Page 31 of The Unfinished Line

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 forSand 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 ofpulling 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.

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