Wyatt: Fine but maybe if you had a little more eggplant in your diet, you wouldn’t be such a miserable cow all the time.
Elijah: Well we don’t all have hot Daddies glazing our peaches anytime we bat our lashes.
Wyatt: Please. You’ve got a super-juicy peach. There are a million guys who would Daddy you so hard. You could have so many eggplants. All the eggplants. Maybe the Highlander’s brother?
Charlie: This conversation is making me hungry.
Elijah: You’re both dead to me. We’re not friends anymore.
Charlie: We’re still doing mimosas and mani-pedis at your house tonight, right?
Elijah: Duh.
Shep lit a cigarette and took a drag, his gaze lingering long after Elijah had pivoted. Disappointment settled in. The boy was so… excitable. Something about the way his cheeks flushed, and his gaze had darted about like a scared rabbit a split second before he’d exited the pool as regal as a king. He was… contradictory. His actions, his affect, his demeanor all so at odds with each other. Shep liked it. It was something different—the boy was something different—after forty-two years of sameness. Shep wanted to play with him some more.
“Hey. You.”
He turned to see the dark-haired woman coming at him, waving her hand at the trail of smoke coming from his cigarette like she was trying to see through the thick haze of a four-alarm fire. Was everybody in LA this dramatic?
“Smoking is illegal pretty much everywhere in California. Lung cancer is a real thing and your second-hand smoke is risking Eli’s life. You know that, right?” she asked, glaring at his cigarette.
He took a deep drag, slowly exhaling the smoke into her face before dropping it to the ground, stamping it out beneath his boot heel. “All gone. Crisis averted.”
She coughed then sneered at him. “Listen, Carpenter—”
“Shepherd,” he corrected, knowing full well she hadn’t forgotten his name in the ten minutes since she’d introduced him.
“I knew it was some biblical occupation,” she said, brushing off her mistake. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so… well, like this.” She waved her hand at him. “I can’t have you doing… that thing you were just doing. That ends now or I’ll have to have you replaced.”
He frowned, trying to puzzle through her cryptic statement, but nothing came to mind. “I don’t follow. The thing?”
She planted her hands on her hips, her red nails looking like blood splatter against the fabric of her pants. “Yeah, you and Eli with the flirty-flirty.”
Shep tilted his head, examining the woman. “You thought we were flirting?” Shep took a moment to mentally flip through things he perceived as flirting, positive he hadn’t gotten that one wrong. “That was not flirting. If anything, I was rude.” How fucked up were the people in this town that they mistook being a dick for flirting? Shep had spent most of his life feeling like he was from another planet, but these people were truly alien to him.
“Rabbit. That’s what I’m going to call you,” she mocked, dropping her voice low in a terrible impersonation that made him sound like he had the IQ of a turnip.
“I don’t talk like that,” he muttered.
She rolled her eyes. “Look, I get it. He’s hot. He’s a celebrity. He’s just bitchy enough to knock your Kinsey rating from one to three, but I’ve finally gotten his career back on track and he will be every bit the star his grandfather was.”
What was a Kinsey rating? His brow hooked upward. “Still not sure exactly what that has to do with me.”
She made a disgusted noise. “Are you kidding? It’s hard enough keeping his cat in the bag without you trying to sniff his tail like the big bad wolf,” she snapped. “Eli and I have a deal. When he’s at home, he can be the queen of the castle, but out there, I need him to be approachable Ellen gay, not yas-queen-glitter-twink gay. His career depends on it, and so does mine.”
Her muddled metaphors were giving him a migraine. Still, he kept a casual smile on his face. “I’ll say it again, slowly this time. There was no flirting. I’m just here to do a job. I don’t answer to you.”
If steam could have come out of her ears it would have, but still, she crossed her arms, giving him an almost deranged smile, clearly determined to establish her dominance. “You obviously don’t know who I am. Ask around. I can make your life very, very unpleasant.”
She was already making his life unpleasant. He didn’t have time for this shit. He let his mask slip, losing his affable expression for one of utter indifference. The color drained from her face and she swayed away from him. He kept his voice low, his tone calm. “I don’t have to ask around. I don’t care who you are. But I’ll offer you a bit of advice. Don’t fuck with me or I’ll be the one making your life very, very… unpleasant.”
For a split second, she seemed like she might choke on her own tongue, but to her credit, she recovered quickly. “Fine. I suppose I read the situation wrong. But you have to understand, Hollywood isn’t like other places. Eli needs to be likable and non-threatening. That’s why he has Robby.”
“Robby?” Shep parroted.
“Yes, Robby Shaw is an adorable, family-friendly, studio approved Nickelodeon gay with a hot new tv show on NBC. He’s perfect. He’s exactly what Eli needs. Not some hot Scottish porn star with more muscles than brain cells.”
Shep blinked. “Am I the hot Scottish porn star in this scenario?”
