Page 133 of Places I've Never Been

“Told her I had to finish edits on the screenplay so you could have them this morning.” Marshall winked. “For the meeting.”

“That meeting was two weeks ago. I know because that’s when I signed my life away.” Blake tossed the ball to Marshall. “What edits?”

“Stop being such a drama queen. It takes a lot less time to do voice work than it does a location shoot. You don’t even have to leave town. Easy peasy.” Marshall dribbled and faked right, then left, looking for a hole. “I reworked the bar scene. The dialogue needed more snap.”

Blake kept pace with him, arms outstretched to block. “You gotta give that scene a rest, man. If you keep harping on the bromance it’ll turn our cool caper into a sappy rom-com or something. Besides, the fake-out scene that happens before the con needs the most work.”

“Minor detail,” Marshall said. “The con is brilliant. That’s what everybody will remember.”

Marshall dashed right, spun around, and shot. The ball brushed Blakes’s fingertips and veered off past the net to bounce down his driveway.

“Shit,” Marshall muttered.

They both took off after it because if someone didn’t stop the ball, it would roll all the way down to the gate. His housewas on a hill, and the run would be more of a workout than either of them wanted right now, especially in this heat.

A few feet down the drive, Marshall stopped running, leaving Blake to retrieve the ball on his own. By the time he managed to get the ball and jog back, Marshall had sprawled on one of the lounge chairs by the pool.

“You realize if you quit now you can’t win the fifty bucks I promised,” Blake told him. “You have to actually play to win.”

“I didn’t have a shot anyway. You’re already up fifteen points.” Marshall squinted at him. “Besides, don’t you have to get going? The read-through is in, what, thirty minutes?”

Blake pulled a couple of bottles of water out of the mini-fridge in the outdoor kitchen and checked the time. “Two hours. Man, I’m not looking forward to this. The script doesn’t feel tight. I bet you anything they aren’t finished.”

His friend gave him a suspicious look and took the offered bottle. “You get to be a cartoon. What’s not to like?”

For one thing, he’d never done voice work before and wasn’t exactly sure how hard it would be to slip into the role when he wasn’t acting it out, and for another, the idea of having to record a song was intimidating, but he wasn’t about to admit that to Marshall. The teasing would be relentless.

He gave a nothing-to-see-here shrug. “It’s in the way. I have better things to do.”

Marshall narrowed his eyes. “No, you don’t. You literally got nothing better to do, because if you don’t finish playing the prince inScorched, we don’t get to startConned, and we’ve given blood, sweat, and most of our twenties to get that project off the ground.”

“I know.” Blake stared at the pool that took up a large part of his backyard.

The pool was a gift from his mother for his twenty-first birthday. She’d duplicated the one in his tenth movie,Jake’s Day Off, down to the hot tub and simulated lagoon waterfall. He’d hosted one hell of a premiere party around that pool.

He and Marshall had come up with the idea forConnedthat night. They’d known they had a hit on their hands before they’d even written it.

But that was almost a decade ago, and the movie still hadn’t been made. They’d both put a good portion of their own money on the line, but it hadn’t been enough. They needed a backer if the script were ever going to see the light of day.

So when the studio offered him a deal, it had felt like serendipity and winning the lottery all rolled into one. Their first, second, and third leading man choices for a new animated feature had all flamed out for various reasons, and now they were two weeks from kickoff with nobody even close to being on the hook to play Prince Jesse.

It was a simple deal. If he did the voice work, they’d provide the rest of the funding—twenty-five million dollars—and studio backing forConned. That meant the marketing might of one of Hollywood’s biggest studios would be behind his directorial debut. It had been an easy yes, even if it did feel like a waste of time to play with cartoons.

“It’s just annoying.Scorchedfeels cheesy to me. Kind of like how ours was when we started. I just don’t think it’s finished yet, which isn’t a good sign.”

“Hey, ours ain’t cheesy, it’s a future classic.” Marshall peered at Blake over his sunglasses. “We’re going to make something modern and fun. It’ll be a thriller caper with a feel-good ending and franchise potential, and we need that deal you signed to do it. We won’t get the funding if you don’t play your part. You’re not thinking of backing out, are you?”

He wanted to say yes.

He wanted to race right past this stupid animated movie and get on with what he increasingly felt was his life’s calling.

“I didn’t spend my entire childhood on movie sets to be a cartoon. I want to tell a really great story, not ham it up in a studio. I don’t have time to deal with a bunch of people who don’t know the first thing about the business.”

“I thought you said they got Gina Paige to voice the dragon?” Marshall asked. “She’s won like, what, five Tonys? Can’t say she’s inexperienced.”

“Not her. Princess Jewel. Piper Bellamy.”

Marshall snorted. “Can’t say she’s inexperienced either. That girl cansing. She can carry your lame ass through all the songs. Can’t believe you get to meet her and I don’t.”

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