“Look.” He points toward the bar.
When I glance across the crowded space, Anderson Lind’s white-blond hair is unmistakable, as is the self-satisfied smirk on his face.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Rage and annoyance immediately boil beneath my skin. I throw the rest of my drink back, enjoying the way its warmth spreads inside me, firing me up further. I was doing a good job keeping my head down. This asshole doesn’t get to ruin that.
“Okay.” Vin wraps a hand around my arm and pulls, even though he’s nearly a foot shorter than I am, so he doesn’t have much leverage. “Time to go.”
“What? No. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Damian.” He tugs again, nearly tumbling out of his chair. “Please. Roberta said—”
“No.” Maybe it’s whisky fuelling my determination, maybe frustration. Either way, I am a rock. A glacier. Moving me takes a force of nature, not Vin. “We were here first. He can go drink somewhere else.”
“Shit.” Vin ducks down. “I think he saw us.”
He did. He locks eyes with me, and even beneath the haze of alcohol, my brain goes on alert. Because in fact, Anderson is the last person I need to see right now. He’s been the director of the last threeShadow Leaguemovies, the franchise that has made my career.
He’s also my ex. Ex-what is not totally clear. We were never serious enough to be boyfriends. But while we were in Cairo and Vietnam on the shoot forShadow League 4, we certainly fucked enough that we’d been something. I broke things off with him once filming wrapped, but I guess Anderson was more into our arrangement than I was, because let’s just say he did not take it well. I’ve got the text messages to prove it. And the emails. The voicemails. The notes that basically said he’d end my career.
What I don’t have is a recording of him leaning in to whisper to me while we were standing on the red carpet at Cannes, saying I’d never land another blockbuster if the studios knew I was gay.
And then the world’s entertainment press corps got an all-access pass when I finally lost my shit right there in front of the Théâtre Lumière and the entire planet and called him, along with a sadist and a liar, such highlights as “a predatory fuck goblin.”
Needless to say, the comment ruffled some feathers and got a fair bit of coverage. The rumor mills have been going ever since. Speculation has run from the truth—that it was a lover’s tiff—to me having an undiagnosed mental illness or substance abuse problem. It’s ugly and largely unfounded, and despite all my best efforts to pretend nothing happened, it won’t go away. So Roberta ordered me to lie low to see if the story drops if I’m out of the spotlight for a few days. Of course, it doesn’t help that Anderson has been happy to talk to anyone, saying he values what I’ve brought to the franchise and hopes I get the help I need without ever specifying what that might be.
But he’s holding all the cards because a voice in the back of my head is still whispering that he might be right. That if I admit we had a relationship—that all the relationships I’ve ever had were with men—I’ll be quietly excluded from consideration for the next slate of big projects, and my career will slowly evaporate until I’m stuck doing medical procedurals on network TV.
And now that asshole is here, and he’s walking toward me.
I stand, and Vin mutters, tugging on my sleeve and still begging me to leave.
I can’t let Anderson win.
But he’s not even close enough to speak to when another voice echoes over the space.
“Oh my God, it’s Damian Marshall!”
The karaoke dies, and a bar full of heads all turn in my direction. I can practically hear the collective gasp.
Then someone says, “I think that’s Anderson Lind.”
I should probably be pleased that I’m instantly recognizable whereas Anderson is a guess at best, but instead, all I can feel is the panic finally breaking through the booze as people press toward us and a sea of cellphones is raised in the air, all hoping to capture whatever happens next.
“Damian. So good to see you. How have you been?” Anderson’s voice is soft and lightly accented, a remnant from a childhood spent in Stockholm before his parents got divorced and his mother moved him to the States.
Maybe wewerein a relationship. I know more about his history than an average fuck buddy would. But it’s weird when you’re away from home for months at a time and see the same handful of people over and over. Things happen. We never promised each other anything.
He holds out his hand for me to shake, and too late I realize I’m already screwed. Because either I shake it and we can say we buried the hatchet, in which case Anderson wins, or else I tell him to fuck off and continue to look like the asshole.
I go to step around him, and he puts a palm on my arm. On reflex, I grab his wrist. “Don’t you touch me,” I say, then fling his hand away. He stumbles back maybe more than justified and crashes into a table behind us, looking surprised.
“I was just trying to say hi,” he says.
The rapid-fire repeat of a camera shutter pulls my inebriated attention off Anderson’s smug face, and a man with a ridiculously huge camera lens smiles as he tries to get a better angle.
“Parasites,” I mutter.
“Got anything to say, Damian?” he calls. “Want to double down on your comments from Cannes?”
