HDU #2: Dirt (11 page)

“So when do you
officially sign on to
The Legends
,
big shot?” he asked with a big grin.
 
“You know you’re gonna buy me a Maserati once you get that paycheck,
right? Remember what you promised junior year.”

Liam
laughed.
 
“I’ll buy you two once I
sign the contract.”

“That’s so
exciting!” Stella squealed.
 
She
turned to Amanda.
 
“So, if Liam
buys Connor two Maseratis, he should buy you like, a diamond necklace, right?
And take you out to some big, fancy dinner?”

Amanda smiled,
resting her palm on Liam’s knee.
 
“If he got that role,
I’d
take
him to a big, fancy dinner.”

“Right.
 
On a low-rung staff writer’s salary?”

Amanda’s eyes
fluttered up at Connor.
 
“What?”

He said nothing,
instead taking a drink of his scotch.
 
Amanda looked over at Liam whose attention was with Lilac’s general
manager who had come around to say hello.
 
Maybe he didn’t say what I thought
he said.
 
Maybe you’re still all
wonky like you were this afternoon.

“So are you
excited to start your new job tomorrow?” Stella asked brightly.
 
Amanda turned to her, catching the
scolding look she flashed Connor before asking her question.
 
“You must be so psyched about being a
writer! They always seemed like such smart, funny people to me.
 
I mean just judging from Connor and his
writer friends.”

Amanda could
feel the nervous twitch in her smile.
 
She could sense Connor just waiting for her to give a stupid
answer.
 
“I’m… incredibly excited and
nervous,” she said.
 
“But I know I
can do it,” she corrected herself hastily, not wanting to appear unconfident.

“Do what?”
Connor leaned back in his seat and draped a long arm around Stella’s narrow
shoulders as she sunk her attention into her phone and taking pictures of her
blood orange cocktail.
  
Amanda tucked her bangs behind her ears.

“Um… what do you
mean?”

“Their writers
have already been on the job this whole summer.
 
They’re mapping out the second half of the season since the
first half’s already written and shot at this point.”
 
He squinted, drumming his fingers against the table.
 
“So… what have you been doing this
whole time?”

“Oh.
 
Well… Tom emailed me a bunch of things
to… familiarize myself with.
 
I’ve
been reading the scripts and the treatment.
 
Stuff like that.
 
And other things.”
 
Dear God, Amanda, make a real sentence,
please.

Connor scratched
his chin, looking at her with exaggerated curiosity.
 
“So you can do what? What are they gonna get from you now
that you’ve familiarized yourself with the material?”

Amanda
swallowed, watching the ends of Connor’s lips twitch with what she assumed was
suppressed laughter.
 
Her mouth
opened only to close without a good reply in mind.
 
“I… don’t know,” she finally answered quietly, unsure if
he’d even heard her.
 
She stared
down at the table for a moment, trying to figure out what the hell was going on
and if she was imagining Connor’s asshole act.
 
Finally breaking the silence was Stella, who suddenly looked
up from her phone with oblivious perkiness.

“You know they
offered Connor a job on that show, too?” she asked excitedly.

Despite herself,
Amanda felt her eyes fly to him with curiosity.
 
“Really?”

He studied the
menu.
 
“As a consultant.”

“‘Cause of that
baseball movie he wrote that won at Sundance,” Stella beamed, running a hand
through Connor’s dark blonde hair.

“And… you said
no to the
Leadoff
job?” Amanda asked
him.

“I know right?”
Stella snorted, flicking Connor’s temple.
 
She only laughed at the death look he flashed her, taking a big gulp of
his drink.
 
“Such a dumbass, right?
I was like, it’s Tom Fucking Vogel.
 
You don’t say no to Tom Fucking Vogel.”

Connor swatted
her hand away, taking his glass back.
 
“It’s Tom Fucking Vogel, yeah.”
 
He took a swig of the drink before lifting his gaze to Amanda.
 
“But it was right around March and
considering some of the hires he made at that time, it kind of seemed like he
was getting desperate.”
 
Okay, are you kidding me?
Amanda felt
her jaw tighten.
 
She had been
hired in March.
 
“Wouldn’t really
want to jump onto a ship that’s already sinking, you know?” Connor said before
finishing his glass of scotch.
 
Stella blinked.

“Wait.”
 
She held her hand up, squinting
drunkenly.
 
“That was totally
rude,” she pointed out as if Connor might not have any idea.
 
“”You know Amanda’s working on that
show, right?”

Connor looked at
her incredulously.
 
“Oh.
 
Right.”

Amanda could
only stare.
 
Did that really just
happen? Connor had just taken less than two minutes to act like a complete
unredeemable asshole to her and her only witnesses were either too drunk to
notice or engaged in polite chatter with a needy, overbearing restaurant
manager who wouldn’t go the hell away.

“Liam.”
 
Amanda tugged on his sleeve, flattening
her lips into a smile at the ever-clueless manager, who finally excused
himself.

“Christ.
 
Thank you,” Liam said under his
breath.
 
Glancing down at his knee,
he removed Amanda’s hand.
 
“This
counts as torturing me,” he murmured with a low laugh before returning his
attention to the table.
 
Upon
looking up herself, Amanda caught Connor’s steely grey eyes on her, dropping
them to the hand she’d had on Liam’s thigh.
 
He shook his head, giving a disgusted roll of the eyes
before flicking a switch and jovially answering whatever question Liam asked
him.
 
Amanda gaped, too struck with
disbelief to say a thing.

What in the actual fuck?

~

Maybe there is a God.

Throughout
dinner with Connor and Stella, Amanda had desperately prayed for a reason to
leave.
 
She couldn’t help feeling
completely unsettled by Connor.
 
Unless
it was her imagination, he seemed to find every opportunity to say something snarky
to her — and in a way so passive or vague that she couldn’t even point it
out.
 
As she and Liam rode in his
Mercedes to Chelsea Piers, Amanda recalled every odd thing that Connor had
uttered, hoping to convince herself that she was being stupidly paranoid, that
her boyfriend’s best friend of thirteen years didn’t actually hate her.

“Okay.
 
Connor is totally tired of hearing me
talk about this but I don’t even care right now,” Stella had started after
downing her second champagne cocktail, swatting Connor’s hand away when he
tried to take her glass.
 
“Amanda,
I just need to tell you how much I
love
your total Cinderella story.
 
Like,
the fact that you moved here for Liam and were completely lost and clueless in
the city and then ended up totally killing it? That’s like, the American dream
right there.”

Before Amanda
could even respond, Connor had interrupted, giving Amanda a brief and
unreadable look.
 
“Come on,
Stella.
 
I don’t think Amanda was
ever clueless.
 
She always knows
exactly what she’s doing.”

It had sounded
like the makings of a compliment but something in his tone tipped Amanda off to
the fact that it probably wasn’t.
 
But she couldn’t quite pinpoint why.

“True, true!”
Stella agreed enthusiastically.
 
“Considering you went from
magazine
writing to TV writing? That’s like, amazing.
 
A clueless girl could never pull that off.”

Connor
nodded.
 
“She does move on
quickly.”

Again, a
compliment that sounded just a hair off, that somehow seemed a whole lot more
like an insult.
 
But again, Amanda
couldn’t put her finger on what exactly was so strange about his remark.
 
Oddly enough, it was a conversation
about dessert that solidified her suspicions that Connor might just flat-out
hate her.
 
She had merely been
trying to decide between two pastries when Connor spoke up.

“You’ll like the
treacle tart,” he’d said, innocuously.
 
“It’s British.”

Staring out the
car window at the Hudson River, Amanda felt her entire face growing suddenly
hot.
 
Holy shit, he was totally talking about Dylan.

“You okay?”

Amanda blinked
herself out of her thoughts, looking up at Liam, who stood holding open her car
door for her.
 
She hadn’t even
noticed that the Mercedes had arrived at Chelsea Piers let alone seen that Liam
had gotten out of the car.
 
Holding
one hand out to her, his other gripped his skinny tie at the knot, loosening it
to prepare for the impromptu
Soldier
publicity stunt that Terrence Rambis had interrupted their dinner to have
performed.
 
Despite the bizarre
request to meet him at Chelsea Piers close to midnight, Amanda couldn’t have
been more grateful for Terrence’s call.
 
She’d had officially enough of Connor’s underhanded insults and had been
a second way from snapping and looking like the crazy, irrational girlfriend.

“I’m fine,”
Amanda lied, letting Liam help her out of the car.
 
She managed to crack a smile at the way his gaze
involuntarily locked on her legs as she swung them over the side of the
backseat.
 
“I think I’m just…
nervous about work stuff,” she said as she got out.
 
It was true, after all.
 
She hadn’t had the time before to worry about her first day
until Connor had decided to be an ass and remind her about it.

“That makes two
of us,” Liam laughed, wrapping his arm around Amanda’s waist as they followed
one of Terrence’s assistants into the closed building.

“You don’t have
any idea what Terrence brought you here to do?”

“No, but whatever
it is, I probably had too many drinks to do it safely.”

He certainly
wasn’t wrong about that.

Whatever bit of
tipsiness Amanda had had from drinking at Lilac promptly evaporated upon
hearing what Terrence intended for Liam to do.
 
Standing in the Aquatics Center at Chelsea Piers, at the
edge of the Olympic-sized pool in her black Thierry Marc stilettos, Amanda
absolutely gaped at Terrence, the ultra-tanned and leathery skin on his cheeks
wrinkling from the sheer width of his overzealous smile.
 
His iPhone in hand, he tapped the
screen until he had the videocamera open and ready.

“I swear to God,
Manda, he did it between takes one day while we were in Jordan.
 
He fuckin’ did and we didn’t get the
whole thing on tape but I sure as hell won’t let that happen again because I
need the world to know what a fuckin’ real goddamned
soldier
this guy is! I am gonna get this shit to go viral by fuckin’
breakfast
tomorrow.”

“Right.”
 
Amanda managed a polite albeit weak
smile for Terrence before turning her look of pure horror to Liam.
 
“Liam, can I talk to you for a second?”
she asked through her teeth, her heels clicking neatly as she took his hand and
stepped aside on the tile floor.
 
Once out of earshot from Terrence, Amanda let her smile fall flat.
 
“Liam, you are
drunk
right now,” she hissed.
 
“I don’t think holding your breath for fifty meters under water is safe
even when you’re sober.”

Liam rubbed the
back of his neck as he gazed out into the still blue pool water.
 
“I did this once before.
 
Don’t worry about me.”

“Uh oh.
 
The girlfriend’s gonna kill me!”
Terrence laughed, holding his hands up in apology before turning to the Pararescue
reserve whom Liam would apparently be swimming alongside for effect.
 
To the world, he was meant to look like
Liam’s competition but Amanda was well aware that he was actually there to
supervise in case Liam’s eyes rolled to the back of his head at any point
during the near two hundred foot swim.
 
“It’s what the real PJs do during training, Manda! It’s called Superman
School and your guy is a fuckin’ Superman!”

Liam bit his
laugh back as he watched Amanda twitch at being called Manda again.
 
He gave a sigh and let his shoulders
fall when she shot him daggers.
 
“Amanda — ”

“If this stupid
stunt doesn’t kill you, Liam, I will,” she interrupted him.
 
Anger tingled in the back of her throat
when he dared to crack a smile.
 
“This isn’t a joke, Liam,” she insisted, promptly turning his face back
to her when he tried to sneak a glance at Terrence.
 
Her palms flattened against his jaws, she continued only
once his dark eyes looked at her earnestly.
 
“It’s not the same as doing some combat scene and breaking a
bone — you are depriving yourself of
oxygen
.
 
You can get brain damage, Liam, and you
are scaring the life out of me right now because you just had three or four
strong drinks, or I don’t know how many, and even when people
actually
training to be PJs and SEALS do
this, they lose consciousness.
 
Most of them do.
 
I know
this because while you were in Jordan doing every last stupid stunt that
Terrence challenged you to do, I was worrying about you here and reading about
the entire Pararescue pipeline and praying that he wouldn’t ask you to try any
more of those things.
 
You trained
for two months, Liam, not two years.
 
You are literally risking your life for a movie right now — is it
worth it?”