Never Just Friends (Spotlight New Adult Book 2) by Mina V. Esguerra Page B

York.
    “Thanks, Cora,” she said.
    “You’re with him though? Finally?”
    “I guess I am.”
    “I’m happy for you two, really. Don’t want to think I messed anything up by taking him away from California. Glad he manned up and told you how he feels.”
    Lindsay nodded, but frowning while at it. “Thank you, Cora. Thanks for calling too.”
    When she walked back into the auditorium, Jake was sitting on one of two chairs on the stage. The other held a woman, looked like she was in her forties, had bright red hair, wearing an entire khaki-colored outfit. She was dressed like she was going on a safari, while Jake was in jeans and a gray shirt.
    Lindsay found her seat as a disembodied voice told everyone to keep quiet, the “conversation” was about to start.
    “I have a class at this exact time, and I don’t see any of you in it,” the woman said, a microphone was pinned to the neckline of her top. The room was filled with nervous laughter even before she finished her sentence. “I should have handsome young men sit up here every Saturday morning. As you know, I’m Pamela Rowe and I teach Film Theory here. With us this morning is Jacob Berkeley, you know him as Charlie, or Charles, from the wildly successful series Rage Eternal. ”
    Jake’s smile as he waved to his adoring crowd was pure sunshine. It could power a small city. It was charm that she knew he had, but didn’t realize he had mastered already. It was a weapon, quite dangerous.
    He sat back as the lights dimmed and the screen behind them began to show a montage of clips from the show. It was kind of a jumble of scenes she didn’t understand, not having seen an episode, but she could hear the audience behind her and knew every time the clip was from a scene they loved.
    It looked like a good show. She should start watching it.
    He had a hand over his mouth by the time the last scene ended, and the lights came back on. He took that hand away and revealed a big smile.
    “Let me be the first to say that it’s a travesty that you don’t have an Emmy nomination right now,” Pamela Rowe said, and the crowd applauded, agreeing with this being a “travesty.”
    “Thank you, but it’s all right,” Jake said. “That’s not what we do it for.”
    It became clear very quickly that this was going to be a conversation about his life, and Ms. Rowe began it from a fairly recent point in time—his start at acting. Lindsay was strangely disappointed by this, thinking that maybe she’d get a special mention for being in his life prior to Rage ...but that wasn’t professional. This was a film school, and they wanted to know about his work, right? Not his non-work life. It wasn’t any of their business.
    She’d seen him give interviews before, and he had a few standard stories.
    How he was discovered: Cora Barker was a former teacher at Addison Hill University, and was still somewhat active in their media school. He was presenting a paper in his lit class, she happened to be visiting his teacher that day, and he caught her attention. She knew of a part in an upcoming show that needed to be cast, and she took a chance and fielded him. He was instantly hired as Charlie Sloane, a detective, investigating a series of grisly, and likely supernatural, deaths in upstate New York. Jacob was seen to be a good foil for the established actor Danny Wilde, who was headlining a television show for the first time.
    She was happy for him when this all happened. Also disoriented because she wasn’t sure they’d stay friends when he left. That of course had since been debunked.
    Pamela Rowe had moved on. “I can tell you that it was an absolute joy for me to discover that season 2 would be entirely set over a hundred years in the past, but featuring the same two characters. Did you know this, when you came in to audition for a supernatural crime show?”
    So that explained why his costumes were different, when she saw promotional photos earlier this year. But also,