“It’s not like they’re going to leave us in here all day,” Angel said. “Eventually someone is going to need a light adjusted or a costume changed.”
Continuing to use my self-defense moves, I punched the screen out of the window and peered down. The first floor of the house was more elevated than I had expected. It was at least a five foot drop, but there were bushes to break my fall.
“Luca,” Angel said, and this time my name was strained on his lips.
I had to get the hell out of here, so I began to do what any reasonable human being would do and shimmied out the narrow gap between the window and the frame, my legs kicking and my hips wiggling.
I’d always thought stuck porn was incredibly unbelievable, but in this moment, it began to make sense. Of course, admitting I was wrong had always been a tough pill to swallow, but I made a mental note to let Teddy know I’d had a change of heart, especially after our argument over plausibility on the set of Stuck Step-Mommies 8.
Fuck. I couldn’t wiggle my luscious ass through the window.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” said Angel.
Nothing—and I mean nothing—could hurt more than being stuck in this McMansion with him, Blake, and Blake’s windsock dick. With a grunt, I pushed as hard as I could, my body tipping over the window frame to freedom.
“Oh, fuck,” I swore as I realized I had zero control of how my body was about to fall.
Okay, maybe the ground was more like six and a half feet away. Or eight. How tall was a standard house story again?
A shriek tore through my chest as my body broke through the bushes, my shirt snagging, until I found myself cradled precariously in a tangle of leaves and branches and—ouch—thorns. Who landscaped an LA mansion with thorny bushes? Didn’t rich people have special rich people plants that were made of skin-enhancing snail mucus and yacht insurance policies???
“What the hell?” I shouted as I tried to push myself up and out, but I was surrounded. My arms were bleeding and—
“My hands! My beautiful hands!”
I couldn’t work without my hands, and now they were riddled with cuts, many of which had thorns now lodged inside of them. Blood welled along a few of the wounds, a deep, deep scarlet.
Angel peered out from the window above me. “Don’t move! You fell in a rose bush.”
He disappeared, and I stared helplessly up at the blue sky, entirely offended by how bright and cheery it was in the face of my suffering.
Could this day just end? Could I just exit out of this browser and do a hard reset on my life?
And then I felt a warm hand reach for me. It wrapped with comforting strength around my forearm. “I’ve got you,” Angel said. “This might hurt.”
With one hand wrapped in his jacket, he cleared the branches and stems just enough so that he could haul me out of the bush and to my feet.
I stumbled forward a little and into his chest, dropping my mangled hands before they could get smashed between us. “Sorry,” I said under my breath and then looked around to the wall of windows behind us. “How the hell did you get out here so fast?”
He was already wrapping his hand around my upper arm and guiding me somewhere. I should resist, I knew I should, but my hands hurt so much, and I was always a total goner the minute he turned bossy. “The door,” he said as we turned the corner around the back of the house.
Which was when I saw the balcony with its wide, easy steps coming down from the second floor. Along with the huge sliding glass door leading straight to the room we’d just been locked inside of.
“There was a third door?” I asked. “You have to be kidding me.”
“It was hidden behind those Olive Garden–looking drapes,” Angel said.
I looked down at my hands and whimpered at the sight of the blood and thorns.
Angel clicked his tongue sympathetically. “Let’s get your dumb ass cleaned up.”
“I didn’t know it was a bush full of thorns,” I grumbled as we walked down the backside of the house to the pool house where craft services was set up. Teddy hired a nurse for every major shoot, and she usually posted up near the doughnuts and sub sandwiches. (Craft services also served fancy crushed ice and Metamucil smoothies for all the performers who, for anal reasons, might not have been eating much that day. Teddy Ray Fletcher was a thoughtful man.)
Angel just looked back at me with a dry expression. “The roses didn’t give it away?”
I wanted to tell him that not all roses showed their thorns. That not all artists-slash-animators displayed the fact that they’d leave you for Paris and an ex named Blake.
But as always, I opted for the high road, and lifted my chin to stride past him to where the nurse sat eating a doughnut while handing a tube of hemorrhoid cream to a performer.
Chapter Three
“It burns,” I hissed.
“Not the first time someone’s said that on set,” Fiona, our on-set nurse, tutted. We were in the McMansion’s pool house now, a shockingly tacky space decorated with a Tuscan-themed mural and bowls of fake grapes set on marble-topped tables. I was sitting next to an oversize rooster made of wrought iron while she doused my hands in rubbing alcohol.
Well, perhaps doused wasn’t the correct word. But she wasn’t exactly gentle as she pressed her alcohol-soaked swab into every cut. And there were many.
Behind her, Angel stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her every move.
Fiona’s phone chirped and she looked away from her sadistic swab-based work on my hands. “I’ve got to run over to the main house. One of the camera guys had an allergic reaction to the cantaloupe on the breakfast bar.”
“Because it’s a horrible and useless fruit?” I asked.
“I can handle it from here,” volunteered Angel.
Fiona heaved a heavy sigh. “You’ve got to go in with the tweezers and pull out any remaining thorns.” She turned to me. “It’ll hurt.”
I sniffed. “I am very familiar with Angel causing me pain.”
She shrugged and rushed out the door as Angel sat down on the little stool in front of me.
“I’ll be gentle,” he said.
“Don’t start now.”
He paused and looked directly at me, his gaze practically pinning me to the wall before reaching into Fiona’s kit for a long pair of pointed tweezers.
I flinched slightly.
“Don’t look,” he whispered. “It’s easier if you’re not anticipating it.”
I didn’t trust him, of course, but he did make sense. So although it pained me to listen to his advice, I closed my eyes.
He started talking, his voice soft and cheerful. He was trying to distract me from what he was doing to my hands. “Mackenzie’s Julia Roberts hooker dress—” He plucked a thorn from my palm with a quick, graceful jerk and I gasped. “—was uncanny . . . not that I’ve actually seen the original movie.”
My eyes shot open. “I’m sorry. What?”
He held up the tweezers. “Eyes closed.”
I obeyed. “You have some explaining to do.”
“I’m sure it’s a great movie, but it came out a decade before I was born. Plus I was more of an anime gay than a ‘divas of the past’ gay.” He pulled out another thorn, which seemed to hurt less than the last one.