Chapter Sixteen
I GET CAST. NOT A CALLBACK, not a maybe. A real part in a real film, with a name and lines and my own chair with my own character taped to the back of it, and on the first day of the table read I discover that my scene partner is Ricco Enriquez.
Which would be excellent news, except that Ricco Enriquez remembers me.
"Callback girl." He drops into the seat beside mine, grinning like we share a secret. "You got it. I knew you would. I told my agent, watch that one."
"You didn't."
"I absolutely did. Ask her, she'll deny it, but I did." He leans in, easy and warm and entirely too handsome for a Tuesday. "So. That guy from the soundstage. The one who owns the sky. Tell me that's your brother and make my whole year."
"He is..." I hunt for the word and come up with none of the true ones. "Complicated."
"Complicated." Ricco beams. "I love complicated. Complicated means available."
And he flirts. All the way through the read he flirts, generous and funny about it, sharing his water, stealing my margin notes, making me laugh in the exact loud way that gets us shushed twice. It's nice. It's uncomplicated. It's the kind of attention a smart girl would water and grow.
But this smart girl spends the entire afternoon thinking about a man who folds his smiles away in a vault.
When they break, there's a car at the curb that I didn't order and would know anywhere, and a man leaning against it with his arms crossed, watching Ricco walk me out with the focused calm of a storm deciding where to be.
"Enriquez," Maximo says.
"We've met?"
"No." A beat. "She's expected home."
Ricco looks at me, looks at him, and does the math faster than most. "Right. Complicated." He squeezes my shoulder, unfazed, and saunters off whistling. The car door shuts. The city slides by, and the back seat is suddenly the size of a shoebox.
"Were you jealous?" I ask the hard line of his profile.
"No." He doesn't turn his head. He watches the road like it might bolt.
"You looked jealous."
"Irritated." His hand rests on the seat between us, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off it, and he doesn't move it, and I don't move mine.
My borrowed heart is going loud enough that I'm half afraid he can hear it, which is exactly the sort of excitement my last checkup asked me, very politely, to avoid. My heart, as usual, has other ideas.
"They're extremely similar looks, on you."
"They're not." But his voice has dropped, gone low and a little rough, and his jaw is a straight line, and the whole car has gone warm in a way the heater has nothing to do with.
"Agree to disagree." I settle back, thoroughly warmed. "By the way, he thought you were my brother."
His jaw works.
"I told him it was complicated," I add, and watch that hit home, and decide it's the most honest sentence either of us has managed all week.