Lilah blinked. “What? No. Why?”
“What happened to your freckles?”
Her hand flew to her cheek, then dropped back to her side. “Oh. They got lasered off.”
“You got them removed?” His brows knit together in concern.
“Not on purpose. It’s a side effect. Trying to shave a few years off more than just my Wikipedia page.”
He returned his attention to the donuts, flipping the lid open and studying the contents of the box. “Too bad.”
“I still have plenty more,” she said reflexively, but she regretted it when his gaze flicked back to her, taking her in from head to toe.
“I know,” he said, in a tone that was matter-of-fact and not pervy in the slightest, but that didn’t stop her from feeling like her entire body was blushing.
Without waiting for her to respond, he grabbed another donut. “See you down there,” he said with a grin, sticking it between his teeth and heading out the door.
17
It took only fifteen minutes in Jonah Dempsey’s presence for Shane to conclude that Lilah’s secondhand reports about him hadn’t been an exaggeration. If anything, they’d been too kind.
He seemed unassuming at first—thin and wiry, with a ruddy complexion and dirty-blond hair gelled firmly away from his face. But when Shane shook his hand, thanking him for coming in to help them, Jonah just tipped his head back and smirked. Even though he was a few inches shorter than Shane, he somehow managed to look down his nose at him anyway.
“Sure, man. You know, this is my mom’s favorite show. It’s cute.”
He barely looked up from his phone during the table read, even leaving the room to take a call at one point.
However, that inattentiveness didn’t carry over once they started shooting. The schedule on the call sheet quickly proved to be just a suggestion, as his overambitious camera setups and exacting direction led every scene to run over, sometimes by hours.
After the third day, when Jonah made a PA, an extra, and the head of catering cry in quick succession, Shane pulled Walt aside.
“This is ridiculous. He’s making everyone miserable. There’s no way he’s talented enough for this to be worth it. What kind of set are you running here?”
Walt shrugged helplessly. “I don’t have any say in it. The network hired him, and they’re not budging. You know who his father is, right?”
Shane didn’t, but the fact that the question was even being floated in the first place got the point across.
“There are a lot of assholes in this business,” Walt continued. “And we got pretty damn lucky that none of them are with us on a regular basis. It’s only three weeks. We’re just gonna have to tough it out.”
The van back to the hotel every night was dead silent, half the passengers sleeping, the other half staring moodily into the distance. Shane would lose consciousness the moment he tumbled into bed, his alarm jolting him awake what felt like minutes later.
Their second week of shooting kicked off with a scene that was shaping up to be an even bigger pain in the ass than his eventual kiss with Lilah: the restoration of Kate’s physical body, followed immediately by her kidnapping. It was a long andtechnical scene, the second half of which would take place in the rain—something none of them were looking forward to in November in Canada.
To make matters worse, Jonah had announced that he was planning on shooting everything after the rain started—five complicated pages—in one continuous take. The sense of dread that settled over them, cast and crew alike, was palpable.
The morning of the shoot, they boarded the van when it was still pitch-black outside. Their location for the day was the lush rain forest of the Clayoquot Sound, four hours away. Locations had already been out to prep everything the day before, so a mini village of tents and trailers awaited them when they arrived, powered by an army of generators, cords snaking out of the backs and snarled like neon-orange rat kings.
After he stepped out of the makeup trailer, Shane grabbed a cup of coffee and took a moment to absorb the scene: the sun filtering through the rolling greenery, the blue of the sky. He closed his eyes, inhaling the fresh, crisp scent of cedar. Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all.
He felt the hard clap of a hand on his shoulder.
“Didn’t realize we were paying you to stand around.” Jonah’s oversized grin didn’t match the flintiness in his eyes.
“I’m usually sitting around, actually,” Shane said evenly, sipping his coffee.
…
Lilah knew it was optimistic to think that they’d get through it in under ten takes, but she allowed herself to hope for it, anyway.
