“I know I’m way overdressed, but I had a meeting today that I couldn’t get out of,” Sawyer said as he scanned the room for Lara, who entered a moment later, fashionably late to greet him.
“She’s shedding entire dogs at this point. You’re going to get covered.”
He shrugged and bent to pet her. He plunged both hands into her fur and scrubbed them down her neck and over her shoulders before looking up at me. “It’s just dog hair. Actually, do you have a brush?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well, if she tolerates a nice brushout, we can sit out back and talk about what comes next in the book while we brush her.”
“Don’t you need your computer nearby for notes?”
“Nah. Whatever I don’t remember I can just ask you later.” He stood and looked at me expectantly. “Brush?”
“Right. Ah, I’ll get it and meet you out there. Do you want something to drink?”
“Just water is fine. I was stuck in this meeting with coffee so bad that roofing tar would’ve been more appealing.”
“Yikes.”
“Yeah. I think I’ve hit my caffeine intake limit for the year. Maybe the decade.” Sawyer started for the back door, Lara following along beside him, getting hair all over his pants. A pair of nicely tailored trousers that hugged his ass in a way that made me think obscene things.
Sawyer glanced back at me, his cheeks turning pink when he realized I’d been checking him out. “Are you coming?” he asked as he reached the door.
“Right behind you.” I found the dog brushes in the junk drawer in the kitchen, grabbed two bottles of water, and followed Sawyer out onto the deck.
It was a nice day, the sun a little warmer than it usually was this time of year, accounting for Lara’s massive shedding issue the past couple of days. Without any regard for his pants, Sawyer sat down on the deck and encouraged Lara to lay down in front of him.
I took the spot opposite to Sawyer and handed him a comb meant for dogs with her kind of coat.
“It might feel like it’s pulling, but it doesn’t hurt her. I keep her brushed, mostly. Some days it gets away from me during shedding season.” Handing the brush to Sawyer, I watched as he gently worked through a small patch on her neck. He had a soft, methodical touch, and I found myself feeling intensely jealous of my dog and the way she got to luxuriate in the sunshine and enjoy his hands on her.
“Tell me about what happened after high school.” He handed me the other comb and motioned to her rump. “If you start down there, we can meet in the middle.”
I took the comb and started to work on her back end, combing massive clumps of loose hair out of her coat. It took me a few minutes to gather my thoughts but Sawyer was patient. He diligently worked on brushing Lara and praised her for lying so still.
“I was broke. Directionless. Jobless. I know a lot of people feel like they don’t have many options, but I knew I didn’t. I didn’t graduate. I barely had a home to go to. I couch-surfed whenever possible. And sometimes I cleaned myself up real nice and went down to the clubs. Sometimes I managed to stay theweekend with a guy, and that’s how I met Curtis Chastain. He was the owner slash director slash producer slash talent scout for his studio Six Six Nine.” I glanced up at Sawyer, whose face looked like a thundercloud. He was shit at hiding how he felt. He’d make a terrible poker player but knowing he wasn’t unaffected by my story somehow made it easier to tell.
“He was nearly fifty to my freshly eighteen. He’d been around several blocks, and he still looked good for his age. It was easy to be charmed by him. I was barely an adult and barely getting by. Curtis promised me… well, he promised me a lot of things.”
Sawyer’s gaze flicked up to meet mine. Anger flashed in his eyes, dark and deep, like it was down in the pit of his soul and I was just seeing the tip of it. “Predators often work that way.”
“Yeah, well, my eighteen-year-old ass wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, because I fell for it, hook line, and sinker. A few nice words, some money thrown around. A warm place to sleep every night. But it was the line about how everyone in his company was like family that reeled me in the fastest. I’d been so fucking lonely, so desperate and alone, that the idea I could have an instant family was almost too good to be true.”
“I’m sorry. That’s… incredibly shitty of someone to do. To manipulate you like that. I take it things weren’t as he described?”
“They were at first. Because he was an incredibly good liar. He was a great gaslighter. Definitely an expert in shifting blame and pitting his talent against each other to keep them from being mad at the real villain.”
“That sounds stressful.”
I let out a dry laugh. “Stressful is a kind word to use for what it was. It was mental and emotional torture. If you were in his good graces, you were untouchable, which was how he earned your loyalty to begin with. At the start, everyone was nice to you. And then when you weren’t around Curtis, they were less nice.”My gut clenched when I thought about the way things were back then. Fighting for every scrap of approval. Throwing myself into shoot after shoot.
“What was your first shoot like?” Sawyer asked.
The question was inevitable, and really it was a testament to his professionalism that it hadn’t come up before now. Sawyer had wanted to have the groundwork down before he delved into the stuff about the industry. Some of the people I’d tried to work with had only been interested in digging up dirt on people or hearing the horror stories. Sawyer had approached the project from a different perspective.
Between us, Lara moaned and rolled over, showing Sawyer her belly.
“It wasn’t horrible, that first shoot,” I said after a minute.
