Another Thing to Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

agency. I don’t have the manpower — woman-power, if you will — to provide the kind of services you want.”
    “We just need someone to be with her while she’s off set. When she’s filming, our security provides all the coverage we need. But away from work, she needs someone, and it has to be a woman.”
    “Why?”
    “Men are… helpless around Selene. Any male between eight and eighty, she can twist to her will.”
    “Including you?”
    Flip pulled out a wallet and showed Tess a photograph of what appeared to be Philip Tumulty III. Same brown curls, same puckish expression — and probably the same Freudian issues in a decade or so. “My son, just turned five. He’s back in Los Angeles with his mom. Now that he’s in school, they can’t travel to locations with me, although if we get a full order for
Mann of Steel,
we’ll move east. Which would be a godsend, having a chance to raise him some place other than Los Angeles. You know my dad?”
    Tess, remembering how upset Flip had been when she almost invoked his father’s name, shrugged vaguely to indicate that she might — possibly, maybe — have heard of someone named Phil Tumulty.
    “It’s okay. I know he’s the big man, that I can make television shows the rest of my life and win a hundred thirty-seven Emmys and probably never equal the two movies he made in the ’80s. Anyway, my dad is a great director and a brilliant writer.
Was,
before he started doing big-budget crap. He wins on that score. But he was and is a shitty father, and I can beat him at that game. I’m not saying that I’m made of stone, that I can’t see how beautiful Selene is. I’m saying that I resist temptation for this little guy’s sake.”
    “That’s great,” Tess said, meaning it, but also wondering at his vehemence. Flip’s little speech carried the whiff of addiction, a junkie at his first 12-step meeting, saying the right things, but not yet feeling them. “I get that you need a woman. But I’m not the right woman for the job.”
    “We’ll see,” Flip said, putting his wallet away. His cell phone reprised its eerie imitation of a real phone, and he departed abruptly, leaving Tess alone for the first time. A sneeze overtook her, and Tess realized that the pink chenille had spread, like kudzu, almost to her nose. She hoped someone returned with her clothes before the bathrobe swallowed her completely.
Killer Bathrobe
— now that was a promising concept for a horror film. She would rather see that than a hundred Oscar-worthy films about beautiful underage prostitutes.
     
Chapter 3
     
    W
hat time was it?
    The hotel’s blackout curtains were drawn, which always disoriented him, made him feel as if he were in a sensory deprivation tank. Going on two months in Baltimore, and he still couldn’t get on local time. Couldn’t get on anything local, if you didn’t count the local girls, and he didn’t. He was through with them, anyway.
    Ben looked at the empty spot next to him. Had Selene really been there, just a few hours ago? She hadn’t left so much as a dent in the pillow. Maybe she didn’t weigh enough to make an impression. She was thin even by actress standards, almost fragile. It had been disturbing how young she looked, undressed. He wasn’t a pedophile, for fuck’s sake. And while a lifetime spent more or less in Los Angeles had inured him to bony women, at least most of those had gone out and bought a pair of tits along the way. But then, Selene liked to say she was 100 percent certified organic, one of those throwback freaks
born
gorgeous. He could never work out whether such women had increased or decreased in value as plastic surgery became mainstream. If anyone could buy a face and a body, then was it so special to have one bestowed on you by nature? The law of supply and demand would seem to suggest that natural beauty was less important than it had once been. But that
face
. With a face like that, he could forgive Selene for not having any