“Sounds good.”
I call room service and then run to the bathroom and brush my teeth. I have just enough time to sweep on lip balm before Graham taps lightly on the door. When I unbolt and open it, he’s holding two forks and the most massive slice of cake I’ve ever seen. “Wow. That thing is enormous.”
“Yeah. It’s basically an entire cake.” He runs a hand through his hair and a couple of strands towards the middle stick straight up. He’s barefoot, wearing jeans and a worn t-shirt inscribed with the name of an indie band I vaguely recognize. Emily would know it.
We drag the chairs and one nightstand out onto the balcony, where we sip coffee and eat from opposite sides of the cake without dividing it. The muffled din of Saturday night floats up from the street below. After a few minutes of clinking forks and sighs of contentment, Graham asks what made me want to play Lizbeth Bennet, returning to this afternoon’s conversation as though the interruption occurred moments ago, rather than hours.
“What girl wouldn’t want to do an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice?” I hedge.
“She said mysteriously,” he returns, one eyebrow raised. He takes another sip of coffee, waiting, slouching into the chair, turning more fully towards me, his long legs extended.
I pull my knees up into my chair, angling to face him. “Well, like most girls in the English-speaking world, I adore Elizabeth Bennet. She’s the ultimate heroine, strong-willed and independent, intelligent, loyal, but at the same time, she’s not flawless, she’s not above mistakes, or falling in love.”
He nods. “So as soon as you knew about the film, you wanted to do it?”
Wow, he’s good.
“Not exactly. I mean, it isn’t Elizabeth Bennet, after all. It’s Lizbeth, this Americanized version. And some of the screenplay lines… I guess I’m a purist about some things, and Jane Austen is one of those things.”
“Fair enough. So when did you first read Pride and Prejudice?”
Here we go. “I don’t know. It was my mother’s favorite book. I remember her reading it aloud to me when I was very young.” My stomach pitches and I blame the sugary cake and caffeine-laden coffee, when the origin of this uneasiness is all too familiar. I evade this discussion whenever possible. I could do that now, with Graham, but I’m not going to. I want to tell him.
“So what does she think? Did she want you to do the film, or is she a Jane Austen purist, too?”
Here we go, here we go, here we go. I pick at a fingernail, staring at my hands. “She died when I was six.” The words spill out quickly, but softly, and I want to tell him everything, all of it, though I can’t say any more because I can’t quite face the bits and pieces I always fold away and shove under the surface. My father and the way we haven’t connected since we lost her. My inability to have a normal childhood because I’ve been in front of a camera, pretending to be someone else, since before she was gone. Chloe and the way she always expects to be the center of every universe near her. And I’m okay, I really am, most of the time. But sometimes, I’m just not.
Graham doesn’t speak until I look at him. His eyes hold mine, and they don’t slide away, uncomfortable with the fact that mine are brimming with tears. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he says.
I nod, take a breath, and pull a napkin from under the nearly-empty plate, pressing it under my eyes. “Thanks.”
We sit outside for a while longer, eventually talking about other work we’ve done. I tell him about the Nazi director of the grape juice commercial, and he tells me about the attractive forty-something star of an art house film he did a few years ago who showed up at his trailer door wearing a robe and nothing else.
“Do I want to know how you found out about the ‘nothing else’?”
He grimaces. “The exact way you’re thinking.”
“Eww… so did you—?”
“Um, no. I told her I had to get up early, and she said, ‘you don’t have to be scared, Graham,’ and I just blustered through it, of course, something like, ‘oh, no it’s not that, I’m just really tired.’ And then I didn’t answer my door after that. She got the idea eventually.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” he says, laughing. “I may still need therapy over that night.”
We end up sitting on my bed, six or so inches of space between us, watching a movie on pay-per-view. I fall asleep about halfway through it. When I wake up just after 4 a.m., he’s gone. The chairs are back inside, the balcony door closed and locked. The comforter is folded over me like a cocoon, and there’s a note on the nightstand.
Thanks for helping with the mountain of cake.
I’ll be downstairs at 6 if you want to run.
Graham
I set the alarm on my phone for 5:40.
Chapter 16
REID
I should be asleep until noon. Instead, I’m wide awake and staring at the ceiling by nine a.m., deciding how pissed I should be.
Between the late dinner and the martini bar last night, we drove past Brooke, Meredith, MiShaun and Jenna going into a club. Tadd pointed them out. “There go the girls—small world, huh?”
“I didn’t see Emma,” I commented.
Quinton yawned, glancing back at them through the rear window. “Yeah, I talked to Meredith earlier, on the way to the elevator. She said Emma was wavering over whether to go or not tonight. Apparently she had a monster hangover this morning.”
Meaning Graham and Emma both ditched.
“Son of a bitch,” I swore.