“I hate seafood,” I tell him. “What else do they have?”
“I think that’s it,” Damian says.
Damian’s been living here for over a year now and Danna’s been here just as long. At first, he was considering keeping his house as a getaway for Danna, but after the first four months of her never going back to Damian’s old place, he finally decided to let it go.
In some ways, I do resent Jamie, though I’d never say that to Damian or Danna. She was Damian’s first great love and that’s a hard act to follow, especially considering the horrible tragedy of her death and that of the baby.
Maybe it’s not resentment so much as it is a wish that Damian had allowed himself to keep some doors open for the future. For one thing, I wouldn’t mind knowing that I might someday get married, but until or unless something drastically changes in the wiring of Damian’s brain, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
I find myself wondering a lot what Jamie must have been like, and if she’d survived, would she and I be friends? Judging on how Damian and Danna have talked about her in the past, it seems unlikely that Damian and Jamie would have gotten divorced and so, if she’d lived, my arrival on the set of Flashing Lights would have been a lot different.
I’m not sure if Damian and I would have hit it off as friends if he was married, but that kind of pondering is simple curiosity.
“What about Rodolfo’s?” I ask.
It does bug me when people are late, and Danna has a penchant for forgetting the time when she’s out with someone. Those are about the only spats she and I have anymore, though. I just think it would be good to see her. I feel like she’s been gone on a date for at least the last few weeks.
“I’ll call her,” he says, “but she’s not going to be too happy about you overriding her restaurant pick.”
“Oh, so the new seafood place was her idea?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
“All right,” I tell him, “let’s go there.”
“Were you just saying no because you thought I’d picked the place?” he asks.
“Do you remember what happened last time?” I ask.
It’s a long story involving a restaurant with experimental food and an eel that wasn’t quite dead. Yeah, after that, he lost the privilege to have an opinion on where to go for dinner.
“Just because I’ve picked a couple of bad places,” he says, “doesn’t mean that every place I’m going to tell you about is no good.”
“Granted,” I tell him, “but going with your pick is a gamble, and I could really use the meal. I haven’t had anything to eat today.”
“Sounds like bad planning,” he says and starts walking away, his phone in his hand, ready to call Danna. “You know,” Damian says, turning around, “I got an interesting call today.”
“Yeah?” I ask.
&
nbsp; “Yeah,” he answers. “It was Dutch. He wanted to know if the two of us would be interested in doing another movie together.”
“Did he mean the two of us as in you and him or the two of us as in me and you?” I ask, praying for a misunderstanding.
“The two of us,” he says, “as in me and you.”
“No,” I answer quickly. “Sorry, and please tell Dutch I say ‘thank you for the offer,’ but I really don’t think I can work with you.”
“We seemed to do all right the first time,” he says. “It got us together.”
“Yeah,” I tell him, “and it just as easily could have torn us apart. It almost did, if you remember.”
“This movie’s different,” he says, as if that has anything to do with anything. “It’s a period piece. They want you to play a woman named…” and he goes on to describe the movie.
It’s an interesting enough plot, filled with romance and suspense, but with a cerebral, modern edge to it.
The longer Damian talks, the more excited he seems, and I do feel kind of bad when he gets to the end of his spiel and I simply repeat my answer, “No.”