Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66330 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 265(@250wpm)___ 221(@300wpm)
“What about guys?” Halley asked after a moment.
My eyes popped open. “What about them?”
It had been an off handed question, but something in my voice caught Halley’s attention. “Oh,” she said with a hint of glee. “There’s a guy.”
“There is not a guy,” I corrected. It was true. There were a million guys in LA. None of them any more special than the other, as far as I was concerned.
“There’s a guy,” Halley said, distracted again. I heard keys clicking, then she came back, focused again. “Tell me about him.”
With a sigh, I slid off the barstool and walked around the living room, then out onto the patio. Far below, I saw figures splashing in the pool. On one end, a woman in a lime green one-piece was swimming methodical laps. I watched her cut through the water like a tropical fish while I figured out what to say to Halley. I desperately wanted to unburden myself and tell her everything. Surely, I wasn’t the first of her friends to think her dad was hot. Unless they’d all been blind.
Maybe if I could have done it with enough levity in my voice, I would have told her the truth. Disguised it in a joke, of course, but still, I might have been honest. But I couldn’t. Instead, I took a sidestep away from the truth and said, “You know me too well. There is a guy. Maybe you know him—I ran into him at the pool yesterday.”
And then I described everything I was feeling about Con and attached it to this mysterious tenant.
“I’m confused,” Halley said. “Why would he think you’re too immature for him?”
“Because he’s older,” I explained, still watching the woman in the lime green suit swim. “And I guess I came off kind of ditzy.”
“Hmm,” Halley said, unconvinced. “You don’t really give off ditzy vibes. Did you say something dumb?”
I shook my head, then realized that I wasn’t really sitting at the end of her bed and therefore she couldn’t see me. “I don’t think so, but you know, I talked about being in a sorority. You know how people can be about that.”
“Sure,” she said doubtfully. “But if that’s the conclusion he leapt to, he seems like an ass.”
“He might be,” I admitted with a sigh, picturing Con’s dark, impatient eyes when he met me at the airport. “But Halley, he’s so good looking, it hardly matters.”
Now she laughed. “You sound like me! Don’t let LA get in your head, Lily. If he’s an ass, it doesn’t matter how good looking he is, he isn’t good enough for you.”
“Sure, sure,” I muttered. It was funny, I’d never been insecure before. Not since early middle school anyway. A couple of weeks in LA though, and I was full of self-doubt. I wasn’t sure how much of that was the place and how much was the man. I’d had crushes before, but this felt different. Crushing. I desperately wanted Con to be sparing me even a tenth as much mental attention as I was spending on him.
“Seriously,” Halley said again, but I could hear her keyboard clicking beneath her long, lacquered nails. “Don’t waste your time on him.”
“You’re right,” I said, resolve surging through me. I wasn’t going to waste any more time thinking about someone I could never, ever have.
Halley was more important to me than her father ever could be.
9
CON
I avoided the Brand Development department like the plague for the next couple of weeks. It wasn’t hard. I was busy as hell with the new crop of problems that had sprung up since I solved the others. When I first started in this business, I thought that a good agent got to the point where there were no fires actively burning. That if I worked hard enough or long enough, I could take a long, deep breath and not feel the jabbing pressure of unresolved issues. It took me a few years of working myself into the ground to realize that point never came. I could have worked every minute of every day for the rest of my life, and people would still be waiting longer than they wanted.
But I learned that the problem wasn’t me—it was just that this was an impatient town filled with people who wanted to come first and foremost to every single person in their orbit. And try as I might to avoid it, narcissists made this world go round. It used to piss me off, but after two decades, I finally understood that it took a certain kind of person to think they could make it in this industry. If I only signed levelheaded, reasonable actors, my roster would whittle down to less than what my father had maintained. I had to take the big problems with the big payoffs, or I wouldn’t make it in this industry. That had been hard when Halley lived at home, but now I had all the time in the world. I could spend every waking second putting out fires if I wanted to. And if doing so kept me from thinking certain, inappropriate thoughts, then that was just another benefit.