Pretending to Be Us Page 16

  The forty-eight hours had been surreal. I showed up to the first day of the reshoots to find Darcy playing the lead and acting like the world’s most overbearing producer with none other than Lucy as her new assistant. Santiago apparently had to go attend to a death in the family, and in order to avoid being sued for breach of contract, Darcy had browbeaten Lucy into a job as her new assistant.

  It was the ultimate role reversal, and I could tell that’s why she loved it. Darcy seemed absolutely determined to treat Lucy like shit, and obviously delighted in it. I’d known plenty of actors of both genders who treated their assistants poorly, but this was some next-level, call-the-police style abuse. I’d never seen anyone treat another human being the way Darcy was treating Lucy in front of the whole cast and crew. Which, I guess, was Darcy’s whole point. She wanted Lucy to feel subhuman. It appeared to be working, too. When Lucy returned with another iced coffee a few minutes later, Darcy stared at her disdainfully.

  “What took you so long, Princess? I don’t even want this anymore. Why don’t you go put on some makeup and change your shirt? You look horrible today. I don’t want my assistant looking like a dog.” She paused. “But don’t eat anything. You look like you’ve put on at least ten pounds in the last month. I’m putting you on a diet effective right now.”

  What the fuck?

  “Do you want me to get you lunch?” Lucy asked. I could tell this was costing her pride a lot. It was costing me my sanity.

  Darcy, who seemed to be parted from her sanity as well, was typically angry. “Not right now!”

  Lucy slunk off without a backward glance. She was halfway across the soundstage floor when Darcy yelled at her to come back. Lucy marched back toward her with an expression of determination.

  “Yes?” she asked carefully.

  Darcy smiled a not very nice smile. “I changed my mind. Go to Milo’s and get me a Greek salad.”

  Lucy blanched. “Milo’s downtown? That’ll take me an hour in this traffic.”

  “I want it in thirty minutes. No excuses.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I could tell from Lucy’s face that she didn’t think it was possible. I was from Dallas originally, not Austin, but I knew this city was known for its terrible traffic. Getting anywhere seemed to take at least forty-five minutes. It wasn’t LA bad, but it was getting there.

  Darcy didn’t seem to care. “If you can’t do it, don’t bother coming back,” she told Lucy.

  Lucy took off running and I watched her go and take my heart with her. She was dressed differently now than she had been when she’d been pretending to be Princess Lucia. Now she wore beat up jeans and obscure brand T-shirts. She wasn’t hiding her tattoo anymore.

  But she was still her. In fact, she was more her than I’d seen her be ever before. And I was just as in love with her as ever.

  I liked the real Lucy far better than I think she could ever realize. I’d never been in love with the princess. I’d never wanted a princess in the first place. I just wanted Lucy. In truth, part of me was relieved she wasn’t a princess. My dad wasn’t as thrilled to learn the truth, in fact he was horrified, but that was his problem. Although I had lots and lots of baggage when it came to being lied to, I was finally able to see past it.

  Watching the woman I was in love with being constantly humiliated and belittled by Darcy was killing me. And knowing the whole cast and crew blamed her for this situation made it worse. But there was nothing I could do. Lucy wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t so much as look at me. The only time she did talk to me was to pull me aside and beg me not to intervene. She said it would only make things worse for her and she desperately needed this job. I felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

  The rest of the cast and crew were all suffering under Darcy’s reign of terror, but no one had it worse than Lucy. We were all being run ragged. Vanessa had quit the production in protest and taken the original footage with her in the middle of the night, so Darcy was also directing, which went about as well as you’d imagine. Pretty much everyone involved in the production had already forgotten about Lucy’s deception. In truth, nobody really cared. People lie all the time in Hollywood. It’s business as usual.

  Lucy’s lie was a bit more elaborate than usual, but I knew plenty of big stars who’d lied about various aspects of their pasts. It hadn’t even occurred to me when I first heard the truth, but really, what Lucy did wasn’t that unusual or terrible at all. She found an opportunity in a business that offered few opportunities and she’d made herself fit.

  That wasn’t much different than what my forefathers did when they arrived in the United States from Poland and told people they knew how to be tailors when they’d in fact been farmers. They even opened a tailor shop. Then, they had their wives and daughters help teach them how to sew. It all worked out in the end.

  This production, however, wasn’t going to work out. Not at all. Darcy wasn’t just a bad actress. She was a terrible one.

  Not only was she cast against type, to put it delicately, but the woman couldn’t remember her lines. She was flat, robotic, and painful to watch. It was bizarre, because in person she was plenty of unpleasant things, but never uncharismatic.

  “Let’s do the first bar scene next,” Darcy declared when she was done insulting Lucy. She looked at me. “Are you ready?”

  I nodded numbly. The thought of having to repeatedly catch Darcy and pretend to like her was somewhat sickening. I’d rather kiss a camel with halitosis. “Sure,” I told her, attempting to remain professional in the face of obvious ruin. Whatever Darcy, Santiago, and Daniel were planning, I prayed they did it quickly. “Whatever you say.”

  34

  Lucy

  On the second afternoon of the reshoots, as I was given the very unglamorous task of calling around to find the right location for Darcy to get her bikini wax prior to her sex scene with Peter (which was its own special kind of ego blow), Isabelle wandered over to the picnic table outside the barn-soundstage and sat down next to me. I tried not to meet her eyes, but she just sat there for so long that I felt drawn to them. We stared at one another for a moment in silence.

  “Nobody blames you anymore,” she said eventually. “I almost envy you.”

  I blinked in shock. “What?”

  Isabelle smirked. “You got to see what the other side was like.” Her expression was somewhat wistful. “That must have been pretty neat.”

  I swallowed. It had been pretty neat. It had been incredible. Only now it was over, and I felt like the world’s biggest idiot. “Maybe you don’t blame me, but I’m sure everyone else does.”

  She shook her head at me and smiled. Isabelle was actually really pretty under her frizzy hair and big glasses. I wondered if she knew that. “They don’t. I mean, everybody hates that Darcy’s gone off the rails and turned this into her own personal vanity project, but it’s not your fault. If anything, it’s Wallace Prince that’s to blame.”

  “I’m the one who lied,” I said, hanging my head and feeling like this conversation was just the latest in surreal conversations I’d been having lately. “Everyone should hate me.”

  “They don’t. They did until they learned the truth. Wallace Prince should have been more careful with his contract. I heard some people talking about it. Apparently, this sort of thing is never, ever put into contracts. It’s all his fault for letting it happen.”

  I considered letting her in on the truth, but decided she was better off not knowing. She was too sweet to know the depths of Darcy’s deception, and it wouldn’t help her anyway. If anything, it might make her act weirdly around Darcy and somehow tip her off in an inadvertent way. I didn’t think in a million years that Isabelle would intentionally do anything, but I also didn’t know if she could act. Her thing was costumes and sets, not lies. Lies were my thing.

  “It’s nice of you to say,” I told Isabelle, “but you don’t have to be nice to me.”

  Isabelle drew herself up to her full height and cleared h
er throat angrily. I swallowed. She looked pissed!

  “I don’t have to do anything,” Isabelle said, shocking me with her intensity. She stared down her nose at me imperiously. Then she burst into giggles at herself. “Do you remember when you told Darcy that on the first day? At the table read?”

  I smirked, relaxing. “I remember.” It had wiped the smug superiority right off Darcy’s face. Not that it had stayed gone for very long or anything. But it had still felt good for a few seconds. “I wish I could still stand up to her like that.”

  “Why don’t you?” Isabelle asked. “I mean, why are you even coming here to work as her assistant?”

  “She’s making me. If I don’t ‘honor my contract,’ she’ll sue me.” At least, that was the reason Santiago set up for me. He really was a smart guy. This was exactly the kind of cruel scheme that Darcy enjoyed. She fell for it instantly.

  “Can she do that?” Isabelle asked. “I mean, after you were fired from playing Eva...” she trailed off. “I’m not a lawyer or anything but it sounds weird to me.”

  It was weird. The truth was even weirder.

  But I just shrugged. “I don’t want to find out.”

  “Is she paying you?” Isabelle asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then that’s slavery,” Isabelle argued. “You should tell her to go fuck herself. I bet you could do a really good job of it if you put on your princess voice.”

  I laughed out loud at Isabelle’s suggestion. “I wish I could.”

  Isabelle seemed mystified by me. “Well, I have to get back to work,” she told me, “but I just wanted you to know that nobody holds any of this against you. I for one think you’re really brave.”

  “Brave?”

  “Yeah.” Isabelle’s brown eyes were full of something that looked like awe. But that couldn’t be right. I didn’t deserve awe. I wondered if she was fucking with me.

  “Why would you even say that?” I asked incredulously. There was nothing brave about being a liar.

  “You took a risk,” Isabelle said. “Sure, it didn’t pay off, but at least you tried.” She sighed. “I’ve been working in this industry now for three years. I work hard. I think I do a pretty good job at things, but I’m not getting anywhere. I can find all the low-level assistant jobs I want. They’re everywhere. But they pay nothing, they work you like a dog, and then your name is at the very bottom of the credits and you’re unemployed again. At least I can work for my dad, but he’s getting older and...” she trailed off.

  I winced. I knew that feeling. I knew it too well. Isabelle and I were in the exact same place. Trapped at the bottom. “Well, I’m back down at the bottom now, too.”

  Isabelle’s awed expression hadn’t gone anywhere. “Maybe right now,” she said. “But I have a hard time believing you’ll stay here.” Her expression shifted. “Besides, it seems like Peter Prince is in love with you, and I might be out of line, but it seems like you’re in love with him, too. That’s got to count for something, right?”

  I hadn’t realized it was obvious to everybody. I looked down at my phone and the list of waxing studios I still needed to call. “I’ll have to let you know.”

  35

  Peter

  “You could at least talk to me,” I told Lucy when I finally found her alone. I’d been looking all over for her.

  She’d been hiding. In a closet. An actual closet that was filled with costumes, shoes, accessories, props, and Lucy. By the looks of it, she’d been crying in here. Kate would hate that. She was a stickler about humidity.

  She was sitting on the floor and she looked up at me with an expression that made my heart twist. She looked guilty. I’m sure she felt guilty. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it was her sense of her own guilt that was keeping us apart. I forgave her for the whole princess thing. Everyone did, actually. Well, except for my dad. He blamed her for the whole mess. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I didn’t care anymore. I just needed to convince her of that.

  “What do you want to talk about Peter?” She asked me eventually. She was using the same beaten-down voice she had used to reply to Darcy over the last few days. I hated the sound of it. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  I sank down next to her in the closet. My legs didn’t quite fit in the narrow space. I contorted myself into a halfway comfortable position. “We’re done for the day. Everybody’s gone home at this point.”

  “Then why are you still here?” she asked me.

  The answer to that was easy.

  “I was looking for you.”

  Lucy almost smiled, but then she looked down at the floor and sighed. “Well, you found me.”

  “Can we talk?” I asked her.

  Her blue eyes travelled over my face in a way that made me feel like she was staring right into the depths of my soul. “I don’t really feel like talking.”

  “Then I’ll talk,” I told her, settling in beside her on the floor. I didn’t spend a lot of time sitting on the floor of closets, and it felt a bit strange, but at least I was next to her. “How about that?” I asked.

  She nibbled on her bottom lip. “Okay.”

  “My dad is trying to find a way to get out of the contract,” I told her.

  She frowned. “Daniel says he won’t be able to.”

  “No offense, but my dad has a lot of lawyers that are a lot more expensive than Daniel.”

  “Even if he finds a way, it’ll be expensive.”

  I nodded. “That’s true. And it’ll probably mean the movie never sees the light of day.”

  “I’m going to fix this,” Lucy told me. In a flash, her demeanor changed. She stared at me with such intensity that I remembered why I fell in love with her in the first place in a fraction of a second. “I can do it.”

  “Get Darcy to admit to altering the contract?” I asked. “Do you really think that even if you do that, it’ll be enough to fix this?”

  Lucy’s expression was resolute. “It will be.”

  “Or are you just doing this because you feel bad and this is making it better?” My voice was mild, but I had a hunch. “Is getting verbally abused by Darcy all day making you feel less guilty?”

  Her eyes were wide. “I’m not a masochist,” she said after a moment. “This isn’t one of your weird sex games.”

  I stifled a smile. I’d missed her. The meek, beaten down version of Lucy that she was playing for Darcy’s benefit didn’t suit her.

  “I’d say it’s more of a martyrdom thing,” I replied.

  Her face went red. “It’s not a martyrdom thing. Quit trying to psychoanalyze me.”

  “I’m just trying to tell you that if you want punishment, I can arrange a much more pleasant version for you that will leave us both satisfied.”

  It was a crude thing to say, and probably inappropriate. She’d sworn that we wouldn't be getting back together, but in that moment, she hardly seemed to mind. Her eyes dilated and she stared at me openmouthed. Her breathing hitched. She was tempted. So was I. But then she hung her head.

  “It won’t work, Lucy,” I tried to tell her. “We can find another way, we can work this out between us,” I started to say, but she put a finger to my lips, and I froze.

  We stared at each other for a few heartbeats. I hadn’t expected her to touch me. She’d been so distant lately. I was on the verge of grabbing her and kissing her and probably attempting to have sex with her on the filthy floor of the costume closet, but then a noise somewhere in the studio spooked her and she drew away and broke the spell.

  “Well, this has been a nice chat,” she said hastily, attempting to rise and escape me. “I gotta’ go now. I’ll be late for work.”

  She scrambled to her feet, but I grabbed her hand before she could run.

  “Work is over, Lucy.” I wondered if I could get her to go out to dinner with me. Maybe if I could just convince her to stay with me for a few more minutes... “It’s eight p.m.,” I told her. “Let me drive yo
u home.”

  Her eyes went huge. “Eight?”

  I nodded, looking down at my watch. How long had she been crying in here? “Eight twenty-two, actually.”

  “Shit!” She exclaimed. “I’m going to be late to work.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked her. “You’ve been at work since seven a.m.”

  She shook her head. “My other job.”

  I still wasn’t following. “What other job?”

  Lucy managed to awkwardly wriggle around me. “Darcy’s not paying me, you know. I’ve taken another job, working at a bar in the evenings,” she shook her head as if in disbelief. “I’m really a waitress now, can you believe it?”

  I could.

  I wanted to tell her to stop. To stay. To promise her that I could fix things for her and make it so she wouldn’t have to work, and her family would be safe and secure. I could do it too. I could fix all her problems with an amount of money that would be totally insignificant to me but could transform her life.

  But she’d resent me forever if I even suggested it. I saw the determination on her face. I heard it in her voice. She believed that she had to fix this herself. She fundamentally believed that she was no good for me. She thought we’d never belong together. And until I managed to convince her otherwise (and it would take a lot more than just money to do it), we were both trapped.

  I sat on the floor of the closet for a long time after she left. I knew she was out there, somewhere, working her ass off at another job. I knew that tomorrow she’d return to this movie set and watch Darcy destroy what she did while suffering ridiculous abuse. And I loved her for it.

  Lucy was tough. She wasn’t the prim, silly princess I originally thought she was. She wasn’t uptight or arrogant. She was unique, driven, and talented. It was me who needed to learn to be worthy of her. Not the other way around. It was time to stop being a passive observer. Was I the guy who punched gorillas or not? Taking care of Darcy should be easy.