Page 52 of Marisol Acts the Part
Jamila snorts, and I’d be offended by her reaction if I wasn’t so relieved to see her laugh. “Actually, I very muchdowant to be involved with you.”
My hand stills above her elbow, gripping tighter than I mean to. “It feels like there’s abutcoming?”
Jamila nods, pulling away from my neck to face me. “But I’dhave to be careful. No posting about my personal life the way I usually would. No shouting from the rooftops that I kissed the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever met, even though I really want to. At least until people get to know me for me, not who I date.” She tucks a loose lock of hair behind my ear, letting her fingers linger on my cheek. Flashes of Friday night rush through me like a riptide, igniting the same fire in my belly that pushed me to kiss her in the first place. “I know this is the norm for you. Avoiding paparazzi and fans and stuff, and I don’t want you to feel like this is another part of your life that you have to hide. So…I get it. If you’d rather not. Y’know. Be involved with me.”
For once, I listen to my body. I capture her lips with mine. There’s a sharp, salty sting I don’t remember from last night, and I wonder if she’d been crying before I found her. The thought makes me soften my touch, resting a hand on hers where it’s laying in the space between us. She meets the force of my body with her own, entangling our fingers on the leather. It’s not the same as Saturday night—slow and tender, like we want to savor every second of each other—but it still takes my breath away.
“I really, really want to be involved with you,” I whisper against her lips when we part.
“Really?” I can feel the way her lips tug into a smile, and I press a kiss to the corner of her mouth before cupping her cheeks.
“Really.”
When we kiss again, it’s messy and off-center, and we’re too distracted by laughing to fix our positioning, but we don’t care because it’s perfectly imperfect. It’s hard to imagine aworld where I don’t shout about her to the world, don’t sing her praises every day and post photos of her at golden hour. So much of my relationship with Miles was defined by what the world saw—the hidden glances, the way we smiled at each other from across a room, the photos we posted together after twenty minutes of careful posing.
And look where we are now.
This is a good thing,I tell myself as we pull apart to dive in for a less awkward kiss this time. Not the circumstances, but the privacy. Keeping this perfect thing to myself. Not letting the world pull it apart and dissect it and take it for themselves. We can learn who we are together at our own pace with no one watching over our shoulders. No articles, no media, no pressure. Just us and the way we make each other feel. I don’t like the circumstances or the why behind it—that we have to hide ourselves so the industry we work in will accept us as blank slates.
But there can still be silver linings.
Chapter 19
The more my personal life thrives, the worse life on set becomes. Rune must have some kind of machine that senses whether or not I had a good night or weekend and decides how to best terrorize me the following day.
After spending the night watching a movie with Jamila over FaceTime—my saving grace now that I’m not allowed to leave the house and am avoiding Dad like the plague—I showed up to set exhausted but invigorated. Within ten minutes of stepping onto the lot, Rune declared that all phones were officially banned from set. Apparently, someone had leaked a couple pages of the first episode script, screwing the rest of us over by forcing us into total lockdown mode. By the end of the day, the PAs rolled out the new protocol: collecting our personal phones as we arrive and keeping them locked securely in a back office until we leave for the day.
The phone ban is more annoying than anything else. I’vegotten into the habit of texting Jamila whenever our shooting schedules don’t overlap, sending her selfies and memes and dozens of random thoughts because she always seems to appreciate them. Unlike a certain ex of mine, who always told me off for being such an overzealous texter. Not that I’m comparing. Though it’s nice to be able to text the person you’re seeing to ask them if they’d like you if you were a worm and get an actual response (only if I get to dress you up in cute little worm outfits) instead of a dismissal (why do you always ask such weird questions?).
Our first day of shooting without access to our phones is boring and uneventful. Our schedules never line up, so Jamila and I can’t even sneak away to our trailer for some time alone before we wrap for the day. On the few days that we’re shooting on location, exploring the area surrounding our base camp isn’t anywhere near as fun without her. I don’t have many scenes this week, and the ones I do have are with Miles, while she has to spend most of her week with her on-screen parents and Dawn. Better her than me, though. One saving grace is how little Dawn’s character interacts on-screen with mine.
Being a few feet away from Jamila but never getting to communicate, much less touch her, is frustrating—especially when we’ve finally admitted that we’re…something. We’re figuring out what that something is. With lots of kissing. So much kissing.
Thankfully, Jamila, bless her, is an innovator.
“This is for you.” Esther hands me a folded-up piece of notebook paper.
“Who’s it from?” I ask as I unfold it, bracing myself for yet another one of Rune’s weird directorial habits to emerge.
Esther shrugs coyly, suddenly becoming extremely interested in the empty bottle of water on the table beside me.
Written in loopy handwriting so pristine it could easily be a font, is a short message.
Hi, you’re cute:)
My cheeks flare as I glance up from the note toward the bedroom set on the opposite end of the room. Jamila and Miles are debriefing with Rune after their latest run-through of their first scene of the day. For a flash of a second, Jamila looks away from Rune, long enough to give me a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wink before turning her attention fully back to him.
I quickly scribble back a message of my own, folding the paper up again and handing it back to Esther.
“I’m not a messenger pigeon, you know,” she replies while tucking the note into the breast pocket of her flannel.
“It’ll be the last one, I promise,” I say with my best puppy-dog pout.
Esther gives in with a grumble, stomping off to deliver my message.
It is not the last one. Sorry, Esther.
To be fair, Jamila and I spread our messenger duties among the rest of the production crew. Sometimes we even pass them ourselves, sliding notes into each other’s hands as we pass by, holding back smiles and lingering touches. It becomes a running joke between us and the crew—that they’re aiding the star-crossed lovers, kept apart by a lack of cell phones. Slowly, we push the boundaries. A week after we start sending thenotes, Jamila’s hand twitches toward mine beneath the picnic table we’ve settled at for lunch. I don’t bother hiding my smile as we link our fingers out of view of our castmates. Subtle touches evolve into stolen kisses, quick and breathless behind closed doors. Longer when we’re in the privacy of our trailer.
