Chapter 23 EXT. TASHA’S HOUSE—EVENING
Chapter 23
EXT. TASHA’S HOUSE—EVENING
With its crisp-white stucco, red tile roof, and wrought iron Juliet balconies, Tasha’s house appeared to be a sophisticated Mediterranean palace built for a silent-movie star. But when she opened the front door for Maggie and Cole, it was Tasha’s outfit that was the real shock. She was wearing an apron and holding a chef’s knife, like an assassin who’d gone undercover as June Cleaver.
“Nice apron.” Cole gave his best friend a hug. “It took you long enough to get back to the States.”
“Would you have voluntarily left paradise?” she demanded.
“Probably not. So why did you?”
“Libby’s story drops in a few hours.”
Cole looked at Maggie grimly. They’d known this day was coming. A sick feeling roiled Maggie’s stomach. She’d been on board with Tasha talking to the reporter, and she’d supported Cole in doing the same thing. God, but she hoped that would prove to be good advice.
“In that case,” Cole said, “I’d think you’d want to stay inaccessible.”
“Eh, they would’ve found me. At least I have more control this way.”
Cole and Maggie followed Tasha through her house. While Cole’s bungalow was extremely nice and located in a seriously chic neighborhood, it still felt normal, like the regular-people houses on HGTV.
But this was a flat-out rich-person house. Every room was gigantic, and every piece of furniture was clearly luxe. Huge bouquets of fresh flowers graced the rooms, spilling out of gorgeous chinoiserie. The house was even sprinkled with actual marble columns and carved mantelpieces.
In the last six months, Maggie had gotten used to some stuff that would’ve had past-Maggie gasping, but this was almost too much. At some point, she was going to have to ask if Norma Desmond used to live here.
Tasha led them out the back door. On the covered veranda by the pool house—because Tasha’s house needed a second, smaller house, presumably for company—surrounded by the most perfect landscaping Maggie had ever seen, Ryan was grilling. When Tasha handed him the knife, he set his hand on her nape and stooped to kiss her cheek in thanks. It was utterly chaste, and yet so possessive and intimate Maggie looked away.
Those two were a matched set, as beautiful and deadly as throwing knives. But Maggie suspected that with each other, and probably only with each other, they could be soft.
Tasha poured a glass of iced tea and handed it to Cole. “I think we have to talk strategy.”
“For what? The story will break, and he’ll respond. And then we’ll figure it out.” Libby had insisted it would be better if Cole didn’t see the story ahead of time. It would add to the credibility if the sources hadn’t vetted it.
“Do you think I’m going to need a war room?” Tasha asked.
“Why? It’s Vincent who’s in trouble.”
“He’s going to try to torch us. You know he will.”
Secretly, Maggie hoped Cole and Tasha would only be a small part of whatever Libby had found. Vincent might be on the way out, but from the little Maggie had seen of him, she knew he could still do a lot of damage.
Had Libby sent her story to him for comment by now? Probably, if it was dropping soon. Maggie scanned the sky, as if she were expecting to see a funnel cloud forming above Vincent’s head, wherever he was.
Nope, no spontaneous tornadoes in sight.
“I know you want to prepare, but you gotta wait for him to make the first move,” Cole was saying. “Maybe he won’t get personal.”
Tasha poured another glass of tea for Maggie. “The fuck he won’t. The whispers are already starting.”
Well, that was hard to deny.
“Drew found out somehow,” Cole admitted. “Maybe from the fact-checking? I dunno, but he wasn’t happy.”
Maggie had been livid when Cole had explained how his agent had reacted to the news. She hadn’t met Drew yet, but she already hated him.
From the look on Tasha’s face, it was clear the other woman felt the same way. “He never did like risk.”
“Me talking to Libby wasn’t about taking a risk,” Cole said dismissively. “It was about doing the right thing.”
Maggie loved that Cole saw the world in the same approximate way as a Boy Scout did. To him, things were right or they were wrong, and there was no excuse for not intervening on the side of right. That was lovely. It was admirable. But she worried the complexities of life might catch Cole in the teeth if he wasn’t careful.
“I’m so anxious that this is going to go badly,” Maggie said.
“And you missed your chance to stop us?” Tasha rolled her eyes. “Maggie, I haven’t done a goddamned thing I didn’t want to do since I went to the Oscars with Vincent Minna. Every step after that one, it’s been one hundred percent me.”
It didn’t make Maggie feel better , but it did help. A little.
“This is a game Cole and I have been playing for a long time. So whatever happens, it’s on us. If we nuke the bastard, that’s ours. And if we whiff, that’s ours too. Come on.” Tasha gestured to the platter at the center of the table. “This cheese plate won’t eat itself.”
One of the things that was definitely true about California was that the produce was out of this world. This spread could easily have been on a food blog. There were three kinds of cheese, plus artisan meats, multiple types of crackers, a dip, and several kinds of fruit and veg. It was all perfect and unblemished and intensely colored; it was basically model food.
Because Tasha was Tasha, she launched into a lengthy explanation about where everything had been grown and how long the cheeses she’d picked had been aged. As she monologued on, Cole went to dive in, only to pull himself back. At some point, Maggie became convinced that Tasha kept making it longer to torture him.
“And then, because Stiltons are back,” she was saying, “I got—”
“I didn’t realize Stiltons had left,” Cole stage-whispered to Maggie.
Tasha pelted him with a grape, which he caught and ate with a smug smile.
“You are a peasant,” Tasha told Cole, falling into her chair.
“So am I,” Ryan put in.
“But you have so many other qualities,” she replied.
That had Maggie blushing into her iced tea again. Were she and Cole that obvious?
Cole caught her eyes, and from how her body immediately reacted—every bit of her perking up simply because he was watching her in that bedroom way—she knew the answer was yes.
“Arg, you’re all hopeless,” Tasha said. “Eat. It’s cheese, and figs, and grapes, and moutabbal—”
“Which we will never confuse with baba ghanoush again.”
“Thank fucking God.” Cole dragged a slice of pita through the roasted-eggplant dip and ate it with a satisfied moan.
With the aquamarine water lapping next to them—seriously, was it dyed? Maggie had never seen a pool that color outside of a movie—and the pink-and-gold sky and the actual movie stars, it was hard to believe that Maggie belonged in this scene. But when Cole squeezed her fingertips, just to check in, it was harder to believe she didn’t.
Somehow, she’d fallen into this life. And she loved it here.
When she gave Cole a warm shake of her head to say that she was fine, he turned back to Tasha. “Have you talked to Libby? How is she feeling?”
“Tired.” Tasha gave a shrug, as if to say What would you expect? “That girl has worked her tail off. She has Jack doing all her follow-up calls now.”
Cole cocked his brows. “What’s the story there?”
“Well—” Tasha matched his salacious tone.
“You gossips.” Ryan snapped a tea towel at Cole and caught him on the arm. From the tang, it sounded like it had landed with some force.
“And proud of it.” Cole rubbed the back of his arm, laughing. “I like Libby and Jack, but they trade in gossip about us. It seems only fair that we get to do the same thing. And speaking of romances, I don’t think I’ve gotten enough credit for this.” He wiggled his finger between Tasha and Ryan.
Tasha was aghast. “You deserve no credit.”
“Hey, I chased off other guys for years before you were ready to admit how you felt about Ryan, and I talked him into—”
“Arg.” Ryan fell back in his chair, covering his face with the tea towel.
“Well, the rest of us helped that ”—it was Tasha’s turn to wiggle her fingers now, in Maggie and Cole’s direction—“by not teasing you about how you and Maggie were salivating over each other.”
“That was very helpful, actually,” Cole said.
Tasha shot Maggie a look. “Is that what real people do when they’re not making movies—sit around and give each other the business?”
“Pretty much.”
And if Maggie set aside the mansion looming against the sunset and the high-level discussion about publicity and famous predatory producers, she could almost imagine spending a lot of evenings like this.
“You as nervous as Maggie about Libby’s story?” Tasha asked Cole as they carried the dinner dishes into her kitchen.
“No.” Cole wasn’t. “Vincent will try to snap back at us, I’m sure. But he’s going to find out that a lot has changed and he’s got less sway than he used to.”
Tasha made a face. She wasn’t convinced by Cole’s prediction, even though he was just echoing her own words from the Waverley wrap party. “He still might be dangerous enough to cause trouble.”
But here was where Cole thought they were all getting it wrong. Why worry about something that hadn’t happened yet? It wasn’t as if there weren’t real, actual things—inflation, wars, whether Hollywood was finally going to stop making superhero movies—to concern them.
“I’ve learned you don’t have to go looking for trouble. It either finds you or it doesn’t. So I’ll wait to see how this turns out, thank you very much.”
Tasha bumped his hip with hers. “When did you get to be so wise?”
Cole didn’t think he was being especially insightful, but he’d spent a lot of time at the bottom of the heap, trying to understand how he’d gotten there. It was enough to make someone philosophical. “Probably around the same time that Cody Rhodes was training to be an MMA fighter.” As far as mantras went, What wouldn’t Cody do wasn’t a bad place to start.
“That was your worst storyline on Central Square . Hands down.”
“In fairness, there are a lot to choose from.” But they ought to be talking about something that mattered, and Cody Rhodes definitely didn’t.
Cole nodded to the window. Outside, Ryan and Maggie were dousing the firepit. Maggie was laughing at something Ryan had said, her nose wrinkled up and her head thrown back, and Cole’s chest squeezed, vise tight. She was so pretty.
Next to Cole, Tasha regarded the same scene, but she clearly only had eyes for Ryan.
“How are things with him?” Cole asked.
Tasha blushed. Like, she actually blushed. The sex must be radical. “Good. Except ... he tried to convince me to detour through Vegas on the way home.”
“To visit the Liberace Museum or the twenty-four-hour drive-through chapel?”
“The second one. Ryan has a thing against rhinestones.”
Cole whistled, but he wasn’t surprised. Ryan didn’t seem like the type to do anything casually, and it was clear that Tasha was it for him. “And you said?”
“That marriage is a broken institution.”
“So you’re thinking about it?”
She snorted and played with the ties on her apron. With infinite carefulness, she said, “The thing is ... I love him.” The line I totaled my car was usually delivered more cheerfully than Tasha voiced her feelings. But since Cole knew Tasha’s mother and the example she’d set for her daughter, he knew that Tasha must be terrified by the depth of her love for Ryan.
She, of course, wouldn’t want him to reveal that he knew that.
“My condolences,” Cole deadpanned instead.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“My advice? Spring for the Elvis impersonator. Do it real classy.”
“That’s the secret to long-lasting marital bliss?”
“Of course.” Cole suspected the real secret was to marry the right person, and though he would never, ever say it to Tasha when she was in this mood, Ryan was the right person for her. Bar none.
Tasha raised her brows and did her own head-nod out the window. “And things with Maggie?”
“I’m done for.” Cole at least didn’t have trouble admitting his feelings.
“She know?”
“Yeah, I have absolutely no chill where she’s concerned.” He hadn’t meant to blurt out “I love you” while taking her over his bathroom counter, but it had popped out all the same. And besides, he did love her, so it had been bound to happen one of these days.
He’d had three massive bouquets of roses delivered the day after his surprise confession to balance the scales. Maybe he’d have to get a guy in a white jumpsuit to croon “Love Me Tender” to her in case he was on to something here.
“Hey,” Tasha said, jumping in to defend his honor. “You managed not to get together until filming was done. Well done.”
“I could star in an anti-sexual-harassment video series.”
“Oh no, my friend, that portion of your career is over.”
He snorted. Things had never been quite that bad. “Seriously, Maggie and I, we’re great. We just need to keep things quiet for a little bit longer.” As long as she was sleeping next to him, Cole—like a chalk-painted sign from a craft store—was all about gratitude.
Tasha gave Cole a consoling pat on the arm. “Good luck with that.”
His luck had been scary good of late. This had been the kind of night that Cole wanted to repeat every week from here on out, into eternity.
Except Tasha wasn’t wrong. Movie stars didn’t exactly have stellar track records when it came to saying I do . For all that he wanted to believe Tasha and Ryan and Maggie and he were different, that Cole had turned a corner and grown the fuck up, it was hard to trust in it.
“Can we do this?” he asked his best friend. “Be us, and be ... happy?”
“Goddamn, I hope so.”
Cole did too.
INT. COLE’S BEDROOM
A few hours later, Maggie was snuggled on Cole’s chest, and he was stroking her hair when his phone buzzed for the fifth time in a row.
Tasha had sent the link to Libby’s story, followed by a series of flame emoji. I’m going to keep doing this until you write back.
Got it, great work , he replied.
“The story broke.” Cole dropped his phone onto his nightstand and went back to playing with Maggie’s hair. He managed to sound bored, but his body instantly revved awake. The adrenaline was bitter on his tongue, and his arms and legs were restless.
Under his hands, Maggie stiffened. “You’ve crossed the Rubicon.”
“Is that near Redondo Beach?”
Cole didn’t need to read the final version of the story—he’d had enough details about the bastard that was Vincent Minna to cover several lifetimes—but it was wild to know that it was out in the world. That everyone else was learning the truth.
Would it make a damn bit of difference?
Cole had talked to Libby both because it was the right thing to do and also because he wanted things to change. He wanted this industry to be better, and so the absolute least he could do was to speak up when things weren’t okay.
Now, making them okay was everybody’s problem.
So would they?