Chapter 14
Griffin
“Mom! Dad!” Griffin said. “I thought you weren’t home until Monday.”
“Evidently!” his mother said, with a pointed glance at her skirt. “We left early because of the news about Toby Fong. We thought you might not want to be alone. I see we needn’t have been concerned.”
“Angel, don’t be arch.” Griffin’s father was hovering his hand over his eyes as if Griffin and Lana were naked. “We intruded on them. Sorry, Griff. Didn’t see you there until it was too late.”
Griffin took a breath. He wasn’t a teenager. He could handle this maturely. “Mom, Dad, this is Lana. Lana, my mom, Evangeline, and my dad, Peter.”
“Lana, is it?” his mother said in a deliberate, perfunctory manner. “Nice to meet you. I’d shake your hand, but I don’t know where it’s been.”
Lana slowly rose, smoothing the skirt as if trying to restore its factory settings.
Her face was pinker than the fabric, her swollen lips pinker again.
Griffin was hit with competing reactions: attraction, regret, and also no regret whatsoever.
Maybe because it had been building for a while, maybe because it was worth the wait.
He murmured an apology to Lana. To his parents, he said, “We met on set.”
“Oh, and what do you do there, Lana?” his mother asked. “Are you an actor? You must be new.”
“She is,” Griffin answered, aware he sounded defensive.
“What role are you playing?”
“She’s—”
“I’m an extra,” Lana declared, darting Griffin a glance that said I-can-take-care-of-myself-thank-you. “Was an extra. I’ve finished now.”
“A background actor?” Evangeline’s question was directed at Griffin, but again Lana responded.
“That’s right, just for the week. I’m actually a librarian.
” Lana’s embarrassment might be clear from her flushed face, but her spine was straight.
She was coolly respectful, with none of the fawning most people succumbed to when they met his parents—even Hollywood stars in their own right.
But of course, Lana knew his parents as no more than that.
Not the Oscar-winning stars of The Way Back and The Other Side of Midnight.
Just a couple of people who’d intruded on a private moment.
“A … librarian?”
“Yes, in a public library. And I apologize for wearing your skirt, Angeline.”
“Evangeline,” his mother corrected hesitantly. She was not at all accustomed to people getting her name wrong.
“Evangeline. So sorry.”
“I grabbed the skirt for Lana when she spilled water on her clothes. I didn’t know it was some label.
” And there Griffin went, sounding like a teenager.
It wasn’t that he was embarrassed to have been caught by his parents, though it was a genuine jump scare.
It was more that, now his body was cooling off, he could see clearly that he shouldn’t have kissed Lana in the first place, for so many reasons.
It wasn’t his parents calling him out—it was his guilty conscience.
“Everything in your mother’s closet is ‘some label.’” His father stepped up to shake Lana’s hand. “Good to meet you, Lana. Griff, would you mind helping me carry the suitcases to our room? Mitch had to run off to visit his dad.”
“Sure. Mom, you wanna come and tell me where you want your things?”
“I’ll be there shortly, hon. Just need to catch my breath.” She laid a delicate hand on her chest.
Griffin inhaled. She meant “a chance to grill Lana.” Lana subtly gestured at him to go. He hesitated, but only for a moment. Evangeline Zavala was used to commanding every room she walked into, like a Hollywood admiral, but Lana would know how to deal with difficult customers.
As he passed his mom, he shot her a look that said, “Be nice.” She responded with her own look: “I’m always nice.” His father tsked. It was a longstanding family joke that Griffin and his mother conversed in facial expressions the way some people used sign language.
“Divide and conquer, is it?” Griffin said, following his dad across the terrace.
“Don’t blame me! But now that I’ve got you… How long have you been dating a normie?”
Griffin made a show of checking his watch. “About twelve minutes. And we’re not ‘dating.’”
His father waited. “Is that all I’m getting?”
“It’s not a long story.”
“How long have you known her?”
“A week.” It wasn’t quite a lie, though it wasn’t much better than the truth, which was less than twenty-four hours, if you counted it from when he’d learned her name. Though why did he feel the need to lie at all?
“Okay. It’s just not like you to bring someone home. Someone like that. Didn’t your agent say that if ever you wanted a date, he could…”
“Be my pimp?”
“I wouldn’t be that coarse.”
“He would. And this is definitely not that. Lana’s going through some stuff. I’m just … trying to keep her safe.”
“Safe? By pulling her into your life? Does she know that she risks being consumed?”
“Which is why I’m not going there.”
“Really?”
“Really. What you saw … was a momentary lapse.”
“Never a good idea to bring an outsider in—for either party.”
His parents’ suitcases were lined up in the foyer. Griffin stacked three of his mother’s, and briefly considered adding a fourth, for expediency. “She’s not going to sell her story.”
“You know her that well after a week? She’ll be telling everyone she knows—you know what regular people are like. The story will go around until someone figures how to make a buck out of it.”
“Pretty sure none of us knows what regular people are like.”
“I’d like to think I have some appreciation.”
Griffin forcibly kept his eyes from rolling as he navigated the suitcases down the hall.
His father’s most famous role was as a long-haul truck driver, for which he went on a week-long road trip with a trucker.
Ever since, he’d considered himself the voice of the everyman.
While Griffin’s mother was born into Hollywood royalty, his father claimed a working-class origin story.
“My father was in plumbing,” he liked to say.
Truth was, Griffin’s grandfather had owned a successful nationwide plumbing franchise called Pipe Dreams, but Griffin would bet money he couldn’t tell a plunger from a P-trap.
Though, Griffin’s only encounter with a P-trap was the time Estelle lost a sapphire earring down his bathroom sink.
“All I’m saying,” his father continued as they reached his parents’ suite, “this girl, she doesn’t understand how the game is played. She doesn’t know the rules.”
“They’re not that hard to learn. Maybe it’s me who doesn’t understand her world, and I’d have to learn her rules?” Griffin didn’t know why he was arguing the point, given that there was obviously no place for a guy like him in Lana’s alien hermit life.
“There is no crossing over into the regular world for us.”
“You make it sound like a sci-fi.”
“Sometimes it feels that way! Imagine if you two dated, and people got wind of it, and then you broke up and she went back to her library. Imagine the gotcha pieces! Lana the Librarian’s Fall from Grace!”
“It wouldn’t be a comedown. She has a great life!” Was that even true? Was “happy enough” enough?
“Well, yes, you and I know that there’s no shame in a regular life, but most people don’t see it that way. The coverage would be brutal. Please tell me your security team did a background check, at the very least?”
Griffin sighed. “No, Dad, they have not.”
“We have rules about this kind of thing.”
“You don’t even know what this thing is.” Hell, Griffin didn’t know. This wasn’t a thing he did—kiss a normie, kiss a woman he’d known less than twenty-four hours. Let alone kiss a normie he’d known less than twenty-four hours.
His phone beeped. A text from Natasha. She’d found Vivien’s ex.
And that was what it was all about—a vulnerable woman who needed help. Not some will-they-won’t-they narrative.
“I know you’re too old to be answerable to me, but I must say I’m surprised.”
“Stand down, Dad,” Griffin snapped. “I have no intention of dating a ‘normie.’”
His father raised his eyebrows. “Well, whatever you’re intending.”
Griffin ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m not intending anything. You only need to take one look at her to know she’s not my usual type.”
His father’s gaze flicked meaningfully toward the terrace.
A warning. Before Griffin looked, he knew: the doors were open, weren’t they?
His parents always opened all the doors the second they got home.
He stepped to the terrace. Sure enough, across the pool, his gaze met Lana’s for a split second before she looked away.
Shit. What had he said? Why was he even so worked up?
By the time he deposited the last of the luggage into his parents’ closet and walked back around the pool, his mother was quizzing Lana about her life.
Evangeline Zavala had a voice that carried, so he could hear her questions but not Lana’s answers: “Do you cook every night, or cook once and let it last the week?” Followed by, “Do you survive on canned soup between paychecks?”
“Mother,” Griffin said in a warning tone as he walked into the pool house. She was sitting on the sofa. Beside her, Lana widened her eyes in a “save me” look.
Evangeline turned, all innocence. “It’s not often I get to chat with a librarian!”
She said it the way a regular person might say “snake charmer” or “professional mourner.”
“She’s mining you,” he told Lana. “They do this. You wait—she’ll be a librarian in her next movie. Mom—Dad says if you don’t go help him right now, he’ll recategorize your shoes by color.”
“He wouldn’t dare,” Evangeline said, but she stood.
As she left, Griffin sat in the armchair across from Lana. Awkwardness hung in the air between them.
“Sometimes it’s like my parents are amateur anthropologists, except the culture they’re researching is their own,” he said.
“No need to explain. It’s not far off the way I feel.”
“Listen, you might have overheard some of my conversation with my dad…”
“Couldn’t miss catching a few keywords.”
“Lana, I hope you don’t think—”