Page 44 of Shine For Me

She grimaces. “It is starting to feel sore.”

“Do you have any aloe?” She starts to get up and I press my hand to her knee. “Just tell me where it is.”

“The shelf in the bathroom.”

Of course June’s aloe comes in a sleek glass bottle with a French logo on the front—no gloopy green drugstore junk for her. As I’m leaving the bathroom, I notice a bar of soap on the sink. I lean over and take a sniff and am rewarded with that powdery scent from this morning.

I nearly trip over my own feet when I walk into the living room and see her perched on the couch, right where I left her—without a shirt.

It’s not like she’s indecent. She’s wearing a sports bra, which is the same thing she usually works out in. I’ve seen her in gowns that are far more revealing. But somehow seeing her like that sitting on a couch in her suite feels a hell of a lot different than seeing her in something skimpy on the red carpet.

She’s looking over her shoulder with a frown on her face, trying to see the burn. “I’m dead,” she mutters. “Gabe is going to kill me.”

“Your cousin isn’t going to kill you,” I say, trying not to sound like I’ve just been gargling gravel.

She snorts. “He’s not my cousin on set. He’s my director. And he’s going to be pissed.” She looks up at me. “You realize we’re shooting our sex scene in two days?”

My brain short-circuits at the wordsexcoming out of her mouth. And now I’m thinking about June wearing even less than she currently is and that’s a dangerous place for my mind to go.

“The makeup artists can handle it,” I tell her. “Let’s get this on you so you can at least feel better.”

It’s not until I’m back on the couch that I realize I’m going to have to apply the aloe to her back. Which means touching her.Who cares?I ask myself.It’s just June.

But God, those words don’t have any of their former meaning. Just June. Just the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. A girl who would spend her night off helping me learn lines. A girl who cheered so loudly when I caught my first fish today you’d have thought I’d won an Oscar. A girl who falls asleep reading romance novels and loses her glasses every night.

A girl whose skin feels like silk under my fingertips when I start to rub the aloe over her burn. Damn it. I need to get my shit together.

“Are you hungry?” she asks in her normal voice, apparently not affected in the very least by my touch. “I was thinking I might get food. I’ve been craving sushi since we got on the boat.”

“Oh, um…” I trail off, thinking about my early morning meeting with the new trainer. Sushi means a lot of rice, and the drill sergeant the studio hired for me had been very clear about the need to avoid rice. And pasta. And basically any other food that might bring me joy.

“We could hang out in here,” she says, and it’s impossible not to notice the hopeful note in her voice. “With some TV? I’ll even cede control of the remote to you.”

She laughs a little, like it’s no big deal, but there’s still that hopeful, almost uncertain tone beneath her brightness. I’ve heard it before, and it always sinks my stomach, just a little. The very first time we ever hung out she had sounded just like that, when she tried to convince my cousins Everly and Alex to go to a club opening with her. They had both immediately declined—totally not their scene—and June had brushed it off like it was no biggie.

But there was a little flicker of pure disappointment in her eyes when she looked away. And I’ve seen that same look, heard that same uncertain tone in her voice, a bunch of times since then. It’s a reminder that Juniper Cain, for all her fame and wealth and family connections, is, at her heart, a very lonely person.

“I could murder some sushi,” I say, pushing all thoughts of my trainer and his stupid diet out of my head. “But I’m taking you up on that remote thing—I’m not watching any of your shitty dating reality TV shows.”

The grin she shoots back is pure happiness, not a trace of anything lonely or sad in sight. “Deal.”

* * *

We eatsashimi and spicy dragon rolls on the couch in her suite while I flip through the channels. There’s not much on—some sports, a movie her older brother, Jack, is in which she flat out refuses to watch because he has a nude scene, and a sitcom we both hate. “Maybe we should turn on a streaming service,” I say. “What subscriptions do you have?”

She shifts a little. “I don’t really have any streaming subscriptions.”

I stop with my dragon roll halfway to my mouth and gape at her. “What? Who doesn’t have streaming services these days?”

“I don’t watch much TV.”

I bark out a laugh. “Nice try, Cain. I am well-versed in your reality TV addiction.”

She shrugs. “That stuff is on cable. I don’t watch many scripted shows, and that’s mostly what’s on Netflix and all those sites.”

“And movies,” I point out.

Another shrug. “I don’t watch many of those, either.”