in the company of your girlfriend. That’s why she finally took time off.” More glaring into space. “She’d better be sleeping today.”
How to say this? “Um, Alex, have you considered that, uh, maybe your feeli—”
“Enough about the stubby but persistent thorn in my side,” his friend interrupted, willfully ignoring Marcus’s interjection. “Did you see the email and group chat earlier today?”
Yes. Unfortunately, yes, Marcus had seen both the email from their showrunners and the messages flying back and forth among their Gates colleagues.
Carah: yet ANOTHER fucking email about our goddamn nondisclosure agreements and warnings not to share or malign the scripts or face GRAVE REPERCUSSIONS
Carah: is it one of you bitches leaking scripts and blabbing about how this season sucks like a Hoover that gets off on dust, or
Ian: I think the finale’s great
Alex: of course you do, your character arc didn’t get brutally slaughtered
Alex: unlike the tuna population in your vicinity
Carah: hahahahaha
Summer: Con of the Gates is coming up, and the thought of answering questions about this season and what happens to Lavinia and Aeneas just
Summer: gaaaaaaaah
Peter: I heard Ron and R.J. intend to back out of their panels at the last minute, citing “prior commitments”
Carah: prior commitment to not getting their asses reamed by fans who saw those leaked scripts, maybe
Maria: but no one realizes the leaked bits are real yet
Maria: all TOO real
Peter: I know it wasn’t me or Maria showing people those scripts
Peter: was it one of the rest of you, or the crew, or . . . ?
Marcus: for the sake of our careers, hopefully the latter
Ian: how do you know it wasn’t Maria, Peter
Ian: oh, that’s right, your mouth is surgically affixed to her ass, so if she told anyone you’d know
Maria: did you watch The Human Centipede AGAIN, Ian
Peter: mercury poisoning, Maria, remember
Peter: hallucinations from all the tuna
Maria: oh, yes, very sad really
Ian: I mean you KISS her ass all the time, dipshits
Ian: there are hour-long YouTube compilations of all your interviews together, where you’re making puppy dog eyes at her and it’s EMBARRASSING
Maria: more embarrassing than watching YouTube compilations of your colleagues in your free time?
Carah: hahahahaHAHAHA
After Ian stopping replying, the rest of the discussion had largely involved the press junket for the final season’s premiere, and everyone’s upcoming con appearances. But it had left him wondering—
“Please tell me you didn’t leak those scripts,” Marcus told Alex. It wasn’t a far-fetched notion. Alex tended to make decisions in a heartbeat. Then he’d leap with both feet, shaky ground be damned, only to find himself bruised and bloodied and unable to explain afterward why he’d made the jump at all.
He wasn’t self-destructive, exactly. Just . . . impulsive.
Executive function issues, he’d drawled to Marcus after that last, fateful bar fight, aping nonchalance over FaceTime despite his swollen-shut eye and scraped cheek and shaking hands. You’re not the only one whose brain works a little differently than most.
“I didn’t leak those scripts.” Alex’s smile was a little too wide and pleased for Marcus’s comfort, despite the firm statement. “That said, I was so intrigued by the stories I’ve been beta-reading for y—”
“Shhhh,” Marcus hissed, waving a frantic hand. “Not here.” The women were talking in the other room, and it sounded as if they were running the sewing machine Mel had brought over, but they could easily overhear a conversation in the living room if they wanted to. Which would be disastrous. Utterly disastrous.
Alex’s smile vanished, but he obligingly lowered his voice to a whisper. “You still haven’t told her?”
Marcus shook his head.
“You don’t trust her?” his friend mouthed.
In the month he’d spent in her home and her bed, there had been no revealing blind items in blogs, no new intimate details about him or his life in the tabloids, no tell-all interviews on entertainment television shows. Her coworker Mel, for all the woman’s enthusiasm about Gates, didn’t seem to know a thing about him other than the basics: his name, a few of his roles, his status as a onetime local. All April had told her, according to Mel, was that he was kind.
Given the circumstances, given the way he’d doubted April and concealed crucial information from her, he’d had to fight a wince at that description.
No, Marcus hadn’t spotted a single sign that she would ever betray him to anyone. Which he should have known from the moment he found out she was Ulsie, but he hadn’t had sufficient faith in his own instincts or her, and now he was paying for