Jason Read online

  He grinned, clearly pleased with this turn in their professional relationship. “Okay, Cersei. Well now that the cat is out of the bag, I think you’re pretty good-looking too. So now that we know the landscape…”

  “Stop, Jason. We should never have gone down that path.”

  He didn’t agree or disagree, but held up the bottle of whisky again. “How about that drink?”

  “I don’t really drink whisky. But I’d like a double.”

  Jason laughed. He was still grinning when he turned away from her to get a highball glass. He returned to the table and set the glass before her, still grinning, still far too pleased with himself, his hazel eyes twinkling with delight at this turn of events.

  She ignored him. She was very good in her ability to ignore him and trusted she would not falter this time. “Thank you,” she said, and sipped the whisky. It burned along with her pride as it went down her throat.

  “Sip it. It’s not water,” he advised, and tapped his glass to hers. “Isn’t it funny how you think you know someone and discover you don’t know them at all?”

  “You’re making a big deal out of it! I don’t know anything about you,” she said hoarsely.

  “Except that I’m good-looking. And apparently unsettling in a half-naked state.”

  “And full of yourself, too,” she said with a bit of a smile.

  He grinned. “You actually know a lot about me, Mallory. More than I know about you, apparently.” He winked at her.

  “I really don’t. I mean, I know you’re a workaholic. Everyone in Hollywood knows that. And you tend to date for about a month before you move on.”

  “Before they move on,” he corrected her, and with a twirl of his fingers, he added, “Because of the workaholic thing. What else do you know?”

  “That you have a big summerhouse in Maine. And that you are ridiculously unorganized. But that’s about it.”

  “Okay, what would you like to know about me? I’m an open book.” He gestured with his fork. “Go ahead. Ask.”

  “I didn’t know you’d lost your parents at a young age.” Mallory sipped again. “You sort of dropped that on me this morning. I can’t imagine how devastating.”

  “Don’t try—it’s not fun,” he said, and glanced up at another peal of thunder and a bolt of lightning.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was surprised by it, that’s all. You said a plane crash?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said. He glanced away from her. “My dad was flying. They were headed north to pick up my older brother Phillip, and there was bad weather.” He shook his head. “It was so long ago.” He looked into his glass, then picked up the bottle and poured a little more whisky into it.

  “What happened afterward? Where did you go?”

  “My uncle Graham and aunt Claire took us in. We lived with our cousins. Four of them, three of us.”

  “Wow,” Mallory said softly. “That’s a lot of kids.” She knew a little about a lot of kids. There had been five in her family.

  “All boys.”

  “Seven? That’s a KPOP boy band.”

  Jason laughed. “I’ll let you in on a secret. The accident, and the combining of families, is why I’m so in to film.”

  “Really?” This was interesting—she’d assumed he’d gotten into the film industry in the usual way—through family or business connections.

  “Yep. Movies and television provided an escape for me after the shock of losing my parents. And there were suddenly seven of us. It was a lot to handle at my age. I had so many questions that went unanswered.” He paused a moment and shook his head. “So I escaped. I’d come home from school and go to my room and lock myself in with movies. Every movie I could get my hands on. Classics like Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. Fringe movies like Dazed and Confused or blockbusters like Jaws—you get the picture. And when you watch movies back to back, over and over again, you start to get a sense of story arc, and how to construct the arc and how to pace it through several scenes. Because when those things don’t work, you notice.”

  “That is definitely self-taught,” Mallory said. She was impressed—how astute he must have been as a teen.

  “Yep. I escaped into that world, and when the movies I watched finally numbed the pain, I decided I wanted to be a part of it. I worked my ass off to get a scholarship to the USC film school.”

  Mallory tried not to look as astounded as she felt. She and Inez had guessed he’d come from some privileged background where he was lauded for every achievement and his path greased into the finest schools. She could not have guessed that his interest in art had come from a place of such pain.

  She definitely could not have guessed he’d attended USC on a scholarship.

  “What about you?” Jason asked as he cleaned his plate and pushed it aside. “I don’t know much about you either, other than you are very by the book.”

  “That’s not true.” She laughed.

  “It’s true and you know it. Where are your parents?”

  “Oh. Pomona,” she said with a flick of her wrist. Her life was definitely not as interesting as his had been.

  “Pomona. Where is that?”

  “It’s a Los Angeles suburb. There’s not much going on there, to be honest.” That was an understatement.

  “Okay,” he said, and picked up his glass of whisky. “Tell me.”

  Honestly, Mallory felt that her parents were topics that were better left in a closet somewhere. They were children of the seventies. Products, her dad had once said, of the California hippie culture. They’d met at a pollution protest. Their marriage was not a legal one—they’d written their own vows and said them to each other under a Joshua tree. In the picture, her dad had worn his hair in a ponytail, and her mother’s hair had hung long and free and untrimmed. They’d never changed their look—they still wore their hair in that way, except that her dad’s ponytail was silver now, and her mother’s hair was frizzy and streaked with gray. But at least she’d stopped wearing the flower crowns somewhere along the way.

  Her parents were hard to explain. “My family is different,” she said.

  “Well thanks, but that is really vague. Everyone’s family is different.”

  “Okay. My parents were hippies when they met. Last of a dying breed.” Another clap of thunder overhead caused her to pick up her glass and sip more. “They went with the live-and-let-live theory of parenting.”

  Jason gave her a funny smile. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that there were no rules and no boundaries.” Her parents had been social warriors all of her life, tackling the issues of the day and dragging their children along. They’d tried to instill into their large brood the need to have every person’s voice heard. “You don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country where you have the right to protest!” Mallory’s father used to say, pounding the table with his fist to punctuate his passion for free speech or the injustices in the world.

  For the first eleven years of her life, Mallory and her siblings had lived like forest sprites, flitting through life without any guidance whatsoever other than to look out for one another. Their task, their parents had explained, was to experience life as it came to them—not have experience dictated to them. That meant it they wanted to eat through a box of Count Chocula in one sitting, so be it—they would pay the consequences later when their bodies rebelled. If it meant walking out the door and racing across a busy thoroughfare to check out a dog behind a fence, they should do that, too. If they got hit by a car, they would remember to look both ways. If they didn’t want to practice reading or writing, no problem—the desire would come soon enough, so their parents’ thinking went. “You can’t force a round peg into a square hole,” her father would say.

  Mallory had believed the entire world lived the same as they did, free to be you and me, so to speak, in a small, three-bedroom house. They ate ramen with ketchup when the rent was late. They read by candle when the lights were turned off. They built small ca
mpfires and slept in tents when they were evicted.

  “Sounds kind of cool,” Jason ventured.

  “Not so much. Kids need boundaries and rules. Mom and Dad treated us like experiments.”

  “Weird thing to say, but I am intrigued,” Jason said with a laugh. “Like how?”

  “We were a merry band of Pippy Longstockings, to be honest. We were homeschooled, which, in practice, meant that on the days we wanted to learn something, we could. On the days we didn’t feel like it, we didn’t. You can imagine how often we didn’t feel like it. We had no boundaries, we were free to come and go as we liked. We had no televisions, only books.”

  It felt so strange to be talking about this now. That life had been so long ago, and she’d changed so much. She recognized that her life had made her who she was today, and without that life, she probably wouldn’t be as driven as she was now. She didn’t like to recall it. People could be so judgmental.

  “But you went to college,” Jason said.

  “I did. I really wanted to go.” Her siblings hadn’t gone, even with her begging them to apply themselves, to go to school, to have a better life than the one they’d had growing up. Today, Meghan was an accounting clerk at an electrical company. Edison was seriously overweight, no thanks to the Count Chocula habit he still had, and was a maintenance worker at a local elementary school. Nadia was married with four kids and pregnant with her fifth. And Jet? Mallory’s oldest brother was eighteen when he headed out to join the Navy against his parents’ wishes. “You’re feeding a war machine, Jet,” his father had pleaded with him. “We’ve taught you to love peace.”

  “The pay is pretty good, Dad, and I’ll get to go on a ship,” Jet had said. And off he’d gone, disappearing into the world. They heard from him from time to time, but mostly, Jet had left that life behind.

  “So you just decided to go to college?” Jason asked.

  “In a way, yeah,” she said.

  “Tell me,” he said, and he seemed genuinely interested.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, to brought up like that. We were unkempt and uneducated. We all wore our hair long, like our parents. We looked like swamp creatures, too, because we only bathed when we wanted to. We dressed in hand-me-down clothes my parents picked up at local church bazaars and garage sales. We were required to volunteer two hours a week at the local soup kitchen and then had to spend so many weekends protesting inequalities with all these other, like-minded people.”

  “Ah,” Jason said.

  “But one thing they did was take us to the library every week. I suspect because it had air-conditioning, but still. We went every week. That’s where I discovered television and movies. On Saturdays, they had cartoons in one room. And you could rent movies. By the time I was eleven, my parents finally had to face the fact that at least one of them needed a job, because feeding five kids and two dogs was too much for them to handle. My dad took a job in Los Angeles, which was quite the commute. My mom took a job in a grocery store. And we all went to school for the first time. But that’s where I found my people. My organized, ambitious people.”

  “Okay, I’m starting to form a picture,” Jason said, smiling.

  “All that time, not five blocks from my house, was this amazing world of schedules and organization and boundaries.” She laughed. “There was none of the “find your own boundaries” there, because the boundaries were clearly demarcated.” She’d learned of all the myriad possibilities of adult occupations, whereas before, she assumed the world of jobs existed around cashiers and delivery vans or no job at all, like her parents. There were three-ring binders with brightly colored tabs, and that one could sort out her entire life into one of them. More, if she liked.

  “Let me guess—you were the teacher’s pet.”

  “And straight-A student,” Mallory said proudly. “I really loved hearing about my potential. Oh, and I could hang out after school and watch movies in my history teacher’s class. I think he knew I was struggling to keep my foot in that world, you know?”

  “At least you had someone who noticed it. In my case, I was one of seven. Not the oldest, not the youngest, but just in the middle and I never felt as if anyone cared what I did. Except my cousin, Ross. He was a middle kid, too. He would come watch movies with me.” He looked down a moment, as if remembering. “So you discovered your love of three-ring binders in elementary school, and then what?”

  “Then?” She snorted. “Then I began to organize the lives for my siblings. They are younger than me, except for Jet. But they needed help getting to school and staying focused, and I took that job on.”

  Jason laughed. “You really seem to like organizing other people’s lives.”

  “I do. But some people’s lives need a lot of organizing. Anyway, I drifted further and further away from my parents’ ideals and found my own. I discovered I wanted to achieve things with my life. I wanted to explore the world I saw in films and the stories I told myself,” she said, gesturing to her head. “I figured no one was going to do it for me.”

  She remembered that years after she’d left home, Mallory’s sister Meghan had once suggested that the reason Mallory wore her blonde hair in a short bob was because it was the exact opposite style of her mother and father. “That’s not why,” Mallory had scoffed. “I wear it this way because it’s so easy to take care of.” But the truth was closer to Meghan’s theory. Mallory had never really thought of it until then, but even she could see that everything she did was the opposite of what her parents would do. Plus, it was a stylish cut. Her mother was not stylish. Her mother would point out that the desire to be stylish was not a proletariat virtue and was the very definition of vanity.

  Mallory was okay with a little bit of vanity. She liked being stylish and frankly, it was hard not to want to be stylish when one worked in Hollywood. She’d discovered that the hard way when she’d graduated from college with a degree in theater arts from Chapman University and had started pounding the pavement in search of acting gigs. One casting director told her she looked like she was a receptionist at a third-rate hair salon. Needless to say, she didn’t get the part. So yes, she’d become a little more interested in style and her physical appearance since leaving home.

  “For the record,” Jason said, “I am really glad you discovered you wanted to organize people’s lives and tell stories, because I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Mallory smiled with surprise. “Wow. That might be the nicest thing you ever said to me.”

  “You have a remarkable story, Mal. I’m a little embarrassed I never asked more about your life. I’m a little in awe of you right now.”

  “Please,” she said, with a flick of her wrist. “I survived, that’s all. Like anyone would.”

  “Not just anyone. Some of us really struggled to survive. Some of us had every advantage a rich white boy can have and still struggled.”

  “You’re comparing apples to oranges. I didn’t lose my parents.”

  “Not permanently…but it sounds like in a way, you did. Sounds like we were both without that guidance. Sounds like we both used film to escape.”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. He was right—they’d been two kids missing the umbrella of parents over their lives.

  Jason took a drink, then stood up, and picked up the plates. “Want some dessert? I think there is some pie in the fridge.”

  “No thanks.” Mallory looked at the window. The rain was still coming down in sheets, but not as hard as in the beginning. It was cozy, and the whisky, while not her thing, was warming her. How odd that their lives, at opposite ends of the economic spectrum, were so similar.

  She wasn’t mad at him anymore. She was glad she knew these things about him.

  She also felt loose and warm, and while she felt this connection to him, he was still her boss. She looked at Jason’s broad back. “So are you going to tell me about these changes to the schedule?”

  “I won’t lie, I’m a little afraid,” he said, and tur
ned around, grinning at her. “It was a hatchet job that will probably throw everything out of whack. But Cass was insistent we get some of the shoots out of the way that didn’t require a lead actor. That’s our first order of business—we have to find a new star.”

  He came back to the table with the bottle of whisky. Thunder rumbled again, but farther away. “You want to get comfortable first?”

  Mallory blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, settle in. The casting agency sent a link to some possibilities to replace Darien. I thought you might want to shower and change before we start to work.”

  She didn’t know how she was going to settle in to her T-shirt and boxer shorts she normally wore to bed, but she could do with getting her bra off and a hot shower. She looked again to the window and the storm still raging around them. “You’re sure it’s okay if I stay here?”

  Jason’s smile was dazzling. He leaned over her to pick up the bottle of whisky. “I’m sure. But I have one condition.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  A spark appeared in his eye. “If you have too much whisky and decide to make a pass at me, you promise to tell me it’s happening so I’m not confused.”

  Mallory’s belly did a funny little flip. But she rolled her eyes. “I’m so not going to make a pass at you, Jason.”

  “Famous last words.” He moved away from her.

  “Oh my God, it’s true—you think you’re such a stud.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the one freaked out by my lack of shirt. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”

  “You have to admit, that’s not the way people meet their assistant at the door,” she said as she grabbed her backpack and followed him.

  “My assistant was supposed to call me. That way, I could put on a shirt and come and get her off the back drive.” He picked up her suitcase and started up a wide staircase.

  “Your assistant tried, but you didn’t give her even a minute to get to a place where she could pick up a signal.”

  Jason led her down another wide, carpeted hallway. “My assistant is slow.” He paused at a door and looked back, smiling as he opened it.