Scene 11

Dillon wasn't a decent cook.

She was a chef.

And not the run-of-the-mill, garden variety, slap-a-sauce-on-a-pasta-and-call-it-gourmet kind. I'm talking haute cuisine, premium ingredients, artistry on a plate. I didn't know anyone could whip up a pan-seared sea bass with a chive velouté sauce and roasted kohlrabi from the kitchenette of a hotel suite, but I supposed, if anyone could do it, Dillon was the perfect candidate. I doubted there was much she couldn't do, if she put her mind to it. She just seemed like that type of person. Driven. Focused. Talented.

When she brought out the meal to where I was sitting on her private lanai, I'd been in the process of demolishing the polish on my left thumbnail. Until I saw the flakes of paint scattered on my lap, I hadn't even been aware I'd resorted to the nervous habit.

It had been one thing while we were out, crammed amidst the crowds of vacationing beachgoers, to talk big, to gasconade, to flirt like it was the Name of the Game. Like I had any clue what the hell I was doing or how to proceed. But now that we were alone, departed from the downtown bar scene, I felt like an overstrung bow—my synapses wound too tight, with no space for the neurons in between.

I know Dillon must have noticed. One would have to be insentient to not feel the tension radiating from me. But it never changed her languid demeanor.

"It's not Gordon Ramsay," she said, settling into the wicker patio chair overlooking the private beach, "but it's better than pub grub."

I took a bite of the sea bass—tender on the inside, perfectly seared on the exterior—and temporarily forgot my threadbare nerves. "Wow." I glanced at her. It was probably the best fish I'd ever had.

She smiled. "See, I told you I was decent."

"I didn't peg you as a humblebragger."

The admonishment brought her lopsided smile. "Alright," she conceded. "My dad had a thing for the kitchen. He was an engineer, but his passion revolved around everything culinary. I guess a bit of it rubbed off on me."

"So I see."

We ate in silence—I think both of us were hungrier than we realized—and when we finished, she scooped up our plates, and returned a few minutes later with a pair of frosted bottles. I was a little surprised as she popped the metal caps—though she'd ordered a beer in Hana, I noticed she never actually drank it, and at the bar tonight she'd had a seltzer. My interest must have been apparent, because she raised her eyebrows in inquiry as she handed me the bottle.

"What?"

On the spot, I didn't have time to think of a better response. "For some reason, I didn't think you drank."

"I don't, typically. I like to be the best at everything I do. Drinking was no different. I got a little too good at it a while back, but found I race better without a hangover." She took a sip. "Still, sometimes it's worth it to make an exception. How else am I going to get you drunk enough to sleep with me?"

I'd barely set the bottle to my lips, realizing too late it was nothing more than a non-alcoholic ginger beer, but her jesting comment caught me off guard. I immediately swallowed the pungent drink down the wrong pipe, and was overcome by a racking cough as I cleared the fizzy water.

"I'm sorry," I managed, gasping as my choking drew to a minimum. I don't know if my ears actually turned red with embarrassment, or if it was only my imagination.

"Easy there. I'm just winding you up."

Tears continued to stream down my cheeks as I shook my head, mortified she felt the need to clarify. Of course I knew she was teasing.

"I'm sorry," I said again, "I don't know what's wrong with me."

And I didn't. I don't know why I was so incredibly nervous.

Dillon studied me, her thoughts unreadable, before discarding her ginger beer on the outdoor table. She crossed to sit in the adjacent chair, drawing her knees up to her chest.

"Kam-Kameryn," she said with a dramatic sigh, her chin resting on her hands. My only saving grace from utter humiliation was the lurking smile behind her placid expression.

I shifted, uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

"I would tell you to relax, but I feel it might be a bit like telling a drowning person to swim."

She dropped her bare feet to the floor and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, her face level with mine. "How's this—I'm going to tell you my plans for the evening. Then maybe, if you approve, we can get on with this night without you flinching every time I come within a few feet of you?"

I had no idea what that meant, but I must have nodded, because she continued.

"I'd like to sit here for a few minutes, enjoying the ridiculous poshness of this suite while my sponsor foots the bill. I plan to appreciate the view, the company, and the fact that I can sit out here in short sleeves while my friends at home are freezing the balls off a brass monkey.

"Then, I'd like to go inside. I intend to shower, change, stretch—my usual routine. After, I'll come back out and offer you the ensuite while I brew a tea—or coffee, if you'd rather. We'll chat. I want to know what daily life is like living in Hollywood. And learn more about your hidden rebellious streak that pinned you most likely to lead a protest. At that point, I'm going to take the couch, and you're going to take my room. You're going to toss and turn and fret all night, because, well—that seems to be who you are. And I'll sleep soundly, because I'm knackered. At seven AM, I'll go for a swim, come back, knock you up for breakfast, and we'll start our day again from there." She sat upright. "Would that be acceptable for an itinerary?"

For someone who excelled in soliloquies, my talents certainly let me down at the most inopportune times. With no cohesive thoughts forming, I tried to buy myself an extra moment to think. I needed something witty, something casual, to hide my embarrassment . Embarrassment, relief, disappointment . I hadn't realized you could experience all three conflicting emotions in such short succession. So, in an effort to delay, I opted to take another sip of my drink—but my motor skills appeared to have eloped with my ability to speak, and I somehow managed to miss my mouth, losing half the soda down the front of my tank.

"Oh, for the love of God." The only thing I could do was laugh. "Just shoot me now." I wiped away the ginger beer dripping off my chin.

Dillon's smile returned. "That's not part of the schedule, Kam-Kameryn."

The layer of ice I'd managed to materialize since we arrived at the hotel began to melt, and along with it, my tension.

Despite the ridiculousness of an agenda—leave it to me to require one—the evening played out as she said it would, and an hour later I reemerged from showering to find Dillon sitting on the living room floor, applying K-tape to her left knee.

"Kettle's on, if you want a cuppa." She didn't look up from her project.

I poured a tea, then wandered to the middle of the room. The comfort of the hot shower had helped restore my sense of humor.

"I know the blocking put me on the couch at this point in the scene, but does your directorial style allow for minor improvisation?"

"I'd say there was some space for self-expression—just so long as you don't get too carried away with your ad-libbing, Miss Kingsbury."

"I'll stick close to the script, I promise," I quipped, dropping to sit cross-legged beside her.

Of course, now that I knew she had no expectations of me, it was human nature, I suppose, to want what was no longer up for offer.

I watched her tape an intricate line of zigzags around her knee. It was a process I was familiar with after playing varsity soccer.

"Did you get hurt today?" I asked, watching as she laid the final strip beneath her patella.

"This? No." She straightened her leg, grimacing at the various snaps and crackles from the effort. "Just wear and tear from an old ACL repair. I usually can't feel it in the warmer weather. With Alecia on the field today, I probably pushed it a little harder than I had to."

"Is that who won? Alecia Finch?" Hers was a name I'd become familiar with during my accelerated crash course as I tried to brush up on my knowledge of triathlons. She was an American. One of Dillon's strongest competitors.

"Alecia?" her brow furrowed. "God, no. I couldn't let that happen. Not on a fast course. She'd have rubbed it in my face all next season. I beat her by over a minute."

"I thought you said… when I asked you earlier…?" I was confused and it must have shown, because she laughed.

"I won today. I just could have been faster."

"And I thought I was self-critical," I tsked.

"I guess we're our own worst critics, right?" She clapped her hands to her thighs, closing off the subject, which in turn drew my focus back to her legs, where I noticed a coin-sized tattoo just above her ankle. It was a soccer ball.

She saw it caught my attention.

Her smile turned cynical as she ran a finger over the line drawing. "They say nothing lasts forever—except bad tattoos you get with your ex."

I only half laughed, trying to decide if it would be indecorous to inquire about Kelsey. It wasn't like me to ask about exes. I'd never cared before. And in Kelsey Evans's case, I wasn't even sure what I wanted to know. But my curiosity was piqued, and I decided since she'd offered the segue, it was fair game.

"Ex as in Kelsey Evans?"

If Dillon was surprised, she didn't show it. "Wikipedia or Isaac Fortin?"

I admitted I'd seen their names linked previous to Isaac Fortin's snarky comment.

"Are you a football fan?"

"I like to follow the US Women's team. I played through high school."

"Winger?"

I rolled my eyes. "What gave that away? Let me guess: Wikipedia?"

She laughed, reaching over to tap my thigh. "Your quads and hamstrings say you're built for speed."

"Oh yeah?" I tried not to allow my thoughts to get carried away by the knowledge she'd clearly taken a detailed assessment of my body. But who was I kidding? My stomach turned a little celebratory somersault. I'd spent the better part of the year working out with a personal trainer in WeHo who could be classified as nothing less than a sadist. During my first audition for Sand Seekers , I'd been informed the role would be vigorously demanding, so I'd taken it upon myself to turn my willowy frame into something more substantial. An action that, for once, had indisputably paid off.

And not—given the way she'd glanced at me—just for the movie.

I cajoled my wandering train of thought back to the conversation. "Then why not a fullback?" I asked. The position was notorious for some of the fastest players on a soccer team.

"Because you're an actress."

She lost me. "Which means…?"

"Which means the odds are good you enjoy a certain amount of attention."

"With that theorem, why not a striker? They're always the stars on the field."

"Because I think there's an alternate side of you—an unassuming side—that would rather share the spotlight, preferring to distribute the pressure of performance." She swiped her bangs out of her eyes and dropped her head back against the cushion of the couch. "That screams winger to me."

"Well then." I held her gaze for a second, before resorting to fixating on a loose thread dangling from the hem of my shirt. I felt suddenly vulnerable beneath her analysis, uncertain how much deeper I wanted her to look. I tried to make light. "I'm assuming your wiki page forgot to mention you majored in psychology?"

She laughed, but it wasn't genuine. "My mam would've loved that."

Realizing I'd touched on something sensitive, I returned my focus to the tattoo on her ankle. "You're deflecting," I razzed. "All that psychobabble to avoid telling me about your matching soccer ball tattoos, huh?"

"Matching?" she laughed, sitting up to drag her leg beneath her, hiding the topic of discussion. "God no. That matchy-matchy girlfriend rubbish isn't for me." She seemed to consider leaving the explanation there, but after another beat, continued. "It was a bollocks challenge. Our entire relationship was like that—one long, endless competition. The Rio Olympics were coming up, and we were both breaking our backs trying to earn a spot in the games. So one night, daft as we were, we made a bet that whichever one of us made selection, the other would get the opposing tattoo." She flipped an indifferent hand. "When it all came down to it we both ended up representing Great Britain. So now I'm walking around with a football on my ankle and she has a swim/bike/run logo on her arse." She redirected her gaze to catch my eye, offering her wry smile. "I got off easier, if you ask me."

I tried to picture England's darling—blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cover girl Kelsey Evans—with the triathlon logo on her ass. It certainly made Dillon's soccer ball a lot more low key.

"And this one?" I asked, reaching to take her forearm in my hand, turning it over to run a finger across her wrist where the dragon for the Welsh flag was inked in red and green.

"You have used up your introductory credits on question Number One, Kam-Kameryn. Additional tokens will need to be earned." She withdrew her arm from my grasp, but instead of pulling away, slid it forward, bringing our palms together, our fingers intertwined.

I don't know why the gesture robbed me of my breath, emptying my brain of proper cognition. She'd held my hand before—I mean, we'd held hands half the night strolling the downtown district. But here were those axons again, misfiring in every direction.

"In fairness," I said, hoping to mask the hitch in my breath as I played into her teasing, "this coin-op came with no manual. I have no instructions on how to advance to the intermediate level of Dillon Sinclair."

"You'll want to pass the training level, to start. You cannot run before you can walk." My hand still in hers, she leaned back against the cool tile and closed her eyes, her face turned up to the ceiling. "Tell me something about you, Kameryn Kingsbury. Something I won't find on the internet."

I balked. Something about me? What was there to say even? I didn't want to bore her with details of my prosaic life.

I'd grown up in the outskirts of Palo Alto. I was the only one in my set of friends whose parents weren't filthy rich from their efforts in the tech industry. My mom was a horse trainer. My dad worked in the boating industry maintaining the yachts my friends' parents sailed on the weekends. Our home was on a small ten-acre horse farm surrounded by suburban neighborhoods. I hadn't been certain I wanted to be an actress, but I'd not gotten the soccer scholarship I'd been hoping for at Stanford, so when UCLA accepted me into their film school, I hadn't turned it down. My parents hardly spoke to me—not since I'd dropped out of school—and though I'd had little notable work in the industry, not once in the five years I'd been on my own had I asked them for a single dime.

In a few months, I was going to be knee-deep in shooting the biggest blockbuster of the decade, but as forward as I was looking to the paycheck, and creating something more memorable than a Gillette razor commercial, the thing I wanted more than anything was to make my parents proud—even if I tried not to admit it to myself. But my self-preservation tried to keep that hope on the back burner, because I also knew, no movie I ever made would trump that little slip of paper with UCLA's embossed seal.

What else couldn't I say? I loved the beach. My credit score was over eight hundred. I'd tried for years to be a vegetarian but repetitively failed due to my addiction to sushi. I hung out in a lot of circles, but consistently felt like I never fit in. My best friend was a spoiled brat who'd dated every chisel-jawed jock in Northern California before finding a man who was certain to keep her coffers overflowing. I spent months avoiding calls from my high school boyfriend, only to call him back when life got too lonely and I wanted his familiarity to fill that void. I hated my boring brown eyes. I had a tendency to cry when I was angry. My favorite color was salmon. And even though I was 120lbs, if the liquor was free, I could drink most of the guys I knew under the table.

And that was about it—my entire life story.

Aside from Sand Seekers , it was nothing interesting. Nothing like Olympic medals. Famous girlfriends. Hair the color of sunset beaches. Confidence radiating through every breath.

I couldn't tell her any of that.

So instead, I flopped down beside her, our shoulders touching, my hand still in hers. Her eyes were still closed, and I wondered, for a second, if she'd fallen asleep in my silence.

"I have a bad tattoo of my own," I finally said, watching her face out of my periphery. I saw her eyes twitch beneath their lids. She wasn't sleeping.

"Oh? And what's that?"

Propping myself onto an elbow, I looked down at her, absorbed in the stillness of her sunburnt face, the faint freckles highlighting her cheekbones, the unruliness of her still-damp hair. Without allowing myself to overthink it, I leaned down and kissed her lips—still faintly tasting of ginger beer.

"Maybe later on in the screenplay, you'll find out." I whispered against her mouth, and felt her smile, never opening her eyes, before I forced myself to my feet— back on script, Kameryn —and headed to call it a night.