Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
It didn’t make for a warm and cuddly relationship between us. I’d gone through a period where I really wanted to be close to him. I wanted to hear his side. I wanted to understand. I was sixteen before I fully understood that there was nothing to understand. Fletcher James was an asshole. A user, and a creep. A bigshot who had preyed on a twenty-something production assistant in five-star hotels and pretended it was love. Then pretended it was nothing. Then reluctantly introduced me to his real family and made the difference between us clear.
No, I didn’t want Fletcher James’ help in any way, shape, or form.
“I’d rather wait tables for the rest of my life,” I said defiantly. That was what I was doing right now. I was a cocktail waitress at an upscale bar and bistro near my apartment. The main allure was that I could walk there, and the uniform was short but not slutty.
“Whatever makes you happy,” my mom said dryly. She didn’t believe me for a minute. She knew that, hard as I’d fought it, my passion was the same as my father’s. I wanted to create. I wanted to find stories and curate them and build something from the foundation of the script pages. I hadn’t gotten Fletcher's last name, or his looks, thank God, but I’d gotten his love of movies.
“Are you visiting me at work later?” I asked to change the subject. My mom loved Cafe Bellissimo. She liked to come by toward the end of my shift so she could have a glass of wine and we could catch up in person while we rolled silverware for the next shift. I liked it too since half the time, she was off on this retreat or that. Doing yoga in Bali. Breathwork in Belize. God knows what in Peru.
“No, packing,” she said. “The photography safari, remember?”
I didn’t, but it was hard to keep up with her various pursuits. I pretended like I did and listened while she talked about it. By the time I got off the phone with her, I was back at my apartment.
Demoralized, I kicked off my heels as soon as I walked in and let the cool tile comfort my hot, tired feet. Then I dragged my perfectly blown out hair into a ponytail on top of my head and changed out of my interview suit into jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on my way through the living room into the kitchen. The makeup was still perfectly applied, but the illusion of sophistication was gone. I looked young and frustrated and hungry instead of capable, confident, and ready for the responsibility of being a production assistant on a movie. Or a TV show. Or a freaking Doritos commercial, but God, give me something.
Then, as though the universe was answering my prayer, my phone rang. I pulled it out of my back pocket, expecting to see my mom’s name on the Caller ID.
Instead, to my shock, I saw the last name I ever expected to see.
Fletcher James.
2
JULIAN
Callum O’Conner told me to go fuck myself.
Actually, he faxed it to Dana, and it wasn’t those words exactly, but it was the gist.
“What do you want to do next?” Dana asked after I looked up from the fax.
I folded up the paper into fourths and stuck it in my back pocket. I’d expected this. The obvious first step was to up our offer, but I wanted to talk to our father before we did. He was the original Lewis of Lewis Productions, and he’d dealt with his share of tough characters. “Let’s go get a home cooked dinner,” I said to Dana.
She snorted. “If having a personal chef counts as home cooked, count me in.”
I didn’t say anything about her meal delivery service that came every Sunday and Wednesday. I tried to keep to one fuck you a day, and Callum had already fulfilled my quota. We drove down to Malibu where my parents had retired, zipping through and around the traffic in my Porsche 911-Turbo until we finally reached their private road. The guard at the gate shack recognized me and waved us through.
“Loved your last alien flick,” he said cheerfully.
I smiled automatically, but I was glad that my friends were all too busy to make impromptu trips to Malibu to see my folks these days. Your last alien flick implied there had been several, and there hadn’t–three was a few, and it wasn’t like it was all we were doing. Lewis Productions had multiple arms. For example, right now we were producing a multi-year documentary on a kid named Michio Kaku, one of the best skateboarders in the world. Now that skateboarding was being added to the Summer Olympics, everyone thought he’d take home the first gold. We didn’t even know that was going to happen when we started this documentary, but now we were going to have it–and the last few years of his journey–on camera.