Fic: Grace - Chapter 14
Title: Grace - Chapter 14 (part 1)
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
A/N: Just for the record, Katy Steele and Justin Burford are engaged in real life. I'm pretty sure Amiel is married too, but that's not in this. All three of these people are Australian musicians. I couldn't resist sneaking them in. ^^
Chapter 14
You see it in a million shitty highschool films, a million sitcoms, a thousand soap operas. You see the girl after a break up, sobbing too hard into some over-stuffed teddy bear, downing chocolates like they’re going out of fashion. You’re unlikely to see the guy, or, if you do, he’s out with his mates, out with strippers, all pouty and angry and sex-driven. But in reality, the all shattering truth is that the guy’s probably at home too. Choking back tears into the bed sheets and drowning his organs in a pool of expensive alcohol, the original Star Wars films playing too loudly in the background.
The media shapes the world with clever fingertips, creates faux idols and mans a race that worships the centerfold spreads in Playboy, in Playgirl. The Church of the Body, the Church of Sexuality, the foundations of today’s moral ventures. After all, ladies and gentlemen, each battle for justice, for rights and for love, these are all fought by men with chiseled jaws and protruding six-packs, men desensitized and stiff and brave. The girls though, they’re all man-made mountains instead of breasts, waists I could fit my fingers around, hair as naturally blonde as my skin is naturally blue. They swoon, they sigh, they say ‘like’ too much, and really, really they epitomize the damsel-in-distress. Only, you know, dumber.
Me Tarzan, you Jane.
And maybe it’s sad, that as I sit here, fingers clenched in the bed sheets, month old stubble starting a forest on my face, maybe I realize that I think too much. Seriously.
What’s even sadder is the fact that me and Ryan, we were never together; this isn’t even a real fucking break-up.
“Over the last four weeks,” Jon mutters, and he’s slouched across the end of my bed, bottle of whisky clenched in his stubby fingers, “you have become incredibly boring.”
“Thanks,” I reply. “Who says no effort doesn’t get you anywhere, huh?”
“I’m five minutes from setting Loretta on you,” he says, and he’s staring at me with half-lidded, glassy brown eyes. “Fuck knows she’s been desperate to give you a piece of her mind since you came home off your face. Point is,” he says, and he sits up a little straighter, a little taller, and I just shove my face into the pillow. “Point is, I want you to give me an excuse not to set her on you, coz Christ knows she’s gonna eat your soul.”
I sigh too hard, can feel my chest delve further into the mattress. “She’ll find a way in anyway, she’s been quiet too long, I can feel her twitch from here.”
Jon gives me one last look, a furrowed brow and pursed lips. “Are you sure? Loretta, she’s a scary woman.”
“Ngh,” I say, wave a handful of fingers, and Jon, he just shrugs in reply.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Ngh,” I repeat, and clench my fingers beneath the pillow. I’m gonna regret this, but at least I know I’m gonna regret it.
I hear Jon’s sneakers slide across the floor, the door shut gently behind him before, well, before it’s slammed back open again, and a set of angry stilettos are stomping across the tiles, and maybe it’s the same effect that the mobile phone has in Jurassic Park. Terror goes hand in hand with Loretta’s stilettos.
The curtains are suddenly jerked open, and my face, and the light, it just, ngh, burns. The sheets are ripped from my back, from beneath me too, and there’s a hole in the space between my shoulders from where Loretta glares like a violent animal.
I glance up, and she’s staring at me, all angry eyes and hands on hips. “Brendon,” she starts, and her eyes look me up and down, “Brendon this is just fucking sad.”
“Ngh,” I whisper, turn around till my forehead hits the bedside table.
“We start shooting Build God in a week, Brendon.”
“I know.”
“Good.” She rolls her eyes, shoves the fringe away from my eyes with cool fingers. She’s staring right at me, and her face is stony, gaunt, really, really pissed off. “Shave, shower, piss, and go get yourself some fucking coffee. And no, Jon can’t do it for you, but the friendly people at Starbucks can. Get out of this fucking room.”
*
That big green logo that illuminates thousands of streets across America, that fucking Starbucks thing, it draws me to it like mosquitoes to banana, to honey, to those bug catchers that fizzle like the electric chairs in Mississippi. I can smell the brains, see them melt out of some criminal’s nostrils, some mastermind loses his intellect to his nose hair.
The mug here, the cup, it’s warm in my fingers, and I take a draining gulp before I even notice that the chair across from me has been pulled out. A familiar body slipping in, long and fluid.
“Are you always this fucking mopey, or is it just since meeting me?”
“Is that intended as sarcasm?” I ask, because I honestly don’t know. Maybe the coffee is eating my IQ, or maybe it’s the depression.
“I don’t know,” Spencer says, sucks up the steam from his coffee like a vacuum, like Catherine snorting cocaine. “It wasn’t not serious, and I guess that’s what matters,” he says, quirks a brow and grins through his teeth. “You’re a miserable asshole to be around. Your profiles and interviews are misleading.”
I shrug, slide down my chair, and Spencer, he just smiles at me some more. “You should be nicer to me,” he says. “According to Dolly magazine, you’re my celebrity dream match.”
I snort a little, but maybe Spencer, maybe he deserves my smiles. He’s a nice guy, and I can see why Ryan would like him. I can see why Jon adores him.
“We start shooting next week,” he says, “you ready?”
“Yeah,” I reply, shrug, “basically. The last draft of the script was dropped in like, three weeks ago. It’s…it’s really fucking good.”
“It’s very Ryan,” he says, but he’s still smiling, some million-watt thing that should see him on the front of every pamphlet in every dentistry. “Dark and angsty, everyone lies, everyone cheats and no one is capable of love apart from the Yugoslavian mail-order bride.”
“It’s good,” I say again. “My character is the epitome of irony.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says, “he had you cast down to a T. I’m directing, y’know, I get to boss you around like, formally.”
“Don’t think that much of it,” I reply, and I grin, rub my warm fingers through my hair. “I’m pretty sure I can fire you.”
Spencer laughs, clutches his coffee to his chest like it’s his last meal, and I just, I’m tired right now, and he trails off too quickly. Maybe we both forget that we aren’t really friends.
“Tell me where Ryan is,” I ask before I can stop myself, desperation seeping into my tone.
Spencer sighs because this, this was quick to become a fucking routine. “No.” And he gets up to leave.
I tell myself I’ve moved on, but I haven’t, and that in itself, it just hurts.
*
There are six major characters in Build God.
Six angry little fuckers, all fists and fury, repression and innocence and broken hearts, six personalities that are so fucking three-dimensional that I have to remind myself that they aren’t real. Have to force myself to ignore those parallels that creep up the corners of the page.
I am Timothy Wyatt. I’m a lawyer at the Black House of Justice, and Ryan, he loves to play on words, loves that I wear black suits for my black heart for my shameless racist behaviour. I’m sexist, I’m homophobic, and I’m angry too much. I don’t use my fists to end a fight, but this is because I don’t have to; my words, they are far, far more effective. I don’t love anything, I don’t want to, but it’s more the fact that I can’t, and maybe Ryan, maybe Ryan was thinking I’d get the hint.
I do fall in love though, as much as I can anyway. I fall in love with Jelena completely by accident. Jelena the mail-order bride from Yugoslavia (even if she says she’s from Texas). Jelena who tries too hard to understand how America works, who watches Desperate Housewives to try to figure out how to act, to try and figure out how to speak English. Jelena is the beautiful wife of my ugly colleague.
My colleague Paul who has crawled his way to the top of this law firm with knives instead of hands, a backstabber and a bastard and kinda a sleaze.
He buys Scarlet, Scarlet the Catholic prostitute who says her rosaries before she fucks someone, says twenty Hail Mary’s and crosses herself when he’s sprawled on top of her, when her fingers reach for his wallet. Scarlet who falls in love with the drug addict, the dealer, the kid with no future.
Scarlet who falls in love with Jake. Jake who falls in love with Scarlet. Jake who deals cocaine at night and works as a butler for Paul during the day. Jake who works with Mihai.
Mihai, the tiny little Asian maid who can’t remember which specific country she’s from. Mihai, who tells a story that she doesn’t understand, Mihai, who narrates the whole goddamn ugly thing.
So there are six major characters in Build God, and none of them are particularly likeable.
Loretta is sitting on a fold-out chair opposite me, and we’re at the first meeting of the cast and crew. Her eyes flick over the script, scan the page too quickly, and her legs, they cross over each other, hidden behind thick knee-high stockings. It’s winter and it’s fucking cold here in New Jersey.
“Do you know much about the other leads?” Jon asks, and he scratches at the back of his head with blunt fingers. He’s wearing sandals today, and Loretta, she almost punched him when she saw.
“Yeah,” Loretta says, and she doesn’t glance up from the pages in front of her, flicks through a couple. “Yeah, uh, Scarlet is being played by Amiel Daemionn, soft and quiet girl, has starred in a few indie flicks but other than that not a lot…fucking gorgeous though.”
Jon nods, tips his head back a little and rests an arm on my shoulder. “Jelena?”
“Katy Steele. Apparently a friend of Ryan’s,” she says, and her eyes flick just enough to glance at me. “This is her first major role, and according to Spencer the character was written with her in mind. Her fiancé is playing Jake, an Australian boy, Justin Burford.”
I nod this time, lean my head over into Jon’s neck. “Paul?”
“Brandon Flowers.”
There’s a guy beside me before I even have the chance to think him into existence. A lean, good looking man with the worst moustache I’ve ever seen in my life. He looks like a villain from a silent film, and maybe I should hide Loretta, hide my female co-stars because I can see him carrying them away and tying them to a train track somewhere. He sticks out a handful of long fingers. “Brandon Flowers,” he says again, and I nod in reply.
“Brendon Urie.”
Somewhere in the backdrop, Loretta rolls her eyes, shifts her feet on the grass beneath her. The audience pays no heed, she’s not a lead here, not at the moment, and it’s funny how as soon as I get on set, life is suddenly a movie. Life is suddenly a million flickering images that are way too easy to detach from.
Brandon doesn’t take long in getting distracted, his eyes flick past me to Loretta and Jon, and yeah, his eyes were quick to seek them out, but they’re even quicker to dismiss them. Loretta, she pulls her jacket off the back of the chair and moves to talk to Jon.
“Jelena, I presume,” he says, and my face falls, and maybe I’m too quick to defend myself, too quick to pull my sword from my belt and fight to the bitter end with this guy and his ugly moustache.
“Try Scarlet.” And there’s a girl behind me, a frail, blonde little thing, with dark eyes and skin as pale as the white of an egg.
“You look too European,” Brandon says, and he does this half-smile that leaves me more disgruntled than I’d admit to.
“I’m Amiel,” she says, and she huddles deeper into her olive-jacket, the purple scarf that eats her neck and her chest and maybe the lower half of her heart-shaped face (her heart-shaped everything, coz Amiel, she’s all gentle touches and bedroom eyes even at the lunch table, even behind the camera, and this, this must be why she got the part).
“Brandon,” he says, and what he lets creep across the corners of his face is almost a leer.
“Brendon,” I answer, and Loretta and Jon behind me, they shrug tired shoulders and cast identical lidded stares. Maybe there’s chemistry between these two, between Brandon and Amiel, but that nagging instinct to save her chews at the space between my toes.
This is ridiculous, and it is, coz five minutes ago I’d be able to walk past either without a second glance.
“Katy!” And there’s another girl here, this one all glassy skin and heavy dark hair that frames her drooping eyes and lips that could be put behind glass. Lips that could exist in the Louvre (or maybe on a particularly wealthy hooker).
Brandon nods, and Amiel lets loose a tiny grin, one that doesn’t stretch to her eyes, this tiny twitch of her mouth, and maybe there’s this sadness about her that I’ve only really seen with Ryan.
Katy’s eyebrows fight to hide beneath her fringe, but she shrugs, and twirls in her worn-out sneakers until she’s maybe twenty centimeters in front of me.
“Katy Steele,” she says, nods and smiles up at me with a set of picture perfect teeth. Lips that tighten and cheeks that swell, and fuck, she smiles with her whole face.
“Brendon Urie,” I reply, and Katy’s eyes widen and her body stiffens, but her face, it’s still fucking smiling. Brandon and Amiel are deep in conversation, slipped away into the backdrop, and Loretta and Jon, they’ve fallen off the face of the earth.
“The boy who broke Ryan Ross’ heart, and wow, if that in itself doesn’t deserve a punch in the face.”
“Spencer beat you to it,” I say, touch the space beneath my eye, touch my nose, because even if it was two months ago, the memory still hurts.
“Good,” she says, “I think I have a better right hook, but I’m not one to dish out punishment where punishment has already been dished.”
I’ll establish very quickly that Katy is a person very hard to not like. She’s also a very hard person to get rid of, entirely capable of crawling beneath your fingernails and digging in the heels of her battered converse. She’s not someone that I have lost contact with yet, even after all these years and all these fights and the falling outs that come advertised on Hollywood’s travel pamphlets, and that, it’s better than I thought it would be.
Loretta wanders over from that vast space behind me, close enough to grip my arm tight through my jacket. “All right?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I wrap an arm around her shoulders, nod to Katy where she grins back at me. “Katy, Loretta, Loretta, Katy.”
Loretta sticks out a handful of pale fingers, and Katy accepts with ones clothed in pink wool, orange bobbles sticking off her wrists like the model planets kids make in the first grade.
Brandon is a few feet in front of us, he wraps his jacket around Amiel’s tiny frame, and she practically fucking swoons. I have Loretta and Katy on either side, and both roll their eyes in almost perfect synchronization.
“Well,” Katy whispers, “this is gonna be fun.”
Loretta nods, letting a sneer escape across her face. “Between the playboys and the sluts there shall be no reprieve for lowly managers.”
“I’m engaged,” Katy says, and she glances up at Loretta with honey-eyes. “Faithful too.”
Loretta shrugs, looks at me with a tired stare, but Katy, she doesn’t cave that easily. “And I come bearing cigarettes for lowly managers.”
Dark eyes light up like a Christmas tree, and she moves to Katy’s petite side, links arms with a girl that’ll be her best friend too quickly. “My reprieve is a freakish little actress from Australia,” Loretta hums on the wind. “I can deal.”
Katy grins, a great, hearty thing, and pulls two cancer sticks from the wrist of her glove. Loretta turns around quickly, pecks Katy on the cheek and steals a cigarette from between her pink fingers.
“For some reason, I knew you’d like each other.” Spencer’s smiling behind us, and he’s supposed to talk us all through the script today, the order of the whole thing.
“Hi.” Katy pulls loose of Loretta’s gentle hold, leaps across the concrete flooring to wrap her arms around Spencer’s neck. “I’m getting me a fucking soy latte.”
*
Continue to Part 2.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
A/N: Just for the record, Katy Steele and Justin Burford are engaged in real life. I'm pretty sure Amiel is married too, but that's not in this. All three of these people are Australian musicians. I couldn't resist sneaking them in. ^^
Chapter 14
You see it in a million shitty highschool films, a million sitcoms, a thousand soap operas. You see the girl after a break up, sobbing too hard into some over-stuffed teddy bear, downing chocolates like they’re going out of fashion. You’re unlikely to see the guy, or, if you do, he’s out with his mates, out with strippers, all pouty and angry and sex-driven. But in reality, the all shattering truth is that the guy’s probably at home too. Choking back tears into the bed sheets and drowning his organs in a pool of expensive alcohol, the original Star Wars films playing too loudly in the background.
The media shapes the world with clever fingertips, creates faux idols and mans a race that worships the centerfold spreads in Playboy, in Playgirl. The Church of the Body, the Church of Sexuality, the foundations of today’s moral ventures. After all, ladies and gentlemen, each battle for justice, for rights and for love, these are all fought by men with chiseled jaws and protruding six-packs, men desensitized and stiff and brave. The girls though, they’re all man-made mountains instead of breasts, waists I could fit my fingers around, hair as naturally blonde as my skin is naturally blue. They swoon, they sigh, they say ‘like’ too much, and really, really they epitomize the damsel-in-distress. Only, you know, dumber.
Me Tarzan, you Jane.
And maybe it’s sad, that as I sit here, fingers clenched in the bed sheets, month old stubble starting a forest on my face, maybe I realize that I think too much. Seriously.
What’s even sadder is the fact that me and Ryan, we were never together; this isn’t even a real fucking break-up.
“Over the last four weeks,” Jon mutters, and he’s slouched across the end of my bed, bottle of whisky clenched in his stubby fingers, “you have become incredibly boring.”
“Thanks,” I reply. “Who says no effort doesn’t get you anywhere, huh?”
“I’m five minutes from setting Loretta on you,” he says, and he’s staring at me with half-lidded, glassy brown eyes. “Fuck knows she’s been desperate to give you a piece of her mind since you came home off your face. Point is,” he says, and he sits up a little straighter, a little taller, and I just shove my face into the pillow. “Point is, I want you to give me an excuse not to set her on you, coz Christ knows she’s gonna eat your soul.”
I sigh too hard, can feel my chest delve further into the mattress. “She’ll find a way in anyway, she’s been quiet too long, I can feel her twitch from here.”
Jon gives me one last look, a furrowed brow and pursed lips. “Are you sure? Loretta, she’s a scary woman.”
“Ngh,” I say, wave a handful of fingers, and Jon, he just shrugs in reply.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Ngh,” I repeat, and clench my fingers beneath the pillow. I’m gonna regret this, but at least I know I’m gonna regret it.
I hear Jon’s sneakers slide across the floor, the door shut gently behind him before, well, before it’s slammed back open again, and a set of angry stilettos are stomping across the tiles, and maybe it’s the same effect that the mobile phone has in Jurassic Park. Terror goes hand in hand with Loretta’s stilettos.
The curtains are suddenly jerked open, and my face, and the light, it just, ngh, burns. The sheets are ripped from my back, from beneath me too, and there’s a hole in the space between my shoulders from where Loretta glares like a violent animal.
I glance up, and she’s staring at me, all angry eyes and hands on hips. “Brendon,” she starts, and her eyes look me up and down, “Brendon this is just fucking sad.”
“Ngh,” I whisper, turn around till my forehead hits the bedside table.
“We start shooting Build God in a week, Brendon.”
“I know.”
“Good.” She rolls her eyes, shoves the fringe away from my eyes with cool fingers. She’s staring right at me, and her face is stony, gaunt, really, really pissed off. “Shave, shower, piss, and go get yourself some fucking coffee. And no, Jon can’t do it for you, but the friendly people at Starbucks can. Get out of this fucking room.”
*
That big green logo that illuminates thousands of streets across America, that fucking Starbucks thing, it draws me to it like mosquitoes to banana, to honey, to those bug catchers that fizzle like the electric chairs in Mississippi. I can smell the brains, see them melt out of some criminal’s nostrils, some mastermind loses his intellect to his nose hair.
The mug here, the cup, it’s warm in my fingers, and I take a draining gulp before I even notice that the chair across from me has been pulled out. A familiar body slipping in, long and fluid.
“Are you always this fucking mopey, or is it just since meeting me?”
“Is that intended as sarcasm?” I ask, because I honestly don’t know. Maybe the coffee is eating my IQ, or maybe it’s the depression.
“I don’t know,” Spencer says, sucks up the steam from his coffee like a vacuum, like Catherine snorting cocaine. “It wasn’t not serious, and I guess that’s what matters,” he says, quirks a brow and grins through his teeth. “You’re a miserable asshole to be around. Your profiles and interviews are misleading.”
I shrug, slide down my chair, and Spencer, he just smiles at me some more. “You should be nicer to me,” he says. “According to Dolly magazine, you’re my celebrity dream match.”
I snort a little, but maybe Spencer, maybe he deserves my smiles. He’s a nice guy, and I can see why Ryan would like him. I can see why Jon adores him.
“We start shooting next week,” he says, “you ready?”
“Yeah,” I reply, shrug, “basically. The last draft of the script was dropped in like, three weeks ago. It’s…it’s really fucking good.”
“It’s very Ryan,” he says, but he’s still smiling, some million-watt thing that should see him on the front of every pamphlet in every dentistry. “Dark and angsty, everyone lies, everyone cheats and no one is capable of love apart from the Yugoslavian mail-order bride.”
“It’s good,” I say again. “My character is the epitome of irony.”
“Yeah,” Spencer says, “he had you cast down to a T. I’m directing, y’know, I get to boss you around like, formally.”
“Don’t think that much of it,” I reply, and I grin, rub my warm fingers through my hair. “I’m pretty sure I can fire you.”
Spencer laughs, clutches his coffee to his chest like it’s his last meal, and I just, I’m tired right now, and he trails off too quickly. Maybe we both forget that we aren’t really friends.
“Tell me where Ryan is,” I ask before I can stop myself, desperation seeping into my tone.
Spencer sighs because this, this was quick to become a fucking routine. “No.” And he gets up to leave.
I tell myself I’ve moved on, but I haven’t, and that in itself, it just hurts.
*
There are six major characters in Build God.
Six angry little fuckers, all fists and fury, repression and innocence and broken hearts, six personalities that are so fucking three-dimensional that I have to remind myself that they aren’t real. Have to force myself to ignore those parallels that creep up the corners of the page.
I am Timothy Wyatt. I’m a lawyer at the Black House of Justice, and Ryan, he loves to play on words, loves that I wear black suits for my black heart for my shameless racist behaviour. I’m sexist, I’m homophobic, and I’m angry too much. I don’t use my fists to end a fight, but this is because I don’t have to; my words, they are far, far more effective. I don’t love anything, I don’t want to, but it’s more the fact that I can’t, and maybe Ryan, maybe Ryan was thinking I’d get the hint.
I do fall in love though, as much as I can anyway. I fall in love with Jelena completely by accident. Jelena the mail-order bride from Yugoslavia (even if she says she’s from Texas). Jelena who tries too hard to understand how America works, who watches Desperate Housewives to try to figure out how to act, to try and figure out how to speak English. Jelena is the beautiful wife of my ugly colleague.
My colleague Paul who has crawled his way to the top of this law firm with knives instead of hands, a backstabber and a bastard and kinda a sleaze.
He buys Scarlet, Scarlet the Catholic prostitute who says her rosaries before she fucks someone, says twenty Hail Mary’s and crosses herself when he’s sprawled on top of her, when her fingers reach for his wallet. Scarlet who falls in love with the drug addict, the dealer, the kid with no future.
Scarlet who falls in love with Jake. Jake who falls in love with Scarlet. Jake who deals cocaine at night and works as a butler for Paul during the day. Jake who works with Mihai.
Mihai, the tiny little Asian maid who can’t remember which specific country she’s from. Mihai, who tells a story that she doesn’t understand, Mihai, who narrates the whole goddamn ugly thing.
So there are six major characters in Build God, and none of them are particularly likeable.
Loretta is sitting on a fold-out chair opposite me, and we’re at the first meeting of the cast and crew. Her eyes flick over the script, scan the page too quickly, and her legs, they cross over each other, hidden behind thick knee-high stockings. It’s winter and it’s fucking cold here in New Jersey.
“Do you know much about the other leads?” Jon asks, and he scratches at the back of his head with blunt fingers. He’s wearing sandals today, and Loretta, she almost punched him when she saw.
“Yeah,” Loretta says, and she doesn’t glance up from the pages in front of her, flicks through a couple. “Yeah, uh, Scarlet is being played by Amiel Daemionn, soft and quiet girl, has starred in a few indie flicks but other than that not a lot…fucking gorgeous though.”
Jon nods, tips his head back a little and rests an arm on my shoulder. “Jelena?”
“Katy Steele. Apparently a friend of Ryan’s,” she says, and her eyes flick just enough to glance at me. “This is her first major role, and according to Spencer the character was written with her in mind. Her fiancé is playing Jake, an Australian boy, Justin Burford.”
I nod this time, lean my head over into Jon’s neck. “Paul?”
“Brandon Flowers.”
There’s a guy beside me before I even have the chance to think him into existence. A lean, good looking man with the worst moustache I’ve ever seen in my life. He looks like a villain from a silent film, and maybe I should hide Loretta, hide my female co-stars because I can see him carrying them away and tying them to a train track somewhere. He sticks out a handful of long fingers. “Brandon Flowers,” he says again, and I nod in reply.
“Brendon Urie.”
Somewhere in the backdrop, Loretta rolls her eyes, shifts her feet on the grass beneath her. The audience pays no heed, she’s not a lead here, not at the moment, and it’s funny how as soon as I get on set, life is suddenly a movie. Life is suddenly a million flickering images that are way too easy to detach from.
Brandon doesn’t take long in getting distracted, his eyes flick past me to Loretta and Jon, and yeah, his eyes were quick to seek them out, but they’re even quicker to dismiss them. Loretta, she pulls her jacket off the back of the chair and moves to talk to Jon.
“Jelena, I presume,” he says, and my face falls, and maybe I’m too quick to defend myself, too quick to pull my sword from my belt and fight to the bitter end with this guy and his ugly moustache.
“Try Scarlet.” And there’s a girl behind me, a frail, blonde little thing, with dark eyes and skin as pale as the white of an egg.
“You look too European,” Brandon says, and he does this half-smile that leaves me more disgruntled than I’d admit to.
“I’m Amiel,” she says, and she huddles deeper into her olive-jacket, the purple scarf that eats her neck and her chest and maybe the lower half of her heart-shaped face (her heart-shaped everything, coz Amiel, she’s all gentle touches and bedroom eyes even at the lunch table, even behind the camera, and this, this must be why she got the part).
“Brandon,” he says, and what he lets creep across the corners of his face is almost a leer.
“Brendon,” I answer, and Loretta and Jon behind me, they shrug tired shoulders and cast identical lidded stares. Maybe there’s chemistry between these two, between Brandon and Amiel, but that nagging instinct to save her chews at the space between my toes.
This is ridiculous, and it is, coz five minutes ago I’d be able to walk past either without a second glance.
“Katy!” And there’s another girl here, this one all glassy skin and heavy dark hair that frames her drooping eyes and lips that could be put behind glass. Lips that could exist in the Louvre (or maybe on a particularly wealthy hooker).
Brandon nods, and Amiel lets loose a tiny grin, one that doesn’t stretch to her eyes, this tiny twitch of her mouth, and maybe there’s this sadness about her that I’ve only really seen with Ryan.
Katy’s eyebrows fight to hide beneath her fringe, but she shrugs, and twirls in her worn-out sneakers until she’s maybe twenty centimeters in front of me.
“Katy Steele,” she says, nods and smiles up at me with a set of picture perfect teeth. Lips that tighten and cheeks that swell, and fuck, she smiles with her whole face.
“Brendon Urie,” I reply, and Katy’s eyes widen and her body stiffens, but her face, it’s still fucking smiling. Brandon and Amiel are deep in conversation, slipped away into the backdrop, and Loretta and Jon, they’ve fallen off the face of the earth.
“The boy who broke Ryan Ross’ heart, and wow, if that in itself doesn’t deserve a punch in the face.”
“Spencer beat you to it,” I say, touch the space beneath my eye, touch my nose, because even if it was two months ago, the memory still hurts.
“Good,” she says, “I think I have a better right hook, but I’m not one to dish out punishment where punishment has already been dished.”
I’ll establish very quickly that Katy is a person very hard to not like. She’s also a very hard person to get rid of, entirely capable of crawling beneath your fingernails and digging in the heels of her battered converse. She’s not someone that I have lost contact with yet, even after all these years and all these fights and the falling outs that come advertised on Hollywood’s travel pamphlets, and that, it’s better than I thought it would be.
Loretta wanders over from that vast space behind me, close enough to grip my arm tight through my jacket. “All right?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I wrap an arm around her shoulders, nod to Katy where she grins back at me. “Katy, Loretta, Loretta, Katy.”
Loretta sticks out a handful of pale fingers, and Katy accepts with ones clothed in pink wool, orange bobbles sticking off her wrists like the model planets kids make in the first grade.
Brandon is a few feet in front of us, he wraps his jacket around Amiel’s tiny frame, and she practically fucking swoons. I have Loretta and Katy on either side, and both roll their eyes in almost perfect synchronization.
“Well,” Katy whispers, “this is gonna be fun.”
Loretta nods, letting a sneer escape across her face. “Between the playboys and the sluts there shall be no reprieve for lowly managers.”
“I’m engaged,” Katy says, and she glances up at Loretta with honey-eyes. “Faithful too.”
Loretta shrugs, looks at me with a tired stare, but Katy, she doesn’t cave that easily. “And I come bearing cigarettes for lowly managers.”
Dark eyes light up like a Christmas tree, and she moves to Katy’s petite side, links arms with a girl that’ll be her best friend too quickly. “My reprieve is a freakish little actress from Australia,” Loretta hums on the wind. “I can deal.”
Katy grins, a great, hearty thing, and pulls two cancer sticks from the wrist of her glove. Loretta turns around quickly, pecks Katy on the cheek and steals a cigarette from between her pink fingers.
“For some reason, I knew you’d like each other.” Spencer’s smiling behind us, and he’s supposed to talk us all through the script today, the order of the whole thing.
“Hi.” Katy pulls loose of Loretta’s gentle hold, leaps across the concrete flooring to wrap her arms around Spencer’s neck. “I’m getting me a fucking soy latte.”
*
Continue to Part 2.