Page 21 of Jace 4Ever
“Well, partly? I really like what I do.”
He plated the food, adding some kind of carrots and roasted potatoes from the same baking dish.
“I’ll do the writing-writing, but I want you to help if you can.” Nelson brought the two plates to the table. “Chicken Saltimbocca, honey carrots, and parmesan roasted potatoes.” Leaning back to the counter, he produced a bottle of white. “Pinot grigio.”
“You eat like this every night?”
“Not every night, but I enjoy cooking. I mean, there’s been many a night of leftover cold chow mein over the sink. Or a box of mac and cheese.” Sitting down across from me, he took a sip of wine. “But I wanted to cook for you. Saltimbocca is one of my favorites.”
Was he trying to impress me? I didn’t need to be. But he grabbed his fork and knife and dug in. I followed suit and let out the most food porn-y noise I had ever made in my life.
“Holy crap, Nelson…”
“Good?”
“I think I just came.” I covered my mouth, horrified and embarrassed, but Nelson just chuckled. “This is so good.”
“The first time I got it to come out perfectly, I did the same thing.” He popped a potato in his mouth. “I’m glad you like it.”
“This is a gorgeous house.” I tried a segue to a different topic where I wasn’t making food porn noise.
“I love it.” He nodded and motioned around. “It’s only me, unless my dad comes to visit, and it’s just the right amount of room for me and the occasional dinner guest or dinner party.”
“Do you have a place in Hollywood?”
“A house, and not in Hollywood.” He nodded. “It’s a nice little place, just for when I have to be there. New York is my home. Dad moved us here when I was six, and I went to Tisch.”
“Did you always want to be an actor?”
“No, not really. I wanted to be an artist. But…I quickly discovered my anime style art wasn’t going to be a best seller in the galleries. Barron Danes, Uriah Orback, they have real talent. I was going to be a stage actor, which is where most of my training lies.” He pointed the fork at me. “And you? How did you get into key grip? Was that what you wanted to do?”
I shook my head. “No. My parents were very supportive of me writing and going into the arts, too, but they also loved that I was good with tech. I was one of the weird ones who was good with arts and science. I thought I could write books, or plays, or scripts. I also thought about being an engineer for a while. Kind of how I ended up in Rutgers.”
Nelson chuckled. “Ruggers. You say that like a Jersey native.”
“Nah, that’s just the way you learn to say it when you attended the school.” I smirked. “I live three blocks from where I grew up in Washington Heights.”
“So, what made you steer away from writing?”
Chewing my bite slowly, I wondered if I should just spill everything. By the time I couldn’t chew what was left anymore, I gave up fighting and told the whole story.
“My parents died when I was fourteen. My mom was hit with a stray bullet from a shootout. My dad died in a car wreck one year later. My brother Jerrod got custody of me, which was…not ideal. He was eighteen, but he was the reason my mom was out of the house that night. She was looking for him to beg him to come home. He was running with dealers, trying to get in with them to make a fast buck. Spoiler alert, ten years later he’s still trying.
“I managed to get into Rutgers on merit and scholarship, and my very first writing class, the professor hacked everything I wrote to ribbons. I didn’t have it in me at the time to fight it. So, I shifted to film, technical, and production.
“College got me away from Jerrod.” Cutting a new piece of chicken, I stared at it for a while. “Jerrod sucked me back into his world when I had to pay for his bail.”
“Bail for…”
The chicken was fascinating. “Homicide.”
“Wow, he went in deep and hard.”
“Very,” I answered and ate the piece at the end of my fork. I hadn’t really told a lot of people outside the Gaggle. They had all scraped together the money—though now I wondered if it was mostly Chase—to get him out. “The lawyer was able to talk it down from homicide because Jerrod turned state’s evidence. He honestly didn’t do the murder, and that’s the first and possibly only time I ever believed him. They got him accessory after the fact, and he served eight months.”
What I didn’t tell him, what I’d told absolutely no one was where I had to go for the money for the lawyer. The lawyer was paid in full. My debt was not. I still had at least five years to go before it was paid off. It had cost a lot to get Jerrod out of deep, deep shit.
“Where is your brother now?”
