Lucky Star: A Hollywood Love Story (22 page)

Jillian cackled and broke in. “That’s absurd. She didn’t orchestrate anything.”

“I assure you, she did.”

“And I assure you she didn’t.” The hard glint in her eyes dared me to challenge her. Which of course I did.

“Look Jillian. I have no idea what you think you know, but before that meeting with the PR team, Sarah called me into the office early to convince me to go along with Aerin’s proposal. We’d
just
gotten engaged and there she was, willingly signing us up for this whole farce without even
trying
to convince Broderick there was another way.” I blew out an angry breath and rolled my eyes. Then, shaking my head, I spoke with a somewhat more subdued tone, “She didn’t just go along with it. She fucking extorted me to as well.”

To Jillian’s credit, she didn’t bat an eyelash at that one. Undaunted, she continued, “I’m not going to ask about that because that’s between Sarah and you and I don’t need to know those details, but I
am
going to tell you something else and I need you to listen until I’ve finished.”

“Yeah, fine. Whatever.” As far as I was concerned she could talk until she was blue in the face. I didn’t think there was anything she could say that would make me change my feelings.

“This whole fauxmance wasn’t Broderick’s idea. It was mine.”

Well, anything but that.

I glared at her. “Explain.”

She huffed. “I was about to but you interrupted, which you said you wouldn’t do.”

I gnashed my teeth to keep from telling Jillian to fuck off. While my first inclination was to storm out, there were two irrefutable truths staring me in the face. One, she’d driven us out here which meant I had no way of leaving and it’d take Uber forever to come get me, and two, I needed to hear the rest of her story. It wouldn’t change the fact that Sarah had agreed to this farce before talking it over with me, but I’d spent the last several weeks fearing she’d been in on it from the beginning. I hadn’t been sure what was worse: that she’d gone along with it or that in doing so she’d made me doubt so much about her. About us.

When I kept my mouth shut, Jillian inhaled and spilled her story.

“So, some of my reasons for concocting this scheme in the first place are my own and I don’t think it’s imperative that I share them with you as they don’t impact the situation outside of the fact that they served as my initial inspiration.” The sentence came out in one rushed speech, her words streaming together without pause or break. “Suffice it to say, it was my agent who approached Broderick a couple of days before the meeting with the idea to have us fall in love during production. Naturally, he loved the idea.” She used her fingers to make air quotes around the “fall in love” part of her statement. “You and I have been at this long enough to recognize that so many relationships in Hollywood are nothing more than cleverly arranged PR opportunities, so I didn’t think there’d be any harm in us doing the same if it meant we’d get better publicity out of it. The studio can only pump out so many behind-the-scenes teasers or trot out the author for Q&A’s before the fans clamor for something more, something personal about its stars. And if their wanting more means wanting more of
me
, I didn’t think that’d be a problem.”

“Except it was,” I remarked. “A huge one.”

“Alright, look. I concede this has had unintended consequences for you, but I honestly didn’t know you were in a serious relationship when we approached Broderick with the idea and he never once said a word about it. Not to lay the blame on you or anything, but you don’t exactly have a lot of information out there to draw from. Your Twitter handle is more Seinfeld and Star Trek retweets than anything, and you never, not once in any of your Instagram pictures, referred to Sarah as your girlfriend.”

That was true, but only because she hadn’t been. “Do the words ‘my best gal’ mean nothing to you?” I asked instead because even though I hadn’t wanted to tip my hand, I’d always been more effusive toward Sarah than my other female friends. I’d taken to calling her “my best gal” one night when I’d almost slipped and called her “my love.” It’d been a garbled, awkward save but people had been drinking so it’d gone unnoticed.

“Come on Cameron!” Jillian exclaimed. “You were giving her a noogie in that picture. That hardly screams, ‘this woman is the love of my life and I’m banging her senseless.’”

I chuckled because yeah, I had been giving her a noogie. At least in the photo Jillian referenced, but there were plenty of other photos I’d used the phrase to describe Sarah. And while I hadn’t so much as kissed her before that night of margaritas and shots of tequila, I’d definitely fantasized about “banging her senseless” for several months by that point.

Instead of sharing any of this with Jillian, however, I said, “She didn’t know how I felt about her then.”

She rolled her eyes so hard I worried they’d get stuck up inside her skull. “You two with all your angsty secrets. How you managed not to explore the whole friends-with-benefits thing is beyond me. It’s clear to anyone with two eyes in their head you want nothing more than to sequester yourself away with her and have crazy hot monkey sex all day long, stopping only to eat and maybe not even for that.”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. I’d taken my fair share of cold showers over the past year in order to keep my lust firmly in check. Up until this nightmare situation came to be, the idea of having Sarah all to myself for days on end sounded like my idea of heaven.

As she continued speaking, Jillian’s eyes went hazy and a slight blush crept up her neck, her cheeks pinkening with what looked like an aroused glow. “I wanted Murray that same way from practically the first moment I saw him,” she muttered, almost as if she hadn’t meant to say the words out loud.

“Wait a minute,” I said, putting two and two together and realizing it didn’t add up to four. “You said he was your fiancé’s best friend? How could you have wanted him while planning on marrying someone else? While mourning the
loss
of that someone when you found out he was cheating on you?”

The longer this conversation went on, the less I thought Jillian was someone who could be trusted. Between this tidbit and the revelation that she’d been behind the plan to hatch this fake relationship that had basically ruined my life, I believed she was someone well worth steering clear of. How could she have said yes to one man’s proposal while lusting after the poor bastard’s best friend? I didn’t know how they did it in London, but if that was the norm, it sounded just as bad, if not worse, than Hollywood. Actually, scratch that. It sounded exactly like Hollywood.

My accusation coming across loud and clear, Jillian glared at me. “It’s not what you think. I
loved
Aidan and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, but he was my first love – my first
everything
—” she placed extra emphasis on that one word so I wouldn’t miss her meaning “—and I was young. Too young, probably.” She shook her head to dislodge some hidden thought and continued. “When I met Murray we had an instant, indescribable connection and even though I thought he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen, I never let it be more than just a fantasy. I absolutely
never
would have acted on my desire for him. Aidan changed that though when I walked in on him having sex with a waitress who worked at his restaurant. Stunned, I showed up at Murray’s flat in the pouring rain, crying my eyes out. He opened the door, took one look at me, and kissed the sad right out of me.” She smiled a satisfied little grin. “What can I say? We’ve been together ever since.”

“And that was five years ago?”

She hesitated before answering, stared at me as if trying to discern if there was some hidden “gotcha” behind my question. There wasn’t, I was just curious.

After a few prolonged moments, she spoke. “I’m 28 years old and in ten years I’ve been in exactly two relationships. So you see, I do know a little something about friends with hidden secrets and desires.” She shrugged and her eyes turned sad for a moment but they cleared just as quickly. “If it hadn’t been for my relationship with Aidan, I probably would have shagged Murray the first chance I had. In the end, it’s probably better things transpired the way they did since if that had happened, we probably wouldn’t still be together.”

She paused, lost in thought. “Come to think of it, maybe it
is
better you and Sarah didn’t act on your impulses either. You’ve been able to build a relationship that’s so much stronger than it could have been if sex had been on the table from the beginning.”

Jillian exhaled, smiled broadly, and changed the subject. “Anyway, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend and Broderick didn’t say anything about it either when we had our meeting. Given both those things, I assumed – clearly mistakenly – that being an unknown yourself, you’d want to get as much extra publicity from this job as you could and, me not being a hideous beast—” she batted her eyelashes playfully “—you would be down for a little Hollywood fauxmance.”

When she explained it that way, our “relationship” sounded harmless. Too bad it had proven anything but.

“That’s all well and good, but I wasn’t single and this has had very real consequences for me. You might be okay with pretending to be with someone other than Murray, but every minute sitting here with you is one more minute I’ve gone against everything I believe it.”

Jillian’s eyes went dark and her lips flattened. “Remember that whole ‘I have my reasons for doing this that have nothing to do with publicity’ thing I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation?”

“Sure. What of it?”

“Despite what you must think, this isn’t a game to me.” She closed her eyes and exhaled. “Okay, maybe it is. But not how you think. Let’s just say I’m not exactly loving being your fake girlfriend either when my own very real boyfriend is back in London perfectly okay with sharing me with another man, even if it’s just make believe.”

The fierce glint of her eye told me there was much more to her story than she’d let on. That’s when it hit me. “You’re doing this to make Murray jealous!” I laughed cynically. “Holy Christ, you’re a fucking piece of work.”

Shaking my head at my stupidity and willful ignorance, I pulled out my phone to order an Uber. It might take them an hour or more to get out to Topanga, but I didn’t want to sit here with Jillian for one more minute pretending to be on a romantic date. I’d fulfill my end of this devil’s bargain since it technically
was
good for my career, but I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the sick game she played with her own relationship. As it was, my own was already in the shitter because of the bargain we’d all made; I didn’t need to be party to the denigration of Jillian and Murray’s as well. They could do that on their own, thankyouverymuch.

“Fuck Jillian,” I said, waiting for the app to tell me how much longer I’d have to stay with her. Shit. Thirty minutes. Shoving the phone into my pocket, I leaned over the table and whispered angrily, “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

When several other diners’ heads pivoted our direction to see what all the commotion was about, I realized I was coming dangerously close to yelling at her so I took a few quick breaths and lowered my voice. “Do you know Broderick has Sarah calling bloggers to feed them fake stories about our blossoming romance?” I clenched my fists and then slowly loosened them, counting to ten as I released each finger. “Because of your bright ideas my fiancé has to pimp out stories about how I can’t keep my hands off you.” I ran my hand angrily through my hair. “Fuck, that bastard probably has her coming up with that shit when she’s not running across kingdom come for him.”

I dropped my head into my hands. “People know about the engagement, for fucks sake.” I looked back up, my eyes sparking with fire. “They think I dropped her the second I met you.” Stifling a sob, I bit out through gritted teeth, “You’ve ruined everything.”

“What do you mean Broderick has Sarah calling bloggers? No he doesn’t. Cassie’s doing that.”

Wait, she was? Hadn’t those costume people said it was Sarah? Shit, they hadn’t said her name specifically, just that it was Broderick’s assistant. Which Sarah wasn’t. Not anymore. Sarah
hadn’t
been the one feeding stories about my supposed exploits with Jillian to those gossip sites.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. What have I done?

“How do you know?” I demanded.

Jillian blew out a breath and looked away for a couple of seconds and then back at me. Staring me straight in the eyes, she admitted, “Because I’m the one feeding Cassie the stories.”

It took three seconds for her words to register before I stood up, tossed two twenty-dollar bills on the table and stormed out of the restaurant. My Uber wouldn’t be here for ten more minutes but there was no way in hell I could stay inside with her one second longer.

When the driver finally picked me up, I didn’t go home. That is to say, to Sarah’s house. Instead I went back to my old apartment. I still had three months left on my pre-paid lease and while I’d removed most of my personal belongings, it was still furnished. Laying in the dark on a naked mattress, I thought back through everything that had happened these past few months, starting with the night, fueled by copious amounts of tequila, Sarah and I had first had sex. I’d been drunk, yes, but not so much that I couldn’t remember how it had felt to kiss her that first time, to recall how, as our lips and tongues had tangled, it felt like I’d found the other half of my soul. Then, later, when I’d stayed away from her because I’d been mistakenly ashamed of taking advantage of her, how desperate I’d been to hear her laugh, or watch as she said my name in that playful way she did, like she was equal parts exasperated and charmed. I remembered how it felt to finally tell her I was in love with her, that I’d been in love with her for a very long time, how her eyes had shined with light and love when she’d said it back.