Chapter 1 #3
“I don’t think they were teenagers when they did those movies. They’re at least ten years older than us, and that’s only if they’re not lying about their ages, which Chad definitely is.”
“But wasn’t that the appeal? Depressive twentysomethings wearing too much eyeliner, pretending to be my age.
I went through a phase where I wore brocade vests with leotards exactly like Macie Finn.
I so should’ve known I was queer. No one who was obsessed with Macie Finn turned out straight, that’s for sure. ”
“I worked with Macie.” Sam said this distractedly, absorbed with watching what was now a heated conversation. She took a few more pictures.
“Wha-a-at? How do I not know this?”
“Macie did a guest spot on Utopia.” Sam had started out in Hollywood in the ensemble cast of a hit sci-fi drama.
She didn’t miss the tight and shiny jumpsuits that costuming had made her wear for her role as a half-android, half-human starship officer, but it had been fun to work with a big ensemble cast and some truly remarkable guest actors.
Bex made a tiny squeal. “Tell me what they’re like. Is all the dry humor real? Are they hotter in person? I feel like they would be hotter in person.”
Sam laughed. She was about to answer when she saw Sloan break away from Chad.
Then she saw Chad start walking toward her car.
No, to her car.
“Shit, Bex. I have to go. Text me when you’re getting on a plane, any plane.”
Sam hit the end button in the middle of Bex’s “Okay,” just as Chad gestured for her to put down her window.
“Hi there, Chad. What can I do for you?”
“Why are you sitting out here?” His eyes darted around the lot. There was nothing to see. She and Chad and Sloan were the only people on the roof of this parking garage, which no one could access but credentialed actors and studio employees. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“I’m listening to a podcast.” The Craven’s Daughter reunion special had involved Sam and Bex hosting what had become a notorious podcast, so Sam got asked about podcasts a lot by people who assumed she was an expert. She was not. But Chad didn’t know that.
The breeze lifted up the waves of his expensive hair, and he furrowed his eyebrows at her. There were tens of thousands of pictures of Chad Bevington making that same furrow between his brows, looking pained, yet artistic, yet hot.
“Did you see me talking to Sloan?” He said this offhandedly, glancing up at a seagull as though its screech had distracted him from his entirely trivial question.
Sam was not fooled. She had spent enough time with Chad in front of a camera to know what he sounded like when he felt a situation had moved too far beyond his control for his comfort. But why control this situation?
“I did spot you with Sloan,” she decided to say. “I love to see a man find a style and stick to it. The fedora and sunglasses still work for him.”
“Yeah. Whatever. I just mean we were having a private conversation.”
He was trying to manage this. “And I was listening to a podcast.” She raised her eyebrows as if to ask, Why are you making a giant deal out of it?
Chad furtively scanned the lot one more time. Sloan stood fifteen feet away, both hands shoved in his pockets, looking like a cardboard cutout of himself.
“Yeah. Okay. I guess you can know. I’m sure I can trust you not to say anything.”
Had that been a threat? Chad was still making an effort to sound casual, but he was also staring right at her, his neck tendons prominent. This was how he looked when he brought up his legal team. Sam raised her eyebrows again.
He sighed heavily. “Sloan and I did an episode of The Howling together.”
It took Sam a few seconds to understand how this statement connected up to Chad’s cloak-and-dagger paranoia.
The Howling was a streamer-original horror series that had become an unexpected phenomenon in its first season due to the wry, winsome appeal of Ramona Watts, also formerly of the Ice Crew.
Now filming its second season at StudioHonor with the full resources of Howell Motion Pictures behind it, The Howling was generating a lot of speculation regarding whether its star would fall apart under the pressure of her own success.
It was a pattern that had played out more than once for Ramona over the years.
Everyone knew The Howling kept a tight lid on its production secrets, but only Chad would treat a pre-airing nondisclosure agreement like a list of nuclear launch codes. “The Howling! Oh, wow. With Ramona?”
“Yeah, but shut up about it, right?” He scowled.
Sam mimed zipping her lips.
He looked at the sky again and then smacked the top of her car a couple of times. “Catch you at our prepress.”
When he walked away, Sam put up her window.
So strange.
People were strange with Sam, in part because she’d been an out lesbian in Hollywood for a long time, in part because she was extremely tall, blond, and famous, and most recently because she was associated with solving a crime.
While trying for a second chance on the Craven’s Daughter reunion special, she and Bex had also used their TV detective skills to close the cold case of what had happened to their friend Jen, the show’s makeup artist. On live television before a breathless audience of millions, they’d coaxed a confession from the man who killed Jen, setting off a firestorm of publicity.
The sleuthing adventure was a one-off, brought to their door by circumstances and old secrets.
But Sam couldn’t say she had entirely put down a certain kind of awareness of undercurrents, obfuscation, and mysteries ever since.
For instance, it was fun to see how people in her professional life checked themselves in her presence.
Being a TV detective turned actual detective made people assume Sam’s bullshit meter was finely tuned. It warded off a lot of bullshit.
Sam flipped through the stealth pictures she’d taken of Chad and Sloan.
She would be lying if she claimed she hadn’t fantasized of heading into a mystery again.
She’d enjoyed working through the clues with Bex and her sisters, talking to people she might normally have never met, and baiting a trap to catch Jen’s killer.
It was fascinating to track the aftermath as the case wound its way through various pretrial motions on a slow path toward justice.
All of it exercised Sam’s mind and put her invisible youngest-of-five-siblings-and-only-girl powers to use.
A-a-and … she was distracting herself from the cocktail of feelings that had hit her system while talking to Bex, with Bex’s arrival on the literal horizon. There were so many of these feelings. Sam was never sure which one was going to hit her at any given time.
If there was such a thing as love at first sight, then how Sam had felt about Bex the first time she met her was an argument in its favor.
But they were kidding themselves to count on six full weeks together.
Six months apart was much more the norm for a Hollywood couple.
Something always came up in this business—callbacks, reshoots, “amazing opportunities” that had to be seized before they evaporated.
Even now, Sam had half a dozen emails from Bradley’s people sitting on her phone, flagging up details to review before she was supposed to be on a plane in seven days, on her way to his rustic mountain retreat to talk about his agenda.
It was how the game was played. He would monopolize her time and make her come to him because he could. How else could Sam appreciate how big his dick was?
Not to mention that Sam’s brother Fergus was hogging her guest room, which meant she and Bex had no guarantee of privacy at Sam’s. Bex had her sister Vic living at home, with Frankie road-tripping her way west from her New York internship and arriving in a handful of days.
With a sigh, she pulled out of her spot to head home and execute Bex’s plan. She trusted Bex’s plans. They’d gotten the two of them this far, and Sam had no reason not to believe that if she stayed the course, everything would get good, and easy, and they could just be Bex and Sam, always.
All they had to do was make it to the part where they were in the same room at the same time. After that, there would be nothing to worry about.
She was almost sure of it.