Part 17 (1/2)

Far away, the director was giving me instructions I could barely hear. ”Cry,” he was saying. ”Make me believe it.”

How could I cry with Kent's arms around me? How could I cry when he had already tried to save me, protect me? How could I cry when the whisper of his breath against my hair lit every nerve of my body on fire?

I bit my lip and tried to think, think of things that hurt me, that filled me with pain.

Oh, right. Whosits. Jason. That guy.

Well, that was easy.

But when the tears welled up, they weren't tears of sadness or grief-they were tears of grat.i.tude.

I didn't have to carry the secret of Jason's betrayal by myself. I had Carter... and I had Kent.

I closed my eyes and let the tears fall, and as I did the sun came out from behind the clouds, was.h.i.+ng the cliff in light. Kent's thumb drifted across my cheek, gently lifting my tears away.

”Kiss,” the director said. ”This is a perfect shot, kiss, kiss!”

So Kent lifted my face to his and kissed me.

Before it was the hunger of his kiss that shocked me, but now it was the gentleness. A side of him I'd seen only once or twice, and now he opened the floodgates and poured it into me, his lips brus.h.i.+ng against mine, his hands on my face as he teased my mouth open with his, his tongue touching me tenderly, gently, as though he could taste my heart and he found it sweet.

I clung to his wrists as he cradled my face in his palms. The camera circled us, the sun gilding our skin, our hair, our whole bodies. In the fading warmth, we turned to gold, his lips on mine, his hands on my face, my fingers ghosting over his.

Exquisite torture. A pain so deep it was almost pleasure. Stolen kisses, right out in the open.

I wanted to reach out and to hold him, grab him, pull him into me, crawl inside him and curl up. I inhaled sharply at the sudden wash of need that swept through me at only this meeting of lips.

I closed my eyes and gave myself over to him. The sun turned my world red behind my eyelids, and then there was nothing but his hands on me, his mouth on mine, and the heat of desire, need and longing. I surged into him, and he responded. I didn't care who saw, only needed his strength, his gentleness. My body remembered the raw, aching need we had already shared, but my heart sang to be cradled in his hands like water. If he let me go, I would flow out between his fingers and slip to the ground, disappearing into the earth...

Thighs pressed against mine as he pulled me closer. I tangled my hands in his s.h.i.+rt, and the tears that had begun with grat.i.tude changed to bitterness.

Will I ever feel this again?

I clung to him harder.

And then someone screamed and, startled, we broke away, looking toward the sound.

And there stood Carter just a few yards away, surrounded by cameras. And utterly devastated.

His face was bone white, even in the gold of the sunlight, as he watched his brother and his girlfriend together. His eyes were wide and hollow, as though he'd been gutted and were looking down the long, dark tunnel into the next life. Cameras circled him, s.n.a.t.c.hing his shocked, horrified face and storing it away, but he never took his eyes from us.

Apologies leaped to my mouth, but I couldn't say them. We weren't real boyfriend and girlfriend. This was for a video, it was just... it was just acting, so why did he look so crushed? Did he... did he actually care for me?

What was going on?

”Cut!”

The director's voice sliced through the air like a knife, and just like that the horrible, crumpled look on Carter's face dropped and he gave me a grin. Suddenly I realized it had been a facade. He had been acting.

Oh s.h.i.+t, I thought. Carter really could act. Kent hadn't been wrong when he'd said that Carter needed something other than music to throw himself into... if he could act, he could go anywhere in life. I knew he didn't love me or think of me as his girlfriend, but for that heart-stopping moment I had thought that he'd been lying to me, that he really did care for me in that way...

And that's when I remembered.

The new script. The changed storyboard.

Of course he didn't have a crush on me. Of course he didn't, because he was the one who changed the script. He and Manny and Sonya had rewritten it... not just for the song, but to put Kent and me into this position.

That f.u.c.ker, I thought. He really was trying to play matchmaker!

Oh. He was good. He was very good. I narrowed my eyes at Carter, but he just grinned wider. I would have sworn he was two seconds from mincing around and singing ”Kent and Rebecca, sitting in a tree...”

Then he sauntered over to us, looking like the cat that ate all the catnip in the garden and then jumped up on the bed and puked it back up all over your great-great-granny's hand-sewn quilt.

”Hey Mrs. Girlfriend,” he said. ”You wanna try some of that making out?”

I glared at him. ”Not right now, thanks.”

He looked so smug I wanted to strangle him. ”What?” he said. ”Are you saying Kent didn't get even you started?”

”Ew, Carter! Don't be gross.”

But Kent had already stiffened, and not in a good way. He took a heavy step back from me. It was like losing a limb. My heart ached.

”You're in big trouble,” Kent said to Carter. Then he turned and stalked off, his shoulders rigid. I watched him go and tried to pretend I didn't care.

”That was great,” the director said, coming up to us. ”Rebecca, have you ever tried acting?”

You have no idea, I thought.

Chapter Twelve.

”That's a wrap!”

”Oh, thank sweet soapy Jesus,” Manny said. ”I hate these things.”

I giggled. Manny had the weirdest phrases, and I'd heard most of them over the course of the last two days of shooting. ”Well I'll be a greased Jesus” was my favorite. We didn't have any scenes together, but a lot of the focus was on Carter and the various girls hired to play the parts of his f.u.c.kbuddies. There were a lot of shots of Carter playing his guitar, and most of the focus was on Sonya as the lead singer, which was fine with me; the storyline for the video was clearly the story of me and Jason, with Carter standing in for my stupid ex.

This meant that Manny and I had had a lot of time on the sidelines to shoot the s.h.i.+t. When he wasn't high as a kite he was really easy to talk to and a pretty funny guy. Fog had rolled in on the second day of shooting, slowing things down but giving us a great atmosphere and more forgiving lighting, and the director had decided to work with it, squeezing me into a long dress and filming me running through the fog like some kind of waifish ghost.

I was sure it was going to look great post-production, but through most of the running scene Manny had been yelling at me from the sidelines. ”Run, b.i.t.c.h, run for your life!” is not the thing you want to hear while you're traipsing through the fog and trying to look like ”a lost soul” as the director had put it. Still, it was nice to make a friend, especially since the only other person who wasn't in almost every other scene was Kent.

Yeah. Kent. Things between us had been tenser than ever. The cliff-side make out session with Kent had been most of what was needed between us in the video, except for a few scenes of him watching me as I watched Carter do his thing with girls, or watching Carter and I do couple-y things like cuddle or laugh or whatever, which we were both experts at faking. I'd gathered that the make out footage was slated for the end of the video, the 'happy ending' as it were, and I found myself wis.h.i.+ng I'd screwed it up the first time so we'd have to have more takes.

Either way, Kent didn't want to talk to me, and more and more as shooting had continued I wondered why Kent, Carter and I were carrying on with this farce. At the very least we should be telling the rest of the band about our arrangement. I'd managed to keep up my end of the bargain, after all-Carter had started to forget all about drowning himself in alcohol and drugs, his creativity was revving up and off the charts, and right about now would be a good time for us to break up anyway. I'd overheard Kent on his cell phone, talking about sending scripts around so Carter could pick a project. If he wanted Carter to be as big as possible, it would be good for us to break up and get him on the gossip reels again.

Even when we went back to the hotel for the night-usually very late at night-Kent wouldn't talk to me or even look at me, though he pa.s.sed me every time we all went to our rooms. His room was right next to mine and Carter's, and I was usually digging the key out of my bag when he brushed past me, stealing my breath.