Nobody spoke for a long moment. At the mention of tongues, Grey was once again plagued by intrusive images of Ethan’s taking a leisurely tour of her body. She tried not to squirm. Ethan finally broke the silence.
“Of course. We’re actors, right? I think we can convincingly pretend to like each other for a few hours a week.” He looked straight at Grey, and it was as if he could see right into the heart of her filthiest, most depraved fantasies. She didn’t trust herself to do anything but nod.
“Wonderful. Let’s move on to the don’ts. I know we didn’t give you much time to read the terms of the NDA, so I’ll give you the cheat sheet. No one outside this room is to know the details of this arrangement.” Audrey pointed at Ethan. “Not Nora.” She pointed at Grey. “Not Kamilah. Nobody.” She slammed her palm down on the desk to punctuate the last word. “If they ask, you were set up by a mutual friend. Which is the truth, in a manner of speaking. Beyond revealing the true nature of the relationship, the only incidents that would qualify as breach of contract are being linked romantically with another party, or causing material damage to the other person’s reputation.” Audrey ticked them off on her fingers. “Any questions on those points?”
Both Grey and Ethan shook their heads.
“I love it when you make my job easy. Now, is there anything I haven’t addressed that either of you would like to bring up?”
Paul turned to Ethan as if to confer with him privately, but Ethan spoke first, his voice gruff. “I don’t want my kids involved. I don’t want them…” He swallowed. “I don’t want to get their hopes up. It isn’t fair to them.”
Audrey nodded. “Absolutely. We can work around your schedule with the girls. I know Nora does an excellent job shielding them from what the press says about you two.” She turned to Grey. “Grey?”
Grey took another sip of water. She considered the question. All the eyes in the room turned expectantly to her. She put the glass down. She really, really, really needed to pee now.
“No smoking,” she replied.
Audrey looked down at her papers to camouflage her snicker.
Ethan raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I don’t—”
Grey cut him off before he could finish. “Yes you do, I can smell it.”
He closed his mouth, indignant. She realized those were the first words she’d spoken directly to him the entire meeting.
Grey turned her attention to the rest of the room. “I can’t cuddle up with a smoker. Even fake-cuddle. Sorry.” She shrugged.
Her imagination said otherwise, but none of them needed to know that.
Renata leaned across the table. “I can lend you the tapes I used if you want.”
Grey almost laughed aloud at Ethan’s bemused expression.
“Um, I’m okay, thank you,” he muttered. Renata shrugged and leaned back again.
“Suit yourself. The patches are a lifesaver, though. You should try the patches.”
Paul cleared his throat impatiently. “Are we done here?”
Audrey smiled serenely at him. “It does seem like we are, doesn’t it? I’ll have the contracts finalized and sent out by end of day tomorrow. Thank you for your cooperation, everybody. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful…something.”
Paul bolted out the door as soon as the last words left her mouth, his phone already pressed to his ear. Audrey followed, with Renata hurrying to catch her at the door to confer with her about something or other. Kevin closed his laptop and swiftly exited, leaving Grey and Ethan as the lone stragglers.
She fell into step with him as she came around to the other side of the table. They looked at each other. She felt like she should say something, but words failed her. It seemed like around him she could only vacillate between saying the wrong thing, or losing the power of speech entirely.
Ethan held the door open for her. As she walked by him, he leaned over her. She froze. All of a sudden, she had the irrational thought that he was going to kiss her. He did smell faintly of cigarettes, it was true, but it wasn’t the sour, overpowering stench of a chain-smoker. Somehow it just enhanced his natural musk, which was clean and spicy and masculine.
He didn’t kiss her, of course. He just brushed his lips against her ear and murmured, “You’re cute when you blush.”
Grey blinked, still frozen to the spot. Before her brain was able to process what happened, he had already swept out of the room without looking back. It was probably for the best: as all the blood in her body rushed to her face, she didn’t feel especially cute. She would just have to take his word for it.
GREY WAS STUMPED. HER TEENAGE Cosmo subscription, which she’d trusted to prepare her to navigate every tricky situation she could ever possibly encounter as an adult, hadn’t quite covered this one.
What does the modern, sophisticated, sexually liberated woman pack for her very first overnight stay at her fake boyfriend’s house?
She walked over to her dresser and opened the top drawer, rifling through it, and throwing five or six more shirts on top of the already enormous pile of clothes on her bed. She looked at it and groaned, falling face-first into it. She missed Kamilah. Of course, even if Kamilah were here, she couldn’t be honest with her about what was going on, so maybe it was better that she was off gallivanting around the world with L.A.’s hottest up-and-coming genderqueer art-pop star, leaving Grey to have her meltdown in peace.
After Grey had returned home from Greece, she’d moved all of her belongings out of Callum’s luxury condo and put a down payment on a secluded 1920s Silver Lake bungalow. In a moment of serendipity, Kamilah’s housing collective had imploded in a flurry of fermentation-related drama around the same time, and Grey had practically begged her to take the spare room.
It was the shot in the arm their friendship had needed. They’d drifted apart after Grey had booked the Poison Paradise pilot and dropped out of USC their senior year. She’d let herself get so wrapped up in the chaos of her shooting schedule, followed by the all-consuming infatuation of her first adult relationship, that she’d let every other relationship in her life fall by the wayside. They’d first reconnected when the Poison Paradise producers were looking for new directors to keep on call, and Grey had immediately thrown Kamilah’s name into the mix.
Kamilah had grown up in a small western Massachusetts college town, the daughter of two professors. She’d eschewed the free liberal arts tuition to follow her acting-slash-filmmaking dreams out West, her hunger amplified by working part-time at her tiny local video store during its final years of existence. They’d initially bonded over being East Coast refugees, though their upbringings couldn’t have been more different. Grey found Kamilah’s tales of DIY home piercings and boxed wine in cow fields as fascinating as Kamilah found Grey’s stories of growing up on set and backstage.
While Grey’s lifetime of industry experience made it easy for her to charm people on a superficial level, she was also most comfortable keeping them at arm’s length. Being regularly pulled out of school and bouncing from set to set had shaped her into something of a loner. Kamilah, on the other hand, had an uncanny ability to disarm almost anyone, her quiet magnetism and genuine curiosity drawing people to her like a beacon. By their sophomore year, they’d become inseparable, hosting elaborate dinner parties, working their way through Kamilah’s Criterion Collection DVDs, and making grandiose plans about what their careers would look like once they left school. When Kamilah had moved into her house, which they’d filled with flea market and estate sale finds, it was like no time had passed at all.