Kissing Me Harder, Stepbrother novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Sasha

The memo ended.

Somebody's hair dryer was still running in the back.

My mother turned it off.

"Play it again," Mom said.

Sasha played it again.

"It's Gigi's script, obviously. Every word. But who's going to believe a hairdresser's daughter?"

Mom set down her comb very gently.

"Come in, honey," she said to Sasha. "Sit in my chair."

Sasha didn't move.

"I said terrible things to her," she said. "At the bonfire. And on the internet. For a month."

"I know. I read them all." Mom pulled out chair one. "Sit down anyway. Your roots are a crime."

Sasha laughed, and it turned into something else halfway.

She sat down in my mother's chair and cried with her sunglasses still on.

Mom took them off her and handed her a tissue and started combing.

The rest of the salon pretended to read magazines.

I sat in chair two and waited.

"He found me at a party in April," Sasha said to the mirror. "He said I had a face for vertical. He said he'd build me a show."

"He says that."

"He said it to you?"

"In a coffee shop. Two years ago."

She closed her eyes.

"He never paid me. Not one day in Malibu. He said wait for the app. Then last week I found a ring box in his bag." She swallowed. "I thought it was for me. He said it was for after the showcase, if I behaved."

Mom's comb stopped.

"If you behaved," Mom repeated.

"Then I heard him on the phone with an investor. He called me a placeholder. He said after season one he'd get a real actress."

Nobody pretended to read magazines anymore.

"So what do you want?" I asked.

"Not a part." Sasha met my eyes in the mirror. "You were right about that. I hated you for it all the way home."

"Then what?"

"My ten days," she said. "That's it. What he owes me. Same as the crew."

"That's not mine to pay."

"I know. I want it from him." Her chin came up. "In front of people. Like you did."

I looked at her for a long moment.

"Then you're crew," I said. "And crew gets paid."

Mom tilted Sasha's head and kept combing.

"Now," Mom said. "Tell her about the bag."

"What bag?"

"Honey, I'm a hairdresser. People tell me everything. You said he keeps the pages in her bag."

Sasha nodded at the mirror.

"He never takes it off. He'll have it at the showcase. He's showing his investors the scans that night, to prove he wrote it. He keeps the real pages in the bag, so they never leave him."

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