Chapter 12 Griffin #2
“And then one day he gets an arrow through the heel. So.” He glanced in the mirror. A black SUV was following them. “Turned out he was only human after all.”
“I’m not saying there’s no basis to the risk posed by an Achilles heel.” Reading his expression, Lana turned to look behind. “Griffin? What is it?”
“Nothing. Thought it might be the goons, but it’s a mom and her kids.”
Lana planted a palm on her chest. “I feel like I’m on some fairground ride designed to spike your adrenaline at regular intervals.”
“Let’s take time out to go over all this. We can head to my place.” He realized he was already navigating in that direction. He was taking Lana home after knowing her for a day?
“Your place?”
“I’d suggest your place, but I imagine mine is more secure—it’s a gated community, with security. This is assuming you trust me.”
“I do trust you, but I’m one of these na?ve, trusting types. And maybe I’m getting you mixed up with your characters—you do like to play the hero.”
“Sometimes I get myself mixed up with my characters. Though I’m no Darnell there. I’d hate to think what he’d be like if he’d played a serial killer instead of a P.I.”
“‘Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose.’”
“Whitman, again.” Griffin thought for a minute, picturing the book in the pile beside his bed.
“‘Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?’” He pulled into a turning bay and waited for a break in the traffic.
“To be honest, I don’t even really choose these hero roles.
I just get asked to do them, and if they sound interesting, I say yes.
And I get lucky that most of my films do well, so I get asked again. ”
“You call it luck, but you totally become those characters, I don’t know how.
I found it hard to even walk normally when the camera was on me, and I was way off in the background.
” Lana examined her palms. “It’s like my hands were no longer a natural extension of my arms, and I couldn’t remember what I usually did with them.
Same with my eyes—I didn’t know where to look, and couldn’t think where I’d normally look while I was walking.
Meanwhile, you have the camera in your face, and half the time you’re delivering your lines to a pole with some tape on it. What’s the tape even for?”
“Eyelines.”
“Plus, you’re jumping from the opening scene to the climactic finale, to random scenes in between—and I can see you physically recalibrating, figuring out where that is on your character arc and going there. When you watch it, it’s one coherent journey. I had no idea it was so fragmented.”
Griffin turned onto a narrow, palm-lined road.
He found himself relaxing as they headed to the Hills.
“I’ve learned to do my homework on that.
You can’t wing it—you gotta think it through—but even then you never feel like you do as well as you could have, and you can’t usually go back and fix scenes you’ve filmed earlier.
I’m glad I don’t do the kind of roles that get Oscar nominations.
I’d hate to have the pressure to actually be good. ”
“You realize you are good, right?”
“I try not to get too hung up about that. I just escape into my characters and try to make them real and enjoy the process. I know actors—plenty of them—who believe, consciously or subconsciously, that anything less than universal acclaim and blockbuster success is failure. Recipe for depression, if ever there was one.”
“My dad is an artist—a painter. He goes around saying, ‘What other people think of you is none of your business.’ But then he gets worked up about what people do or don’t say about his work, so…”
“That’s a hard road to navigate. I just hope someone enjoys what I help to make, you know?
Escapes from their own world for an hour or two.
Besides, you’d hope by now I was good at what I do, since it’s all I’ve ever done.
I grew up on sets and soundstages and backlots watching my parents work—and now I spend sometimes eighty hours a week on set.
You’d expect that someone who’s been a builder for a decade or more and grew up in the family business knows their way around a set of tools.
But I’m well aware that I’m primarily here because of the family I happened to be born into. ”
“Don’t shortchange yourself!”
“You’re sweet, but there’s no escaping that I’m a nepo baby. Countless insanely talented actors come through this town and work their asses off and don’t get a single role. If that were me, who knows if I’d have gotten lucky.”
“No one’s gonna hire you for something as big as Gods and Mortals just because of who your parents are. Not if you suck.”
“Well, yeah, you gotta bring something to it. But I’m aware that I have a name that’s not one hundred percent mine. And I still have to constantly prove myself—while not putting a foot wrong.”
“Ever wondered if you care too much about what people think? Like that Big Bird thing? Serious question—not accusing you of anything.”
“Problem is, what people think—the stuff that gets published, even the gossip—it does have an impact on my life, my career, the people around me. There are roles I’d have loved that I didn’t get because of some bullshit story doing the rounds.
And I like to get up every day and go to a job I love—I don’t know who I’d be without that.
I don’t have a backup plan. Besides, it’s not just about me,” he said, as they crossed Sunset.
“My public image could be the difference between a movie crushing it or tanking, and too many people have too much riding on this. Look at Gods and Mortals. A whole ecosystem—not just on set, but also the supporting industries, all the flow-on, the families who depend on that income.” He frowned.
“I have no idea why I just spouted all that.”
“We’re sharing. It’s what humans do.”
“They do?”
“I believe so. And now you’re looking at me like you’re worried that I genuinely think I’m an alien.”
“I’m looking at you like that because I’ve always felt like I’m the one who doesn’t fit. But here you are, a seemingly regular person, and you don’t feel like you fit.”
“You have this fixation with me being a regular person. Hate to break it to you, but…”
“Everyone wants to fit, right?”
“576.82”
“Roget’s Thesaurus?”
“Darwin. The urge to fit into our communities is strong, equal to the urge to pair up. Protection and reproduction—survival of the species. You have to override your programming to truly go your own way.”
Oh, he was feeling some basic human programming. “You fit in your library, don’t you?”
“I do. But a lot of us are a little different. All that time spent in other worlds.”
“Aliens?”
“Books!”
“Maybe that’s my problem too. I spend my days playing make-believe. Do you have a backup plan if you suddenly couldn’t be a librarian?”
“There are some things I could try. Like a social media influencer for books! I’d need more than six followers, though.”
“You could tell everyone about that life-changing book no one’s heard of.”
“That would seriously change the world. But I do like what I do. I believe in what I do. Purpose, like you say, even if I don’t have the impact on the world that you do.”
“I bet you have more impact than you know—being the badass commando librarian you are.”
She laughed, and he found himself smiling.
When was the last time he’d hung out with someone like this?
Someone so genuine. Someone without an agenda—or at least, with an honest one.
Easy company, but with a spark too. It reminded him of what he’d had with Ethan, but for a different time of life.
Someone who got him and saw him for who he was and not what the world said he was.
She might be using him for what little help he might be with her sister, but he didn’t mind being used like that, not by her.
And it was beginning to feel like that wasn’t the only reason he felt compelled to stick with her.
Or was he the fool, overriding a lifetime of programming to open up to a stranger with a pretty face and a hypnotic manner?
“Griffin? You’re retracting?”
“I am? Just wondering if maybe you’re a gossipmonger, right now planning your exclusive about your twenty-four hours with Griffin Hart and his massive ego and his asshole ways, and I’m the dumbest shit in L.A.”
“As if I could hide a secret like that from you with your mind-reading superpowers.”
“How do you know I’m not bluffing about seeing right through you, just to find out what you’ll confess to?”
“Because so far, you’ve been one hundred percent correct.” She shrugged. “Seems like we’ll just have to trust each other.”
“Easy as that?”
“Can be.”
He wasn’t so sure. But here he was, about to take a normie home—and surprisingly nervous about it. Good thing his mom wouldn’t be there to see it.