And yes, I understood it was a comedy, but without proper growth and development of the main characters, it was going to be boring and very one-note for the audience.
My phone rang just as I’d turned to the scene, and speaking of people I paid, Maggie, my publicist, was on the phone.
“Hey,” I said, putting her on speaker.
Maggie was an awesome publicist, had first worked with athletes, training up in San Francisco with a big firm called Prestige Media Group, but had then transitioned to celebrities and Hollywood and was now running her own company.
Artie had recommended her to me, and it had been one of the best things I’d done for my career.
Maggie made it so I didn’t have to think about anything except for acting.
No games. No going out to be seen. I could just be me, sitting at home in my PJs, picking the films I wanted, and not overexposed by unnecessary press and interviews.
So, yeah, maybe I gave Maggie a paycheck, but I was also lucky enough to have her steady presence in my life.
“You ready to go?” she asked. “I’m not interrupting?”
“I’m good,” I said, setting the script aside. I was fussing and tinkering when I just needed to stop. Rehearsals would begin tomorrow, and I needed to be fresh enough that my performance wouldn’t be stale.
“Good. Just a couple of things. The studio wants to get a couple of publicity shots, so they were hoping you could do that Monday or Tuesday.” A pause, and we’d been working together long enough that I knew Maggie was waiting for me to chime in if I had a problem with that. Since I didn’t and I remained silent, she went on, “People wanted to see if you’d give a quote for the importance of female representation in Hollywood. I agreed, since Artie is doing it as well. It’ll be a bit of a fluff piece, but it fits in with your brand. I’ll put something together and you can approve.” Another beat. Another moment of me keeping quiet since that was fine.
Maggie kept working down her list, all minor commitments, all easy to do now since I was in L.A. for the time being.
“You’re easy today,” she said.
“I’m easy every day.”
She laughed. “That’s true enough. You never create drama for me.”
“That’s because I don’t have a personal life.”
“You do give me a challenge in that way.”
I frowned. “What?”
“It’s all about image, babe, you know that,” Maggie said. “And you’re the Queen of Single.”
My brows drew further together. “Um—”
“Oh, no,” Maggie said. “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing at all. You do you. Be happy. Be single. It’s just that the press sometimes loves nothing better than a good relationship story, and so I spend half of my time killing stories about your potential boyfriends or fiancés, rather than talking about all of the good things you’re doing, work wise.”
“Oh.”
“And the shitty thing is that if you were in a relationship, it wouldn’t be any different. Every other story would be about when you two were getting married or is Eden Larsen wearing a ring or is that a baby bump?”
Slice.
Slice.
Slice.
Married. Ring. Baby.
Damn, the past would just not stay tucked away.
I heard Maggie suck in a breath and realized that I’d been silent too long. “I . . . uh . . . that would be fine if you were pregnant or secretly engaged . . .”
The careful question at the end of her trailing off snapped me out of it. “Sorry,” I said. “You won’t be able to use your Secret Agent Ninja PR skills on me right now. I’m not engaged or pregnant. I’m not even dating anyone right now, let alone having a sex life.”
One night didn’t count as a sex life, right?
“It would be okay if you were.”
I snorted.
“Sorry, that sounded asshole-y,” Maggie said, contrite now. “I just meant—”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just doing my part to not be easy all of the time. Okay, so let me play celebrity gossip columnist. What about you? How’s Ben?”
A sigh. “Ben is now firmly in the category of ex.”
“Ugh. I’m sorry.” Her tone told me it hadn’t been a pleasant breakup.
“He decided that being tied to one woman was too much pressure for him . . . and also that he wanted to sell my lingerie on eBay.”
“Ew.”
“Dirty lingerie.”
“Double ew.”
“I know.” A beat. “Men suck.”
“Yes,” I agreed, but even as I commiserated with her on the suckage of men, I couldn’t help but think that not all of them were bad.
Pierce staring at Artie, love all over his face.
Damon smiling down at me from my porch, pizza boxes in hand.
Tim’s angry eyes, fist descending—
I blinked, caught the tail end of Maggie’s sentence
“. . . and so then I threw all of his underwear out of the window,” Maggie said. “God, I’ve seen them do that in movies, but actually doing it in real life was so satisfying.”
The image of cool and collected Maggie launching underwear out her window made me laugh, made the past fade back away.
“Please tell me they were tighty-whities.”
“Unfortunately, Ben was strictly a boxer brief man.”
“Disappointing.”
“In so, so many ways.” Then she sighed and shifted back to business, promising to touch base with me about the shoot on Monday or Tuesday, wishing me luck for rehearsals, telling me I was going to kill it.
Supportive. Sharing. Funny. Caring.
All the things a friend would do.
By the time I thanked her and hung up, I realized that maybe I wasn’t quite as alone as I’d thought.
A Month Later
Rehearsals were completed, filming had started, and I’d quickly gone from being beyond excited to begin shooting to absolutely dreading showing up to work every day.
My male costar was . . .
An ass.
Grant Seagurio had been the hottest thing in town about five years before, lead billing on every movie he’d made, films hitting the top of the box office, paparazzi trailing his every move.
And now . . . a little of that star power had dimmed.
He’d headed a few busts, but that wasn’t what he was struggling to overcome. Nope, what had really shuttered his fandom was the video of him yelling at a valet. Okay, not so much as just yelling, but screaming, throwing things, kicking over a trash can, and then running over the foot of the poor valet.
All for grinding the gears of his Ferrari.
Oh, man. He had it so tough.
I snorted to myself as I watched him on set. I’d been reticent to work with him after the incident, but it had been several years without anything else happening to make headlines and so I’d hoped he’d grown up, grown out of the asshole-ness, especially when jobs had begun to dry up. Clearly, I’d been wrong. Nothing seemed to faze him. Grant’s ego was something to behold, and I felt like I’d been around Hollywood and the model world long enough to have seen some huge ass egos.
Grant’s was . . . on a whole other level.