Mr. Hollywood’s Secret by Adora Crooks
Nico
My phone clatters on my nightstand.
I reach out to grab it. Normally, my arm would collide with Eric’s warm body on the way to my phone. Instead, it slices through thin air. I pick up the phone and peel back my sleep mask. The lighted words on the phone vibrate as my eyes adjust in the dark.
It’s one in the morning, and Chrys’ number pops up on my phone.
A shiver of fear goes through me. Why would she be calling?
I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“I spy with my little eye…something that starts with the letter V.”
A momentary pause to go through my mental Rolodex. “Vodka?”
She gasps. “Oh, you’re good at this.”
“Are you drunk?”
“No, but I might be later.”
I let out a deep sigh. “Okay,” I tell her, “talk to me.”
* * *
And she does. We talk. For hours.
Me: “What’s your sign?”
Her: “Cancer.”
Me: “Ah, Cancer. The emotional one.”
Her: “It’s true. I cry at sad commercials.”
Me: “That sounds right. I’m a Virgo. He’s an Aries.”
Her: [gasping] “The ram. That explains everything.”
* * *
Me: “Antonio Banderas, Monica Bellucci, and Brad Pitt.”
Her: “Fuck Antonio, marry Monica, and kill Brad Pitt.”
Me: “Not a fan of Fight Club?”
Her: “Overrated, but mostly, I am still not over Jennifer Aniston.”
Me: “Ah, love is tragedy.”
* * *
Her: “How long have we been on the phone?”
Me: “Two hours.”
Her: “What do you think the roaming charge is on that?”
Me: “The production company is paying for your phones, aren’t they? Scalp the bastards.”
* * *
Me: “He’s really not that bad, you know.”
Her: “Maybe to you, but I’m pretty sure he hates me.”
Me: “Eric can be slow to warm.”
Her: “Any helpful tips?”
Me: “He’s a brute on the outside, but a puppy dog underneath.”
Her: “So I should start chucking tennis balls?”
Me: [Laughing, then quiet] “When you kiss him…run your fingers through his hair. He likes that.”
* * *
I’m lying on my bed, watching the ceiling. We’ve lapsed into one of those comfortable silences, the ones where someone is going to say soon, Well, I should let you go.
But I don’t want this conversation to end. And neither does she. I can feel she needs the companionship, maybe more than I do.
Why did we ever let so much time and space come between us?
“How did you meet Eric?” she asks.
“Have you seen the movie Second Hand Kill?”
“I missed that one, sorry.”
“You and most of America. That movie was based off of my book, Three O’Clock Shadow.”
She gasps, “I loved that one.”
“Thank you. They took some liberties with the movie, mind you—added some sex and car chases to make my modern noir palatable for the mainstream audience.”
“Wasn’t Eric in that movie?”
“He was. He played my dashing hero, Isaac Black. The production company paid me handsomely for the rights to my work, and I never heard from them again. Truthfully, I’m not even sure the scriptwriter read the source material.
“Eric did. Which, honestly, surprised me. Considering his past performances, I assumed the extent of his character work was hitting the gym. I was wrong. He read my book and called me almost every day. And this was before filming! He wanted to know Isaac’s backstory—what his parents were like, how he’d grown up. He wanted to know my thoughts on the character’s motivations, why he acted a certain way, did he truly love Lola or was she just a passing fancy…?
“It started on the phone, but eventually, we were meeting regularly. I’d have him over once or twice a week. We’d eat lunch on the back patio and discuss the character.
“I was…in a bad place at the time. For some writers, getting their work auctioned off would be a dream come true. For me, this was the end of my dream. I had just about given up on writing. I didn’t sell the rights because I wanted to see what would become of it—I wanted to be done with it. This novel that I had spent years working on was about to become a summer box-office flop, stripped of all meaning and stuffed with cheap one-liners and 3-D special effects.
“I felt like a failure. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t sleep. I’d started drinking rather heavily. I was depressed but functional; no one around me, not even my mother, had a clue how bad it’d gotten. I daydreamed about downing a bottle of sleeping pills and tossing myself in the pool. It was that bad.”
Chrys sighs. “Oh, Nico. I had no idea.”
“No one did. At least, that’s what I thought. My meetings with Eric—they’d become the highlight of my week. His questions started shifting, less about the characters, more about myself. He’d become my therapy session. And he was a great listener—he would sit there and say nothing, let me ramble and vent. Then finally, one night, when I’d spent all day talking and he’d spent all day listening, he turned to me and said, ‘No one knows how much pain you’re really in, do they?’
“It stuck with me. No one did know, because I’d let my pride get in the way of asking for help. Eric, quite literally, saved my life. I asked for help. Stopped drinking. Started seeing a real therapist. Started writing again—I’ve published two novels since.”
“That’s great, Nico. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you.”
“So when did it get…romantic?”
“Well…let’s just say it got physical before it became romantic. We held off on committing as long as we could…he didn’t want to draw me into his world, I worried that my emotional baggage would be too much for him to carry. But we were compatible. In every aspect. We fell in love. You can’t always help that.”
“Do you wish you could?”
“No. Not for a second.”
“It sounds like you two are happy together.”
I swallow my tongue. The silence around me feels heavy. The air compresses. To her credit, she lets me have my silence. She lets me work through my ivy-tangle of thoughts.
“I think that’s what worries me, truthfully,” I confess after a while.
“What does?”
“That no one knows.”
“Knows what?”
“How much pain he’s in.”