Page 36 of Best Served Hot
‘Uh, hold on, I’ll just have a quick listen.’ She took the phone away from her ear while she listened in for a moment. Then put the phone back to her ear. ‘Yeah, so, what he’s landed on is that it’s the cashbox for the show, and he knocked it out of the window. It might fly, I guess? I think he’s tryna play a charmingly clumsy Hugh-Grant-in-the-nineties kind of spin on it.’ She leaned back out of the window for further inspection of the clown show. ‘I don’t think he’s pulling it off, truth be told. Kendall looks a bit suspect. She just said, “Lot of money to have in cash.”’
‘How is he responding?’ Nicole asked, excited.
‘He just laughed in a fake way and said, ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’
She tutted. ‘It’s a pretty weak show. I expected more of him.’
Nicole was guffawing. ‘Oh my God, stop. I need to catch my breath.’
Alex loved hearing her laugh like that. She sounded so happy, light even. ‘OK, he’s managed to get most of it. Though I can see a few twenties in a tree that he hasn’t spotted. He’s heading back in. Should I wait for him or leave?’
‘Go. This isn’t getting any better,’ Nicole advised, still chuckling.
‘Roger that.’ They hung up, and Alex fled the scene.
Twenty-Three
Nicole was in heaven listening to that shit show at Ethan’s office. She hadn’t even needed to be there, but Alex had painted the picture with just enough hilarious brush strokes. She’d captured Ethan’s pathetic desperation.
Maybe it was actually better not to have seen it herself. Nicole’s mind’s eye was free to add entertaining details. Sweat pouring from Ethan’s temples, his hair dishevelled, his stuttered excuses to Kendall. Brilliant. Alex had played a blinder.
Yeah, about Alex… That little thought about kissing her had been some kind of aberration, Nicole felt sure. Because she was coming to understand Ethan in a way she never had. Ethan had fancied Alex, so all that had happened was that she’d seen things through his eyes for a moment.
The desire had been his, not Nicole’s. That was believable, right? Because she’d never gone down this path—kissing girls. It had never come up. Well, not that it hadnevercome up, exactly.
Perhaps it was fairer to say that it had neverseriouslycome up. Because, of course, she’dthoughtabout it. Everyone considered it sometime. For instance, when she was eighteen and had moved into university halls and become friends with Becca Doyle.
Becca was from Donegal, and Nicole had liked her immediately. She liked how she’d say the most cutting shit in that charming accent. And, it had to be said, she was beautiful. Dark-haired and pale-skinned, she was the kind of girl they put on tourism posters to draw you to Irish shores.
Nicole had felt a crush develop, and it had unnerved her a bit. Was it serious? Or was it just some weird thing that would pass? While she’d been pondering that, she’d found herself being pursued by Jake Moss, and he was nice—not to mention much less complicated—so she’d run with that.
But then there was also that time that she’d been on ADing on a tiny indie movie when she was twenty-six. And the lead actress, Adriana… Well, she was the lead for a reason. She was gorgeous, charming, the whole package. She and Nicole clicked from the off. They just got each other.
Nicole felt it happening again, the tingle of a crush. And she thought that maybe this time, she should justcheck. But before she could get the courage to make the big move, the shoot ended. And she’d decided that if she’d liked her enough, she’d have done something about it, so she’d left it at that.
Though now she thought about it, there had also been this other time…
Nicole was done thinking about this. It was ridiculous. She’d been happy enough in her relationships with men. Well, until quite recently. She wasn’t kissing anyone—end of story.
When she came back to set that afternoon to shoot the rest of the scenes, she saw Alex and felt OK. Not like she was gonna try to snog her face off at all, which proved that it wasn’t anything.
‘So, scene seven,’ Alex said, checking her paperwork, a wry little smile on her lips.
‘Yep, scene seven,’ Nicole said.
Alex gave her a small, secret smile, and Nicole remembered about the cash thing, and it was all she could do not to laugh her arse off. She wished she could sack shooting off entirely and go to a bar with Alex so they could laugh all afternoon about that bozo and his cash grab whilst getting nice and afternoon drunk. But only because they had camaraderie. Nothing else.
Actually, maybe booze wasn’t a good idea right now. It was a loosener. Nicole needed to remain… tight. Not that she was worried about acting on that one isolated impulse. It was just better to err on the side of caution.
Anyway, there was no real question of that happening because they had a long afternoon of shooting melodrama ahead of them.
‘Quiet on the set,’ Alex called, and as everyone wrapped up their noise, Alex leaned in and whispered, ‘Hey, you wanna grab a drink after this? Have a war room?’
Nicole nodded. ‘You know it.’ It was out of her mouth before she remembered that she’d just told herself that doing something like that with Alex was the opposite of a good idea. One might even say a bad idea.
Twenty-Four
Alex was gonna get over this Nicole thing, and she knew just how. She would rationalise it away.
