Shuttergirl Page 6

  As if on cue, my phone lit up. It was my contact at Sequoia.

  I answered. “Yeah?”

  “Britt Ravenor’s being released in an hour.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but she’d already hung up.

  I’d get a nice take for that shot. I could make it to Sequoia in forty minutes, more than enough time to find out which exit they were using, and get very, very close. I could dig up my spare rig, go get the shot in my good clothes, and go to Breakfront late. Maybe then the bad feeling would pass. Or more likely, night would come, and my phone would rattle, and I’d use money as a reason to avoid the gala.

  I was all right with that. I didn’t need to go to a fancy party. Though it had been a pricey camera, I could still get Tom to dig deep into his pockets and replace it.

  I talked myself out of going to the party as I helped Phoebe into her car, then I went back upstairs to my huge, empty loft. All I had to do was text Michael my apologies.

  —Hey, sorry I can’t make it. We can either forget the camera or do the Merv’s thing—

  The bad feeling went away as soon as I hit send. Even as I yanked off the dress, I found myself hoping that he’d text back that he wanted to see me anyway. I didn’t have a chance to question my girlish desire, because three seconds after I hit send, the text was bounced.

  Of course. He was a superstar. He couldn’t get incoming calls from numbers outside his little goddamn list. I wanted to throw the phone out the window.

  Not counting the bedroom, which was separated by a wall of shelves, my loft was a huge open space with fifteen-foot ceilings, a few exposed brick walls, and one huge wall that was smooth and plastered. On it, I’d put a custom mural of a map of Los Angeles. Even though the street names were so small I had to get nose-close to see them, the map took up the entire wall. It stretched from the Pacific to the easternmost points of the San Gabriel Valley, from Flintridge, which was only visible with a ladder, to San Pedro, touching the floor.

  I cursed it, claiming ownership of every street, and stopped on the west side, just south of Brentwood. In a tiny green patch behind a hedge was a school for the specialest snowflakes money could raise.

  The tennis courts were the size of memory chips and just as green.

  Why was I so enraged? Why did that make me wrestle myself back into the fancy black dress with the lace trim? Why did I poke the dangling silver earrings into my ears as if I was stabbing myself, and why did the feeling that something was going to go wrong just get stronger and stronger when I jammed my feet into red-soled pumps?

  Because I didn’t want to go to a stupid party. I wanted to see the guy with the serve again, and there was a pretty good chance that if I didn’t go tonight, I’d never see Michael again without a lens between us.

  To hell with it.

  Let it all go wrong.

  Chapter 10

  Laine

  I had a black Audi that I kept spotless. If I wanted to park outside fancy clubs and restaurants, if I wanted to stop in some of the best neighborhoods in the city to shoot out the window, my car needed to fit in to the point of invisibility. A Mercedes would have been even more inconspicuous, but sometimes a girl has to make a concession to her own taste.

  I pulled up to the Breakfront guard and told him my name. He looked on his little clipboard. He was a nice-looking kid with light brown hair finger-spiked at the top, which had been the style two years before. Clean-shaven with a sweet mouth and a rock-hard body under his generic blue shirt, he smiled at me with caps, and I knew he was an actor biding his time. I smiled back.

  “Hang on for a second, ma’am.”

  I tapped the wheel, looking inside the grounds. I’d always gone in through the student entrance, and this entrance, for parents and benefactors, was older, more elaborate, and verdant within an inch of its life. It had been designed to provide a feeling of peace and safety. During my first visit through this entrance, during the interview with my new, and quite temporary, parents, I’d felt safe, as if I was returning home.

  I didn’t have the same feeling as the blond guard tapped my name and creds into the computer, but I remembered it. I remembered how real it felt and how fake it had been.

  “Miss Cartwright?” he said, leaning down.

  “Am I not on the guest list?” I flicked my eyes at the clock. Could I still make it to Sequoia?

  “You are, but I hate to say this—maybe I should get a supervisor?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Well, you’re on the guest list, but our system pulled you up on the ‘no entry’ list. It’s kind of like a ‘no fly’ list that the TSA keeps but—”

  “Did it say why? Did I commit an armed robbery?”

  “It just says you’re a photographer-slash-journalist. This list carries over year after year, so maybe someone with the same name had a problem with a benefactor or board member years ago?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too stunned.

  “I’m happy to get you a supervisor. I’m sure it’s a mistake, but he has to sign off on it.”

  “It’s fine.” I rolled up my window.

  He raised the gate behind me, and I backed out. I felt nothing, not even disappointment. No, I didn’t care at all. I was going to get my head-to-toe of Britt getting out of the hospital and—damnit, if I cried, I would totally mess up my mascara, and that was not cool. This was not cool.

  I’d gone to the Breakfront School, same as anyone. Michael was on the board at twenty-eight, as was Lucy Betencourt. But me? I’d gone there, and it was mine, board or no. As much as Los Angeles. As much as Balonna Creek or the Arroyos. Mine, mine, mine. I would not ask permission to be a citizen of my own damn city.

  I turned off San Vicente and parked on a side street, trying to breathe normally without gulping for air. The tennis courts were across the street, behind fences and hedges, like the camera I didn’t care about, and Michael, who strangely, I did care about. I wanted to show him what kind of woman I’d become, what kind of woman he’d left behind. I wanted to show him my heels and my long legs and everything he’d missed. I wanted to see him up close again, to dissect how he’d changed, how his soft skin had become rougher, his jaw more defined, his jade eyes more mature with concerns and thoughtfulness. His hair had gotten darker and a little wavier, and I wanted to inspect it for change, to ask what had happened in the years past. And now, poof. Never.

  A text came in.

  —Fiona Drazen’s at Tinkerbell’s with a new guy—

  Nothing in my life had changed. I just had to continue as always. I couldn’t make it to Tinkerbell’s, not with my spare rig across town, but it was Thursday night. My phone would light up like a Christmas tree in an hour.

  I checked my passenger-side mirror so I could pull out. I could see down the block and across San Vicente. The green-tarped gates of the tennis courts were centered in the oval of the mirror, objects closer than they appeared.

  I’d studied in the tennis bleachers partly because they were relatively quiet and unpopulated in winter, but also because I could exit the school from there without being seen by anyone who would hand me a professionally printed Future Prostitutes of America application. I could slip out unseen and unscathed through a patch of trees and a little-known gate meant for emergency crews. It set off an alarm for half a second until the gate shut behind me. From there, I just cut across the golf course and onto San Vicente.

  I still felt the gnaw of something going wrong. With it, excitement flowed through my veins like a drug.

  I shut the car and got out. Breakfront was mine.

  Chapter 11

  Michael

  “Here’s what I want,” I told Steven in my most modulated tone. “I want you to play with that schedule so we’re shooting for the next three weeks. This delay cannot happen.”

  We stood in the foyer outside the ballroom, our anti-social postures a temporary bulwark against intrusion. I’d tried to get an appointment with the director of Bullets, but the fallout from B
ritt’s accident had kept him busier than me.

  “We frontloaded the schedule. We can afford it and still make release,” he reassured me.

  “I don’t care about the release.”

  “You should. It’s your Oscar.”

  “This delay cannot happen.” I was shouting down an alley. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and the delay was happening.

  “What’s the problem, Mike?” Steven put out his arms, the ice clinking in his whiskey sour. “Gareth looks like shit on a cracker. He needs the time off if you ask me.”

  I leaned a little closer, my eye contact transmitting seriousness and secrecy. “Look, have you talked to him?”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s holding himself together with spit and chewing gum.”

  “He’s not on the bottle. I’d know,” Steven said.

  He wasn’t. Not yet. But he had a failing liver and an addiction that would only be slowed by work.

  “He’s not,” I said, “but I know the patterns. He needs this movie. He needs for it to happen, and he needs to get treatment or fall off the wagon. Soon.”

  The director thought he was just dealing with a Britt nightmare. I’d promised him my father would stay sober for production. That was the deal.

  I glanced over Steven’s shoulder to break eye contact. Through the layers of guests milling and mingling, I saw Laine, neck craned to catch my eye, carrying an aura all her own.

  I hadn’t felt more than curiosity when we met all those years ago, and though the curiosity had a mile-wide sexual streak, I wasn’t ready for it. But this woman, right now? I was ready, and she looked delicious, soaked with the sweet, tart sticky juice of the forbidden. It must have been all over my face, because Steven looked around in the middle of a sentence.

  “Do I know her?” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “I feel like I do, but I can’t place her.”

  I hadn’t foreseen a problem when I put her on the guest list and paid for her ticket, but that had been stupid and naïve. The room between us was full of people she’d shot, whose images she’d sold for an amount commensurate with their invasiveness. There was too much room between us. I saw Theo muscle through the crowd toward her then Janice, who’d had a sex tape foible only weeks before.

  “Steven,” I said, wanting to close the conversation before I got sucked into her sphere, “we talked about this. The cirrhosis will kill him.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Steven said pointedly, even as I wanted to break away and head for Laine. “Let’s say Britt didn’t break something. What were you going to do after we were done shooting? He’s going to drink again.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I figured if I could show him thirty days wouldn’t kill him, he’d get treatment.”

  Steven patted my shoulder as if comforting me and encouraging me at the same time. There was something slightly patronizing in it, but I didn’t care. Laine needed me.

  I painted on a smile and walked to her. With her little clutch in front of her, chin up, she walked straight for the bar, where we triangulated and met.

  “Glad you could make it,” I said, putting my hand on her arm to let everyone know she was with me and thus safe from harm.

  “Just came for the camera.”

  “You’re wearing a dress. You look stunning.”

  “Some rigs are worth dressing up for. What’s your excuse?” She smiled, looking me up and down.

  I touched my tie. Which one had I worn? I forgot. “Occupational hazard. I don’t get to dress down.”

  “It’s working for you.”

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  A glass of white wine appeared at her elbow.

  “Thanks, Robert,” she said to the bartender.

  I ordered something for myself while a waitress came around with a silver tray of stuffed endive leaves. Laine pressed her lips together in refusal, and the waitress left.

  “Do you ever get this feeling,” she said, eyes darting around the room, “that people are looking at you?” She laughed almost immediately. “Never mind.”

  She cleared her throat and picked up her head, straightening her shoulders as if she’d always told herself she’d act a certain way when she was in my shoes, and this was the way. In attempting to look comfortable, she looked incredibly uncomfortable.

  My inner delight darkened when I saw two men in navy suits walk in and scan the guests. Oh, no. Laine was there because I wanted her there, and if they took her out, I didn’t know if I’d see her again. The compulsion to stand between them and fight to the death was physical, as if I’d be losing more than nice chatter at a party. I put my hand on her arm to keep her by me.

  Chapter 12

  Laine

  Some of them recognized me. That, I knew. The question was, what would they do about it? I was on their bad girl list, but when Michael touched my arm, that list stopped mattering. I had to hold my head high. I belonged there as much as anyone else, even if I was only there to pick up a replacement camera. The string quartet, the dark wood, the wool rugs, and the three-ton lead crystal chandeliers—all of it was my birthright as much as theirs.

  Only Lewis, the caterer, had stopped me in the kitchen amid the shouts of the staff and the bang and clatter of pots and plates. The fluorescents seemed brighter than the human eye could bear.

  “Laine?”

  “Hey, Lew.” I hadn’t even slowed, but he’d grabbed my arm.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need to get in. I’m on the list, I just…” I just have to sneak through the kitchen. “I don’t have a camera.” I held up my bag, which couldn’t fit more than a raisin and a rolled up dollar bill.

  “Laine, come on,” he said as if he would pry something from me with his sarcasm.

  “Have I ever lied?”

  “You’ve never needed to lie,” Lewis said.

  “I’m a guest, whether you believe me or not. If you don’t get out of my way, everyone’s going to know you have me on speed dial.”

  He’d surrendered, but I felt in the depths of my belly that that hadn’t been the last of it. When Michael smiled after looking across the room, I knew that this was going to go terribly wrong. He was stunning, and irresistible, and a one-way ticket to nowheresville. But the stunning and irresistible parts were not to be ignored. He stood straighter when he saw me, as if I was the only woman in the room, and I shuddered.

  “You do look nice,” I said. “That’s why people look at you.”

  “It’s not my talent?” He didn’t seem offended, just playing.

  “Try letting your beard go mountain man and running around in sweats. See who wants to look at you then.”

  I didn’t mean it as an insult, and he didn’t seem to take it as one, but he did get serious all of a sudden. It was only a slight shift in attitude.

  He leaned toward me just a little. “Would you rather be known for what you do, or who you are?”

  I leaned in a little as well and whispered. “I’d rather not be known.”

  “Okay, well,” he leaned in closer, whispering, and my eyes fluttered closed from how close his lips were to me. “You’re about to be known as the pap who got escorted out of the Breakfront Gala. And I’m about to be known as the guy who didn’t let that happen.”

  I looked behind me. The security guys weren’t wearing cheap uniforms with patches on the shoulders, but I knew them by their heavy gait and the authority on their backs. They were across the room, looking for someone. Me.

  I put down my wine. “This was a bad idea. I’ll just go.”

  He put his hand over my wrist with confident authority, as if he had a right to touch me. “No, you won’t.”

  “I’m not going to embarrass you.”

  He looked at me, nothing but warmth in his eyes, and a little of the anxiety that had followed me into the room melted away. He tightened his grip on my wrist. He could have led me anywhere, and I would have followed.


  “You’re the most interesting person in this room right now,” he said. “And they want me to stay more than they want to get rid of you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  I didn’t know Michael Greydon much better than the millions who didn’t know him at all, but I knew a few basic truths. He drove sober, got in at a decent hour when he was shooting, always smiled, didn’t sleep around, and hammed for any lens pointed at him. But what I saw in his face then was something I’d seen on a few of the men in my life and more than my share of friends and fake family. It was the look I was told I got before I did something rash.

  He looked as though he wanted to get into trouble. Any normal woman, recognizing that, would have tried to steer him to safety, but my neck burned hot with the thought. I didn’t know if it was from the idea of trouble or the sexual streak in his recklessness.

  “Michael Greydon?” I said. “What is on your mind?”

  “I have no idea.” The words rolled around his tongue as if he loved having no idea.

  I should have been excited. Thrilled. I should have jumped into his arms and suggested something reckless that sat at the very edge of legality. But I didn’t, because unlike most of the people I’d climbed fences and broken things with, he had something to lose. A lot to lose. If I created a scene with him, I’d lose something as well. My anonymity, which was already compromised by my gender, would be non-existent.

  So though temptation twisted me in knots, I pulled my hand away.

  That was when Lucy Betancourt showed up. The story of their breakup a year after he entered Yale was well known, but from her bitter expression, knowledge of the torch she carried for him was less common.

  “Laine?” she said. “Laine Cartwright?”

  “Laine, this is Lucy—”

  “Hello, Lucy. It’s nice to see you again,” I lied. The last time I saw her, she’d been slipping a Cosmo article entitled “How to Fellate Him Like a Porn Star” into my jacket pocket.