Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Deacon
Our director, Gavin, walked over with a pinched expression like he’d just bitten into a lemon—not the sort of expression you wanted to see when you were trying to film a lighthearted romantic comedy. Ivy and I had already run the scene six times and we still couldn’t get it.
"Deacon, it's great. We just need a little more . . .” Gavin twirled his hands skyward, as if I should somehow know the interpretation of that gesture. “Ivy, come talk to me," he added, slinging his arm around Ivy and walking her down the rainforest pathway and out of earshot.
A mob of assistants and makeup artists chased after them, touching up her makeup as they walked. Luca ran halfway to me, holding out my green juice, when I gave him a little half-wave to let him know I was good. My personal chef was trying to kill me with all of these drinks that tasted like fresh cut grass. Luca went back to typing away on his phone in the shade of the tent set up over a grassy patch of picnic tables.
I blew out a long breath and stretched. This was probably going to take awhile.
Ivy had just found out her very real—not PR—girlfriend was cheating on her, and while I was empathetic, she was massively holding up production with her inability to hold it together. This was part of the job—putting our personal lives aside to get the shot. But Ivy was new to the acting world, and I was beginning to wonder if she regretted her agent nudging her away from modeling and into this acting thing. At this rate, we were losing daylight and might not even get a very simple shot.
“This whole movie is going to be an utter disaster,” I muttered to myself. It was a statement that was quickly becoming my personal mantra, but I’d known that it was a disaster from the start and had chosen to do it anyway.
I put my hands on my hips and stared up at the two gibbons swinging through the trees in the distance. This place had changed a lot since I’d been a kid: new exhibits, new animals, everything freshly painted, and a killer restaurant that was providing us with some of the best food service I’d ever eaten in my life.
Luca had gotten the zoo gossip from the eldest brother’s very pregnant girlfriend, Hannah. She’d spilled all of the current animal and Lachlan family drama to him when he’d asked if he could pet their miniature cow—a cow which was apparently named Colin and Hannah had very strong feelings about it.
My assistant was good at a lot of things, and subtly snooping for me was certainly one of them.
The TLDR of the Lachlan clan was all but one of the Lachlan kids still lived on-site, some with their respective spouses. Hawk had built himself a cottage behind the lion exhibit. Finch had an apartment above the vet hospital, which she shared with her zoo chef girlfriend, Frankie. Even the old monkey house that I remembered from childhood was now a makeshift human house where the Lachlan twins lived . . . which was crazy since they were still six-year-old miscreants in my brain.
“Speak of the devil.” I spied one of them walking through the chain-link toward the penguin exhibit and took a stab at which one it was. "Heron!" I called.
The keeper stopped, spun in a confused circle, and then pointed to their chest. "I'm . . . Crane."
"Oh, right, sorry," I said, jogging over with an awkward wave.
"Heron is the hippie-looking, non-binary one with the gauge earrings and long hair,” Crane said. "They look like they're a stoner, but they're not. They’ve just got those chill, tie-dye vibes," he added. “Anyway . . .”
I could tell by his shifty eyes that he was nervous and eager to disentangle himself from this conversation.
I was used to clocking it. Most people who were nervous to meet me either became overly friendly or notedly cold to prove that they weren’t affected by celebrity. But I had a feeling these particular shifty eyes had less to do with me and more to do with a certain zookeeper sibling of his.
“Heron and I are very easy to tell apart,” Crane added as if remembering himself. There was that coldness. “Anyway, I'll leave you to it."
"Wait," I called after him, and he turned back to me again. “It’s good to see you. Uh, it’s been a long time,” I offered. “I don’t know if you remember me. I was?—”
"I mean, barely. I was a little kid," Crane said, swinging his bucket with mindless irritation. "I think I remember more Mom talking about you than actually you, you know?" He kept looking around awkwardly like he might be caught.
I let out a sigh. "Did Dove tell you not to talk to me?"
His mouth tightened. "No. She didn’t,” he said. “She doesn’t need to tell me anything. Her enemies are my enemies.”
“Enemies? That’s certainly a strong word,” I retorted. “I see the Lachlan family loyalty is still ironclad.”
“In this particular instance, it’s conservationist loyalty so . . . " Crane saluted me as he started walking backwards. “I wish I could say it was good seeing you, Deacon. Talk to me when you want to start an Almadran skink breeding program."
Damn. Way to twist the knife deeper.
I remembered Luca saying that Crane was now the head reptiles keeper, so I supposed that tracked. Of course he was pissed at me about the skinks. The Lachlans seemed to be the only ones who even remembered the Zap incident. The rest of the world had moved on to juicier and less scientific gossip.
I didn’t know why they were trying to hold me personally responsible. I wasn’t the one clear-cutting the island to dump factory waste on it. Just because I’d been contracted to sell the product, and just because sales had sky-rocketed since my endorsements, thereby needing more unethically built factories, didn’t mean I should get any of this misplaced hate.
Nope. Their anger is definitely misplaced.
I wanted to tell Crane, “Blame Zap for being bad at running a business, not me for being good at selling it.” But he was already walking away, and it felt weak to shout after someone to get the last word.
“Should've tried with an easier sibling,” I murmured to myself as Crane disappeared behind a bamboo hedge. “Of course I’m at the top of reptile guy’s shit list. I need to find the carnivores one.”
It was a surprisingly strange feeling to have someone be so blunt to my face. Neither wooed nor repelled by my status, Crane just simply didn’t like me, which was both refreshing and pretty awful too.
My publicist, Cody, suddenly appeared through the bored and waiting crew while Ivy and Gavin were still talking in frantic, hushed voices. I furrowed my brow at Cody’s harried expression. I thought he was working from the Holloway Estate today. He had his phone clutched in his hand, notifications making it buzz every second.
"Don't worry," he said, panting and ruddy-cheeked. "I'm already getting it under control."
My pulse quickened. That was never a good way to start a sentence.
"Get what under control?" I managed to see the TMZ video on his phone before he locked it. My heart leapt into my throat as I spied the face on the screen—the wire-rim glasses, the purple-dipped hair, the khakis with a porcupine over the breast pocket. "Is that . . . Dove Lachlan?"