Page 89 of Act Like You Don't Care
Nearly twenty anxious minutes later, Will called me back. “Okay, got you cleared. Go down to Lot Three and grab spot sixty-eight. It’s Tam’s but he didn’t feel like driving today.”
“Thanks, Will. You sure I can’t entice you away from the entertainment business to work in personal security?”
“Ha! Not likely. We’re up at Stage Six, come in the small side door. Just ask anyone where we’re shooting and they’ll show you the way.”
“Thanks.” I cut out into traffic and rolled up to the gate, my driver’s license already in my hand to show to the guard. He glared at me, but my name was now on his list and he couldn’t turn me away.
I drove down to Lot Three with butterflies churning anxiously in my stomach and pulled into Tam’s parking spot.
One of the craft services people pointed me to where Wirechild was filming. On impulse, I picked up a bag of the trail mix that Tam seemed to have on hand all the time now. A peace offering of sorts, or maybe I could just throw it at him and run while he was distracted.Damn you, Jim.
The red light was on outside the stage door when I got there. I leaned against the wall beside it and tried not to jig in place the way Tam would while I waited for shooting to finish. This needed to look like a casual visit to anyone passing.
Will came bustling by with a smoothie in one hand and his ubiquitous clipboard in the other. “There you are!” His eyes flicked up to the bulb above the door. “Not done yet?” He made a face. “They’re pushing an extra scene in today.”
“They can do that?”
“Properly motivated,” Will replied darkly. “We’re on a pretty inflexible schedule.”
I made a face, but luckily the light went out before I had to take any heat for my share in the reason for Tam’s schedule. Will opened the door and we slipped in just before the crowd that had gathered waiting behind us.
Tam was sitting on a stool getting his makeup touched up. He looked good, in a pair of tight pants with a silvery sheen, a black and blue leather jacket, and no shirt. The right side of his face was covered with pale wiring that looked like it was embedded in his skin. As I watched, the wiring lit up in a complicated pattern of moving sparks that slowly faded.
Will flipped through the bundles of paper on his clipboard and extracted one in particular to hand to the actor. “Next scene.”
“I think I went over this one already,” Tam said, flipping through the pages, then his eyes fell on me and his face lit up in a way that made my heart ache. “Hey, what are you doing here?” He hopped off the stool with a grin and a quick word for the makeup artist and loped over to me.
My eyes met Will’s. He nodded, handed Tam the smoothie with an order to drink it all even if he had eaten with me and disappeared in the direction of one of the many small groups clustered around the set.
“Something up?” Tam asked, watching me with the smoothie straw trapped in the corner of his mouth.
I squared my shoulders and took his arm to guide him to an area that looked quieter than the rest of the stage. “I’m going to apologize right now for this and I want you to know that I’m going to kill Jim when I get home. But I wanted you to hear first before I bounce him around the parking lot.”
“Okay.” Tam squinted at me and took the straw out of his mouth, playing with it like it was a spoon. “What did he do?”
“Not him. His wife. She sold the story about the baby to the papers. He figures it’ll be out today, tomorrow at the latest.”
Tam’s face went still. Even the hand twisting the straw around in the melting smoothie stopped its eternal fidgeting. Only his eyes had life in them, though I couldn’t read the thoughts ghosting across their surface. I caught a glimpse of how disappointed he was, just a flash of it in sagging shoulders and downturned mouth, then he straightened and his face went blank like a mannequin’s.
“Tam? I’m really sorry. If you can think of anything I can do to take the pressure off you, I’ll do it.” For a security firm, we weren’t batting high enough to get us out of the minor leagues right now.
His eyes widened and his eyebrows flew up. “Like what?” He put the straw in his mouth and sucked, draining a quarter of the smoothie as I stood there stammering without a single clue what I actually could do. The cat was entirely out of the bag now.
“Relax,” he said finally, with a wry twist to his mouth. “I thought about it a little after that photographer this afternoon. I hoped he’d just heard about us hanging around together and went snooping, but it was bound to get out. Sucks, though. I wanted to keep it quiet for at least another month. Now I’m going to have to sneak everywhere and they’re still going to make up stories. It gets old, fast.” He moved close enough that he could put a hand in the middle of my back. “Thank you for letting me know. I’m guessing she was mad at me for not giving her a leg up the ladder?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still grappling with the idea that he didn’t even appear to be annoyed. I’d been shitting bricks all the way over here. “I’m struggling here a little.”
He grinned at me, puckish, and punched me slow motion in the ribs. Just a couple of bros. “Yeah. It’s pretty funny.” He sighed and glanced over his shoulder, where the set was in the process of being simultaneously dismantled and reconstructed. “It’s tempting to throw a fit, but you’re not the one who did it. And all it did is push up the timeline a little. You didn’t do anything wrong, Miles. I’m sorry if I’ve been such an ass that you thought I’d lose it on you.” He peered up at me with raised eyebrows and a hint of a smile on his face. “You still came to tell me, though.”
“It’s only fair,” I said, the tightness in my chest loosening up now with the rush of relief in my veins. “So you’re seriously not bothered? I was sure you’d be mad as a wet cat.”
He laughed and sucked on his smoothie. “Oh, I am, but not at you. You’ve been nothing but good to me over this and I’m trying to learn how to act like a grown-up before the kid gets here and I don’t have any choice.” He rubbed at his neck, kneading the muscles there. “Margaret and I talked about it right at the beginning of all this. We were going to let the news out once we had most of it in the can anyway, start to build momentum about the movie with that. I’ll let her know and we’ll figure it out from there. I’m going to be too busy for the next while to notice much while they flip back and forth between demonizing me and calling me a wonderful example to all omegas everywhere.” He offered me the smoothie. “Want a drink?”
I eyed the concoction, a sort of khaki-green with little dark bits in it. “I’m good.”
“It tastes better than it looks, but not by much. All sorts of nutrition in there, I’m told. For the first time ever in my life, I can’t wait for filming to end so I can go back to eating real food.”
“That’s not what you’re surviving on, is it?” I demanded, shocked.
