“I know! They’re gonna pay me to kiss him!”
“Jammy devil!” She giggled more and whipped off to get me bubbly I didn’t really need.
I didn’t know what a jammy devil was, but I generally approved of both jam and devils. “Am I bovvered?” I asked no one.
“Hhhhhhhssssssss,” replied Taco.
“Oh, you’re always taking the piss.” I settled back, my glittering bubbly in hand.
You’re going to be brilliant,
I told myself.
And you’ll have a killer British accent any minute now.
Yes—I felt much, much less terrified. No more fear of plummeting into the cold ocean like Kate Winslet in
Titanic
. Although she’d won an Oscar for her icy plunge. Hadn’t she? Leo DiCaprio sure hadn’t. Always a bridesmaid, never a golden statue for Leo. Poor Leo. Only his millions to sustain him. I would absolutely win an Oscar, though. Someday.
I blinked away some of my brain haze, pulled up my script and read the title aloud. “
What Could Go Wrong?
” My case of the yawns reached its zenith after the flight attendant handed me even more champagne. I decided to catnap before I studied my script. A powerful yawn overtook me. Yes, I’d already memorised the thing, anyhow. Super professional…yawn…respected actress…burp. “Excuse me,” I said before I nodded off.
What Could Go Wrong?
by
F. Langley
Draft 2—Shooting Script
Int. The British Museum—night
Chase Dakota,
disbarred barrister (played by Daniel Zhang), crouches in the doorway of a dark gallery of the museum and blows powder into the air. Ghostly streaks of laser light appear, criss-crossing everywhere. The way forward is blocked. His partner in crime, unemployed museum curator
Jayde Loving
(played by Samantha Lytton), pokes her head up from where she’s been skulking along the floor.
Angle On: Jayde tucks some of her red hair into her black skull cap.
Jayde Loving: Daniel Zhang, I loved you in
Mission Extremely Difficult III
.
Chase Dakota: Thank you, lesser-known actress from America. I wanted Kerry Washington for your role. You’re just so…pasty and short.
Jayde Loving: I know. It’s not even genetic.
Chase sneers and turns away from Jayde.
Chase Dakota: Sad. But my star power will guarantee box office success, especially in Sweden. They love me there.
Jayde Loving: Really?
Chase Dakota: Why wouldn’t they? You think blonde people can’t like actors of Chinese descent? That’s racist.
Jayde Loving: What? No, I didn’t mean it that way! I just don’t know anything about Sweden! Except that they made Alexander Skarsgård which, you know, bravo.
Chase glares. Jayde pulls the script from her back pocket.
Jade Loving: I—I’m confused. None of this is in the script.
Chase Dakota: It’s called ‘improvisation’, you hack. If you can’t act, can you at least lose ten pounds?
A shadowy figure slinks in and crouches beside Jayde.
Illicit Lover Sam: I don’t think you should lose ten pounds, my love. Your boobs might shrink, and then where would I lick food off of?
Jayde Loving: You can’t be here! You’re a thief!
Chase Dakota: This film is
about
thieves, idiot. I can’t work with this Yankee trash!
Chase storms off set.
The Director: You’re fired, you bargain-basement Emma Stone.
Jayde Loving: What? No, I—what is happening?
Illicit Lover Sam: Everything seems to be going wrong.
Jayde Loving: No shit, Sherlock.
Illicit Lover Sam: Remember when you didn’t get cast in that episode of
Sherlock
? That was a pathetic day.
They are joined by the executive producer,
Captain Taco.
Captain Taco: When she lost the role, she cried all over me. I was licking salt from my fur for a week.
Illicit Lover Sam: Disgusting. Hey, do you have Ms Washington’s number? I’d rather illicitly lover her.
Jayde Loving: I thought you cared about me!
Illicit Lover Sam: We are now beginning our descent into London Heathrow Airport.
Jayde Loving: I swear by this tray table, I love you, Sam! Don’t leave me!
Illicit Lover Sam: I’m sorry, but you must turn off all romantic attachments in preparation for landing. All penguins to the cockpit.
Angle On: A procession of human-sized penguins begins waddling their way down the aisle of the set, which is now dressed as the inside of an aeroplane. The last one leans over Jayde’s seat. He whispers in her ear.
Giant Penguin: They’ve stopped manufacturing Cheez-Its.
“No!” I yelled, bolting up only to be whipped back into the seat by the belt. Both my seat mate and the once-friendly flight attendant were grimacing as if I were a madwoman.
“Ma’am, please prepare for landing.”
I nodded and shifted from butt cheek to butt cheek, but both were numb as bricks of, well, bricks. My head pounded like a…pounding…lump of…pound cake. I squeezed my eyes shut. Wow—Xanax and champagne do not mix. It was far too early in my career to need rehab—that was the sort of thing you saved for when you slipped to the D-list.
I squared myself away and squeaked as the plane made one of those swooping, steep banks that makes you feel like you’re gonna die.
In…out. In…out. My heart rate slowed with my breathing, and I glanced at the script I’d half-crumpled.
I’m okay,
I told myself. Life was heavenly, after so long a struggle. I was a smart, strong, capable woman with bright red hair at the top of her game.
Not a damn thing would go wrong.
Chapter Two
Reunited and He Feels So Hood
I hopped off the plane at Heathrow and grabbed a coffee post-haste. Caffeine was exactly the chemical I needed to counteract all the other chemicals floating around my arteries.
I have come to realise some of the perks of being a kind-of-somebody—one of them is that you can travel with six suitcases and people smile instead of frown at you. What? I was going to be there for two months, and Momma needs her leopard print. My wardrobe used to come almost exclusively from thrift stores, but since I’d made a few bucks, I’d indulged my inner fashion goddess. I am a five-foot-tall lady built like Betty Boop, and it’s a truth universally acknowledged that body-con dresses inspire strange men at baggage claim to spontaneously help you.
My passport stamped, and my luggage loaded precariously on a cart, I surveyed the immediate area for a person in a suit holding my name on a card. I spied Hill, Platter and Souphanousinphone, but no Lytton.
I leaned against my vanity mountain for ten minutes. Nothing and nobody, save an attempted pickup by a guy in the Marines. I told him that while I was grateful for his service to our country, no, I wasn’t keen on humping him in the airport bathroom. Finally, I took a gander at my phone to see if the travel plans had changed. I saw an email from my studio liaison confirming the cancellation of my pickup. I smelt a rat.
I saw a rat, too. He was the most beautiful rodent I’d ever seen.
“You cancel my ride, and you can’t even be here on time?”
Sam flashed a cheeky grin from underneath his shades and truly goofy beige sun hat. With a rush of pure joy, I silently greeted his dimple, only one, on the left side. It was just for me, that damnable dent. I hadn’t seen it in a month, and the hole it left felt like a missing limb.
“Samantha Lytton, party of one?” He halfheartedly showed me the pathetic sign he’d made on notebook paper. “Or party of seven? What the hell is all this? God, woman. At least my cat is on top.”
“Mawr,” Taco agreed, his furry face pushed against the slots of his kitty jail.
I shoved the cart into Sam’s knees. He made ostentatious being-hurt noises that I ignored. I clapped my hands. “Come, come, underling. Direct my luggage to your vehicle forthwith.” I sailed past him towards the automatic doors leading to Ye Olde London Towne. Or at least the Ye Olde Suburbs. When he followed me into the cloudy afternoon, grumbling profusely, I added, “And stop breaking into my email!”
“On my honour, I would never read your ridiculous inbox. Much, anyway.”
“Honour?”
“‘Honour among thieves’ is a phrase.”
I stopped dead in the parking lot, and he tumbled straight into me. Catching his arm as he headed unceremoniously towards the deck, I said, “I think…the entire idiom is ‘there is
no
honour among thieves’.”
“Well”—he stood and brushed dust off his knees—“everything’s bad if you look at the whole thing.”
I had to laugh. Selective observation is what made our ‘relationship’ work.
“Chauffeurs don’t wear such tight pants, mister.”
He glanced at his painted-on jeans and turned around to present his butt to me. My heart leapt, and my lady parts…let’s just say they weren’t numb from the aeroplane seat anymore. I tugged on his hand. Its strength flowed into mine. “Get the car, Sam. I have some jet lag for you to treat.”
“How inebriated are you, scale of one to ten?”
I kicked him, and he sauntered off with the luggage cart, laughing, that tight butt promising a delightful evening ahead.
* * * *
Kissing and groping, we fell into the door of my apartment, and subsequently onto the floor. I’m certain my new neighbours were clutching their Queen Elizabeth anniversary tea sets in shock.
Personally, I was delighted—his warm, gorgeous mouth on mine, his hands everywhere at once and my skin on fire for him to devour me. He kicked the door closed and hauled me up into his arms, over his shoulder. Is there any better feeling than a manly man carrying you, consensually of course, to his cave of love—
He dropped me. Okay, he didn’t quite drop me, but my butt still smarted from its too-quick meeting with the hardwood floor. And what had caused my lover to suck in a breath, splat me and run away?
“Meowr! Meowr! Meowr!”
Sam opened the carrier, scooped up a freaking-out Captain Taco and rubbed his face in the cat’s black belly. I couldn’t hear everything, but the words ‘wuv,’ ‘miss my widdle baby’ and ‘fluffy wuffy stuffy foo’ were uttered, to the horror of my ears and all right-thinking people. I leaned on my arms and waited for them to finish, like a mortified college freshman whose dorm mate has brought back a lover to fumble with in the shared space. There were even slobbery sounds as Taco pushed the stupid hat off Sam’s head and began eating his hair.
I took the opportunity to explore my new digs, a charmingly-furnished place in creams, browns and mint greens. It was vintage—maybe thirties from the lovely rounded door arches. I rose to explore the rest.
“Where are you going?” Sam asked, the syllables clipped in annoyance.
“Who, me?” I kept going about my business. Ooh! A cute pantry. And the studio had left a gift basket of fruit in the kitchen! How thoughtful, although it’s not surprising that they didn’t leave me what I really wanted—Pizza Rolls. But starlets aren’t supposed to eat fatty foods unless a reporter is present, in order to pretend that they aren’t being forced to diet. “Do you remember my name, Sam? I’m the one not named after tacos.”
An arm snaked around my waist from behind. “Your name? Your name…” The hand attached to the arm crept towards my boob. I batted it away. My backside still hurt, and he would have to work harder than that. “Is it…the most beautiful movie star in the world?”
I snorted. “Really?”
His lips tickled my ear as he whispered, “In this tight dress, is your name Beyoncé?”
I shivered from the caress and pushed back into him. He was hard. So was my breathing. I didn’t remove the hand that now returned to my breast. “You’re getting warmer.”
“Olivia Newton-John?”
Turning to face him, I laughed and said, “Yes!”
“I missed you so fucking much.” He kissed me so urgently it hurt a little, but seeing as I was biting at his lip as if to eat him whole, I didn’t care. The near-violence of his mouth, and his cock pushing against me, made me feel powerful, a goddess who inspires lust and groping. He broke the kiss off to throw me over his shoulder once again. My poor brains sloshed in my skull, afloat on leftover liquor and misplaced gravity.
He took off down a corridor with purpose. “It appears you know the way to the bedroom,” I said.
He grunted and threw me on the bed. Oh, how I’d missed man-grunts since I’d seen him last. Or smelt him. There may be no single scent on Earth I prefer more than the essence of his skin, of him. Not even cheeseburgers.
Everything stopped. He straddled me and balanced himself on his arms. “Did you just moan ‘cheeseburgers’?”
I licked my lips. “I was thinking of you favourably by comparison.”
He cocked a brow, his eyes deepest pools of brown in the fading light of the room. “I take it as a compliment if I scored above ground beef.”
I laughed. Tears came out. “I’m sorry.” I swiped at my face and clutched his white shirt with wet hands. “I missed you, horrible man. Too long.”