Chapter 13 INT. COLE’S TRAILER
Chapter 13
INT. COLE’S TRAILER
There was an ancient Hollywood joke about how you did the acting for free; the paycheck was for the waiting around. As Rhiannon would probably say, Where’s the lie? Two hours into twiddling his thumbs in his trailer, Cole was grateful for the distraction when his phone rang.
“Drew, you’re up early.” As far as Cole could tell, his agent never slept. He seemed to rise with the sun, spend the entire day in the office, and make appearances at parties late into the wee small hours—every night.
The man might actually be a vampire.
“Gotta hustle for my favorite client.”
The next time he was at a Hollywood party, Cole was going to ask around and figure out by what order of magnitude that was a lie. Cole knew it wasn’t true, and Drew knew Cole knew. The compliment was that Cole was important enough to be on the receiving end of the ass-kissing.
“What’s up?”
“I strong-armed Brett into letting me make this call. But honestly, this is thanks to me.”
Parsing these things was impossible. Drew could be telling the truth, or he could be taking credit from Cole’s PR guy. Drew did that sometimes. But then again, he was the person Cole was supposed to be able to trust the most. It wasn’t that big a deal if Drew assumed the wins and the losses for the entire team.
“Look, right after you finish Waverley , you’re going to shoot”—Drew paused for dramatic effect—“the cover spread for GQ .”
“No way.” That was legitimately a big deal. Cole had done Men’s Health several times, but there seemed to be some barrier keeping him from the higher-profile stuff. A GQ cover was several rungs up the ladder.
“Yup. It’s happening because Videon is thrilled—I mean thrilled —with the footage. They’re talking a big Emmy campaign, For Your Consideration ads everywhere, the works. This cover would just be the spear tip of what they want to do. And here’s the best part: Jake Cloobeck can do it, but it has to be two days after the wrap party.”
Damn it. Cloobeck was one of Cole’s favorite photographers, but they’d never been able to work together. Cole tended to get stuck with folks who were a little less established and who had less of a vision. That was the reality of life on the almost-B-list.
“What if the shoot runs over?” Zoya was keeping things on track, but Scottish weather was unpredictable.
Frankly, prior to this conversation, Cole had been rooting for rain. He was having such a good time working with Tasha and Maggie and Ryan that he didn’t want it to end. Besides, they were only halfway through Waverley ’s shoot, and already the commitments for afterward were starting to pile up. There was something appealing about staying in this moment for as long as possible.
He didn’t want to think about how much of that had to do with a certain intimacy coordinator.
“If we can’t schedule it then, you’ll get stuck with some Terry Richardson knockoff who’ll go for fake wood paneling and washed-out polyester or who’ll want you to jump in a pool in a suit.”
That was annoyingly true. The two main looks for guy-fashion editorials were low-budget ’70s porn and wet dress clothes. He’d much rather have Cloobeck.
“Why aren’t you happy?” Drew asked. “I thought you’d be psyched.”
What Drew was really saying was Why aren’t you fawning all over me to thank me for all my effort? Cole usually never missed a chance to fluff Drew’s ego.
In all the years they’d worked together, Cole and Drew had argued a few times. Drew thought Cole was sometimes too nice, which he’d blamed on overcompensating for when Cole had messed up as a kid. He also thought Cole sometimes went for the lower-profile project for the wrong reasons—such as liking a director. Whatever your instinct is, run in the other direction, he’d teased Cole.
Except it hadn’t felt like teasing.
For so long, Cole had needed Drew, and he hadn’t wanted to risk losing him. If this worked, if Waverley hit, the gravity might shift.
Maybe it already was.
Not wanting to be ungrateful, Cole told him, “I know you’ve worked hard to get this for me. The GQ cover? That’s huge. It’s what we’ve wanted for so long.”
“But?” Drew was no dummy. He’d picked up on Cole’s mood.
“I feel ... I feel more myself than I have in forever.” Because this wasn’t actually about Drew or whether Cole was appreciative enough for him. It was about Cole.
It was odd to find yourself while pretending to be someone else, but that was the job. In this part, on this shoot, Cole felt like he was becoming the person he wanted to be. It was the way Zoya and Maggie were treating him. The way the younger actors on set looked to him for guidance and advice. Everything about Waverley had combined to make him feel like a grown-up, not like a frat boy.
“That’s probably why the work is good,” Drew said pragmatically. “But I still need you back here right after you wrap.”
Cole felt an argument rising in him, but he smothered it. They were way too far into this thing for Cole to start having second thoughts.
Acting demanded everything from you. You didn’t get to have days off. You didn’t get to linger in Scotland, hiking after the TV show was done. You were into the next project, into the promo, into whatever it took to get the next job. If you were lucky, it was an endless treadmill. The only other option was irrelevance.
He had to keep toeing Drew’s line. He owed him this.
Which was why Cole didn’t even sigh when he said “Will do.”
“Also, Vincent Minna’s little protégé, Malik Dennis, is doing a space movie next year, and Vincent got you a reading.”
Hmm, that was odd. Tasha had always been far more Vincent’s pet than Cole had been, for all that Cole had appeared in several Silverlight projects. Oh well, it was a good opportunity.
“I’ll get that on the books for the day after the cover shoot,” Drew said. “They’re moving on this, but they’re eager to meet you.”
Everyone wanted an IP movie franchise. Cole had auditioned for a hundred of them, but no one had considered him seriously for one before. His part in Waverley was going to change everything.
Cole and Drew had already agreed that his next project should be a movie—he didn’t want to get stuck on television—and it needed to be either awards bait or something very splashy and big budget.
Or Drew had made the case for that, loudly and repeatedly, until Cole had finally relented.
“Send me the sides as soon as you get them.”
“Will do.”
“And look, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’ll be back in California as soon as we’re done. I know how hard you’ve worked.”
“How hard we’ve both worked.”
And that was the truth. If Cole wasn’t changing people’s perception of him, then Drew’s efforts would go nowhere. They’d both made a bet when they’d gone into business together. It was time for it to pay off.
“The world’s your oyster, Cole. If you don’t want the space flick”—he hadn’t even been offered it yet—“there’s also a boxing one, Palooka . It’s more training, but you’re in shape already. I trust you’ve been keeping up with the regimen we agreed to, eating well and all?”
About that, there could be no negotiation. “I am.”
“Good. Palooka is more serious. More awards-y.”
Cole didn’t want to take projects just because he might get nominated for something. He wanted to keep growing in the ways that this project and the team behind it, specifically Zoya and Maggie, were helping him to. “Is there anything literary on the horizon?”
“Ha, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s not like Waverley is Shakespeare.”
Because he didn’t think Cole could do Shakespeare.
Cole tried not to take it personally as he said “I’ll take a look at the boxing one too. Gotta run.”
The only thing he had to do was wait some more. But at least that didn’t come with the smack of low expectations. Drew meant well, but sometimes their conversations made Cole feel as if he were still a twenty-four-year-old dudebro instead of a forty-year-old not-quite dudebro who had learned at least a few things from his mistakes.
Partially to figure out what was causing the delay and partially because he knew it would annoy Drew, Cole went in search of the craft-services table. It wasn’t petulant snacking if it was potato chips. But at the food table, Cole found something better than carbs to calm him down.
Maggie was perched on a stool, stirring a bowl of oatmeal and chatting with one of the catering assistants, a guy in his twenties with a sleeve of colorful tattoos down both arms.
“Cole!” Maggie said excitedly, and his heart skipped a beat. “Come, settle a bet.”
Oh. That was disappointing. He wanted to be exciting all by himself.
“Are corn dogs and beef Wellington in the same food group?” She tossed this off lightly, without any indication of how she wanted him to rule. While she put the proposition to him, she added a generous pat of butter, a handful of Craisins, and a squeeze of honey to her oatmeal.
Cole gestured to her bowl. “Aren’t you just making deconstructed granola there?”
“Perhaps. Oatmeal is mostly a blank canvas for what you add to it anyhow. But don’t get distracted, James. Lives are at stake.”
Feeling far, far less antsy than when he’d left his trailer, Cole reached for a handful of baby carrots. “Lives, huh? Well, corn dogs and beef Wellington are both protein wrapped in carbs, but corn dogs don’t have the mushroom layer.”
“Ha!” Maggie raised a fist in triumph. “That’s what I said.”
Cole was irrationally happy that, by sheer luck, he’d picked Maggie’s side.
“Okay, but what about this?” The caterer leaned a hand on the table, which conveniently brought him into Maggie’s personal space. He was watching her with what might be called erotic interest, but thankfully, Maggie seemed immune. “Have you ever had Korean corn dogs? Some have dog, a layer of cheese, and then the rice-flour coating.” He ticked these attributions off on the fingers of his free hand. “What about those?”
Maggie took a big bite of her “oatmeal” and chewed thoughtfully. “I think we’ll have to allow it.” She shot Cole a look as if she knew that they agreed on this exception to the rule. “But only multilayer Korean corn dogs are related to beef Wellington. Not the regular kind of dog you find at American state fairs.”
“You are as wise as you are beautiful, Maggie, my love.” Then the caterer tweaked the end of her ponytail before winking at Cole. “I better go get that case of water bottles.”
As the guy left, Cole chewed his carrots a bit louder than was necessary, just to prove some kind of idiotic point.
“How are you?” Maggie asked when they were alone. “I heard that the new bulbs arrived and they’re hoping we’ll be underway soon.”
“Oh, good.” Cole had been worried about that before Maggie had distracted him with her important food questions and the less important matter of the crew flirting with her.
He searched his gut. He wasn’t feeling impatient anymore, that was for sure.
“How are you ?” he asked.
“Fine. No, better than fine.” Her smile felt more real for the fact that it was soft, quiet. “I didn’t expect the crew to be so ... varied. They all have such great stories. I don’t know who I thought ended up on movie sets, but it feels like a pirate ship’s crew.”
It was such a perfect description, it took a second for him to know how to respond. “That’s my favorite part,” he said finally. “A lot of people end up making movies because they couldn’t do anything else. Everything else just feels ... boring. Colorless.”
“That true for you?” She was staring into her oatmeal, but Cole had the sense that she was deeply interested in his answer.
“I’d like to think I could find something else that would make me happy, but obviously I’m working pretty hard to stay in the industry.”
“Maybe because it’s your calling.”
Certainly Drew wouldn’t say that. Drew would say ... well, Cole honestly didn’t know. For all that he treated Drew’s advice like gospel, Cole didn’t necessarily understand how or why his agent did what he did. The man’s image was so finely polished, Cole had no idea what was underneath it.
Maggie hopped off the stool. “I’m going to check with Kevin, see what the estimated filming time is. But”—she set a hand lightly on his forearm—“are you sure you’re okay? You seem a little quiet.”
Just that tiny bit of warmth from Maggie’s hand soaking through his linen shirt helped melt the last bit of chill that his conversation with Drew had left behind.
Cole wrapped his fingers around her wrist. Her skin was smooth and alive, and her pulse under his fingertips was racing—like his own. “I was getting in my head a bit. But this—this shook me out of my funk. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Cole didn’t want to contemplate how much he wanted that to be true.