bed with nearly as many men as some of her friends had either, despite the number of willing and sometimes pushy suitors she encountered. It was occasionally difficult to deflect with grace the passes a few of her admirers made, but she understood that she shouldn’t complain. If no one were coming on to her, she would likely miss the attention and wonder if something was wrong with her. Her mother had also set her straight on this topic, her words spoken softly but tinged with what sounded to Elise like scorn: “If you plan to be a movie star, you’d better be able to live with the good and bad attention you’re asking for. Just do your father and me a favor and don’t accept any roles that require you to take off your clothes. That way you’ll have fewer perverts stalking you.”
Perverts. The word had always sounded comical to Elise, even more so when her mother said it, because it was not the kind of word she was in the habit of using. Her mother spoke with a pronounced southern accent, being a native Texan, but her father did not because he had been raised in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. (Elise had been told that she also spoke with a twang, but it was not as obvious as her mother’s. Still, it needed to be effaced for most of the roles she would play, if not all.) Mrs. Connor used words like critter and britches as naturally as a character out of a John Wayne movie. When Elise told Renn about some of the southern peculiarities in her mother’s speech, he had laughed. “Does she say it as in ‘too big for your britches’?” he asked.
Elise smiled. “She sure does. What else? Too tiny for your britches? Too pretty?”
“I bet she said that about me, if you told her about us.”
“You are too big for your britches. And too pretty,” she said, looking down the length of his unclothed body, one that had surprised her by being more muscular than she had expected. He was almost thirty years older than she was, and although he looked good in his clothes, she hadn’t been sure what would be lurking beneath them. They were in his room at the Omni Hotel; it was their second week together, and she was thinking that she might be falling in love with him. She wasn’t sure what he felt for her though, aside from lust, and it made her nervous. Was he considering their relationship a fling, destined to end as soon as they wrapped Bourbon at Dusk? He had talked about introducing her to his friends, and to his son and daughter (both older than she was), but maybe he had no intention of doing so. The age difference should have made her feel as if she had the sexual edge, but she felt as if the opposite were true—he might think her too immature and unworldly and already be very close to tiring of her.
“You don’t have to say that,” he said quietly, but his smile was so sincere and uncomplicated that she could see how much he liked hearing it. He was as keen for flattery as any of the other men (eight? or maybe it was nine—why was it that she couldn’t recall exactly?) she had been with by then.
“I know I don’t.”
“If you keep giving me compliments like that, I might have to marry you.” He laughed but then abruptly stopped smiling.
She couldn’t tell if he was serious. He’s an actor, she reminded herself. I really have to make a point of remembering this.
“We’ll have to see about that,” she said, burying her face in his neck, breathing in the scent of the lemony soap he had used in the shower before she had come to his room.
“I want a small wedding to go with my big cock,” he said solemnly.
She shrieked and pulled back, thrilled by his crudeness.
“It has to be small,” he said. “Otherwise my cock will get jealous if it’s not the biggest thing in the room.”
“You’re terrible,” she said, laughing.
“Yes, I am, so you’d better get used to it.” He squeezed her sides until she shrieked again.
“Shhh,” he said. “What will the neighbors think?”
2.
To Elise’s and everyone else’s minor amazement, Renn and his assistant director were able to stay on the production schedule for Bourbon that they had devised with their producers, but inevitably, at the end of the fourth week, events began to conspire