He held out his hand for Natalie’s glass, and she passed it to him. She rested her chin on her hand. “Wow. So that was, what, seven years ago? And you’re both still this weird around each other? Not that your littleScenes from a Marriagerole-play isn’t fun for all of us, but it kinda seems like it’s time to get over it.”
Shane hunted around for the sour mix, considering. He shouldn’t say anything else. He shouldn’t.
“It’s not just about that.”
“What, then?”
He mixed Natalie’s drink thoughtfully, buying some time. He didn’t want to seem like he was trying to turn her against Lilah. But it was the truth. It wasn’t his fault if it made Lilah look bad.
“She slept with Dean.”
Shane placed the drink in front of Natalie, but she ignored it, her eyes wide with shock. “What? When?”
“At her last wrap party.”
Her jaw dropped. “Atthe party?”
“After, sorry. After. They left together. That was the last time I saw her. Until upfronts.”
He still saw it, sometimes. The two of them headed toward the exit, Dean’s arm slung around her shoulders. He must have had a few too many at that party, though, because he remembered it two distinct ways. In one version, she glanced back at him, making sure he was watching. In the other, she didn’t bother.
Three and a half years later, he still wasn’t sure which one was worse.
Dean had stumbled home the next morning, shirt inside out, shamefaced, mumbling about how nothing had happened, unable to meet Shane’s eyes. That was the thing about Dean, though: he’d never grown out of that little kid impulse to lie his way out of trouble.
Shane had forgiven him, obviously. Eventually. But he hadn’t believed him for a second.
“Damn.” Natalie craned her neck to look across the bar, and Shane followed her gaze. At that exact moment, Lilah and Dean were dancing to the eighties hair metal playing on the jukebox—in a manner that was decidedly goofy, not sexy. Not even touching. Still, Shane felt something hot flare behind his rib cage, and he quickly looked away.
“Can’t blame her for having a type, I guess,” Natalie mused.
Shane shook his head a little too emphatically. “It was only that once. She just did it to get back at me. They both did.”
“Get back at you for what?”
His mouth tightened. “Doesn’t matter.”
Natalie’s eyebrows were in her hairline as she sipped her drink. “It matters what they did, but not what you did?”
Just then, Margaux came to his rescue, appearing out of nowhere with a plate bearing an array of cupcakes, “three” and “five” candles stuck haphazardly into the two in the center. Shane ducked out from behind the bar as the rest of the group crowded around him, singing “Happy Birthday” boisterously in a variety of keys and tempos.
“Make a wish!” someone shouted.
He didn’t put much stock in birthday wishes. Even so, as he bent over the candles, he racked his brain, only to come up empty. At the very last second, he glanced up, catching Lilah’s eyes in the back of the crowd right before he blew them out.
11
Backstage atAfter Hours with Joey Masters,Lilah was trying her best to keep her cool—or look like she was, at least. If she’d still been in her own dressing room, she probably would’ve been pacing, trying to work off some of her nervous energy. But once she’d gotten her hair and makeup touched up, she’d been brought to a shared greenroom with Shane to await their interview together.
The network had put them on a red-eye to New York less than a week beforeIntangible’s season premiere, theirAfter Hoursappearance serving as the centerpiece of a press tour that had seemed endless. Thankfully, they’d been making the rounds separately as much as together. But out of everything they’d doneso far—the magazine spreads, the newspaper profiles, the soul-searching podcast interviews, eating hot wings on YouTube—this appearance was the one she’d been dreading the most.
After Hourswas an entertainment industry dinosaur, a legendary late-night talk show that had been on the air since the fifties. Its current host, comedian Joey Masters, had gotten famous for his filthy, misogynistic stand-up, his hard-core coke habit, and his extramarital hookups with barely legal fans. But once he’d done the bare minimum to clean up his act, he was rewarded, in classic smarmy-white-guy fashion, with a show that brought him into fifteen million homes a night.
Talk shows had always made her skittish, though she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t being in front of an audience—she’d done plenty of theater. The show was pretaped, not live. All their talking points had been approved in advance. She’d been a professional actress for over a decade now; there was no reason that her hands should be this sweaty, her heart racing like she’d been running stairs at the Empire State Building.
Maybe it was because she was playing her least favorite character: herself, but not herself. Blander, glossier, smilier, all her sharp edges sanded off, eyelids heavy under fake lashes and skin thick with foundation, channeling a level of perky falseness that left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. Or maybe it was the persistent reminder that a hell of a lot of people’s jobs—her own included—were riding on whether a critical mass of strangers wanted to either be her friend or fuck her.
This was the kind of thing that made her feel the most under the microscope, even more so than when she was secretly photographed out and about with no makeup and greasy hair. It was the ultimate paradox: She was there to show the audience how relatable she was, that she was just like them. But the fact thatshe was up there to begin with meant she wasn’t very much like them at all.
