The Bungalow – Part 2
Speeding west on Sunset Boulevard, Gold allows himself a moment to look at Belle French in the passenger seat next to him. Idly stroking the grey leather upholstering, she leans against the car door and watches the other vehicles go by.
She's not fuming any more – at least from what he can tell – and while her spirit is something of an attractant to him, he likes her easygoingness just as much. She's cooling off, and it's given him time to resolve not to push her buttons so hard in the future.
It's fun of course, teasing her out to parry barbs, but Gold thinks he might've struck too hard at something soft by denying her professionally.
Belle French doesn't seem like the type to take overt insults to her person too seriously, or to her performance, but there's a vulnerability, to do with her credibility in her career, that he had struck home on, and he's sorry for it.
Gold knows the highs and lows of fame as well as any other working actor, and he knows the price that has to be paid for putting your entire person out there for other people to criticise and to find fault with.
Despite his disillusionment with the weight people put on his word and his name, he knows that he can still wound with it. He can be intimidating, he knows, and before French's offer he has always worked closely with his co-stars and rewarded their bravery for treating him just like the human being he is with anything they wanted from him professionally. He'd forgotten that with French, had been twisted by his personal wants, and he'd not thought about her.
Just because she is intriguing and attractive and wordy, it doesn't mean he has to punish her for liking those things about her. He has his issues and he needs to deal with them, not alienate her into thinking she's not good enough a co-star for him.
Being an unintentional arsehole is a life-long habit, picked up from his father – who was, to be perfectly honest, more of an intentional bastard than an unintentional one – and the legend's only grown with age, preceding him wherever he goes.
It doesn't matter if he's at a charity fundraiser or the bank, he has this whole...fucking shroud of doubt surrounding his character, battering him from all sides like he's a terrible person but, damn, does he make some good movies.
Like he'd told French, he is who they want him to be while the camera's rolling and after that they don't give a shit, because he's Rumford Gold and his name is synonymous with all the worst aspects of fame and fortune.
Gold glances at her again, the woman next to him, and finds she's smiling at the cigarette paper-filled glove compartment in the door.
"I'm disappointed you don't have a phone in here, like in the movie," French tells him in that genuine way of hers, leaving him a little bit bemused as to what she's actually fishing for.
Or is she not fishing at all?
He's used to one sentence hiding another, one coy glance meaning a whole fucking range of different things, but he's not much used to plain honesty.
If there's one thing his more recent streak of dating 'normal' women has taught him, it is that it's not the career or fame that dictates what a person is like. People are who they are, despite what hope you might hold out for them, and Belle French, he thinks, is honest, despite the glamour of her chosen career and the cut-throat nature of the business.
It hasn't hardened her, hasn't turned her into the type he's most accustomed to, and he's slowly learning that 'normal' doesn't mean a bloody thing anymore.
The recent women he's dated, they were, by all standards, normal, but he'd still come across Charlotte, the redhead he'd first met on a late-night run to Starbucks, who had decided to take those pictures of him and get what she could for them.
Did his fame make her do it? Or was it always in her, this greedy need and disrespect?
Gold's at a...tender time, for want of a better phrase, and despite what French might think about him, she's the best person he could be around right now.
She won't let him get away with anything, and despite the temptation she presents, she's good company.
He realises too late, however, that he hasn't replied to her quip, and now she's watching him from behind those sunglasses of hers, face unreadable in his peripheral.
Gold gives her a smile, keeping his eyes on the road. "The phone and the sonar screen were optional extras."
He can tell his grin falls short, because she just sits there and watches him for another moment.
"You know," she says eventually, sounding like he's pulling the words from her. "We can just go back to our separate rooms, tell Frank we rehearsed and forget about it."
Gold taps his thumb on the wheel, biting back the urge to tell her yes, that's exactly what he wants to do, because the enigma of her torments him. But he doesn't. He presses an easier and wholly more familiar smile onto his face and treats her like his co-star.
"No, French. We'll run these lines, and we'll do it until Gracie and John are satisfied. Alright?"
She takes a long time to give him a nod, and he thinks he sees a tiny smile from the corner of his eye, too. Her returned good humour relaxes him.
"I don't know why you didn't take Wilshire," she says after a quiet moment, simply sounding curious. "Even I know it would've been faster."
He frowns, indicating right as they come up on the turning for The Beverly Hills Hotel entrance. "But then we would've had to turn around."
Belle sits forward. "You're turning?"
Feeling completely lost, Gold waits for a car to pass and carries on, turning into the palm tree-lined and red-marked drive of the hotel. Belle pushes up her sunglasses to sit on her head and eyes the dark green entrance sign.
"But I thought..." She turns to him, forehead creased. "You don't stay at the Hilton, with me?"
"No." He shakes his head, and then realisation sets in. "You saw me there?"
"The car," she clarifies, patting the door as Gold lines up behind the rest of the short queue waiting to get to the hotel doors or the car park around the side. "Marco, my driver – he said you nearly hit him on the way in."
Gold swallows, neck heating with shame, and vaguely remembers Charlotte putting her red lips to his ear with a lusty whisper when he approached the Hilton. He's suddenly sure that his distraction led to more than one near-collision on the way to the hotel, and he has to hold back the flood of self-loathing and disgust he feels.
He's fucking pitiful.
"No," Gold tells Belle, clearing his throat. "I...uh, booked a room there last night."
Her pink lips shape a silent 'oh,' before she says, "I was wondering how I hadn't seen you there before."
They manage to get past the queue of new arrivals and departures at the front doors, before heading to his parking spot, across the lot.
"I thought you were here too, to be honest," Gold said, indicating and pulling into the space. "You could be, you know."
He cuts the engine and puts the handbrake up. He glances at her once he's done to find that she's shrugging in answer to his statement.
"I like the Hilton. It has charm, and I can make my own lunch every morning without the management getting pissy."
Gold says nothing to that. He just follows French's lead when she opens the door and gets out of the car. He taps the windows to make sure they're all up, locks the car, and then leads his co-star over to the front doors of the hotel.
Co-star, co-star, co-star... Why is it so hard for him to reconcile this? It's not because she's not good enough, but it's...something.
A concierge greets them there, under the striped canopy roof, while his other counterparts go about overseeing the new arrivals and the valet parking service. He surreptitiously brushes off his beige trousers and gives them a wide smile, welcoming them to the hotel.
Gold gives him a nod, but French is more generous and gifts him with a slow, curling smile, turning the poor boy into a stuttering wreck.
They pass him by as he tries to maintain his cool, and Gold can't help the smirk that crosses his face. He knows now, at least, that he's not the only one affected by French and her easy smiles.
She doesn't even seem to notice the little diversion she's made for the lad as they enter the hotel's lobby through the main doors.
They collect his key from the front desk, the smiling clerk welcoming him back to the "Pink Palace," before heading out through to the courtyard.
French looks about at the green palms and their fluttering fronds, the freshly cut grass and the pink pathways intersecting it, before hitching a quick step to keep up with Gold as he leads her towards his bungalow.
"You know," she says, eyeing the hidden stone fountain in the hedge to the left and the row of fuchsia flowers lining the path on the right. "I heard that when Howard Hughes stayed here, he got someone to hide sandwiches in the garden for him."
Gold blinks, hands in the pockets of Tupelo's suit as he glances at French. "Why would he do that?"
"Because he got hungry in the middle of the night." She smiles, keeping pace. "Haven't you ever asked for anything weird?"
He thinks about it for a moment, as they approach the secluded brick walk towards the presidential bungalow, and he thinks about it seriously.
"I don't know." Gold rubs the side of his thumb along his jaw, a smile burgeoning across his face. "I asked for a tin of sardines on location in a remote part of Russia once. You wouldn't believe how quickly I got them." He looks to her as he spies the bungalow's green security gate and the door beyond. "What about you?"
"Me?" She squints in thought, following as he precedes her. "I think the strangest thing I ever asked for was...a pepperoni pizza at about...three in the morning? But there was beer involved that night, so..."
Gold smirks, pulling the keys from his pocket and opening the gate. "You can't be held accountable for your actions?"
"More like taste." She scrunches her nose. "That hotel couldn't make a good pizza for love nor money."
He thinks about that as he opens the bungalow door, thinks about French not being French and just being...normal. He thinks about her ordering a terrible pizza in the wee hours because she's too drunk to know any better, thinks about her getting drunk in the first place, and he wonders what that's like for her, whether it's a release or just a regular day.
Gold realises he doesn't really know anything about her.
But he watches as he shuts the door behind them and she looks about, peering down the gallery into the living room as she takes off her shoes at the front door, before stepping into the Great Room, with its dining table for ten, its grand fireplace, its sofas and expensive floors.
She bites her bottom lip as she glances at the pool outside of the French doors to the right. Gold rubs his thumb across the fob of his keys, unsure what to say in the face of her wide-eyed look.
"There's a lift, too," suddenly springs from his mouth. "An elevator. It's on the other side of the bungalow, for private access."
For a man that tries not to mince his words, he's doing a fine fucking job of it now.
But then French seems just as surprised by her words too when she says, "You should have brought your date here."
There's a quiet moment – a moment remembrance for him of typing his number into Charlotte's mobile phone while she slept only to see the photos of him and the failed messages she'd tried to send a couple of hours previous – and then French is shaking her head of blonde hair, looking apologetic.
"But I guess that would have been stupid," she tells him, putting her handbag down on the dining table next to the fruit bowl.
"It's my home for the next few months." He puts the keys down on the table. "Best not to invite more trouble."
She smiles at that, a dimple appearing in her cheek. "You don't think I'm trouble?"
He laughs, even as he thinks to himself that, yes, she is trouble, and, yes, he's going to regret working so closely with her, if not for the temptation she represents for him then the opportunity she presents to the press to make something of the two of them that they're not.
Best just to let this blow over and see French around, rather than make more problems for himself that he can't deal with. Best to just be professional and let her pass by, rather than make the mistake of not doing so, like he's done before.
Maybe it's because he enjoys his work so much, or maybe it's because he's met some truly gifted actors and actresses that he likes getting involved with them, meeting them or keeping their numbers. Maybe it's because he's weak that he hasn't been able to turn down a pretty woman with a quick smile yet, which gives him this reputation and this string of failed relationships.
But he knows it's because he's stupid that he gets sucked in. He trusts, and they lie. Nothing is what it seems and sometimes, when he's not immersed in a role or holed up in his house back in the highlands, he wonders if it ever will be.
For now, though, there's French, and her fascination with the remote for the fire.
He smirks, behind his fingers, and resists a laugh as she presses button after button, going to her side and looking down at the device.
"Trying to blow me up before my reputation is tarnished?" Gold asks, and French doesn't bother to glance at him as she makes the flames leap higher.
"I think we're a little past that point," she mutters, eyebrows matching the movement of the fire as it rises and falls. "This is kind of neat."
She drops the remote on the couch, before moving to the French doors and eyeing up the blue rippling water of the crystal-clear swimming pool. He puts the control back in its rightful place on the side-table, absently wondering if he's really so neat and if she leaves things lying about in her hotel room, before running his fingers through his hair.
The cufflinks of Tupelo's shirt catch his eye and he suddenly feels the need to change, to be comfortable and to just be running lines with another actor.
"I'll be back in a minute. Feel free to amuse yourself," Gold tells French, before hastily adding, "Anything that doesn't involve fire."
She laughs but doesn't turn around, and he turns his back on her to stalk to the master bedroom across the foyer. Gold shuts the door behind him and proceeds to get changed, folding his costume and putting it on the trunk at the end of the king-sized bed.
He washes his face of make-up in the sink of the en suite bathroom, eyeing the dark marks under his eyes, before getting into some soft jeans and a shirt in the too-big walk-in closet. He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt and sighs, before running his fingers through his hair and across his scalp.
Before he leaves to join French again, he takes a look about the bright sunlit rooms like she might, like a stranger would.
The bungalow's too big for just him, he knows, but the security is why he insisted on having the place, along with the privacy the hotel offers. Privacy, not for clandestine meetings or secret love affairs like some other residents, but for his ordinary life.
He ignores the sobering thought, or at least tries to while he retraces his steps back to the Great Room and remembers what it first felt like to be told he had talent. It grounds him, makes him remember the times he went hungry and that his personal sacrifices are few in comparison to other people in the world.
Gold finds French where he left her, except she's not at the windows anymore and is sat in the corner of the sofa, a thick and white-paged script in her lap.
Even from the door Gold can see that her lines are neatly highlighted in bright green, and that none of the paper is torn or battered, like his copies. He raises an eyebrow as he makes his presence known, joining French in the fashion-over-comfort armchair across from her.
She glances up, a challenge in her expression. "Ready to finally do this?"
He resists rolling his eyes at her, even playfully, and reaches for a copy of the script that he keeps on top of the stone mantle of the fireplace.
"Ready."
They rehearse lines, with Gold following French's lead as she goes through some scenes and tries out different variations of emphasis on certain words, and occasionally he gives her his opinion, but apart from that he watches her.
Gold can see Belle French for who she is as an actress, even if she stumps him a bit altogether, and he can see her passion and her capability clear as day as she takes on the mask of Gracie and tells Tupelo that she loves him despite everything.
He's quietly impressed with the way she clearly pauses to think before she launches into her character. She's not just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, unlike some actors, and it's refreshing that she's careful about her craft, considerate of the knife she wields and the cutting out of the persona she must portray.
But there's one thing that bothers Gold.
While French is enthusiastic and obviously very in touch with her character, the way she holds the pages of the script in her hands is very telling about her method.
To Gold, there's something wrong about the way she carefully turns each page, the way she slides her fingers down the paper as if it's precious, and the way she keeps the script firmly in her lap, taking care not to bend it.
Belle French, Gold thinks, holds her script like it's the Bible – the be all and end all – and it...bothers him.
He stops her as she makes her way beautifully through a monologue. "French?"
She glances up, blue eyes a little glazed with a far-off look. "Hm?"
"Can I ask you something?"
She nods, and Gold watches as she slides her hand carefully between the pages of her script to keep her place. He rubs the knuckle of his thumb along his eyebrow, frowning as he looks down at his own script. He's holding it by the bottom of the pages, folded and bent and coffee-marked, and it solidifies this sudden idea in his mind that he can actually give her some advice.
He looks up again, shifting forward in his chair to perch on the edge, his forearms resting on his knees. He plays with the bent corner of the page they're on as he tries to put his thoughts into words. He decides to start with a question.
"Have you gone to Whale with anything yet?" Gold asks curiously. "You know, like an odd word, or a phrase that doesn't sound like Gracie to you?"
French tilts her head like she can't quite understand what he's getting at, what he's hinting, but she answers him all the same.
"No." She frowns, sitting forward a little more, mimicking him. "Have you?"
Gold gives her a sure nod. "Ten times, at least. Tupelo's complex. He can't be captured in clichés."
She doesn't seem to struggle with what he's saying – so that's something – only that she doesn't seem to agree with his actions entirely.
French shrugs helplessly. "If you think your lines needed changing then I'm sure they did, but mine are alright."
"But that's the point," he stresses, his voice suddenly passionate. "They can't just be alright. You need to feel that you're reading your character off of a page, that they could have written those very words, that you can feel them in the writing." He raises an eyebrow at her nod and expression of agreement. "There's nothing you want to change?"
And because she's Belle French, she doesn't just brush him off. She thinks about it, and very seriously too, if the pearly teeth in her lower lip are any indication.
She looks at him after a moment, squinting slightly as if bracing for something. "Maybe."
He doesn't know what she's expecting from him, but he gives her a smile.
"That's good," Gold says, nodding. "That's really good."
Eyebrows meeting her hairline, French asks, "Really? But...the script's the script. I mean, occasionally there's something really stupid or a mistake, but...August okayed this version. He created the characters."
Gold runs his hand through his hair. "That's all well and good, French, but he just observed them, writing down what he saw. We are them, and there's no one more qualified than we are to say whether something is right from them or not."
She taps her fingertips against her bare right knee, pursing her lips against a smile. "You're right."
He sits back in the armchair – not gleeful, nor smug, but content to have actually helped – and he feels satisfied that, actually, this whole thing might go well after all.
But then she throws him again, with that sudden easy smile of hers and that open expression, as she sits further forward and lays her script to the side, looking excited.
"There's definitely one thing I'd like to talk to Frank about," she tells him quickly, as if the words are coming faster than she can verbalise them. "In the second act, when Tupelo's blown Gracie out and she's confronted him after getting drunk at the bar, she grabs him and kisses him at his door."
Gold swallows as French stands, taking to her bare feet and pacing as she gestures.
"She's so violent," French stresses, shaking her hands. "She's just so angry and embarrassed, but she's also...disappointed. It's not like she wants to hurt him, like it is in the script, but more like she wants to...show him what he's missing, show him that he doesn't need to be this...aloof man with her. He can be the prick, he can be the bastard, but she doesn't need him to try to prove it to her because she knows that's not who he really is."
And then French walks towards Gold suddenly, cornering him in his chair before kneeling in front of him.
There are a thousand things he could say at this moment – and a thousand more he shouldn't – but all that comes to mind is the stupidest question he can ask.
"What should it be like?" He voices, his throat ever so slightly dry.
French shifts on her knees, blue eyes narrowed in thought, before she reaches up to grasp his knees. He almost fucking jolts in the chair at the touch, her grip so solid and firm and so freely given, and she's just getting into the swing of things, being swept away, but he's fighting himself and the itch to really give himself over to this, because nothing good can come of that.
French looks up at him, all flushed cheeks and sudden seriousness, and he knows that she is centred, that she has found something important to her character, and if she needs help to act this out then so be it, but...God, she's taking his face in her hands and bringing her mouth to his, so close he can feel the warmth of her breath on his dry lips.
Her eyes flick to and fro, back and forth from each of his. "It should be like..."
Her voice is near a whisper, but not quite. Her fingertips slide into his hair, pushing it away from his face.
"It should be like this," she says breathily, holding him close even though it doesn't feel like she's truly touching him. "Quiet, with the storm raging underneath, and then when she kisses him...it's slow, tantalising, making him want to give her more than he does everyone else. And then when they get to the bed...it's like they've already had their reconciliation."
There's a breathless moment where he thinks she might act it out with him now, where she's so close to actually kissing him that the not-kissing hurts. She draws out the suspense like a fucking puppeteer, her lashes low and her eyes intense, and then she's moving back, letting go, standing up and smiling.
She thanks him, tells him she'll talk to Whale and see what they can do, but he's rooted in the leather and wood he sits in, disturbed beyond belief that his face actually heats and itches where she's touched it.
And then he realises why he finds it hard to think of her as just his co-star, because, as a term, it isn't enough. It diminishes her.
Rumford Gold watches Belle French evolve as an actress right before his eyes as she takes a pen to her script, and he knows that she will do wonderful things with her skill, but he's not sure whether to be pleased that he'll see it in action or worried.
For now, he needs a fucking cigarette.
Belle watches as clouds cross the sky outside of the bungalow's lavish sitting room, the cumulus massing into a grey ceiling that Gold furiously smokes beneath.
He's pacing on the far side of the pool, his free hand fisted in his jeans pocket, and Belle wonders if the photo scandal has really put more pressure on him than he has let on.
She would wonder more about him, but she's a little preoccupied herself. She's taking the time he's out of the room and earshot to cool herself off.
She had grabbed Rumford Gold. By the face.
It had been in the heat of the moment, with Gracie's determination and desperation to draw the true Tupelo out, but still...the aftermath of staring into Gold's dark eyes had felt decidedly not like acting her attraction to his character. Not one bit.
Belle fidgets in her corner seat of the couch, pressing her fingertips against her temples to help her decipher her muddled thoughts.
No, it had felt decidedly good to be holding Gold by the face, to have control over his wayward mouth and whether or not it touched hers, and that's...scary.
She had liked it. Belle had liked pressing herself between his knees and pulling him close, speaking to him in that bedroom voice and imagining the beautiful cinematography of the resultant sex scene. It is still vivid in her mind, this tasteful depiction of Gracie and Tupelo making love, instead of the scripted version where she literally fucks him until he can't form a coherent sentence, until he can't push her or run away anymore.
Gracie is tough, but with Tupelo she finds this unerringly soft side of herself – not like the learned love she had given to her father, but more like...an instinctual thing, a bond she can't deny and doesn't want Tupelo to try to.
Belle isn't sure whether the hammering of her heart and the urge that she had felt to kiss Gold was Gracie's doing, or her own, and she's not sure which is worse.
Despite the small smidgen of resentment she still holds towards him, along with her exasperation, Belle likes this place where Gold feels he can ask her to his hotel and actually run lines with her, help her, rather than lie to Frank and blow her off.
She likes that she felt like an equal when he told her if something worked or if it didn't and that he didn't get indignant when she did the same for him.
She likes this...work. She likes having this professional level between them where there is no glass ceiling, no baggage, and nothing is holding her back from doing what feels right. So, it would be ridiculous to ruin that, to scrap their hard-earned progress for the tickle of heat she had felt in her belly when she was an inch from his mouth and he had licked his lips, unconsciously or not.
Despite the easy way he seems to be able to get under her skin and the fact that he can put all of this worry in her head, she knows he needs a friend right now. He doesn't need another problem, which is what that feeling of attraction inside of her is.
It is a problem – a big one – and it's not to be dismissed so very easily.
But Belle can use it, can mould it and work it into her performance to fuel Gracie's fire, and it will make her job that much easier, starting from something that is actually tangible. She can smooth out any personal problems that stem from it, because a crush is just a crush, and a crush between co-stars is almost a given in their business.
For now, Belle just needs to support her leading man, and a smile crosses her face as an idea comes to mind.
She leans against the arm of the couch and calls out, "Gold!"
He turns from his pacing, stopping by a sun lounger, and meets her gaze, eyebrows lifted in both expectation and surprise. Whatever his thoughts had been, they hadn't been pleasant, and they've left their mark on his face.
"What's the pepperoni pizza like here?" She asks.
Belle can see the immediate change in Gold's expression, his sudden sour mood turning as quickly as it had come into quiet amusement. He tries to hide his returned good humour behind his hand as takes a final draw from the shortened cigarette between his masculine fingers.
"Finest in the world," he tells her on the exhale, and Belle smiles.
When her driver comes to pick her up hours later, Belle French leaves Rumford Gold to return alone to his bungalow after seeing her off.
He stands between the empty plates and half-finished dishes decorating the brightly lit Great Room, and he wonders how an Aussie with a penchant for picking the toppings off of a pizza and who can't abide his non-use of a napkin could have wormed her way so quickly into his happier thoughts.
He thinks it might have been on the first day of filming, when she told him that he looked tired too.