When Gossip Columnist Em Springs is forced to do a story on the up-and-coming actor Luke Walker, she must go undercover as an actress on his new movie to get the juicy details.
But things quickly get out of hand when she gets promoted to the love in...
When you are utterly distracted and have had several awkward encounters, it is a proven fact that the people around you think they are the reason you are acting weird and take it upon themselves to try and fix it, even though they don't know what the actual problem is.
So soon, you have a bunch of people being extra nice to you and hardly notice, because again, you are too distracted by the fact that either your co-star is being blackmailed, or you are being blackmailed, and you aren't sure which one it is.
The rest of the shoot in Hawaii was a blur, my scenes didn't include Luke, which gave me time to figure out how to handle the blackmail situation. Should I tell him about the note? Would he think it was his? Or would he assume it was mine, and distrust me again?
The heavy feeling inside grew stronger and stronger as the shoot days continued, making it impossible to think about much when the camera wasn't on me. Dustin has gotten me another phone, and Lavender had made a point of checking before barricading the door each night.
She had kept to herself, not ignoring me, but lost in her own mind, focused on getting through the shoot without having any run ins with Luke. We had that in common. We developed a silent companionship, eating snacks while watching old movies, neither one of us saying much in general and even less about the article that had splashed across social media since my hotel night in Luke's room.
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The familiar font and logo burned me. I hadn't written anything about that night. Dawn shouldn't have known. The article shouldn't have existed at all. The post proved my suspicions that someone else was giving her information about me, and that made keeping secrets near impossible.
Dawn had changed our agreement in a flippant text that next morning, insisting I no longer had to write anything, so long as I kept causing drama as well as I was doing. She actually praised me, saying that purposefully pulling Luke into the pool, and tricking him into letting me into his room was brilliantly evil.
I felt sick, nearly breaking my new phone, angry and feeling trapped by a game with rules and players I couldn't see. So, trying to keep what little control I had left, I ignored Luke, determined to keep him and myself out of more articles. It was the only way I could think to protect Luke and Carter.
We finished shooting in Hawaii and instead of taking the jet back with Luke, I went back with the others, needing space and time to process, lost in thought, making a mental to do list of all the things I needed to do when I got back to reality, wishing I could continue pretending that a stressful world wasn't waiting for me.
...
"Then we ate dessert nachos!" Carter said, grinning widely as he set Bowser's terrarium back on the table by the window in our apartment. He had spent the entire drive from Katherine Dalton's house describing every meal they had eaten while I was gone, which had been a ridiculous amount.
I raised a brow as I dropped my bag on the ground, tired after lugging it up five flights of stairs. "What are dessert nachos?" It sounded like something Tate would invent.
