Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) (6 page)

That second Christmas, Lindsay remembered, was when she was bitter about Jessica. His show was set to premiere in January, two weeks later, and the thing she refused to acknowledge as hurt was still fresh enough for her to stubbornly avoid watching the premiere. Which yes, was childish and insecure of her, but she couldn’t suddenly take that back. Catching up on twenty episodes of television
now
would take some time.

But she knew that she should, finally take the time to see this thing that made Jake a success to so many people.

They were in the Caine Foundation office, the day after he arrived in New York. They woke up early to swing by her place uptown so she could shower and change, while he sat in her tiny living room and ate a donut with his coffee. He had a car service thanks to the hotel and it took them back to midtown before nine a.m. She made the rounds and gave him a tour, introducing him to a gleeful Marnie, and now they were parked at the meeting room, his office for the next few days.

She was watching him read a chapter of the Caine Foundation Annual Report, something she wouldn’t even do unless she wrote it (and she did write that chapter), and wondered again what was happening here.

Knowing that he was absorbed in something else, she picked up her phone and texted Marnie:
Can you get me the number of Jake’s manager?

The meeting room had only three walls and they were clear plastic paneling. Lindsay
saw
Marnie receive it, read it, and toss her a look. She’d been a professional assistant for over a decade now though, and knew to be discreet.
I’ll send you her contact details. Did I leave something out of the contract?

No, she didn’t. Marnie was thorough.

“You really sure about this?” she asked Jake again.

Jake’s eye didn’t even leave the printed page. “Ask that one more time and I’ll start to think you consider me too stupid for this.”

“That’s not it.”

“Then you have your answer.”

Lindsay remembered senior year, and what Jake had been doing before acting threw him into a totally different path. He was being courted to take further studies by the agriculture department; an extra pair of hands was always needed at their ongoing rainforest outreach program. Was it something he really wanted to do? Did Lindsay ever remember him do more than talk about it, or work on it from the library or his laptop? Did he go to nearby national parks, plan trips to the Amazon?

“Done reading,” Jake said, putting the report down. “Do you want to quiz me now?”

Fine. Lindsay wanted to help, and not only because her boss essentially told her that Jake could not screw this up.

“You see what that chapter is getting at?” It was the one on the lessons learned for certain grant projects that were coming to an end.

“Small achievements, replicable results. Touching personal stories.”

She nodded. “That’s what it said, but when your donor is giving you money, they don’t want to hear about the one person whose life became marginally better or that small dot of land that you’ve kept green.”

He nodded. “They want big-picture impact.”

Lindsay nodded. “Far reaching. Policy level. But that kind of thing costs an obscene amount of money, more than anyone is willing to give. Do you realize what that chapter is trying to do?”

Jake glanced at it again. “Convince them that their small amount of money is going to matter, when it all adds up. But it’s not true, is it?”

“It’s not
untrue
,” Lindsay said, “We can’t prove it. Sometimes a lot of money with ambitious intentions will be the biggest flop. Manageable intentions, manageable expenses. We can tell them that this served as an inspiration for something bigger. That this was the catalyst for another thing. That this small thing contributed greatly to the grand design.”

“It’s a dream,” Jake said. “You’re selling the dream that they can make a difference.”

“But they’re not wide-eyed innocents. They’re old hands at this. They can see through the BS and know that it’s just money moving around the world. Which small thing that probably won’t matter do we put our money into now?”

“And this is what you need me for then?” It was beginning to sink in now. “To sit in meetings and help argue the case that this insignificant thing is better than that insignificant thing?”

“Kind of. You thought you were saving the planet?”

“I know I still am,” Jake said, like a trooper, “but apparently from bureaucracy.”

“You remember that signal we came up with for when we’re in mortal danger but can’t say anything?” Lindsay said. “If you get asked something crazy, do that. I’ll be there for you in a heartbeat.”

The signal Lindsay was talking about was a closed fist but with a thumb tucked inside, because on one of those times when they drank beer and talked about the details of their life during the zombie apocalypse, Jake said she should never tuck her thumb in when she threw a punch.

“You’ll break your own finger, which is stupid,” he had said. “We’ll need all our thumbs.”

“Then if you see me making a dumb fist like that, you’ll know I’m in trouble. Or I’m just trying to annoy you,” she had said.

As the day wore on, and he read more, he felt confident that no trouble signals would be needed.

Jake was also beginning to see why this work would need defending. As he spent more time in the meeting room, shifting from one report to another following a project’s progress from proposal to evaluation, the idea of this being a gig that had him hug trees and be photographed started to fade. But he knew it could be like this. He didn’t pull that string to be photographed hugging trees.

If this were a typical year, Jake would be in the middle of filming
Rage Eternal
right now. Maybe they’d be at episode four, pre-production for the fifth. Though available to him, he didn’t take the option of traveling back to California during his three-day gap per episode. There was, to be honest, no one else to visit in California, and he took the flights only to take meetings with his manager, have lunches with people.

Then he didn’t need to use the travel at all because he started seeing Jessica, and she was originally from Vancouver.

He waited for his heart to painfully contract, the way it used to, when he thought about Jessica. Thinking about her at some point became like knocking the first domino and watching in horror as the rest began to fall, and there was no way to stop them. It would start with her face, that first time he saw her at the script reading, no makeup and hair pulled back. He was new to all of this; she flirtatiously offered to “teach him” things. They were friends immediately; she was good at making friends. She wasn’t in that many episodes that first season but she was in town, and before he knew it he was going to her apartment every chance he got. It was good for a few months. Jake winced every time the story went further, because when it got ugly, he got the short end of it. Pre-actor, the Jake that Lindsay met, would never have gotten into that situation. He was out of his depth, clung to Jessica for support, and she shook her leg to dislodge him.

Even though filming the show took a relatively short time (they only had ten episodes, shorter than most network television series), there was publicity work before the show aired, and then pre-production work for the following season soon after. That part fucked with his head the most; she was cold, distant, cruel by default, but for occasional bursts of being interested again. But he couldn’t tell which was genuine, because he didn’t know her that much at all.

That meant during his second year in Vancouver, filming season two, he was a mess. But his show runners, Cora, everyone really, made it work. His character Charles was tapping into a darker side, and he poured himself into it. Not that he felt any satisfaction in nailing “broody.” But there was no going back now. Even if he quit and went back to California to continue school, write off the acting as a period of insanity, what would be the point? His inheritance had run out, and how much was he going to make researching trees?

Also, Lindsay had graduated, and was already in New York.

The good thing about watching those dominoes fall, all the way to the last one, was the peace that came with the silence. Lindsay was always the last domino. He began to ask himself though why that even mattered. 

In any case, the ratings were stellar, especially for the episodes nearing the end of the second season, which aired only a few months ago. He was getting more attention than ever, and when he began to put himself back together, he realized that he could go with a happy middle here. Get the best of different worlds. As long as he had enough guts to take it, and ask for it.

He knew he would be sitting in on meetings about electric transport, water pollution, and smog, but his attention kept gravitating toward that reforestation project. It meant to revive a portion of Indonesian forest almost completely lost to logging. Surely they hadn’t completely brought it back. Why were they getting cut off from the money?   

Being on the research side in college, and let’s face it that was college (kid stuff), gave him the impression that this was done for the sake of
doing the right thing
. And that it had been established previously that one can pour money in doing right things, and it would be worth it. Someone had figured that out already, right? Smarter people than him.

And then, the list of problems. A suspect consultant list from the winning implementing agency, collusion to embezzle from the grant, successfully draining it, performing the barest minimum on the ground and spending too much on conference trips to Spain, Brazil, Canada. It looked like a mess. He wouldn’t go and give money to
these people
again.

Oh wait. He was on the other side, right? Caine Foundation did everything above board, and monitored it as much as they could from New York, but one can only do so much from a distance.

He saw her again as their work day came to an end. She’d been at her desk preparing presentations all day, but she had sandwiches sent up for lunch and placed his in front of him. He couldn’t help it; he reached for her waist and asked if there was a broom closet in their office, anything with solid walls and an actual door.

“
No
,” she said, slapping his hand away. “You signed up to work. You’ll work. And you won’t interrupt mine, I have lots of shit to do.”

So he read, and took notes. Jake still knew how to do this.

And when she went back into the meeting room, a few minutes before six o’clock, he had a work question waiting for her. “Why wasn’t there more monitoring in Borneo?”

Lindsay was taken aback, but was pleased by it. “What? By us? We visited once a year. Lucien even did the mission visit one time. We appointed a third party from Jakarta to go, in other times of the year.”

“Obviously a lot of things slipped through the cracks.”

“Obviously that was one screw-up after another.” Lindsay took a seat across from him, crossed her legs, and swung toward him so he could see it. “We did everything right with that one, we thought. I wasn’t here when it started, but I was at all the evaluations. They chose a stellar firm to do it on the ground. Best recommendations. They had a list of people who might have been a bit shady, but that couldn’t be avoided, and with how small the grant was, relatively, we understood that these were the people they could afford. They always came up with awesome presentations, when we visited. When the third party evaluators visited. It was great, until the finances were tallied.”

“How much did they manage to steal?”

She shook her head. “See, that’s a loaded question. Also, technically not true. When you pay for a service and you don’t like how they did it, it doesn’t mean they didn’t do the work. You just wish they did it better. We don’t deal in products here, we’re not purchasing things. We’re paying people to get something done.”

Like when he started working on
Rage Eternal.
His manager Cora had not been happy with the first offer he got, and he was glad she had been there to say that because it seemed to him like too much money to say lines for a few hours, and not even the whole year. He was sure, in the beginning, half the people there thought he was overpaid and underperforming. By now he knew better, knew that the pay had to be worth the things he gave up because of the demands of the job on his regular life. (The fact that it had obliterated it.) But when he started, he really thought he would be written off before his third month there. He would always do well at the physical stuff though—running, firing the prop weapons, jumping over fences onto offscreen inflatable cushions.

Not the same as environment work, of course.

“So the spin here,” Jake said, “is to convince your donors that
Caine Foundation
is worth giving money to, provided they work with better people.”

“
Message.”
Lindsay rolled her chair closer to his and squeezed his thigh, just above his knee. It had been hours since they’d touched. His skin flamed up, and he felt himself harden as if on cue. “Not spin. But you’ve got it, pretty much. Good job, Berkeley.”