“Oh please,” she says, eyeing me up and down. “You think this is my first human heist?”
An hour later I’m in the back of Alexis’s Porsche Cayenne, covered in a quilt. We’ve packed up essentials—clothes, toiletries, laptop, cell phone—and made it out of the gate. I hear the shouts and screams. Luckily, I can’t make out most of the specifics.
We pull out of Bel Air, and I sit up as we turn onto Sunset and make our way across to Santa Monica and then the Pacific Coast Highway. I watch the ocean as we pass. I wonder what would happen if I just forced my way out of the car right now and ran straight in. Would someone catch me?
“A few things,” Alexis says, glancing in the rearview at me. “First things first: I’m going to get you through this, but you need to call Sandy back, and you need to set up a meeting with your agent.” Alexis shakes her head at me. “No excuses. This will blow over, but it’s big, and you need to talk to them about how you’re going to rehab your image. You need to be smart, Paige.”
I cross my arms. “Fine,” I say.
“And drop the attitude, darling,” she says. “No one likes a grump. Especially when she’s trying to recover from a very public scandal.”
“Anything else?”
Alexis’s eyes flash in the mirror as she makes a left into the Colony. “No lying out without me,” she says. “If we get tan, we get tan together.”
She parks, and I grab my duffel out of the back. I follow her up the stone steps, but the front door is already open. For a moment I have a flash of panic—the paparazzi have made it inside the Colony. They’re here. They found us already. But then I see him standing in the doorway. I am flooded with relief and then immediately dread—he doesn’t look happy.
“Oh yeah, one last thing,” Alexis says, passing him and disappearing into the house. “Listen to him.”
I look at Wyatt, his arms crossed and his black jeans and Ramones T-shirt combo offsetting his wild, curly head of hair. He’s wearing a look I’ve seen a lot before.
“I go away for one fucking month, and this is what happens?”
I hike my bag up farther, but I don’t take a step toward him.
“Well, come on,” he says when I don’t move. “I can’t yell at you until I’ve hugged you.”
And then Wyatt Lippman, our infamously temperamental director, is making his way toward me. He takes off my bag and puts it on the ground. It feels like he takes a lot more than my duffel. And then he puts his hands on my shoulders. I lean into him, stiff, but then he pats my back and I put my head on his shoulder. The tears come fast and furious. Everything from yesterday and the day before. The breakup, the tabloid headlines, those pictures—capturing the most confusing, personal moment and making it so harshly public—all come out in Wyatt’s comforting embrace.
“Now you give me emotion,” he says, chuckling.
Wyatt doesn’t let me off easy, but I don’t expect him to. He was the one who first warned me about dating Rainer. He didn’t like it.
“I expected more,” he says.
“I know.”
“You’re not like those other girls. Running around drunk with no pants on. Come on, PG, don’t let me be wrong about you.”
“I’m not. It was one stupid moment. Rainer and I got in a fight and he—”
Wyatt sits on a stool at Georgina’s counter, a glass of water in front of him. Like in Hawaii, he looks unbelievably uncomfortable at the beach. It fills me with something close to comfort. “Jordan,” he says.
I see Alexis through the sliding glass doors. She’s outside, giving us space, but I know she’s eavesdropping. I wonder if she can hear anything with the ocean behind her.
I put my elbows on the counter and thread my hands around my water glass. “Have you spoken to him?” I ask.
Wyatt shakes his head. “PG, listen to me. It doesn’t matter. You gotta let this go. This is not a love triangle, okay? This is not fiction; this is real life. You have to put this personal bullshit—all of it—behind you. You have a job, a real one. You need to go back to Maui ready to work.”
“I can’t even think about that.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to,” Wyatt says. “You know I don’t like to get personal,” he says, but his eyes have softened. “But I am telling you to stop with the both of them. Date someone from home. Date someone you met at the dog park—”
“I don’t have a dog.”
Wyatt waves his hand in the air, likewhatever.
“So get one. Just stop keeping company with your costars,” he finishes. “What you need to worry about now is gaining back your fans’ trust.”
