The Hollywood Project: Shuttergirl Part 14

"I kiss better than him!"

"I just brushed my teeth!"

Squeaky kiss noises fell like rain, and I couldn't turn away. I walked right into the pack with my arms out. I grabbed a short guy with a beard and planted one on his cheek. Another guy came at me with his arms out and kissed my cheek. Another just hugged me. We laughed, and the shutters went on and on. With every handshake and testament to my coolness, I looked for Laine, hoping she'd be at the back of the pack, but of course, there were a thousand little stakeouts in the city, and she'd be wise to avoid me.

But still, I looked for her. I didn't know what I expected, but I knew what I wanted.

When the last willing pap had been smooched and the last picture taken, I waved and went into the restaurant. The speeding traffic along Sunset was replaced by music, the hum of conversation, and good acoustics.

Brad sat in the center of a long table in the back with his usual dirty dozen. Guys from his hometown and whatever girl they were with. His manager. A stylist. I knew their names, but they belonged to Brad. He saw me immediately, from half a room away, and waved.

"You!" he shouted. "I want to talk to you!"

After much reseating, shifting, arguing, and joking, I sat next to Brad. He kept one hand on the knee of a German ten-thousand-dollar-a-day runway model who was already half drunk. I said my h.e.l.los, using names when I remembered them, and ordered something to eat.

One guy, an obnoxious friend of Brad's from his hometown, held up his phone. A picture of me kissing a bearded pap had already been tossed up. "Too far, Mikey baby. Too far."

He looked like a Hollywood player, with his thick gold chain and carefully placed hair product, but his Arkie accent still hung around the corners of his vowels. Three of Brad's entourage were from home, but this guy was the only a.s.s. I'd forgotten his name, because I couldn't stand him.

"Letting them think you're their friend is too far."

"He was cute," I said. "Here, I'll kiss this a.s.shole too."

I grabbed Brad's head and kissed his cheek. Brad laughed and dunked his napkin in his water to wipe his face.

"Not cool," said Arkie. "These people, they're parasites. You talk to them, and they think they're your friend. They think they have access." He flopped the phone down, angry. "They're animals, and they don't have access to us, okay?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "To who? Access to who?"

Groans went up, and heads shook. Everyone at the table could feel the tension. Brad's model got up to go to the bathroom.

"Arnie, man," Brad said, reminding me why I called the guy Arkie, "cool it."

But Arnie-slash-Arkie was a sheet to the wind and belligerent even sober. "You cannot f.u.c.k paps, okay? That s.h.i.t is scary. That b.i.t.c.h is scary."

"You didn't-"

"You got fooled by her t.i.ts or whatever. Maybe she sucked your d.i.c.k like a pro, but she's an animal just like the rest of them."

"Shut up, Arnie," Brad groaned.

I said nothing, because the half of my brain that wanted to kill him was arguing with the half that had been trained to be a civilized member of society.

"You can get a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b anywhere, man," Arnie said while I tried to keep my hands under the table. "Half the girls at this table would suck your d.i.c.k. Why you gotta get head from a lowlife hooker pap is like-"

I grabbed his gold chain and twisted it so fast, he didn't know what was happening. I tightened it and pulled him over the table. Plates crashed. Girls screamed. Food went flying as I pushed his head into someone's dinner.

"You no-talent piece of s.h.i.t," I growled, watching his face get red. "You've done nothing your whole life. No one cares what you think."

"Dude." Brad's voice. A hand on my arm.

I looked up to a huge restaurant packed with people standing, phones up. A dance of rectangles, some with flashes, captured me in the act of choking someone with a gold rope. I let the chain go. Arnie hacked, and Brad yanked me away.

I pulled him off me and got my finger in Arnie's face. "Stay away from me."

"With pleasure, motherf.u.c.ker."

His friends made a show of holding him back, but he wouldn't come after me. He was a coward.

Brad pulled me, navigating the chairs and camera phones, into the kitchen. The adrenaline in my blood made me sensitive to the bright lights and the ambient noise, which was more of a crash bang than a loud hum.

"Dude?" Brad said. "What the f.u.c.k?"

I held up my hands. "I'm done with him."

"Cool. Totally cool, but then what? He's always trash talking. That's what he does. Remember what he said about Harriet when you were with her? And you didn't care, dude. You laughed."

"The tone of this was a little different." Was I defending myself? What a waste of time. Choking him with his gold chain was indefensible.

"Sure, sure, I get it," Brad said. "But who cares what Arnie says?"

"I do, all right? I care."

"Duh."

I rubbed my eyes, coming off the adrenaline rush. My apology would have to be public, and the pictures would be discussed by over-coiffed entertainment jockeys in TV studios and insiders over lunch on Wilshire.

The kitchen had quieted, as if the staff had made room for us.

"I knew her in high school," I said, backing into the refrigerator room door. "She scared the h.e.l.l out of me then, and she scares me now."

"Hey, I get why she scares you now. She's pretty scary with that camera."

"The camera? f.u.c.k the camera. She's got something explosive in her."

"You're the one with the explosive side."

"It's just..." My hands were in front of me, as if clutching something I couldn't explain. Some desire to make things happen, to change, to break the status quo into a million pieces and live in the center of an unknowable, unplanned, unpredictable, boundary-free universe. "I can't keep away, and I won't. Maybe she's going to screw me, but that's my problem."

Brad shoved me into the metal door in a gentle, brotherly way. "You know what? Go for her. 'Cause you're not the guy who gets his b.a.l.l.s in a twist for any woman. You feel like this, whatever this is, and I'm cool with it. She seems all right from here. I'll take care of Arnie. I got your back. Just hear this." He held up his finger. "She starts some s.h.i.t I don't like, I'm gonna tell you. Don't try to choke me across the dinner table. Got it?"

"I got it."

We shook on it.

Chapter 21.

Michael By six thirty the next morning, my night out had been broken apart, a.n.a.lyzed, chewed, digested, and regurgitated. The photos of my affection toward the paparazzi at the back door of the restaurant got the least press, naturally, because I was having fun. The fight was front and center in still and video. Arnie and I had shaken hands over the upturned table. It hadn't been photographed as extensively, but by the time I got up, it was as if the handshake had never happened.

The places that had had enough time to write more than a hundred words about the fight speculated that I was losing my s.h.i.t because of the break in the Bullets schedule. They attributed my rooftop kiss of a paparazza to my tension. I was a workaholic, they said, and without my drug of choice, I was snapping.

I admitted I felt as if I was bending, but it wasn't the schedule as much as what the schedule break might cause. My father would start drinking if the movie fell through. Brooke and I knew it. He was on a thread.

I didn't usually look at the media's reaction to me and what I was doing. It had always been bland and boring. Just me walking or drinking coffee. There had never been any bad behavior to get distracted by, so it had been easy to follow a simple rule... don't look.

The rule was easy until Laine, in that dress, her hair unpinned, her fingers gripping my elbow as I kissed her. I felt alive. And that was a cliche, of course. A phrase directors used that I tossed off as meaningless, representing a feeling that had something more at its core. I had tried to capture it a hundred times by linking it to other feelings that were closer to delight.

But this wasn't delight. It wasn't joy. I'd gotten it all wrong. Life, yes, but inside it sat a precarious tilt toward death, oblivion, pain, and danger. Alive didn't mean happy or joyous. It meant that my relationship with my own existence was unstable, and only in the nearing loss of it did I realize I wanted it so badly.

How had Laine come to represent that? Was it when she nearly fell off the roof and I grabbed her, or was it the look on her face when her brother took those pictures at NV? Or maybe I'd made that connection with her on the tennis court bleachers. Knowing who and what she was, so different from me, brought close enough to touch the side of the world that I never got to see. Was it her survival that caused my fascination?

I sat on the back patio, flipping through the news on my tablet. The pictures of Laine and me still attracted my eye. The LA Post piece was ridiculous, because they didn't get it. They didn't know the half of it, but they pretended to until the end.

"It's seven in the morning," Ken said, sounding as awake as always, when I called. "I was waiting another half an hour to call you."

"What the f.u.c.k is in the news today?"

"You beating the h.e.l.l out of a poor kid from Arkansas?"

"How did they find out I knew Laine from before?" I asked.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing reading the papers? We have a deal. You don't read the papers, and I tell you what's in them. One, you choking-"

"How did they find out who she was? Her history?" I wasn't quite shouting, but I was using a b.i.t.c.h of a tone that only worked through my teeth.

"It's their job."

"No." I pointed at the view of the city below because Ken wasn't in front of me. "The Almanac cherry-picks what's easy."

"Jesus Christ, Michael, Britt breaking her shoulder is the worst thing that could have happened to you. I've never met a guy who needed time off so badly and couldn't handle it when he got it."

I knew Ken. He'd deflect until I was apologizing for Arnie, for not being productive on my days off, for not strictly maintaining my image. That wasn't going to wash anymore.

"What did you tell them?" I asked.

"Anything in the public record that would make you look sympathetic. Kissing a foster child as opposed to a slimeball, you know? It works, especially after the incident-"

"With Arnie? Arnie's a moron. If murder were legal, he'd be dead already."

"Can you make sure to not say things like that in public?" he asked.

"Can you never breathe her name again to anyone? Ever? I don't care if it's in the public record. She's mine, and that means she's my problem."

"She can be your a.s.set too."

"Can it be normal? How about that?" I said. "Not an a.s.set or a problem. Not a big deal. Just some girl that I may or may not be seen with again."

Ken sighed as if I was a recalcitrant child he'd explained things to a hundred times. "No, Greydon, normal is not on the menu. Your career would die of boredom on a diet of normal."

I shook my head. "Just leave her out of it, Ken. That, or you let me know what you're doing before you do it. Can we agree on that?"

"Sure, kid. Sure."

We said good-bye and ended it, but his a.s.sessment of my choices stuck in my mind. I craved normalcy, and I craved the tingle of life. Could they even coexist? I'd played normal, everyday guys living a life I'd never lived. I'd played them deadened and dull, because that was what I'd been told normal was.

I didn't want normal.

I wanted real.

And my G.o.d, Laine was real.

Chapter 22.

Laine I didn't hear from Tom. I slept like a dead thing and could have slept another ten hours. When the sun went down, I could have woken and gone out to the clubs to see who I could catch looking good doing something bad, but that didn't happen.

Sometime in late morning, I was rudely awakened to my ceiling thumpity thumping techno music from the loft above. I wasn't just annoyed, I was interrupted.

I gave it thirty minutes, pacing and showering to kill time until whoever was up there split. The s.p.a.ce upstairs was unoccupied, so I hoped the cleaning crew was just in to prep it for showing. On the opposite side of my hope, I feared there was a new owner and he was an inconsiderate jerk.

I opened my door so I could stare up the stairwell, which could not have been a more ineffective way to deal with the problem. At my feet sat the LA Post Almanac section, without the rest of the paper. I picked it up. Of course the rooftop picture was on the corner of the front page, with Brenda Vinter's byline.

When Celebrities and Paparazzi Share s.p.a.ce c.r.a.p. I read the article, which tried to quickly disseminate whether or not paps and celebs were truly in bed together, how the media feeds on itself, and how the internet played a part in all of it. It said everything and nothing, failing to make its point because it sounded hurried and wanting for s.p.a.ce. What they'd really wanted was to show the picture a day late rather than not at all.

But the nugget was in the last few paragraphs. I dialed Phoebe with shaking fingers, trying to shut out the blasting music.

"Did you see the thing in the LA Post?" I asked before she could say h.e.l.lo.

"Yeah." She sounded contrite, and her glitter tossing for Michael was gone. "Just now. Where are you? A disco?"

"It says Michael and I were at Breakfront together."

"Yep."