Beautiful When You Don't Try

Chapter 34

It was Sunday, just a few hours before the beginning of Camila's early show. Dinah scurried down the corridor towards Camila's dressing room, periodically glancing behind her and then increasing her speed, nearly running by the time she arrived. She flung the door open and shut it calmly as she walked over and sat down on the loveseat, preparing herself to seem ignorant. "He's coming." She warned in a musical tone as she pulled a magazine up to her face.

The diva shut her eyes tightly for a second in dread and rolled them open as she looked to her friend through her mirror. "Is he going to do this every day?"

Dinah shrugged. "Knowing him, yes."

Just as she finished, there was a banging knock at the door. Camila didn't even have the option of asking who was there or to give permission for them to enter when the door flew open and a man her and Dinah's age walked in. His angular jaw was clinched, his thin lips pursed tightly together, the nostrils on his perfect surgeon-sculpted nose were flaring, and his dark brown eyes narrowed at her reflection in the mirror. "Are you trying to humiliate me?"

He threw a newspaper onto her table, all very cliché and all very well-rehearsed in his mind. She quickly glanced over to the paper and saw it was about her and Lauren. She also caught his name typed in the article. "Believe it or not, but not everything is about you, Jake."

He scoffed threw his hands down to his sides melodramatically. "Camila, when my name is in the paper, it is about me." Dinah laughed lightly and received a scowl of disapproval from the brunette man. "And what is it that you happen to find so humorous?"

Dinah smiled and pulled the magazine back up to her face. "Normally you would be ecstatic to have your name mentioned in an article and would be showing it around to anyone that you could sucker into looking at it."

"But this..." He trailed off, walking over to pick up the paper that Camila was still ignoring as she messed with her hair in the mirror. "This is humiliating. They said I was just a cover up for a lesbian romance." Both women shrugged. Technically he was, Camila just hadn't been aware of it at the time. "You're not even gay."

The diva stopped messing with her hair and looked up to the man and paused. "Jake, I'm in love with a woman. That kind of happens to mean I am gay."

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling and threw the paper in the air, again, well-rehearsed. "You and I dated and we had sex. How come that doesn't make you straight?"

Dinah only shook her head, but internally cringing that Camila actually slept with him. "Because she didn't love you. It's not that hard to believe. Well..." she paused and dropped the magazine in thought. "It may be that hard for you to believe that someone isn't in love with you, but for the rest of us...it's not."

He scowled at her again and stood in the door way. "If this jeopardizes my career, I will never forgive you, Camila." And with that he stormed out and slammed the door shut.

The two women sat in silence as light smiles began to spread over their lips. "How exactly, is you being gay going to destroy his career?"

Camila shrugged and went back to what she had been doing before she was interrupted. "It doesn't. But everything in some form is always related to him. I mean, he's more narcissistic than I was in high school. I still can't believe I dated him for as long as I did."

"I can't believe he's not thrilled that his name is in the papers. It doesn't even paint him in a bad light or give him a bad review." The Polynesian woman confessed as she lifted the scattered paper from the floor. "All it says is that previous to you coming out, you were romantically involved with your co-star, Jake Seaton."