AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ladies first.” I held the door open for Brooke and she barely acknowledged me as she climbed into the back seat. I followed, sitting in the middle, and Wyatt crammed in on my other side. My thigh pressed against Brooke’s, and I fought the urge to pull it away.
Isaac took the front seat and made small talk with the driver as he pulled away from the curb.
“You know what blew my mind?” Wyatt asked me as we approached the main road. “That extra, the one who got chewed out by Preston.”
She’s hot, isn’t she?I wanted to say. That was the first thing I’d noticed when she returned Brooke’s script — how intensely blue her eyes had been in the sunlight, and how curvy her body was, like an old-school movie star. It was a refreshing change from the Ozempic-taking stick figures I usually saw in Hollywood. But instead, I asked, “What about her?”
“I can’t figure out how she knew all the lines. She wasn’t justcopyingBrooke; she was saying the words first. Anticipating them.”
I remembered how vulnerable and nervous the blonde woman had looked when she’d held out the script for me to take. Her arm had trembled slightly, and after I’d taken it, she rushed away like she thought she was about to be arrested.
“We did a thousand takes, and she heard the lines over and over again. By the end of the day,everyoneknew them except Brooke.” I paused, waiting for Brooke to protest, but she was picking at her nails, not listening to our conversation. “Of course she could anticipate them. We call could.”
Why was I protecting the extra? Nobody except me knew that Brooke had misplaced her script, so nobody could accuse the extra of stealing it. I certainly wouldn’t: I’d seen Brooke leave it unattended at the airport bar, the restaurant at the motel and right now, it was under her feet. I half expected her to leave it there when we reached our accommodation, but instead of unbuckling her seatbelt like the rest of us, she stayed where she was, even though I held the door open for her.
I squinted into the afternoon sunlight and shuffled my feet in the gravel. Even though the sun was sinking toward the horizon, the ground was hot and heat radiated through the soles of my shoes.
“Are you coming?”
“I need a drink,” she said to the driver, ignoring me. “Take me somewhere fun, like a nightclub.”
The driver was a middle-aged man with a weary expression and he looked back at her in the rear-view mirror.
“The nearest nightclubs are on the Gold Coast. Two hours away.”
“We’re filming at eight-thirty tomorrow,” I reminded her.
Brooke waved me away and tossed her hair back over her shoulder.
“Driver, take me there.”
She stared resolutely ahead, ignoring me until I closed the door. The car rolled out of the parking lot and I sighed. This was exactly the kind of thing I expected Brooke to do, but it spelled disaster for the rest of us. I’d seen more than one movie cannedmidway through filming because one of the leads became too much of a liability.
An uneasy feeling lurked in the pit of my stomach as we walked through the parking lot.
Our accommodation at the Lakeside Lodge Motor Inn was a far cry from the glitz of our trailers on set. It looked like one of the motels my family stayed in for a while, before we ran out of money and slept in mom’s car: old and functional, with rooms arranged in a horseshoe shape around a parking lot. Our rooms contained a bed, a fridge, and not much else, and of course, Brooke hated it. She’d complained to Preston the first night we’d arrived and I could hear the weariness in his voice through the phone as I sat on the end of the bed and removed my shoes.
“Therearen’tany five-star hotels in this area,” he said. “The Rainforest Resort was the only one, and it closed down five years ago.”
Tears formed in Brooke’s eyes as she opened the bar fridge. Inside was a handful of long-life milk sachets and nothing else.
“If I wasn’t contractually forced to be here…”
I tuned out. I’d heard enough of her whining for one lifetime: the private jet wasn’t fast enough. The script had too many pages. There wasn’t a beach for miles.
It was nice to walk into the restaurant with the other guys, pick up a menu, and not have to hear about how the meals didn’t fit her macros.
“What are you drinking?” I asked and tapped my credit card on the bar to indicate that I’d pay. For the next few weeks, these guys would be my colleagues and co-stars. We’d be living in adjacent rooms, taking breaks between scenes together and performing on the same set. I knew from experience that it would be better for all of us if I put effort into making sure we got along.
“Scotch on the rocks,” Wyatt said.
“Water for me,” Isaac added, and I raised an eyebrow at him.
“I thought you Brits liked a drink? You don’t have to be frugal on my account. This is a gold card.”
Which will only keep working if Brooke sorts her shit out so this movie can be made, I thought, but didn’t add.
Isaac gave me a wry look.
