Reel (Hollywood Renaissance 1)

Stop it, Neevah.

He tilts his head to read the fine print beneath the photo, and his head bumps mine.

“Sorry,” he says, glancing up from the pile of faded memorabilia. Our eyes hold, and I hope mine don’t tell him everything; don’t tell him that I’m fighting this most ridiculous, inappropriate, ill-fated attraction every time I’m around him. And I am fighting it. I know it’s wrong and will only make this job harder.

His eyes search mine and drop to my mouth, and I feel his gaze like a hot, tender touch. My lips part on a caught breath, and I have to lick them. I have to stop before I make this weird and uncomfortable for him. He’s my boss.

I let the playbill fall from my fingers to the floor, seizing the excuse to bend, to break the hot connection between our eyes. It’s hot to me. I’m burning up, but when I sit up, Canon’s eyes are cool, his expression inscrutable. I want to apologize for disrupting the easy rapport between us, but I didn’t do anything. It just happened. My body inconveniently reminded me that Canon Holt is exactly my type, and I didn’t even know I had one. Big and brooding and brilliant.

“Saints and poets?” he asks.

For a second, I have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s staring at my hand holding the playbill, at the ink scripted along the outside of my thumb.

“Oh, my tattoo. Yeah. It’s from—”

“Our Town. The stage manager says that.”

I glance up to smile, but can’t hold it when I meet his eyes. There’s an intensity about Canon that I don’t think he even cultivates. It’s simply who he is—hungry to know, to understand, and his intellect and curiosity consume everything in his path. Every story, every project, every conversation. This conversation. And when you are the subject of his lens, you feel like he’s hungry for you. Like he wants to understand exactly what it is he’s looking at. And I can’t help but wonder how that hunger would feel in a kiss. Would he crush me against him like we couldn’t get close enough? Like the taste of me was driving him wild? My fingers burn with the need to scrape across his shadowed jaw, to trace his brows and lips.

“It was, um . . .” I clear my throat, desperate to rein in my rebel thoughts. “It was the last play I did in high school. That line stuck with me.”

“Where are you from?” he asks easily, apparently oblivious that I’m struggling to maintain some semblance of non-kissing normalcy.

“A-a tiny town in North Carolina you’ve never heard of. Clearview.”

“You’re right. Never heard of it.” He almost grins, yielding the slightest curve of his lips, and I realize how seldom he smiles. “So you had a burning desire to spread your wings and you struck out for New York City, diploma in hand?”

“Not quite.” The shard of Terry and Brandon’s betrayal pricks my heart. Not as much as it used to, but it may always draw a drop of blood. “I might have been content to stay there and do community theater. Get married. Have some babies.”

“But?”

“But things happen.” I shrug and force myself to meet the probe of his stare. “And it was off to Jersey, not New York. I had a scholarship to Rutgers, the drama program.”

“It would have been our loss. You might have been content to stay hidden away in Clearview, but it wouldn’t have been right. You were made for the spotlight. Whatever happened to make you leave was a blessing in disguise.”

My breath stalls. There’s so little space separating us, and the air seems to pulse in time with my galloping heart. And this time, now, I don’t wonder if he feels it, too. I know he does. It’s in the way he frowns and his eyes darken and his jaw tightens. It’s like a wavelength between us in the taut silence.

He clears his throat and leans away, inserting a few more inches between us. “So this play, Voodoo Macbeth.”

“Oh, yeah. The play. The play.”

“Right, before Orson Welles did this play, most had only seen Black actors on Vaudeville or in black face. There was even a national tour after the New York run, so this was huge.”

“I can imagine.” I need something to do with my hands, some way to reroute this conversation to neutral ground. I look down at the playbill and pull a photograph from inside. It’s of two young women posing in front of the Lafayette, both dressed well, smiling, glowing. Dessi and Tilda.

Canon flips through the small pile of papers and pulls the wedding announcement out again, placing it beside the photo.

I trace one finger over the handwritten words on the newspaper clipping.

I had to. Forgive me.

“For someone who supposedly disappeared from Dessi’s life,” Canon says, lifting his brows, “there’s a lot of letters from her hidden here. There’s a story here. Now we have to find it.”