future.
For one thing, I wouldn’t mind knowing that I might someday get married, but
until or unless something drastically changes in the wiring of Damian’s brain,
that’s not going to happen any time soon.

I find myself wondering a lot what Jamie
must have been like and, if she’d survived, would she and I be friends? Judging
on how Damian and Danna have talked about her in the past, it seems unlikely
that Damian and Jamie would have gotten divorced and so, if she’d lived, my
arrival on the set of
Flashing Lights
would
have been a lot different.

I’m not sure if Damian and I would have
hit it off as friends if he was married, but that kind of pondering is simple
curiosity.

“What about Rodolfo’s?” I ask.

It does bug me when people are late, and
Danna has a penchant for forgetting the time when she’s out with someone. Those
are about the only spats she and I have anymore, though. I just think it would
be good to see her. I feel like she’s been gone on a date for at least the last
few weeks.

“I’ll call her,” he says, “but she’s not
going to be too happy about you overriding her restaurant pick.”

“Oh, so the new seafood place was her
idea?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says.

“All right,” I tell him, “let’s go there.”

“Were you just saying no because you
thought I’d picked the place?” he asks.

“Do you remember what happened last time?”
I ask.

It’s a long story involving a restaurant
with experimental food and an eel that wasn’t quite dead. Yeah, after that, he
lost the privilege to have an opinion on where to go for dinner.

“Just because I’ve picked a couple of bad
places,” he says, “doesn’t mean that every place I’m going to tell you about is
no good.”

“Granted,” I tell him, “but going with
your pick is a gamble and I could really use the meal. I haven’t had anything
to eat today.”

“Sounds like bad planning,” he says and
starts walking away, his phone in his hand, ready to call Danna. “You know,”
Damian says, turning around, “I got an interesting call today.”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he answers. “It was Dutch. He
wanted to know if the two of us would be interested in doing another movie together.”

“Did he mean the two of us as in you and
him or the two of us as in me and you?” I ask, praying for a misunderstanding.

“The two of us,” he says, “as in me and
you.”

“No,” I answer quickly. “Sorry, and please
tell Dutch I say ‘thank you for the offer,’ but I really don’t think I can work
with you.”

“We seemed to do all right the first
time,” he says. “It got us together.”

“Yeah,” I tell him, “and it just as easily
could have torn us apart. It almost did, if you remember.”

“This movie’s different,” he says as if
that has anything to do with anything. “It’s a period piece. They want you to
play a woman named…” and he goes on to describe the movie.

It’s an interesting enough plot, filled
with romance and suspense, but with a cerebral, modern edge to it.

The longer Damian talks, the more excited
he seems and I do feel kind of bad when he gets to the end of his spiel and I
simply repeat my answer, “No.”

We haven’t worked together since
Flashing Lights
, and as much as I love
the man, I really don’t think us working together and living together would end
up being a good idea.

“Okay,” he says. “If you’re not into it,
you’re not into it. I will say, though, that my agent called Academy Awards for
the leading male and the leading female roles and, if we were to do this thing
together, that would be—”

“Yeah,” I interrupt. “That would be us, I
get it. I remember the last time someone in your family called an award and, if
I’m not mistaken, you didn’t even get nominated for
Lights
, did you?”

“I was just trying to get in your pants,”
he says.

“Well, it worked, I guess,” I tell him.
“If you ignore just about everything else that’s happened since we’ve met, you
can absolutely thank your calling your award for our relationship.”

“It wasn’t that bad of a movie,” he says.

“I never said it was a bad movie,” I tell
him. “I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s a good idea for the two of us to
work together.”

“Fine,” he says. “I’ll let my agent know.”

Damian and Danna found it useful to compartmentalize
their relationship so that, for anything work related, Damian talks to her and
refers to her as his agent. For everything else, she’s still his twin sister.

You know, the funny thing is that the two
of them really don’t look all that much alike.

Damian walks off and calls Danna and I
just take another sip of my Long Island iced tea. By the time he comes back,
I’ve almost finished the drink.

“So, I don’t know if you remember my old
assistant Kieran,” Damian says as he nears me again, “but he just got his first
director job.”

“Good for him,” I reply.

“I guess,” Damian says. “I always thought
the guy was kind of an idiot, but maybe he just hadn’t found his calling yet.”

“Is Danna going to be joining us for
dinner?” I ask.