How to Land a Movie Star novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Kept Woman

Reporters block her building and her landlord is on the stairs, so she takes his truck and his guest room, until his ex phones with a detail the photo never showed.

Nobody on the stairs breathed.

The executive in the grey vest stood up out of my chair for the first time.

"Mr. Wray, with respect, this is a staffing matter."

"Is it," Corin said.

He didn't raise his voice, because he didn't have to.

"She's my guest, and anyone with a problem with that can bring it to me."

"The studio has concerns about the optics."

"The studio can tell me about them on Friday, at the table."

He turned and went back down the stairs, ducking under the lintel again.

The cameras swung after him.

Marj put a stick of gum in her mouth and looked at me over her glasses.

"He asked for you, you know," she said, too quietly for the doorway.

"Asked for what?"

"To send the pages with you. Not his assistant. I told you the flu, because you'd have fussed."

I opened my mouth, and I had nothing in it.

"Go on," Marj said. "I'll hold the building."

I went down the stairs through eleven phones and one man who shouted, "How much, Hedy?"

I did not run.

The black truck was idling at the curb with the engine rumbling.

Corin sat at the wheel, looking straight ahead.

I walked past it.

I walked the whole length of Magnolia Boulevard on my own legs.

I was not going to be loaded into a truck on camera.

The truck followed me at four miles an hour with its flashers on.

Two blocks down, a woman on a bench lowered her phone and said, "Honey, I think he wants you."

"He can want," I said.

At my building in Toluca Lake there were nine people on the sidewalk and a van with a dish on top.

My landlord, who had never once met me at the door, was waiting on the second step with a folded paper.

"You're blocking the building," he said, as if I'd put the van there myself.

"I live here."

"The tenants are complaining. I'd like you to find somewhere else by the end of the month."

"Because of a picture?"

"Because of the picture."

My phone buzzed in my hand.

It was Wills again, finally in words I could read.

"A kid in my statistics class posted it with a joke. I hit him. I'm fine. Don't be mad."

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the truck had pulled up at the curb and the passenger door was open.

Corin leaned across the seat and said nothing at all.

"I am not a project," I said.

"I never said you were."

"You're doing a rescue. I can see it on your face."

"This is my face," he said. "It doesn't do anything."

It was the first thing he had ever said to me that was funny, and I hated that I noticed.

The man with the dish on his van had started walking toward us with a microphone.

I got in the truck.

I did it because my landlord was watching, because a stranger was filming my feet, and because I did not have another door.

Corin pulled away from the curb without a word.

We were four blocks away before either of us spoke.

"You lied back there," I said. "In front of everyone."

"I didn't."

"You said you asked me to be there."

"I asked Marj to send you," he said. "I asked for the pages by hand."

"That's all of it?"

"You were there because I asked."

"That's not all of it, and you know it."

He didn't answer, and his jaw did something very small.

"I have a guest room," he said. "It has a lock on the inside."

He glanced at the mirror.

"The gate has a guard, and nobody gets in without my name. You can stay until this goes quiet."

"It won't go quiet."

"Then you can stay until it's loud somewhere else."

I looked out the window at the freeway signs.

"I'll pay rent."

"Fine."

"Real rent. I'll find out what's reasonable."

"Fine."

"And I'm not your story. I'm not anyone's story."

"Understood."

"You're agreeing too fast."

"I've never had to argue with anyone," he said, and I heard how true it was.

His phone lit up in the cup holder.

The screen said SASKIA, with a small photograph of a woman with silver hair.

He let it ring three times and then pressed the button, and her voice filled the cab.

It was warm and low, and every syllable was wrapped in silk.

"Darling, I just saw the news. I'm so sorry about all of it."

"Saskia."

"Tell me honestly. Did the little casting girl stay for tea?"

Corin's eyes flicked to mine.

The photograph showed a gate, a hoodie, and a wet street.

It did not show a kitchen.

I had stood at his counter while he poured two cups of tea, and nobody on earth was supposed to know that.

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