7
Now
When Walt called Lilah and Shane into his office during their lunch break the week after the photo shoot, Lilah was sure she knew why. They’d shot their first major scene together a few days before, and it had taken them all day to get through three pages—a disaster on a strict TV schedule, causing them to run behind for the whole week.
She’d been mortified, painfully aware of how many people’s days she was ruining as she fucked up one take after another. Shane’s barely concealed amusement at her struggles had only made things worse. Her embarrassment had compounded on itself, making it impossible to recover, getting in her head so badly that eventually she was messing up lines that she’d delivered perfectly before.
After a while, the director had come up to her and kindly asked her if she needed to take a few minutes to regroup, bringing in her stand-in while they shot coverage of the other actors. Her cheeks had burned as she’d slunk off the set.
But when they sat down in Walt’s office, both of them bearing guilty sent-to-the-principal’s-office expressions, Walt flopped a tabloid onto the desk without a word. Lilah glanced at Shane, who seemed equally confused.
“Sorry to hear about Peyton’s…baby drama?” he said tentatively, looking up from the cover. Walt grabbed the magazine and thumbed to a dog-eared page, folding it back onto itself and sliding it over to them again.
MATCH MADE IN HELL: Intangible’s Dream Team is Back—and a Behind-the-Scenes Nightmare!
Lilah’s stomach lurched when she saw the photos. One of each of them, taken at completely different times and locations, but superimposed together in a way that implied their unhappy expressions were directed at each other. Based on the fact that Lilah was in her Hangoveralls (the oversized Carhartt overalls she wore whenever she had an especially bad hangover, as dubbed by Pilar), her picture was from three months earlier, when she’d gotten a flat tire on her way to pick up breakfast tacos. Of course she looked annoyed.
Flicking her eyes to Shane’s photo, she idly wondered what had made him look so tormented. Probably racked with guilt that he’d had to tell a waiter they’d messed up his order or something.
They both inched forward in their seats so they could read the article without picking it up from the desk. It was mostly padding—basic facts about her return to the show—ending in a breathless claim from an anonymous source that their photo shoot had allegedly been cut short after the two of them got into a furious screaming match on set.
“It’s not true,” Lilah said meekly. “We didn’t scream at each other.” Even though Dario and Mercedes had been the only people in the room with them at the time, there were at least a dozen witnesses to Shane’s hasty exit through the main area of the suite. The story could have been fabricated by any one of them.
Walt sighed. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true. The network is pissed. We need to nip this in the bud.”
“You don’t want us to pretend we’re dating, do you?” Shane grumbled.
“Of course not,” Walt said. “Nobody’s trying to meddle in your personal lives. They just have a big old press tour lined up for you two, but it’s going to be a big old waste of everyone’s time if it’s obvious you hate each other.”
“We don’t hate each other,” they replied, robotically, in unison.
Walt sighed again. “Right. Well, I’ve been talking to the network, and they think it might be a good idea for you to do a few sessions of couples counseling to work out whatever…whatever’s going on here.”
“We’re not a couple,” they said, once again in unison.
“That’s very cute. You should take it on the road,” Walt said with a humorless chuckle. “Yes. I know you’re not a couple. You’re a couple of pains in my ass, is what you are.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s not just the story. It’s how you’ve been on set, too. At this rate, we’re going to be shooting this season for the next three years. I know you’ve had some personal issues in the past, and that’s none of my business. But once it affects your work, then it becomes my business, and my problem.”
Lilah stared down at her hands, abashed. She’d never been reprimanded like this before. That was something she’d always taken pride in: no matter the circumstances in her personal life, she showed up and nailed it. She burned with resentment toward Shane for fucking that up for her, too—though, of course, she had to accept responsibility for her part in it. A match wouldn’t light without something to strike it against.
“Okay,” she said abruptly. “We’ll go to therapy.”
She glanced over at Shane, who was already looking at her.
“Sure,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Right. Sorry. Whatever you want.” He actually sounded remorseful. He should—it was his tantrum that had landed them in the tabloids, exaggerated or not.
A few minutes later, Lilah followed him out of Walt’s office, pulling the door shut behind them. They both paused there, his eyes searching her face with an indecipherable expression. She thought he might say something, but instead, he turned and strode down the hall. She scampered to catch up with him.
“Well?”
He didn’t even turn his head. “Well, what?”
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
“You were the one who needed all those takes the other day.”
His nonchalance infuriated her. “Yeah, because you kept messing me up. But this wouldn’t be happening without you freaking out about the tattoos.”
Honestly, it was still a sore subject for her, too.
A few weeks after their breakup, she’d left town to shoot the second H.A.G.S. movie during their hiatus before season two. Instead of a lonely summer moping around L.A., she’d escaped to upstate New York for six weeks with her best friends and little to no cell service, which was exactly what she needed. She was grateful to have the work to distract her; an actual vacation would’ve given her too much time alone with her thoughts.
Once they’d wrapped, the four of them piled into Yvonne’s rented Jeep and drove forty minutes to the nearest tattoo studio, where they’d all gotten matching tattoos of the logo of the fictional summer camp where their characters worked. If Lilah looked closely enough at hers, she could still see the faint outline of the ghost underneath—but then, she rarely looked closely at it these days.
By the time she had to return to production on Intangible, she was at peace with the whole situation—as much as she was ever going to be. If Shane wanted to live out his douchey little Entourage fantasy and fuck his way through Los Angeles, that was none of her business.
But as soon as she was back in the real world, she’d been blindsided by breathless nonstop coverage of the hottest new celebrity couple: Shane and Serena Montague, fresh off her divorce from her equally A-list husband—and seventeen years Shane’s senior. She’d been one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood when Lilah and Shane were kids, but now that she was on the other side of forty, her career had hit an inevitable stalling point.
The tabloids had been obsessed with them, painting Serena as a desperate cougar and Shane as her fame-hungry boy toy. As much as Lilah’s wounded pride wanted to believe their relationship was rooted in a mutual need for attention, they’d stayed together for several years—and the handful of times she’d interacted with Serena, she’d been nothing but kind and gracious to Lilah.
As for Shane, at least he seemed appropriately guilty about his exploits once they were back on set, tiptoeing around with a sheepish puppy-dog look that infuriated her. She could’ve coasted on her moral high ground as the wounded party, and maybe things would have eventually cooled off between them.
But that wasn’t who she was. Of course she had to retaliate.
Shane had helped Devon Dillon, the infamous carpet/drapes offender, land a ten-episode guest arc on the show, with the potential for more if his character was well received. She was already dreading the prospect of working with Shane for the next four years of their contracts; the thought of adding Devon to the mix was unbearable.
Somehow, after a few casual-but-pointed suggestions during a night out with Polly and a few of the other writers, she managed to get Devon written off permanently after only three episodes. It was the next best thing to getting Shane himself fired. The first time she saw Shane after he found out, that puppy-dog look was gone, replaced by contempt. Neither one was ideal, but she’d take being hated over being pitied any day.
After that, there was no turning back. Once the rose-colored glasses of their relationship had been smashed, she saw with perfect clarity that the easygoing charm that had initially drawn her to him was actually a mask for spinelessness, for insecurity, for the pathological need to be liked. And through his eyes, she became the ugliest version of herself: the tightly wound, vindictive, humorless shrew.
Whatever therapist they’d end up seeing certainly had their work cut out for them.
Shane stopped abruptly and turned on his heel. “It wasn’t about the tattoos.”
She stepped closer to him until they were almost nose to nose. “Then what?”
His jaw tightened. “You know what you were doing.”
“What? What was I doing?” She made her eyes wide and innocent.
“You were trying…” He looked away before starting again. “Everything’s a competition with you. You always need to win.”
“Your dick is not the prize you think it is, Shane,” she snapped.
He smirked a little, his voice dropping low. “That’s not what you used to say.”
“Well, I also used to have Lean Pockets and Red Bull for breakfast, but thankfully my standards for what I allow in my body have gotten a little higher since then.” She pushed past him, trying to fight back her blush.
Okay, yes, she had been teasing him a little at the shoot, but just to deflect from her own discomfort about how weirdly hot and bothered she was getting, too. It was the only way to feel like she had some control over the situation. But she’d paid for it later. It wasn’t until she’d woken up in the middle of the night, on the verge of orgasm after hours of anxious, sexually charged dreams, that she allowed herself to reach between her legs and finish the job they’d started.
Her one consolation as she brought herself over the edge was that, judging by Shane’s tortured reactions, there was no way he’d been able to hold out as long as she had. She told herself the only reason she was seeing stars as she came was because it had been building all day, and not because her friends were right about it being hotter because she hated him.
They exited the building practically side by side. She at least had the maturity not to fight with him when he held the door for her, muttering a begrudging “thank you” under her breath. She cringed at the prospect of walking with him all the way back to their trailers, so instead of turning right, in the direction of the set, she went left toward the parking lot, to take a lap around the building and give herself a chance to cool off.
“Where are you going?”
She whirled around. “What do you care?”
He blinked, a look of genuine confusion passing over his face. “I don’t. You’re right. Sorry.” He turned and walked off without another word, leaving Lilah perplexed in his wake.