Chapter 4

4

DAWSON

I couldn’t sleep. In addition to not being able to get my mind off a certain man, someone on the other side of the wall was having headboard-banging sex. His low groan went straight to my dick.

Kissing Jem tonight—and having him kiss me back—had made me feel out of control. I wanted to throttle him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to take whatever the hell he was going through and carry the burden of it for him.

But I also knew how he felt about me. He’d made it abundantly clear from early on that he had a chip on his shoulder about formally trained actors with fancy resumes. Even when I’d tried to talk to him in the past, he’d only given me short responses before finding the first excuse to bolt. That was fine. At least… it had been fine. But now we were going to have to present a united front in tomorrow’s interviews.

I finally fell asleep with the echoes of my unknown neighbor’s sexy groan in my ears and the image of a feisty, argumentative Jem in my head.

When I woke up, I felt almost hungover from the shorter-than-usual night’s sleep. Morning radio shows weren’t great for a stage actor’s schedule, so I stopped at the nearest coffee shop for the largest cup of caffeine I could find before making my way to the tall tower building that housed the radio station.

Even though I was early, Jem was already waiting for me in the lobby. He had a kelly green scarf around his neck that set off his bright eyes and cheeks still pink from the cold air outside.

“Hey,” I said, suddenly feeling awkward around him. “You doing okay?”

His forehead crinkled. “Um, yeah? You?”

I cleared my throat. “Peachy. Ready for the interview?”

We approached the security desk together so I could get my visitor’s badge.

“What do you think they’re going to ask us?” he asked. “Media interviews aren’t my strong suit.”

I nodded my thanks to the security attendant before slipping the lanyard with the badge over my head. “Their biggest hope is that we’re entertaining. They want ratings. They want their listeners to stay on their channel.”

“You probably took a class for this shit,” he grumbled. “Probably learned the ‘right way’ of doing it.”

I glanced over at him, expecting to see his annoyance and signs of that chip on his shoulder. Instead, I noticed his nerves.

“Hey, hey,” I said, reaching out and grasping his biceps to stop his progress toward the elevator. He stopped and glanced up at me in question. “We have a few minutes. Let’s sit down, okay?”

He sighed but followed me back to the bench he’d been sitting on when I’d found him. Jem’s jaw was tight as if he was anticipating me being a know-it-all asshole.

“Look,” I said softly, “I know this can be intimidating because it intimidates me too. But I learned some tips from a friend of mine who’s been doing this a lot longer.”

“I don’t believe this intimidates you too.”

I let out a laugh. “How the hell would you know what does or doesn’t intimidate me when you barely speak to me? You barely know me.”

“I kiss you every night,” he said with a raised eyebrow. The corner of his mouth quirked up in a teasing grin. “You can tell a lot about a man from his kiss.”

It was true, but I wasn’t about to let him win this little bullshit battle.

“What do I do before the show every night?” I asked.

“Avoid everyone,” he said.

I nodded. “And why do you think that is?”

“We’re beneath you.”

I threw up my hands. “When have I ever said that? No. It’s because I get crippling stage fright. I find a quiet corner and go through guided meditation so I don’t faint or puke.”

Jem’s eyes widened comically. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Wow. I… had no idea. How is it possible to get so nervous when you have as much experience as you do?”

I blew out a breath. “Because I had a horrible experience in my high school drama program and live in fear of it happening again. Every time I go onstage, I imagine doing something or saying something humiliating.”

I could tell he was taken aback by this information. Good. He needed to learn that he’d misjudged me as some elitist asshole who thought his shit didn’t stink. In fact, I was a scaredy-cat afraid of making a fool of myself all the damned time.

“So how do you get past it?” he asked. “Besides the meditation.”

“One of the things that helps is exactly what I told you a minute ago. It doesn’t really matter as much that you follow the script or answer the actual question asked. As long as you entertain them, they’ll be happy.”

Jem looked unsure, but I could see the cogs turning in his head, so I continued. “When we were first given direction for that kiss, do you remember what it was?”

He shrugged. “It was just to kiss, right? I mean, there’s a mark where we’re supposed to stand, but other than that…”

I nodded. “Why is the mark so far over on stage left?”

He bit his bottom lip and glanced at me through his lashes. I wanted to nibble on that lip so badly it hurt.

“Because we want the audience to watch us on stage left instead of the stagehands swapping out the set piece on stage right.”

“Exactly. As long as the audience is being entertained by something else, they aren’t looking at the boring stuff in the background. It’s the same thing with interviews. If the interviewer and the audience are being entertained, they won’t notice or care if you’re nervous, if you say the wrong thing, if you forget to tell them when and where to see the show.”

Jem let out a nervous huff of laughter. “Show management might notice.”

“Maybe. And then they can call and ask the radio station to announce it again. That’s their problem. Our job is to be entertaining. If we act like we’re having fun, people will want to come see what the show is all about even if our fun isn’t related at all to what we were supposed to talk about.”

He looked at me skeptically. “And you think the two of us can fake having fun?”

I tapped my chin. “If only we had acting experience, this whole thing might go more smoothly…”

Jem shoved my shoulder. “Be serious. We barely get along in real life.”

“Yeah, why is that?” I asked, seizing my chance.

He laughed again. “Because you think I’m a shit actor who doesn’t deserve to be in the show.”

My stomach dropped. Was he joking? Where did that thought even come from? “What the hell are you talking about?”

He waved a hand in the air and stood up to stretch. His lithe body always attracted my eyes, but right now, I was too upset to focus on it. “It’s fine. I’m over it. We don’t have to talk about it.”

I reached for his wrist and pulled him back down next to me. “It’s not fine. Explain why you think that.”

“I heard you telling someone early on how disgusted you were with them casting me. You made your opinions very clear about untrained actors landing roles trained actors should have gotten.”

I stared at him in shock. “And you thought I was talking about you?”

“You were. It was clear you were.” Jem’s eyes pinned me with a challenge. I dare you to disagree with me.

“No I wasn’t,” I said fervently. “I was talking about my friend Marley’s mother, who landed a role in a show because the director overheard her being rude to a server in a restaurant. He thought it was the perfect affect for the role, not realizing or caring that it was simply the woman’s real personality. She couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. She was an entitled society matron whose only job up to that point had been working as a flight attendant for six months in 1969.”

Jem blinked at me. “For real?”

I clasped his forearm. “Jem. You are an incredible actor. Whether you have a degree in it or not, you’re clearly well-trained and experienced. I respect the hell out of your talent and dedication.” How could I convince him the words I spoke were the truth? “I can’t believe all this time you thought this about me.”

He let out a breath and closed his eyes. “Fuck,” he said softly, sounding defeated. “I thought you hated me. I was such an ass.”

“I don’t hate you.” I bit back the other words I wanted to say, words about liking him more than was professional and wanting him more than I could ever admit out loud.

He looked back up at me. “Now what? I feel like I need a do-over.”

I stood up and reached for his hand to pull him out of the chair. “Unnecessary. Let’s just continue as we mean to go on. As…?”

Jem smiled at me, and I thought maybe my stomach would tumble out of my gut and stay right here in a heap on the lobby floor. “Friends. I’d like that.” His cheeks turned pink. “Okay, maybe friends with benefits.”

My gut twisted with excitement until he added with a chuckle, “Stage kissing benefits, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said, biting back my disappointment. “Stage kissing benefits.”

***

Jem hadn’t been exaggerating about his nerves. The interview got off to a rocky start when the DJ asked Jem to tell the listeners a little about the show and Jem blanked on the name of Not My Alfred.

“Forgive him. He plays a bit of an airhead in the show and has trouble breaking character offstage,” I teased, shooting Jem a wink over the tangle of microphone booms and cords between us.

Jem seemed to blink into awareness. “And you play a know-it-all.”

The DJ chuckled and asked us some fairly easy warm-up questions before finally getting to the big one. “Tell us about the kiss. How did it get started?”

Jem and I locked eyes across the table. I could see the residual nerves still in his body language, so I answered first. “Not My Alfred is a show about a mobster who’s trying to keep his crimes away from his devoted wife. When the character of Alfred’s wife comes into a scene, our characters—the mobsters—have to act casual. Each time it happens, we pick more and more outrageous ways of looking like we’re not conspiring to commit crimes.”

Jem cut in with a shit-eating grin. “And that’s when he kisses me.”

“And that’s when I kiss you,” I said, feeling the same squeeze in my chest that was happening more and more around him.

“Woo-hoo-hoo,” the DJ said, fanning himself with his hand. “The tension between these two is off the charts! Tell us more. What do your significant others at home think of you kissing someone else every night?”

His question was teasing and flirty, even though it was ultimately inappropriate. I glanced at Jem, whose eyes were still on mine.

“No significant other for me,” Jem said.

“Same,” I admitted.

Silence permeated the room for a heavy beat before the DJ sighed. “Ooookay then. Does anyone else see the obvious here? Just me? If you want to see these two and their incredible chemistry, find a way to source tickets to the sold-out production of Not My Alfred, playing at the Silverlight Theater. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us this morning.”

We left the studio with smiles of thanks and plenty of handshakes, but underneath it all was an unspoken question. What happened next if we were no longer at war with each other? How did we respond to the implication there was more between us than a professional relationship?

Wasthere more between us? Did the chemistry onstage mean anything offstage?

When we got back down to the lobby, Jem blew out a big breath and leaned over to prop his hands on his knees. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath. “How do you make that look so easy?”

I was surprised by his relief. “You go out every night onstage and don’t have a problem. I know you said you were nervous about this, but you did great.”

He stood up and shook out his hands, doing a few deep inhales and exhales before flashing me a big smile. “You’re right. It was fine. Onward and upward. We got this.”

We walked out into the bustling city street and headed toward the television studio for the next interview, The Wendy Goodley Show. This one would be more challenging since we’d be on camera, but Jem was right. We had this.

And we would have.

If Wendy Goodley had stuck to the script.