Keaton
Finally at home, I sat against the headboard of my bed and sighed. Throwing my head back so I could stare up at the ceiling, I tried to make sense of it all.
My feelings. What the right thing to do was.
Maybe it didn’t matter, anyway. I’d already told him I was staying. Too late to go back on that now.
Except I knew it wasn’t, and I could still hand in my letter again tomorrow, and maybe I should – given how easily I had melted like butter when he stood over me, pinning me against that door, making me wish he would move closer and press his huge body against mine.
This was all so messed up, in what felt like the best possible ways, except for that one guilty secret I couldn’t ignore.
The footage I had filmed.
I looked at my laptop, sitting on the table in my room. I had uploaded everything, but never actually gone through it. I should. That was the first step. I needed to go through all of it and see what I actually had.
In fact, maybe I could show it to Clara. Get her view on what Olly – Mr. Harvey was really like. Maybe she could help pull some of that rose-colored wool off my eyes.
I grabbed it and walked the short distance down the hall to Clara’s room, knocking on her door. I waited a few seconds before I heard her call me inside and opened the door.
I smiled to see my little sister sitting cross-legged on her bed, with a box of fancy chocolates open in front of her. She was reading a magazine and eating them. It looked like a rare and well-deserved moment of relaxation.
“Mind if I interrupt?” I asked.
Clara grinned at me. “I didn’t know you were home, or I would have come and found you,” she said. “I’ve been listening to music through my headphones, so I guess I didn’t hear the door.”
“I only got in a little while ago,” I said. I didn’t want to check my watch to see exactly how long. Probably only ten or fifteen minutes. Only that long since Ol – Mr. Harvey had dropped me off with a lingering look and a reconfirmed promise that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Ten or fifteen minutes without him before all the doubts swarmed my mind so fully that I couldn’t think on my own.
“Well, sit down,” she said, patting the bed covers. The grin on her face was getting wider, if that was even possible. “I have news.”
My eyebrows lifted as I sank down on the end of the bed. Clara looked like she was almost vibrating with excitement. I hadn’t seen her this happy in a long time.
A brief worry swept through my head. Fernando? Had he proposed? Was she… could she be this happy about being pregnant?
“It finally happened, Keat,” she said, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “I sold a project!”
It took me a long moment for the words to filter through to my understanding. I blinked.
“… Like… a pilot?”
“Yes!” she cried out, throwing her hands into the air above her head and drumming her feet on the bed in a quick rhythm. She was wearing pink socks with cartoon frogs on the sides. “I sold a pilot!”
“Oh, my god! Clar!” I leaned forward and swept her up into a hug. “That’s amazing!”
“I’ve been waiting so long for this,” she said. As I pulled away, she was wiping under her eyes – but only happy tears. “I can’t believe it finally happened.”
“Who’s the production company?” I asked. The great thing about both of us working in film and TV, albeit on very different parts of the production, was that we actually knew a lot of the same people and companies.
“It’s a small indie,” she said. She made a little face. “It’s only a small sale. But if it gets picked up by a network, it looks like a really good deal for at least ten episodes.”
“That’s incredible,” I beamed. “You’re really making it, Clar. This is it.”
“I hope so,” she said. She laughed and covered her face. It was like she was full of so much joy that it had to just keep bursting out of her at random moments. I felt a twinge of jealousy that I wasn’t proud of. I hadn’t had that kind of a win in my filmmaking career – not yet.
I just hoped ‘not yet’ didn’t turn into ‘never’.
Not just because I was working for Mr. Harvey right now, but because secretarial work seemed to be about the best I could get.
If I got into a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck without enough time to film anything… I didn’t see how I would get out of it.
I couldn’t think about that now, though. I couldn’t think about it at all. It was too much – too scary.
“We need to celebrate,” I announced.
“Not right now, though,” she said. “It’s late and I know you have work in the morning. But we can do something this weekend.”
I made a face. “It doesn’t feel right. We should celebrate when you get the news, not days later.”
“I’m already celebrating a bit,” she said. She gestured to the box on the bed. “Look at these chocolates Fernando got for me. He was busy with a meeting tonight, but as soon as I told him, he had them couriered over here.”
I pouted. “You told him first?”
Clara laughed. “Don’t get jealous, big brother. I was having lunch with him when the call came in.”
“I feel like he sees you more than I do,” I groused.
Not that that was unnatural or unusual in any way.
He was her boyfriend, after all. That was the natural progression of things – first start dating, then spend all of your time together, and finally move in together.
One day, probably sooner than I liked, I would be all alone.
“In fact, you probably see him more than I do, which is odd given that we work together.”
Clara laughed and shook her head. “He makes time to see me. Besides, he told me your boss has you all secreted away in his office like you’re his personal property or something.”
The particular words she had chosen – which had to be Fernando’s words, given that she had no other way of assessing the situation – sent a peculiar stab of lightning down into my core.
His property?
I should have been offended by that.
Why was I thrilled instead?
“We just have a lot of work to get through,” I said. “I, um. He said he’s making me inner circle. He told me some things that not a lot of other people know. About the business.”
Clara’s eyes went round like saucers. “Weren’t you just telling me this weekend that you wanted to quit? Didn’t you hand in that resignation letter we worked on?”
“No,” I said with a wince. “No, I, um… didn’t get to hand that in.”
“What do you mean? Did he spring something on you that stopped you?”
“Well, I gave it to him, but…” I shook my head. “He shredded it without reading it.”
“What!”
“And then he took me to dinner.”
Clara stared at me for a long, silent moment. “Keaton Dunbar,” she said at last. “Your life is stranger than fiction.”
In the echo behind her words, I heard him calling my name just the same way. Keaton Dunbar. And then he’d looked at me with those clear blue eyes.
“I promised I’d stay,” I said. I didn’t even know why. I was kind of thinking out loud. Saying the things that had been swirling around in my head since I’d gotten back. “After the dinner, he asked me if I would stop trying to quit and I said I would stay.”
“Okay,” Clara said. “And are you? Staying?”
I swallowed. “I…”
Clara gasped. “You want him.”
“What?” It was my turn to stare at her wide-eyed, mouth open.
“Keat!” She slapped my arm lightly for emphasis. “You have the hots for your boss!”
“Well, I mean, I…”
“No, this is real, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “When we were talking about him being hot before, I thought you were just playing around. But you actually like him, don’t you? More than just to look at. You want him.”
I could do nothing but hang my head in recognition of the fact that she was telling the truth. I did want him. I wanted him more than anything.
“That’s why I needed to quit,” I said miserably.
“But you’re not going to,” Clara said. I didn’t need to confirm it for her. She knew. She knew me.
“I don’t want to leave,” I said with a simple shrug of my shoulders. “He’s letting me in. And… I don’t know. Maybe that just means he thinks I’m a good secretary. But…”
“But you’re so starved for attention, you’ll take anything you can get from a man who looks like that?” Clara filled in for me. Her voice was soft and careful. Not mean. Not cruel. She wasn’t saying it just to hurt me.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. “I guess Jordan really did a number on me, huh?”
“Oh, Keat.” Clara sighed and rubbed the back of my hand.
“Things will work out, one way or another. But you have to promise me that when you feel ready to move on, you move on. Don’t get stuck in a dead-end job you don’t actually want.
Don’t give up your dream for a boss who doesn’t see you the same way. ”
I nodded.
After a moment, I was the one to break the silence. “I didn’t mean to crash your celebration like this,” I said. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Clara said. “I’m here for you, Keat. You know that. You and me against the world.”
I smiled. “You and me, kid.”
And maybe the one thing that made people take Clara seriously, treat her like an adult and give her the deals she had been dreaming of, was the fact that – unlike me – she was secure enough in her identity not to argue with me when I called her a kid.
I headed back to my bedroom with my laptop tucked under my arm and stowed it away on the table again. There wasn’t any time to look at the footage right now. I had to sleep – Mr. Harvey wanted me in early again tomorrow, like always, and I needed to be sharp.
The last thing I did before going to sleep was to check the trending stories on my favorite social app, and what I saw made me cringe: ongoing and endless speculation about whether Ridley Angus, the biggest football star in the nation and widely-regarded good guy, was actually a giant asshole who had been lying to his fans for his whole career about who he really was.
People were digging into archive footage and unearthing old posts, trying to find any hint of something that showed he was an alcoholic, a liar, whatever they wanted to make him out to be.
And my last thought before dropping off?
Worry for Mr. Harvey, and how his star client was going to survive this – because, apparently, my whole life now revolved around one person only.