I bawled myself to sleep that night, but I do feel better. So I’m happy to return the favor if you’ve got something burning on your conscience.”
His silence was all the answer she needed. Yes, Mr. Perfect had a secret. One he was ashamed of.
“No one knows this,” he said. “Not even Luke.”
Rori’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?”
“Yeah,” he said softly.
Silence.
Rori’s heart was racing. Why, though? This wasn’t her secret. There was no reason to be nervous, and yet her heart was pounding and she could feel her palms growing a little sweaty. It was like Mike’s nervousness was transferring to her.
“After I finished school, I was ready to jump into the industry,” he said carefully. “I had all these scripts and shorts I thought had potential, but no one wants to invest in a director who hasn’t proven himself. I was fine to do projects with no budget, and even had actors that would volunteer time in exchange for adding scenes to their reel, but the real issue came in with getting a production team. They all wanted to get paid, which makes sense. I get it. But the point was that every time I tried to get someone on my projects, they simply responded by inviting me onto theirs. And after so many weeks of striking out, I started going for the paycheck rather than the vision.”
“That’s understandable,” Rori said.
“For several months that worked out. I wasn’t directing, but I was making great connections as I worked on set with other directors, and occasionally even scored a second unit director position to pad my resume.”
“Makes sense,” she said when he paused. “Connections are very important in your industry.”
“Yeah, well so is experience,” he said, his voice sounding oddly bitter. “It’s also kind of a given in my industry that you cut your teeth on projects that are very forgiving of mistakes while still turning a profit.”
She connected the dots a step ahead of him thanks to Luke. “Ah, yes. Porn.”
She could have sworn she felt him nod in the silence. “Pick any director that’s respected in Hollywood and you can pretty much guarantee he has a porn reel—maybe under another name, but he has one and it was there he met producers and others he works with to this day.”
“So I hear.”
“But I’d promised my mom I wouldn’t stick my toe in that field. Not only because I didn’t want something like that on my resume, but because I had arrogantly believed that I was so good that I could skip that step based on my own merits. Producers would just see my brilliance, I’d thought, and at least one of them would snatch me up without me having to prove how well I could frame a threesome.”
He stalled again, even though the end of the story was obvious. “So what happened?”
“The magical six-month grace period for student loans passed,” he said. “All of a sudden I owed payments of $1,500 a month when I was barely making enough to pay rent on the apartment I shared with two other guys. I was going to default on my first payment, and I had no prospects on the horizon. And when people found out, they were more than happy to point me at a fast cash-making opportunity. Five grand for five days of work, making five different ‘scripts,’ if you can call them that. It was enough to make rent, cover my payment, and give me a bit of carryover into the next month.”
He became silent again, and even though Rori couldn’t see him, she was fairly sure she understood what he was feeling.
“Just say it, Mike,” she said gently. “You’ll feel better. Promise.”
“You’ve already guessed it.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the same as you saying it. Me guessing creates a whole lot of room for me believing things you may or may not have done. You want to let it go? Say it. The secret is safe with me.”
Another moment of silence. “Yes, I took the job. And I completed it. And I’m not going to lie and not confess that at first I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world. All these women walking around naked, anxiously doing anything I directed them to? I could barely walk most of that first day no matter how many times I visited the men’s room. I was surrounded by beautiful women with perfect bodies who did things on a regular basis that I hadn’t even really dared to imagine. I