How to Land a Movie Star novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Blink

For a moment I couldn't breathe.

"You what?"

"I saw the light in your bag when you bent down at my hall table," Corin said.

"Small, red, blinking. I've worked on sets for fifteen years. I know what a mic looks like."

"And you let me in."

"Yes."

"You poured me tea."

"Yes."

"You told me about your father." My voice climbed. "On purpose. You said it into a machine."

"I wanted to know what you'd do."

The words went through me.

"You tested me," I said.

"I did."

"With the worst thing that ever happened to you."

"It was the truest thing I had," he said, very evenly.

"I thought, if she'll sell it, she'll sit there and take it. If she won't, she'll stop."

"And if I hadn't stopped?"

"Then I'd have known who you were, and I'd have been alone in my kitchen, the way I was last Tuesday."

I walked around the end of the counter and hit him in the chest with the flat of my hand.

It was hitting a door.

He didn't move.

"You used me," I said. "I was terrified, and I was crying in your hallway, and you were running an experiment."

"You took eight thousand dollars to sell me."

"I know!"

"I know you know."

"I'm not saying I'm not guilty!"

My voice cracked off the glass.

"I'm saying you could have thrown me out, and you let a stranger hear it instead."

"Hedy."

"So you don't get to be the one who forgives me!"

I hit him again.

He took it.

"Again," he said.

"Don't you dare."

"Again, Hedy."

I hit him a third time, harder, and my glasses slid down my nose, and then my hand didn't pull away.

It lay flat on his chest, over a heartbeat that was running as fast as mine.

He caught my wrist.

It wasn't rough.

It was a hand the size of my forearm closing carefully around me, and holding.

"I should have thrown you out," he said, low. "I couldn't."

"Why?"

"Because you were standing in my hall with a lie in your bag."

His thumb moved on my wrist.

"You still looked at my shoes to keep from looking at my face. Nobody's ever done that for me."

I made a noise that wasn't a word.

Then I got my other hand into the front of his henley and pulled him down.

I kissed him hard enough to hurt.

He answered at once, and all the fury in me turned over and became something else, something hot and wet and shaking.

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