Page 8 of Crocodile Tears
“Fuck my life," I muttered as I turned to see Finch's head in the window of the vet hospital. She was most definitely standing on a gurney to spy on me. I picked up my radio. “Birds, go ahead.”
"Stepawayfrom the super fans, Lovey Dovey,” Finch said, hooking her thumb to the side.
I rolled my eyes as I started trudging back up the hill. I saluted Finch as I held the radio to my mouth. "They didn't even listen to me anyway."
"Good,” she said. “The last thing you need is to be on the wrong side of the Harrow Heads.”
I pretended to gag. Harrow Heads. Gross.
I clenched and unclenched my hands. “It’s only eighteen days,” I whispered to myself. “You can handle anything for eighteen days. Then you will never have to think about him again.”
And I really wished in that moment that I could make myself believe the lie, but the truth was Deacon Harrow had lived rent free in my head for a long,longtime.
Chapter Five
Deacon
Our director, Gavin, walked over with a pinched expression like he’d just bitten into a lemon—not the sort of expression you wanted to see when you were trying to film a lighthearted romantic comedy. Ivy and I had already run the scene six times and westillcouldn’t get it.
"Deacon, it's great. We just need a littlemore. . .” Gavin twirled his hands skyward, as if I should somehow know the interpretation of that gesture. “Ivy, come talk to me," he added, slinging his arm around Ivy and walking her down the rainforest pathway and out of earshot.
A mob of assistants and makeup artists chased after them, touching up her makeup as they walked. Luca ran halfway to me, holding out my green juice, when I gave him a little half-wave to let him know I was good. My personal chef was trying to kill me with all of these drinks that tasted like fresh cut grass. Luca wentback to typing away on his phone in the shade of the tent set up over a grassy patch of picnic tables.
I blew out a long breath and stretched. This was probably going to take awhile.
Ivy had just found out her very real—not PR—girlfriend was cheating on her, and while I was empathetic, she was massively holding up production with her inability to hold it together. This was part of the job—putting our personal lives aside to get the shot. But Ivy was new to the acting world, and I was beginning to wonder if she regretted her agent nudging her away from modeling and into this acting thing. At this rate, we were losing daylight and might not even get a very simple shot.
“This whole movie is going to be an utter disaster,” I muttered to myself. It was a statement that was quickly becoming my personal mantra, but I’d known that it was a disaster from the start and had chosen to do it anyway.
I put my hands on my hips and stared up at the two gibbons swinging through the trees in the distance. This place had changed a lot since I’d been a kid: new exhibits, new animals, everything freshly painted, and a killer restaurant that was providing us with some of the best food service I’d ever eaten in my life.
Luca had gotten the zoo gossip from the eldest brother’s very pregnant girlfriend, Hannah. She’d spilledallof the current animal and Lachlan family drama to him when he’d asked if he could pet their miniature cow—a cow which was apparently named Colin and Hannah had very strong feelings about it.
My assistant was good at a lot of things, and subtly snooping for me was certainly one of them.
The TLDR of the Lachlan clan was all but one of the Lachlan kids still lived on-site, some with their respective spouses. Hawk had built himself a cottage behind the lion exhibit. Finch had an apartment above the vet hospital, which she shared with herzoo chef girlfriend, Frankie. Even the old monkey house that I remembered from childhood was now a makeshift human house where the Lachlan twins lived . . . which was crazy since they were still six-year-old miscreants in my brain.
“Speak of the devil.” I spied one of them walking through the chain-link toward the penguin exhibit and took a stab at which one it was. "Heron!" I called.
The keeper stopped, spun in a confused circle, and then pointed to their chest. "I'm . . . Crane."
"Oh, right, sorry," I said, jogging over with an awkward wave.
"Heron is the hippie-looking, non-binary one with the gauge earrings and long hair,” Crane said. "They look like they're a stoner, but they're not. They’ve just got those chill, tie-dye vibes," he added. “Anyway . . .”
I could tell by his shifty eyes that he was nervous and eager to disentangle himself from this conversation.
I was used to clocking it. Most people who were nervous to meet me either became overly friendly or notedly cold to prove that they weren’t affected by celebrity. But I had a feeling these particular shifty eyes had less to do with me and more to do with a certain zookeeper sibling of his.
“Heron and I are very easy to tell apart,” Crane added as if remembering himself.There was that coldness.“Anyway, I'll leave you to it."
"Wait," I called after him, and he turned back to me again. “It’s good to see you. Uh, it’s been a long time,” I offered. “I don’t know if you remember me. I was?—”
"I mean, barely. I was a little kid," Crane said, swinging his bucket with mindless irritation. "I think I remember more Mom talking about you than actually you, you know?" He kept looking around awkwardly like he might be caught.
I let out a sigh. "Did Dove tell you not to talk to me?"
His mouth tightened. "No. She didn’t,” he said. “She doesn’t need to tell me anything. Her enemies are my enemies.”
