Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) (18 page)

He gripped my hand and I almost lost it right there, currents twisting down my arm and dancing around my heart. I could see the hope in his eyes. “Really?” he asked.

“Really.”

***

I left Ryan with orders to learn the script—I couldn’t usefully help him much until he’d done that. Also, I needed time to process.

I walked, barely looking where I was going.

They’d
fired
him! I couldn’t wrap my head around that. I mean, sure, I worried about being kicked out of Fenbrook but, even if something as apocalyptically bad as that happened, there were always other colleges. I didn’t even want to contemplate messing up
Blue & Red
and blowing my big break but, if that happened, I at least knew that there were other acting jobs. But as a cop, once you were fired that was
it.
I was pretty sure that once you’d been fired from one force, no other force would take you...even if Ryan wanted to move to a different city. His career would be over.

I wasn’t going to let that happen. I’d help him stay in the pilot and then get back to being a cop. And...
Oh, what was that other thing?
I thought bitterly. Oh yes. I’d do that while pretending I hadn’t fallen for him. And then, when he was done with this acting thing he probably found so stupid and lightweight, he could go back to his real life and find himself a nice, normal girlfriend—maybe another cop, like Sierra—and they could settle down and raise rug rats.

I was half a block from the police station by now. I pulled out my phone and called Nat. I couldn’t tell her what was really going on, but at least I could vent about some of my other problems.

***

An hour later, we were sitting in Harper’s, the deli cafe just down the street from Fenbrook. I was staring at my salt beef sandwich (rye bread, pickle, heavy on the mustard mayo)—normally my go-to food when I’m feeling bad. But today I just gazed at it.

“Five
hundred
dollars?” asked Nat. “Just to borrow her uniform for a half hour?”

“She didn’t even let me take the gun,” I told her. “But it did get me the part. But I’m not going to see any money from that for months, and I still need to fit in classes
and
do the cop training stuff with R—with my partner. I can’t take on any more bar shifts. I may even have to cut some. That leaves a big hole in my rent money.”

Nat reached into her bag. I didn’t guess what she was winding up to do until she started counting out bills.

“What are you doing?!” My voice had risen an octave. “Put that away!”

Nat looked at me blankly. “What? It’s fine. Five hundred, right?”

“It’s not fine! I can’t just—”

“Why?” Nat sighed. “Look, let’s be realistic. I’m okay for money now. Very okay. You need some. It’s fine.”

I blinked at her. “Nat,
it
isn’t fine.
Not that much money.”

“You can pay me back if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

My eyes bugged out. “Well of course I’d pay you back! My God, you were going to give me five hundred dollars as a
gift?!”

She sighed again as if I was being stupid. Was I? I mean, I was very grateful for the offer, but didn’t she see I couldn’t possibly accept? Clarissa was rich—maybe not Darrell and Natasha rich, but seriously well off—but she’d never have dreamed of offering me money like that. The problem was that Nat was new to all this. Not so long ago, she was as poor as me.

“It’s very generous,” I said carefully, “and thank you. But no. How’s Darrell?”

She leaned forward. “Great! I mean, I have to drag him away from his work, still, but he’s doing it because he loves it, now, not because he feels he has to.”

“What’s he working on, again? A solar-powered….”

“A solar-powered aircraft that can stay in the air for months. It’s going to map the terrain in desert regions and figure out the best places to dig wells.”

“That’s good karma.”

“He keeps saying he has a lot to make up for.”

I hesitated. “Are the two of you still…?”

“You can say it:
in therapy.
Yeah. Once a week. It’s helping.” She’d finally persuaded Darrell to go a few months ago. Just another way in which she was changing. I was happy for her—I sure as hell didn’t want her to return to the dark days of self-harming. But between Karen changing and Nat changing and Clarissa heading off into the sunset with Neil—maybe literally, if she persuaded him to take her with him on his next trip—it was starting to feel as if I was losing all of them. Like they were moving on and I was standing still.

Maybe that’s what I’d doomed myself to, by inventing Jasmine. When I’d been a terrified eighteen year old, she’d been reassuringly simple and stable. Now, I was starting to realize that
stable
was a lot like
static.
I’d put on a mask, three years ago, and the problem with masks is that they can’t change.

But what choice did I have? Move somewhere else and reinvent myself again? I couldn’t handle more lies. And I couldn’t just stop being Jasmine because there was nothing left underneath. I didn’t know how to be Emma anymore.

“You okay?” asked Nat. “You look worried.”

“I’m fine. I—”

And at that moment, my phone rang, and I felt guiltily relieved at the interruption. The number wasn’t one I recognized. “Hi,” I said, doing my best Jasmine bouncy voice.

“Hi sis,” said Nick.

***

Seconds later, after waving to Nat that
I need to take this
and that she should go, I was standing outside Harper’s wishing I’d brought a jacket. After being gloriously sunny all day, it had suddenly turned cold.

I think I said something really inane, like “Well, it’s been a long time.” But honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I just stood there with my mouth open. It wasn’t that I was surprised to hear from him—I’d left my damn number at the bar in the hope he’d call. But hearing his voice slammed me straight back to Chicago. Suddenly, I couldn’t see yellow cabs and tourists and the pizza place across the street. I could see an unlit road and scrubland and trees lit up by headlights.

I could see his eyes, begging for mercy.

I crushed the phone between my palms, covering the mic, and then I leaned over the handrail outside and dry-heaved. A couple of tourists who’d been about to go in saw me and suddenly decided to go elsewhere. That would have been funny, any other time.

When I put the phone to my ear again, Nick’s voice was asking if I was okay.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m great. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You sound different,” said Nick.

Of course I sound different. You’ve never talked to Jasmine before.
He was expecting Emma, and I was busy shoving Emma back down into the darkness where she belonged.

There was an awkward silence. Given the circumstances, I was surprised there weren’t more of them. The whole call should have been one long awkward silence.

We established that I was acting—I didn’t mention Fenbrook—and that he was working in a bar—which I decided might be just about believable, if he was clean
.
We both admitted that we lived in New York—neither of us said where—and we both said we’d seen the other one at the subway station, but glossed over the fact we hadn’t sought each other out sooner.

And then we were up to date and I couldn’t put it off any longer.

“Are you still in contact with him?” I asked.

I heard him swallow. “Not since I left. You?”

The question took me by surprise. I’d been so focused on whether I was inadvertently opening up a channel to my dad by talking to Nick, it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be worried about the same thing. “No. God no. Of course not.”

Another awkward silence. But it gave me time to think things through. He’d split from my dad, just as I had. He was like me, alone in the city. We could get together and be friends—hell, we were brother and sister—

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window of Harper’s, my red hair gleaming.
More or less.

He was like me. Adrift, probably lying about his past just like I was. I should reach out to him and team up. Look after him. Except—

Except a part of me was thinking,
haven’t I already done my duty?
I’d risked a lot just by leaving my number in that bar. What if he
had
still been in contact with my dad?

I’d been worried that he was sleeping on the streets, and probably using, but he sounded okay. He said he had a job. Why not just keep a safe distance? He wasn’t asking for help.

But then I thought back to the start of that year. I’d been a hairs-breadth away from becoming an escort—
had
become an escort, technically, I’d just walked out on my first client. And I hadn’t asked for help, not even from my closest friends. Karen had had to rescue me.

What if he needed rescuing?

“Let’s meet up,” I said, not quite believing what was coming out of my mouth. We agreed on a Starbucks, in a few days’ time. And then I had to tell him that I’d changed my name. I really, really, didn’t want to tell him...but it was better than him coming out with “Emma” in front of someone. He solemnly promised to only call me “Jasmine” from now on, and that was that.

I hit the button to end the call and then stood there staring at his number.
Add as a contact?
the phone was asking me.

I hesitated...and then pressed the button for
yes.

Chapter 21

Ryan

A couple of days went by. I plowed through the script about five times and, on the fifth time, I finally started to get a feel for Tony, my character. Or at least, I could sort of see what Dixon was trying to do. I got the bad boy part: he was a rule-breaker, a corner-cutter, and he drank too much and he seemed to have bedded half the female cops in his precinct. But when I tried saying his lines, it still sounded stupid. I stood there in front of the mirror, praying my neighbors couldn’t hear me, and said the words over and over again, until they started to lodge in my brain, but it was still just words. It wasn’t like Jasmine would do it.

I was almost relieved when I got called into the studio for a uniform fitting. We were all getting special ones for the show with the fictional precinct’s number on. It was weird—like being back at the academy. Once I had the fake uniform on, it felt even stranger: familiar and yet wrong. They wanted me to walk around for a while to check the fit, so I headed out into the corridor and joined all the other actors and cops, now even more difficult to tell apart because they all looked the same.

I stopped. One of them was Jasmine.

I mean, I’d figured that maybe she’d be there somewhere, but I hadn’t counted on seeing her. Not looking like...
that.

She was in a patrol officer’s uniform, the navy pants clinging to her wonderful, rounded ass. They’d fitted the shirt and jacket well—they were the right size, but they still couldn’t hide Jasmine’s curves. Her breasts pushed out the front in a way that made me give a mental groan of longing. Everything was buttoned up and demure, but somehow it was even sexier for it.

And her hair. I’d always loved her long, silky tresses, and I’d never have thought it could look as sexy in a ponytail. But gathering it up had revealed areas of her I’d never seen: the long, elegant length of her throat, the creamy-white softness of the nape of her neck and the soft dusting of hair there. It made her look more commanding and yet sexier, too. She looked like some sort of Irish warrior princess.

And then she turned around and saw me, when I was still incapable of speech.

“What do you think?” She did a spin, which only made things worse because then I got ass and breasts and smile all at once—

Something in my brain went
fzzt
and burned out.

“Uh,” I said. Nothing more would come out, so I said it again. “Uh….”

“Too tight?” She smoothed the jacket against her breasts.

I swallowed and stared fixedly at the ceiling for a few seconds. “It’s perfect.”

She turned her back to me and, when I glanced down, she was pointing her ass at me. “Seriously?” she asked, and smoothed the fabric there, too. “I think they made it too tight on the ass. I don’t want to rip something.”

“Perfect,” I said, feeling myself flushing. She locked eyes with me for a second.
Shit!
Had she seen that? “How does it feel?” I asked, to cover my embarrassment.

“Okay, I guess. Scratchy.”

“I meant more: do you feel different?” It was out before I’d realized what I was saying and immediately I cursed myself for asking a dumbass question. I’d been thinking that
I
always felt something when I put the uniform on and I guess I wanted to share that with her.
Idiot.