Fame, Fate, and the First Kiss(19)

“We’ll take my car,” I said, pointing to my beautiful cherry-red mustang down the street.

“Have you ever been in a ten-year-old car?” he asked. “That can be the first new place you experience today.” He opened the door, raised his eyebrows at me, then climbed inside. He was so frustrating.

I went around the back to the passenger side and slid into the seat. “I have been in a ten-year-old car. Do you think I’m some snob or something?”

He paused for one beat, then said, “Yes.”

I smacked his arm, and he laughed. “I’m not,” I said. “I live in a small two-bedroom apartment with my dad.”

“But that’s only because you’re down here temporarily. Where do you normally live?”

He had me there. I wasn’t sure how he knew this but he did. “In a house,” was all I answered. My stepdad was a high-powered attorney on the Central Coast. He had his own firm and everything. So yeah, when I lived with my mom we lived in a nice house on the beach. And yes, I owned a brand-new car, but I’d bought it myself with television money. So I wasn’t that snobby.

He didn’t ask me to expand on my answer.

“What about you? You live in Southern California, maybe you’re the spoiled one.”

“Possibly,” was all he said.

I couldn’t read him well enough yet to know if that was sarcasm or not. He could deliver a line without attaching any emotion to it. It was actually quite impressive . . . and annoying.

He turned the key in the ignition. Loud music with heavy electric guitar sounds blasted from his radio, and he quickly turned it off.

“Really?” I said. “Choir boy likes heavy metal?”

“I’m not as straitlaced as I seem after all,” he said.

Maybe he wasn’t.

“Where to?” he asked.

That was the million-dollar question. I wasn’t from around here, so I wasn’t sure. “Do you have any abandoned buildings close by?”

“We’re going to trespass?”

“What was that you said about straitlaced?”

He tightened his grip on the wheel and backed out of the parking stall.

“What is this?” I asked.

Donavan had stopped the car in the shadow of a three-story building. “It used to be an old folk’s home. Now it’s nothing . . . obviously.”

I opened the car door to get a look that wasn’t through dirt-streaked windows. The building was boarded up, but not tightly, so hopefully the windows would let in some of the light from outside. The parking lot was completely empty, cracked and crumbling parking curbs the only other thing besides Donavan’s car.

“Let’s go see if there’s a way inside,” I said.

He took a deep breath but didn’t argue.

We walked the perimeter of the entire building, over dried weeds, around a dumpster in the back filled with various things people had apparently dropped here so they didn’t have to pay or drive to the city dump—a floor lamp, a mattress . . . “Is that a giant dice?”

“Looks like it,” he said.

“Why would anyone throw that away?”

He chuckled. “You could take it home.”

“Who knows where it’s been.”

“In a dumpster. Behind an abandoned old folk’s home.”

I tugged on the brown metal door to the building. It was locked tight. The window next to it had a board across it that was hanging by just one nail. I pulled at the board, and it easily fell to the ground with a clatter. I wiggled my eyebrows at Donavan.

“Is that a good thing?” he asked. “Because there’s just a locked window behind it.” He knocked on the glass as if to show me it was solid.

I pushed on it and tried to slide it over. Sometimes the windows on old buildings were flexible. And I was right. It was. It popped a little, then slid with the applied pressure.

“Are you sure you’re just an actress?” he asked. “And not some cat burglar?”

“Cat burglar? Do people say that? Do people even say burglar without adding the cat?”

“What would you call this, then?”

“Not cat burglary.” I climbed in the window, first perching on the frame and then jumping down, much like a . . . cat.

He didn’t say anything, but it was clear what he was thinking.

“Shut up,” I said.

He chuckled, then climbed through behind me. “I still don’t understand how this helps you at all.”

“Sometimes I need to snap out of my normal way of thinking. So I do something different—see a new place, experience a new emotion—and it helps me have a breakthrough. It opens up something in me that helps me work past whatever block I’m experiencing.”

“You’re having a hard time relating to the script? That masterpiece back in your dressing room? I can’t imagine why.”

I ignored him, because it was obvious he thought he was better than a low-budget movie. He apparently would’ve held out for a script with Oscar potential for his very first feature film. And he thought I was a snob. Everyone had to start somewhere, and this was my start. Plus, the movie had somehow scored Grant James. The producers were smart. He’d make it successful. I was smart too—his star power would guarantee people would watch it, would see me.