Chapter 22
22
G rant had no memory of the short drive home from Sadie’s. After pulling into his parking spot, he sat in the car trying to convince his leaden body to move. The Surf Summer launch party at Ronny’s was that night, and he needed to get a haircut and wash his car. He had things to do, but his thoughts kept snapping back to Sadie accusing him of lying and then dismissing him down a back staircase. Out of sight, out of mind, out of her life. Somehow, leaving his car would make final the reality of what had just transpired between.
All this time, through all these dates, he’d convinced himself that cracks were forming in the wall Sadie had erected between them so long ago. Yesterday, he’d even learned what the bricks of that wall were made of. And while his excuse for dating her roommates wasn’t blameless, he had hoped his confession of love for her might have helped her see things in a better light. It had not.
A stinging burned behind his eyes, and he pounded the steering wheel to make it stop. Julia was right—he was na?ve, a country fool. Someone like Sadie Heppner could never be interested in a dope like him. His dad had turned love at first sight into a successful marriage, but that didn’t mean Grant could do the same. Just more evidence of his naiveté.
He’d led a pretty charmed life so far, getting into the school he’d wanted and getting roles—and soon a leading role—in major movies so quickly. A lot of actors would sell their souls to be in his shoes, so he could hardly complain that true love wasn’t also in the cards for him. And yet…it was way more important to him than money or awards or career accomplishments would ever be. If acting didn’t work out, he could always be a farmer. But if his love for Sadie remained one-sided, he knew deep down he would never find true love at all. Others would call him ridiculous for even thinking such a thing—plenty of fish in the sea and all that—but there was only one fish for him.
The slam of a nearby car door made him look to his left. Someone was getting out of a limo that had just pulled up. That was unusual enough, but they appeared to be headed for his apartment. Grant sat up, trying to get a better view, but they disappeared into the landscaped courtyard.
Curiosity and exhaustion finally convinced Grant to abandon his car. After he explained to this mystery person that they were at the wrong address, he would have a stiff cup of coffee or, if he could manage it, a nap followed by a stiff cup of coffee before starting his errands. His acting career wasn’t going to wait while he sorted out how to piece together a new life plan without Sadie Heppner as its centerpiece.
Rounding one of the enormous bougainvillea bushes flanking the narrow sidewalk that led to his front door, Grant was startled to see that the person who’d exited the limo was a woman.
“Hey, Farm Boy,” Julia said from behind large, dark sunglasses. She pulled a pink scarf from her head and tucked it into the pocket of her long, tan raincoat, cinched tight at the waist.
Her unexpected appearance at his home left him momentarily unable to move or speak. His shoes might as well have been nailed to the sidewalk, and his tongue too.
“Are you going to let me in? I didn’t wear this get-up because it flatters me.” She smiled as she removed her sunglasses and winked at him. “I’m trying not to be seen.”
He dashed forward, digging in his pocket for his keys. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just surprised to see you here. I didn’t realize you know where I live.”
“I know a lot of things that might surprise you,” she said. She placed her hand lightly on his back as he put the key in the lock and turned.
The cloudy day let in little light, so he went to open the curtains, but she flashed him a warning look. He flipped the overhead light on instead. “Sorry. You’re trying not to be seen.”
She slipped out of her coat with the grace and confidence of a big cat and hooked it over his coatrack by the door. Underneath, a lavender, sleeveless wrap-around dress showcased her slim waist.
“Can I get you something?” he asked. “I have orange juice, water, coffee, herbal tea?”
“I’m fine. I’m just here to congratulate my hero and see how my leading man is doing after his final date with mini-me. It was quite a finale.” She sat down in the middle of his sofa and patted the seat next to her.
Grant began to lower himself into a nearby armchair, but she batted her eyelids at him and patted the couch with greater insistence. Not wanting to annoy his future co-star, he moved over and sat down to her right, leaving some space between them. She scooched herself over till their hips touched. Grant was instantly uncomfortable. Why hadn’t Julia phoned like she usually did? He folded his hands in his lap and pulled in his shoulders, trying to manufacture a modicum of air between them. “It was kind of a crazy day yesterday, especially that woman who was drowning.”
“Photos of your selfless deed are everywhere this morning. If I didn't know you as well as I do, I’d suspect you planned it that way. What could be better for the lead-in to our summer beach movie than a handsome hunk dashing into danger to save a drowning damsel?” She paused as she reached up and played with one of her curls. “But did anything else unusual happen at the beach?”
The hair at the back of Grant’s neck began to prickle, though he couldn’t say why. Nothing had happened at the beach that Julia, or Ronny for that matter, shouldn’t know about, but what had sparked such a question? “Why do you ask?”
“Let’s just say I suspected things might be a little more off than usual on this date. That’s why I intercepted the photographers Ronny sent. Paid them double and told them to skitter away home.” She made running motions in air with her fingers.
“You did that? We noticed there didn’t seem to be paparazzi around.”
Julia sent him a motherly smile. “I had to protect you.”
“Protect me? What do you mean?”
Julia held her hands a foot away from her face and admired her deep fuchsia nails for a moment before puffing out an impatient breath. “You still haven’t caught on?”
She sat so close he could see the creases in her foundation. “Caught on to what?”
“Oh, Farm Boy,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “What would you do without me looking out for you? I’m the one who told the producers to give you a few speaking lines when I spotted you as an extra in the bank heist movie.”
“You are? Well, thank you.”
“I’m also the one who insisted to Ronny that you get the co-lead in Surf Summer .” She reached up and stroked his cheek with long, cool fingers before adding, “I told him I needed a fresh, handsome face.”
Grant leaned away from her a little. He nodded in a perfunctory way he hoped came off as businesslike. “Well, thank you again. I figured you might have had something to do with that.”
“Mm hm. And ever since Ronny came up with the fake dating idea, I’ve been watching Sadie extra carefully.”
“Sadie? What does she have to do with me being in danger?”
Julia chuckled knowingly. “Darling, why do you think she chose to go to the temple festival without telling you?”
“I don’t know. I thought Ronny had forgotten to tell me, but later he said she liked surprises.”
“She does at that,” she said, and rolled her lips over her teeth like she was resisting spilling a secret.
Famous actress or no, Grant’s patience ebbed. “Julia, I appreciate all your help, but I’m afraid I’ve got a bunch of things I have to do today. Can you please tell me whatever it is you came here to say?”
She stretched her long neck in an unhurried motion. “Oh, I will, I will. I just need to make sure you get the full picture. For example, why do you think she made you go to a skanky mud wrestling venue next?”
“I have no idea, but?—”
“And why do you think she arrived at the beach dressed up like a homeless grandmother and then kept trying to get you to gawk at other women?”
“She didn’t…” Grant started to say but fell silent. She pretty much had done that.
“And all this makes me wonder,” Julia said next. “Did other scantily clad women approach you on the beach for no apparent reason?”
She had Grant’s full attention now. “A couple of times, yes. They were flirting with me, and I had no idea who they were. Three of them tried to drag me away. I had to physically pull them off.”
Julia rested her hand on Grant’s knee and gave it a slow squeeze as she asked, “And where was Sadie when all these strange happenings were occurring?”
“She was—she was right there.”
“Did she comment on how strange it was?” Julia said, changing from squeezing his knee to tapping it with an index finger to accentuate each syllable of ‘strange it was.’
“It…it didn’t seem to surprise her. She was sort of encouraging me to flirt back.”
Julia pulled her shoulders back slightly and looked him in the face. “Well, that’s the strangest thing of all, don't you think?”
Grant said nothing. It was strange.
“Grant,” Julia said, the words coming out as if she were speaking to a child. “Don’t you see the pattern here?”
“No. Is there a pattern?” His miserable night and his miserable morning, and now Julia’s questions—more like riddles—were combining to fill Grant’s skull with pudding. There probably was a pattern, but it was all a jumble to him. Clenching his fists, he stood and faced her, hoping to clear his head. “What’s the pattern?”
Julia blinked slower than the Zen master of blinking. Her speech came out in slow motion too. “She’s been trying to sabotage you and your career this whole time. Since the very first date.”
Grant jolted backwards as if pushed. “No! She wouldn’t do that. She’s not like that.”
“Oh, but she is. You didn’t ask me how I knew there were women behaving strangely on the beach.”
A dark tangle began to build in his stomach. “You must have seen photos, or maybe you were there somewhere.”
“I was getting these gorgeous nails done yesterday afternoon.” She showed them off to him, waggling their tips. “And I sent those photographers home. I’ve searched social media. There’s not a single shot of that part of your day, and yet…I knew.”
Grant’s voice came out like the last breath from a deflating balloon. “How?”
“Like I told you, I suspected. I suspected from the minute she noticed you in Ronny’s office. There was a history between you. It was easy to find it online. You went to college together. Why didn’t you mention that at the time, or when I called you?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t seem important. It had nothing to do with the reason we were going on fake dates.”
“But it had a lot to do with why she was going on fake dates, or at least why she was choosing the dates she chose.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. She knows an awful lot about you. Why take the sheltered farm boy to an Indian temple festival and immediately leave him to fend for himself? Why give a fastidious guy the impression he’s going out to a nice dinner, only to throw him and his best suit in the mud?”
“That’s not?—”
“And why,” she pressed, her hazel eyes flashing fire and her voice gaining steadily in speed, “when I finally confronted her, did she ask if she could take you to Be-Seen Beach, a place where there’d be plenty of gorgeous women to catch the eye of someone she sees as a womanizer? Do you think those women randomly showed up and interrupted your date? Or do you think maybe, just maybe, someone tossed them a few bucks to make sure you’d have opportunities to look like a cad while she pretended to be hurt and upset?”
“She wouldn’t do that, Julia. I know her,” Grant practically yelled, but he wished he could be more certain of that. Sadie had called him a player to his face.
Julia’s lips drew down at the corners as her eyes widened in pity. “And that’s the tragedy of it. You’re so trusting. You’ve convinced yourself of her goodness. But answer me one final question—how is it possible that I know you dated and dumped all three of her roommates, one by one?”
The floor of Grant’s apartment seemed to roll underneath him. He slammed his forehead with a fist in a bid to hold onto reality. “How do you know that?”
“Because I paid a little visit to her apartment, and she told me,” Julia said. “That’s why she was doing to this you—to get revenge. And you never even suspected.”
The air in Grant’s apartment felt thin as he grasped for oxygen. It was one thing for Sadie to dislike him because she thought he’d been cruel to her friends, but another altogether for her to have been plotting against him all this time. She had abandoned him the moment they’d arrived at the festival, sending him to get a list of foods he’d never heard of and couldn’t pronounce. If it hadn’t been for the kind people there, he might have had a meltdown in front of all those clicking cameras. She’d also made a point of commenting on his nice suit and shiny shoes on the way to the Down & Dirty Bar and had pre-arranged front-row seats for them. He remembered her laughing as she’d said, You won’t get your suit dirty just watching…probably. Had the plan been for Slinger to pull him in, nice suit and all? And why hadn’t she been concerned about all those women on the beach?
Finally, he remembered the forceful way Sadie has said, “I get to choose the dates,” on the day they’d agreed to the plan. A jittery fear had shot through him in that moment, and he had ignored it—apparently at his peril. He didn’t want to believe it, but it was hard to deny.
Legs now gelatin, Grant slunk toward the couch and collapsed back down next to Julia. His eyes blinked, but they weren’t seeing anything.
She reached up and stroked his hair, sending wave of her perfume toward him—sweet and cloying. “Aw, I know it hurts. You managed to outwit her on your own with the first two dates, but just imagine the photos of you that would be all over social media today if I hadn’t stopped those beach paparazzi? You know they would have found a way to make it look like you were in the wrong, and then Sadie would have marched off, pouting, and the destruction of #mudpuppiesinlove would have been all your fault.” She clicked her tongue. “Hard to redeem oneself after that.”
Grant could barely feel her hand in his hair. He couldn’t feel much of anything.
At least it would be easier to get over Sadie now, knowing what she had tried to do to him. He could easily chalk up the Indian temple festival and the mud wrestling as pranks. If he’d thrown a temper tantrum at either of those venues, it would have been one hundred percent on him. But paying multiple women to don tiny bikinis and flirt with him on their beach date, the date he’d tried to make as perfect for her as possible, was despicable. Doing that while knowing all the while that their previous dates had made them the latest ‘it’ couple was diabolical. His downfall would have been huge and public. Clearly, something had happened to Sadie since they’d graduated. Something had hardened her. She wasn’t the same person he’d known.
Julia, still sitting beside him, prattled on, but her voice floated to his ears as if from far away. “…but don't you worry. She’s not going to be in Surf Summer . She’s not going to be in any movie ever once I’ve made a few choice phone calls. She’s messed with you,” she pressed a fingernail into the tip of his nose, “and that means she’s messed with me. Sadie Heppner is one of the little people, and she can fry egg sandwiches for the rest of her miserable life.” She snuggled in against him, and Grant, still in a stupor, put up no resistance. “But you are not one of the little people. Now that my contract with Mark is up, we will be the ‘it’ couple, the golden duo. And we’ll show the world starting tonight at the launch party.” Her fingers wrapped around his upper thigh as she whispered into his ear. “#Juliant.”
“You broke up with Mark Briddle?” he managed to say, though his voice came out robotic and flat.
Julia’s brown eyes widened and then blinked once slowly, as if filtering her shock through her eyelids. “You truly did think that was real? My goodness, you’re sincere. We were in a contract to fake date—much like you and your devious college friend.”
Everything is fake, Grant thought. Everything.