The Girlfriend Stage Read online

  My heart stops beating for long enough I should probably be worried.

  But all I can think is, Josh Rios wants to be my agent.

  It’s not like this possibility has never entered my mind before. I’m a newbie actress, after all, and Josh is an agent with a capital A. He’s not quite at the very top echelon yet, but for being only twenty-eight, he’s really close. He represents Chad Montgomery and Asia Phillips and a heaping handful of others who are breaking out, big-time.

  The things he could do for my career . . .

  And yet.

  I like Josh. And though I clearly have no problem using guys for car rides, the thought of leveraging the fun I have with him into some stepping stone—like so many in Hollywood do as naturally as popping pills—makes me faintly nauseated.

  This thing we have has an expiration date, and the last thing I want is some super awkward agent/client relationship with Josh once it sours.

  “That sounds a lot like mixing business with pleasure,” I finally manage. “Which I hear isn’t a great idea.”

  Josh leans in close enough that his hair brushes against my forehead. “Lots of agents sleep with their clients. It’s really not a big deal.”

  Suddenly I can’t help but wonder if—and how often—Asia Phillips rolls around on these same Egyptian cotton sheets. The image of that gives me a pit in my gut like after Gabby talks me into eating at Fong’s.

  Which is stupid. Who he sleeps with isn’t any of my business. We’re super casual, Josh and I, and that works for us.

  “Thanks,” I say, even though part of me is wailing in disbelief at what I’m about to say. “But I’m going to stay with Brent.”

  Josh winces in mock pain. “You’re breaking my heart, Halsey.”

  I run my foot up his leg, under the basketball shorts. “I know one way to ease the pain of my rejection.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t want to be late for work.”

  “I don’t.” I hold up my phone, showing him the time. “Turns out we have a few extra minutes. Seems like we always do, don’t we?”

  A sly smile spreads across his face. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that even as you’re rushing me out of bed, you build in time for this? Every morning?”

  I grin back at him. “Took you long enough to catch on, Rios.”

  He chuckles, and then his hands are in my hair and his lips are on mine, and I lose myself happily in all things Josh.

  That expiration date could happen any day now, and I’m determined to enjoy this while it lasts.

  Two

  Anna-Marie

  I’m sitting in the cramped backseat of a Ford Focus on the way home from work, listening to the middle-aged Uber driver up front as she hums tunelessly to radio music turned so low only she can hear it, when my dad calls.

  I grimace at the phone. I love my dad, but we only ever call each other if there’s a Reason.

  And I have a pretty good idea what that is.

  I answer the phone. “Hi, Daddy,” I say, my voice far more cheerful than I myself feel.

  The Uber driver gives me a look in the rearview mirror and I glare back at her. Yes, I call my dad “Daddy.” No, I do not call any of the guys I sleep with that.

  I’m not sure if she can read all that from my expression, but she goes back to her humming.

  “Hi, Pumpkin,” my dad says. “We missed you today.”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the funeral, my work schedule is so—”

  “It’s fine! I get it. You’re a successful actress, and you have work commitments.” He says this with no small amount of pride. “And besides, I know you weren’t ever all that close to Aunt Ida.”

  That’s kind of an understatement. Aunt Ida is—was—actually my dad’s aunt, a crotchety old woman with the fragile bone structure of a baby bird and a habit of saying whatever crossed her mind. And the things that crossed her mind grew increasingly meaner—and shockingly anti-Semitic—as the years went on.

  “Well, the last time I talked with her, she called my soap opera ‘an ad for legalized prostitution’ and ranted about relations with Israel. So there’s that.”

  My dad laughs. “Yeah, I kept expecting her to sit up in the coffin and chew us all out one last time.”

  “If that had happened, then I really would have been sorry to miss it.”

  There’s a pause of heavy silence, and I know the Reason is coming now, and it wasn’t the funeral of my great-aunt. “You’re still coming to the reunion, though, right?” Dad asks. “I know how busy you are, but I’d love for you to meet Tanya.”

  And there it is, the thing I’ve been avoiding thinking about ever since I asked for the time off of work a few months ago: the Halsey Family Reunion, in my hometown of Everett, Wyoming. A yearly event, and one I’ve managed to avoid since I left for LA, four years ago.

  But my dad’s getting married again, and I know if I don’t show up, it’ll look like I’m making some kind of stand against this woman I’ve never met and my dad’s happiness. Which would make me a total bitch, if it were true.

  The truth is, I don’t have any problem with Tanya. What I do have a problem with is the thought of being back in Wyoming. With all of the rest of them.

  Which puts me at only semi-bitch level, I’d like to think.

  “I’ll be there. I promise,” I say, curling and uncurling my toes in my new red Fendi slingbacks, which were already growing uncomfortable at the restaurant last night with Josh and are now slowly turning my feet into two giant throbbing blisters. But they are adorable.

  “Good. Good.” My dad tends to repeat himself when he’s nervous, and it hits me then how worried he was that I’d bail. Which makes me feel like the worst daughter ever.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say. “Driving. So I’ll be there in a few days.”

  Dad doesn’t question the driving part; he also doesn’t know about my aversion to doing so in Los Angeles. “I’m so glad, Pumpkin. I can’t wait to have both my favorite girls with me.”

  I’m not sure he realizes how many times he’s lumped me in as one of his “favorite girls” over the years with women who have very quickly lost that title. But I know he means it, every time.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I say, and with the Reason taken care of, we quickly end the call.

  We get to my apartment not long after, and the moment I’m inside and close the door behind me, I kick off my beautiful designer feet tenderizers with a low moan of relief.

  “Oh, damn,” Gabby says, poking her head out from the kitchen and startling me enough that I jump. “For a second there I thought maybe you’d finally brought Josh here.”

  “And while I’m making that noise, that’s really when you want to meet a guy I’m seeing?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  She’s not wrong. She’s walked in on no small number of my make-out sessions with guys over the years, until I finally just started taking them straight to my bedroom rather than bothering with the living room couch pre-show.

  But Josh . . . I look around our cramped apartment, with its thrift store furniture and only semi-functional appliances and the threadbare carpet with that wine stain that looks like a Rorschach test, and I think: no way. Not that I don’t love our apartment. It’s been my home ever since I came to Los Angeles. It’s like a part of me. And it’s not that I think Josh would be a jerk about how much nicer his place is than mine—he’s too good a guy for that. But Josh is a rich boy from Bel-Air who became a rich agent in Hollywood. He’s a man of fancy restaurants and Porsches and coffee machines that don’t have to have a “personality” to make up for the fact they can’t actually make coffee.

  I can’t imagine him sleeping over in my bed that’s raised up on cinder blocks so it can fit my ever-growing shoe collection underneath. Or tak
ing a shower in the stall so small and dimly lit you feel like you’re getting washed in an MRI machine.

  Which is fine. Some guys I date, I bring here, but would never take to a swanky industry party. It’s best to keep parts of my life separate. It’s easier that way.

  “Do you want some chicken-fried teriyaki steak?” Gabby holds up a styrofoam container, and the smell of teriyaki and grease wafts out, making me queasy. “Fong’s gave me way too much.”

  “Um, no thanks. I had a big lunch.”

  Gabby looks dubious, and she probably wouldn’t consider the cobb salad I ate to be an actual lunch at all, let alone a big one. But she’s also not on camera every day, playing a character with a great fondness for crop tops.

  “Your loss.” She scoops some onto a plate. She bounces on the balls of her feet a bit as she does so, which is odd. There’s something off about Gabby’s energy today.

  “You okay?” I ask, pulling a bottled water from the fridge.

  She tugs at her hair, which is pulled back into a ponytail that’s draped over her shoulder. She’s wearing her scrubs pants from work and a black t-shirt that says “I heart Nursing,” with the heart as an actual anatomical heart. There’s a yellowish stain just above her left boob that I convince myself is mustard. Which is likely, because Gabby. But since she’s working as a nursing assistant while she’s getting her degree, you can never be totally certain.

  “Yeah, I’m great.” Her eyes widen. “But I got you something!” Still with that strange manic energy, she darts to the counter and rifles through her purse, then pulls out a bottle of shampoo. Mango Sunrise.

  I sigh, though I can’t help but smile. “You didn’t have to—”

  “No, I did! Or Will did, anyway. I’m sorry he used up the last of your shampoo the other day.”

  “Yeah, well. I could have handled it better.” Which is true, given that I stomped out of the shower in an ill-fitting towel and dropped the empty bottle into the cereal bowl from which he was eating. Though I was already running late and had to use the crappy dollar store brand he brings over that makes me smell like raisins and old pennies, so he’s lucky I didn’t do far worse.

  “He feels terrible,” she says.

  “Seriously, Gabs, it’s fine.”

  “Well, he’s never going to do that again. Which is good, because having him and you both smell the same coming out of the shower gave me some very confusing sexual feelings.”

  I laugh, and Gabby grins back at me. For all that Will can be an obnoxious occasional roommate—Gabby clearly didn’t start dating him for his ability to throw pizza boxes away—I love how happy he makes her. Between being with Will and her new nursing career, this past year she’s in the best place, emotionally, that I’ve ever seen her.

  Besides which, now I can actually talk about sex with her and she can comment on things that don’t come from those Sultry Sins novels she loves so much.

  “Soooo,” she says, and I know she’s going to bring up Josh again. She gets this fascination with the guys I date somewhere around the two to three month mark, because she keeps hoping it’ll turn into something serious. Unfortunately, she tends to get this fascination right around the same time I’m ready to end things. I don’t think Gabby has that kind of power over the winds of fate, but I cringe inwardly anyway.

  I’m not ready to end things with Josh.

  “Are you going to be seeing Josh again before you leave for the reunion?” She takes a huge bite of chicken-fried steak, and teriyaki sauce drips down onto her other boob.

  Now I cringe outwardly. “I was supposed to go to this movie premiere with him tonight, which I had totally forgotten about until he reminded me this morning on the way to work. But I told him I couldn’t make it. I said I had decided to leave for the reunion tonight.”

  “What? Why’d you do that?”

  I scrunch my face up. “Ummm . . .”

  “Spill it,” she orders, pointing at me with a fried breading covered fork for emphasis.

  “Because tonight’s the midnight release of Death Arsenal 6!” I say, like it’s been bottled up in me all day. Which it has been. I’ve been waiting for this game forever and there is no one I can geek out with about it other than weirdos online on the forums.

  Among which I am known as ZomBGrrrl and have an avatar of Captain Jane Jennings in fishnet tights, so yeah. I’m one of the weirdos.

  Her eyebrows knit together. “Anna-Marie! You canceled a movie premiere date with your hot agent boyfriend so you can wait in line to buy a video game? Who are you?”

  “Okay, first off, he’s not my boyfriend. And second, it’s not just any video game, it’s a long-awaited installment in a well-beloved series that—”

  “And you lied to him about it?” She shakes her head. “Why didn’t you just tell him?”

  One thing I’m not as keen about new, madly-in-love Gabby: she’s gotten a hell of a lot more judgmental about my dating life.

  “Because he wouldn’t understand. He’s . . . he’s Josh Rios! I can’t tell him I’m obsessed with a zombie shooter marketed to fifteen-year-old boys.” Or that I’ve been so since high school, well before they started making the crap-fest movies that do unreasonably well overseas. Or that I got a bit drunk after senior prom and got a tramp stamp of Death Arsenal’s evil Millipede Corporation logo—a costly and painful mistake I’ve since had removed.

  Gabby rolls her eyes. “Yeah. Because most guys hate it when girls are into video games.”

  “Josh isn’t most guys.” Which is clearly the wrong thing to say, because Gabby gets a sly little smile on her face, which she tries to hide behind a chunk of dripping steak.

  “So how’d he take it when you canceled on him?”

  I shrug. “He was fine. He said he was sad he wouldn’t get to see me again before I left for Wyoming. But really, I’m not going to be gone for that long, and it’s not like he won’t have plenty to keep him busy in the meantime.”

  I wish the thought of Asia Phillips didn’t jump to mind.

  “But it’s so last minute. Is he going to take someone else?” She bites her lower lip in clear concern.

  “Probably. It’s a movie premiere. He’s not going to go alone. And it’s not like he’ll have trouble finding a date. Which,” I add, because she looks like she’s ready to go from concern to pity, “is fine. We’re not together like that. Really.”

  “That’s not what that gossip column last week seems to think.”

  She’s referring to a picture taken of Josh and me at a club. We’re dancing close, and I’m saying something in his ear that’s making him laugh, but from the angle of the shot, it looks like I’m sucking his earlobe. You can’t see much more than my profile—and the fact that my ass was looking downright spectacular in that red dress—but they ID’d me anyway. The pic got posted on a lesser TMZ-type site with the caption “Hot Nights with Soap Star for Josh Rios.”

  Well, they got that right.

  Ever since then, I’ve had friends and co-stars sending me links of places that pic has popped up, with other captions: “New Love For Hot Agent Rios,” “Talk Dirty to Me, Josh!” and “Maeve’s Real-Life Hottie!” (that last one from Soap Opera Digest online, the only place on earth where I’m a bigger deal than Josh).

  It doesn’t bother me that even though I’m the actress, it’s Josh who’s the more famous of the two of us. He was a model in college, and was already getting attention in Hollywood even before he switched career tracks to agenting. Being seen with Josh has only been helpful for my own name-recognition. But it does bother me when these articles imply that’s why I’m seeing him. I get why they’d think that, but really—that part’s just a perk, like his nice car.

  “It’s click bait, Gabs. These people get paid to make everything seem like a big deal. But we’re just having fun. I don’t do the girlfriend thing.”

  “Yo
u did in high school. What was his name?”

  Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Shane. So I had a boyfriend in high school. I also had a truly terrible bobbed haircut around that same time. Years ago. Now I have great hair and I don’t get serious. Both of which I’m pretty sure Josh appreciates about me.”

  She smiles, but there’s a troubled aspect to it that goes beyond her investment in my dating life. Something else is going on here.

  “Gabby. What’s going on? Are you and Will okay?”

  She cringes, and suddenly I’m imagining that she found racy texts in his phone to another woman, or maybe even pics. And god help me, if he’s cheating on her something more sinister than my Mango Sunrise is going to end up in his breakfast cereal.

  “Will asked me to move in with him and I said yes!” she blurts out.

  I gape. “Is it because of the shampoo? Because I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no,” she says quickly. “It’s just, you know, he’s been staying over here so much anyway, and this place is a little too small for the three of us, and his place is closer to the hospital . . .” She trails off, and then nods, as if reassuring herself of something. “And I just want to. I think we’re ready for this.”

  “That’s . . . that’s great!” I say, because I know I’m supposed to. But inwardly, I feel like my insides are squeezing. Will makes Gabby happy and is a guy I genuinely like, as long as he’s not cheating on her and he keeps his hands off my shampoo. But right now, I kind of hate him a little for stealing my best friend.

  Jealousy does not look good on anyone, and I am no exception.

  “It’s okay if it’s not,” Gabby says. “Great, I mean.” She looks down at her plate forlornly. I remember how the two of us bought those plates at a yard sale, because I thought the random purple-splattered pattern looked like they had been wept on by Prince himself, and she thought it looked like they’d been found at the murder scene of the purple Teletubby, and we figured either way that made them awesome plates, especially at five for fifty cents.