“I eat meat like nobody’s business,” she says suggestively. Then she widens her eyes and shakes her head. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“Go on…”
She squeezes her eyes shut again. “No! It’s just the tipsiness. I’m not like this.”
“You aren’t?”
“I mean, I haven’t been with anyone else. I haven’t beenlike thiswith anyone else, I mean… And I haven’tbeenwith anyone else before.”
And there it is.
“We can take it as slow as you want, Piper. We can do whatever you want.”
She shifts around in the chair, smirking. If we were texting right now, she’d throw a smiling-face-with-horns emoji at me. But there’s no app between us. There is nothing at all standing between us and no one else around us now. “The thing is,” she says hesitantly, “I want to do a lot of things…”
Happy New Year to me.
“Well, I literally have nothing else to do for the next couple of days, so why don’t you tell me what you have in mind.”
Now she’s giving me smiling-face-with-halo-emoji vibes.
Piper gets up, carefully places the gifts I just gave her on the coffee table, and comes over to where I’m standing. She holds her hands behind her back and crosses one leg in front of the other, twists her lips to one side. I get the feeling she’s about to say something awesome.
But my phone starts ringing.
My phone never rings when I’m not on set unless it’s business or an emergency.
“You should get that,” she says, suddenly looking concerned. “It might be Shay.”
I pull my phone out, and indeed, it is Shay Nicholls calling. I had almost forgotten about her. I put her on speakerphone so Piper can hear too, and I never take my eyes off her. “Hello?”
“Oh my God, are you in Big Bear already?”
Piper winces at the sound of Shay’s voice, and that tells me everything I need to know.
“Yeah, I’m at the cabin, actually.”
“Gahhh! That airline was such a cockblocker, but I’m at LAX now. I just have to get my bags and then I’m in my car and I’ll be there in, like, three and a half or four?—”
“You aren’t going to be able to drive here today,” I say, cutting her off. “It’s snowing pretty hard, and by the time you get to the mountains you won’t be able to drive on the roads without chains.”
A beat, and then she says, “Oh. Well…should we meet at your hotel, then?”
“I can’t leave here, so just Venmo me, and I’ll pay you the rental fee for this cabin, okay?”
She makes an overly dramatic, frustrated, spoiled Hollywood-actress sound. “Okay. Well, there should be champagne and charcuterie in the fridge if my PA did her job correctly.”
“She is doing everything right,” I say, staring at Piper.
“I’ll bring all of your stuff back to give to Lainey,” Piper says, leaning in closer to my phone. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Wait, what?” Shay’s voice sounds so shrill through the speakerphone. “Is that Piper? Why areyoustill there?! You get out of there, you cockblocking little?—”
I end the call before Shay finishes that sentence.
Piper covers her mouth, but I can see in her eyes that she’s smiling a little. “Oh no, she’s so mad.”
When I was driving up here this morning, Rita called to say that Alex Vega watched the screener ofRiders of Storm and Fireand he even got to see an early cut ofWinds of Change. He thinks I’m perfect for the lead in his movie and wants to meet with me as soon as possible in the new year. Not that I had any interest in Shay at all once I figured out it was Piper I’d been texting with in Backroom, but now I don’t need to have anything to do with her. Unless Piper keeps working for her, I guess. Which is unlikely.