The only upside of smoking was seeing the girl with pink hair. She was something. Great style. Great body. Great everything. Really, really cute. I’m used to seeing beautiful women. LA is overflowing with them. But she had something special. I look around for her again, but there are no girls in the studio besides Mia, who’s been rushing around all over the place like the building’s on fire. She’s leaning over Adam at the moment, pointing at a paper in front of him.
“I’ll get you another one,” Brooks says. “Mia, can you—”
“I’m on it,” she says, popping up. In two seconds she’s handing me a fresh script, like she can telepathically identify every problem that needs to be fixed.
“Thanks,” I say.
“No problem.” I expect her to rush off again but she stays with us. “We’re all set, Brooks. Anytime you want to start.”
“Great.” He looks at me. “Here’s how this is going to work. First, we’re screening the actors in the next room.”
Mia raises her hand. “That’s my job. Step one.”
“We’ll evaluate there,” Brooks continues, “and send the actors we think have the most promise in here to read with you.”
This isn’t what I expected. I expected dozens of beautiful women waiting in line for me.
“You’re quality control?” I say to Mia. “Then I’m trusting you. Only send the hot ones through.”
She lifts an eyebrow. “Right.”
“The lines you’ll be reading—” Brooks takes my papers and starts flipping through them, searching, searching. After a second, Mia lifts them from his hands and turns to a page. “Right here.”
“That’s them,” Brooks says. “These are the lines you’re reading, but the important thing is to just stay relaxed, go with the flow. If you make a mistake, don’t worry. This is a test for screen presence. The cameras won’t even be on you. Just give these girls something to work off. Oh, and wear your ski hat. Your head’s really distracting. We cool?”
Brooks levels an anxious look on me. Over his shoulder, I see my brother watching me. This whole thing, me reading lines for this audition, is sort of hilarious, but Brooks and Adam really have been working toward this for years. I can suck it up for a morning and try to do this right.
“Sure, Brooks. I’ve got this.” I take my papers and sit on the couch under the lights.
Mia comes over and attaches a microphone to my t-shirt.
“What’s this for? I thought there weren’t going to be cameras on me.”
“There aren’t going to be.”
“ ’Kay.” She leans down right in front of me, trying to get the microphone on, and she’s wearing a low-cut blouse so I appreciate the view.
“Roxanne’s your first,” she says.
“Actually, that ship sailed a long time ago.”
“Ew, Grey. Focus?”
“Right. Roxanne.”
Mia shakes her head before she leaves, like she can’t quite figure me out.
There is, of course, more waiting. I’m getting hot under these lights. Hot and bored. So I take the mic and start singing “Roxanne” by the Police.
I hear a few laughs. Saul, the sound guy, pulls his headphones away from his ears. “Hey, kid. You got a really good voice.”
I’m about to thank him when I see the first girl making a beeline toward me. She stops like she hits a force field, and makes a sharp turn to face the tables where Adam, Brooks, and Mia sit with a few other people I don’t know.
“Roxanne Marguiles,” she states, like an inmate sounding off.
“Okay,” Brooks says from the darkness. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Roxanne walks over and sits next to me on the couch. She’s wearing a bow tie, which I’ve never seen a girl wear even though this one is feminine, red and pink, and her platinum blond hair is perfectly smoothed, not a hair out of place. It might actually be a wig. She’s also sweating so badly her makeup’s running.
“Hey, I’m Grey,” I say, offering my hand.
She clears her throat. Looks at my hand. “Start,” she whispers.
“Oh. Okay.”
I look at the pages and read the same dumb lines about I love you, Emma, you’re everything, Emma that I read earlier. I’m proud of myself for managing to deliver them without too much sarcasm.
Then I look up, waiting for Roxanne-slash-Emma to hit me with her amazing lines back. But she just blinks at me with watery blue eyes and clears her throat. “Can you start over?” she whispers. “I forgot my lines.”
“Um . . .” I look around, but get no help from the twenty people in the room who actually are in this line of work. “Sure.”
So I read them again. Maybe a little more sarcastically.
Here we go. Roxanne’s turn. I look up, ready for them.
Her eyes are filling with tears. She’s about to cry, but then she gives me a wide, wide smile, which shocks me for a second because she has adult braces—a lot of them—and I didn’t expect that. I had no idea.
“I am so sorry,” she stage whispers. “I forgot them again!”
I hand her my stack of pages. “Do you want—?”
“No!” She puts her hands up, like I’ve just offered her monkey brains. “I couldn’t. I’m a professional.”
She’s still whispering. I don’t know how she’s missed the fact that we’re both mic’ed up and Saul is on a ladder, holding a boom mic over us.
“Can you start over?” she whispers. “Just one more time?”
Oh, hell no. Jesus. What the hell do I do now?
Fortunately, Mia comes over. “Roxanne,” she says, guiding her off the couch like she’s an eighty-year-old woman, “we’ll try again a little later, okay? Nothing to worry about. Everyone gets nervous.”
I shake my head. Somebody ought to just tell her. She’s in the wrong line of work.
After Roxanne comes Sheila, who manages to read her lines, but with a lisp. Cute, in all honesty, but cute like a three-year-old. Then comes Amanda, a brunette knockout. Her breath smells like onions and garlic. And corpse. I almost puke when she leans in and speaks her lines. Then comes Molly, who has no visible afflictions. She’s decent, in fact, but has no spark. No soul. No . . . style.
Two hours pass this way. I’m sweating under these lights, and I’m getting more tired by the second. I ask for breaks. Brooks, Adam, and Mia take turns shooting me down. This couch is my prison.
I learned the lines the first time I read them, so I make a few paper airplanes out of the script pages and try to peg Adam with them. That gets boring. So I make up a song and call it “Emma-Love.” It’s decent. People clap when I finish singing it.
Then I hit a wall. My hangover shows up and it’s rude. It has a bad attitude, my hangover. By lunchtime, I feel like I’m dying. I get half an hour to raid the craft services table, then I’m back on. My energy’s completely gone, so I start napping on the couch during the three-to-five-minute intervals between reads.
The p.m. hours drag past, even slower than morning. This was never fun, but now it’s torture. My band’s practicing tonight. I tell Adam I need to be there. That I won’t miss it. But around six o’clock, I’m still saying that I fucking love Emma and always fucking have.
“I’m done, Adam,” I say, after the thirtieth girl who looks the same and sounds the same. I lie back on the couch, closing my eyes.
“No you’re not, Grey.”
“Feel free to go off script if the mood strikes,” Brooks says.
They’re getting desperate. I don’t think they’ve found a single girl they like. I know I haven’t. They want my help in drawing these girls out, but I’ve nothing to give. “Must. Go. Home.”
“One more hour,” my brother says.
“Can’t. I hate Emma, Adam. I really do. I hate her.”
A nudge on my boot surprises me. “Hey. Could you scoot over?”
Lifting my forearm, I force my eyes open though they want to slam shut. And then they don’t. Then I’m sudde
nly wide-awake, because what do you know?
It’s the girl with the pink hair.
Chapter 6
Skyler
The kid gives me the sleepy-eyed look of a sloth on Thorazine and slowly, really slowly, straightens his massive frame, scooting up and back against the arm of the sofa. There’s a lot of him, filling the space. Broad chest and thickly muscled arms, long legs that spill everywhere. Giant pair of scuffed-up motorcycle boots that look to be the size of my forearm. I need him to at least make a pretense at some life here, or I’m sunk.
“Told you I’d see you again,” he says, and gives me a sly grin. “Didn’t get your name before. I’m Grey. Blackwood.”
No.
Really?
Shit.
“So, you’re Adam’s—”
“Servant. Like I told you outside.”
“Brother,” Adam answers from behind a long table about five feet away. He and the others sit there with ramrod postures, like the panel at a parole board hearing. I can tell this guy, Grey, is working every nerve today, not just mine.
I take a deep breath and then another. The only way out is through, I decide, so I sit next to him. “I’m Skyler,” I tell him. And then I smooth my skirt and glance over the pages because I have no idea what I’m actually supposed to do.
Paper rustles, and I look over to Mia, who gives me a sympathetic smile. “Why don’t you start us off, Sky?” she nudges. “Start with, ‘What did you come to tell me, George?’ ”
I nod, look over the script again, only it’s like one of those anxiety dreams where words turn to squiggles and slide off the page. I can’t find the line. I don’t know what I’m doing. My heart doesn’t speed up but makes these giant thuds in my chest—boom, boom, boom. Like someone’s using a battering ram on my sternum.
Grey sits there, looking at me with this crooked smile on his face. That grin again. The one that says it’s all just fun and games to him. I want to strangle him, but I make myself settle down, home in on my desire to wake him the hell up, make him pay attention.
Magically, the words reassemble themselves on the page, and I start. “What did you come to tell me, George?”
It sounds angry, but in the waiting area, I’d imagined delivering the line in a way that spoke of weariness, resignation. Emma’s lost her chance at love, and all she expects from George is further confirmation of that fact.
Grey starts, but it comes out in one mumbled rush. “EmmabeautifulEmmaI’velovedyouforeverIwasbornto—”
“Whoa.” I put up a hand. “Hold your horses.”
His eyes go wide. “What’s wrong?”
I look at the others, and the two I don’t know—one man, one woman—whisper to each other. But about Grey or about me, I don’t know.
“I mean, it was a little fast, don’t you think?”
“Do it again, Grey,” Brooks says. “Give the girl something to work with.”
“I thought you said it doesn’t matter.”
“Well, it matters to me,” I tell him. “Kind of a lot.”
He gets a chastened look, like a little kid, and goes from hard-edged to sweet in the blink of an eye. Then his expression reforms, and he shrugs. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m not feeling great.”
“No problem.” But it feels like I’m losing control over everything here. This moment. My life.
A vision forms in my mind: me, hauling my lone cello onto a bus, bound for Lexington. Me in my little attic bedroom, listening to my parents argue as my brother’s three kids run screaming around the house. My sister-in-law, Jordan, is military—deployed to Afghanistan for a fifteen-month tour.
They all need me. If I go home, I know I’ll never leave again.
But if I stay, I can figure out a way to help and have a life. My own.
I look over at Mia, sending “help me” vibes her way.
“I’ve got an idea,” she says, brightly, and gets up from behind the table. “Why don’t you guys stand up for this?”
She looks at Brooks. “I just think it might change up the energy a bit. What do you think?”
“Good idea, Mia,” he says. “Up you go, Grey.”
He sighs and gets up, planting his boots like he’s about to take a punch. Stuffing the script into his pocket, he tells me, “Go again.”
Part of a tattoo peeks out of the neck of his t-shirt, a wing of some kind, along with a tendril that traces along the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. It looks like a vine or a branch. I can’t tell, but I have an irrational desire to see the rest of it. It’s like when I was a kid and took cello lessons. It used to drive me crazy to wait for the teacher to turn the page on my music. I wanted it all there in front of me. All the notes.
“Sky?” Mia prompts.
“Sorry. Okay.” I’m blowing this so majorly, but at least let me get out the lines.
I take a step toward him, look into his eyes, and just let everything else go. “What did you come to tell me, George?” This time, it comes out the way I’d imagined saying it. World-weary and skittish about what I’m going to hear.
“Emma. Beautiful Emma. I’ve loved you forever. I was born to love you. I’ve been here all along. I was just waiting for you to see me.”
He’s not an actor, but he puts something into it this time. There’s depth there and a rich timbre in his voice that weaves its way into me.
I glance at the sides and then back at him. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t love me. You told me yourself. I’m a phony. I meddle too much—”
He laughs, the perfect note. “You do meddle too much. And you get it all wrong, most of the time.”
“Most of the time?” I smile at him, allowing myself—allowing Emma—to soften just a bit, to allow in the first stirrings of hope.
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Grey comes closer. He reaches for me, a little tentatively, and the warm strength of his hands on my shoulders surprises me. It’s like being anchored by a tree with roots that spread to the center of the earth. “You get it all wrong all the time. Because you’re in the wrong line of work.”
“But, I love what I do.”
“I mean setting people up. Trying to fix people who don’t need fixing.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Emma.”
“Do I do that?”
He nods.
“But it’s just that . . .” I try to conjure all the innocence of my childhood, all of the magical thinking that kept me content in my room with my cello, while my family fell apart around me. “I want everyone to be happy.”
I don’t want to look away from him, but I don’t remember my next lines. We’re crackling now. I feel it. And I feel the focus of the others—Mia, Adam, Brooks—feel the weight of their attention on us. The room doesn’t have that drowsy quality anymore. It’s vital now, sharp and alive. I’m sharp and alive, becoming exactly what this moment needs in a way that sends prickles of euphoria through me.
“Like I said,” Grey continues. “Wrong line of work.”
“Well, what then? What should I be doing?” I can’t bring myself to look at the words, but I think they’re mostly right.
“Making yourself happy, Emma.”
I move in even closer, because they’ve arrived at a moment that’s been sealed for them since they first met. “I want to be happy,” I say, and it comes out small and intimate, meant just for the two of us. Luckily, we’re mic’ed. “You could . . . you could make me happy.”
“How? Just tell me what you need.”
“This . . .” I smooth my hands over his broad chest and tilt my face up to his. For a second, I wonder if we’re meant to go through with it or if someone’s going to stop us. And then I realize I don’t want to stop. I can’t. It would be like ending Beethoven’s Fifth without the last movement.
He hesitates for a moment—his expression a little surprised, eyes a little dreamy—and then he moves his hands to my waist and pulls me up against him.
Is this happening?
His face moves closer, eyes searching, asking for permission.
It’s happening.
I lace my fingers around his neck and urge him the rest of the way.
“Kiss me, George,” I whisper. “I want to be happy.”
He leans over me. Close. Then closer. Finally, his lips touch mine, and they’re warm and firm, softer than I’d imagined. They part, gently, and his mouth moves against mine, and it’s liquid and hot and restrained but generous all at once.
I press into the kiss, sinking into it in a way that feels like floating. His breath tastes like smoke and mints, and I should break the kiss at some point, but it’s too good. It’s all too perfect. I’m myself, making out with a guy I just met in full view of a bunch of people, but I’m also Emma, finally allowing in the love I’ve denied myself, the love I’ve spent my life trying to secure for others.
Grey’s tongue slips over mine, and that’s probably not right, not strictly professional. But it sure feels right. I meet it with my own, fleeting, teasing—
And then I become vaguely aware of Brooks yelling, “Cut!”
Chapter 7
Grey
Brooks says, “Cut,” but cut is not what happens between me and this girl. Detach is more like it. A slow, slow detach, like we’re made of Velcro. Even when we finally part, I can’t look away and neither can she. We’re locked in, still staring at each other like the scene isn’t over.
Her big hazel eyes are a little wide, surprised, and her cheeks have a pink color, just a few shades lighter than her hair. She’s blushing. And I feel like I’m on fire.
I can’t believe I just kissed her. Kissed her kissed her.
What was I thinking?
I wasn’t thinking. I got wrapped up in the scene and just did it.
“Okay,” Mia says. “Guys, that was . . . wow. That was really good.”
Damn right it was.
Skyler finally looks away, toward Mia. “Was it?”
“Amazing, Skyler,” Brooks says. “Amazing. Give us just a minute,” he says, then there’s the buzz of excited, hushed conversation over on that side of the soundstage.
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