But he closes his eyes and presses his forehead against mine, taking in a deep breath.
“I know you don’t always like it when I speak what’s on my mind,” he murmurs, my skin igniting just from the raw lust I hear in his voice. “But it’s taking everything I have to not try and persuade you.” He bites his lip and glances up at me through his long lashes. “For you, though, I’ll be the gentleman you need me to be.”
Then he pulls back to press his lips into my cheek, shivers cascading down my back, and straightens up.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says to me with that easy smile of his and then he turns and walks away, calling over his shoulder. “Sleep well, sunshine.”
And then I’m left in front of my apartment building, turned on and bereft. I was this close to having a wild night of hot, sweaty sex with him and then he had to suddenly turn into a gentleman and leave me be.
I watch as the Suburban drives off and shake my head as I go into the building. I love a gentleman as much as the next girl, but damn it, Emmett sure has a knack for making me appreciate a scoundrel.
Chapter 9
Emmett
“So, how’s the new Sheila treating you?” Julian asks me while the hair, makeup and wardrobe team flits around us, adjusting us under the lights. I can tell they’re listening as they always do.
I give Julian a look. “You know, I’ve been to Australia and I never heard a single Aussie use the term Sheila. Nor were there any shrimp tossed on any barbies, either.”
Julian shrugs and gives me a sheepish grin. “Sorry mate. I know the ladies here love it, ain’t that right girls?”
On cue, all of them give him a placating smile, just to keep him happy. The fact is, I might have a bad reputation for being a bit, well, to borrow from Alyssa, prickly on set, but Julian Crane is an outright douchebag. But he’s the star of Boomerang and the one with the permanent contract, so it doesn’t seem to matter what he gets up to, he’s staying put.
As for me, well, I have to say the crew is treating me a bit differently today. Pretty sure it’s all because of Alyssa. They aren’t exactly falling over themselves to talk to me or be extra nice, but I’ve seen a few more smiles tossed my way than what I normally get.
Knowing I have a captive audience who might go report this down the entertainment grapevine, I say, “It’s actually going really well. It’s still really early of course, I met her at a mutual friend’s wedding. But she’s really quite special.”
“She’s very pretty,” Tina, my makeup artist says, as she presses powder onto my forehead. “So natural looking.”
“Yeah, she definitely doesn’t seem very LA,” Julian says. “Except for her tits, am I right mate? They have to be real.”
For some reason it bothers me to hear him talk about Alyssa that way.
Remember, you’re her supposed boyfriend. You should be bothered.
“That’s none of your business,” I tell him. “But yes, everything about her is real.”
Well, everything except our relationship.
“So refreshing to see a man like you find a nice, normal girl,” Yvonne, our wardrobe girl says as she adjusts the tie on the black suit I’m wearing for the scene. “Gives the rest of us hope.”
“Yeah,” Tina says with a dreamy sigh. “And to think you met at a wedding. It’s just so romantic. She must feel like she’s in a fairy-tale dating you.”
Or a nightmare. It’s hard to tell with her sometimes.
When the scene is over, fifty million takes later and all Julian’s fault, not mine, I get in my car and leave the studios. It’s too late to go and find Alyssa and I feel like she was pretty serious about having her three nights a week to herself, so I head downtown.
But I don’t go to Gastown or Coal Harbor or Yaletown for a drink or a bite to eat. Instead, I park my car in a secure parking garage off Hastings, grab the plastic bag beside me, put a baseball cap on my head, and head out onto the street.
If you’ve never been to Vancouver’s downtown east side, consider yourself lucky. And maybe a bit naïve. The city is known around the world as being one of the best places to live thanks to the gorgeous scenery and healthy living and it being Canada, of course. But aside from the outrageous expense, Vancouver has a dark and dirty secret that most citizens turn a blind eye to.
Homelessness and drug addiction rules the east side of downtown, so much that you can’t walk down those streets without seeing something horrible. Hundreds of junkies wander about, sleep outside doorways, try and sell DVDs, yell and scream at nothing or shoot heroin right in front of you. The police can’t handle it, the province and their non-existent health care sources can’t handle it. So it’s just this lawless town where people are dead and dying, a sort of limbo leaning towards Hell.
I grew up down here. I lived at the top floor of a flea-ridden apartment, the hallways filled with addicts trying to find shelter for the night. My mother did the best she could for me even as her addiction worsened. By the time I was ten, I was pretty much fending for myself while she tried to wean herself off her medicine.
I was ten years old when she just took too much. She became another statistic, one of the hundreds of souls who die each and every month on these streets, alone and undocumented. If it wasn’t for me, no one would have even noticed or known her name.
But for my shitty upbringing, one I try so hard to bury, one that’s impossible to escape, I harbor no hard feelings toward my mother. Despite her addiction, she did everything she could to provide the best life she could for me. I never went hungry, I always had a bed. I was able to go to school with other kids who had lives just like me. On her best and brightest days we would escape the east side and walk just a few blocks over to where the scenery changes and Chinatown begins. We’d explore strange shops and she’d pretend she spoke Cantonese. I could never quite figure out if the merchants understood her or not.
And through it all, my mother always had a back-up plan. I think she knew, deep down, that she’d die from the drugs one day, which is why she arranged for her estranged-sister to be my guardian. She needed to know that I would be okay in the end.
Little did she know that I had actually preferred living with my comatose but loving mother in the zombie-like slums compared to the cold, Christian prison of my aunt. But life isn’t something you can plan. You can only hope for the best.
“Hey man, can you spare a quarter?” a toothless man asks me. His face is caved in, covered in sores. Maybe meth, maybe carfentanil or whatever opioid of the month is killing people in the alleyways. Either way, though his voice sounds young, his face is halfway to dying and I have no idea his age.
I reach into the plastic bag and pull out an energy bar I had gotten from craft services on set. “I can spare you this.”
“Nah man, I need a quarter,” he says and when he sees I’m not budging, he takes the bar. I watch him, curious, and see him shuffle down the street before trying to sell it to another junkie for a dollar.
I’m not surprised. I never give them money because they only want it for one thing and as often as I do bring food from the set, occasionally buying someone in need a burger from McDonalds down the road, it can be hard to find people who are seriously hungry. Usually their only hunger is for drugs.
But there’s always Jimmy. Jimmy’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember and by some kind of luck, he’s never been addicted to the hard stuff. That’s not to say he’s perfect. He’s a drunk, through and through. But he’s a good man and even as he’s pushing into his seventies, he’s still living in the same apartment in my old building, with a job working at the homeless shelter and soup kitchen.
I tuck down the brim of my baseball cap by habit, even though no one would ever recognize me here, and then head into the apartment. I step over a man passed out on the stairs, cover my mouth with my sleeve to block out the smells of urine, vomit and shit, and head up to Jimmy’s apartment.
I knock on his door, even though it’s partially open, and wait a long minute before I step inside.
This is the moment I fear. The idea that I might step in here and find him dead. It only gets worse as time goes on, that I’ll have to deal with the same situation I found my mother in.