Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) by Mina V. Esguerra Read Free Book Online Page A

her thumb in when she threw a punch.
    “You’ll break your own finger, which is stupid,” he had said. “We’ll need all our thumbs.”
    “Then if you see me making a dumb fist like that, you’ll know I’m in trouble. Or I’m just trying to annoy you,” she had said.
    As the day wore on, and he read more, he felt confident that no trouble signals would be needed.
    Jake was also beginning to see why this work would need defending. As he spent more time in the meeting room, shifting from one report to another following a project’s progress from proposal to evaluation, the idea of this being a gig that had him hug trees and be photographed started to fade. But he knew it could be like this. He didn’t pull that string to be photographed hugging trees.
    If this were a typical year, Jake would be in the middle of filming Rage Eternal right now. Maybe they’d be at episode four, pre-production for the fifth. Though available to him, he didn’t take the option of traveling back to California during his three-day gap per episode. There was, to be honest, no one else to visit in California, and he took the flights only to take meetings with his manager, have lunches with people.
    Then he didn’t need to use the travel at all because he started seeing Jessica, and she was originally from Vancouver.
    He waited for his heart to painfully contract, the way it used to, when he thought about Jessica. Thinking about her at some point became like knocking the first domino and watching in horror as the rest began to fall, and there was no way to stop them. It would start with her face, that first time he saw her at the script reading, no makeup and hair pulled back. He was new to all of this; she flirtatiously offered to “teach him” things. They were friends immediately; she was good at making friends. She wasn’t in that many episodes that first season but she was in town, and before he knew it he was going to her apartment every chance he got. It was good for a few months. Jake winced every time the story went further, because when it got ugly, he got the short end of it. Pre-actor, the Jake that Lindsay met, would never have gotten into that situation. He was out of his depth, clung to Jessica for support, and she shook her leg to dislodge him.
    Even though filming the show took a relatively short time (they only had ten episodes, shorter than most network television series), there was publicity work before the show aired, and then pre-production work for the following season soon after. That part fucked with his head the most; she was cold, distant, cruel by default, but for occasional bursts of being interested again. But he couldn’t tell which was genuine, because he didn’t know her that much at all.
    That meant during his second year in Vancouver, filming season two, he was a mess. But his show runners, Cora, everyone really, made it work. His character Charles was tapping into a darker side, and he poured himself into it. Not that he felt any satisfaction in nailing “broody.” But there was no going back now. Even if he quit and went back to California to continue school, write off the acting as a period of insanity, what would be the point? His inheritance had run out, and how much was he going to make researching trees?
    Also, Lindsay had graduated, and was already in New York.
    The good thing about watching those dominoes fall, all the way to the last one, was the peace that came with the silence. Lindsay was always the last domino. He began to ask himself though why that even mattered. 
    In any case, the ratings were stellar, especially for the episodes nearing the end of the second season, which aired only a few months ago. He was getting more attention than ever, and when he began to put himself back together, he realized that he could go with a happy middle here. Get the best of different worlds. As long as he had enough guts to take it, and ask for it.
    He knew he would be sitting in on meetings