Chapter 4 #2
I’d felt an ache, watching their ease with one another.
When I thought of the show as their shot at the spotlight, it was easy to write off their relationship as staged for the cameras.
But up close, when they weren’t doing their sitcom-marriage bit, they truly seemed to like each other.
He was always seeking her out, looking across the room to get her approval. She was always touching him.
I’d had exactly one real, long-term relationship—the cute and kind and not-quite-right-for-me guy that I had crashed with in New York.
Watching the way Maggie and Jason sat together by the pool, the way they knew each other’s bodies, anticipated each other’s next moves, I felt a slice of regret that it hadn’t worked out.
I might have been dreaming of my own foot massage under a cabana, but my reality was TV bureaucracy.
The closest hardware store to the address Gabe had given me was in Thai Town, and I wasn’t going to be able to get in, grab all the different swatches of blue paint, and get out in time to meet him in West Hollywood by three.
Instead, I went straight to our meeting spot.
It was a squat converted warehouse with a row of mailboxes in the lobby and limited street parking.
In a moment of panic, I thought he’d brought me to an abandoned office and now was going to rape and/or murder me, and all Celia would be able to tell my mom about where I had gone was that the guy’s name had been Gabe.
But that seemed so counter to the errand I was on that I decided it couldn’t be possible.
I circled the block; there was nowhere to park.
By the time I realized I was going to have to suck it up and walk half a mile, I was already ten minutes late. I just had to get in and get out, grab a quick signature. I double-parked out front, blocking a fire hydrant.
The building had a buzzer, but someone had propped open the main door with the broken heel of a stiletto.
This did not bode well for my possible murder, and I clutched the manila folder with Gabe’s unsigned release like a key chain of mace I could deploy.
What was Dan thinking sending me alone to solicit a strange man?
Didn’t he know I was young and impressionable and clearly very weak?
He’d seen me struggle to carry all that AV equipment.
I left the shoe in the door—figuring there was just as much danger within as without, so it was best to keep the easy exit open—and went to look at the mailboxes.
A few were labeled with last names, but others read things like “The Pencil Pack” or “Oboe”—businesses, if strangely named ones, the fact of which reassured me.
I was trying to figure out if there was a letter missing in “Ball on,” or if it was maybe a porn company, when an inner door opened.
“You’re here.” Gabe was just as tempting as I remembered.
Rangy but still muscular, with lips that on a girl you’d swear had been enhanced with filler.
Thick brows over hooded blue eyes. Dimples in both cheeks when he smiled.
He had on a gray T-shirt advertising a little-known punk band’s world tour, and his hair was just a tiny bit too long. Get in and get out, I reminded myself.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t buzz. There’s a . . .” I gestured toward the broken high heel.
“Huh. Cannot explain that.” Gabe’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t outright laugh.
When he shrugged, I was drawn again to his hands, adorned in the same jewelry he’d had on when I first met him: the fancy watch, the thumb ring.
He broadcast a nervous energy, fingertips tapping in a pattern against his thumb, and I sensed that, were we sitting down, his leg would be espresso-jittering.
“Anyway, I have the paper here,” I said, trying not to let on how much he intrigued me. “Also, I’m sorry about your car.”
He gave me a look that was longer and more assessing than the way you would look at someone you weren’t at least a little bit interested in.
“Water under the bridge,” he said. “Consider it forgotten entirely.” He smiled. “I hope you didn’t have too rough a drive.”
“Whatever.” I shrugged. “I’m on the clock for it.” Something was fluttering fast between us, the wing of an insect. In the quiet I could almost hear the infinitesimal buzz.
“You wanna come in?” Gabe nodded toward the door behind us.
My body hummed like I’d just come off running a marathon, an endorphin high that made me lightheaded.
I didn’t know his last name, and I was totally sober, sticky from my carousel of car rides, wearing an old pair of ratty underwear, yet I couldn’t quite rule out the possibility that we were about to hook up.
I was indeed on the clock. But those hands.
Those dimples. He smiled again, and I knew he could tell at least some of what I was thinking.
“There’s other people back there,” he assured me. “The band hasn’t left.”
“There’s a band?”
“Well yeah,” he said. “My band.”
“You have a band?”
“Come on in.”
This was not, in fact, a conventional office building but a studio space. The band—a guy putting away a bass guitar, another lounging near a drum set—greeted me in a way that made me think I was not the first young thing Gabe had brought back behind the scenes.
“Oh no,” I said, correcting their unspoken assumption. Even more embarrassing than my own intense attraction was its public recognition. “I just have this paper for him to sign, and then I’m going to go.”
“Don’t let us bother you,” said the drum guy, although I wasn’t sure to me or to Gabe.
It was three in the afternoon, but in the windowless studio, it might have been midnight.
Where Maggie’s recording space felt like a glamorous cave, this was more like the basement of a fraternity house.
Cleaner than a frat, I would give it that, but with the same bare-bones vibe of dude and purpose.
Presumably they’d been at their task since before I had called Gabe that morning.
A few expensive-looking guitars lay spread out across the floor.
“I just need you to sign,” I said. The three of them looked at each other.
“What’s this for?” asked Bass.
“A release. So we don’t have to blur out his face on TV.” Surely people in entertainment were familiar with this concept. I had explained it to Gabe over the phone.
“It’s for real.” Bass raised his eyebrows. “She’s actually got paperwork for you.”
“I knew it,” said Drums. “I knew it, dude. She didn’t realize. You owe me twenty bucks.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m missing something. What’s going on?”
Gabe chewed on the side of his cheek, that restless energy increasing exponentially. Drums turned to me. “You have to imagine him like two feet shorter with blond tips and a smushed-up face.”
It seemed that Gabe was someone I was supposed to know, either someone I’d gone to school with or somebody famous.
Had he been friends with my brother? Did he do college a capella?
I tried to see the picture Drums painted, but I’d never been much good at visualizations.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’m sorry for not knowing what you’re talking about, but can we cut to the chase? ”
“I did a TV show when I was younger,” Gabe muttered. “I thought that was why you wanted to get together. It’s no big deal.”
Except he said this in the way that people do when it is, in fact, a big deal.
“What’s the show?”
“The Tiger Crew.” He gave a little shrug, as if he was sorry I’d caught him.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. With Maggie—”
“With Maggie McKee!” Bass said, gleeful.
“But she’s on my show. The one I’m working on.” It slipped out before I could stop myself, my professionalism no match for the combination of confusion and sexual tension I was currently experiencing. “I ran into you coming down her driveway.”
“That’s sort of why I thought you knew.”
“He thought you knew because he thought you were coming to—” Drums started. He was interrupted by a combination of a police siren going off outside and an elbow from Gabe.
“Oh shit,” I said. Gabe started to say something, but I shook him off. “No, it’s not you. I just remembered my car.”
“I don’t usually just assume people know who I am,” Gabe was saying. He’d trailed me down the hall to the elevator. “But you knew my name, so I figured you, I dunno, were a fan. I thought the release was a red herring because we’d, you know. That you were using it to . . . get together.”
“A red herring? We’re in a mystery now?” I couldn’t help teasing him. It was rare to find someone so objectively hot who didn’t try to hide his insecurities. “I knew your name because I heard your friends say it when we were on the phone.”
“Well, now I feel dumb.”
“Were you guys, like, betting on me?”
“No!” Gabe had the decency to look appalled. “No, I didn’t—oh, you’re kidding.”
“Did you make money? If you did, we should split it.”
It was a joke, but I did think it seemed fair, especially since I wasn’t sure if production would pay a parking ticket I got on their errand. I’d seen Lauren dole out cash for incidentals, yet this seemed less an incidental than a stupid move on my part. Which reminded me—the paperwork.
“Here’s the release.” I pulled the folder out from under my arm. “It’s real. You can check.”
We’d reached the ground floor, and he walked with me down the hall to the main entrance. “Those guys are assholes. I’m an asshole. Obviously, I feel like an idiot.”
I turned to look right at him. He seemed nervous. I felt a strange urge to take his face in my hands. His earnest face, so eager to correct my bad impression. Had he not towered over me, I might have. Instead, I looked directly into his eyes as I said, “It’s no big deal.”
Of course he’d been on TV. Those eyes were too blue not to be.