Page 69 of Shine For Me

She looks over to the fire, quiet for so long I wonder if she’s not going to answer me. “I don’t want us to be over,” she finally whispers.

“Hey.” I reach down to cup her cheek, not giving a damn who might see us. Everyone here signed an NDA before filming, and who gives a shit if the crew gossips amongst themselves at this point. “June, who said anything about us being over?”

She still won’t meet my eyes. “We haven’t talked about what happens when we get to LA. When we get back to the real world.” She takes a deep breath and finally looks at me, her eyes wide and worried, but determined. “When we started this, we said we were going to ‘give it a go.’”

“We did say that,” I agree, brushing my thumb along her cheek. She got sun today, making her skin a little pink. It reminds me of the way she looked after our fishing trip, back when she was just my good friend June.

But was she really? Even then, didn’t I know, deep down, that there was more to us?

“So I guess the question is,” I continue. “What comes next after giving it a go?”

“What do you want to happen?” she asks, turning my initial question back on me.

I smile. We’re still working on that bravery thing. If she needs me to go first, I can do that.

“I want us to fall asleep in the same bed tomorrow night,” I tell her. “I want to see you as much as I can in LA.” Our gazes lock. “And I want to be able to tell the people who matter what you mean to me.”

“I want all of that, too.” She swallows. “I’ll give my grandfather one more week to work out the announcement.”

A little flash of irritation goes through me. He’s already had weeks. How much more time does he need? I have the worst feeling that he’s just stringing June along with this bullshit, like always.

“I know,” she says, sounding embarrassed. “I know how it looks. But I swear, Fox, I’m not going to let this continue.”

“I don’t want to keep hiding, June.”

She releases me to hold out a hand, gesturing around us. “Are we hiding right now?”

“You know what I mean.”

She deflates. “I’m sorry. You’ve been so patient.”

I lower my head to hers, pressing our foreheads together. “I can be patient, sweetheart. That’s not the problem.”

“The problem is you don’t trust me to follow through,” she says glumly.

“Jimmy Cain is the one I don’t trust.”

“Well it’s not up to him,” she says, and I can tell she’s trying to make her voice more sure than she feels.

There’s no point in arguing this anymore. If I keep pressing her it will just hurt her feelings. What she needs right now is to know I believe she’s capable of standing up to the bastard. So I pull her closer to me and we dance in silence.

Maybe she’s trying to prove that she’s ready to be more open about us, because June doesn’t stop touching me for the rest of the night. After a few more dances we go to the bar to refresh our drinks and she keeps my hand in hers the whole time—even when we get stopped several times to talk to cast-mates and crew members. Her cousin Bash finished up last week, so he’s already gone, but there are several other people we’ve had good working relationships with. We might have even become friends, if we weren’t so caught up in each other for most of the shoot.

We’ve just gotten our drinks when the assistant director and the production designer join us at the bar. “Christ, I thought that would never end,” Genie, the production designer, says in her gravely, two packs a day voice.

Rick, the AD, rolls his eyes. “Are you kidding? That was one of the smoothest shoots I ever worked on. When’s the last time you got through filming without a single catastrophe?”

Genie points at June. “Our lead broke her freaking ankle!”

“She twisted her ankle,” Rick says derisively. “She was barely off set. Jesus, you’re such a drama queen. Why areyounot in front of the camera?”

“The camera cannot handle all that this face and body have to offer,” she says smoothly. Genie is in her mid-sixties, drinks whiskey like it’s water, smokes both cigarettes and cigars, and likes to tell elaborate, highly detailed stories about bedding just about every famous actor in Hollywood over the years. She’s kind of my hero.

But now she’s narrowing her sharp green eyes on me. “What’s this I hear about you dropping out of the Hiller project this autumn?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see June’s head snap in my direction. I don’t have to see her face to know she’s surprised.

“Nothing official yet,” I tell Genie, not meeting June’s eye. I wanted to talk to her about this privately.