Chapter 23
Chapter 23
When Jaime answered his phone—which he’d scrambled to find after dashing from the bathroom postshower—Ev asked neutrally, “Hey, are you done for the day?”
After everything that had gone down with Dad, he answered the phone when it was Evelyn. Always. And this, whatever it was, was the reason for that. All it took was the one question for Jaime to know that the shit had hit the fan. Something was not right, really not right, with his family.
Jaime wrapped the towel more firmly around his hips. It didn’t do much to stop him from dripping onto the hotel carpeting, though.
“Yup.” He matched Ev’s tone, as if this conversation was about their joint gift for their mom’s birthday or some other normal, happy stuff. The kind of stuff they might get to care about if their lives had been totally different. “We wrapped almost an hour ago.”
Jaime was exhausted, probably because he’d spent too many nights lately burning the midnight oil—among other things—with Scarlett. And that was after endless long days in which he had to make a million decisions and manage this unwieldy production.
His body had spent months in constant high-alert mode, and whatever Ev was calling about only pushed him further. Adrenaline was bitter on the back of his tongue, and his muscles had tensed. The last two decades had involved a lot of fight or flight, and Jaime had often been stuck in the worst position: watch.
“Great!” Evelyn said, in a faux chipper tone, the one that communicated We’re going to get through this, the way we’ve gotten through everything . “So ... I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but FCI Petersburg is locked down.”
Prison lockdowns were all too common. At minimum, it meant no one went in, and all other perks, like education services, stopped. At their most restrictive, lockdowns meant inmates were limited to their cells for more than twenty-two hours a day. The guards could instigate them for any reason, from something as small as a fight to something as major as a riot. Sometimes, Jaime would’ve sworn they did it based simply on vibes.
“Is Dad okay?”
“Bobby”—their attorney—“says so. But there was a stabbing in another wing.”
“Yikes.” Still caught up in his relief that his dad was physically unharmed, Jaime couldn’t manage to be more eloquent than that. Stumbled-tongued understatement was going to have to do.
“Yeah.” Evelyn gave a deep sigh, the first moment of the conversation that felt real. The mixture of release and anxiety and exhaustion in it mirrored everything in Jaime’s gut. “Anyhow, Mom and I can’t get over there, obviously, and it’s been making some waves around here. I didn’t want you to hear the news somehow and worry. You have enough going on.”
“I appreciate it.”
Jaime scrubbed a hand over his face. Filming was almost done for Queen’s Kiss , but the last few weeks of any shoot—they were a lot. Nate could step in if Jaime needed to get away, but it wouldn’t be the same. Nate was technically proficient, but he would say it himself: he wasn’t much of an improviser.
So many of the moments in Jaime’s previous projects that felt magical, the ones that critics had praised and of which Jaime was most proud, hadn’t been planned. They’d arisen in the moment or had been accidental. If Jaime had to run off to deal with a crisis, it wouldn’t be good for Queen’s Kiss , that was for sure.
“Is filming going well?” Ev asked.
He had no idea. “There comes a point when all you can do is finish and sort it out in postproduction.”
“That sounds kinda demoralizing.”
“Making TV is often not very good for morale,” he agreed.
“Well, I better let you go,” Evelyn said. “I just didn’t want you panicking for no reason.”
“If you figure out the one weird trick to stop me from worrying, you’ll have to let me in on the secret.”
“Dad is okay, Jaime.”
But that was wishful thinking, just one step up from an office motivational poster.
The larger point, the point neither Jaime nor Ev could ever forget, was that prison—where Dad would likely spend the rest of his life—wasn’t a safe place to be. He was okay this time, but what about next time? Because, rest assured, there would be a next time. There would be another fight, there would be an outbreak of some illness, or there would be a cruel guard. And few people who didn’t have family or friends inside would care, because they bought into that great, intoxicating myth: if you ended up in prison, you probably deserved it.
Dad did deserve to face consequences for his mistakes, but he was also a human being, as was every other incarcerated person. Both things could be true at the same time.
But Jaime was too tired to say all of it to Evelyn, and besides, she knew it.
“Have a good night, Ev.” Jaime knew his sister would hear the undercurrent in those words. We have no way to make sure he’s safe. Not now, and not ever.
“Love you,” she said.
“Love you too.”
Jaime hung up and dressed before he collapsed at the room’s desk. He checked the website of the Musgrove Messenger , the local paper at home, and read a story about the lockdown. The blasé tone made him want to squeeze his phone into fragments of metal and plastic, and he shoved it away before he did.
Until Ev’s call, he’d been feeling okay. He was almost entirely certain that the production was fine. It was some kind of miracle given how Jaime had almost messed up the first few weeks, what with being unable to have a conversation with Scarlett and all. But now that they were sleeping together, he could look at her again without wanting to gouge his eyes or his heart out. Better yet, he could listen to her. He could argue with her.
It was a good thing, too, because Scarlett was great at dealing with the cast and at offering suggestions for the production. Jaime had spent more than a year adapting her book and getting ready to put her story on screen. And now, filming said story, he knew that she got the big stuff right. If Jaime didn’t like every one of her tactics, fine, but she was usually right about strategy. She chose to fight the right wars, even if she sometimes waged them sloppily. On set, certainly, and maybe also in her personal life ...
Jaime shook off the thought. Now wasn’t the time for that. He’d pick up the revelation again later—say, when he wasn’t thinking about whether his dad was okay and when he wasn’t exhausted from working ninety twelve-hour days in a row. He’d try to schedule five minutes to think about it during that gap between postproduction and the marketing push for the show, six months or so from now. His feelings remained a mess. A Superfund site that, like all environmental disasters, was better ignored than acknowledged. So he just didn’t acknowledge them.
But the nonfeeling stuff was good. The scripts Scarlett and Jaime had written were great, the episodes taut and carefully constructed. Clara was giving an incredible performance as Emily, nuanced and intuitive, powerful but vulnerable. And the crew was working together like a well-trained army. If Jaime needed Queen’s Kiss to be amazing in order to prove that he wasn’t a one-hit wonder, then the show they were making ought to do that.
Jaime ran a hand over his still-wet hair. The air-conditioning vent was blowing right onto him, and he was chilled. Jaime didn’t move away from it. He just let the air numb him until the ache in his chest wasn’t so acute. The worries about his dad, they would never go away; the confusion he felt about Scarlett ... that was probably a permanent condition too.
When he dropped the veil of fiction and let himself see what they were making as an honest examination of her life, he was in awe of Scarlett. Her discipline. Her accomplishments. Her ruthlessness.
His goose was cooked, that was for sure.
Jaime got to his feet and paced a bit, as much as he could in a hotel room. Videon wasn’t skimping on the production, but sexy chess dramas didn’t get sexy-dragon-fantasy dollars, and so it wasn’t a massive room.
Maybe he could hit the hotel gym and work out some of the anxiety zipping around his body, but he’d just showered. Besides, he’d been on his feet for the better part of ten hours: a workout was the last thing he needed. Maybe he could call Nate and see if he wanted to grab a beer.
Or maybe he could be honest with himself and admit that the only thing he wanted to do right now was see Scarlett.
That was more or less always true these days. But the twist was that, right now, he didn’t want to see her for carnal reasons. No, at the moment, he wasn’t interested in sex at all. If he could just clap his eyes on Scarlett, he knew it would be like pressing Tare on a scale. He’d be zeroed, and he’d never needed that more.
So he grabbed his phone and his room key, and he headed down there.
When he arrived at her door, he knocked more loudly than he usually did, probably because this wasn’t a booty call. Jaime didn’t feel vaguely sleazy and embarrassed about this visit, mostly just needy and raw.
The door bumped gently into the frame as she checked the peephole. When Scarlett swung the door open a moment later, she was smiling coyly. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
Jaime, bumbling Casanova that he was, tended to stop just short of shoving a note into her hand on set to arrange a hookup. Can I come over for sex? Circle Y or N.
He was so smooth. It was such a miracle that she’d ever seen anything in him.
“Tonight, I didn’t come for ... that.”
Because she knew him nearly as well as he knew Evelyn, Scarlett’s expression immediately sobered. “Okay. Why are you here?”
“I thought we could hang out.”
For a second, after he’d asked to come inside and not have sex and instead to use their mouths for purely communicative purposes, Scarlett appeared to be vaguely stunned, which made sense. Jaime had been pretty clear that he wanted ninety-nine things from her and talking wasn’t one of them.
A year ago, he’d known exactly what he’d wanted from Scarlett: the future, every bit of it—the future they hadn’t quite been able to grab back when they were kids. It was as if they had been buying it on layaway all these years and they were almost ready to bring it home, to possess it fully.
But then the truth had crackled between them, as red hot and destructive as a wildfire. And now, Jaime couldn’t untangle what made sense from his lust and his anxiety and his exhaustion. Those things were braided together, and he wasn’t certain if or how he could separate them again.
After the news about the stabbing, though, it didn’t matter. Jaime’s bruised heart and ego were still there, but they were incidental. He felt better when he was with her. It wasn’t any harder or more complicated than that.
“Of course we can.” Scarlett gestured, and he trailed her into her room. It was the twin of his: chic in that generic way boutique hotels tend to be, but impersonal, small.
Jaime took the chair at the desk, and Scarlett curled up on the small couch by the window. She’d obviously been reading when he showed up, though she didn’t pick up the book she’d abandoned when he’d appeared. Instead, she pulled her knees to her chest and rested her hands on them.
She had such pretty hands.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Why does something have to be wrong?”
“It doesn’t have to be, but it is.”
For a split second, Jaime considered pleading that he was simply tired or stressed. But instead, he blurted out the truth. “There was a stabbing at FCI Petersburg. Dad’s okay, but the place is in lockdown, and it was ... a reminder.”
Scarlett’s mouth twisted in concern. “That’s awful. Does stuff like that happen often?”
“Yes.” He said it flatly.
“And you . . . blame me?”
“No! I didn’t come here to yell at you.” Jaime honestly hadn’t. Whatever impulse he’d had to yell at her had long since scabbed over. He was embarrassed that he’d ever felt it. “It isn’t your fault. I came because I feel better when I’m with you.”
Jaime didn’t only feel better, and what he wanted from her wasn’t as simple as better . Scarlett was a jumbo box of 120 Crayolas. You didn’t reach for it when you wanted something straightforward like red. That was what your backup box of eight basic colors was for. You grabbed the big box when you wanted Atomic Tangerine and Jazzberry Jam.
Scarlett was gazing at him steadily, and just as if this were a chess match, her expression wasn’t giving a thing away. But he recognized what she was thinking all the same: she was trying to decide what move to make next, and then seeing all his possible responses to that move rippling out from hers in fractal patterns.
He didn’t have the energy for her machinations, not tonight. So what he said was, “Can we watch a game, order some food, and just be?”
Jaime had no idea what Scarlett might say to that. Some part of him didn’t know what he even wanted her to say, because in many ways, it was a more intimate request than what he normally asked from her.
Can you be with me in my pain and, by your simple presence, comfort me?
Jaime had kissed every inch of Scarlett’s skin, had had her in every way that he knew how, and had been had in turn. But his request left him feeling exposed beyond all that. Beyond anything.
Which was the reason he found himself exhaling when she said, “Yes.”