Chapter Six
Alessandra
“All done.” I pulled back my cotton pad from Joel’s face and he immediately jumped up and went back to work on set without one word uttered to me.
Whatever. I wasn’t too thrilled with him right now, either. He was screwing with me last night, so I screwed him back. His butt-hurt feelings didn’t make me feel any better, but seriously. He was all too eager to play along and get me into his bed.
In a way, I know it was all a joke. And I’m not sure why I played along. But the whole day today, he had been putting on a front with me. He would smile, and look every bit Joel Kline on the outside, but I saw it in his eyes. He knew he shouldn’t have played with me. And he didn’t like it that I played back. The player got played, so to speak, and he didn’t like that it was his own fire that burned him.
I watched him as he rested in a space ship whose course was set for Earth. Of course, it wouldn’t make it there, that would be too easy. But right now, he was talking to the reader who was slowly falling in love with him. You could hear the sadness in his voice. The loneliness.
He was a good actor. I felt like he meant every word he said, even though it was scripted.
When Leighton yelled cut, Joel just sat in the fake ship for a few minutes while everyone around went about their business. When his eyes finally travelled my way, I waved him over, and he nodded.
As he jumped out of the ship and walked over to me, everything in my head started to weigh on me.
“Hey, can we talk?” Even though I didn’t really do anything more wrong than he did, I was still his lead artist, and he could make my life miserable if he wanted to. Not that I thought he would, but the air between us needed to be cleared.
“Sure.” He looked at me, and waited.
“I think last night got carried away from both of us. I’m sorry for my end.” There.
“I’m sorry, too. Who’s Jenson?” His voice held slight malice at the mention of Jenson’s name. Oh boy. Did he really think I was with a guy that cheated on me?
“My thirteen-year-old son. He was at a friend’s house last night and wanted to know if we could go surfing this weekend.” I was nervous mentioning my son to him. When he took in my words, his expression was almost comical.
“Your son?”
“Yeah, my son, Jenson.”
“I didn’t know you had a son; why haven’t you mentioned him?” He sounded hurt, but that was just too weird, so I ignored it.
“Didn’t know we were friends like that. Last time I checked, you just wanted to get into my pants.” He rolled his eyes, and it was sort of a cute reaction. But it was Joel. He was cute no matter what he did.
“Well, we are friends now. You wanna talk about shit, you can call me anytime.” Without asking, he reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone. I didn’t have any lock on it, so one swipe and he was typing away. I didn’t protest. I should have, but I didn’t. When he was obviously up to something other than just putting in his number, which should have only taken a few seconds, I tried to get it back from his greedy hands.
“Okay, what are you doing now?” I lunged for the phone, and he held it above his head, still up to something.
“Seriously, what are we, twelve? This is stuff my son would do.” He stuck his tongue out at me.
“Real nice.”
“There you go. Now you can call your new bestie anytime.” He smiled and sauntered off, looking pleased with himself.
“You’re not my bestie!” I hissed at him and followed behind. He grabbed an orange from the food table and started peeling.
“Can’t let me go, huh, Lips?” I huffed and walked away. Jesus, I swear he lived to screw with me in any way he could.
The rest of the day went by quickly, and we actually were done pretty early. As soon as I got home, I gathered our surf gear together so when Jenson got home from school we could grab some waves before the sun set.
It was all worth it to see the smile on his face when he saw I was ready with our boards, my wet suit on, and beach bag in my hand. He put his fist in the air in triumph and zipped off to his room to throw his suit on. Together we headed toward the beach.
We were all tied up and ditched our bag in the sand, heading straight for the water. Surfing and his love of the water was something he got from me. No matter what we had been through, the water always took away the stress of life. We had gotten in a good half hour of shredding the waves before I heard Jenson yell out to me.
“Got a man in a gray suit!”He started paddling towards the beach calmly, and every other surfer who heard him, did the same. Wanting to be with my baby and not risk fate more than I was, I paddled in as well. No reason to be out looking like a tasty turtle when there was a shark sighting.
“You really saw one, kid?” a tanned surfer asked Jenson.
