SEVEN

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

Two hours later, they were at one of Katie’s favorite places: the overlook up on Mulholland Drive, with its sweeping view of the lights in the San Fernando Valley, spreading miles and miles to the north of where they were standing. Sometimes, the air was smoggy enough to prevent you from seeing very much, but it had rained heavily a couple of days ago and the air was still fairly clear.

The limo was parked nearby, and the driver had busied himself with something on his phone. He’d been trained to ignore what his passengers were doing, Katie supposed, although if he worked regularly for Amanda, the fact that they’d come up here wouldn’t be much of a secret.

Still, being up here was worth sitting through that ridiculous dinner.

“You come up here much?” Doug asked, leaning against the railing at the edge of the overlook.

“Once in a while.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever been here.”

“No? Where do you like to go, then?”

Doug had shucked his jacket and left it in the car; Katie had done the same with her trendy but very uncomfortable pumps. She was pretty sure she and Doug looked like exactly what they were: a couple who’d gotten dressed up for an event that was now over, but they weren’t yet ready to go home.

Assuming that anyone other than the limo driver was interested in looking. There were no photographers up here. They’d left them behind in Beverly Hills.

“It depends,” Doug said. “I go riding sometimes—horseback, or I borrow my buddy’s Harley. I go up to Ojai for the music festival every year. I’ve got friends in Santa Barbara, so I drive up there every couple of months.” He paused, thinking. “Sea World.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “The zoo, too.”

“I haven’t been there yet. Almost ten years out here, so you’d think I’d have gotten down to San Diego at some point, but I haven’t. I suppose I should, although it’s kind of tough to schedule things unless we’re on hiatus.”

“During hiatus, then.”

Was that an invitation? If it had come from anyone else, Katie would have been almost positive that it was. On the other hand, maybe this was part of Amanda’s full-service representation, something few other agencies provided. If Katie wanted a companion to go with her to San Diego and show her around, Amanda could probably arrange for that.

But would it seem odd if Katie asked for Doug?

This town, she thought. Everything’s got so many rules. Back home, she could have just asked him. Found out if he was free on a particular weekend. Decided whose car they should take.

They could have gone to a movie together. Gotten some ice cream.

The nice thing was, he seemed to want to be with her, too. He’d agreed pretty readily to taking a ride so they could talk, and to stopping up here to look at the view for a while, even though it was getting late. Tomorrow being Saturday, she didn’t have to work, but he might have to, if Amanda had more chores for him to take care of, more flowers to deliver, on top of whatever else he did from day to day.

“What is it you do there?” she asked before she could convince herself not to be curious. “At Reign.”

“Pretty much everything.”

“Do you like it?”

He hesitated. “It’s not exactly what I expected. Or maybe it is. Nothing’s ever exactly what you expected, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“Is this what you expected? Where you are, what you do?”

That was a harder question to answer than she would have thought. She’d come out here expecting to spend a number of years waitressing, or working as someone’s assistant, or maybe helping out at a bookstore, until she started to find acting jobs—jobs that were by no means guaranteed.

She’d talked to plenty of women of all ages who’d come here with big dreams and high expectations, women who had yet to land a single significant job. Back then, she’d known it wasn’t impossible that she’d end up going home to Twin Falls as a failure, although, as her mom had reminded her plenty of times, simply trying to succeed would mean she hadn’t failed.

And here she was, ten years later, in a position few people ever reached. Not a household name, though. Not someone producers were calling to ask if she’d star in their next movie. The few roles she’d been offered (with the proviso that she would have to audition; the role wasn’t automatically hers) had turned out to be in the kinds of movies that were real stinkers, the kind that got squashed on Rotten Tomatoes and were hard to find even on Netflix.

On top of it, she was alone.

There’d been boyfriends, sure, but only for a short time. A couple of them had seemed like guys she’d want to be with long-term, but after a few months, one thing or another had gotten in the way. She was an old maid by no means, but it would have been nice to be with someone for more than a couple of months. A real partner, someone she could share her thoughts with, make plans with.

Someone who’d smile at her when she opened her eyes in the morning.

She’d come out here thinking that a boyfriend would be easier to find than a good acting job, only to have that expectation turned upside-down. In the ten years that she’d been here, both her younger brother and her best childhood friend had gotten married, her oldest brother and his wife had had a baby and were expecting their second, and all around her, people seemed to be coupled up.

Engaged. Married. Expecting. Moving from tiny apartments into their first homes together.

So, what is it that you really want? she wondered.

“I don’t know,” she told Doug. “It sort of is, but it feels like there’s something missing. I don’t feel satisfied, if that makes sense. In a way, I felt more satisfied when I was growing up. Dreaming of being out here.”

“The anticipation is better than the reality of it.”

“I think so.”

He chuckled softly. “Welcome to the club, Katie Dunn. I work for one of the highest-ranked agencies in town, and if I play my cards right, who knows. I could end running the place in… however long it takes Amanda to retire, I guess.” He paused, and a grin made its way across his lips. “But if you breathe a word of that to her, I’ll have to kill you and leave your body out in the desert for the vultures to find.”

“You want to end up being the Big Kahuna, then?”

For a long while, he didn’t say anything. He stood leaning against the railing, looking out at the hazy lights of the Valley, hands clasped together in front of him.

Then, finally, without looking at her, he said quietly, “I pretty much know what I want. But I’ve put myself in a spot where I can’t have it.”

 

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

 

He shouldn’t have said that.

Not to her. Not on a night like this. Not ever, actually, but particularly not when they were more or less alone, in a reasonably romantic spot. He’d spent the whole evening marveling at how lucky he was to be able to spend time with her, even if it wasn’t actually a date, but that had led him farther and farther down the wrong path.

He couldn’t ever date her, not while she was Amanda’s client—and he knew without asking that Amanda would let him go before she’d let go of Katie.

This was pretty awful, actually. Standing here with her when it would have been so easy to kiss her.

To ask the driver to take them to her place, or his.

Of course he couldn’t do that. It was bad enough that they’d come up here; Amanda would know by mid-morning how the evening had gone, and would have gotten hold of at least some of the pictures. She’d be able to see how he and Katie had giggled together like a couple of little kids. How they’d thrown decorum completely to the winds and had tried tossing those tiny rolls into each other’s mouths.

They were only following Jen Cowell’s lead—Jen having been pretty looped by that point—but it still wasn’t Cool Young Hollywood.

You are so going to hear about this.

Really, it was a wonder he hadn’t heard about it already. His phone was on vibrate, and he’d felt it go off a couple of times, but when he checked, it was only a buddy of his, and his cousin in Arizona.

Not a peep from Amanda.

But that was coming. Oh, boy, was it coming.

“I feel like I’m being pulled in a dozen directions all the time,” Katie said abruptly. Like he’d done a minute ago, she seemed to be talking more to the view than to him. “I mean… I know I should feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world. And I am. I have a great job. It’s really fun, you know? I have what so many other people want. But I keep feeling like there’s something missing.”

He thought she might turn to look at him then, but she didn’t.

“I feel bad for Ellery,” she went on. “But I’m glad they’re bothering her and not me. And then I feel jealous that it’s not me. But that’s a stupid thing to want, isn’t it? For those papers to write nonsense about me.”

“Probably?” he guessed.

“It’s so stupid. I should want to have a solid career. End up being like—I don’t know. Julia Roberts, say. People respect her now. She’s a producer, too.”

“It took her a long time to get there.”

“I know. I know,” Katie groaned. “I swear, I feel like—what was that movie about the woman with all the personalities?”

“Sybil?”

“Yes. That’s what I feel like.”

There was a note of anguish in her voice. Maybe it was because she was tired, but it struck Doug right in the heart. It made him want to wrap his arms around her and hold her so she’d go back to admiring that glittering view spread out below them, so they could look like a normal couple to anyone who might happen to drive by.

Except for that limo parked twenty feet away, of course.

“I feel the same way sometimes,” he admitted, though he wasn’t sure she wanted to hear his perspective. “I’d like to run my own agency, to be the one people think of as the real mover and shaker. On the other hand, some of the things you have to do to get there—that’s not the person I want to be.” He chuckled softly. “Sometimes, I want to end up being like a character in one of those old movies. The old guy who runs the hardware store. The one everybody in town loves.”

“You could play him in a movie,” Katie said wryly.

“My grandfather owns a hardware store,” he told her, smiling at the thought of Gramps standing behind the counter with his sleeves rolled up, ready even at the age of 78 to dig in and fix something, no matter how dirty he had to get. “He and his brothers, originally. It’s been in the family going back to when there wasn’t much out here but orange groves. It’s a really cool old place.”

Finally, she turned to look at him. “Where?”

“I could show you sometime.”

“I’d like that.”

He couldn’t resist, then. Not standing with his back to the limo so that nothing seemed to lie around him but trees and brush, with the subtly hazy lights of the Valley spread out to the horizon and a hint of night-blooming jasmine floating through the air, just enough to conquer the always-there smell of car exhaust.

Katie was looking at him half-lidded, a little melancholy, and he could imagine her not dressed in this snug cocktail dress but in the jeans and sweatshirt he’d seen in a picture.

With a smudge on her cheek.

For a moment, he imagined her working with him to fix up an old house, one that had been around since the heyday of old Hollywood, something tucked into a private corner of a quiet street, surrounded by orange trees and decorated with old Spanish tile and hardwood.

That’s what I want, he thought.

You’re what I want.

And before he could stop himself, before he could surrender to common sense and the rules of the job he was determined to succeed at, he took Katie Dunn gently into his arms and kissed her.