Page 2 of Kiss Across the Universe
Alannah skirted around the loungers, her heart still working way too hard. A tight mass was sitting in her chest.
Then she remembered that she had abruptly left an unofficial meeting happening in the upstairs relaxation area of the big house. She didn’t know whose house this was. She had just been told to turn up to this address by her boss, Dale Alyard. Dale ran Luxe Productions and might even have an interest in the company. Alannah didn’t know because he wasn’t the sort of boss to share anything significant. But he didn’t mind her carting his dirty laundry to the cleaners.
Alannah realized she had come to a halt where the path moved up a set of brick steps to a patio beside the wide wall of glass doors into the house. The doors all stood open, light blazed from the rooms beyond. The inside of the house was as busy as the area around the pool and she would have to squeeze through and around groups to get to the stairs up to the area where her meeting was taking place.
She made herself trudge up the steps. Whatever was eating the back of her brain about Thanksgiving she would have to deal with later. She pulled the sleeves of her jacket down, and brushed at the back of it in case it had picked up any dirt from the wall of the cabana.
She moved into the house and wondered if even more people had squeezed in here since she had moved outside to take her call. The noise of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of conversations was almost deafening. She winced at the sound and began working her way through the room to the foyer beyond, where the stairs were located. The room was a large one with a vaulted ceiling and faux medieval beams “supporting” it. Ceiling fans, incongruous against the olde worlde décor, were trying to move the air around but there were too many people and too much smoke—no one was giving up their prime networking opportunities to poison the air outside.
Alannah’s eyes began to water. She hadn’t noticed the smoke levels before moving outside and breathing fresh air. More than a little of the smoke was from marijuana, too. Staying sober in here would be impossible. She would have to escape as soon as she could. Not that she minded being either drunk or stoned, but tonight she was working.
Finally, she made it to the front foyer, a cavernous rounded area where the stairs swept grandly in a sinuous curve up to the second and then the third floor.
Dale Alyard stood next to the newel post of the stairs. He gripped his big whisky glass, which rested on the flat top of the post, seeping condensation onto the curled banister end.
“Dale!” Alannah said, surprised. “Did the meeting end?”
He glared at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and the whites were pink, showing he was even more sensitive to the smoke levels than she. “He left,” he said flatly.
“Who? Adán?” Her surprised gave way to shock. “Heleft?What happened? I was only gone a few minutes!”
Dale’s scowl deepened. “And what the fuck were you thinking, leaving like that?” he demanded. “You left, then Caballero left. Thirty seconds, and he was gone like a breeze. I didn’t eventalkto him about the film.” He sucked back a good inch of the two inches of dark whisky in the glass and hissed in reaction to the liquor. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to talk to him?”
Weeks. Alannah didn’t voice the thought aloud, because Dale would get pissed.Morepissed. She had thought all along that Dale’s plan to sign Adán Caballero to star in his little suspense movie was way too ambitious. Caballero was an action star and at the very top of the A-List, now he had two Oscars on his mantle shelf.
“You fucking abandoned me, right when it was critical,” Dale added, his voice rising.
“Adán Caballero left because of me? BecauseIleft?” Alannah was beyond shocked, now. She was just an assistant. Stars didn’t talk to assistants. They barely nodded at them.
“He said it was the smoke, that he was training for the next Smoky Silva movie and didn’t want toxins in his lungs,” Dale shot back.
That actually sounded pretty reasonable to Alannah. But she kept her face immobile, for Dale wasn’t in a reasonable mood.
“But he really left because you signaled that you couldn’t give a fuck about him by walking out as soon as he got there,” Dale snarled.
“I took acall!” Alannah protested. “You both heard my phone ringing.”
Dale’s expression grew thunderous. “What fucking call could be more important than Adán Caballero standingright in front of you?”
It was my mother calling. Alannah held her teeth together, though. Telling him she valued her family over talking to someone like Adán Caballero would be the equivalent of putting a flame to tinder.
“Yeah, thought so,” Dale said, even though she hadn’t spoken. “You know what? You’re fired.”
Alannah’s jaw dropped. “What? For taking a phone call? You’re kidding me.”
“You’refucking fired!”Dale shouted, his face turning red. “Get out of my fucking face, you moronic bitch!”
Alannah couldn’t help but look around to see who had heard Dale shouting, her cheeks burning. No one was standing about the foyer, but several people were passing through for there was a visitor bathroom tucked under the stairs. Even more people stood right next to the elegant arches leading into the big vaulted room.
Lots of heads had turned at the shouting, but no one looked particularly shocked and they all turned back to their own conversations.
Alannah’s middle was shaking. Soon it would reach out to her extremities. She felt cold, except for her face.Shock, her mind clinically catalogued.
Dale was busy ignoring her and draining the rest of his whisky. The creases around his mouth were white, while the rest of his face was flushed a deep, angry red.
She couldn’t argue him out of firing her. Not now. She couldn’t predict what his reaction would be. Not when he was this upset. He could possibly become violent. And again, her glance took in the whitish-grey flesh around his mouth.
So Alannah turned and headed back to the vaulted room. She would find a dark corner outside where no one could observe her, then jump back to her apartment in Brentwood. Screw behaving like a proper human, tonight. She wanted to be out of this noise, and somewhere where she could think.
