Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

Emmeline got out of the car laughing loudly at nothing with her head tipped back and one hand waving in the air like a woman finishing the funniest conversation of her week — and then, before either guard could form an opinion about the timing of any of it, she launched.

"—which is exactly what I told her, but she won’t listen, because apparently three posts in one afternoon looks desperate now, and I said fine, then explain why the entertainment pages picked up two of them within the hour, and she said that’s different because a repost from a fashion account doesn’t count as engagement, and I said if it doesn’t count as engagement why has every single one of those comments been asking who he is—"

She adjusted the strap of her dress without pausing for oxygen. "—so now I have to build the whole schedule again from Thursday, because she thinks we should have staggered them across two days, and honestly if I have to hear the word staggered one more time before lunch I’m going to start throwing things."

Jacobs, standing by the driver’s door, said nothing at all.

Quinn said nothing either.

Emmeline turned to her and jerked a thumb at the car. "Anyway. Take this ridiculous boy to work."

"Yes, Young Lady."

Park watched the whole performance from the back seat with something close to admiration.

It should not have worked. Objectively, none of it worked since she was a really really bad actor:

She’d come out of that car with her hair somewhere it hadn’t been going in, delivered ninety seconds of social-media grievance at a volume better suited to a stadium, and used the word staggered four times in one breath as though the sheer weight of tedium might physically repel anybody from asking a follow-up question.

Emmeline Bennett was a terrible actress.

Genuinely bad.

’Which is exactly why it worked.’

Jacobs and Quinn weren’t suspicious of anything, so there was nothing for the performance to fail against.

Put that same routine in front of two people who already had a question in their heads and it would have collapsed inside four seconds.

’You’re lucky I love you,’ Park thought, watching her stride off toward the stairs. ’And you’re lucky they’re not paid to think about what me and you do in shadows.’

They pulled out of the garage and up into the light.

Quinn handed him his phone somewhere along the estate road, passing it back between the seats without comment.

Park pressed the side button.

The screen woke up and immediately began to convulse.

It buzzed against his palm in one long unbroken run — notifications stacking on notifications, the little banners piling over each other faster than he could read a single word of them, the phone vibrating in a continuous stutter that went on long enough for the whole thing to stop being exciting and start being faintly alarming. Pings. Chimes. More pings.

Somewhere under all of it, the device made a noise he’d never heard a phone make before, which he took to mean it had run out of ways to describe what was happening.

Park looked at it.

Then he smiled, thin and dry, and put it face-down on the seat beside him.

He would look at it but not while it was still coming.

Jacobs settled the car onto the main road through the Crown District. High walls slid past. Old trees. Private gates opening for other people’s expensive problems.

The phone buzzed. And buzzed. And kept buzzing.

Then, eventually, it stopped.

Silence filled the cabin, and Park left the thing exactly where it was.

Quinn kept checking the rear-view mirror but not the road behind them — him but quick glances, professionally spaced at him, each one lasting exactly as long as a mirror check ought to last and no longer.

She had it down to a science.

Park let her run three of them before he spoke.

"So how’s this going to work?"

Her eyes came up again. "Sir?"

"At the agency. Are you planning to stay on me in there?" He shifted, watching the mirror rather than the back of her head. "Because if you’re going in dressed like that and standing four feet behind me all day, people are going to draw a conclusion, and the conclusion is going to be that you’re my girlfriend, and then—"

"It’s not going to be like that, Sir."

"No?"

"For now we’ll keep to the usual routine."

Park waited.

Quinn returned her attention to the road.

’That is the entire answer?’ She’d folded the whole thing shut like a case file and put it somewhere he couldn’t reach, and there was clearly nothing else coming.

The usual routine.

Right. Except the usual routine had involved a grey suit, a car park two blocks out, and a woman built to be looked past — and this morning she’d come downstairs in a fitted black dress with satin bows on the arms and enough bare leg to derail a public official.

Nothing about that arrangement was usual.

If she genuinely intended to keep her distance at the agency, then the outfit had a purpose he hadn’t been told about.

Park didn’t ask.

Partly because pushing Quinn for information was a known losing game — she’d simply say Yes, Sir in a slightly different tone and the conversation would be over.

Partly because there was clearly more to whatever she’d worked out than she was prepared to share in a moving car with Jacobs listening.

And partly, he admitted, because she was sitting up there in the morning light with those bows on her sleeves and the collar folded soft against her throat, and any man who complained about that particular view had lost track of his own priorities somewhere.

’Fine,’ he thought. ’Keep your secrets, Guard Queen.’

She could tell him when she was ready.

She’d have to eventually, and Park was extremely good at waiting for women to arrive at conclusions they’d already reached.

They came down out of the Crown District and into the grey area.

That was what he’d started calling it — that unglamorous middle band of Crown District before the towers of Aurora started being spectacular; the apartment complex sat halfway down a street with a bakery at one end and a laundry at the other.

The Maybach pulled up short of the entrance and he got out with everything he was carrying — the notebook, the bag, his prone the cap pulled low — and walked to the gates like a man arriving home and stood inside the entrance archway where the angle of the wall did the work for him and watched the black car pull away down the street until it turned and was gone.

Then he waited there for seven minutes he spent them leaning against the wall of a building he did not live in, in a neighbourhood he’d never slept in, holding three songs worth more than the entire block, and found the whole arrangement funnier than it had any right to be.

’One day,’ he thought, ’somebody’s going to write about all this. And nobody will believe the part where I stood outside a stranger’s laundry pretending to be poor.’

The Alphard turned into the street at the seven-minute mark.

’Good timing, boy.’

The van pulled up, the side door slid open, and Mick looked out at him from behind the wheel, having evidently used up his entire allocation of patience for the day before eleven in the morning.

"You’re on time."

"I’m always on time."

"You were late twice."

"Those were both auditions of character."

Mick did not respond to that, which Park was starting to understand was simply how Mick responded to things.

He climbed in, pulled the door shut, and the Alphard swung back out into traffic and started the long climb up onto the elevated roads, out of the grey band, and into the bright ridiculous heart of Aurora where the agency kept its offices.

Park settled back into the seat.

’Today is the day.’

Not only was he going to sign the contract but it was also the day the agency found out what a gem they’d actually picked up off the street.

They’d seen the face. They’d seen his peerless acting before the system increased it by 400%, and one AD had already said out loud, in front of witnesses, that Park had more talent than the man they’d built the show around.

They thought they knew what they had:

A pretty rookie with promising talent and development-slate prospect who might be worth a few years of patient investment.

They were going to walk into a room this morning expecting a nineteen-year-old with a nice voice.

Park had three finished songs in a notebook under his arm, an ability that could reach into a listener’s chest and press on something they’d stopped talking about years ago, and every intention of ruining several careers’ worth of assumptions before lunch.

He looked out of the window at the towers coming up gold and enormous over the road.

’Let’s see how unreasonable I’m allowed to be,’ he thought, ’once they find out what they signed.’

****

A/N:Guys, lyrics are written to be sung. On the page, stripped of melody and voice and timing, even genuinely good ones tend to read as flat and slightly embarrassing, I will be refraining to write them in Chapters.

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