Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) (7 page)

***

Hotel sex had its benefits (roomy suite, surfaces and linens that were miraculously spotless by the same time the next day) but there was an unexpectedly sharp thrill to making love to Lindsay in her studio apartment.

That first time he had Christmas dinner with her family, he’d had more beers than he could keep track of out on the porch with her brother-in-law Rusty, and they insisted that he not even walk back to his house. He’d been given the living room couch, and Lindsay had set herself up on the smaller couch nearby, to watch him in case he inadvertently hurt himself in the middle of the night. Truth was he’d been more alert than he let on, and he spent an uncomfortable night with his eyes closed, knowing she was sleeping within reach.

So in the early morning, day three in New York, Jake was extra horny as he waited for her to finish her shower. He sat on her couch and tried to focus on the furniture, to keep him from needing his own hand to give him relief, but it helped only microscopically. Anything, even that round coffee table that looked like a cross section of the earth, could be a place he could prop her up on and satisfyingly sink into her.

Lindsay emerged from the bathroom, pink towel wrapped around her body, damp hair darker against her shoulders. She had walked past him, distracted, and then backed up.

“You’re hard.” There was a lilt in her voice, a smile.

“Thanks for noticing.”

“We had sex before leaving your hotel.”

He adjusted his pants, briefly lessening his discomfort, but also making her very aware just how hard. “I remember. I like how you’ve laid out your furniture, by the way. Everything’s facing the door.”

She paused and her gaze did a sweep of her dining set, couch, bed. “You’re right. I never have my back to the door.”

“It’s secure. I like it.”

“How long have you been hard?”

He shrugged. “Maybe since we walked in.”

“Were you always like this?”

“It’s this place. It smells like you.”

She inched closer, slowly, her hand going up to the fold that held her towel in place. “Let me guess—is a fantasy about doing me in my bedroom in Fremont involved at all?”

He coughed. “Not your bedroom. The living room.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re horrible. With the children upstairs? My sister and her husband too?”

“Rusty and I worked out a signal, you know. We wouldn’t have been interrupted.”

“You and your signals.” The towel came off, fell on the coffee table.

“Oh dear God.”

Jake looked up in the same direction, then smiled and stepped in front of her. As if he could hide the twenty-foot banner with his face on it, hanging right there next to the archway they were about to walk through. “Yeah, we’re doing this for a sec.”

“A
sec
?”
Davis School of Film New York presents: A conversation with Jacob Berkeley.
Lindsay pointed to the banner. “It starts in five minutes. Right now.”

“Yeah. It’s really close to your place; didn’t think you’d mind.”

“You said we were going to go out to eat! ‘Explore the neighborhood.’”

“Yeah,” Jake said, pulling her in through the arch. “After we do this.”

“You managed to get this in your schedule while taking a consultant job and committing to go to an environment conference in Hong Kong?”

“Cora’s very efficient.”

Truth was, Lindsay had never had to deal with Jake’s fame, apart from seeing his photo all the time in random places. When they saw each other, even when he was already on
Rage
, they were mostly home, or places where he was barely recognized. And then Lindsay found herself being led into a building, apparently the campus of a film school she’d always walked by but never noticed. A short, pixie-haired girl with adorable yellow-frame glasses, wearing a shirt with the words “It’s the sled” across her chest, met them at ground floor and breathlessly told them that she’d be bringing them up to the auditorium.

And then Lindsay was being ushered to the front row of said auditorium, easily buzzing with the noise of over a hundred people, film students, up on a Saturday to see
Jacob Berkeley, star of TV’s Rage Eternal.
Lindsay was disoriented.

“They need to mic me up backstage,” he was telling her. “I’ll be back.”

“You’re so sneaky,” she said, and he planted a quick kiss on her before leaving.

Her phone began to ring, and one of the ushers told her that she had to take the call outside. Or could she ask them to call back after an hour. But it was Cora, Jake’s manager, so Lindsay walked up the steps surrounding the auditorium and took the call outside.

“Jake’s Lindsay,” Cora said, by way of greeting. “I don’t think we’ve actually met. But thanks for getting in touch. Jake’s Davis Film School panel on time?”

It took a second for Lindsay to digest this, how easily Cora established what they were to each other. Like Lindsay was supposed to know about Jake’s schedule, and this wasn’t one surprise after another for her.

“Cora, hey,” she said. “Yeah, it’s starting in a few minutes. They’re setting up. Thanks for calling me back.”

“No, no, I should have done that first actually. I do that. I make calls. You said call you back when I had the time.”

“Right.” She did call Cora, yesterday, when Marnie had gotten back to her with the manager’s number. She had been directed to voicemail, and she didn’t know what to say, so she asked for this. A call. “I guess I wanted to ask you how Jake’s been lately.”

Cora paused. Lindsay noticed this because Cora was breathing audibly, like she was on a treadmill, and then there was no breath. “Excuse me? He’s all right, isn’t he?”

“Well yeah, but...I guess I need to know why he shows up here without telling me? Of course you’d know this, you’d be aware of his plans for everything.”

“If you’re wondering if he’s terminally ill, no he’s not. Doesn’t he share his medical results with you or something like that?”

Lindsay laughed. No, she wasn’t that paranoid. Was she? “Oh I wasn’t thinking that.”

“A man can’t have a change of heart? He just wants to spend more time with you. And do that thing with trees that he thinks he missed out on.”

“Did anything trigger this? I haven’t heard from him in more than a year and then he’s practically living with me.”

“Lindsay, the guy had a rough year. It was good for him in some ways, because I’m sure you know that he acted his ass off and earned everyone’s respect for it, but it was rough. I’m sure he took stock of his life and decided that he wanted you back in it.”

I should want to hear this.
It was all perfect, everything that should reassure her.

“But isn’t he supposed to be in the middle of filming? They’re usually at work this time of year.”

“Oh, the France shoot got pushed back. Did he tell you that?”

“No.”

“Season 3 is France. French Revolution period. Exciting. They’ve done some key scenes in the studio but had to break because the France permits needed to be arranged. He should be there about a week after the end of his obligations to your foundation. You should go with him, if you’re not busy.”

Because that was what she would do, right? If she were still Jacob Berkeley’s girlfriend, after the three weeks he’d be in New York.

“Thanks, Cora,” she said.

“You’re with him though? Finally?”

“I guess I am.”

“I’m happy for you two, really. Don’t want to think I messed anything up by taking him away from California. Glad he manned up and told you how he feels.”

Lindsay nodded, but frowning while at it. “Thank you, Cora. Thanks for calling too.”

When she walked back into the auditorium, Jake was sitting on one of two chairs on the stage. The other held a woman, looked like she was in her forties, had bright red hair, wearing an entire khaki-colored outfit. She was dressed like she was going on a safari, while Jake was in jeans and a gray shirt.

Lindsay found her seat as a disembodied voice told everyone to keep quiet, the “conversation” was about to start.

“I have a class at this exact time, and I don’t see any of you in it,” the woman said, a microphone was pinned to the neckline of her top. The room was filled with nervous laughter even before she finished her sentence. “I should have handsome young men sit up here every Saturday morning. As you know, I’m Pamela Rowe and I teach Film Theory here. With us this morning is Jacob Berkeley, you know him as Charlie, or Charles, from the wildly successful series
Rage Eternal.
”

Jake’s smile as he waved to his adoring crowd was pure sunshine. It could power a small city. It was charm that she knew he had, but didn’t realize he had mastered already. It was a weapon, quite dangerous.

He sat back as the lights dimmed and the screen behind them began to show a montage of clips from the show. It was kind of a jumble of scenes she didn’t understand, not having seen an episode, but she could hear the audience behind her and knew every time the clip was from a scene they loved.

It looked like a good show. She should start watching it.

He had a hand over his mouth by the time the last scene ended, and the lights came back on. He took that hand away and revealed a big smile.

“Let me be the first to say that it’s a travesty that you don’t have an Emmy nomination right now,” Pamela Rowe said, and the crowd applauded, agreeing with this being a “travesty.”

“Thank you, but it’s all right,” Jake said. “That’s not what we do it for.”

It became clear very quickly that this was going to be a conversation about his life, and Ms. Rowe began it from a fairly recent point in time—his start at acting. Lindsay was strangely disappointed by this, thinking that maybe she’d get a special mention for being in his life prior to
Rage
...but that wasn’t professional. This was a film school, and they wanted to know about his work, right? Not his non-work life. It wasn’t any of their business.

She’d seen him give interviews before, and he had a few standard stories.

How he was discovered: Cora Barker was a former teacher at Addison Hill University, and was still somewhat active in their media school. He was presenting a paper in his lit class, she happened to be visiting his teacher that day, and he caught her attention. She knew of a part in an upcoming show that needed to be cast, and she took a chance and fielded him. He was instantly hired as Charlie Sloane, a detective, investigating a series of grisly, and likely supernatural, deaths in upstate New York. Jacob was seen to be a good foil for the established actor Danny Wilde, who was headlining a television show for the first time.

She was happy for him when this all happened. Also disoriented because she wasn’t sure they’d stay friends when he left. That of course had since been debunked.

Pamela Rowe had moved on. “I can tell you that it was an absolute joy for me to discover that season 2 would be entirely set over a hundred years in the past, but featuring the same two characters. Did you know this, when you came in to audition for a supernatural crime show?”

So that explained why his costumes were different, when she saw promotional photos earlier this year. But also, sadly, she really just didn’t bother to learn much about what Jake did. It wasn’t fair to him.

“...so yes, they warned me about this,” Jake was saying. “They had me read for a few...
anticipated
time periods.”

“How far back will it go?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

“It was worth a shot, Jacob. May I call you Jacob? This was your first ever acting role, and you’ve been cast alongside Danny Wilde. How has he influenced your craft?”

“Until I met him I didn’t realize how much of a craft this could be. I had a beer with him the night before we started, and then the next morning he showed up as John Weeks.
As John freaking Weeks.
Accent, posture, gait...it was unnerving, because I showed up as myself. I’m still learning.”

That might sound disingenuous, from someone over a hundred people had come in to see, but Jake showed nothing but sincerity. He was also answering questions in a mildly flirtatious way, and Lindsay gave herself a minute to decide if it bothered her or not.

It didn’t.

This Film Theory teacher seemed like a genuine fan of the show, by the way.

...We’ve seen Charlie see four, eight, twelve hours in the future. Has a rule been established about the limits of his power?

...Is the cat supposed to mean anything?

...How much of an immersion in crime investigation did you have to do?

...Did you witness an actual exorcism?

...Will it ever be addressed how John and Charlie met? Everyone has their theories.

And then this:

“Will we be seeing Eve next season, in any way?”

Eve, obviously Jessica’s character. Lindsay inadvertently straightened up in her seat, wanting to hear every word of this response.