“Quiet on the set!”
Silence hung in the air like that suspended moment before falling glass shattered on the ground. It felt heavy and thick against my ears as I waited for the word that instigated movement and momentum.
“Okay…Action!”
There it is.
Before their rehearsed lines left their lips, the near-violent pounding of my heart and unsteady inhale and exhale of my lungs boomed inside my head at a hummingbird wing’s pace.
I should’ve been used to this by now, but I’d learned pretty quickly the silence before the words was the most terrifying part for me. Like right before a bomb detonates. It was that silence that allowed for doubt and discomfort to grow suddenly until it became a physical reality inside my bones.
“Talk to me, Grace,” Johnny Atkins whispered toward Ivy, his voice loud enough to reach my ears. His big hands moved into her hair, and his thumbs caressed the silky red strands with his thumbs.
They were the only ones on set, in front of the camera’s lens, inside a replica of the Cold police station.
Although the sharp, stinging pain inside my chest told me it had to be take number nine-hundred-and-two, it was only take number three for this particular scene.
And it was a kissing scene. A Grace and Levi showing progression in their romantic relationship scene.
If I’d eaten something today, I might’ve had the urge to vomit.
“Cut!” Hugo called from his director’s chair, and Johnny and Ivy stopped, looking toward their director with slight confusion in their eyes.
“Everything you guys were doing was perfect, I’m just not thrilled with the lighting,” Hugo explained. “Billy, we gotta adjust,” he instructed a man with jet-black hair who I’d quickly learned was the lighting director of this production. According to the perpetual scowl etched on his lips, it wasn’t the easiest of jobs.
“I need it softened up a bit,” Hugo continued. “There are too many harsh lines and shadows falling over Ivy as she’s looking up at him. She needs to be almost ethereal in this scene. Like heaven itself dropped a damn angel from the sky just for him.”
Billy nodded, and his team of three moved their asses and got to work on adjustments while everyone else watched on with patience.
With production on Cold in full swing, the entire cast and crew had been putting in twelve, sometimes fourteen, hour days. Unless I had a patrol shift, I was on set nearly every day, watching in the background as Ivy and Johnny played their starring roles of Grace and me and waiting for my ride out of hell. It’d been three weeks since the clusterfuck at Ivy’s house, and the burn was still so hot, I was practically smoking.
But the only chance at a reconciliation was to keep myself around. The more space I gave Ivy, the more she’d be able to build a fully fortified wall.
Plus, I’d found the more I hung around, the more useful I became.
I’d spent the better part of the morning chatting with Hugo Roman between takes, ensuring the dialogue and the way they’d laid out the events of the Cold-Hearted Killer in the script felt real to me.
The man was a perfectionist to his core. Over the past three weeks, I’d had countless meetings with him where we’d scoured every detail of the script together.
But he refused to let chance or lack of focus sully his reputation.
Where most people would be okay with a simple double- or triple-check, Hugo Roman wanted ten checks, and sometimes fifteen or twenty, depending on his mood.
I waited patiently, expecting him to call me toward his director’s chair with questions, but sighed a breath of relief when I realized he was very much engrossed in something on the camera monitor.
It wasn’t easy, watching the movie-version scenes of the real-life experiences that had thrown my life into a downward spiral toward complete numbness, and it was even harder giving someone pointers about how to make it more realistic. As much as I liked having an actual role here rather than standing around, it was nice to have a breather from the grief.
Before Grace had died, before Walter Gaskins wreaked havoc on our small community, I’d been a different man. Sure, I still had been rough around the edges but not so damn closed off. Back in the day, I had been a man who’d actually smiled freely and found real fucking joy in life.
After Grace had died, I’d lost it all.
I’d become a shell of myself, and I’d set my priorities on being numb—to myself, to life, to everyone and every-fucking-thing around me.
I’d changed from someone who rarely drank to someone who’d savor the moments when a few glasses of whiskey could anesthetize my feelings and quell my racing thoughts.
At least, that was how I had been.
Ivy’s red hair fanned the room as she spun to talk to Johnny about something, and my heart kicked in my chest. Now, I was actually living.
Thank God for her.
Of course, living meant feeling, and as a whole, my body wasn’t used to it. My bones ached with exhaustion, and my mind felt weary from the emotional and mental fatigue. I would have been lucky if I’d slept twenty minutes last night. Hell, I would have been lucky if I’d slept eight hours all fucking week.
Every night for the past three weeks, it’d been the same routine.
As I tossed and turned, my brain raced with thoughts of her. Her smile, her scowl—every interaction we’d had since the day we’d met.
My dreams were all Ivy, all the time, and none of them left a lot of room for actual rest.
“All right,” Billy announced as he walked back off set and toward Hugo. “I think we’re all set. Roll some film and see what you think.”
While Hugo worked with camera angles, Ivy and Johnny stayed put on set, their bodies no longer entangled, but their eyes still focused on one another.
He said something under his breath and a soft giggle spilled from her lips and hit me straight in the chest. I couldn’t not watch her as she quietly conversed with her costar.
She was quite the talented little actress, and if I didn’t know her as well I did, I might’ve believed she actually enjoyed Johnny’s company.
But her smile was too brittle. And her laugh was too forced.
Ivy was the type of woman where you had to work for her smiles, her giggles, her bright eyes. She didn’t offer them up freely. No. Those reactions had to be earned.
Stubborn to her core, she was strong and determined in everything she did, even when she was screaming at me. It was one of the things that drew me to her.
As Johnny continued to talk quietly about who the fuck cares what, her emerald eyes roamed off set until they locked on to me.
It only lasted a second or two, but I didn’t miss it.
I relished it, actually. If anything, it gave me hope that she still cared.
“Quiet on set!” Hugo called as he situated himself back in his director’s chair. “Johnny and Ivy, let’s take it from the top.”
They both nodded, and my eyes were graced with the horrible view of them entangled together again, Johnny’s hands back in Ivy’s fucking hair, his gaze locked with hers.
The set made it look later than it was, the lights mimicking night. A soft glow shone in through the only window in the frame of the camera, simulating a Montana moon, and a few gently lit lamps on the station’s desks provided the light for the room.
“Rolling in three…two…one… Action!”
“Talk to me, Grace,” Johnny repeated his line.
Ivy looked up at him, and her petite hands slid up his arms and stopped only when they reached his shoulders. Her green gaze searched his, and she didn’t say anything until she found whatever it was she was looking for.
Johnny and Ivy. Clenched in a tight embrace. They were acting out a scene where Grace and well, I, were alone in the station, their sexual attraction toward one another reaching a point where they could no longer deny it.
Basically, it was a fucking car crash before my very eyes, one I wanted to look away from but didn’t. If this wasn’t masochism, I didn’t know what was.
“I don’t know what to say,” Ivy said back, her voice soft and tender.
“Say you feel this too.” Johnny gazed down at her, his normally confident and cocky eyes laced with undisguised affection and a four-letter word I’d rather not say.
“I’m scared, Levi.” She swallowed, and her throat bobbed with emotion as she looked away, but his fingers were under her chin, guiding her gaze back to his.
“What are you scared of?”
“Of losing you,” she whispered back. “Of us starting this, and then it not working out. I can’t bear to lose you.”
“You will never lose me, Grace,” he said, his words ringing clear and true.
I shut my eyes for a moment. Memories, so many fucking memories, threatened to play behind my eyes, but I blinked them away. This was already hard enough; I didn’t need the ghost of my past filling my head too. My heart had limits, and this, watching Ivy and Johnny acting out an intimate scene together, was already taking a Herculean effort to handle.
On the inside, I felt like a caveman. Like a man watching as his lover, his whole heart, let herself be intimate with another man without any remorse about infidelity.
I had the urge to step onto that fucking set and drag Ivy straight off of it.
Which was insane and completely irrational.
She wasn’t mine.
But I couldn’t help it. The emotions Ivy spurred inside of me—the pain, the remorse, the guilt—I had to feel every day when I saw her were nearly too much to endure.
Though, I needed to endure it. Her anger and any other bad emotion she wanted to sling my way was my fair cross to bear. I’d made this mess. I’d hurt her badly, and my impulsive, thoughtless actions that’d caused her pain had consequences.
And more than that, she needed to see that I was suffering through everything she tossed my way. My words meant shit to her at this point, rightfully so, and Ivy deserved to witness my actions. No apology or excuse or explanation would fix what I’d broken or repair what I’d lost.
I had to show her.
And me, sitting on this set when I didn’t even need to be here, was step one.
“I’m yours, Grace,” Johnny said, his blue gaze shining with affection. “Can’t you see that?”
She didn’t say anything, but I didn’t miss the fact that her green eyes, albeit fleetingly, glanced toward where I stood off set. For the briefest of moments, Ivy’s gaze locked with mine, and without any hesitation, she looked back at Johnny just as he moved his lips to hers and kissed her deeply. So fucking deep it made my chest ache with the discomfort of watching it all go down.
Those perfect, rosebud lips should only be touching my lips, my mind whispered. And God, those soft little moans and whimpers should only be swallowed up by me.
Even though she was acting, and it wasn’t real, it hurt all the same.
And deep down, I knew Ivy wanted it that way.
She wanted me to feel the same pain that’d been tossed her way when she walked in on the sight that was her sister in my lap and her lips locked with mine.
“Cut!” Hugo Roman called from his director’s chair, but Johnny and Ivy didn’t stop right away; their kiss lingered for about five seconds longer than it needed to.
Eventually—a goddamn eternity later—they disentangled themselves and looked toward a smirking Hugo.
“The lighting is perfection, and what chemistry you two are giving me!” he exclaimed as he stood and clapped his hands together in three successive smacks. “I’m loving everything I’m seeing!”
Johnny smiled like the egotistical bastard he was and wrapped an arm around Ivy, pulling her into his side. “I’d love to take credit, but this beautiful and talented lady right here makes it too easy.”
Ivy laughed off his half-assed compliment, but her shoulders stiffened at the first inkling of his off-camera touch.
Hugo walked onto the set and chatted with both Johnny and Ivy for a few moments, and I was thankful for the reprieve from having to watch them lip-locked, with Johnny’s stupid hands all over her.
I fantasized about breaking those fucking hands of his. Finger by finger, I’d twist each knuckle back until it gave way with a satisfying snap.
It was morbid. And crazy. But it didn’t change the fact that I’d thought about it. On more than one occasion over the past week, to be honest.
The break ended before it really began, and Hugo was back in his director’s chair calling for another round of fucking misery.
Nausea clenched my gut. Fuck, I don’t know how much more I can take today.
“Action!” he shouted, and instantly, I had to look away.
I knew the script, and I knew that kiss would turn heated and, well, I just preferred not to see the rest. My heart couldn’t stand seeing Johnny Atkins’s lips all over Ivy’s neck, her shoulders, and even the soft swells of her breasts peeking out above her bra after he unbuttoned her uniform shirt and slid it down her shoulders.
I just…couldn’t watch it.
But when I turned on my heel to stare in the opposite direction of the set, the view wasn’t much better.
With a mane of red hair tossed up in a ponytail and green eyes that should be illegal, there stood Ivy’s reflection, her twin sister, Camilla.
Her shoulders looked stiff, and her arms were crossed over her chest. Her normally friendly gaze moved from the set, meeting mine, and her expression was everything but welcoming.
After the conversation we’d had where I’d declared my intentions, she’d softened slightly, but she was nowhere near my biggest fan.
A conversation with her today wouldn’t get me any closer to where I needed to be.
What I needed was sleep. Even though production had a day off tomorrow, I still had a patrol shift in the morning.
But I’d be back, and Ivy would be seeing me again.
Even on the days they didn’t need me and I was free from a patrol shift, I’d be on set.
I’d be here until the end.