Page 15 of Act Like You Don't Care
"Damn," Tam said, and brushed some of the dust off his clothes. "I thought you really had it in for me for a moment there."
His partner laughed and clapped him on the back. "Method acting. My motivation was to knock your head off for salting my coffee yesterday morning."
"It was an accident," Tam protested as he walked off the set in my direction. "Someone jogged my elbow. And maybe a lesson to people who leave rubber snakes to fall on innocent bystanders." He paused as his gaze landed on me and he changed direction, making a beeline for my part of the set. "You guys are still here." His tone wasn't friendly, but it wasn't exactly unfriendly either.
"We might have come up with a solution to your problem," I told him. "Just waiting to hear what the studio says, and to see if we have the right personnel to pull it off."
"What's the plan?"
I shook my head. “I don’t want to get your hopes up about it until we've got it worked out and okayed by the higher-ups."
"Fine." But Tam didn't sound fine, he sounded frustrated and halfway to furious. "Just remember that you need my cooperation for this to work."
Oh, fuck this. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?"Why wouldn't you want to cooperate? You want him to get to you the next time?"
Tam lifted his chin and stared coldly down his nose. "I can fight."
I moved in half a step and lowered my voice. "Not if you're drugged. Not if you're concussed. And not if he's got a weapon and you don't." I watched as the actor's eyes widened a bit at the list, then relaxed, the lids drooping lazily over blue eyes that shone like sapphires.
You're a tough nut to crack, aren't you?I tried again. "Let us do our job. I promise, we'll stay out of your way as much as we can."
Tam stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't want this fucked up for me." His gesture took in everything around us and implied a lot more.
Odd how his urgency about this seemed to affect my own feelings about it. Maybe this was his secret, the power of his acting. “I swear, I will do everything in my ability to keep that from happening."
That got the actor's attention and he gave me a closer look. "Promise?" he asked, in a tone very different from the brash jokes or angry frustration. Almost plaintive, but with a core of steel to it.
"I promise. You’ve put in a lot of work. I don’t want to see that wasted." Even in just this little bit of time I’d spent with him, I could see how the media got him wrong. I’d worked with artists, some of them so talented you occasionally questioned their sanity. Tam didn’t go that far, but he definitely had talent and whatever that undefined thing was that made it almost impossible to take your eyes off him. Except he was an omega in an alpha’s world. There had to be a lot of behind-the-scenes pushback against giving him roles that were traditionally played by alphas, despite the progressive rhetoric going around. It made perfect sense, looked at from his point of view, that he’d be pushy and touchy and damn stubborn.
Tam glanced away, then looked up at me again. "Yeah, you're right." His voice sounded thoughtful, which I hoped boded well for his cooperation when we trotted out our compromise for him later. If the studio would go for it.
Someone shouted in the background and Tam looked over his shoulder. "They need me for close-ups." He turned back to me. "Talk later then?" He touched my arm, so brief I almost didn’t feel it, then let his hand fall.
"Sure." I kept my tone casual, but I was hard-pressed not to grin in triumph. Maybe the stubborn actor could be made to see sense.
I wandered back off to the side of the room and leaned against the wall to wait for Dad to get back, carefully not thinking about how I could still feel where he’d touched me.
Tam
Iwas so distracted for the rest of the shoot that after the third take on the close-up for the scene in the bathroom, where Grady had me bent backward over the edge of the bathtub, Pete sent me to get a drink and get my head back in the game.
As I walked across the set to the coffee cart, I saw the security guy I’d spoken to earlier. It was becoming clearer and clearer that I wasn't getting out of this without taking at least one hit to the ego. Maybe I could compromise, if he’d be the one guarding my body. He was well-built and not much taller than me. Handsome, but in a quieter way than the other two had been. I actually liked his looks better than the others. Were they his brothers? Cousins? Some sort of relation, because they all kind of looked like each other. Security guy just looked friendlier, somehow. Like he’d be less focused on himself. I’d dated too many of the stunningly handsome, center-of-the-world types not to shy away from them. At least, for anything more in-depth than drinking and fucking.
I grabbed a diet cola and popped the tab while I looked for someone who might know where Elijah was hiding. He didn't often show up on set, so after this morning’s meeting it was anyone's guess where he'd be. I tracked Elijah down in a room off the access corridor that ran behind the far end of the set. He glanced up and saw me hanging in the doorway. I thought for a moment he’d make me wait, but he dismissed the set chief with a sharp nod and a jerk of his head instead and gestured me into a storage room a few feet farther down the hall.
I closed the door behind me but didn’t come any farther in. “What’s going on?”
"I was coming to look for you in a few minutes. Mr. Astra has a suggestion for how to go forward with your protection that I believe you will find more acceptable. I'm not crazy about it, neither is the studio, but you made some valid points in there. We’re willing to give it a try, as long as you keep in mind that the goal is to keep you safe while we track down where these letters are coming from. If we think this isn’t safe enough, we expect you to accept a traditional protection detail."
"What is it?" Finally, someone was going to tell me what was going on.
Elijah gestured back down the hall. "Let's go back to the room and you can ask all your questions there."
I stepped to one side to let him go by, then followed him out onto the set, where we collected Security Guy and made our way to the room that we used to run lines each day before filming. We took our old seats, which put me right across from Security Guy and his dark eyes that looked like they saw everything. Not necessarily my favorite place to be, even if Security Guy was easy to look at, because I felt like I was going to be spilling my guts here and I wanted to believe that I could keep at least a few unsavory truths about myself hidden away.
Elijah started. "Tam, I understand that you're worried about how all this will affect your career. You're not the first actor to have issues with a fan who loses track of where reality and fantasy meet, regardless of what you think."
I raised my eyes in challenge. "You don't think this is going to prove I can't cut it in the alpha's world of Hollywood?"
