Page 11 of Sweet as Sin (Bad Habit 1)
“I know. Sears the retinas, doesn’t he?” Chuckling, Kenji linked his arm through mine.
The master bedroom was as cavernous as the rest of the mansion, elaborate with antiques and oil paintings. The cameras were set up opposite the bed. A field of white-hot halogens on telescoping stands lurked behind. Rock music blared through speakers wired to the walls, and the air reeked of stale coffee and sweat.
I was ninety percent sure I was going to faint.
“Replacement girl! Yo!”
A young man swaggered up. Pasty and skinny, tatted from wrists to shoulders on both arms, he wore a red baseball cap reversed on his head, a sleeveless T-shirt, cargo shorts that looked as if he’d slept in them, and an enormous gold cross on a chunky chain around his neck. He looked all of fifteen years old, like a white kid from the burbs playing dress up in gangsta rap clothes.
In other words, he looked like Justin Bieber.
He jerked his chin at me. “’Sup?”
I took this as an inquiry into my general state of being. My response was to recall the shit-eating grin. He grinned back, revealing a gold front tooth.
“So here’s what needs to happen, yo? We only got half an hour for this scene, so we gotta work quick. You and Nico are on the bed, and it’s right before the part where you run out on the wedding—”
“Run out on the wedding?” What woman in her right mind would run away from Nico on her wedding day? This sounded like a stupid video already.
Kiddie gangsta looked at me as if I were mentally challenged. “Yeah. You know. Like in the song.”
“The song?”
This was the wrong thing to say. Kiddie gangsta’s pale face turned an interesting shade of red. He looked at Kenji.
“Yo.”
There was so much emotion packed into that one syllable. Disappointment, disbelief, anxiety, anger. It was as if he’d just given an entire speech about his artistic dreams being crushed and the impossibility of working with such an idiot, using only two letters.
Kenji dug his elbow into my side. “Of course she knows the song, Obi! Everyone knows the song! She’s only playing.” He turned to me with a brittle smile. “Right?”
I realized I’d made a gaffe of epic proportion and would have to quickly backtrack. Whoever kiddie gangsta was, he was apparently important. “Of course,” I lied smoothly. “Who doesn’t know the song!” Then I laughed.
It sounded, even to me, more than a little insane. I was beginning to crack from nerves.
“Ha! You got me, yo!” Obi grinned, easily appeased. He contorted his hands into some kind of gang sign. “She just buggin’!”
I wondered how much worse this day was going to get.
Obi rattled off a list of instructions about how I was to act, stand, and stare off pensively into the middle distance while Nico lip-synched the lyrics as the song played over the speakers. I was tempted to give Obi another heart attack by asking about my character’s motivation, but decided in the end to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want anything coming between me and that thirty grand.
“We good? You got it?” Without waiting for an answer, Obi turned and swaggered back to the bank of cameras, and started barking orders.
“He’s the director?”
“Yes, honey, he’s the director. He’s the director in music video at the moment.”
“He looks like a teenager!”
Kenji chortled. “Among other things. But he’s the real deal, lovey.”
“What’s with his name?”
“Random, right? It’s a thing now. All these young directors are giving themselves nicknames, think it makes them sound badass. Obi is short for Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi Master.” He snickered. “Because, you know, our boy over there is so in touch with the Force.”
I rolled my eyes.
Kenji added, “And by the way, please don’t make any more jokes about not knowing the song. It’s probably one of the best rock ballads ever written. It’s a shoo-in for the Grammy this year.”
