12. Daniela
TWELVE
Daniela
Most women in my position just would've been excited.
Excited for the table read, for meeting all these people…being introduced to the A-lister playing opposite me.
The romantic leads. The glitz and glamor.
And the whole time, I was just thinking about Sawyer Holt.
Every word at the table read, he was on my mind…every confession, him.
Every love scene on the page, his hands.
I was losing my mind.
The table read had been in a converted warehouse space in East Austin, all exposed brick and good lighting and the nervous energy of twenty people who'd never been in a room together pretending they had.
Ellis at the head of the table in her boots, cigarette tucked behind one ear, watching everyone with those flat assessing eyes.
The DP on her left. Mark right behind me, vibrating at a frequency only I could detect.
The cast was extraordinary. I knew that objectively.
The A-lister playing opposite me—Anderson Reeves, two Oscar nominations, the kind of face that belonged on a billboard and knew it—had shaken my hand and smiled and said he'd been looking forward to this, and I'd smiled back and meant it and then spent the next four hours thinking about a man in a trailer three hours from here who made my eggs the way I liked them without ever being asked.
I was in serious trouble.
The Far Meridian was a good script. A great one, actually—the kind Ellis made, where the love story was load-bearing rather than decorative and every scene had two things happening at once.
My character, Rose, was a woman coming back to a place she'd left and finding out she'd left something behind she hadn't meant to.
I'd read it three times before the table read and cried twice and told Mark it was the best thing that had landed on my desk and meant every word.
I just hadn't expected it to hit quite this close.
Some things don't wait for you to be ready, Rose said, on page forty-seven. They just become true while you're not looking.
After, there had been dinner—long table, good wine, people more important and more famous than me talking about things way above my pay grade.
Daniel had been charming and easy and genuinely funny, which I hadn't expected and appreciated.
The director of photography, a woman named Rue who'd shot Ellis's last two films, had leaned across the table and told me she'd watched Devil's River twice after Ellis sent her my reel and I'd felt the compliment tingle at the back of my neck.
This was everything I'd wanted. I knew that. I could feel it—the rightness of the room, the script, the people, all of it snapping into place the way good things did when the timing was finally right.
And I'd still gone back to my hotel room alone and lain there staring at the ceiling thinking about Sawyer's voice.
I left at five-thirty in the morning, the second I could reasonably go.
Couldn't sleep anyway. I'd been awake since four, staring at the ceiling of a perfectly nice hotel room that had everything a person could want and none of the things I actually did, and at some point I'd stopped pretending and just got up and got dressed in the dark.
The drive out of Austin was empty and grey, the city still mostly asleep, the highway opening up fast once I cleared the last of the suburbs.
Hill Country in the early morning was something else—the sky going from black to a deep bruised blue, the cedar and limestone just shapes in the dark, the road cutting through it like it had always been there and always would be.
I had the heat up and both hands on the wheel and a gas station coffee that was terrible and I didn't care even slightly.
I made it in two and a half hours.
The gate to Holt Creek was pale in the headlights and then I was through it and on the ranch road, the familiar ruts, the cedar pressing in on both sides.
The main house lights were on—Peggy, probably, or Gage, who kept rancher's hours whether he needed to or not.
The paddock fence materialized out of the dark and then the trailer, the small light on inside, warm and particular, the same light I'd seen from across a field in December and felt something shift in my chest.
He was at the picnic table.
Two mugs. His hands around one of them, his breath making small clouds in the cold. He wasn't looking at his phone. He was just sitting there in the dark, waiting, the way he did everything—like he had all the time in the world and none of it was wasted.
I pulled up and cut the engine and sat there for a second.
Looked at Sawyer. Watched as Bishop moseyed across the paddock to lean against the fence, like he'd been waiting too.
I got out of the car.
The cold hit me full in the face, sharp and clean, and I pulled my jacket tighter and crossed the frosted grass toward him. Bishop whinnied from the fence—loud, indignant—and I veered toward him first, let him push his nose into my chest, pressed my forehead against his.
"I know," I said. "I missed you too."
He exhaled hard, warm breath against my collarbone, and I stood there for a second with my eyes closed and my hands on his face and felt the knot in my chest start to loosen.
Then I turned to Sawyer.
He was standing now, the second mug held out. I crossed to him and took it and wrapped both hands around it and looked at him in the thin early light.
Something was different.
I couldn't have said what exactly. He looked the same—the medal, the jacket, the particular set of his shoulders. But there was something in his face that hadn't been there before. A carefulness. Like he was holding something he didn't want to drop.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi." His eyes moved over my face. "You look tired."
"I didn't sleep."
"I figured." He looked at his coffee. Back at me. "How was it?"
"Good." I wrapped my hands tighter around the mug. "Really good. The script is—" I shook my head. "It's a great part, Sawyer."
"I know. Ellis sent it over."
"And?"
"You're going to be extraordinary in it."
"Don't," I said.
"Don't what."
"Say things like that when I haven't slept."
He almost smiled. But the carefulness was still there underneath it, and I felt the first cold tendril of something move through me. The particular dread of a conversation you hadn't agreed to have.
"Hey," he said. "We should talk."
There it was.
My stomach dropped straight through the frozen ground.
We should talk. Four words and I knew exactly what they meant in every language, in every context, on every set and in every hotel bar I'd ever been in. They meant the thing you'd been careful not to name had been named while you weren't looking and now someone was going to be reasonable about it.
"Okay," I said. My voice came out even. I was a professional.
I was terrified.
He looked at my face and something shifted in his—the carefulness breaking open a little, something more urgent underneath.
"Hey." He stepped closer. "Not—it's not bad, Daniela."
"Okay."
"You just went white."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're doing the thing where your face goes completely neutral."
"This is just my face."
"It's not." He took the mug out of my hands and set it on the table and then he had both my hands in his, warm and certain, and I looked up at him and tried to find the thing in his expression that told me how bad this was going to be.
It didn't look bad.
It looked—terrified. Almost as terrified as I felt.
"I've been trying to figure out how to say this for about a week," he said. "And I'm just going to say it because I'm not good at speeches and you're standing here looking at me like I'm about to fire you and I need you to know that's not—" He stopped. Exhaled. "That's not what this is."
"Then what is it," I said. Barely sound.
He looked at me. The pale early light on his face, the cedar dark behind him, Bishop at the fence watching us with his ears straight up.
"I don't want while you're here," he said.
"I want you. All of it—the film and the career and the traveling and whatever comes next.
" His hands tightened around mine. "I want to be the person you come home to.
Whatever home looks like for you. I'll figure it out.
" A beat. "I love you. That's what I'm trying to say.
I've been trying not to say it because I thought it would scare you off and then I realized I was just scaring myself and?—"
"Sawyer."
"I know the timing is?—"
"Sawyer."
He stopped.
I looked at him. At this man who made my eggs right without being asked and waited at picnic tables in the cold and talked to his grieving brother on Thursday mornings and had spent two months quietly, methodically taking apart every wall I'd ever built without once making me feel like I was losing something.
"I thought about you the whole time," I said.
"Every scene. Every line." I turned my hands over in his and held on.
"Every love scene on the page I was thinking about you and it made me insane because I'm supposed to be a professional and I could not stop—" I stopped.
Swallowed. "I left at five-thirty in the morning, Sawyer.
I haven't slept. I drove two and a half hours in the dark.
" I looked up at him. "Why do you think I did that? "
He was very still.
"Say it," he said. Low.
"I love you." It came out steadier than I expected. Steadier than I felt. "I've been trying not to for months and I'm done trying."
Something moved through his face—fast, unguarded, the careful thing dissolving all at once.
He pulled me in and kissed me, one hand at my jaw, the other at my waist, and I grabbed his jacket with both fists and held on. He kissed me like the week had been long and the morning was cold and he'd been waiting at a picnic table in the dark…and like he loved me.
When he pulled back his forehead dropped to mine.
"Okay," he said. Rough.
"Okay," I said.
Behind us Bishop exhaled loudly, deeply satisfied, and went back to his grass.