Read Online Shooting Star (Beautiful Chaos) by Arianne Richmonde - Free Book Online Page A

ignored members of my staff as they came and went: my masseuse, my chef, my hairdresser, who passed by to touch up my highlights. Jake was polite but reserved. Never once did he berate me for having so many people invading his home, and for the first time I became self-conscious—aware that having a team fluttering about me wasn’t really normal; not the way most people lived. Jake had money but he didn’t seem to need an entourage to support him, to cater to his every whim. I had indulged myself too much and now it was beginning to dawn on me that privacy—having moments completely to myself with just the dog, for instance—was actually a good thing.
    There was a magical peace in Jake’s house that I hadn’t experienced before. A calming experience. Jake was there physically but also benignly absent—an old married couple who no longer spoke to each other—that’s what it felt like between us. At least to me. I still couldn’t work out what his game plan was—if he had one. Every so often, I’d catch him observing me. A flicker of a second, a dart of the eyes, but then he’d go back to pretending I hardly existed.
    The more he ignored me, the more I wanted his attention.
    After a couple days of this (we were about to start filming in two days’ time) Jake finally broke the silence.
    “You know all your lines or just the first few scenes?” he asked out of the blue.
    “I always like to learn the whole script so I know it backwards.”
    “Good girl.”
    “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman, if you hadn’t noticed.” But when he said “good girl” my heart skipped a beat. He had just come out of the pool, trailing water as he walked into the living room, and his dirty blond hair was slicked back wet, a white towel carelessly slung about his hips, accentuating that manly V, his body bronzed—and for the first time I got to see how beautiful the contours of his muscles were: his arms taut and strong, his chest wide, narrowing beautifully down to a segmented stomach. Not bulky or thick—but lean like a tennis or soccer player—somebody muscular because of sport, not because of weights. It was the first time he’d had a swim since I’d been here—usually he was in the main living room, his head buried in a huge great art book, gleaning inspiration for a scene or watching old movies with the blinds drawn, freeze-framing and snapping a shot with his iPhone or sketching a new idea for his storyboards. Then he’d be on the phone forever, talking to producers or location managers, or with Leo about the shooting schedule, changing things up at the last minute. Pre-production details. Cool, calm, on top of things.
    In this instant I had him to myself, as I drank in his body, admiring him the way you might a Greek marble statue at the Met or some Italian fountain in Rome.
    “I like to be flexible,” he told me, his eyes flickering for just a millisecond to my breasts before he settled back on my eyes. Water was dripping from his body like raindrop crystals. Everything seemed in slow motion—freeze-framed for me as I blinked like a camera lens to take in the shot—to save the image for later. I swear I could feel the electricity charging between us but then he looked away (upward to the right, funnily enough) squinting his gray eyes in thought, and I understood it was my imagination that had had him wanting me, desiring me. Because never had a guy ignored my come-ons so much as Jake. Never. My nipples were poking through a see-though top—I too had been swimming earlier, my hair still damp—and the air conditioning in the room had chilled them into little peaks. All for nothing! I could have been a chair or a table as far as he was concerned—so little did I matter to him, except as a tool for his movie.
    “I thought we could do a few acting exercises,” he said. “Not the scenes themselves but a bit of improvisation.”
    I loved improv. Some indie directors did whole films by way of improvisation;