Jake tipped the server twenty dollars and then engaged the privacy lock on the door once he was gone.
“The coast is clear,” he called to Celia. “Let’s eat.”
They ate, sitting at the fancy oak dining room table in the padded oak dining room chairs. The steaks were excellent, cooked to a perfect medium rare and covered with the sautéed mushrooms. The wine was excellent as well, and they killed the first bottle well before getting to their cheesecake.
Jake opened the second bottle of merlot while Celia took the first bite of her dessert.
“Oh, this is heavenly,” she declared, savoring the bite.
“Yeah?” Jake asked.
“Oh yeah,” she confirmed. “I can feel it going to my hips as we speak, but it’s worth it.”
Jake poured them each another glass of wine and then tried a bite of his dessert as well. Celia was correct. It was excellent cheesecake, with just the right level of sweetness and an absolutely decadent texture. And the fact that he could see the bulging of Celia’s hard nipples poking out as she sat across from him only added to the experience.
“I think I’m ready to talk now,” Celia said softly after chewing up her next bite and washing it down with a drink of wine that was a little too high in volume to qualify as a sip.
“Haven’t we been talking?” Jake asked, catching a glimpse of a slight smear of cheesecake on her pink tongue. He wished he could suck it off of there. Jesus fucking Christ, he thought lustfully, I need Laura to come visit in a bad way.
“I mean talk about what’s been bothering me,” she said.
He let his eyes move up a bit, from her tongue and lips to her eyes. They were very beautiful eyes, a rich, luxuriant brown. And they were serious now, no longer flirty or teasing. “Oh...” Jake said slowly. “That ‘ready to talk’.”
She nodded. “If your offer is still good,” she said. “Your offer to listen and be here for me?”
“You know it’s still good,” he assured her. “Let me just shift my brain out of ogling and impure thought mode and into friend who will listen and absorb mode.”
She smiled, a weak smile but a smile nonetheless. “Go ahead,” she said.
He took a deep breath, hit the side of his head with his right hand dramatically, shook his head a little, and then looked back into her eyes. “All right,” he said. “Switching of gears complete. What’s been going on, hon?”
She took another bite of her cheesecake, chewing it thoughtfully, seemingly composing in her mind how she wanted to put her problem into words. She chased it down with another gulp of her wine and then simply blurted out the summary of her issue in four simple words: “Greg cheated on me.”
Jake had strongly suspected that whatever her problem was, it had something to do with her husband. Still, he was caught off guard by this. He knew Greg very well and had come to respect and like the man over the years of their acquaintance with each other. Greg did not seem the cheating type. He was pompous, arrogant, more than a little conceited, but he was honest and he truly loved Celia. Jake never would have pegged him for a cheater.
“Really?” he said after pondering for a moment. “Cheated on you with ... you know ... another woman?”
“With another woman,” she confirmed. “Some puta who works in the makeup department for the film crew. It happened about two months ago, while they were doing the principal photography up in Alaska.”
“How do you know this?” Jake asked. “There hasn’t been anything in the celebrity rags about this, right? They’d be all over the story.”
“They don’t know about it,” she told him. “I know because Greg himself told me.”
“Greg ... told you?” Jake asked, surprised.
She nodded. “He called me on the phone and confessed the night after it happened.”
Confessed? the essential male part of Jake’s mind asked with appalled bewilderment. Why the hell would he do something like that? Who in the hell confesses if you haven’t actually been caught? Maybe that was it. Maybe he had been caught.
Celia was apparently able to read these thoughts in his brain. She shook her head. “I never would have known if he hadn’t told me,” she said. “He says he felt so guilty after doing it that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, was having trouble with his acting even. He said he needed to get it off of his chest.”
“Jesus, C,” Jake said, still trying to wrap his mind around an unsolicited confession. “I’m so sorry. I never would have thought Greg would do something like that.”
“Neither did I,” she said, picking at the edge of her cheesecake but not actually cutting into it any further. “Of all the things I worried about with him on that project—helicopter crashes, the film being another Northern Jungle...” She looked up at Jake meaningfully. “ ... my own temptations—Greg sticking his polla in some puta’s concha was down at the bottom of the list.”
“Did it just happen the one time?” Jake asked.
“That’s what he says,” she said bitterly. “And I believe him. Why would he lie about that? He didn’t even have the decency to keep me in the dark about the first time.”
“Would you have preferred he keep you in the dark?” Jake asked.
She put the fork down and picked up the wine glass. She shot down another healthy slug of it. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s part of what’s been running around in my head ever since that asshole told me. Is ignorance bliss? In a way, I suppose it is. If he had just kept this shit to himself...” She shook her head. “But then again ... I hate the thought of being played for a fool almost as much. I just don’t know, Jake. I can tell you what he should have done though. He should have not fucked that bitch in the first place.”
“Agreed,” Jake said, “but the deed is done, right? And so is the confession.”
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. “The deed is done, as is the confession.”
“Is he still working with this woman?” Jake asked now.
“According to Greg, as of the last time I talked to him anyway, she is still part of the crew, but she is no longer put in the position of working with him.”
“Why don’t they just get rid of her?” Jake asked. “Wouldn’t that kind of be the logical thing to do?”
“They can’t just fire her,” Celia said. “That can’t even reassign her. It’s a union position protected by a very strong collective bargaining agreement. She would own that movie studio if they dismissed her just because she slapped her fucking twat down on my husband’s chorizo. And even if they could fire her, how long do you think it would be before she was talking to the goddamn Watcher about what happened? As it stands now, as long as she’s employed in that position, she is held to a strict nondisclosure clause in the contract. Revelation of any details about the film, the actors in it, the crew making it, or even the subcontractors working on the periphery of it would lead to immediate termination, blacklisting, and legal action. If she is unjustly fired, all that goes right out the window.”
“That is a bit of a dilemma,” Jake said. “I can see how this would tend to keep nagging at you.”
“Yeah, that’s the goddamn understatement of the year,” she said spitefully.
“Did he ... well ... explain how this happened?” Jake asked.