Page 78 of Witch You Would
“If you do end up with this show,” Isaac said, “you’ll need to ditch her.”
What?
“She’s fine forCast Judgment, but she doesn’t have the ‘it’ factor, you know what I’m saying? You have to level up your pussy game. And anyway you’re going to want to fly solo for a while.” Isaac madean airplane motion with his hand. “Let the press see you with a few different people—the hotter, the better—get them talking about you as much as possible. New week, new flavor.”
Bad. This was bad. Assuming Penelope and I—
“We’ll cross that bridge when we burn it,” Isaac said. “For now, keep doing what you’re doing, or should I say, keep doingwho you’re doing?” He cracked a laugh, and somewhere behind me, Mary cackled like a cartoon hyena.
I guess Isaac was all funned out, because he got up and left the room without even saying goodbye.
That worked for me. I had nothing to say to him, either.
On the way back to the hotel, I frantically texted Sam and Ed that I needed to talk to them ASAP. I wanted to do a video callfrom my room, but Sam insisted we should get together in person, which was ridiculous. I’m pretty sure she was having majorFOMO and wanted to get close to the fun times. We agreed to meet at the hotel bar for happy hour once they made it throughtraffic.
Plenty of time for me to get Penelope alone and finally explain everything. Unless... Maybe I needed to talk to Sam andEd first?
The stuff Isaac had said kept repeating in my head, making me second-guess my plans from this morning. Would I really haveto go around fake dating random people as part of my image? That sounded awful. When would it end? Would it ever end?
Not that I was rushing to get married—look how my parents turned out. But Grandpa Fred and Grandma Louisa had been happy for so long, and so were my abuelos on my dad’s side. I guess I always assumed that would be me one day. A husband. A dad. Backyard birthday parties with croquetas and pastelitos and grocerystore cakes. Family vacations to overpriced theme parks. Enchantment lessons in the kitchen.
That was definitely not the future Isaac pictured for me. But what did I really want?
Right now, I wanted to hide in my room and pace. So I did. I took off my mustache and glasses, fixed my hair and changed intonormal clothes. Better to have this conversation as me than as Leandro.
Forcing myself to answer emails for another hour might possibly have been a special circle of hell. When Sam finally textedthat they were downstairs, I was ready to crawl out of my skin and eat it like a bug.
I used the camera on my phone to make sure the hallway was empty, spy-movie-style, then ran for the stairwell with my headdown. It dumped me out on the sidewalk, and I casually walked over to the bar like I was some rando from one of the condobuildings.
Sam and Ed had grabbed a table against the wall and were checking out the menu. Sam wore one of her usual T-shirts—a stylizedsamurai cutting a film strip into pieces—while Ed had on a pale blue dress shirt and gray tie like he’d just come from a businessmeeting and left his jacket in the car. I threw myself into an empty chair and put my face in my hands.
“Hello to you, too,” Sam said. “I see you’ve temporarily abandoned your secret identity.”
“Shh!” I said. “Please don’t start with that.”
“Okay, then let’s start with why you dragged us all the way out here.”
I gaped at her. “You’re the one who—”
“Incoming,” Ed said.
The waiter arrived to take our orders. I got a beer, Sam got a whiskey sour, Ed got a soda. We decided to share a plate of egg rolls.
“All right.” Ed folded his hands and looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “We know you can’t talk about certain thingsdue to your NDA, so I assume this isn’t related to any of that.”
“No, it’s totally separate. Well, some of it is.”
“Is it good or bad?” Sam asked.
“I’m not sure. It’s a secret, though, so cone of silence.”
Sam mimed dropping a cone over the table.
“I had a meeting today with”—I dropped my voice—“Isaac Knight. He wants me to do a screen test for a show.”
“Fuck yes! What kind of show? Deets!”
“Shh!” I explained briefly. “It’s not a sure thing.”
