The Awakening of Poppy Edwards by Marguerite Kaye Read Free Book Online Page A

California, I rolled up my sleeves and got on with my life and until I met Lewis, my life was exactly the way I wanted it, going along at a nice even keel. I mean, yes, I was frustrated sometimes with the parts I had, but not enough to have rocked the boat. I had my singing to balance that out.
    Then Lewis came into my life. He gave me the chance to act. We were a perfect match physically, and mentally we clicked, you know? We both had the same rule book. We played the same game. It was a game I started to enjoy way too much, but I didn’t notice, because you don’t, do you, when you start to climb up the happiness scales. You don’t think about it until you start to fall again.
    So you see, the rule I’m talking about breaking isn’t the business-and-pleasure thing. Don’t get me wrong, it was bad enough his being my boss, but we’d already managed to bend that rule to fit us. No, it was the other one. The not-getting-involved one. The one about being self-reliant and independent and not letting anyone get too close. For a few weeks, we stopped worrying about the little game we were playing and just enjoyed playing it. And then…
    We were having dinner, Lewis and I, at the Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, because then there would be photographs, which was good business. That’s when it all fell apart. I didn’t see it coming, because I’d stopped looking out for it. He was already there, you see, in that space under my skin, leaving me vulnerable, exposed, leaving me with no option but to rip him out before he destroyed me.
    Lewis
    She saw it coming before I did. That day at Musso and Frank’s, all I had on my mind was Broadway. I guess I knew, deep-down, that I was in deep, but it had been so long since I’d let myself look deep-down, I’d pretty much succeeded in kidding myself that I was immune. Don’t get me wrong, things between Poppy and I were amazing, I knew that. Not just the sex, but the way our minds worked. As though we were in tune. But you see, I thought that was work—that’s what I told myself. We wanted the same things, we were both ambitious, we complemented one another. It was a business relationship with sex thrown in. Yeah, I know, I ought to have taken a look in the mirror, but I didn’t. Not until that day. Then Poppy made me look.
    ‘Tell me about your sister,’ I said to her once our steaks arrived. I’d been working on an idea, you see, though I hadn’t told her. I’d even put in a few calls. I thought it would be a surprise for her, and I’d decided to sound her out. It would make for great business, too, if I could pull it off, but truly, it was Poppy and not business I’d been thinking about.
    But she got all defensive straight away. ‘Why? What do you want to know?’
    ‘You were an act once,’ I said. ‘Tell me about it. Did you sing?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Just that. Yes. A very clipped
yes
, all English accent and icicles. I should have stopped there. One of the rules we’d stuck to was not getting too personal. You might think that sounds ridiculous, considering how very physical our relationship was, but that’s it, you see. We had work and we had sex but we didn’t do the bit in-between. Yes, we talked and told each other stories and made each other laugh, but it was all around the business. Movies. The theatre. Hollywood. Broadway. So when I persisted with the questions, she started to give off those no-trespassing signals, and they’re the kind of signals I’d give out myself if she asked me, say, about France, which she wouldn’t because she had no idea. And, see, once I thought that, once I realised how little I’d told her about me, it made me realise how little she’d told me about her, and I wanted to know more. So I thought, in my convoluted, totally unprepared kind of way, that the way to do that was to keep asking what she obviously didn’t want to tell. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what happened when you broke up the act, left her for