Chapter 9 #2
If everything went perfectly with filming today, it would be past midnight by the time I made it home, and so help me, if his bike was still there, I was moving. Again.
I’d trade Cameron my house for his motel room.
He could have my king-size bed, leather couch and spacious shower.
If Cam didn’t want it, then I’d swap with Shelly.
Because there was no way I was staying in my yellow house for another month if there was even the remotest chance I’d overhear Presley getting it on with another man.
“Hi, Shaw.” One of the crew members waved as I approached a group gathered outside the room where we’d be shooting today.
“Morning,” I said to all five bodies huddled together and reading off the same iPad. With no sign of Cameron, I continued past them toward his room.
His face, covered in his new gray beard, was not the one that answered.
“There you are.” Dacia cocked a hip as she held the door. “I tried to find you when I came in last night, but the crew said you weren’t staying at the motel.”
“I’ve got my own place.” I pushed past her to enter the room. She didn’t move, forcing me to brush against her as I stepped inside. The smell of her perfume made me gag. “Hey, Cam.”
He was sitting in the chair beside the window, watching something play on his laptop. “Morning. You’re here early.”
“I figured you’d want to run through this one a few times.”
“You’re right.” He shut the laptop and stood. “I do.”
Then, like every other day working with Cameron, he consumed our attention.
I didn’t have time to think about Presley and whether she was wearing her glasses to work today.
I didn’t have the chance to worry that Leo had pulled them off her nose to kiss her after I’d left.
I didn’t have a free minute to ponder why a woman I’d just met had me so completely unnerved.
We were too busy trying to get Dacia to look genuinely terrified that she’d been stabbed by her lover and was about to fucking die.
“I’m sorry, Cameron.” She sniffled after the thousandth run-through.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, the headache that had been brewing since lunch finally breaking through.
The woman could cry on command, but Cam didn’t want fake tears. He wanted one—one real tear to leak out of the corner of her eye and fall to the floor.
As much as Dacia frustrated me, I got why she was upset. Cameron was asking for perfection and she wasn’t delivering. Maybe no one could deliver. His expectations were . . . extreme.
But we needed his extreme. This was the opening scene. This was the scene where we had to hook the audience. Where we had to make them fall in love with Amina so they’d care about her death and have a vested interest in watching more.
Beginnings.
They were always the hardest scenes for me to shoot.
“Maybe we should take a break,” I suggested.
“Good idea.” Cameron nodded. He was as frustrated with this as I was.
“Come on, Dacia.” I waved for her to get off the bed and follow me.
“Where are we going?” She walked by my side as I crossed the parking lot.
“Let’s go get some dinner.”
“But the caterer is that way.” Dacia pointed to the tent set up beside the motel’s office.
The owner of the motel and his wife were making their way through the buffet line. Shelly had invited them to eat with us for the meals we hosted here. A couple cameramen were sitting at a collapsible table in folding chairs.
“I think maybe we both need some space from the motel.” I dug my keys from my jeans pocket and clicked the fob to unlock the Cadillac’s doors. The inside was stifling from sitting outside all day in the summer sun.
Dacia hopped into the passenger seat, hissing as the bare skin of her legs touched the black leather seat.
I hit the ignition and cranked up the air conditioning. “How about a burger?”
“That’s fine.” She waved a hand, not caring what we’d eat. Probably because she wouldn’t eat.
Dacia and I had gone out three times, each to a nice LA restaurant. She’d ordered a meal. She’d held her fork and knife. She’d chewed. But when the waitstaff had come to clear the table, my plate had been empty and hers barely touched.
Like she had on those dates, she’d watch me eat tonight, and when we returned to the motel, she’d eat the meal specially planned by her nutritionist.
My diet was normally regulated and my exercise regimen set in stone, like hers.
The lax hold I’d had on food in Clifton Forge was mostly because this part didn’t require my abs to sell tickets.
I was playing an aging police officer, fit in his later years but not unrealistically so.
Any extra weight on my face actually made it easier for the makeup team to turn me into a sixty-something-year-old man.
Dacia didn’t have that luxury. She’d be mostly naked in the murder scene.
She had an incredible body. She was long and lean, fit with curves in the right places to fill out a gown. Dacia had a certain image to uphold and this industry was unsympathetic, especially toward women.
That was the reason I’d taken her home after that third date. The reason why I knew exactly what Dacia French looked like without a stitch of clothing.
I’d been stupid enough to think an actress who was dealing with the same media onslaught I did might actually want a meaningful connection.
A refuge from the attention. A person who knew how exhausting it was to constantly smile and gauge every move.
To eat just right. To work out, day in and day out.
A person who would be there in the unwind to talk about her day.
But Dacia had been too wrapped up in her own life to bother asking about someone else’s. Dacia, to put it mildly, was a rattlesnake.
She’d taken a picture of me the day after the two of us had hooked up. I’d been in bed, asleep on my back with an arm tucked beside my head. A white blanket had covered my groin and a leg, but the rest was all bare skin and wrinkled sheets.
Lazy morning.
That had been Dacia’s caption. Her face had been on one side of the picture. Mine on the other. The photo had gone viral and I’d woken up to fifteen messages from Laurelin asking me why I hadn’t bothered telling her I was in a relationship with Dacia. Managers needed to know that kind of thing.
I’d called Dacia a cab and kicked her out of my house. She hadn’t cared. She’d gotten what she’d been after—speculation in the tabloids and an influx of social media followers.
Dacia had been the last actress on my arm. From then on out, I took one of my sisters to movie premieres. It was usually Matine, because she liked dressing up more than Astrid or Becca. If I wanted to take a woman to dinner, I invited my mother. There hadn’t been a woman in my bed in months.
If it had been my call, Dacia wouldn’t have been picked for this film, but Cameron thought she had the talent for the part. Was he regretting that decision after today’s rehearsals?
“I’m trying, Shaw.” Her eyes were aimed out her window as I drove through town. “I don’t know what he wants.”
She was trying, and as much as I hated to admit it, she had the talent. Besides, it was too late to find someone else anyway.
“You’ll get it,” I said. “We’ll take a break. Get out of there for a while and then regroup.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, conversation closed.
The drive to town was silent because neither of us cared to find out what the other had been doing since we’d seen each other two years ago.
I’d caught a glimpse of her at the Academy Awards last year, but we’d been going in opposite directions, each swarmed by people, so I hadn’t been forced to make small talk.
I pulled into Stockyard’s and parked, grinning as Dacia’s lip curled. Clearly she hadn’t explored Clifton Forge much, because Stockyard’s was the quintessential Montana bar and it matched the rest of the town.
It was rustic without any fanfare or polish. The parking lot smelled like grease and smoke. To her, I’m sure the place looked . . . dirty. Beneath her.
But while I was on a diet reprieve, I wanted one of the Stockyard’s damn good burgers. It was worth the added hour in the guest room I’d turned into my temporary gym. It would be worth it watching Dacia squirm as she took a rickety stool, then doused herself in hand sanitizer when we left.
Cameron had introduced us to the place when we’d come back to start shooting and I’d been five times since. I’d even bought Luke Rosen a burger here after we’d met for beers at The Betsy this past Friday.
“Here?” Dacia asked, gulping as we walked toward the door.
“It’s not that bad. Just relax and enjoy a break.”
She scowled as I held the door for her, making sure not to touch it as she slipped inside. “I’m relaxed.”
“Sure,” I deadpanned.
The inside of the restaurant was dark and it took my eyes a moment to adjust. When they did, I scanned the tables, searching for an empty high-top.
Instead, they landed on white-blond hair and my heart skipped.
Presley was sitting at the bar. She caught me in the reflection of the mirror behind the liquor bottles and her spine straightened.
She was alone.
A slow grin spread across my face. It stretched, wider and wider, when she didn’t look away and a smile of her own tugged at her lips.
Lost in that blue gaze, I didn’t notice Dacia staring between the two of us until her hand slid into mine and she stood on her toes to nibble on my ear.
Dacia really was a bitch.