To the Moon and Back

by Melissa Brayden

  Ethan met her gaze with a thoughtful one of his own. “Carly, I love the frustrated sink to the floor, but can we try it again, the moment where Ashley notices Mandy nearby just after?”

  Carly nodded at Ethan and reset herself in the scene. “Yeah, of course. As in a fleeting glance, or something more meaningful?”

  “Let Ashley’s stare linger a moment before she recesses into her thoughts again. Notice something about Mandy. You choose what that is. Oh, and I love the action of you blowing your hair off your forehead. You did it earlier.”

  “Great. I’ll keep it.” She studied Evelyn, who sat waiting on the floor of the faux airport for them to pick up again. Evelyn, Carly had decided, was a decent enough actress, but certainly not very giving within their scene work. Carly didn’t have a lot to play off emotionally. They were supposed to be constructing this deep, destined-to-be relationship a little at a time, but with Evelyn as her counterpart, they were falling flat. Surely Ethan felt that. Hopefully, they still had time.

  This whole process was a trip. Carly had never been allotted this much rehearsal on any one project or character. With screen work, there was rehearsal, sure, but it was short, and then you shot the scene, moved forward to the next, and never looked back. The rehearsal process for the play, however, came with a never before experienced intensity for her. It blew Carly’s mind how deep they were going with each nuanced moment, how much time they invested in just two minutes of the play. The technique allowed her to sink her teeth into this role like she’d never done before. The jury was still out on whether this had been a good move, career-wise, but on the plus side, she was learning a lot from working with Ethan Moore. He damn well knew his stuff. They’d gone over objectives, tactics, line-by-line intentions, all of it, and they still had over three quarters of the play ahead of them. Mind-boggling.

  “You good, Evelyn?” Carly asked before beginning. Evelyn nodded politely and looked away as if choosing not to engage further. “Before we start, do you need anything more from me in the scene? Or less, for that matter? I’m open.”

  “I’m good,” Evelyn said coolly.

  Inside, Carly sighed. The two of them definitely had different processes. Carly liked finding the moments in the rehearsal room, taking a more organic approach. Evelyn showed up with every choice already made in advance. What you saw on the first run-through of the day with Evelyn was often the same set of choices she ended with. Didn’t allow for a ton of collaboration.

  As Carly reset herself for another run of the scene, she stole a glance at Lauren Prescott, who sat at the table next to Ethan, complete with her clipboard and series of file folders, all neatly laid out. She was studiously scribbling something in her production book. From the moment they’d first met, she’d noticed Lauren. She came with a quality that was hard to look away from. She carried herself with confidence, and while she seemed friendly, there was also a removed quality that drove Carly nuts. She’d tried several times to break through that shell, to only fleeting success.

  “Lauren?” she’d asked on their last break of the day, because she was apparently five years old and simply couldn’t seem to leave it alone.

  “Yep. What can I do for you?”

  She rested her chin in her hand, hoping Lauren would make eye contact. “How many tickles do you think it takes to make an octopus laugh? I’m just curious. I’ve been dying to figure it out. Up all night. It’s a problem.” She flashed what she hoped was a killer smile.

  Lauren looked up from her laptop with confusion in her green eyes that quickly dissolved into what could best be described as slight amusement. Not a full-on smile, no, but the start of one. “I don’t know, Carly. Why don’t you tell me how many? I have a feeling you know.”

  “Ten, Lauren. Ten tickles to make an octopus laugh. Can you imagine?”

  Lauren shook her head and laughed silently, returning to the solace of her production book. “I can’t believe you just said that,” she murmured. Her dark hair, when Carly studied its length, fell just above her breasts, not that she knew much about them. The clothes Lauren wore to work, while professional enough, didn’t offer too many glimpses of the body beneath, which she had a feeling was being undersold.

  “Oh, but I did. I did say it. And there’s more where that came from. I’ll hit you up tomorrow.”

  “If you’re on time, I’ll consider it,” Lauren said casually, this time not glancing up from her work.

  “Now you’re just tempting me.”

  “I’m entirely fine with that.”

  Carly noticed that Lauren didn’t socialize with the cast much during their downtime. She maintained a professional distance, which made sense given how she was not only the person who kept them moving forward but, in a way, the disciplinarian as well. Kind of like their very put together camp counselor.

  Carly stole another glance. The really, really hot kind you made out with before summer ended.

  Chapter Three

  Over the course of the next week, several things became clear to Lauren. Number one: Carly Daniel was single-handedly breathing life into each scene without much help from Evelyn Tate, who was still holding back, and turning in a stiff interpretation of Mandy. Number two: Carly Daniel was proving herself to be a total thorn in Lauren’s side. She was chronically late and had twice now organized the cast into a late-night gathering at the bar down the street, leaving them all slower and hungover the next day. She hadn’t memorized any of her lines and didn’t seem to care about simple requests like returning a prop to the prop table when not in use. Number three: she was, conversely, always upbeat, positive, and actually kind of fun to have around. Sigh. Carly Daniel was an interesting problem to have.

  “Hey, Lauren?”

  “Yep?” Lauren said, looking up from her production binder to see Carly standing next to her with an anticipatory grin. She had some slight blocking corrections to add to her notes, based on the changes Ethan had made at that day’s rehearsal, and hadn’t even heard her approach.

  Carly slid a strand of hair behind her ear and flashed the dimple that resided in her right cheek. “I was wondering if you wanted to come out with us tonight? Everyone’s going to meet at Put Upon Pete’s for mango martinis. My treat.”

  Oh, man, she hated having to shoot people down, but that outing wasn’t in her best interest. She would celebrate with everyone at the closing party. “Very nice of you, but I have to decline.” The reply was automatic. There was probably a good Dateline waiting for her and a warm bowl of popcorn. She looked back down at her binder, prepared to jump back into work.

  “Why?”

  She glanced back up at Carly. Lauren hadn’t been prepared for the question. Did she have to explain herself, include the Dateline bit? She stared at Carly, who blinked back at her with big, sad blue eyes. Those eyes were incredibly hard to argue with. It became apparent that this woman wasn’t moving from her spot until Lauren gave her more.

  “It’s been a long week. I need to decompress.”

  Carly nodded. “But it’s Saturday. No rehearsal tomorrow. Do it. Come be bad with us.”

  She sighed. “I’m not sure it’s always the best idea to fraternize with the cast. It’s better for a stage manager to keep a professional distance when possible.”

  “But it’s not possible, because your lead wants to see you mingle in a really bad way.” Carly knelt next to Lauren, which showcased the dip of cleavage down the front of her aqua-blue ribbed tunic. Well, that was certainly…attention getting. She quickly glanced away out of respect, but her eyes apparently did what they wanted and slowly drifted back. She was going to hell for this. She’d never objectified an actor before. She had more control than that! What was happening? “So, what do you say?” Carly asked.

  Lauren blinked and opened her mouth to try to answer. Didn’t go so well.

  “What’s happening right now?” Carly furrowed her brow and followed Lauren’s gaze, glanced down at her shirt, then slowly back to Lauren with eyebrows raised an
d an intrigued look on her face. Nope, now it was amusement. “Okay. Okay,” she said quietly, like the cat who’d gleefully found the stash of catnip. “I see.”

  “What?” Lauren asked, doing her best to play it off. “I don’t think there’s anything to see.”

  “No?” Carly asked.

  Lauren shook her head. Her face felt hot, and she reached for her water bottle, pretending to study the group in conversation across the room from her table. Yep, something important was clearly going on over there that needed her attention. She needed to make sure all was well. There could be a fist-fight at any moment. Inside, she berated herself for being highly unprofessional, and weak to boot. No wine gulping for her later. She was grounded from the gulp.

  “Martinis, then?” Carly asked, standing again.

  Lauren glanced back at Carly as if she was an afterthought. “Yeah, I guess I could stop by Pete’s.” What in the world had she just said? Damn it. Yet there had been no other choice but to give Carly what she wanted, or she’d never go away. In that moment, Lauren was so mortified by her own behavior that she desperately needed Carly to walk away and give her a moment to breathe and experience the unrelenting self-recrimination in peace. Luckily, she did just that.

  Tops of tan breasts were hard to scrub from one’s brain, apparently. Lauren knew firsthand. The fact that Carly had likely come by them by sunbathing topless was an image she probably shouldn’t imagine. Yet she damn well did, to traitorous response from her body. She spent the rest of rehearsal trying to stop that image from infiltrating her brain. Failure struck. Her mouth was chronically dry, and her temperature remained warm. Lauren focused on her job as best she could, but one thing was clear. Carly affected her and not always for the good. She also hadn’t had sex in over seventeen months, so maybe that played in to things a bit. Not like she was counting or anything.

  Once everyone had left for the day, Lauren and Trip put the room back together, moving bits of stand-in rehearsal scenery back to their assigned spots in the room. Though the rehearsal studio belonged entirely to The McAllister, so no production except for Starry Nights would use it, it was important to keep the room in top condition for when they arrived back to work on Monday. “Hey, I’ve got the rehearsal report pretty much ready to send. Can you update our end times and projected daily for Monday?”

  “On it,” Trip said. “You going to Pete’s? Carly’s throwing another bash. Say yes. She’s a lot of fun.”

  “That’s what TMZ says.”

  “Don’t be uptight, Lala. You can have fun, too. There’s no law. I checked.”

  She sighed. “Fine. Nine tonight, right?” She was trying to come up with some way to get out of this thing. Court TV was back, and they likely had a killer to put on the witness stand. She wouldn’t want to miss crucial testimony from a killer. She mentally winced at her own line of thinking. God, she’d become boring. A lonely little shut-in.

  “She says nine, but no one will be there until ten.”

  “Ten? Is she trying to kill me?” she squeaked. “I’m a grandmotherly thing.”

  “You’re thirty-one, Lala, and no one’s nanny. Carly Daniel is a girl who knows how to turn it up, and you could use a little of that in your life.” He sat on top of the table and did the gesture he did with his hands that said she had to hear this. “You should have been there Friday night. She literally danced on the bar. It was all over Instagram, and then Perez Hilton jumped on the bandwagon and ran a story with the photos. Not your typical McAllister kind of coverage.”

  “Wait. She danced on the bar at Put Upon Pete’s?” Lauren wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anyone dance on the bar at Pete’s. “It’s not really that type of place.”

  “It is now. Lala, you should have seen it. She had half our people up there with her in thirty seconds flat. Everyone was in sync and working it. I felt like I’d stumbled upon the middle of a performance of Rent. It was epic.”

  “Sounds epic,” Lauren said blandly. Inside, she scoffed. She knew how to have fun, but it had been a while since she’d kept show-people hours. She turned in when the theater folk headed out because she was Lauren. Maybe she missed it a little bit, though. The old days. She could admit that.

  When Lauren arrived at Pete’s at precisely ten, she found Carly and Kirby, who played Ashley’s assistant in the show, among other roles, doing a pink colored shot at the bar. The rest of the group populated the small tables that dotted the main floor, an oasis in which drinks and pub food flowed. The lighting gave the place an overall red tint, and a variety of ball caps—each sporting the word Pete somehow worked into a slogan—dotted the walls. The other room was furnished with dartboards and pool tables under fluorescents. Five restored jukeboxes lined the back wall. Pete’s was known for two things: drinks and billiards. Lauren happened to be better at one than the other.

  Deep breath as she approached her colleagues. She relaxed, smiled, and left her metaphorical clipboard at the door. Hell, if she thought about it, she was supposed to be on a beach right now. Tonight, she planned to embrace that relaxation, unwind, and maybe even get the tiniest bit tipsy. Who knew? The night was young.

  * * *

  “Did I mention that I love martini night?” Kirby enthused. Kirby Bonner was an up-and-comer who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three at most and had the cutest little pixie cut. From the moment they’d met, she seemed to really look up to Carly, even after all the bad press. Maybe not the wisest role model choice, Carly thought, but she also understood that her celebrity did tend to attract people. “Let’s do them every Saturday. God, I live for a good martini. Don’t you? I’d love it if we made it a thing. Do you want to make it a thing?” She also liked to talk. A lot.

  “We can totally make that happen,” Carly said, accepting the mango martini from the bartender. Orange and beautiful and well earned. Carly touched her glass to Kirby’s. With her brown hair and doe-like brown eyes, she would surely be cast as everyone’s cheerful younger sister. At least for the next five years. Carly turned back to the group, and would you look at that? Her stomach muscles went tight, and she shimmied against the tingle that crept up her spine. Lauren Prescott had just walked in. “Well, well,” she murmured to herself. Dreams do come true.

  Kirby followed her gaze. “I feel like she gets on you a lot,” Kirby said, surely trying to make it clear that Carly’s enemies were hers. “Who cares if you missed the off-book deadline for the first three scenes. You’re a professional. You’re going to be fine on lines.”

  “Lauren? Nah, she’s just doing her job.”

  “She should get who you are, though, you know?”

  It was possible the same thought had occurred to Carly. Yet she could forgive Lauren for being so uptight and stuffy and hell-bent on following a clock. It was apparently what she was hired to do.

  “I’m not always easy to wrangle,” she told Kirby.

  “My boyfriend says that about me. He’s six three.”

  “Is he now? Amazing.” Carly sipped her martini and let the nearly too loud music wash over her. Saturdays were for letting off steam, and that was exactly what she planned to do, especially with a day off tomorrow. She was already a drink in and her muscles felt a little looser. She inched her way slowly to that point of tipsy with each new sip. God, she loved the gradual feeling of that unravel. She wasn’t a fan of drunk, but tipsy she could do. “Be back soon,” she told Kirby and headed across the bar, following the magnetic pull that wouldn’t seem to let up.

  “You came,” she said to Lauren when she arrived at her table near the front of the bar. “I honestly wasn’t sure you would.”

  Lauren gasped and smiled. “Why? Because you think I’m uptight?”

  “No. Because I know you are.” She tossed in a wink for good measure.

  “Don’t be so sure you know everything.”

  “I’ll work hard,” Carly said. “Let me buy you a martini. Please. I’ve never seen you outside that rehearsal room, so this warrants a cele
bration. Deal?”

  “I’m in.” Carly stole an extra few seconds to absorb this new version of Lauren. Her dark hair was down and she’d added a subtle curl to it which came off as fucking glamorous. Carly loved it. Lauren wore jeans and a white cold shoulder blouse. Yeah, those bare shoulders were really doing Carly in. Lauren was hot with her shoulders covered, but this just seemed cruel. The straitlaced thing only fueled that fire.

  “One martini for my stage manager,” Carly said five minutes later, depositing the drink next to Lauren. She picked up her own martini and offered a toast. “To a kick-ass show.”

  Lauren touched her martini glass to Carly’s. “I will sincerely second that. As soon as you meet your off-book deadlines.” She added a wink.

  “Is it really that big a deal?”

  Lauren stared her straight in the eye. “It really, really is.”

  “For you? I will put in the effort.”

  “It should really be for you, but I’ll take it.” Lauren passed her an amazing smile, and that made everything better.

  The music in the bar portion of Pete’s was loud, but by now Carly’s ears had acclimated. Yes, they had to talk louder than usual to hear each other, but that was part of the fun of being out and about. God, she felt like dancing, but one-on-one time with Lauren won out.

  “Do you live near here?” Carly asked. It wasn’t small talk. She wanted to know more about Lauren, and geography seemed like a good place to start.

  She nodded. “Only a couple of miles north. Easy commute to the theater, which is nice, given I have to be there at odd hours.”

  “I feel like your job is never ending. You’re there before all of us, and you leave after we do.”

  Lauren sipped her drink, which, okay, was off-the-charts sexy to watch, and considered the statement. “There are definitely a lot of responsibilities that fall into my lap, and they take time.”

  “Then you have Hollywood assholes like me, who show up and ruin your life.”