Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
And why is that your business, Lau?
It wasn’t. But he couldn’t help taking a professional interest, and he settled on the sofa and let the whiskey pour down his throat with a burn that made him think of Cillian’s screen presence, spreading and melting through his blood with a pleasant lingering heat, not unlike the answered questions lingering in the air after each brooding, intense performance. The clock on the smart TV said it was almost midnight. Brendan tapped his fingers against the tumbler, idly skimming his lips against its rim, breathing in the faint stinging aroma rising from the golden liquid.
One more, he told himself, and set the tumbler down to hit Play before sprawling himself comfortably along the sofa to watch.
He woke to a finger prodding him in the center of the forehead, and painfully bright Los Angeles morning sunlight stabbing him in the face.
“Wake up,” Drake demanded, and poked his forehead again.
Brendan creaked one eye open—then winced and raised an arm to ward off the sun, turning his face toward the back of the sofa. “Why?” he croaked.
“Because.” Poke. “You’ll be late for day two of filming.” Poke. “And you already skipped day one.” Poke poke.
Growling, Brendan batted Drake’s hand aside and closed his eye again. “That’s not an adequate answer.”
“Brendan.” Fwhump. A throw pillow smacked down over his face. “You know why you have to be there.”
“Nngh.” Before Drake could hit him with the throw pillow again, Brendan snared it in one hand and dragged it away, letting it flop against his chest. “Why are you here so much? Why are you even in Los Angeles? Don’t you live in New York?” He craned his head back, peering at Drake upside down past the arm of his sofa. “And how did you get in my apartment?”
“You never took back the spare key you left during the year you spent in Hong Kong, I keep apartments in multiple cities where my biggest clients live, and I’m here right now because I had a feeling a certain client of mine was going to be difficult about the role he chose to accept, so I’m here to be your emotional support agent.” Drake curled both hands around Brendan’s forearm and tugged firmly. “And your alarm clock, if you’re done playing twenty questions. Get up. It’s better if you’re there before the kid.”
“…yeah.”
The kid. Right.
The entire reason Brendan was waking up sore on his sofa, just staring at Drake flatly while Drake tugged ineffectually on his arm like a not particularly useful leash.
Fuck.
With a frustrated sound, Drake gave up, letting his arm go. “Having second thoughts?”
Brendan pushed himself up on one arm, rolling stiff shoulders until they pulled loose with a pleasant stretching sensation. “About what?”
“Playing his human shield. You never wanted kids, so adopting some puppy-eyed aged-up teenage heartthrob doesn’t really suit you.”
“Don’t be crude. This isn’t some kind of daddy issue thing, and I don’t see him as a surrogate child. He’s not that young.” Brendan dusted a hand back through his hair and dragged himself to his feet. “Nor is he my protégé, before you start on that.”
He padded toward his bed, navigating around the columns spaced throughout the room by rote and ducking through the free-standing arch that was more a symbolic division between the living and sleeping areas than anything else.
“Get out, Drake,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the waist of his pajama pants. “You know the rule. Naked time is not agent time.”
“I’ll go if you answer this,” Drake challenged. “What is he, then?”
Brendan stopped, settling his hands on his hips, turning over his answer. Searching for one, really; one that made sense, one that quieted the restless feeling inside him. Cillian wasn’t a friend. He was a stranger Brendan had barely spoken to for more than five minutes; a coworker, not even a co-star when Brendan wasn’t center stage in this production; a colleague, certainly, and someone with enough talent that Brendan could foresee and hope for his eventual success, so long as Cillian disciplined himself further and stopped riding purely on natural flair without the work.
But that wasn’t the answer, was it?
Nor could he say he saw his younger self in Cillian. A few directors had tried to make suggestive advances on Brendan when he was younger and just starting out—but none so brazen as to actually try to force him, even when he’d been a new, untried Chinese man in the entertainment industry, treated as less than human by so many he’d dealt with. His experience wasn’t Cillian’s experience.
So the fact that he had no answer for this sudden urge beyond basic human decency left him…
Uncomfortable.
And after a few moments, moments in which he stared at the black arcs stitched into the shams and duvets on his bed, following the patterns of black on white as if they might lead to an answer…