Colder than Ice Read online

  “I’ll wait,” Sophie remarked. “I don’t want to spoil my appetite.”

  “Oh, but I’ve—” said Prasad.

  “What?”

  Tristan looked up from over the stove. Prasad was frowning.

  “I’ve just remembered that I completely forgot the yogurt.” He pulled at the apron strings. “Stay here, I’ve got to go get some or it’ll all be wrong, Tristan, don’t stop stirring that sauce,” Prasad said as he went down the hallway to the front door, “It takes a long time to get it right, but keep at it, it takes patience!”

  And just like that, he was gone, leaving the two of them standing in the kitchen for a moment before Tristan remembered to run the wooden spoon around the edge of the stock pot. The butter sauce was a beautiful shade of orange, and smelled absolutely amazing, but his stomach had gone cold when the door had shut behind Prasad, leaving just a stone where he’d been starving earlier.

  There was a long pause.

  “I guess we could get out the tomatoes,” Sophie murmured, and opened the French doors on the refrigerator to look in. He wondered how soon it would be before they ran out of general niceties to say to each other—or worse, if they’d already reached that point and he would have to endure the creeping, oppressive feeling of an awkward silence and no easy remedy for it. No charming smile, no stupid thing with his face to fix or fill an awful, yawning chasm of—

  “Oh,” said a soft voice.

  Tristan looked back over at her. Sophie was still in front of the fridge, just staring into it before shutting the doors again.

  “Are they not in there?”

  “What?”

  He wasn’t sure what she thought he meant.

  “The stuffed tomatoes. Are they in there? He might have put them in the back.” He was just moving to set the spoon back on its rest and help her when Sophie pulled the French doors open again, bottles clanking loudly against each other inside, and grabbed the tray of bright red amuse-bouche from the front shelf, setting it on the counter.

  She tried one and chewed thoughtfully.

  “Any good?”

  “I don’t think he made them himself,” she replied, “But they are good. Would you like one?”

  Sophie brought it over to the stove and held it up. For just a moment, Tristan wasn’t sure if she meant to reach up and pop it into his mouth, and as he held out his hand for it, she turned just a little pink in the cheeks, as if she really had been about to do it unconsciously, and then thought better of it after all.

  It tasted like green and red and a summer garden—all wild, bright colors, he thought—and it was the best thing he’d had to eat in a while. He was hungry again.

  Gratitude is not the foundation where we build love. We build our relationships on trust and mutuality of understanding.

  Oh God, why was he thinking about love at a time like this? It was the last thing he needed.

  “How’s the rest of the house?”

  “Oh, I’d be happy to give you a tour if you don’t mind the moving boxes,” he said.

  “Ah, don’t forget—you’re supposed to be working on that sauce,” Sophie replied, and it took him a moment to realize she was teasing him a little.

  “He hasn’t got any of his artwork up, but there’s a really nice view of the Hills from the balcony just down that hall.”

  Sophie wandered off toward Prasad’s study, and Tristan set the spoon on the rest anyway to reach over and turn down the heat. Almost all the cabernet was gone, and he’d brought a nice pinot noir. When he’d texted Joanna over the weekend to see if she’d be able to make it, he’d asked which wines she preferred.

  Sangria, she’d written. One of those big-ass liter bottles. Cheap and disgusting and sweet. Don’t tell anybody I’m so unsophisticated.

  He’d been happy to oblige, and opened the fridge now to dig it out and see if it was chilling quickly enough.

  And stood there staring into the contents of the refrigerator with both doors in his hands.

  Sitting on the front of the shelf, exactly at eye level, was a large pot of plain Greek yogurt.

  Tristan reached in and picked it up—unopened, with an expiry date two weeks from now.

  “Oh,” said Tristan to himself.

  He closed the refrigerator doors again. So that was what Sophie had been staring at. Prasad and his damn schemes. He was probably downstairs in the lobby right now, waiting exactly half an hour before he’d magically reappear with some excuse.

  Tristan couldn’t really be angry, though. Prasad was his closest friend, in LA or anywhere, and he meant well. It wasn’t as if he’d pushed Tristan and Sophie overboard from a yacht and told them to seek land and begin creating human civilization from scratch.

  He paused, and with a glance at the sauce now gently simmering away and a twinge in his abdomen, went down the hall to Prasad’s study.

  Sophie was standing in front of the windows, her form indigo-dark even as the Hollywood Hills were lit pink and orange with a velvety sort of violet in the sky behind them.

  “They really are lovely, aren’t they,” he said, coming up next to her and putting his hands into his pockets. Sophie turned to glance at him and back out at the tree-lined crests with palm trees jutting up here and there.

  She hmmed in agreement.

  Think of something to say, Tristan, before it gets weird.

  “Is there anything like this in Nebraska? I can’t say I’ve ever been there.”

  Sophie was quiet for a moment, but when she finally answered, the tone of her voice sent the pressure in his chest rushing out all at once.

  “If Omaha has hills studded with tropical plants and multi-million-dollar estates built into them, they’re keeping an awfully big secret,” she said.

  Of course. Nebraska was one of the flat states.

  Idiot.

  “I suppose we’d all be living out there, too.”

  She chuckled in reply and sipped at her wine, eyes moving over the view from the picture window. It was her turn to say something, but they fell into silence once more. Finally, when he was thinking about turning and going back into the kitchen, Tristan heard himself say,

  “I can’t shake the feeling that you don’t like me very much.”

  It hung there in the air between them a moment, Sophie staring at him wide-eyed, a gulp of wine still in her mouth.

  Tristan felt his soul exit his body through the top of his head. He had not just said that. No one went around saying things like that to people they sort of knew through a work friend.

  Sophie finally swallowed, and to her credit, actually looked… well, a bit guilty. She paused a moment, apparently gathering herself.

  “I’d blame it on being new to Los Angeles, but I think that probably isn’t a very good excuse,” she said at last. “Honestly…?”

  Tristan waited. Sophie seemed to consider, to swirl the words around before unleashing them.

  “I think it’s that you’re so nice.”

  He let that sink in for a moment. Being nice was a value, a standard. Tristan found that so many people here in LA were… not nice. Cynical, or self-obsessed. He was firmly an outsider, both a foreigner and an eager, open personality, but he’d been embraced. He was invited to parties, to premieres, to awards shows. Given blissful write-ups in fashion magazines.

  And being nice had helped him achieve those things. It was all part of the narrative. It was how he stood out in a crowd, how his reputation with the fans who loved him—and loved being loved back—had grown so solid, so steady. Sure, things didn’t always end perfectly—that whole thing in Chicago had resulted in a much shorter leash between him and his management team, but Tristan honestly hadn’t seen where any of it had warranted so many write-ups and blog entries about whether he’d cracked.

  It had made that girl so happy. It was the story, the narrative.

  That was the point.

  “How is that such a bad thing?” Tristan asked her genuinely.

  Sophie looked at
him sidelong for a moment, and for once he could almost see her thoughts playing out across her face. Hesitation to tell him her real thoughts, a strong urge to do it anyway, carefully choosing the right words.

  “Everyone here is supposed to be so fake, but you’re the one genuine person in all of LA,” Sophie said. “And, I don’t know, it just makes you...”

  “Charming?” He’d been described that way so many times. A gossip columnist’s favorite descriptor of Tristan Eccleston. Prince Charming, said the blogs when he’d been in his sister Julia’s postmodern production of Russian fairy tales. Maybe it was true. Maybe he was just trying to be himself. Or maybe he just wanted to be loved so badly it was like making a constant appeal for it.

  “Suspicious,” Sophie said reluctantly, and then went on quickly as if to defend herself, “like you’ve got something to hide and you want to do it behind all this—” She gestured in the general vicinity of his face. Tristan blinked.

  “I had no idea I was working for ulterior motives.”

  She looked at him, frustrated, for a long moment. And then Sophie downed the last of her wine, looked out once more over the Hollywood Hills, and watched the fading sunset leave the last bit of scrub brush and trees.

  “When I was in college, I had this boyfriend,” she began. “He and I were both creative writing majors. I wanted to write new adult fiction. I had tried things like NaNoWriMo a few times, but was still just testing out ideas. He was always focused on literary stuff—said he wanted to write the next great American novel, that sort of thing.”

  She shifted from one foot to the other and sighed.

  “I had this friend online who was really into webcomics, and one day she showed me this thing she’d written. She’d gotten so good at drawing and crafting characters that she just went for it, and already had almost ten thousand followers. People were sending her fan art of her story.

  “Not that I did any of it for fame and glory,” Sophie said. “For some reason, it just clicked with me, and I realized that the blend of words and pictures made more sense to me. And then I started making my own story.”

  “A creator even then,” Tristan said, and half-smiled at the thought of her neglecting biology homework so she could write about caped superhumans punching each other.

  “It was called Rubente Dextra—”

  Tristan couldn’t help himself, making a small noise of surprise.

  “The vengeance of God—His red right hand,” said Tristan when she paused, and she cocked her head and gave him a strange little half-smile.

  “Anyway, it was all about this man who was downtrodden by society, but essentially good. He was unhappy with his life, and one day gained the ability to fly, and became invincible. He could save people and punish criminals. But over time these special powers started to infect his mind and make him think he was a god,” she said. “He could decide who lived and who died, literally turning into the hand of revenge, doing the whole judge/jury/executioner thing.”

  “That does sound like a plausible reaction.”

  “Yeah.” Sophie frowned and looked down into her empty glass. “I’d figured out most of the plot, the dialogue, even written out detailed character descriptions and breakdowns of how the storyboards should look. I was going to send some sample stuff around to artists to see how they liked it, whether they’d consider drawing it with me.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “I hadn’t registered a website, put in for a copyright on the name, anything like that. It was all on my laptop. And…”

  Tristan had a feeling he knew where this was going.

  “One day I came back to my dorm room, and my computer was open, but it was all gone. Everything. My schoolwork was all saved on the network drive, luckily, but everything else…” She mimed an explosion with her hands.

  “What happened?”

  “I was devastated. I’d worked so long and so hard on something that I thought might be a career for me one day, poured myself into it, sacrificed class time and a few grades for it, and it was gone. I thought maybe the computer had just crashed. But one day my online friend pointed me toward a website and asked me if I thought this new comic seemed familiar.” Sophie looked up at him. “Derek had stolen all my work and even gotten an artist. It was the same, right down to the color of the main character’s cape. He’d heard me talk about it, had listened while I worked through some of the development. And… he’d just decided to take it.”

  Tristan felt his heart go out to her. So much work, all gone because of someone she’d thought she trusted. Someone she thought she loved, perhaps.

  He felt a sudden twist of panic over the rewrites he’d done for Prasad over the summer, the dialogue, the character arcs. But it wasn’t exactly the same—he wasn’t stealing it from her, and she was putting it back together in the way that she wanted.

  “So what did you do?” Tristan asked instead.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was loaded with student loans already, so I couldn’t hire a lawyer. I couldn’t prove the designs were mine because everything was gone, and it was just college, so I had to move on and find something else to do.”

  So much work, all spent and gone, he thought. Someone had put her light out too quickly. No wonder she was so closed-off and suspicious of people. Even him.

  Maybe for a good reason.

  Tristan shook himself mentally.

  “You did—Imperium is an excellent series.”

  “Eventually, I did, yeah. But it stings even years later, you know? It still makes me a bit too cautious. I had such a huge chunk of myself ripped away, and Derek never apologized. I tried to confront him, but he just avoided me, wound up leaving school, and we never talked to each other again. I don’t believe that closure’s a real thing, but it felt like something that never really got fixed, you know?”

  He nodded, knowing the feeling perfectly well. Of course now would be the perfect moment to bring it up with her, that he was the one who’d changed so much of her story. But she was actually talking to him, opening up, and… well, he didn’t want to go back to the coldness that had defined all their interactions so far. Tristan opened his mouth to say something to her, but the front door opened, and Prasad’s and Joanna’s voices came floating down the hall to them.

  The last thing he saw before Sophie went out toward the light of the kitchen was the look on her face, as if she was willing to let herself trust him, and hoping he was worth it.

  Chapter Five

  Was any of this ever going to work out?

  Sophie tossed the dogeared fourth final script (the one with the green cover page, not the pink one) onto the conference room table, and leaned back in her chair to rub at her eyes. If the corrections they’d made were what she wanted, she couldn’t tell anymore.

  It also didn’t help that the party the night before had gone so late.

  While Tristan had politely busied himself with washing dishes, she’d lounged, deliciously full, on the couches with Prasad and Joanna Hart—Morganna herself.

  Joanna was a nice surprise, it turned out. The giant blonde was even more imposing and impressive in person than photographs of her managed to capture, and she had a good sense of humor, to boot. Her role as the malevolent, vengeance-driven AI computer in Screenshots From Qatar had been challenging and rewarding, apparently, but if Joanna had her way, the movie would have had an altogether different tone.

  “I think there need to be more stories about benevolent AI,” Joanna said, sipping at her dark-red Sangria. That was another surprise—either Tristan’s idea of sensible wine choices had taken a sudden left turn while he was in the store, or he’d bought it especially for her. Joanna had come in, introduced herself, and opened the refrigerator as if she knew it was sitting in the back chilling just for her. No one mentioned it, and Tristan certainly wasn’t taking any opportunity to claim credit for it.

  Which was interesting.

  “What would a benevolent AI do?” Sophie asked, intrigue
d.

  Joanna said that a good artificial intelligence system would take care of people—“Like in that science fiction story, what’s his name, that guy…” said Joanna—and that knowing everything about everybody and what they were doing would mean that a computer could manage people’s lives for them, make better decisions about where to live so they could reap the benefits they didn’t know they were missing.

  “That sounds pretty dystopian,” Sophie said, wrinkling her nose.

  “So does uploading every aspect of your life to Facebook or Twitter and expecting them to not do anything crazy with it,” Joanna reminded her, tilting her glass in Sophie’s direction. “The difference I’d make is that the computer would create a network of people and make them perform good deeds for each other, as strangers.”

  “Bruce Sterling,” said Tristan from behind them. Sophie turned; he’d rolled his sleeves up and was carefully drying a wine glass, turning it back and forth in the dish towel covering his hand. Every time he turned the glass, the long muscles in his forearm would flex, looking lean and strong. “Maneki Neko,” he murmured, still looking at the glass, Sophie still looking at his forearms. She had to make herself move her neck and turn back to Joanna, who punched at the air above her head with one finger.

  “Yes,” she said. “That guy. The AI made someone buy an extra coffee to take it to someone nearby who needed a pick-me-up.”

  “Eugh,” Prasad said. “A computer keeping a tally of what you’ve done and deciding how you should live your life?”

  “Just polite gifts to make everybody get along for rewards, or annoying punishments if they were rude to each other. Nothing that’d kill you, or even inconvenience you, just little things to remind people to behave nicely. Computers have huge memories to keep track of every good deed, so the people wind up wanting to please the computer. Like a feedback loop.”

  Sophie frowned at the coffee table in front of her.

  “Like a computer worshipped as a god,” she remarked. “People would probably wind up praising the AI for taking care of them and believing that it blesses them by correcting their lives.” The room was so quiet that she wondered if Tristan had stopped working over her shoulder, but Sophie planted herself where she was, steadfastly refusing to turn and look at him.