Grey took another sip of water. She considered the question. All the eyes in the room turned expectantly to her. She put the glass down. She really, really, really needed to pee now.
“No smoking,” she replied.
Audrey looked down at her papers to camouflage her snicker.
Ethan raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t—”
Grey cut him off before he could finish. “Yes you do, I can smell it.”
He closed his mouth, indignant. She realized those were the first words she’d spoken directly to him the entire meeting.
Grey turned her attention to the rest of the room. “I can’t cuddle up with a smoker. Even fake-cuddle. Sorry.” She shrugged.
Her imagination said otherwise, but none of them needed to know that.
Renata leaned across the table. “I can lend you the tapes I used if you want.”
Grey almost laughed aloud at Ethan’s bemused expression.
“Um, I’m okay, thank you,” he muttered. Renata shrugged and leaned back again.
“Suit yourself. The patches are a lifesaver, though. You should try the patches.”
Paul cleared his throat impatiently. “Are we done here?”
Audrey smiled serenely at him. “It does seem like we are, doesn’t it? I’ll have the contracts finalized and sent out by end of day tomorrow. Thank you for your cooperation, everybody. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful…something.”
Paul bolted out the door as soon as the last words left her mouth, his phone already pressed to his ear. Audrey followed, with Renata hurrying to catch her at the door to confer with her about something or other. Kevin closed his laptop and swiftly exited, leaving Grey and Ethan as the lone stragglers.
She fell into step with him as she came around to the other side of the table. They looked at each other. She felt like she should say something, but words failed her. It seemed like around him she could only vacillate between saying the wrong thing, or losing the power of speech entirely.
Ethan held the door open for her. As she walked by him, he leaned over her. She froze. All of a sudden, she had the irrational thought that he was going to kiss her. He did smell faintly of cigarettes, it was true, but it wasn’t the sour, overpowering stench of a chain-smoker. Somehow it just enhanced his natural musk, which was clean and spicy and masculine.
He didn’t kiss her, of course. He just brushed his lips against her ear and murmured, “You’re cute when you blush.”
Grey blinked, still frozen to the spot. Before her brain was able to process what happened, he had already swept out of the room without looking back. It was probably for the best: as all the blood in her body rushed to her face, she didn’t feel especially cute. She would just have to take his word for it.
GREY WAS STUMPED. HER TEENAGECosmosubscription, which she’d trusted to prepare her to navigate every tricky situation she could ever possibly encounter as an adult, hadn’t quite covered this one.
What does the modern, sophisticated, sexually liberated woman pack for her very first overnight stay at her fake boyfriend’s house?
She walked over to her dresser and opened the top drawer, rifling through it, and throwing five or six more shirts on top of the already enormous pile of clothes on her bed. She looked at it and groaned, falling face-first into it. She missed Kamilah. Of course, even if Kamilah were here, she couldn’t be honest with her about what was going on, so maybe it was better that she was off gallivanting around the world with L.A.’s hottest up-and-coming genderqueer art-pop star, leaving Grey to have her meltdown in peace.
After Grey had returned home from Greece, she’d moved all of her belongings out of Callum’s luxury condo and put a downpayment on a secluded 1920s Silver Lake bungalow. In a moment of serendipity, Kamilah’s housing collective had imploded in a flurry of fermentation-related drama around the same time, and Grey had practically begged her to take the spare room.
It was the shot in the arm their friendship had needed. They’d drifted apart after Grey had booked thePoison Paradisepilot and dropped out of USC their senior year. She’d let herself get so wrapped up in the chaos of her shooting schedule, followed by the all-consuming infatuation of her first adult relationship, that she’d let every other relationship in her life fall by the wayside. They’d first reconnected when thePoison Paradiseproducers were looking for new directors to keep on call, and Grey had immediately thrown Kamilah’s name into the mix.
Kamilah had grown up in a small western Massachusetts college town, the daughter of two professors. She’d eschewed the free liberal arts tuition to follow her acting-slash-filmmaking dreams out West, her hunger amplified by working part-time at her tiny local video store during its final years of existence. They’d initially bonded over being East Coast refugees, though their upbringings couldn’t have been more different. Grey found Kamilah’s tales of DIY home piercings and boxed wine in cow fields as fascinating as Kamilah found Grey’s stories of growing up on set and backstage.
While Grey’s lifetime of industry experience made it easy for her to charm people on a superficial level, she was also most comfortable keeping them at arm’s length. Being regularly pulled out of school and bouncing from set to set had shaped her into something of a loner. Kamilah, on the other hand, had an uncanny ability to disarm almost anyone, her quiet magnetism and genuine curiosity drawing people to her like a beacon. By their sophomore year, they’d become inseparable, hosting elaborate dinner parties, working their way through Kamilah’s Criterion Collection DVDs, and making grandiose plans about what their careers would looklike once they left school. When Kamilah had moved into her house, which they’d filled with flea market and estate sale finds, it was like no time had passed at all.
That is, until Kamilah had been hired to direct Andromeda X’s high-concept new music video. Kamilah had left for the shoot early one morning three months ago, and Grey hadn’t seen her since. She’d woken up to a dozen drunk, giggly voice memos of Kamilah gushing about how she had found her soulmate, and how within an hour of arriving on set, Andromeda had immediately invited her to tour with them for the next several months.
Grey was thrilled for her, of course, and had been following their exploits on Instagram with only the slightest twinge of envy. She’d scrolled through pictures of them clubbing in Berlin, smoking intimidatingly large blunts in Amsterdam, trying on outrageous streetwear in Tokyo. The video content Kamilah was creating for them on the fly, editing on the plane and in hotel rooms, was stunning, some of her best work ever. Meanwhile, Grey was stuck at home, tragically unemployed, trying unsuccessfully to keep Kamilah’s plants alive, and wondering whether she should bother packing anything cuter than her tattered middle school graduation T-shirt to sleep in for her first thrilling night of no-mance with Ethan.
She checked the time on her phone. 6:40. Shit. She needed to get on the road soon. She shoved the tower of clothes onto the floor to reveal her empty overnight bag buried under it, and threw a few random items in without looking. The only thing she really needed was her toothbrush.
Nearly an hour later, she followed her GPS up the winding Santa Monica Mountains road to the gate of Ethan’s house. Down the street, she saw a few cars idling. This must be the paparazzi Audrey had called in advance. She tapped out a text to her just to be sure:
