Kissing Me Harder, Stepbrother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Salon

The clip hits her mother's salon, Gigi answers it with the truth about the unpaid crew, Dallas arrives with a lawsuit threat, and Gigi decides to remake the whole show, with Lennon as the lead.

By nine the next morning, the clip had four hundred thousand views.

By ten, every chair in my mother's salon was full.

Nobody needed a trim that badly.

"Is it true he's your brother?" the woman in chair two asked me, with foils in her hair.

"Stepbrother," said the woman in chair three. "That's different. My cousin married hers."

"Your cousin married her stepbrother?"

"Second husband. Very happy. They have a boat."

I was sweeping hair off the floor because my mother had handed me a broom the second I walked in.

"You sweep, you don't talk," she'd said. "Talking is how the whole town knows our business."

The whole town knew our business. It was on their phones.

Mom was doing a color in chair one with her lips pressed white.

Her phone hadn't stopped buzzing since dinner.

Half the comments were jokes. The other half were about her.

"Hope the salon's cleaner than the family."

"Book with Cheryl, she'll throw in a stepson."

She'd just gotten up at five and opened early.

Izzy came in at ten-fifteen with her camera on her shoulder and her cap on backwards.

"I quit," she said, dropping onto the waiting couch. "So did sound. So did both grips. He paid nobody this morning either."

"He said he'd pay us when the app pays him," I said.

"He said that to the gaffer in July too." She looked at the salon. "Why is everyone here?"

"Moral support," said chair two.

Izzy pulled out her phone and scrolled the clip's comments, then mine.

"You haven't said anything."

"My mother told me not to."

"Your mother is getting called a stepson dealer by a guy whose profile picture is a fish."

Mom's hands stopped in the foils.

I leaned the broom against the wall.

"Film me," I said.

Izzy was up before I finished.

I stood in front of the shampoo sinks with my hair in a clip.

"My name is Gigi Wheeler," I said. "I wrote all thirty-eight episodes of Sugar Tide, and I played the lead until yesterday."

"The man in that clip is Lennon Pascoe. I met him yesterday, on camera, about ten seconds before that kiss. Our parents got married five weeks ago. We did not grow up together. We didn't know each other's faces."

I took a breath.

"Then Dallas Zeller fired me and gave my role to the woman who posted it."

"And while you're watching," I said, "Zeller Shorts owes fourteen crew members two weeks' pay. Ask him when they're getting it."

I nodded to Izzy.

She stopped recording and posted it before I could change my mind.

Then she held out her hand.

"Laptop."

"Why?"

"Because you just declared war on a man who knows your password."

I gave her the laptop.

She plugged in a thumb drive from her key ring and copied the Sugar Tide folder onto it.

Mom held out her palm without looking up from the foils.

Izzy dropped the drive into it.

Mom put it in the salon's cash drawer and locked it.

At eleven-forty, the bell over the door rang.

Dallas walked in wearing sunglasses indoors.

A man in a gray suit came in behind him carrying a folder.

"Gigi," Dallas said, smiling at all the chairs. "Ladies."

Nobody smiled back.

The man in the suit handed me a letter.

"Deliver episodes twenty-nine through thirty-eight within seventy-two hours," Dallas said, so I wouldn't have to read it. "Or we sue you for the full value of the contract. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars."

"What contract? You never signed mine."

"Mine with the app. The one your little temper is breaking."

He looked around the salon.

At the leopard smock. At the stack of magazines. At my mother.

"And you must be the hairdresser."

Mom set down her brush.

"Cheryl," she said. "We met at my wedding. You ate three plates of shrimp."

"Right. Great party. Look, Cheryl, you should talk sense into her before this gets embarrassing for your little business here."

"My little business," Mom said.

"I'm just saying the clip's doing numbers. Nobody wants to get their hair done at the scandal salon."

Mom picked up the water bottle she used to wet down cuts.

She walked around chair one.

She sprayed him in the face.

Twice.

"Out," she said.

"Are you serious?"

She sprayed his sunglasses. The man in the suit backed toward the door.

"I'm fifty-two years old and I own this building," Mom said. "Out of it."

Dallas wiped his face with his linen sleeve.

He pointed at me through the water.

"Seventy-two hours. Or I take your mother's building too."

The bell rang behind him.

Chair two started clapping. Chair three joined in.

Mom put the bottle down and her hands were shaking.

I went and held them.

"He doesn't get my ending," I said.

"Then what?" Izzy said from the couch. "You sit on ten scripts nobody can shoot?"

"No." I let go of my mother's hands. "I make the whole show again. All thirty-eight. Myself."

"With what crew?"

"The one he didn't pay."

"In what town?"

I looked at the window, at Main Street, at the pier at the bottom of it.

"This one."

Izzy stood up slowly. A grin started on her face.

"Great," she said. "Who plays the lead?"

The bell rang over the door.

Lennon walked in carrying a tray of coffees, his red hair still wet from the ocean.

Every woman in the salon turned and looked at him.

So did I.

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