7. Anna
ANNA
Imeet with Delia first thing in the morning. She lays out the plan. We need to move quickly. Today.
She gives me the rundown for the day with Luke. My hands are shaking, so I take a sip of water.
I fill out paperwork for Delia. I have a kick-ass manager. That took eight years in LA.
“What time do you get off?”
“Three,” I say.
“He’ll be there with Elle, our social media person.”
I head over to Steven’s office in Beverly Hills.
He looks at my materials. Headshots. Resume. He has someone in the office upgrade everything to agency standards.
He looks at my reel.
He wants me to do a monologue. So I do.
“Okay,” he says. “Lovely.”
“Lovely?”
“You can act. A lot of people in this town can act. Can you get paid to act? That’s what we need to find out.
You need new headshots. I recommend a photographer.
Our guys start at a thousand a session. I’ll put it on Luke’s bill.
Don’t call me, I’ll call you. I bust my ass for my clients.
If I don’t call you, it’s because I don’t have anything. I didn’t forget.”
My head is about to explode. Information overload.
I drop a water tray in the middle of the restaurant during the lunch period.
Doug checks on me. “Are you alright?”
I keep checking the clock.
2:47.
I refill a coffee. The customer looks at his cup and doesn't say anything because it's still coffee and who complains about more coffee.
2:51.
Chloe finds me at the service station.
"You should breathe."
"I can’t. He’s coming.”
I sit and count my tips at a table.
The door opens.
Luke Wolfe walks in.
Dark jeans. White t-shirt. Ripped and muscular. Tattoos. Sunglasses he takes off as he steps inside and hooks into his collar like he's done it a thousand times, which he probably has. He scans the floor until he finds me.
The diner does a collective recalibration. Phones tilting. Conversations dropping half a register. Eyes going somewhere else while actually going directly to the door.
I pick up my order pad because I need something to do with my hands.
I stand up.
I untie my apron.
He walks straight to me, past the host stand, past the customers who are already filming, past Doug who has gone completely still behind the register.
"Hey," he says. "You ready?"
"Yeah, I just clocked out."
He takes my hand and walks me past the tables. Stops in the middle of the diner.
Plants a kiss on me.
Long and slow and deliberate, his hand coming up to my jaw, tilting my face toward his. The kind of kiss that has a beginning and a middle and takes its time finding the end. Like in the movies.
The diner goes completely silent.
When he finally pulls back, he keeps his hand where it is for one more second, his eyes finding mine.
My heart is pounding.
"You could have warned me," I say.
"Where's the fun in that?"
The room is filming this.
Behind him I can see Chloe. She has both hands over her mouth.
"Sorry, I can't keep my hands off her," he says to a table on the way out.
The Maserati is parked illegally in front of the entrance.
Convertible. Top down. Silver. It catches the afternoon light the way things do when they were designed specifically to be looked at.
There are already three phones up on the sidewalk before we push through the door.
Luke puts his hand on the small of my back.
I feel it through my work shirt.
He opens the passenger door and I get in and he walks around to the driver's side with the easy unhurried movement of someone who has never once worried about being watched.
He starts the engine. My body vibrates.
We pull into traffic and the city opens up — warm air, palm trees, the feeling of Los Angeles moving past us fast with the top down and people turning to look as we go.
"That kiss was a little long," I say.
"You're welcome."
I've driven these streets for six years.
They have never looked like this.
My building looks smaller.
We pull up and the Maserati sits in front of it like a joke the neighborhood isn't in on. A kid on a bike stops and stares. The guy from 2B who is out front looks up from his phone.
Delia's social media person, Elle, looks too young to be working, but she's already there waiting, camera ready.
Luke gets out and opens my door.
We go up. Three flights.
He carries boxes without being asked. More than his share. Elle follows at a distance, getting angles on everything — Luke in the stairwell, Luke in my doorway, Luke looking at my bookshelf with genuine curiosity I shut down before it becomes a conversation.
We're on the third trip downstairs when Jade opens her door opens.
In a silk robe. Hair still doing whatever it was doing last night. She sees me. Then she sees Luke behind me with a box.
The robe situation becomes more open.
"Hey," She smiles at Luke specifically. "I'm Jade."
"Luke," he shifts a box, extends a hand.
She takes it and holds it a beat longer than a handshake requires.
"Are you helping Alice move?"
"Anna. She's moving in with me."
Her body jolts. "Anna?"
She stares at me in disbelief.
"Yes," I say. "He's my boyfriend."
Jade looks at me. “Anna, you never told me that.”
Then back at Luke.
She looks at me like she’s doing difficult math.
She gives me a look I have never received from her in three years of sharing a wall — something close to respect.
"Well." One more glance at Luke. "We should all go for a drink, Anna?"
"Jade, your robe."
"Oh my God. That's so embarrassing."
Luke carries the last box down.
"See you around," I say.
She watches us leave, mouth open.
Everything I own fits in the convertible with room to spare.
Elle gets the last shot — Luke closing the trunk, turning to say something to me, me laughing at whatever it is.
She wants Luke tickling me near the car. She reminds me we're having fun.
What doesn't make it into any photo: me standing alone in the empty apartment for sixty seconds before I close the door.
Looking at the tilted picture frame I never fixed.
The outline in the carpet where my couch used to sit.
The kitchen counter where I put Delia's card and told myself it was nothing.
Six years.
“We’ll send someone for the rest,” Luke says.
I close the door.
The road into the Hollywood Hills winds up. The city is trying to leave itself behind.
I've driven up these roads to houses like this for catering gigs. The side entrance only.
The gate opens when we pull up.
The houses get bigger and further apart. The air changes. The noise drops away.
Luke's house appears off the road.
Modern black steel and glass built into the hillside like someone paid off half the city to let it exist there. Three levels cut into the canyon. Walls of glass glowing warm against the dark. Infinity pool hanging off the edge of the property like it might spill straight into Los Angeles.
There's a row of cars near the garage. And two motorcycles.
"That's your car," Luke says. "The Mercedes. Keys are inside."
Blue Mercedes convertible, pristine and waiting.
"Happy?”
I don’t say anything.
A staff of three comes out to take the boxes.
Elle wants to film us carrying one box in together.
I stand in the driveway a moment longer. Look through the window of the Mercedes.
I laugh.
She takes the picture. Looks at it. “So romantic.”
The house is everything the outside promised.
Glass walls and city views that go until they become sky. A pool glowing blue in the early dark, close enough to the living room you could practically dive in from the couch. A gym. A sauna. A screening room with leather recliners and a projector.
Something large and golden detonates from across the living room.
"Zeke." Luke says it without urgency.
Zeke ignores him completely. He's got his paws on my shoulders and is attempting to make direct eye contact from two inches away.
"Hi," I tell him.
He sniffs me. That's all I get.
"Good boy. Be nice," Luke says.
Zeke follows me like he's cataloguing a potential intruder for the rest of the tour.
He ignores Elle entirely.
Luke shows me the gym, the screening room, the balcony off the kitchen, the guest suites repurposed into storage and office space. At the end of the east hall he opens a door.
I step inside.
Elle films the whole thing and I don't have to act.
Floor to ceiling windows. A bathroom with a soaking tub. A walk-in closet.
"This works?" Luke says.
"It's a little small," I say.
We go to his room. Elle wants a picture of us lying in bed. Clothes on. Shoes off.
“This is where all the magic happens,” she says.
He shows me my room.
"There's a lock on the door."
"Good."
"You know I can open it with a butter knife."
We stand in the doorway for a second.
"You haven't changed," he says.
"You have."
"Is that bad?"
I don’t answer.
I get introduced to Nina. She’s in charge of everything cooking, cleaning, paying his bills.
"She's the mother I wish I had," he says.
Nina smiles without looking up from whatever she's doing. But she’s studying me.
Zeke follows me everywhere I go. No trust from him or Nina.
By seven o'clock my boxes are sorted, and the house has absorbed my things without really changing. The way big houses do. Like I made no dent at all.
Luke is in the kitchen when I find the door to the balcony and push it open.
Los Angeles is below me in every direction.
Not the diner and the parking wars and Jade's headboard finding the wall at midnight. The big version. The one that looks like it was designed to be seen from above — all light and grid and sprawl and the dark shapes of the hills interrupting the glow.
I stood on a balcony at a party when I first got here and looked out at the city and thought: one day.
One day I'll be inside all of that.
Zeke pushes through the door and sits beside me without being asked.
I put my hand on his head.
Below us Los Angeles keeps moving, enormous and indifferent. Ten million people who have no idea I'm standing up here.
They're about to find out.
“We’re going out to eat. We need to be seen.”
"Let's go out. I'll drive."