Chapter 36: Welcome to the Bird Streets

The three of them went off up the Koreatown sidewalk and didn’t look back, and Jane stood where she was with Ronan’s arm still around her and let them go.

She was gladder to have him there than she wanted to think about. She was also stuck on one thing.

"Where did you even come from?" She turned her head to look at him. "You were up in that apartment a minute ago."

"You hadn’t gone far." He was still getting his breath back. "I came out the door and you were already down the block with those three behind you. All four of you were walking. I wasn’t."

"Thank you." She got the sunglasses settled properly on her face, since he’d put them on her crooked. "For a second there I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I didn’t even know they were gone until I went to reach for them."

"They were on your floor— on my floor." He let go of her waist. "I stood on them on my way past. Then I ran."

She took a breath and let it out.

"I shouldn’t have walked out of there in such a hurry. That part’s mine."

"It is." He looked at her sideways. "And you might want to remember you don’t have a car down here. You came in mine."

"...I’d completely forgotten that."

He took a look up the street and back down it. There were people out on both sides of it, and there had been the whole time.

"Come back up with me. Every minute you’re standing out here is another shot somebody gets of you." He was already turning her around. "I’ve got a scarf upstairs. Put that on over the bottom half of your face and I’ll drive you home."

"Alright. That works."

They went back up. The scarf was a gray one he never wore, and she took it and had it over her nose and mouth before he’d finished explaining what he wanted her to do with it, and then he walked her back down and out to the lot and put her in the car with the cap and the sunglasses and the scarf all doing their jobs at once.

Nobody so much as glanced at them on the way.

They were most of the way through Koreatown before he said anything.

"So you’ve seen where I live now." He kept his eyes on the road. "Doesn’t seem fair, does it. You get to stand in my apartment and tell me everything wrong with it, and I never get to see yours."

"Then come and see it." She was watching the windshield. "I’ll tell you now, though, you’re not going to enjoy the comparison."

He didn’t doubt that for a second. She had money the way people in the trades had tools, and whatever was waiting at the other end of this drive was going to make his point about rent look small.

She gave him the turns as they came. Sunset most of the way, west and west and west, and the city changed around the car while she did it. By the time they came up out of the Strip and started climbing, he was looking at houses that sat sideways on the hill with their backs to the road and their whole fronts made of glass.

"You weren’t exaggerating." He slowed for a bend that came at him tighter than he’d expected. "This is all industry money up here, isn’t it."

"Mm. And mine’s in the Bird Streets."

His hands came off the wheel a fraction. "The Bird Streets? Those are movie star houses."

"You’re sitting next to a movie star, Ronan."

He’d managed to lose track of that somewhere between the barn and the sidewalk fight.

"...Right."

The turn came up off Doheny and the road narrowed again, walls and gates and hedges on both sides of it, barely room for two cars anywhere along it. She pointed him at a house on the lower stretch, close enough to Sunset that he could still hear the traffic on it, and he pulled up short of the gate and looked at what she’d pointed at.

Low, wide, flat-roofed, the whole face of it glass and pale stone, sitting behind a wall he couldn’t see over.

She put her window down and said her name into a box on a post, and the gate started sliding open on its own.

He was still watching it go. Somebody up at the house had heard her and let her in, and neither of them had had to touch anything.

He drove through and the gate closed itself behind the car.

He parked, got out, and stood there with the door open and nothing to say about any of it.

"Well?" Jane was watching him over the roof of the Accord, and enjoying it. "Verdict."

That got him back. "I’ve got nothing. This place is unreal."

"Right?" She was already going up the steps. "Wait until you see inside."

He followed her in, and two women in the hallway straightened up when the door opened.

"Welcome home, Ms. Kingsley."

"Thank you." Jane pulled the scarf down off her face. "Two coffees, when you get a minute. Then we’re fine on our own, both of you."

They said yes to that and went, but not before their eyes had gone over Ronan and found each other, and whatever the two of them had settled on about him was going around that house by dinner.

Ronan didn’t catch any of it. He was too busy with the room. The air was cool the second the door shut, and past that it was the light, coming in through the whole back wall and lying across the floor in long shapes, and the furniture set out in it like somebody had been paid to decide where every piece went.

He’d seen rooms like this. On television, and in pictures on the internet, and never once with his own shoes standing in one.

Jane dropped onto the sofa like she’d been on her feet all day, which she had.

"Sit down somewhere. The coffee’s coming."

Ronan sat. He did it the way you sit on furniture that costs more than your car, on the edge of it, taking up as little as he could.

She watched him do it.

"What’s the matter with you?" She had her head against the cushion, looking at him sideways. "Back in your own apartment you had all the nerve in the world. Look at you now."

He couldn’t argue with any of it. In his place he’d known where the floor was. Here he didn’t, and it had gone straight into how he was sitting.

So he went the other way with it.

"You want me bold?" He let it sit on her. "Say the word."

The color came into her face, faint but there.

"Don’t start."

He laughed and let her off it, and had another look around the room while he did.

"It’s a hell of a house." He came back to her. "What did it cost you? Am I allowed to ask that?"

She folded her arms. "You actually want the number."

He nodded.

"It’s not a secret." She shrugged one shoulder. "About $7 million."

Something went down the wrong way and he had to sit forward and get it back. "$7 million?"

"It sounds like a lot." She wasn’t laughing at him, which somehow made it worse. "For up here it’s nothing. This is the bottom of the hill, Ronan. I’m close enough to Sunset that I can hear the traffic on it from my own bed at night."

She tipped her head at the glass, and the city underneath it.

"It’s not a prime lot. The prime lots are further up, and the people on them have names you’d know, and those houses go for $30 million and past $40 million."

He didn’t have anything to put against that. The $7 million was already a number that had nothing to do with him and never would, and she’d said it the way somebody says the rent’s a bit steep.

"I don’t know about you," he said. "I’d take it tomorrow. Traffic and all."

"Would you." She was enjoying that. "Maybe I’ll sell it to you, then. When you can afford it."

"If."

He gave the word its whole weight and left it there, because he had no idea when, or whether, or what a person had to do to get from $90,000 in the bank to a house on a hill above the Sunset Strip.

The coffee came in on a tray then, set down by one of the two women from the hallway, who put it between them and went out again without looking at either of them for longer than she had to.

After that it got easy. They sat with it and talked about none of the above — the show, the people on it, the ones neither of them could stand — and she kept it going every time it looked like stopping.

He got his phone out at some point and saw what it said.

"I should go." He was up before he’d finished the sentence. "That’s an hour, easy."

She nodded, and got up with him, and came with him as far as the door.

Then she stopped him there, and put a hand on his arm, and kissed him on the cheek.

"What was that for?"

"A thank you." She was already stepping back. "For coming down that street after me."

He looked at her a moment longer than he needed to.

"You know what you’re doing to me?" His voice stayed level. "I kiss you at my place and you tell me to forget it ever happened. You tell me you don’t have feelings for me off the set. Then you kiss my cheek at your own front door. I can’t read you when you keep doing both."

She opened hers, and nothing came out of it.

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her square to him, so she couldn’t send it past his ear the way she’d been doing all afternoon.

"If you’re going to thank me, do it properly. On the mouth."

"Wait—"

He was already kissing her.

Her eyes flew wide against his for a heartbeat—then fluttered shut. Her mouth opened under his, soft and willing.

It turned hot fast. His hands slid from her shoulders down the small of her back, over the full curve of her ass, then up again to cup the soft weight of her breasts pressed against his chest.

Every part of her yielded and pressed back into his touch. She had a fist twisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, matching his hunger.

Then her palm came flat against his chest and pushed—gently, but firm enough to break the kiss.

"Why do you keep doing that to me?" She was breathing through it. "What, am I supposed to owe you a kiss now?"

"You do owe me one." He hadn’t let go of her waist. "I ran down a street for you."

"But—"

"Don’t act like it’s something new. We do it on set with a room full of people standing there watching us."

She had no way around that, and she knew it, and she shut her mouth.

"And stop making me feel like I’m making all of this up." He said it quieter. "You like me. Just say it."

She looked up at him with the color all the way up her throat, and then she looked at the wall.

"I’ve told you where I stand. Don’t ask me for it again."

He let out a breath.

"Fine. I’ll go."

He went to the door and opened it himself, and she stood there in the hallway and didn’t stop him.