“I know, right?” I said in response to her silence as I flopped into my chair. “Totally.” The waiter was all over me, draping my napkin across my lap, handing me the wine list, running through all the water options.
Gwendolyn’s dog yapped, and she dragged the little peabrain into her lap, saying, “He thinks he’s big.” Literally every person with a small dog makes that exact same joke literally every day.
“Must be hard being that dumb,” I said. I ordered a vodka soda.
“Someone’s been busy,” Gwendolyn said when the waiter was gone.
“Me?” I frowned and considered, like, what has been going on with me? “Not really. I’m basically under house arrest. Oliver always said I should put in an underground bowling alley, and now I wish I had.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to feel sorry for you.”
Here’s a key fact about Gwendolyn: Gwendolyn wrote the Archangel books because she dreamed up Gabriel as a dorky sex fantasy and fell in love with him. She was working the night shift at some resort where people have conferences about medical devices and accounting software, and she was spending most of her time sitting behind the desk reading fat paperbacks about dragons and sexy wizards, and she came up with this magical pseudo-Russian dystopian world and told herself stories about forbidden teen love. Then one day she was like, fuck it, and started writing it all down. A good decision, financially.
Here’s another key fact: Gwendolyn got confused like all the other crazy bitches and mistook Oliver-the-actor for Gabriel-the-character and fell in love with him. She’d light up like a Roman candle every time he was around, all fizzing and erratic and scary, and flirt relentlessly in a creepy, motherly way. I think she thought because Oliver once married an older woman she had a chance, but Oliver’s ex-wife was cool to a galactic degree, like David Bowie or Charlotte Gainsbourg, and therefore ungoverned by age. Plus, Oliver was a teenager when he met his ex, romantic and susceptible, and now he’s a movie star who hangs out with other movie stars and cheats on movie stars with models and singers and probably random normals, too.
“I’m going to be honest,” Gwendolyn said. “I’m deeply concerned about the way you’re representing Archangel.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Spare me, Hadley.” It came out in a deep, ragged voice I’d never heard before, like she’d started to transform into a monster.
“I just—” Suddenly I was too tired to keep messing with Gwendolyn. “I was eighteen when I signed on for this,” I told her. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
“Right, how could you ever have anticipated becoming very rich and famous when you auditioned for a series of movies based on wildly bestselling books? What possible precedents could there have been?”
“I know, but this isn’t even like normal famous. It’s a fame tsunami.”
“I don’t think you should make light of tsunamis,” she said.
The waiter materialized with my vodka soda, all chipper and professional like he didn’t notice how tense we were, like he hadn’t waited for the most awkward possible moment to pop in. “Are we ready to order?”
“Cheeseburger, no bun,” I said.
“Fries or salad?”
“If I were going to eat fries, I would eat the bun, dude.”
He pursed his lips and scribbled on his pad.
“The ahi salad with no wontons and dressing on the side,” Gwendolyn said, thrusting her menu at him. When he was gone, she said, “You think I don’t know fame’s complicated? I have a full-time security guard at my house. People keep coming out of the woodwork, asking me for money. I’m under a lot of pressure to write.”
“It’s not the same as for me and Oliver. People don’t buy magazines because you’re on the cover. Nobody takes your picture when you put gas in your car. No one cares enough what you look like naked to hack your phone. Anyway, you’re not under that much pressure to write. Just stop. Wrap it up.”
“My readers want more. I do it for them.”
“Oh, please.”
“You’d be nothing without me.” Her dog, whose head she was stroking so hard the whites of its eyes showed, started whining. “A face on a lunch box nobody buys at a garage sale. A dead girl on CSI. A loser trading blow jobs for new headshots. I created an entire universe. I made up a story that’s worth billions of dollars. What have you ever done? What have you ever made?”