16. Sierra
SIERRA
F inn settled in his seat. “She really is a director in the making, huh?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, looking at the perfectly cooked French toast in front of me.
“Action!” Ro called.
Finn caught my eye, his face broke into a smile, and I resisted the urge to groan at how fake and dazzling it was. I didn’t know how it was possible to miss the grumpy jerk who barked orders from the side of the set, but I did. At least he was real .
“Enjoying your food?” Finn asked, cutting into his pancake stack.
“Uh…” I hadn’t even taken a bite yet. I picked up my fork and knife, realizing I’d missed my cue. I cut into my food, the knife screeching across the plate. “Sorry.” I glanced at Ro behind the camera. “Can we start again?”
“Reset!” she called. “Action! ”
I shook off the sudden bout of nerves and stuffed a bite of French toast into my mouth.
“Enjoying your food?” Finn repeated.
I nodded, half choking on it as I rushed to answer. Finn shoved a glass of water into my hand.
“Cut! Okay, Sierra,” Ro called. “Try not to choke to death. You don’t actually have to eat the food. Just push it around the plate like they do on TV! Let’s try to get past the first page of the script!” We reset again.
“Enjoying your food?” Finn asked for the third time.
“It’s great,” I said woodenly, reading off the script. “I love this place.”
He nodded. “Good. I was thinking we should get away this weekend.”
“That sounds nice,” I replied. “We could both use a little break. Just the two of us.” I looked up from my plate to find Finn beaming at me.
“Perfect,” he said. “I’ll get something on the books, darling.”
Ugh, darling . “Okay, sugar puss.”
Finn rolled his eyes at me, and Ro called cut again.
“That’s not your line,” Finn said, taking a sip of his water.
“Well, I thought we talked about this. We agreed that darling was out.”
“Not according to the script,” he said.
“If you get darling, then I get sugar puss. It’s only fair.”
He scoffed. “No script changes are being approved at this point.”
“Well, honey,” I said, gesturing at him with my fork. “Like we’ve said before, marriage is about compromise. I’ve been doing my part, dealing with your neat-freak tendencies.” And that cat.
“I’m not a neat freak,” Finn growled. “You’re just a whirlwind of disaster with questionable taste in food.”
“I am not !”
“Back to the script, people!” Ro called. “Take it from the top!”
“Enjoying your food?” Finn grumbled at me.
“It’s great,” I said, stuffing a cold piece of French toast in my mouth.
“I was thinking we should get away this weekend.”
“That sounds nice. We could both use a little break. Because I’m fairly sure you must sleep in your suits. Do you even own comfortable clothes?”
“Get back to the script!” Ro called.
“Perfect, I’ll get something on the books, darling .”
“Sounds good, sweetheart,” I said, the words sticking to the roof of my mouth. Finn reached out then and tucked my hair behind my ear. I leaned into the touch, feeling horribly strange.
It was nothing like it had been the other day when the light had fallen on set and he’d tucked my hair back to see my face. In that moment, I’d felt like my heart would beat out of my chest. Now it just felt… Ugh !
“Cut!” Ro said before we went any further. “Great! We’re making real progress. But don’t forget that anyone recording you at the café might overhear the conversation. You need to keep to the script so you don’t out yourselves.”
This was never going to work. The damn script was half the problem. “Can we try one take on our own—with no one else around?” I asked .
Finn’s eyebrow lifted to a point.
“Just so we can get a little more comfortable,” I said. Maybe if we could run through it without eyes on us, I wouldn’t be so nervous.
“Okay,” Finn said. “Let’s act like this is a closed set.”
Ro nodded and ducked out with the camera operator. I’d hoped I’d be able to relax once they were gone, but the moment we were alone—really alone—I seized up. I had no idea how to bridge the gap between what was real and what was fake.
“Are you more comfortable now?” Finn asked.
Hardly . I forced a smile. “The camera and the directions and…It’s all a lot.” I chuckled under my breath. “Clearly, I was never cut out to be an actor.”
“Me neither,” he said. “Found that out the hard way.”
“Is that why you have those couple of acting credits on your IMDb page?” I asked.
He smirked. “Trolling my page for info?”
“I did my research,” I admitted, taking another bite of my breakfast.
He conceded the point with a nod. “Yeah, I decided it would be a good idea to act in a couple of indie films early on in my career. When I watched myself, I just looked so unnatural on-screen. It definitely pushed me behind the camera, which worked out well. I’ve always been a better producer.
Even if the first couple of films I put together were rough. ”
“Did you really produce a nature documentary?” I asked. “On baboons?”
He snorted, his real laugh so different from the fake booming laugh he used when he was being The Face. “Oh, you really deep dived. ”
“I did. I went back to the very beginning.”
“Yikes,” he said, playfully tugging at his collar. “It was my first and last nature doc. The monkeys were too unpredictable.”
“More unpredictable than working with your mother and X?”
He scoffed, and I caught sight of his real smile. Not the big, shiny, artificial one but the soft, slightly crooked one that looked the best on him. The one I imagined when I closed my eyes. “Surprisingly, yes,” he said.
“But that doc still did a lot better than my first produced feature. At least with a nature doc, no one expects it to go anywhere, you know? But I really thought my feature was the real deal. It was a script I’d picked out myself, too, and really cared about. Which made it that much worse.”
“The movie about the spy who falls in love?” I asked, taking another bite of French toast. “I adored that film.”
Finn took a swig of his coffee and grimaced. “The box office didn’t agree. If you look up the definition of a flop, it’s there.”
“That’s not what a lot of the critics said,” I pointed out. “The reviews were pretty favorable.”
“Yes, well, the film didn’t catch on with audiences the way I’d hoped.
” I could hear the disappointment in his voice.
“Honestly, I think that’s what stung the most. If I’d produced a bad movie, then whatever—I’d learn from the experience and move on.
But I made a good movie, one I really loved.
I thought everyone else would fall in love with it, too… but they just didn’t.”
“We’ve all got those projects,” I said, nodding. The ones that didn’t get the traction they deserved for reasons known only by the film gods .
“I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong with that western I did. There was a lot of great buzz about the costumes, and I was super proud of how they turned out and then just…nothing. I didn’t even generate any costume work off the back of that.”
I’d spent months after that film wrapped making ends meet with side hustles while I tried to land another production.
“ Texas Wanderer !” Finn said. “I saw you worked on that film. I couldn’t believe it didn’t even get an Oscar nod. I loved it. Westerns are one of my favorite genres.”
I shook my head, humming softly.
“What?”
“The country music in the car. Your love of westerns. I’ve just figured out that Finn Lockhart is a cowboy at heart.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Why haven’t you been putting out cowboy movies all these years then?”
His lips twitched. “Because that’s not where the audience is. Horses aren’t as fast as cars.”
I propped my head up on my hand, smirking. “I think you’re missing a real opportunity here for a Run ’n’ Gun prequel.”
He laughed. “ Run ‘n’ Gun: Horses and Highways ?”
“I was thinking more like Full Throttle Frontier .”
“Hey,” he said, intrigued. “That’s not half bad.”
“I want title credit,” I joked.
“Noted. What kind of film do you want to costume next? Now that you’re doing your big twenties period piece,” he asked, eating the fruit on the side of his plate. He saw me eyeing a strawberry and lifted it onto my plate .
“Thanks,” I said, internally aww -ing at the sweetness of the gesture. I ate it while I thought through his question. “You know what, I’d actually love to do a rom-com set in the eighties. Neon. Shoulder pads. Spandex. Big hair. Bowling alleys.”
“Bowling alleys?” He laughed. “Where the hell does bowling come into a rom-com?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just what I think of when I imagine the eighties. I adored bowling growing up. Probably because there wasn’t much else to do out in Garnett.”
“Kansas was kind of lacking in the extracurriculars, huh?” He shook his head as I laughed. “I’m really trying to envision you bowling.”
“I was actually pretty good,” I said. “It was the only sporty thing I was ever any good at.”
“I played tons of sports in school,” Finn said, which didn’t surprise me. “Also joined some clubs.”
Oh this was good. “Sports I can see given your…” I waved my hand at his body suddenly embarrassed. “Physique,” I finished and then plowed ahead so he wouldn’t question that. “What kind of clubs?”
He sat back with a smirk—the very one that did strange things to my insides that should never happen—but then he thankfully let it go. “Usual stuff—astronomy, film, pottery, Spanish, debate.”
“Hold on there, cowboy. Buried one in there. Pottery? Why don’t you have any of your pieces around the penthouse?” Well, anything personal. The place was a damn museum to austerity.
“That was a long time ago and I only participated in everything I could because they gave me a good reason not to have to spend a lot of time at home. ”
I wanted to dig deeper into that. Anyone who spent time with them could see the relationship was strained between Finn and his mother, but what I didn’t know was why.
The way he acted around her…it wasn’t like he was mad at her, exactly, but more like he didn’t quite trust her. There had to be a story there, and I wanted to learn more about it. But before I could ask, before things got too real, he gestured to my plate.
“You finished your food.”
“I did.” I hadn’t even realized. “They really do make the best French toast.”
“Guess that means the date is officially over,” he pointed out.
My thoughts skittered back to the script that had been written for us. This was the part where we were supposed to lean in and kiss. For real. Not just a little peck. He wasn’t actually going to go in for the kiss though, was he?
But then he was moving, and my pulse exploded, blood rushing in my ears, because I couldn’t kiss him like this…not if it didn’t mean anything. I couldn’t lie about that, not even to myself. Before I could try to explain, Ro burst back into the room, clapping, and Finn pulled back.
“Amazing!” she said. “That looked so natural! If we stick to the script a little more, you two will knock it out of the park during the real thing.”
The real thing , I thought as reality came knocking, reminding me that playing pretend was all this would ever be. There was no real real thing. Not for Finn and me.