Free Where She Went by Gayle Forman

cryin’ shame. But I’ll leave you to lick your wounds or just get acquainted. I’ve got to get back and present. Adam, see you around, I hope. You should come to L.A. more often. You could use some color.” She sauntered off, winking at Bryn.
    We stood there in silence for a second. I offered a cigarette to Bryn. She shook her head, then looked at me with those eyes of hers, so unnervingly green. “That was a setup, in case you were wondering.”
    “Yeah, I was, sort of.”
    She shrugged, not in the least embarrassed. “I told Brooke I thought you were intriguing, so she took matters into her own hands. She and I, we’re alike that way.”
    “I see.”
    “Does that bother you?”
    “Why would it?”
    “It would bother a lot of guys out here. Actors tend to be really insecure. Or gay.”
    “I’m not from here.”
    She smiled at that. Then she looked at my jacket. “You going AWOL or something?”
    “You think they’ll send the dogs on me?”
    “Maybe, but it’s L.A., so they’ll be teeny-tiny Chihuahuas all trussed up in designer bags, so how much damage can they do. You want company?”
    “Really? You don’t have to stay and mourn your best-kiss loss?”
    She looked me squarely in the eye, like she got the joke I was making and was in on it, too. Which I appreciated. “I prefer to celebrate or commiserate my kissing in private.”
    The only plan I had was to return to my hotel in the limo we had waiting. So instead I went with Bryn. She gave her driver the night off and grabbed the keys to her hulking SUV and drove us down the hill from Universal City toward the coast.
    We cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway to a beach north of the city called Point Dume. We stopped on the way for a bottle of wine and some takeout sushi. By the time we reached the beach, a fog had descended over the inky water.
    “June gloom,” Bryn said, shivering in her short little green-and-black off-the-shoulder dress. “Never fails to freeze me.”
    “Don’t you have a sweater or something?” I asked.
    “It didn’t complete the look.”
    “Here.” I handed her my jacket.
    She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “A gentleman.”
    We sat on the beach, sharing the wine straight out of the bottle. She told me about the film she’d recently wrapped and the one she was leaving to start shooting the following month. And she was trying to decide between one of two scripts to produce for the company she was starting.
    “So you’re a fundamentally lazy person?” I asked.
    She laughed. “I grew up in this armpit town in Arizona, where all my life my mom told me how pretty I was, how I should be a model, an actress. She never even let me play outside in the sun—in Arizona!—because she didn’t want me to mess up my skin. It was like all I had going for me was a pretty face.” She turned to stare at me, and I could see the intelligence in her eyes, which were set, admittedly, in a very pretty face. “But fine, whatever, my face was the ticket out of there. But now Hollywood’s the same way. Everyone has me pegged as an ingenue, another pretty face. But I know better. So if I want to prove I have a brain, if I want to play in the sunshine, so to speak, it’s up to me to find the project that breaks me out. I feel like I’ll be better positioned to do that if I’m a producer, too. It’s all about control, really. I want to control everything, I guess.”
    “Yeah, but some things you can’t control, no matter how hard you try.”
    Bryn stared out at the dark horizon, dug her bare toes into the cool sand. “I know,” she said quietly. She turned to me. “I’m really sorry about your girlfriend. Mia, right?”
    I coughed on the wine. That wasn’t a name I was expecting to hear right now.
    “I’m sorry. It’s just when I asked Brooke about you, she told me how you two met. She wasn’t gossiping or anything. But she was there, at the hospital, so she knew.”
    My heart thundered in my chest. I just