Нора Робертс - Hideaway

“Excellent.” Darlie took a sip of water. “Now. How’s it going, Cate?”

“Oh, shit.” Slumping back, Cate closed her eyes a moment. “It’s a good part, and I think I’m doing good work. But she sucked the joy out of it, Darlie. I can’t find the joy in the work. She’s still pushing out stories. Doing some straight-to-vid thing. I know, like you told me once, it’s part of the job, but I can’t step outside. Telephoto lenses catching me sitting by the pool at my grandparents’.”

“Were you naked?”

“Ha-ha.”

Darlie gave her a pat. “See, it can always be worse.”

“It got there. We needed to shoot some exterior scenes on location, and somebody leaked it. So they’re swarming, and taking pictures and shouting questions because I made the mistake of thinking I could go with my movie brothers to this pizza place for lunch. Just to do something. But the worst? One of them harassed my grandfather’s cook—the sweetest woman in the world—when she was at the market. He threatened her, Darlie, threatened to report her to immigration if she didn’t give him access to me. She’s a citizen, she’s a goddamn US citizen, but he scared her.”

“Okay, fuck it. None of that’s part of the job. Not any of it.”

“Maybe not, but I can’t stop it as long as I’m in the job.”

“Don’t you give up, Cate. You’re good, really good.”

“Joy,” Cate said and flicked the fingers of both hands. “Sucked.”

“This blows. We need sugar.”

Shock had Cate’s eyebrows disappearing under her bangs. “You? Sugar?”

“Crisis food.” So saying, Darlie dug into her purse. “My emergency stash.”

Cate stared at the bag Darlie pulled out, opened.

“Reese’s Pieces is your emergency stash?”

“Don’t judge me.” After popping one, Darlie offered the bag. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet.” But oddly, sitting there in the deliberately dopey sweater, eating candy with a friend, settled her.

“I’m going to finish what I started, and do the best work I can. Then I don’t know. I can’t talk to my family about this, not right now. Their worry’s constant, and that’s hard to deal with, too.”

“Fuck ’em—not your family. The rest of them.”

“I’m feeling sorry for myself,” Cate admitted. “ Absolutely Maybe ’s about to release. I couldn’t do the circuit. I can’t go to the premiere, not without getting my family—and me—all stressed out.”

“Not worth it.”

“No, not worth it.” She propped her elbow, rested her chin on her fist. “I haven’t so much as kissed a boy—as me—since Ireland.”

“Ouch.”

Wallowing, Cate took a handful of Reese’s. “I’m going to die a virgin.”

“No, you won’t. Not with that face, those legs, and your annoyingly positive outlook.”

Cate managed a snort, ate candy.

“But you’re overdue for some touch, even considering your tiny tits.”

“Tell me.” And she found herself able to smile and mean it. “I’ve really missed you.”

“Mutual.”

“And way, way enough about me. Tell me what’s going on with you, so I can add envy to my list.”

Cate glanced over at the knock on the trailer door. “You’re needed on set, Ms. Sullivan.”

“Sorry, damn it. I spent all this time crying on your shoulder.”

“I’ll go dry it off. Look, how about I text you, and we figure out some hang-out time. I can come to your place.”

“That would be great. Seriously.”

As they walked out together. Darlie put an arm around Cate’s waist, and Cate returned the gesture. “I’d hang now, watch you work, but I have to book it. I have a date—a hot one—tonight.”

“Bitch.”

With a laugh, Darlie veered away.

Within twenty-four hours, a tabloid printed a grainy picture of the two girls’ affectionate embrace with the headline:

ARE HOLLYWOOD’S SWEETHEARTS

ACTUALLY SWEETHEARTS?

Darlie and Cate’s Secret Romance

Within the speculative article, with suggestions that the two actors had fallen into more than friendship during the filming of Absolutely Maybe , Charlotte offered a quote.

“I support my daughter, whatever her lifestyle, whatever her orientation. The heart wants what the heart wants. And my heart only wants Caitlyn’s happiness.”

She swallowed it; what choice did she have? But it cut in ways she couldn’t explain.

And when she flubbed her lines in a key scene five straight takes, she felt something break.

“I’m sorry.” Tears pushed through the crack, began to rise in her throat. “I just need to—”

“That’s lunch,” McCoy announced. “Cate, let’s have a minute.”

She wouldn’t cry, she promised herself. She couldn’t, wouldn’t cry and be one of those overemotional, oversensitive actors who couldn’t handle a smackdown.

“I’m sorry,” she said again as he moved to where she stood on the rapidly clearing kitchen set.

The set looked like she felt, she realized, total chaos. Which was the damn point of the scene she kept screwing up.

“Have a seat.” He pointed to the floor, lowered to it himself, sat cross-legged.

Thrown off balance, Cate hesitated, then sat with him on the floor. “I know the lines,” she began, “I know the scene. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I do. You’re somewhere else, and you need to be here. Your head’s not in it, Cate. It’s not just the lines, you’re not giving me the heart, the frustration, the pent-up anger that leads to the blow. You’re walking through it.”

“I’ll do better.”

“You’ll need to. Whatever’s pulling you out, I need you to get rid of it. And if you’re letting that bullshit tabloid garbage get to you, you need to toughen up.”

“I’m trying! She blubbers about me on Hollywood Confessions , I have to toughen up. She blubbers on Joey Rivers , toughen up, Cate. Celeb Secrets Magazine does a cover feature on her blubbering? Don’t think about it, Cate, just toughen the hell up. And on and on and on.”

She pushed to her feet, threw up her arms. God, she wanted to throw something, break something.

Break everything.

“And now this, after weeks of being hounded, this? I can’t even have a friend? Someone I can actually talk to without that being tossed in the sewer? And what if I were gay, or Darlie was, and we weren’t ready to come out? What kind of damage would that do to someone if they were still trying to figure out who they were?

“I know this kind of shit happens, okay? Toughen up? Goddamn it. My whole life is behind the walls of my grandfather’s house and this lot. I have no life. I can’t go out and get a pizza, or go shopping, go to a concert, the damn movies. They won’t leave me alone. She makes sure of it. Because I’m still her goddamn golden ticket. That’s all I ever was to her.”

She stood, fists clenched, angry tears still streaming, breath heaving.

His gaze still on her face, McCoy nodded. “Two things. The first as a human being, a father, a friend. Everything you said is right. And you have a right to be sick of it, tired of it, pissed off by it. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not decent.”

He patted the floor again, waited until she—with obvious reluctance—sat again. “I haven’t said anything about Charlotte Dupont to you. Maybe that was a mistake, so I’ll say this now. She’s despicable. Every way, every level, every angle, despicable, and I’m sorry for what happened to you, what’s happening to you. You don’t deserve it.”

“Life’s not about deserve. I figured that out really early.”