Scandalized(56)

“She dies?” I whine.

He drops his jacket over the back of the couch and braces his hands there, bending to kiss my temple. “What are you—oh. Yeah.”

I am delighted that he returned in the middle of a make-out scene where his costar—a woman Google also told me is named Mariana Rebollini—is topless.

“This is some real strategic filming,” I say. “Do you actually see boob when you’re filming this?”

“She has stickers,” he says, and when I look over my shoulder, he gestures to his chest and then glances at his watch. “God, what are you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

He walks over to the fridge in the small kitchen area and pulls out a bottle of sparkling water. “Wow, we killed a lot of beer today.” He cracks open the top and joins me on the couch. “No wonder I’m dragging.”

“On a scale of one to let-us-never-speak-of-this-off-set,” I say, lifting my chin to the TV, “how awkward are these sexy scenes to film?”

Alec slides his arm behind my neck, coaxing my head onto his shoulder. “Depends.” He tilts his water to his lips, takes a sip. “Sometimes they’re awkward if someone is new or very uncomfortable—”

“Are you ever uncomfortable?”

“Not really,” he says, amending, “not outwardly, I think. If it’s a body double you haven’t met until that day, then it can be. But usually love scenes are perfunctory. There’s minimal staff on set and there’s an unspoken agreement that everyone is a professional and it’s just part of the job. The scenes are all so carefully blocked it’s almost anti-romantic for the actors.” He leans his head against mine. “I’m always surprised how sexy they look when they’re edited.”

“But this one.” I point to the screen. “Great or terrible?”

“This one was fine.” He drinks another sip. “I was bummed when her character was written off the show. Mariana was funny.”

“You say that like someone else is not funny.” He gives me a wry look and I lean over, kissing his cheek. “Did Elodie spill her drink on my man tonight?”

He turns and looks at me, eyes unguarded and surprised. My man.

I’d try to take it back or soften it into something meaningless, but it’s late and I’m feeling sparky. Alec sets his water bottle down and then coaxes me back so I’m lying along the length of the sofa and settles his hips between my legs. “No, she didn’t.” He rests his mouth on mine, humming.

“Good,” I say against his lips.

“I’m too tired to talk about it now.…” He drops individual words into my jaw, my neck, the hollow of my throat. “But tomorrow or Wednesday or whenever we have time… we should talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Do?”

“After Sunday.”

After Sunday.

These two words land like a slab of marble.

“You mean,” I say, as he sucks on my collarbone, “me and you?”

“Me and you.” He comes back up to my face and nods, staring down at me. “Okay?”

I nod and stretch to kiss him. “Okay.”



* * *



But we don’t get time to talk Tuesday—I have an early call with Ian, and Alec is gone before I’m done. Wednesday he’s up before sunrise—this time for a livestream in Korea that he does from the living room of the suite and we have discussed that I am not even allowed to roll over in bed for fear of making a sound. Yael picks him up barely five minutes after he finishes, so all I get is a quick peck goodbye.

Still, I remind myself, it’s more than I would get if I was staying at my place. At least here I see him. I imagine going this entire week without Alec and something vital inside seems to desiccate. I do everything I can to not think about life After Sunday.

It’s a lot of time alone in the suite, but I’m used to it now; it allows me to get a massive amount of work done with Ian on the follow-up story. And in the end, Wednesday is the jackpot for investigative journalism. After Alec leaves with Yael I learn that Ian managed to obtain a full transcript of the chat forum spanning the two months when the explicit videos were shared, giving us the usernames of everyone sharing and engaging with the videos. These scumbags call the women in the videos “Bambis,” for fuck’s sake, and I have never in my life wanted to take someone down more than this. Even Spence.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our first story initiated an investigation into police payoffs, and London’s Metropolitan Police Service, otherwise known as the Met, is all in. By cross-referencing the parking garage video footage with the Hotel Maxson’s footage, we’re able to confirm that at least three of the owners—Gabriel McMaster, David Suno, and Charles Woo—were present in the club on the dates of each of the videos. Unfortunately, Josef Anders continues to be hard to pin down. He moves like a ghost.

But Thursday morning, an absolute bombshell hits.

Alec’s call finds me sitting on the bed, staring intently at my computer screen. My hands are shaking—they’ve been shaking for nearly an hour. “Hi.”

“Hi, I—” Alec pauses, I assume, at the tight strain in the single word. “You okay?”

“That depends on what ‘okay’ means.” I stand and pace the suite, feeling the adrenaline spike hit my bloodstream in earnest. Holy shit, we did it.