I groan. I don’t care about decorum anymore. Flipping my phone to speaker, I twist until I’m lying on my back on the seat, my knees in the air. “No, first she licked the cheesecake off the waiter’s face.Thenshe kissed me.”Kissbeing a loose term, of course.
Hunter chuckles in the front seat. “She was impressively bold,” he says.
“No cap,” Liam agrees.
I roll my eyes. “Whose side are you on, Wright?” I ask Hunter, though his joking is making it easier to breathe. He was never truly worried about my safety tonight, despite Shannon’s wild display, which kept it all from getting too crazy. I can generally take care of myself, but it’s nice to have backup.
“Always yours, Derek,” Hunter says. “Liam, ask him about the soup.”
I tense. “Don’t ask about the—”
“Well now I have to hear about the soup,” Liam says with a laugh.
I sigh. He’ll hear about it sooner or later. “I convinced Shannon to leave once we, uh, helped her become decent again.” AKA when I wrapped my suit jacket around her after Hunter dragged her off my lap so I could breathe. She still has my jacket and will probably sell it on the internet for some quick cash. She’ll need it after tonight. “She grabbed a bowl of soup from a random table on the way out and dumped it on the head of a man sitting outside, claiming he looked sad and hungry.”
Liam whistles low, and he sounds a little more serious when he asks, “What happened to her? She wasn’t like this on your first few dates with her.”
No, she wasn’t. Shannon has actually been really nice. We met at an audition, and she was sweet and witty, with a genuine quality about her.She’s just starting out in the film industry and has a lot of potential, and it was nice to be around that kind of untarnished enthusiasm for acting. We seemed to have a connection, one I was eager to explore.
“Fran happened,” I mutter, exhausted.
Liam swears, and Kasey speaks up for the first time, asking, “Your old publicist?”
The publicist I should have fired long before I did.
“I found out tonight that she’s working for Shannon, and I’m eighty percent confident she put Shannon up to it afterHot Scoopcalled Shannon unremarkable.”
“Only eighty percent?” Liam asks. “That’s not very Derek Riley of you.”
Yeah, well, I’ve been faking my confidence more and more lately, and I’m tired. The exhaustion goes far beyond tonight. “I feel bad for Shannon, more than anything,” I say with a sigh. “This could ruin her.” With the wayHot Scoophas been writing about me, itwillruin her.
And there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s the worst part, having no power over this situation.
“She’s smart enough to know better,” Kasey says. “She made her choice when she agreed to go bat crazy.”
Kasey and Liam are my only friends who have met Shannon so far, since a movie Shannon auditioned for is one whose screenplay Kasey is helping revise. I was planning to bring Shannon to our Sunday brunch next week to introduce her to the rest of the gang, but that plan’s out the window. It’s for the best.
It’s not like I’ll ever find someone who can both handle my fame-packed life and keep me grounded. I can’t even do that for myself lately.
“Hey,” Liam says, his tone soothing. “At least you can betHot Scoopwill spin the whole thing in your favor, right?”
I huff a laugh. That stupid site has never had a negative thing to say about me despite constantly tearing down my friends. Even last fall, when they uncovered a long-buried secret that my cousin Elliot is really my half-brother, they were still mostly in my corner. “I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse,” I say.
“Definitely a blessing. It’s brutal when you get on their bad side.”
Every single one of my friends has been onHot Scoop’s bad side. Relentlessly. A gut feeling that won’t go away tells me their battles with the tabloid have somehow been my fault. I wish I knew how—why—so I can fix it, but that website has become the bane of my existence. My white whale. The sharp rocks at the bottom of a slope I’ve been slipping down for years.
“I’m sorry you had to endure the date from hell,” Liam says. “Don’t let it bug you.”
“Does anything bug Derek?” Kasey asks. It’s a joke. I think. But it almost sounds like a genuine question.
Yes, things bother me. Plenty of them. I just don’t let anyoneknowthat they bother me.
I feel Hunter’s eyes on me in the mirror again, and I’m pretty sure he has something to say. Something only for me, or he would have said it by now. He’s never been shy about voicing his opinion, which is one of the reasons I’ve kept him around as long as I have. Honesty is hard to come by in my line of work.
Clearing my throat, I keep my tone light. “At least I’ll be out of town for a couple of weeks and can avoid the spotlight.”
“Ah right.” Liam sighs dramatically. “Your super secret research trip.”
