“I’ll be there shortly, hon. Just need to catch my breath.” She laid a delicate hand on her chest.
Griffin inhaled. She meant “a chance to grill Lana.” Lana subtly gestured at him to go. He hesitated, but only for a moment. Evangeline Zavala was used to commanding every room she walked into, like a Hollywood admiral, but Lana would know how to deal with difficult customers.
As he passed his mom, he shot her a look that said, “Be nice.” She responded with her own look: “I’m always nice.” His father tsked. It was a longstanding family joke that Griffin and his mother conversed in facial expressions the way some people used sign language.
“Divide and conquer, is it?” Griffin said, following his dad across the terrace.
“Don’t blame me! But now that I’ve got you… How long have you been dating a normie?”
Griffin made a show of checking his watch. “About twelve minutes. And we’re not ‘dating.’”
His father waited. “Is that all I’m getting?”
“It’s not a long story.”
“How long have you known her?”
“A week.” It wasn’t quite a lie, though it wasn’t much better than the truth, which was less than twenty-four hours, if youcounted it from when he’d learned her name. Though why did he feel the need to lie at all?
“Okay. It’s just not like you to bring someone home. Someone like that. Didn’t your agent say that if ever you wanted a date, he could…”
“Be my pimp?”
“I wouldn’t be that coarse.”
“Hewould. And this is definitely not that. Lana’s going through some stuff. I’m just … trying to keep her safe.”
“Safe? By pulling her intoyourlife? Does she know that she risks being consumed?”
“Which is why I’m not going there.”
“Really?”
“Really. What you saw … was a momentary lapse.”
“Never a good idea to bring an outsider in—for either party.”
His parents’ suitcases were lined up in the foyer. Griffin stacked three of his mother’s, and briefly considered adding a fourth, for expediency. “She’s not going to sell her story.”
“You know her that well after a week? She’ll be telling everyone she knows—you know what regular people are like. The story will go around until someone figures how to make a buck out of it.”
“Pretty sure none of us knows what regular people are like.”
“I’d like to think I have some appreciation.”
Griffin forcibly kept his eyes from rolling as he navigated the suitcases down the hall. His father’s most famous role was as a long-haul truck driver, for which he went on a week-long road trip with a trucker. Ever since, he’d considered himself the voice of the everyman. While Griffin’s mother was born into Hollywood royalty, his father claimed a working-class origin story. “My father was in plumbing,” he liked to say. Truth was, Griffin’s grandfather had owned a successful nationwide plumbing franchise called Pipe Dreams, but Griffin would betmoney he couldn’t tell a plunger from a P-trap. Though, Griffin’s only encounter with a P-trap was the time Estelle lost a sapphire earring down his bathroom sink.
“All I’m saying,” his father continued as they reached his parents’ suite, “this girl, she doesn’t understand how the game is played. She doesn’t know the rules.”
“They’re not that hard to learn. Maybe it’s me who doesn’t understand her world, and I’d have to learn her rules?” Griffin didn’t know why he was arguing the point, given that there was obviously no place for a guy like him in Lana’s alien hermit life.
“There is no crossing over into the regular world for us.”
“You make it sound like a sci-fi.”
“Sometimes it feels that way! Imagine if you two dated, and people got wind of it, and then you broke up and she went back to her library. Imagine the gotcha pieces!Lana the Librarian’s Fall from Grace!”
“It wouldn’t be a comedown. She has a great life!” Was that even true? Was “happy enough” enough?
