Page 45 of Good Enough

“Before we left L.A. For research.”

“Oh.”

Will she ask?

He figured she would want to know which movie he liked best. The question she asked was unexpected.

“Did you believe what you were seeing? I mean, did you feel like it was real when you were watching them?”

Looking over his shoulder at her, something clicked. She had kept pushing with him and God that truth was what she worked toward in her work. It wasn’t technical accuracy that she meant, although she did strive for that as much as possible. She wanted Truth. The capital T version. She wanted people to live in the world she created and be a part of the experience. “Yes. Even the wolf shifter romance, and I’m not fond of those kinds of movies. I can’t buy into all the creatures. But when I watched that one, I just saw people who couldn’t get along because they believed in different life philosophies.” He turned his head back to the drawings and began adjusting one of her sketches with his pencil. “It reminded me of Afghanistan, actually.”

“I’m not sure if I should be sorry about that or flattered.”

She reached over his shoulder with her own pencil and made some adjustments to a storyboard frame on the far left. He breathed deeply, as quietly and unobtrusively as he could.

I will never smell lilacs and not think of her.

He cleared his throat to settle himself. “The people in the Middle East, most of them are pawns on a chessboard. It’s not their fault what’s going on. Most of them don’t want it any more than we do. But they’re just as powerless to stop it as the average American. The kindness I saw while there for our soldiers, especially with the wounded, was sometimes even greater than what we experienced back home. We tried not to trade on that because villages got punished for helping the Infidel. But we always tried to do what we could. The kids were the best. We’d get our asses handed to us on a regular basis by them. Their soccer skills were insane.”

He reached into his thigh cargo pocket and pulled out a thin credit card sleeve, sliding out a folded photo of himself and an Afghani teen. Handing it to her, he watched her reaction. The photo was beat up, as he’d been carrying it around for over a decade.

She was smiling softly before looking up at him. “You’re such a baby there.”

“It was my first tour. Nineteen. His name was Hesam.”

She handed the photo back to him. “Was?”

“At one point, there was a reporter with us for a while, and he sent me this after he came home from doing his story. He was there when Hesam died shortly after our unit moved on. He thought I’d want to know.” He slid the photo back into the sleeve and put it back into his cargo pocket. “One of those innocent victims. I carry the picture to remind me that good people exist everywhere. Corny. But sometimes, in my line of work, you need a reminder.”

Lilacs wrapped around him comfortingly as she placed a hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, “You’re a wonderful human being, Waters. Fucking perfect.” Her lips barely pressed against the side of his head.

Without thinking about it, he reached a hand up to grasp hers as she lifted it from his shoulder. He tilted his head to brush his cheek against the back of it. “You’re pretty damn perfect yourself, Kubrick.”

It was late. The actors had all drifted off to bed. Kubrick and Waters barely even noticed that everyone was gone. She was lying on the floor, shoveling more junk food into her mouth, a paper script in pieces in front of her—which were clearly out of order now, given the grumbling and page flipping that was going on—and there were a number of pencils she had worn down to blunt tips scattered around her. Waters sat on the couch, feet propped on the coffee table, tablet in his lap. He was trying to concentrate on the email in front of him, but between her constant whispered swearing and the contents of the email, he couldn’t stay focused.

Doesn’t help that she’s ass up on the floor, either. Knew it would be wicked.

He watched her unwrap another Zinger and start shoving it in her mouth.

Grinning and shaking his head, he went back to his computer screen.

Hey, Boss.

Midas still has no new information on our missing sailor.

Boss is so pissed and ate so many suckers he broke two teeth. Cherry took away his stash. Now everybody in that office is cranky. Glad I’m here with you.

Cyclopes is up and watching all entrances and exits, plus the main rooms and hallways, live 24/7. Bedrooms are also recording but are not live to view. If you need him to turn off the feed for any reason (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), just use “Stanley” as a code, and the system will shut down until you tell him to turn it back on.

Fun story. We sent Nerdboy on a field trip around the property. Dumbass got bit by a snake, so Demon had to play doctor. Apparently, it was the poisonous kind, so Nerdboy is limited for a day or two. By the way, Demon got his contract of employment today, so he’ll be officially in place on set tomorrow.

— TB

It was concerning that there were still no leads on Ka-Bar, there’d been no attempts of anything hinky in connection to Kubrick, and that meant they were still at Ground Zero. That, in itself, was proof enough to Waters that something wasn’t right, and obviously, God thought so as well if he was breaking perfectly good teeth.

“I give up.” The groan from the floor was tortured as well as muffled. Kubrick was softly banging her forehead on the floor since she was face first on the carpet, arms and legs splayed like she was floating dead in the water.

“Never give up,” Waters admonished. “There are still Zingers left in the box.”

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