But first, Jayson had to find a prop that resembled a gun before he ran out of sunlight.
The garage, which doubled as Toni’s studio, was dimly lit and filthy. Jayson frantically rooted around the piles of melted bridal toile and boxes of bride and groom cake decorations for something, anything, with which Tara could take aim and fire. She would be relatively far in the background, probably even a little blurry, so the gun didn’t need to be that terribly realistic. Even the spray nozzle off a garden hose would work. In the dark he finally felt something hoselike and followed it along to the end. As hard as he twisted the nozzle wouldn’t come loose, and given the dim lighting it was impossible to determine why. So he stepped down on the hose with one foot and yanked as hard as he could on the nozzle, breaking it free and nearly knocking himself over into a pile of flea market wedding dresses.
After feeling his way back to the door, he emerged from the garage, quickly passing the nozzle to Tara and running back to take his mark next to Trey. This would be his second love scene with Trey, and as much as he tried to convince himself that he was merely excited for the final scene, Jayson knew that much of his anxiety came from the anticipation of kissing Trey.
Trey propped up the camera on a splintered Teeter Totter in the overgrown grass.
‘Go?’ Trey asked.
‘The word is “action,”’ Jayson clarified. ‘And the director says it.’
‘So say it, motherfucker,’ Tara shouted drunkenly from across the yard. ‘My ass is glempty.’ She held up her glass and tipped it upside down to illustrate her obvious point.
Jason looked through the site on the camera to be certain Tara was in frame in the background, yelled Action, pressed the record button, and ran to his mark in front of Trey.
‘Though you may be a common gigolo,’ Jayson recited staring up into Trey’s blue eyes, ‘I will always be yours.’
With all the hurrying to finish before the sun went down, Jayson had broken out into a sweat. He could feel a trickle run under his wig and down the back of his neck. The lake mosquitos were out in full summer force and quickly zeroed in on the heat he was giving off. It felt like a dozen of them were plunging their hypodermic bloodsuckers just below his hairline all at the same moment. He resolved not to flinch. Or swat. This was the biggest moment of the whole series. The whole summer, really.
‘And I will always be there for you, Amethyst Carrington,’ Trey replied. Jayson looked deep into Trey’s eyes, searching for some sign that Trey might not merely be acting. He rose up on his tiptoes and pulled the back of Trey’s head down to his own. Trey hesitated for a moment before finally giving in to the inevitable. Their lips met, both warm from the hurrying about and the bourbon/scotch cocktail. As they kissed, Jayson moved his head from side to side as he’d seen all the best romantic actresses do. It was a good kiss, Jayson thought. He hoped it would read as well on screen as it was playing out in his head. And it was long.
Too long.
Where was Tara’s entrance?
‘The worst thing that could happen right now,’ Trey said, pulling his face away from Jayson’s, ‘would be for Pamela to burst out of the house right now and shoot one of us.’
Jayson had to admit it was pretty good adlibbing on Trey’s part. He stole a glance to the side and saw no sign of the homicidal ‘Pamela.’ He didn’t know what to do. They needed the murder for the cliffhanger. At a loss for what to do next, he pulled Trey’s face back toward his own and resumed kissing. To step it up a notch for the audience, Jayson decided to use his tongue. He hoped it would clear the censors. His tongue finally found Trey’s and the two made their introductions. He was frenching, Jayson realized. Honest-to-God frenching.
‘Heya, fellas!!’
It was Tara, stumbling through the sliding glass door. Finally.
‘Sorry for the delay,’ she continued, off script. ‘But I had to get a refill. See?’ She held up the bottle of bourbon she’d brought outside to the camera to prove her accomplishment. ‘Now I guess I may as well get on to killin’ one of yas.’
Finally, she was back on script.
‘No! Don’t shoot!’ Jayson yelled, pulling himself closer to Trey. ‘You have a beef with both of us, but I happen to know that there’s only one bullet in that gun!’ Perhaps the script was a bit expository, but as Aaron Spelling told TV Guide, you should never overestimate the intelligence of your audience.
‘Well then, for one of you, it’s your lucky day!’ Tara yelled back. She leaned down slowly to put the bourbon bottle down on the deck, nearly losing her balance. ‘Whoopsie,’ she giggled before standing upright again and drawing aim at the two of them with the hose nozzle Jason had given her.
‘Prepare to meet your maker!’
WHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMPPPPHHH!
First came a blinding orange flash. Then the ground under their bodies bucked like a car hitting a speed bump at fifty miles an hour.
Jayson landed about ten feet from where he’d been standing. A bicycle tire pump with its plastic handle in flames came crashing down into the grass next to his head. His bicycle pump. From the garage.
‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!’ Tara was screaming from somewhere at least fifty feet west of where he’d last seen her. All of the lights in the house had gone out, but luckily, Jayson noticed, someone had helpfully lit hundreds of little candles all across the backyard.
Jayson sat up, and looked around for Trey.
‘Trey?’ he called into the darkness. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m under the seesaw,’ came the response. ‘You okay?’
‘I don’t know. What happened?’
The back porch lights at the Wernermeiers’ clicked on, flooding both backyards. The hundreds of candles in Jayson’s yard weren’t candles at all but flaming debris, being systematically doused as they fell into the dewy, overgrown weeds–flaming debris that looked suspiciously like items from Toni’s garage/studio.
The garage/studio that–in the light from the Wernermeiers’ porch lamps–wasn’t a garage/studio at all anymore.
It was nothing.
It was an empty space, through which the trio could now see clear across the street to the moonlit lake. One by one lights up and down the backyards in both directions clicked on, like a synchronized strand of Christmas lights.
‘Are you okay?! Who’s hurt!? Oh God, Where are you two?!’ Terri Wernermeier was now running across the backyards, dressed in an oversized bra and baggy cotton panties. As soon as Tara spotted her mother racing toward them, she spun around like an Olympic discus thrower and hurled the bourbon bottle in a high arc clear over the backyard, landing two yards away in the Weimhardts’ pool.
Jayson kept staring at where the garage had been, trying to figure out where it had gone. From the looks of the floating pieces of fire still drifting down from the sky, it had gone, in some instances, down to the far end of Lac LaBelle Drive.
‘Jayson? Are you out there?’
The voice was soft. Calm. Jayson could barely hear it through the persistent ringing in his ears. It was Willie, leaning