That is, until Kamilah had been hired to direct Andromeda X’s high-concept new music video. Kamilah had left for the shoot early one morning three months ago, and Grey hadn’t seen her since. She’d woken up to a dozen drunk, giggly voice memos of Kamilah gushing about how she had found her soulmate, and how within an hour of arriving on set, Andromeda had immediately invited her to tour with them for the next several months.
Grey was thrilled for her, of course, and had been following their exploits on Instagram with only the slightest twinge of envy. She’d scrolled through pictures of them clubbing in Berlin, smoking intimidatingly large blunts in Amsterdam, trying on outrageous streetwear in Tokyo. The video content Kamilah was creating for them on the fly, editing on the plane and in hotel rooms, was stunning, some of her best work ever. Meanwhile, Grey was stuck at home, tragically unemployed, trying unsuccessfully to keep Kamilah’s plants alive, and wondering whether she should bother packing anything cuter than her tattered middle school graduation T-shirt to sleep in for her first thrilling night of no-mance with Ethan.
She checked the time on her phone. 6:40. Shit. She needed to get on the road soon. She shoved the tower of clothes onto the floor to reveal her empty overnight bag buried under it, and threw a few random items in without looking. The only thing she really needed was her toothbrush.
Nearly an hour later, she followed her GPS up the winding Santa Monica Mountains road to the gate of Ethan’s house. Down the street, she saw a few cars idling. This must be the paparazzi Audrey had called in advance. She tapped out a text to her just to be sure:
I’m here.
A little thrill went through her. There was no going back now.
Her phone buzzed immediately with Audrey’s response:
Good to go.
The car doors opened and several middle-aged men carrying enormous cameras started toward her. Even though this was all part of the plan, she couldn’t help feeling a little freaked out. She rolled down her window and leaned her torso out of the car, pushing her hair behind her ear to give the cameras a clear view of her face as she slowly tapped Ethan’s security code into the keypad.
Click-click-click-click. The high-speed shutters snapped in sharp flurries, the flashes sending dark spots dancing in front of her eyes. Once they had their money shots, the photographers politely thanked her and scattered back to their cars before the gate had opened fully. Grey stared apprehensively down the long expanse of driveway, engulfed in shadow.
Honey, I’m home.
* * *
—
SHE WAS HERE. In his house.
For the first time, Grey existed outside the walls of Greenfield & Aoki or the screen of his computer (and, okay, the screen of his phone, too). She was fidgeting in his hallway, leather overnight bag slung over her shoulder, having trouble meeting his eyes. Not that he was trying, either.
He led her through the house.
“Kitchen—help yourself to anything in the fridge; if you want something else, you can text Lucas and he’ll postmates it for you.” He turned to face the living room and gestured at the enormous, plush, U-shaped sectional parked in front of a projector screen. “He can also probably help you figure out the remotes if you want to watch something. I think you can stream…whatever you want. I pretty much only use it when the girls are here, they’re better at that stuff. I can’t really make heads or tails of it.”
She was silent, taking it all in. He brought her down the hallway and opened the door to one of the spare bedrooms.
“Normally I would put you in the guesthouse, but there’s some kind of pipe thing going on. Lucas says the guy keeps giving him the runaround. The pipe guy, I mean. Sorry about that.”
“Um, no, it’s fine. I’ll just knock a star off your rating.”
He jerked his head back to look at her. She looked back at him innocently. He ran his hand through his hair, a little unnerved. There she went again, making jokes, making herself impossible to write off. He wished she wouldn’t.
“Right. Well. Make yourself at home.” He tried to keep his pace casual as he walked away.
For the next hour, Ethan holed up in his office, doing whatever he could to ignore the new bumps and shuffles and sighs permeating the house, let alone what—make that who—was causing them. He felt a little guilty about abandoning her so unceremoniously, but surely she understood that this was how it had to work. Tonight was about the photo op when she entered and when she left. It had to be. He’d watched her lose any illusions about the kind of guy he was at their first meeting, and he wasn’t about to show her firsthand all the fun and unique ways he could disappoint her.
He had a glass of bourbon next to him, but he hadn’t touched it much. Something about tonight made him want to stay alert. A book lay open on his lap, but he couldn’t concentrate, staring out at the pool instead. His house was ranch-style, wrapping around the pool and enclosing it on three sides, with all the back walls replaced by floor-to-ceiling glass.
He sighed and put the book down, casting his eyes around the room for something else to do. He would not go see what she was doing. He picked up his guitar from the corner and gave it a perfunctory tuning before settling back in his chair, strumming absently, lost in thought.
Ethan was so zoned out that he didn’t hear the office door, already open a crack, creak open farther.
“Know any Hole?”
Grey was standing in the doorway, hand on her hip like she owned the place. Her confident expression wavered when he met her eyes, but only for a split second.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s Nirvana, right?” Her brow furrowed melodramatically. “You’re not one of those ‘Courtney killed Kurt’ guys, are you? Because if that’s the case, I’m writing Audrey that million-dollar check right now.”
Ethan chuckled. “Oh yeah? That’s your dealbreaker? ‘Must love Courtney Love’?”
“Is that so much to ask?”
“Not at all. Unfortunately, I can only play about three and a half songs and Courtney didn’t make the short list.”
“Was that one of the three, or the half?”
He offered the neck of the guitar to her, in mock offense.
“Can you do better?”
She accepted his challenge and slung the strap over her shoulder, still braced on the doorframe. She leaned her head over the fretboard in concentration, a few blond curls slipping over her eyes as she organized her fingers over the strings. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back dramatically, bringing her other arm down in an aggressive strum of the ugliest, most dissonant chord Ethan had ever heard.
Ethan threw back his head and laughed.
“Guess not.” Grey shrugged, handing it back to him. “I did have a couple lessons a few years ago, I had to fake it for the show I was on. Seems like they didn’t stick.”
Ethan let the guitar lie flat on his lap, resting his hands on the strings. He considered her.
For the first time, he tried to put himself in her shoes. She was in an unfamiliar place, in a bizarre situation. He had all the power. And yet she’d sought him out, even though he had tried to shut her away and ignore her. He toyed with the idea of actually getting to know her, letting her get to know him. Just because their relationship wasn’t real didn’t mean they had to stay strangers. She seemed, so far, to be down-to-earth and easygoing—that is, when she didn’t want to bite his head off. Maybe she wouldn’t try to claw her way inside his heart, demand things of him that he could never provide.
And, yes, seeing her standing there in her leggings and bare feet and a cloud of wavy blond hair with a smile still lingering at the corners of her lips stirred something inside him that he hadn’t felt in years. Like he had a glimpse of something that could be his, something so painfully perfect that his chest ached, something he had done nothing to deserve. All he had to do was reach out and take it. It would be so easy to put the guitar down and pull her into his lap right then, burying his face in her hair.
The fact that he wanted to terrified him.
Grey had been staring at him with an unreadable expression, waiting for him to respond. He needed to say something. He couldn’t.