golden

fourteen: it's all yellow

"No."

"Bet, c'mon-."

"I said no." Her voice spiked an octave, the final word coming out much harsher than she had intended. She sighed and put the silver watering can between the two ferns that decorated the window view table. "I can't just up and leave. I have a job, one that requires all of my time and energy." Well, not all of it lately.

Truth be told, she had been a woman possessed as of late. Her thoughts and her chest riddled and plagued with Harry. Her free time was consumed by him, for him. Stolen hours tucked away in his hotel room, in her house during Howie's absences. Shadowed kisses behind closed curtains and under the secret cover of nine gigantic letters to spell out the name of the city they met in. The quiet strum of a guitar. Dirt under fingernails digging in the garden behind her house.

Each day she went to filming, she performed her best. Her brain imagined that Gregory wasn't himself or his character at all. He was Harry. And she wasn't Vivian, she was simply herself. She wasn't acting or performing. All her words were spoken as if she had said them to Harry. Each fleeting touch and lingering gaze as if it were for him. And each day when filming was over, she was praised to the heavens and her talent commending for being so raw and real.

"Ma's sick." Howie muttered. "If ya cared 'bout anyone but yerself, ya'd take a couple days an' go see 'er with me."

Elizabeth's eyes widened at the insinuation. The sheer fact that someone she had sheltered and pulled up from the trenches had the nerve to call her selfish. And even if she was selfish, didn't she have a right? Who could argue against someone's selfishness with their own life? It was her time to do with as she-.

That was it. Everything Gregory had pressed onto her. It was her life. Her career. A contract was just, well it was just a piece of paper saying she was employed by the studio. Louis Mayer commanded her employment with MGM, not her feelings or her heart.

"Bet?"

Howie had relied on their mother more than she ever had. Especially after she nursed them back to health after their scarlet fever scare. He clung to her skirts and lived to please her. Elizabeth expected that had he not been called into the war, he would have spent his life in Port Aransas and dedicated it to doing whatever their mother wished of him. A tragedy in itself, only killed by another.

"I can't. Perhaps when the filming is over. I'll have a small break and I'll go out to see her." He had to surely understand how detrimental missing filming could be. If they saw her as a flake...

"Sure," Howie muttered, "when it's over."

He didn't give her the chance to say anything else before he was walking out of the kitchen.

"Oh, I just can't stand him!"

Harry raised an eyebrow as the lavender heeled shoe was launched across the vast closet and fell against a plain black purse.

"He thinks he's so much better than I am because he can drop everything and fly out to Texas for-." Her voice broke off in the middle of her babbling rant. Elizabeth froze in her spot, a lime neck scarf draped over her forearm and her hand curled around the wooden handle of a fuchsia tote bag. "Harry?"

"Beth."

Her lips drew together in a disquieting frown. "Do you think I'm selfish?"

Selfish. It wasn't necessarily a word he would use to describe her. Motivated. Driven. Ambitious. Determined. But selfish? No.