Romance stories: Loving Phil

By Mary Drake

Gary Raymond is a short, short and incredible actor from Scotland. His life is going nowhere until he meets Phil Platt, a pale, short man with a passion for booze.

Gary takes an instant disliking to Phil and the brutal and malicious ways he learnt during his years in the hood.

However, when a chav tries to mug Gary, Phil springs to the rescue. Gary begins to notices that Phil is actually rather delightful at heart.

But, the pressures of Phil's job as a actor leave him blind to Gary's affections and Gary takes up hiking to try an distract himself.

Finally, when malicious police officer, Roger Jones, threatens to come between them, Phil has to act fast. But will they ever find the magical love that they deserve?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HappyLife Publishing
• Release date: Nov 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311586230

Mary Drake

Birthday Birthday May 1, 1936 Age 79 years old Tropical zodiac Taurus Online Email Address [e-mail] This is a real email address. Click here to activate it! Browser user agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Book preview

PART I

Gary met a lot of people. Being in his profession meant he spent a lot of time around people he didn’t particularly like, but the day he was introduced to Phil he realised he had never before hated someone. With Phil it was different. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why it was different, exactly, and he wished he could, because then he would at least be able to explain why he didn’t want to spend any more time around Phil than he had to. Unfortunately he didn’t have much of a choice. Phil was one of the people helping to make the film he was staring in more ‘real’. Maybe that was part of the problem. Sighing, Gary pulled his comb through his hair one last time, checking to make sure it looked okay, before leaving the room. He was going to deal with it all as best he could. It wasn’t going to be that hard.

Where have you been? The director looked at Gary in such a way he knew he had to come up with an explanation that made sense, without saying anything about Phil. Phil was helping them out for nothing, because he was friends with the director, and Gary knew better than to screw up by saying the wrong thing. In the time he’d been doing the job he’d had no choice but to learn how to bite his tongue at times. Everyone’s waiting for you and this isn’t exactly professional.

Fortunately Gary realised then he did have an excuse. My sister’s been taken ill and I needed to take a phone call. It wasn’t true about the phone call, but his sister was in hospital, so it worked. There’s a chance I might have to take another, because she’s been taken into surgery and Mum promised me she’d ring me to let me know how it all went. He hoped if he did get another phone call it wouldn’t happen too soon. Of course there is also a possibility she’ll ring me got no reason at all, as this has all been really hard for her and I’m the only support she has.

The director nodded. Okay, that I can understand, it’s just people have been saying you aren’t comfortable around Phil and if that’s true I need to do something to fix the problem. He’s going to be around for a long time and the last thing I need is for there to be tension.

Everything is fine between the two of us.

Lying, fortunately, was something he’d become much better at. Nodding, the director led him into the room where they were all talking through the next scene. Phil, as always, had a drink in his hand, which was something else that made Gary incredibly uncomfortable. Having lived with an alcoholic father he’d always been teetotal, which wasn’t something that was always understood, so being around someone who did drink the way Phil did took Gary back to a past he really didn’t want to think too much about. When he’d decided to become an actor it was so he could live other lives, lives that weren’t his own, and forget about the past, as best he could, because when he thought too much about it he could remember being told multiple times he would never become anything.

When his first film came out he received a letter from his father. He pushed the thought aside, telling himself to focus. Gary, you’re the leader of the gang, so you need to be charismatic. People have to believe that everyone is working for you for that reason, because you are evil. There really is no other word I can use to describe you. Gang leaders often are evil. Phil sipped his whiskey and for a moment Gary couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, but that quickly faded as he remember that gang members could be just as evil as the leaders, and he’d heard a lot about what Phil had done when he was a part of one of those gangs. You, in this film, take things another step, which is important, as people are going to want you to die in the end.

It wasn’t Gary’s first time playing the villain. There was a time he thought his height was going to have an effect on the roles he was given, but it hadn’t. Being short did actually seem to have got him some roles he didn’t think he would have been given if he was taller, no matter how