Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,48
sake. “Yes, sweetheart, but people know you now, a lot of people, and they’re going to be watching you,” she could hear her mother querulously counseling her.
After Billy had come inside and sat down, she looked at him intently and said, “You really do look a lot like your dad. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”
He shook his head. He was perspiring, the underarms of his green Lacoste shirt darkened by sweat, his hair dampened too. “I know you mean it as a compliment. I could do worse than look like my dad.”
“That’s for sure.” She paused. “Do you want some water? I have some in the fridge.”
“That’d be great,” he said, his eyes flitting to her face before he glanced at the window.
“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from something? I don’t want to make your boss mad.”
Billy opened the water bottle and took a drink. He started coughing almost immediately, his face reddening as his eyes filled with tears. “Oh God,” he choked out. “How embarrassing.”
“Keep coughing,” she said. “That’s the only way you’ll get the water out of the wrong pipe.”
When the fit ended, he had tears running down his cheeks and his face was a furious red. Handing him a tissue, she felt a rush of tenderness for him, something almost maternal. Here’s a guy, she thought, who needs to be looked after. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked, his weakness giving her courage.
He blinked, surprised. “Yes, I guess I do.”
She smiled. “You guess?”
“Yes, I do. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
“What’s her name?”
“Danielle.”
“I hope she appreciates you,” she said, earnest.
He nodded slowly. “She says she wants to move in with me.”
Elise regarded him, intrigued. “Do you want her to?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” she asked, suppressing a sudden urge to wink, something she never did, except at small, shy children.
He hesitated before taking his phone from his back pocket, and after a few seconds of pressing and repressing two or three buttons he found a picture and handed her the phone. The display showed a startlingly pretty redhead in a black tank top, Billy in a Dodgers hat looking handsome and proud and suntanned next to her, his arm around his girlfriend’s pale, gleaming shoulders. “That was taken a few months ago,” he said, blushing. “We were in San Francisco for her birthday.”
“She’s so gorgeous,” said Elise, feeling a tremor of jealousy in spite of herself. Didn’t she have her hands full enough with Renn? Yet it was terribly fun to flirt with Billy, and she savored this perilous impulse, as if on a dare she were thrusting her finger through a flame. “She looks very sweet too. I can see why you’re with her.”
“She is sweet. Most of the time, anyway.” He paused, putting the phone back in his pocket. “What’s it like working with Marek Gilson?”
She reached for his water bottle and took a drink. “He’s very good,” she said. “His heart really seems to be in it, but I think everyone in the cast is crazy about this film.” She liked Marek well enough but wasn’t nuts about his recreational name-dropping, which seemed a little absurd to her because he had already made it, and in her opinion he had little to prove, though there was also the chance that he was trying to remind her of her place, making it clear that he knew more people than she did, that he was the film’s real star whereas she was still at the stage where she needed to prove her worth. Before she had started acting, she had always assumed that male and female actors did not feel competitive with each other, that there was only same-sex rivalry, if there had to be any rivalry at all. Now she realized how naive this assumption had been.
“My dad loves this film. His screenplay is really good.”
“You should tell him that,” she said.
Billy looked at her. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. I just think he’d be happy to hear it. I would be.”
“I think I already told him that I liked it.”
There was something unstudied about him that she liked, something softer and less demanding than the swagger or smugness of the grown children of the other seasoned movie people she knew. She wondered if it was his mother’s influence, or else Renn had tried not to spoil his son and daughter too much. Elise was a little afraid