Selfie (19 page)

When they left, it would be my turn to come running up in werewolf form and decide whether to kill the detectives or to run off and find my pack. I pick the good guy option, which will make it harder to hate me, and the story goes on.

It meant I got makeup as soon as Brenda and Lissa left the trailer, and it meant I had to run through the woods, looking fierce and predatory and pissed off.

I thought I could fake it, and any residual pain would make me look fierce—I could use that!

So I was fine—patient, like you have to be in the makeup chair—and relaxed, right up until Conklin came up behind me and started rubbing my shoulders. No, I hadn’t asked him to do that and, well—proximity alert!

I must have stiffened up because he gave an apologetic mutter.

“Sorry, man, usually I ask. I’m just trying to do the coach thing, right?”

He nodded like a little kid, and I nodded back and winked.

“I hear you,” I said mildly. “Just, you know . . . getting to know people.”

He nodded and patted my shoulder and then moved back. “So, the ‘How ya doin’, champ?’ speech doesn’t have as much pull when I’m not doing the massage thing, but I’ll ask you anyway. How ya doin’, champ? You up for the fight?”

I grinned at him in the mirror. “Oh yeah—definitely. I’m totally looking forward to this!”

And I was. Because once you get the makeup on, being in the role was so much cooler.

“Really?” And Conklin sounded like that favorite best friend from grade school again. “You’re like, the only actor I’ve heard say that!”

I grimaced. “Well, it’s easier since they haven’t started working on my face yet—but I’m looking forward to it—lots of ‘loping’ if I read the script right.”

Conklin tilted back his head and laughed, and I thought again how handsome he was. Silver strands in his brown hair, piercing blue eyes, a long, angular face that normally I would have found quite attractive.

Maybe if Noah hadn’t been glaring at the two of us in the mirror.

I caught Noah’s eyes and crossed mine, making him roll his own eyes and smile.
Yeah, he’s cute, and he’s my boss, but he’s not you so just deal.

I should have questioned, right then and there, that we even had to have that sort of eyeball-rolling conversation, but that’s when Junior pulled—hard—on my foot to get it into the prosthetic, and I had to concentrate one hundred percent on my acting.

I’m doing fine, nothing to see here.

Even the trailer smelled like redwoods and ocean. And
nothing
reminded me of Vinnie.

God, I wanted to stay in the Pacific Northwest.

“Mr. Conklin,” said a young voice, “they’re ready for you on the set.”

“Sure thing, Viv!”

I looked toward the door and waved, because Noah’s little sister always made me smile. Not nearly as tall as her brother—but not short either—Viv Dakers was a
stunningly
beautiful girl. Where Noah’s hair did big, glossy, springy curls, Viv’s were tight ringlets, unapologetically African American—and she wore them big and poofy, like springs sticking out all over her head.

Everything about Viv was unapologetic and stunning, from full lips that she painted bright red to big-hooped earrings that were probably impractical but I couldn’t see her giving up unless they snagged on something. She wore a tight yellow T-shirt and mildly bell-bottomed jeans, and damn, she was good at her job.

I could see why Cheddar was solid gone in love with her—and why he’d be sure she’d move on and leave him in the dust.

But I’d chatted her up in the last week, and I didn’t think Cheddar had anything to worry about.

Viv might go to college after she’d saved up enough money, but she was as obsessed with Cheddar as he was with her.

It sort of gave me heart to know they were young and in love, and there was something so vibrant and wholesome about Viv that pretty much everyone on the set responded to that romantic possibility in her.

If Viv thought something wasn’t right, it didn’t matter that she was low man in the company, people would by golly listen to her before they dismissed her intuition out of hand.

So Conklin didn’t dismiss her when she told him it was time to go. Instead he gave me one more animated wave before rabbiting out of there, probably so he didn’t have to try
not
to touch me.

Noah waited until we could hear Conklin shouting instructions to the cameraman before he spoke.

“He likes you,” Noah said. There wasn’t any recrimination in his voice—but he wasn’t all hearts and flowers about Conklin either.

“He does that to all the actors,” I muttered, blushing.

“No, he doesn’t,” Junior said, applying glue to my ankle. “I think Simon has had a crush on you since he and Anna talked about getting you for the part.”

Oh God. “That’s really flattering,” I said, meaning it. “But I’m pretty sure he’s crushing on the actor, not the guy.”

Junior looked up at me and rolled his eyes. “I’m straight,” he said, raising a triple-pierced eyebrow over a narrow, freckled nose. “I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s cute—goth like me, likes helping me come up with concepts. Nice girl. I’m gonna marry her next year, and we’re gonna dye our hair green together for the ceremony. You’re invited if you’re still here.”

I stared at him, bemused, wondering where the hell this was coming from. “That’s, uh, great, but, uh—”

“I would totally crush on you, Mr. Montgomery. You’re so hot you’re making me question my own sexuality, and the last person to do that was Carter Samuels. Now are you going to promise not to go mountain biking again? I mean, I covered the stuff on your face, and I can just use this as part of your werewolf persona and deal, but I’m saying, you are not making my job any easier.”

“I was on the easy trail,” I mumbled, completely mortified. In the mirror, Noah was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “A tree root reached out and grabbed me. Not my fault, I swear.”

“See?” Junior shook his head, his floppy purple hair falling into his eyes. “Even your fuckups sound more spectacular than a regular person’s. If you don’t want Conklin to hit on you, you’re going to have to give him the ‘I’m sorry, you’re a great guy, but I’m not interested’ speech.”

I don’t know—maybe it was the pain in my ankle, or the way Noah had been looking at me for two weeks. Maybe it was that epiphany that Vinnie wasn’t coming home and I was going to live through it.

But I had to ask.

“Why not the ‘I’m sorry, I’m straight’ speech?”

Junior was this tall, thin guy with a big nose and a big Adam’s apple—one of those skinny people like Noah with the bigger-than-life voice.

He had a laugh that shook the trailer.

I stared at him, appalled.

“Am I missing something?” Oh, Jesus—I’d followed the press since my YouTube disaster. I had. And yeah—the fangirls had gone apeshit in the archives, and there’d been some tabloid speculation as well. But nothing for certain. Nobody had reported lip-reading “Vinnie I miss your cock!” from that damned video.
Everybody
has done the primal scream thing, and hey—who
didn’t
burst into uncontrollable sobbing? It was all as it had always been—pure speculation—which was something everyone in the limelight had to live with, straight, bent, or very, very gay.

Junior’s expression took “bewildered” to a whole new level. He looked at Noah for help. “Seriously?” he asked.

Noah looked back, equally puzzled. “What? I’m not seeing it either.”

Junior shook his head and finished gluing a fur ruff above my knees. I’d shaved my legs in prep for this, and I had to congratulate myself on my forethought—one way or another, I was losing that hair.

“
You
!” Junior said, half laughing. “
You
are looking at him like . . . like I look at my girlfriend. It’s written all over you, and he’s . . . I don’t know. Is it an artist thing?” And it sounded like he was asking himself. “I mean, I have to
think
about makeup and try to get inside a person’s head—is that it?”

He squinted at me, for confirmation.

“I’m sorry?” he said, still second-guessing himself. “I didn’t mean to . . .” And then, like it had just occurred to him that he held my career in his hands and he’d made a major gaffe, “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he mumbled, looking down. “Here—let me coat your face with the gel and we can put the mask on.”

I could smell the flop sweat and the embarrassment coming off him, saw flashing in front of my eyes all the ways I could fuck up his career if he was wrong, or, hell, if he was right but spoke out of turn.

God. It was so stupid. This kid hadn’t done anything wrong—he hadn’t made any judgments regarding gay or straight—he’d just observed human behavior and had come to a conclusion. If there was nothing wrong with being gay, then there was nothing wrong with making the wrong guess, now was there?

And certainly nothing wrong with making the right one.

“It’s okay,” I said with a gentle smile. “I’m not . . .” The lie wouldn’t come. “Out.” I finished. “Not out. Maybe three people in the world know. Two.”

“Three,” Noah said behind me, and I met his eyes.

Yeah—I could see the hunger now, acknowledge that was how he’d been looking at me for the past weeks. He hadn’t crowded me, hadn’t forced my hand. I hadn’t told him no, so he was just letting me know what he wanted.

It was starting to make my mouth dry and my heart hammer, what I knew he wanted.

“And now me,” Junior said, like he was trying to keep it light. He started rubbing the gel on my face that would make removing the prosthetic mask and the glue a lot easier. “Don’t worry. It’ll stay that way. I just . . . you know. Carter and Levi, Simon, Anna—they’re so out. You get used to an ‘out’ set. I way overstepped.”

“You were human,” I said, meaning it. “You’re right. It shouldn’t be a thing. If I’d been a stronger person back in the day, it wouldn’t have been.”

Noah was frowning at me, like that didn’t completely match what he knew, but I wasn’t going to talk about that now. I didn’t care what Jillian had said. I didn’t want to talk about that
ever
. When someone was
dead
you didn’t get to have that argument with him, did you? When someone was
dead
you got to forgive him for any lingering resentment, for that little automatic whine every time you talked to the press about the girl you’d been seen with the night before. For the mad jealousy that crushed your chest when other people, braver people, posted their FB and Instagram photos of their husbands and their adopted children and their homes together and their perfect lives.

When someone was dead, you let that shit go, right? Because otherwise you’d be bitter about it, and hurt, that your life had been squashed down to the last nth of breath because the person who topped in bed didn’t always make the best decisions in life, now did he.

“Okay, Mr. Montgomery—”

“Connor’s still fine, Junior,” I said, breathing my anger at Vinnie out. It had no place with this kid who’d caught
his
first big break on
Face Off
and his reward had been working this show.

“Connor,” he mumbled. “Thanks. But now’s when we put the mask on and do the makeup around it so, you know the drill . . .”

“Be vewy vewy qwiet,” I said in my best Elmer Fudd. “And vewy vewy thtill.”

“Yes, sir,” Junior agreed, getting the werewolf prosthetic from the hairdresser’s dummy. “Any last words?”

“I should have been a plastic surgeon?” I quipped, and I took my courtesy laugh from both of them as a blessing.

And then I shut up. I was good at it—hell, taping the YouTube selfie with no sound had proved that if anything had.

The shoot was going great—fantastic, even. I’d cut the loping scene, the sniffing scene, the roaring scene—all of it fun stuff, back to Acting 101: “How to be an animal.” I mean, no lines, right? So the ultimate in expression—doubly intense, so you could see it through the mobile prosthetic—and body language and . . .

Well, fun.

Conklin called cut for the final bit, and I stopped my lope into the woods and turned back around on my good foot. I’d developed this way of standing like I was hip-cocked, but in reality? I was holding my left foot off the ground because the pain right now was burning a hole in my brain.

“Good shit, Connor—we’re almost done. What I want now is one smooth take, from beginning to end. We don’t do a lot of those shots in television, but I’ve got a good feeling about this. You game?”

I nodded and smiled. “Absolutely!” I said brightly.
Oh for fuck’s sake, I need to take some goddamned Motrin and some turmeric and beg Noah or Junior to get me some motherfucking ice!
“Happy to do it!”

I limped back to my original mark—I couldn’t help it—but Simon was talking to his cameraman and light man so they didn’t notice.

Viv noticed. “Connor?” she asked quietly while she restrung some fake entrails I’d moved. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” I said through gritted teeth. “This is the last take of the day. I can make it.”

“Good.” She looked at her brother in the corner of the set. “But I’m telling Noah to come help you back to the trailer when this is done. You’re not walking too great.”