I Did Something Bad

Three

Crow’s-feet. Maybe it’s shallow, but it’s the first thing I notice about him: Tyler Tun has crow’s-feet. I hadn’t seen them in any of the TV appearances or magazine spreads I’d diligently studied in preparation for tonight, but there they are: deep and unmistakable.

Otherwise, and while I know it’s trite to say he looks exactly like he does on-screen, he does. For a split second, my brain’s neurons lag in their firing—a consequence of seeing a face that I’ve only caught in movie trailers and magazines and late-night social media scrolling now staring back at me from a few feet away: short, unruffled hair and full brows, both of which are just two shades darker than his dark brown eyes; jawline that you could use as a ruler; that famous million-dollar smile. He’s tall, and despite the distance separating us, I have to slightly tilt my head backward to meet his eyes. He’s also usually clean-shaven, but tonight he’s got a five-o’clock shadow that makes him, well, hot. Not that I’ve ever thought he was unattractive, but it’s taken me until this moment to realize that, actually, I find Tyler Tun quite hot.

I blink to clear my mind of that, and focus back on the present moment. He’s still smiling politely, and it hits me that I’ve spent the past few seconds staring at him—although he doesn’t seem the least bit disturbed, like this is something that happens all the time.

“Hi.” I take his hand, and, apparently continuing tonight’s trend, am caught off guard by how soft they are. It’s probably written into all of his contracts that he has to stay moisturized to the point of feeling like a baby’s butt at all times. Nobody wants a crusty Hollywood heartthrob. “I’m Khin.”

“I’m Tyler. I hope you don’t mind this place,” he says as he leads us back to the small, metal folding table where he was sitting when I walked in. I memorize his outfit while he’s still standing: white sneakers, gray chinos, plain black polo shirt with a subtly imprinted Burberry logo on the right chest. Clean, crisp, classic. Immaculate. Did his publicist pick it out?

He retakes his seat at the red plastic stool, and I plop down on the matching one opposite. Because the table is pushed up against the wall, there’s only one more stool in the aisle, and, assuming that no one else is joining us, I put my purse down on it.

When I look around the narrow space, he continues in a somewhat apologetic tone, “This is my favorite restaurant in the city. I know it doesn’t look impressive, but I’ve been craving their wonton soup for years.”

“Was that the last time you were in Yangon?”

I notice a flicker of a knowing smile before he answers. “Yes.” I open my mouth but he speaks first. “A little over one and a half years ago. I haven’t been back since.” He says it not only like he knows he was one step ahead of me and what I was going to ask next, but that he prides himself on it.

“I see, good to know,” I say. I can’t help but also think, This is going to be more fun than I thought ; after all, there are few things in life I love more than taking someone down a peg, even— especially —if that someone is a bigwig Hollywood star who thinks I won’t be able to see past the smoke and mirrors.

It doesn’t take me long to clock that, despite the stool being a flimsy, backless piece of plastic, Tyler Tun doesn’t slouch, his back instead a taut, straight vertical line. He steers the conversation, talking me through each of the menu items, throwing out recommendations when he arrives at a dish that he’s particularly fond of. I nod, even though I’m already in interviewer mode, making mental notes of as much as I can. For instance, I also observe that he hasn’t uttered a single “um” or “ah” this whole conversation—tics that I look out for to judge how a person really reacts to something I’ve said. He doesn’t tap his foot or crack his neck or exhibit any of the other signs that people usually show when they’re nervous about being alone with a stranger.

As I study him like a Nat Geo researcher studies an animal in the wild, it occurs to me that the reason Tyler Tun has managed to simultaneously maintain such a public professional life and private personal life isn’t because past interviewers have been bad at their job—it’s because he’s extraordinary at his. The man is unreadable and presumably unshakable; in other words, a publicist’s dream. Or, in other words, a challenge for me.

“How did you find this place?” I ask as I peruse the laminated A4 sheet of paper. I flip it over to find a blank page. I flip it back.

“It’s been here for ages. The current owners’ grandparents started it when they lived here.”

“Aww, that’s sweet. Did your grandparents bring your parents here when they were kids?”

I hadn’t thought it a particularly inquisitive question, but he goes silent for a beat, then two. Sensing something, I flick my eyes up from my menu to his face. Nothing. Not a single crease in his smooth forehead. I look at his hands next—once again, nothing; he’s still holding on to the menu with the precise amount of tension that one holds on to any menu.

“No,” he says. He looks over while I’m still staring at his hands, and, when we make eye contact, smiles. Feeling like a kid caught with her hand in the candy jar, all I can do is smile back. “My grandparents died before my parents moved out here,” he explains.

Oh. Right. I knew that. The awkward silence makes sense, then. I’m tempted to say “Sorry,” but from personal experience, I find it tediously useless when someone apologizes for something that’s already happened and is out of your control, because then you’re obligated to say something like “It’s fine!” or “It was a long time ago!” even if the former isn’t entirely true and the latter is literally stating the obvious; so, I say nothing.

“Anyway,” he says, shutting down that topic of conversation (which is understandable; I might be trying to get a scoop, but I don’t want to make someone keep talking about their deceased family members). “It’s been our family’s go-to spot for as long as I can remember.”

“Is that why they let you rent out the whole restaurant?”

He offers me a controlled smile. “You could say that.”

As soon as he answers, I realize what a stupid question that was. Of course Tyler doesn’t need to convince a restaurant owner to close the place for him for one night. Aside from the fact that he could afford to rent out an entire private island if he wanted to, the publicity that this place is going to get from posting a photo of him eating here will make them several months’ worth of income in a matter of days.

Still, I am surprised that this is where he opted to have his first dinner in the city, especially with a journalist. When Clarissa texted me the address, I’d never heard of the place but had assumed it was some new hipster fusion eatery in Chinatown, probably on the first floor of a freshly renovated “colonial-style” building, somewhere where the lights are intentionally too dim, the prices aren’t printed on the menu, and the other patrons are too cool to ask him for a selfie but not too cool to sneak photos from their respective tables. But when the taxi dropped me off in the alley, I’d walked past the shop three times before a nearby parked trishaw driver, taking pity on me and my heels, asked what I was searching for.

In my defense, the wooden accordion door had been shut, and it wasn’t until I rang the somewhat-rusted doorbell hanging to the side that an old man popped out his head, asked my name, and ushered me inside.

I was worried that word might have leaked about Tyler’s actual flight and the fact that he was already in town, that maybe paparazzi and sleuthing fans would be lined up around the block, Instagram streams open and ready to go—but no one outside would guess that the restaurant was open, let alone that Tyler Tun was satting on the other side of those splintered white wooden doors.

We both get the wonton soup. When our beers arrive, he lifts his in my direction.

“Shall we toast to officially signal the start?”

“The start of what?”

“The interview.” He waves his bottle in a small circle. “This whole story. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other over the next two months, right? Feels fitting we start it off with a toast.”

“R-right,” I stammer, somewhat caught off guard by his “let’s get ’em” attitude; for someone so private, he’s awfully… friendly. After a few seconds, he shifts his bottle closer to me, and I realize he’s waiting for me to clink mine against it.

As I (finally) raise my beer to his, I take a deep breath to shake off the nerves that have gripped me from out of nowhere. I need to get my shit together. I need to forget that he’s Tyler Tun, whose last movie broke multiple cinema websites across the world when tickets were released. Or the fact that he’s the only Asian man amongst the world’s top ten highest-paid actors. Or the rumor that he was actually Shonda Rhimes’s first choice for the Duke of Hastings, but it conflicted with another movie so he turned down the role, although that hasn’t stopped Shonda from still trying to get him for future Bridgerton seasons. He’s just… Tyler. And I’m interviewing him.

“Hey, speaking of the story, I did want to say something up front.” He places his free palm down on the table, like he’s literally laying something out for me. “If we’re going to see each other six days a week for two months, I think we should be honest with each other. No… games. Maybe we could even be… friends?”

The word startles me. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere, or if this is one of his tricks for Disarming an Interviewer 101. “What a… novel approach,” I say, careful not to make my confusion blatant. We’re fifteen minutes into this meal, and I still can’t get a thorough read on him. And that ticks me off. Bad. “Do you treat all of your interviewers like your friends?”

He smiles. “Depends on the interviewer.” Before I can ask what that means, he adds, “But I’ve never had someone interview-slash-shadow me for quite this long before. So what do you say?” He lifts a shoulder. “Friends?”

Okay, I’ll play along. I respond with a thoughtful nod. “That makes sense to me.”

“Okay, so let’s start.”

“Start?”

“Getting to know each other. What was your dream job as a child?”

I blink, the question jolting me like an unexpected burst of static. I don’t like talking about my personal life with strangers, period, but especially not with people I’m interviewing. “ I’m the interviewer here, remember?” I try to deflect.

It doesn’t work. “You can’t expect me to be comfortable letting you shadow me for two whole months when I don’t even know you,” he says. “You’ve had a whole Wikipedia page at your disposal. All I have on you is your LinkedIn and a very sleek professional website.”

I contemplate his point in silence until I have no choice but to acquiesce that it is a good point. Not because I’m necessarily worried about his comfort—I’m sure the rest of the world regularly bends over backward to make sure Tyler Tun is always comfortable—but because the more comfortable he is around me, the more he’ll trust me, and the more he trusts me, the higher my chances are of getting something from him.

“Detective,” I say. “I was obsessed with Nancy Drew.” I don’t ask him the same question because I already know he wanted to be a cruise ship captain.

He chuckles. “So was my sister.”

“Does she still want to be a detective?”

“No, she wants to be a doctor. An ob-gyn.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, he stills. The right side of his mouth jerks up, like a puppeteer has just pulled a stray string. Two seconds later, it falls back down, that perfectly symmetrical cover-story smile back in place.

Unfortunately for him, I can discern a tic from a mile away (it’s why my friends no longer play poker with me, the cowards), and I settle a bit more into my seat. At least now I know what to look out for. But now I need to know why that happened.

“Your sister wants to be an ob-gyn? That’s impressive,” I say, trying to push this. I’m feeling around in the dark for something, and even though I don’t know what, I’m almost certain there’s something there, just paces away.

“It is,” he says.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t want to be an actress, too. You know, given how well”—I make a spreading motion at him with my hands—“ you’ve done in Hollywood.”

He shakes his head and laughs, but I notice that he hasn’t put his beer bottle down, perhaps using it as an anchor to keep his body language steady. I know from reading interviews that he’s close with his sister, so this could just be a case of him wanting to protect her from being in the press. But also, it could be something else. Is she planning on becoming an actress? Are the two of them filming something next? I could see a studio wanting to keep a splashy announcement like that sealed shut. “Trust me, Jess is determined to do the complete opposite of whatever I do. She’s… how to describe her? Independent,” he says. Then, “What’s your favorite movie?”

Despite my annoyance in the subject change, I reply coolly, “No one has a favorite movie.”

“But if you had to pick?”

I look up at the ceiling while I think. “ Legally Blonde. ”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“I thought you’d name one of my movies. You know, to play to my ego.”

I can feel the smirk spread on my face. “Truthfully, I don’t think there’s a big enough bat in the world to play to the ego of someone who says something like that, ” I say, and he lets out a loud laugh. Not a full torrent, but a big enough wave that my smirk opens into a grin.

“I can see it, though,” he says, nodding now.

“What does that mean?” I challenge.

“I can see you and Elle getting along.”

“Don’t act like you’ve watched Legally Blonde. ”

“What?” His two front teeth dig into his bottom lip as if stopping a smile, and something zings down my spine. “Like it’s hard?”

This time, I laugh, shocked by what happened inside my body just then and by his quoting Legally Blonde. Before I can ask him something more interesting and less obvious than his favorite movie (the first Indiana Jones, as he mentioned in his speech at the Oscars the year he presented Harrison Ford with a lifetime achievement award), the food arrives, delivered by the same uncle who let me in. “Thank you,” Tyler says up at him with a respectful tilt of his head.

The uncle claps him on the shoulder. “I’ll be upstairs. Let me know if you need anything,” he says before retreating to the small staircase located at the very back of the restaurant and that, I’m assuming, leads to the second floor where the family lives.

“Are you seeing anyone?” Tyler asks with zero transition.

I halt, one shrimp wonton squished between my chopsticks, heart rate going from zero to a hundred. “What?”

Tyler picks up a wonton of his own and shrugs. “That’s what everyone’s always asking me . I’m sure you were going to ask me at some point, too,” he says before putting the entire dumpling in his mouth and following up with a small, delicate slurp of the soup. “So I’m asking you first. Are you seeing anyone?”

“No,” I say. “Are you ?”

“Come on now, I thought you’d be subtler than that.”

“That’s not an answer. Come on now, ” I mimic his patronizing tone. “I thought we were trying to be friends—”

“We are—”

“—and friends tell each other when they’re seeing someone, don’t they?”

His grin shows off his perfect teeth. “Fair enough. No, I’m not seeing anyone.”

“Not on the apps?”

“Don’t have time for a relationship right now.”

“Ugh,” I groan, rolling my eyes. “What a walking cliché.”

“Do you call all of your interviewees a walking cliché?” he asks, eyes glinting as they scour my profile.

“To their face?” I look up at the ceiling as if trying to recall. “Only the ones that I also consider my friends.”

He nods, then shakes his head as though he changed his mind mid-reaction.

“But,” I point out. “You do know you can set the settings to make it clear that you’re only in town for a few months and are looking for something short-term.” That corner of his mouth that I’m now checking in on every few seconds pulls. Is he secretly dating someone here and he’s trying to throw me off? “Wh—”

“And how would you know that?” he asks. “About the apps. Personal experience?”

“Unfortunately.” I sigh. “It’s a war zone out there.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“From whom?”

“May.” His expression, which shifts to I walked right into that one in a blink, makes it clear that he didn’t have time to double-think his answer.

“May Diamond?” I ask innocently.

All he does is chuckle and nod in answer. “Who’s your celebrity crush?” he asks.

“Why? If it’s someone you know, are you going to set us up on a date?”

Once again, his eyes shine with the reflection of the fluorescent lighting and a pinch of teasing. “Depends. Who is it?”

“Chris Pine. The most underrated of the Chrises.”

“And the only one whose number I don’t have,” he says with an exaggerated sigh that, against my will, makes me giggle. Actually fucking giggle like he’s the prettiest boy in school and I’m thrilled to be getting even a modicum of his time.

“Who’s yours?” I ask.

“Jane Fonda.”

“Tyler Tun,” I say, raising a brow.

His eyes widen like I’ve uttered an obscenity. “What?”

“I didn’t know you were into older women.”

“It’s Jane Fonda,” he replies, unfazed. “Why did you take this job?”

We’re playing ping-pong, him trying to get a point when he thinks my guard is lowered, me (obviously) not letting him.

“Easy,” I say and take half a bite of a dumpling, being careful not to let the remaining stuffing fall out. “ Vogue asked me to do a cover story.”

“Is that it? Because it was Vogue ?”

And because I wanted my ex-husband to hear that I was writing for Vogue now. “Yes,” I say. “Why?”

He takes a sip of beer. “It’s… different from your past work. Like that abortion clinic piece in Time .”

I am not a fan of how often this man zigs just as I’m sure he’s about to zag. I make a noise that sounds like I choked on some invisible beer, as though my body, along with my brain, cannot physically digest this new piece of information. He smiles. Point to Tyler. Damn it . “You read that?” I ask, regaining my composure.

“Like I said,” he says with a chuckle. “You didn’t think you were the only one who did research for this interview now, did you? It was a fantastic piece, too. Then again”—he lifts his chin at me—“I guess that’s how they do it at Columbia Journalism School.”

“Wow, name-dropping my college? You really went all in on my LinkedIn, huh? Are you the fourteen anonymous views I got last week?”

“You caught me.” He lifts both hands in surrender. “I created fourteen separate accounts so that I could use the free premium trial fourteen times and keep viewing your profile anonymously.”

I see my opportunity and slide right in. “I thought signing up to be the new James Bond came with at least enough money to cover a LinkedIn Premium subscription.”

His hand, which was casually rubbing his chin, freezes. “Is that you asking if I’m going to be the new James Bond?” he asks. His tone doesn’t fluctuate, but it is the slowest he’s talked all night.

“Is that you confirming?” He opens his mouth, and I point my chopsticks at him. “Remember, you wouldn’t lie to a friend now, would you?”

His mouth corner tics. I’ve got him. Except, instead of acting like you would when you’re backed into a corner, he drops his chopsticks, folds his hands in front of his chest, and, forehead wrinkling with a joke that I didn’t catch, says, “How about this? I promise you that if the time ever comes when I agree to be the new James Bond, my publicist will give you a thirty-minute head start before releasing the official statement.”

I gape at him. Is he being serious? Is he confirming that he’s going to be the next Bond? “And… why would you do that?”

“Because,” he starts, then stops. Instead of continuing, his mouth splits into something halfway between a smirk and a full-on grin, his owlish eyes suddenly making me feel like the tables have turned and I’m backed into the corner. “Because I like to help out all my friends,” he finally says.

“Well, how do I know you mean it? How do I know you’ll keep your word? Or that you won’t try to feed me false information?”

“Because what would I get out of doing that?” he points out. “Besides, you’re too good of a journalist to fall for false information. Like I said earlier, that abortion piece was incredible. Why did you write it?”

My startled “What?” comes out squeakier than it would under normal circumstances, but he shrugs like he’s surprised I’m surprised.

It irks me that he’s still eating as though this is a normal conversation. One minute, he’s quite possibly confirming the biggest entertainment scoop of the decade, and the next, he’s circled back to my piece on the abortion clinic. “Why did you write a piece about the city’s only underground abortion clinic in a country where abortion is illegal?” he asks.

Despite wanting to steer us back into Bond territory, I restrain myself. I’m playing the long game here. Annoying and pushing him at this one dinner won’t bode well for me over the next two months. I need him to lower his defenses, not feel aggravated.

“Why does it matter?” I ask. “It’s my job.”

“Because it takes guts. You could do your job in a lot of other ways that don’t involve potentially prosecutable activities,” he says, a solemnity overtaking his features, the confident smile from earlier loosening. His eating also slows down. “Weren’t you worried you’d get interrogated by the authorities? Or worse?”

I shake my head, refusing to break his gaze, unsure whether it’s because I don’t want to or because I can’t. “Eh, a few eyebrows were raised in my direction, but I don’t scare easily. And in the end, the pros far outweighed any possible cons,” I answer. “I’ve had a lot of women contact me after reading that piece. That alone makes it worth it.”

“And you connect them to the clinic?”

“Used to. Now I forward their details to a friend who runs a women’s shelter.”

“So the clinic is still running? Because that piece came out a while ago.”

“It is.”

After another long stretch of quiet, he simply nods.

There’s something about his fascination with this story that’s nagging at me. Sure, it was my latest big byline and also the biggest byline I’ve had to date, but he’s pressing on it awfully hard. Is he doing research? Maybe for his next film, or some type of documentary he’s doing voice-over work for? Something to do with abortion policies in American politics? A political endorsement? Wanting to focus on the current conversation, I file the note away in my “possible Tyler Tun scoops” folder.

“My turn. I have a question,” I say.

He nods, and when he leans the closest toward me that he has all night, I am not expecting the scent of pinewood that floods my nostrils. I don’t know what I thought he’d smell like, but a pine forest was not it. I don’t even have a particular affinity for pine trees (or anything remotely nature-related), but this man smells good. I can’t stop myself from taking another deep inhale, and this time, am able to better parse the various notes: fresh, crisp, but with a grounded center that’s rounded out by a nearly imperceptible sweetness, like someone sprinkled in a dash of concentrated lychee extract at the last minute.

“Yes?” he asks after a few distracted seconds on my part.

Get it the fuck together, Khin. And stop smelling him, Jesus Christ.

“Why did you agree to this?” I ask.

There’s that stray puppeteer half smile again. “What do you mean?”

“This.” I move my head around in a circle. “Me trailing you for two months. You’re notoriously private—”

“Oh, am I?”

“Yes.” He’s not the only one who can cut people off. “So why did you agree to this? You rarely even walk the red carpet these days.”

His features pull as though this is brand-new information to him. “The truth is,” he says through a short chuckle, “you have my publicist to thank for that.”

I don’t buy it. “You agreed to let a stranger follow you around for two months because your publicist bullied you into it?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘bullied,’” he counters. “But Bolu can be very persuasive.”

“Why this movie? Compared to all the other ones.”

“This one is important to me. It’s… different. Special.”

I perk up. “Special how?”

“Come on, Khin, we’re both Myanmar. Don’t make me go through the representation spiel. You’re too astute of a writer to need me to explicitly lay out what’s riding on this movie.” And then, ping-pong serve landing in front of me out of nowhere, he continues, “Tell me a secret.”

“What?”

He goes quiet although we both know I heard him correctly. It’s not the fact that he’s surveying me in silence that’s getting under my skin, but it’s how he’s doing it. I don’t know how to describe it, but the steadiness in the way his eyes are tracing my face makes me feel like he’s just discovered something about myself that even I don’t know.

He’s not trying to be friends . This man is trying to even the playing field.

“A secret. Tell me a secret,” he repeats. “And not something like I once shoplifted a Snickers bar —”

“Have you ever shoplifted a Snickers bar?” His expression droops for a second and I gasp. “Tyler Tun! Do the authorities know?”

This time, his laugh is unrestrained, deep but joyous, just like in the movies. “Damn, I should’ve worked on my poker face. I gotta be honest, I didn’t come to this dinner thinking I’d be questioned about my sordid past.”

“I’m really good at my job,” I say with a proud, knowing smile.

“I can tell,” he says, still grinning. “But now you know a secret of mine. So it’s your turn. Tell me one. Tell me something that you would rather sell your soul to the devil than have someone find out.”

“Okay, now we’re just—”

“Khin.”

I don’t know why I stop breathing at the sound of him saying my name, voice all low and anchored. What am I, a lusty teenager? “Why?” I ask, buying myself time.

“Because I need to know that I can trust you.”

“So you can blackmail me if you don’t like the profile?”

He shakes his head. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t actually read the stories. Never do.”

“Why not?”

“Khin,” he repeats, and there goes my breath again, hitching on an invisible jagged edge. “You’re stalling. Tell me a secret. I need to know that I can trust you.”

Vogue . That’s what’s on the line here. If I give him this one thing, and he feels like he can trust me, and he lets his guard down, and I find out something that makes Clarissa happy, I will get a full-time position at Vogue . “I’m recently divorced.”

His eyes jump from my face to my finger and back to my eyes. “Not a secret.”

I feel like an animal caught in a snare that only gets tighter the more I squirm.

Vogue. Singapore.

And then I realize— he can’t fact-check my life. Interviewing 101: be relatable.

“It’s… making it hard for me to be happy about my sister’s engagement,” I say, trying my best to sound like I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt for ever saying this out loud; picturing Nay’s and Thidar’s faces kind of helps because hey, I do technically have sisters—we’re just not related by blood. “I keep telling myself that it’s ninety-five percent happiness and five percent bitterness, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably more seventy–thirty.”

“You have a sister?” he asks, taken aback by this information. “You didn’t mention it earlier.”

“You… didn’t ask. And I try not to bring up my personal life in interviews.” It’s the best lie I can come up with on the spot.

He’s studying my face like that again, like at this point, he could pick it out blindfolded just by tracing my features with his hands. Don’t let him get inside your head, I remind myself.

“I understand. Are you close with your sister? Newfound romantic bitterness aside?” he finally asks as his careful expression breaks into a soft smile.

I feel simultaneous bursts of relief and triumph. Bull’s. Eye. I wasn’t expecting to do this tonight, but it’s worked. His shoulders lower a few degrees, and my sense of smugness rises. I just gained the upper hand in this relationship, and he doesn’t even know it.

“Yeah.” I nod. “Apart from, you know, the usual petty sibling nonsense.”

His smile widens. “I get that.”

His head is tilted to the side, and he looks the most relaxed and guard-down he’s been all evening. On instinct, I seize the opening. “Now, what about you? Snickers heist aside. Do you have a secret that you’d—how did you put it? Rather sell your soul to the devil than have anyone find out?”

My eye catches on his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. Obviously, he has secrets. All celebrities have secrets. Every human has secrets. But it’s the way he pulls back, sits up, and resumes eating before the half-teasing “Just the usual” has fully left his lips that snaps me to attention.

“How about one of your upcoming roles?” I press.

“Like what?”

“You tell me. Can you reveal anything that’s currently in the pipeline? Anything that doesn’t rhyme with Dames Lond?”

He smiles, but turns his attention away, like one of his facial muscles might reveal something if this goes on for too long. “Nothing confirmed,” he says.

“Do you want to do another indie film, like Beginning, Middle, End ? Or are you continuing down the more conventional rom-com route for a while? Are you and May planning on shooting anything else?”

“Maybe,” he says with a caution that the question doesn’t warrant.

“Maybe?” I echo.

He looks back up at me, a surge in confidence lifting his features. “May and I need to see if we get through this movie first without killing each other. It’s one thing to be best friends”—he lifts his bottle to his lips—“it’s another to be best friends and coworkers.”

“You’re telling me,” I challenge, “that, should it arise once more, you would actively turn down the opportunity to work on a movie with May Diamond?”

“Truth be told, May can be a brat,” he says, then pauses. “But you didn’t hear it from me,” he adds with a wink and a teasing lilt that only best friends have a right to.

I know when I’m hitting a dead end. It’s fine, I’ll find a way to circle back to this somehow. For now, I’ll try a different approach.

“What’s your favorite role you’ve ever played?”

He takes his time chewing and swallowing another wonton. “It changes regularly but right now, probably… I Won’t Tell If You Won’t .”

My forehead creases in surprise. It was, if I remember correctly, his second-ever movie, the one right before Renegade made him a household name; if you stopped someone on the street and asked them to name five Tyler Tun movies, I Won’t Tell If You Won’t probably wouldn’t make anyone’s list. I was expecting him to say Lost and Found because what kid who grew up watching WWE doesn’t dream about starring alongside The Rock, or Call It What You Want because what human being doesn’t dream about making out with Emma Watson in the middle of the Palace of Versailles, or, the most obvious one—Dylan McClane (aka John McClane’s nephew) in last year’s Die Hard reboot.

“Why?” I ask.

His eyes wander around the table, as though he’s searching for the answer in a script that someone might have secretly taped onto the side of the chili oil pot. “It was—” he starts, and pauses. I have a feeling that it’s not a case of him not having an answer, but that he’s trying to put it into a nice, tidy package before presenting it to me. “Because I was experienced enough to not be too anxious to enjoy it, but also not famous enough to be too anxious to enjoy it.” He laughs at my puzzled expression. “That sounded much sager in my head, I gotta be honest. Basically, I was a kid, and it felt like this acting thing might work out and also it might not, so I was having fun on set every day like it was the last time I’d ever get to do one of these because, well, back then, it might have been.”

I smile at his earnestness. “Do you miss it? Before all the hubbub and lights?”

“Do I miss the measly paychecks? Believe it or not, not really.” He laughs. “I kind of enjoy perks like being a homeowner. Truly lives up to the hype.”

I hold my smile, but I’m not letting him get away with distracting me with humor. “I mean, do you miss…” I try to frame it so it doesn’t sound so sentimental. “I guess, do you miss those days when acting, this whole job, didn’t come with all the pressure and obligations it does now? Without all the publicity tours and the multiple international premieres and brand endorsements and shit?”

“What, do I miss acting just for the sake of acting?”

I wouldn’t have put it that way, but the way he said it, with a rueful smile and a tone that bordered on wistfulness—it makes me curious.

I nod.

He tries to avoid my gaze again, but this time, I lean over to the side and prop my chin on my fist. Realizing what I’m doing, he releases a low chuckle like Okay, fine, you caught me .

“Sometimes,” he answers, and without either of us meaning to, we’re locked in a stare-down. One of the first big journalism rules I learned was to not jump into the silence; if you let it linger long enough, eventually the other person will speak first, and you’d be surprised what people will blurt out to fill the quiet. After a long period of this, he blinks first. “But hey, no such thing as a dream job under capitalism, right? I guess to sort of answer your earlier question, I’m trying to make sure whatever roles I take from now on, they’re fun . A feeble attempt at recapturing the magic, I suppose. I know people write off genres like rom-coms because they’re fun and aren’t the titles you see on the ballots when awards season comes around, or the ones that get the three-minute standing ovations at Cannes, but I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting to make people laugh, to bring joy to the fans. If I have fun while I’m filming, and they have fun while they’re watching, then surely that’s what we should all be aiming for, right?” he says, and finishes the last bite.

“Right,” I say, allowing the silence to resettle as I turn his words over in my head.

What would be more “fun” for a young actor than getting to be the next James Bond? What would bring more joy to fans than finding out that Tyler Tun and May Diamond are, in fact, best friends turned lovers?

Although I still can’t see even the outline of this vague thing I’m searching for, I would bet my entire wardrobe that there is a thing here.

My gut has never failed me. Not ever. Some people’s do once or twice, but not mine. It’s why I’m so good at what I do. And right now, it’s telling me that Clarissa was right: Tyler Tun is hiding something. Something really big. Something that might very well be big enough to get me a job at Vogue .