That cracked him up.
We watched as the scene faded in on my father’s den—Friar Laurence’s room—the two of us frantically pacing about, Trip wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and me in a pair of scrubs (We’d decided to make Romeo into a very Eddie and the Cruisers-type hoodlum and put a literal spin on “the nurse”), and I kept whining about how his main squeeze “Julie” had been moping around the castle.
“Look at you,” Trip laughed out. “God, you were so in love with me. But look at that skinny little fuck. How could you not be?”
“Oh my God, you’re right!” It was so mortifying, watching the teenaged me looking at him all googly-eyed and hero-worshippy. “Oh, this is so embarrassing! No wonder everyone thought we were a couple. I wasn’t even playing Juliet! Yikes. It looks like the nurse wanted to get it on with the Montague boy.”
“She still does, I hope.”
I smiled at that as we directed our attentions back to the television.
By the time “Robbie” finally accepted the mood ring that Julie had asked the nurse to bring to him, we were cracking up, and the movie was over almost as soon as it had begun. I always thought it was like an hour long. Seriously, it was probably no longer than seven minutes.
The screen went blue, and all I could do was sit there and groan in humiliation. “How on God’s green Earth did you not realize I was crazy about you? How could you have possibly been so blind?”
“I knew. Well, I hoped, anyway. You thought you were so slick.”
“I did! Oh, God. Kill me now.”
That made him laugh. “Just shut up and kiss me or I’ll have you bani-shed from this couch.”
I was still giggling as his mouth met mine, but it didn’t take long for me to stop laughing and melt into those soft, inviting lips. He wrapped his arm around my middle and slid my body underneath his as my hands ran over the muscles in his arms. I was practically obsessed with Trip’s new body, tracing my fingers over his new bulges every chance I got. I loved his involuntary response to my touch, the muscles in his back, or his chest, or his abs jumping under my palms.
He groaned as his hips jacked into mine, his tongue teasing against the seam of my lips, coaxing them to open, but he didn’t meet much resistance from me. I opened my mouth and moaned into his as our tongues tangled against one another.
Things had heated up quickly, but I was jogged out of the spell when Trip tore his lips from mine. “Hold on,” he said gruffly, before bounding off the couch.
He threw his new Guns CD in the stereo and skipped to “Paradise City.” He turned from the sound system, looking at me with a wicked smirk, slowly stalking back toward the sofa like a predator and scooping his new palmcorder off the table. “I think we need to make a new movie….”
…And that’s how only a handful of people (okay, just he and I) know that Trip’s greatest film was actually a riveting two-person performance opening to unanimously positive reviews in the winter of 2005 during a private after-party on his couch in Hollywood, California.
Chapter 22
THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
I was in the pool early the next day, trying to work off the feast from the night before. Trip’s plan was to run some errands all morning, then take his mother out for lunch that afternoon.
I thought he’d left hours before, so I was surprised when he came outside, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“What is this?” he asked derisively. I didn’t know what he was holding, but I did know that I didn’t like the tone of his voice. I stepped out of the pool and wrapped a towel around me, coming closer to take a better look.
I was just coming to the realization that the papers he was holding were mine when he spat out, “Are these the notes from your book? My biography? You’re publishing this? How could you do that to me, Layla?”
Hey, whoa. Hold on there, sparky. One minute, I was swimming around the pool. The next thing I know, I’m getting a tongue-lashing. And not the good kind.
I couldn’t even address his anger yet. I had my own anger to deal with. “I didn’t do anything! And why are you reading my stuff?”
“You left it scattered around my office. I couldn’t avoid reading it.”
His office.
But crud. He was right. I did. “It was supposed to be a surprise. And I wrote this for us, not to sell. If I wanted to sell it, I could have done so years ago.”
“Bullshit. You did sell it! You sold me out!”