Chapter 1 #2
Then, after she confessed her feelings and Bex didn’t instantly admit to feeling the same way, Sam had fled, quit the show, and spent half a decade accepting any role she was offered, so long as it enabled her to avoid her quiet house and her own company (Sam’s stipulation) and moved her up another rung on the ladder of Hollywood celebrity (her management’s).
The result was that Sam had reached a fuck-you level of stardom, with the money to match. She was very rich and very, very famous, but without Bex, she hadn’t been happy.
They’d figured it out. Their reunion six months ago had turned out to be the most delicious do-over Sam could have asked for, and it wasn’t her fault or Bex’s that their schedules had been packed ever since.
The commitments that kept them apart had been made long ago.
Sam was a patient person. Level-headed. Extremely chill. Everyone said so.
“You’re doing the thing where you go silent,” Bex said. “So I’m doing the thing where I panic.”
“Right. Sorry.” She wasn’t brilliant over the phone.
They’d suffered through a lot of calls at weird or inconvenient times over bad connections.
They texted constantly at first, but small issues blew up too easily into big misunderstandings, and they’d been relying heavily on voice memos for the past few months.
Sam had started to feel like she was sending letters by carrier pigeon from the warfront to her fiancée back home.
“I am disappointed. I miss you.” Sam delivered this line with, she thought, enough affability to hide her vulnerable yearning. “But we can’t control the weather. When do you think you’ll get in?”
“They seem pretty confident a fresh flight crew will be here in a couple of hours.” Bex sounded as crushed as Sam felt. “And by then, the storm will be past. With the time difference, I could be in L.A. in time for a very late dinner at Tatsu Ramen.”
“Perfect.” Sam bit her lower lip. She could feel every place her stiff costume had dug into her ribs, leaving injuries that would bloom into bruises tonight while she slept. Alone, most likely.
She rolled her eyes at herself. Give a girl a mom who wasn’t cut out for parenthood and a dad with multiple marriages, and she’d be stuck with abandonment issues forever.
“This is what we’re going to do.” Bex’s voice had gotten crisp, exactly like an older sister who’d had to raise her two younger sisters with literally nothing but pure faith and terrifying ambition.
“Tell me.”
“This plane is pulling away from the gate in two hours or less, or I am calling Kevin Costner, who happens to owe me a favor, and who I know is at his place in Denver right now, and he will get me to L.A. in his plane.”
Sam smiled at this pronouncement. At its heart, Hollywood was a small town, which meant it did a brisk commerce in favors, boons, and handshake agreements.
One of the things that made Bex so delightfully Bex was that she kept track of every single one in a secret notebook she kept in a zippered pocket of her bag. “Why not call him this instant?”
“I have to be judicious about how I use my IOUs. But in ninety minutes or less, I want you at my house. I know you wanted to pick me up from the airport, but I’m assigning you to another mission.
” Bex’s voice had become formidable. “Turn on the pool lights. Make sure there is a lot of food. Nothing vegetarian. Frankie’s taken me to every plant-based deli, café, and bar in Manhattan, and I am getting frail.
Tonight, we’re going to eat a devastating amount of something extremely bad for us and listen to all of Vic’s major and minor dramas, and then we will curl up together on the big pool chaise and talk until we fall asleep, or a drone camera catches a picture of my thigh between your legs and my mouth welded to yours”—Bex paused to take a breath—“and the rest of us, you and me, will start early tomorrow.”
Hearing Bex’s description of their bodies intertwined had Sam blushing.
She pulled at her lip, acknowledging a pang of misery that she and Bex couldn’t be immediately alone.
Fortunately, it was a small pang. Bex and her sisters, Frankie and Vic, were a package deal.
It didn’t bother Sam, who’d grown up in a family where privacy was scarce.
Sam’s dad had been married seven times. The longest romantic relationship ever embarked upon by Caesar Polonius Farmer, Oakland periodontist, lasted thirty-six months, and it was on supplemental oxygen by the end.
In defiance of these familial odds, Sam had always hoped to find her person—her one person—and pair-bond until death.
This meant that while the press liked to paint a picture of her dating habits that featured a revolving door of women, the truth was considerably more …
governesslike. Proper. “That is a plan,” she said. “No contingencies?”
“No. This is the only plan. It is a good plan, and what’s more, it’s the plan we deserve.”
“It is a Bex plan.” Sam could easily imagine Bex in plan-making mode, her cloud of unruly auburn curls bent over one of her notebooks as she made a list.
“Yes. Which means it will happen—or something else equally remarkable will—and then I’ll make a new plan. But get ready. Once I’m back, we’ll have six weeks. A week for every month we spent apart.”
Except that I’m going to Telluride.
Sam pushed the thought and everything it represented down somewhere deep inside herself.
At thirty-five, she was a couple of years younger than Bex.
She didn’t feel ancient yet, and her paychecks told her she was far from irrelevant, but in this industry, everyone balanced on the knife’s edge of celebrity.
The bigger her team got in response to Sam’s prestige projects and growing stature, the more that team depended on her work bringing in the kind of money and attention that fed the beast. It was why she hadn’t found a way yet to tell them that taking time off from her six weeks with Bex to schmooze with studio people, talking at and around another Theomina project, was not something she wanted to do.
No one had asked if Sam wanted to. Bradley wanted her to.
Sam didn’t doubt that after she showed up at his rustic abode there would be other things he wanted from her, one after the next until her six weeks with Bex had broken up and disappeared like the surf when it hit the sand.
But if she even attempted to refuse the meeting, her team would be thrown into a panic.
Bradley’s people would either start planting shit in the media about her or assume she was playing hardball and offer more money, which she wouldn’t be able to refuse once her people saw all the zeroes.
Sam had to go to Telluride. But she didn’t have to think about it, much less mention it, until after she’d indulged in at least a few days’ worth of quality time alone with the woman she loved.
“Sam?” Bex spoke her name with a hint of concern. “You’re acting—I don’t know. You’re acting. What’s up with you?”
She was staring through her car’s windshield at the studio building, trying to figure out a way to answer this question, when the exit door opened and her costar, Chad Bevington, walked through it.
He’d changed into plaid board shorts and a loose tank that showed off his waxed muscles.
His luxurious blond hair system was styled in the same tousled waves he’d sported since he was twenty.
A second man followed him out. He wore sunglasses and a black fedora that combined with the man’s slight, dancerlike stature to give Sam an instant sense memory of the Juicy Couture perfume samples shoved inside the celebrity magazines she’d pored over as a preteen.
That was Sloan Lennox.
Sloan Lennox, walking out of the studio with Chad Bevington.
Sloan Lennox talking to Chad Bevington, with one of his signature unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes pinched between his first finger and thumb (on a strictly no-smoking lot), gesturing to Chad with a trail of smoke fading in his wake.
“I’ll be damned.” Sam couldn’t believe her eyes. Seeing the two of them together was like watching a long shot from the classic film The Lights of Marfa, which had made both of these men legendary.
Together, Chad and Sloan had anchored Hollywood’s Ice Crew, a six-pack of gorgeous young celebrities who held court in the nineties from the Velvet Chair Lounge on Sunset Boulevard.
Chad, Sloan, and a third leading man, Christian Stanstedt, became famous for their roles in various Tom Kessler productions opposite Ramona Watts, Macie Finn, and Juliette Draper.
But Chad and Sloan hadn’t been photographed together for at least twenty years, and probably closer to thirty.
Not since Juliette drowned.
“You’ll never guess what I’m looking at,” Sam whispered. She didn’t have to whisper—she was encased in an Audi Q8 with the air-conditioning on full blast—but the gossip value of what she was staring at made whispering feel necessary.
Or maybe it was Chad and Sloan’s body language. There was something furtive in the way Sloan kept scanning the parked cars.
“What? What are you looking at?” Bex’s impatience burned through the phone line.
“The Ice Crew, if you can believe it. Chad Bevington is in this very parking lot with Sloan Lennox. They’re striding across the pavement like it’s Lights of Marfa all over again. Sloan just flicked the butt of his cigarette at the pavement, skipping it like a goddamn stone on a pond.”
“Oh my God!” Bex was not whispering. “I need a picture!”
Chad and Sloan stopped in the middle of the lot to talk to each other. There was a lot of gesturing. Sam shot off a quick series of photos and sent them to Bex.
“Unreal! Chad and Sloan together? They loathe each other! Their feud is legend! I was obsessed with the Ice Crew in high school. I watched Karma Revisited so many times, I wore it out. They were my moody teen ideal.”