19 #2
We reach my landing, and I let us into my place. “No way.”
There’s a noise beyond the sheets hanging across the wall: Jack. I wonder if Yelena is there, too. The image of her hanging onto Jack’s shoulder floats past my mind’s eye like Casper the Busty Ghost.
“Come on. You can’t tell me something like that and then not do it,” Lucas insists.
“Fine. You want a drink?” I make sure to ask that question nice and loud. Though a part of me worries Lucas may get the wrong idea, a bigger part of me hopes Jack gets the wrong idea. To make him jealous, like he did to me with Yelena.
“Wine would be great,” he says.
I twist the cap on the wine, stashing the top in a drawer and smiling as I think of Margie. Lucas joins me in the kitchen, and I hand him his script and a glass.
“You pick the scene,” he says, casually sipping.
I fill my own glass and set the script down, flipping over to a tabbed page. My eyebrows shoot up: the sex scene is a hot one. Filthy. Restraints and blindfolds and—
“Yeah, not this one,” I say.
Lucas’s expression doesn’t change from the completely innocent one he’s sporting. But then again, he’s an actor. “Oh? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nice try,” I say. He laughs and gives me a playful “caught me” look.
I flip purposefully through the pages and chuckle when I land on the scene I want. The violence between the two hitman brothers on the page makes The Godfather look like Mary Poppins. And there’s definitely no kissing or ravishing happening here. I arch a questioning brow.
“You were plotting a murder the first time I met you, so it makes sense you’d find the most bloodthirsty scene now,” Lucas says with a laugh.
I wander into the living room, reading aloud. “Please! Please! Just let me…”
Lucas leans over my shoulder and peers at the script. “Get over here.” He playfully grabs my arm, and I press my wrist across my forehead like a damsel in distress. “Get on your knees. Now!”
I sip my wine. “You don’t have to do this. I’m sorry!” The scene calls for a whimper as Lucas’s character brandishes a gun.
He nods, his lips scrunched in surprised approval.
I mouth, “Pluck Cluck Chicken.”
He growls, “I don’t want to hear your fucking sorrys. You had time for sorrys. Open your mouth and suck on this.”
The script calls for a gun to be placed in the kneeling brother’s mouth.
Lucas grins, and suddenly the sheet on my wall bursts forward, a ghostly figure waving its arms and launching itself at him.
“What the—” Lucas shouts.
“You put your hands on her?” the ghost yells in Jack’s voice, full of muffled fury.
I scramble away and stare, my hand pressed against my mouth.
Jack stumbles off the sofa and flails, kicking over my coffee table in his efforts to wrench himself free of the sheet.
Lucas bats at Jack’s blind reach and leaps onto the sofa behind him.
Their shouts merge into a confusing word soup.
“Jack, stop! We were reading his script for a movie. A movie!” I shout, finally finding my voice.
And suddenly Lucas cries out. His eyes latch onto mine, shock and alarm flashing across his face as he tumbles backward off the back of my sofa through The Hole, his feet tangled up in the sheet, wrenching it off Jack as he goes.
He lands with a ridiculously loud clatter-crash.
Jack stares at me, breathing heavily, his hair disheveled. I blink and rush to the sofa, looking through The Hole. Lucas is lying on his side amid a stack of two-by-fours and debris, moaning softly and holding his cheek.
“Reading a script?” Jack asks me, his voice cracking slightly. I ignore him and climb through The Hole.
“Oh God, Lucas, are you okay?”
“My phone,” he mumbles. I help him sit up and reach for his phone in his back pocket.
He takes it and places a call, touching a hand to his jaw and wincing.
“Dan,” he barks. He winces again and holds his hand against the side of his face.
“You need to come get me. I sent the driver home. Address?” He looks at me and holds out the phone. I recite my address into the receiver.
Jack peers down at us through The Hole, his expression almost comically horrified. I push him back and scramble through The Hole into my apartment to grab Lucas some ice for his face.
“I’m fine.” Lucas waves away my fussing when I return, but he accepts the ice pack.
His agent, Dan, who calls to mind a refined grizzly bear, rushes over in record time and insists on getting Lucas checked out at the hospital, despite his objections.
I ask to ride along, but Dan rejects my request. Lucas doesn’t contradict him.
Evidently, one of our neighbors called the cops during the melee, and two police officers arrive just as Dan and Lucas are about to leave, forcing them to halt their retreat and share what occurred.
One of the officers starts laughing so hard at the misunderstanding—and at the fact that a goth ghost essentially scared a prominent TV celebrity into falling backward through The Hole—that his partner has to tap him none-too-gently to stifle his giggles.
Gence, on the other hand, does not see any humor in the situation. He is glowering at me, though it wasn’t my fault. Not directly, anyway. I push away the feeling of encroaching remorse. How was I supposed to know this would happen?
Lucas limps away without a goodbye to me, radiating offended fury, after the chuckling officer asks if he’d like to press charges against the sheet. Dan quickly follows behind him.