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Once we were all standing on the ferry dock, Will shifted Madame Leota in his arms and muttered, “Okay, this is going to suck. Can you guys help me?” Lorenzo picked up the pink plastic cat carrier while Leonidas held its door open, and Will tried to slip the cat inside. “Come on, girl,” Will said, as the cat braced all four feet around the opening. “You can’t board the ferry if you’re not inside this thing. Please just cooperate.”
Beck suggested, “Try putting her in backwards.”
Will flipped the cat around and tried to load her butt first, but her back legs shot out and she anchored her paws on either side of the opening. I grinned and said, “I can’t help but admire her total commitment to stubbornness.”
It took a while, but eventually they managed to wrestle the cat into the carrier. Will pushed his dark curls out of his blue eyes as he caught his breath, and Madame Leota glared at all of us through the wire door. The ferry’s horn sounded, which let us know it was departing in just a few minutes, and Leonidas told us, “You’d better get going.”
Will grabbed his friend Beck in a hug and muttered, “This weekend absolutely flew by.”
“It really did,” Beck said. “Continue to knock ‘em dead, my friend, and I’ll see you when this movie wraps.”
After we all said our goodbyes, we boarded the first ferry of the day heading to the mainland, which was almost empty. We selected some benches on the open top deck, and Gabriel curled up right beside me and put on a baseball cap and sunglasses before taking my hand. His all-black outfit also included canvas slip-ons and a long cardigan over a fitted V-neck T-shirt and skinny jeans. He’d definitely toned down his feminine side, and it made me sad that he didn’t feel he could totally be himself, but at least there were still elements of his personal style in what he was wearing.
He said, “This is exciting. It’s been a while since I’ve been off the island.”
“Did Tracy make you promise to check in a lot?”
“He did.” Gabriel glanced at my profile as I put on a pair of sunglasses and tilted my face toward the sun. “Are you okay with that?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Some people are the jealous type, like the last guy I dated.”
I grinned at him and said, “I’m not jealous of Tracy, but I’m definitely jealous of this guy you dated.”
“Don’t be. Roger and I were terrible together. We only lasted a few months before we decided we were much better off as friends.”
“You dated a guy named Roger? I’m picturing a skinny math teacher.”
He laughed at that and said, “Not quite. You’ll see for yourself as soon as we get to San Francisco.”
“Because the first thing you’re planning to do is introduce me to your ex-boyfriend?”
“Roger works for Sawyer and Alastair, the couple who’s letting us use their apartment. He’s bringing us the keys.”
That was going to be interesting.
After the fairly quick ferry ride, we stuffed our luggage into Phoenix’s SUV and he drove us to my apartment in West Hollywood. As Gabriel and I climbed out of the dark blue Bronco, Will told us, “The meeting with my agent should take less than an hour. I’ll message you when we’re on our way back to pick you up.”
I lived on the second floor of a nondescript building that dated from the 1960s. It had a chipped stucco exterior, and the long hallway always smelled like fried food. I didn’t know why. As I unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door, I said, “I’m sorry it’s such a cluttered mess.”
Gabriel followed me inside, and when I turned on the light, he murmured, “Oh wow.”
The studio apartment was a rectangle with white walls, and its one small window looked out over the parking lot and a dumpster. My twin-size bed was just inside the door, and it was piled with the two loads of laundry I’d washed right before I went to Catalina. There was a tiny kitchen in the corner and an even tinier bathroom, and every square inch of what was left had been turned into my makeup studio.
Gabriel wandered into the apartment and looked all around him as he said, “This is amazing.” The walls were completely covered with sketches of makeup ideas, pages from magazines, and random inspiration photos. Three six-foot-long folding tables formed a squared-off ‘U’ at one end of the apartment, filling the narrow space wall-to-wall. The tables were crowded with makeup, wigs, masks, facial prosthetics, and other tools of the trade.
An office chair was positioned in the center of the ‘U’, and Gabriel sat down in it and turned slowly as he took it all in. Meanwhile, I pushed aside the laundry so I could sit on the bed and murmured, “I know it looks like a jumble, but I actually have it organized in a way that makes sense to me.”
