Every inch of her.
Her hands drop to my waist and she tugs harder, as if she’s trying to erase any distance between us. I follow her cues, giving her what she wants, rolling my h*ps against her. Her hands are on my ass in a second, grappling and yanking me against her. She pushes back, thrusting her body against mine, and it takes all my self-control not to hike up her skirt, to touch her under those tights, to learn exactly how much more she wants.
Instead we kiss like that, frenzied and fast, bodies smashed together, but never quite going too far. At some point we pull apart for air. She’s breathing heavily but she’s smiling too, and everything about her is starting to lower my defenses, from the sweet curve of her lips, to the glow in her blue eyes, to her talent and the way she was meant to play this role. It’s eating me alive not to ask her to have dinner with me. To start something with her. To take her out, and romance her, the way I want to. I let that sweetness she has work its way through me, and I tell her something I shouldn’t be saying.
“I wanted to cast you as Ava. I wanted you over Alexis.”
Her eyes widen. “You did?”
“Yes,” I say and more words pour out because I want her to know what I see in her. I want her to know that she’s my discovery. I found her, I called her in, I chose her. “You were my first choice, Jill. The producers insisted on Alexis because of her credits,” I add, taking a chance that she won’t think me weak for not having the final say. But I risk it. “But I wanted you and only you as Ava.” I leave a quick kiss on her neck that makes her shudder before I speak again. “You can play her, and you will play her. Hell, you are her. I can feel her pain in you. Her secrets. Her sadness. How wounded she is. Most of all, I can feel her hope.”
She bites her lip and breathes out on the last word. I think her cheeks might be turning red. Slowly, as if she’s enchanted, she brings her hand to her heart. “Really?”
I nod. “You’re going to be such a big f**king star, Jill. I want the world to know I discovered you.”
“Thank you,” she says. “I’m so happy to have this chance so early in my career to work with you.”
Her eyes are filled with such genuine happiness, and it’s a look I immediately recognize, one that sends me back in time right along with her words. So early in my career. I can picture Madeline, how thrilled she was when I called her in for an audition after seeing her in a tiny little workshop production, how over the moon she was to be cast in one of her first shows, how hopelessly we fell in love as we worked together on World Enough and Time three years ago in San Diego.
It breaks me, the way Jill looks at me now the way Madeline did then. I know the ending. I can’t go there again, because she is all my weaknesses.
I shake my head. “Fuck. Rehearsal is about to start. I can’t be late. And we can’t keep doing this.”
“Right,” she says in a shaky voice.
“We just can’t,” I repeat, because I’m the one who needs convincing.
“I know,” she says, with resignation now. “This has to stop. The show is too important.”
She thinks it’s because of the show. But it’s more than that. “Jill. I don’t date actresses,” I say in a firm, harsh voice that’s more for me than for her. It comes out more cruelly than I intended.
She rearranges her features, erasing the happiness, erasing the aftereffects of what we just did. “Well, that’s fine with me. Because I’m in love with someone else anyway.”
She adjusts her coat, pulling it closed and walks up the stairs.
“Then you really shouldn’t kiss me like that,” I call out to her, and this time I intend it to sound harsh.
She gives me one sharp cold stare before she pushes open the door to the stairwell. “You’re right. I shouldn’t.”
Chapter 9
Jill
When rehearsal ends I head for the ladies room to reapply my lip gloss. If I can catch Patrick on the way out, I’m going to ask him out. I can’t keep falling into my director’s arms when the man I’ve been waiting for is here at last. I push this morning into the trunk of forgotten memories, then lock it up and throw away the key.
There. Done. Gone.
As I smack my lips together, one of my cast mates, Shelby, pops in. She’s a few years older and a chorus girl too. She’s an amazing dancer and has a sort of ballroom flare to her moves, all h*ps and sexy sway.
“Hey there,” she says. “The whole cast is going out to Zane’s for drinks. Want to join?”
The whole cast. Yes, that’ll be my chance! “Sure, that sounds great.”
“Cool. I need to grab my bag, so meet me by the elevator.”
I leave the restroom and head for the elevator. I spot Davis talking to Alexis inside the doorway of one of the rehearsal studios. Her hand is on his arm, and something flares inside me when I see them. I try to look away, but I can’t. She’s like a villain in a Marvel comic book, all over-the-top campy, and she has these hideous long red fingernails that she’s digging into his arm, as if she owns him.
“Of course you’re the best, Alexis,” I hear him say in a low voice. “You know there’s no one I’d rather have as Ava. No one in the whole wide world.”
She loosens her grip and then pulls him in for a wide embrace.
What the hell? He told me this morning I’m the one he wanted to cast. He seemed so incredibly sincere. Was he lying to me? Or is he lying to her? Or is he playing us both?
Ding, ding, ding!
I can hear the bell going off in my head, because I’ve figured him out. He thinks we are all fragile little flowers who need praise like we need the sun. So he gives it to us, and that’s how he coaxes out such great performances. Insidiously clever, and totally Machiavellian.
I have to hand it to him. I was fooled. I wanted his words to be true. I want to believe I was his first choice. A hot rush of anger floods my veins, and I’m dying to march up to him and tell him not to toy with me ever again—neither with kisses that I can feel for days, nor those words that undercut. But I won’t give him the satisfaction on either front, so I don’t look at them as I walk by, stepping into the elevator with Shelby.
“That dance number was brutal,” Shelby says, stretching her neck from side to side, as I force myself to eradicate Davis and his puppeteering ways from my brain. I don’t have any extra mental real estate to devote to him. “I thought I was going to die.”