Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Bryn barely slept. When she dozed off between tossing and turning, she had stress dreams about Vivian. Even awake and washing her hair, the image of teenage Vivian haunted her. It was almost as bad as the revolting sound of canned laughter.
At seven in the morning, Bryn was dressed and sitting on the couch like it hadn’t just been her bed. When the knock came at the door, she already recognized it as Iris’s. She opened the door to the woman carrying a tray.
“Let me help with that.” Bryn took the heavy tray and signaled for Iris to follow her inside. “Thank you so much for bringing this. I could’ve grabbed it. I feel so bad that you schlepped this all the way here.”
“It’s no trouble.” Iris stopped to look at the violets Bryn had moved from the top of a bookshelf to the big window overlooking the pool.
“I promise she’s low maintenance,” Bryn said, attention darting between Iris and the acaí bowl at the center of a ton of smaller dishes of cut up fruit and nuts. “She just needed more direct light.”
“You really love plants, huh?” Iris strode toward the kitchen to make tea while Bryn added toppings to her breakfast.
“Not as much as everyone else in my family, but probably more than plant civilians,” she joked, sprinkling chopped macadamias over bananas. Bryn waited for Iris to finish making the tea and sit with her at the table before asking, “She didn’t trust me to eat on my own, did she?”
With a quick swing of her head, Iris moved curls out of her face without touching her hair. She didn’t address Bryn’s question, but the smirk that flashed on her lips told her she’d been right.
Instead of being annoyed at having a minder, Bryn stirred honey into her tea.
She wanted to ask about Vivian’s acting life.
To ask if she was okay after having been a spectacle.
But she couldn’t figure out how to ask without sounding like she was prying.
She pivoted to the other reason sleep had been so hard to find.
“So you’ve probably been around for a few books,” Bryn guessed.
Iris inclined her head. “At least one a week for several years.”
“That’s so many books,” Bryn muttered, but mercifully kept her jaw from hanging open like a bumpkin. “How many times has she had to start over?”
Iris hesitated, light brown eyes shifting. “Never.”
Bryn stopped chewing. Her gut had never been more pissed off at being right. It gurgled in raging protest.
“Drink the tea,” Iris said more sternly than her own mother had ever spoken to her.
Bryn obeyed like Iris had found some previously undiscovered switch in her brain. She sipped the same steaming tea Vivian had made for her, but she still hadn’t gotten used to the taste of spiced licorice.
“How bad is that? Is Vivian mad at me? Does she think it’s my fault?” Bryn swallowed. “Is it my fault?”
“I don’t think it’s your fault,” Iris replied and Bryn didn’t get the sense that she was saying it to spare her feelings. “This author obviously has something very specific in mind.”
“Did she say what?”
Iris chuckled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Wouldn’t that be gloriously helpful.” She watched Bryn for a beat as if trying to decide whether to say something else. Bryn was halfway through her bowl when Iris added, “You weren’t the first Maggie.”
Something about the way Iris said it made Bryn’s eyes widen. “That sounds like when the first wife goes missing in a gothic novel and the naive new wife discovers her body in the rose garden.”
“Don’t be silly.” Iris laughed. “We don’t have roses.”
Bryn smiled, but couldn’t relax. “Who was she?”
“A very experienced talent from LA,” Iris replied before offering an immediately intimidating name.
“And she was recording here?”
Iris shook her head. “You might have already guessed this, but Vivian is extremely private. Very few people even get to the backyard.”
Bryn leaned back and digested the un-comforting news. If Vivian was enduring the discomfort of Bryn in her space, it had to be for a damn good reason. Her stomach ached again, but this time it was silent.
“Did Yenni Montoya provide any notes at all?” She forced herself to finish her breakfast despite getting queasy. She didn’t want a noisy gut or lack of endurance to cost them any more time.
Iris shook her head.
After breakfast, Bryn had half an hour before Vivian arrived to record.
She read her dialogue aloud, trying to find Maggie’s voice.
Maggie, a young woman who inherited her grandfather’s bar in the Florida Keys, was capable and strong, though the fight to keep the place alive in its new form as a lesbian bar had worn her down.
Maggie was weary and sentimental when Jo walked into her bar to include her in a piece she was writing about the death of lesbian bars across the country.
Bryn should be able to connect to her, but she felt like a sputtering fraud instead.
The guesthouse door opened without a knock. Bryn was still pacing and practicing reading aloud when Vivian walked in. In cream linen pants and a white camisole, her hair pulled back in twin fishtail braids, she was stunning.
“Good morning,” Bryn said, but didn’t let her gaze linger on Vivian. All she could think about was leering eyes and cruel laughter. She didn’t want to be another set of ravenous eyes on her.
“You’ve eaten?” Vivian started for the tea kettle and Bryn made a mental note to have it ready for her tomorrow morning. Assuming there was a tomorrow morning. Her chest tightened but she tried not to think about failure when she was trying to summon success.
“Yeah, Iris brought it over. Thank you.”
Vivian tipped her head forward in what Bryn guessed was supposed to be “you’re welcome.
” Anxiety was a jackhammer in her chest. Her every instinct kept screaming that they should get to know each other.
That it could only serve their performances to have actual chemistry, but Vivian had hundreds of books under her belt and most of Bryn’s experience was in recreating sex sounds for audio erotica.
She had to follow Vivian, not her gut. Vivian knew what the hell she was doing.
Bryn clutched the tablet in her sweaty palms. “I’m ready,” she said, voice too loud in the quiet room. “I read the whole thing. I get it now. I get Maggie.”
When she finished collecting the tea in the infuser, Vivian turned to face her, back against the marble counter. Her dark eyes swept over Bryn, assessing her. Dissecting her with nothing but her terrifying gaze.
The silence twisted and turned, taking its own shape. It was judgement and disappointment and disbelief.
Bryn couldn’t take it. The words tumbled out of her, a messy, desperate torrent.
“Just tell me what I’m doing wrong. Please.
I can take it. Is it my pacing? My tone?
Am I not connecting to the material? I know you think I’m an amateur, and you’re right, but I can learn.
I will work all night. Just give me a note.
Anything. What does she want? What do you want? ”
Vivian watched her, her expression unchanged. When Bryn finally ran out of air, her chest heaving, Vivian pushed off the counter. She walked toward her, stopping a few feet away. The proximity was disconcerting and addictive.
“I don’t have a clue about what Montoya wants,” Vivian said with disarming honesty. “Iris said she told you about Janet.” She continued as if to warn Bryn that there were no secrets. “The first book we recorded was good. I don’t know what will make it great in Montoya’s mind.”
Bryn choked down the breakfast trying to return for an encore. If a far more experienced narrator had tried and failed, how the hell was Bryn supposed to deliver what this incredibly picky but totally unhelpful author wanted?
Vivian was quiet again. Her shrewd gaze bore into Bryn with unbearable and unwavering eye contact.
No one had ever looked at her so completely.
It was unnerving. Bryn wanted to look away, to make a joke about her counting freckles, to ask whether she read minds.
But her instinct told her to stand her ground. To withstand the evaluation.
“But she heard your audition,” Vivian went on, her analytical gaze pinning Bryn in place. “Out of everyone they listened to, she chose you. She heard something in your voice.”
This was not the lecture Bryn had braced for. This was something far more confusing.
“But you—”
“There is a quality to your voice,” Vivian stated, more observation than compliment.
“A warmth. An earnestness that is difficult to fake. My guess is that’s what Montoya heard.
It’s what you need to lean into.” She took another step closer, her voice dropping even lower, somehow sounding more commanding than a shout.
“Don’t try to mimic me or anyone else you’ve ever heard.
Whatever the hell you did on your little audition clip—do that.
Be aggressively yourself,” she said like she was already annoyed at the result and they hadn’t started yet.
Without another word, Vivian took her tea and started for the booth. Conversation apparently over.
Bryn wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t form words.
An excellent problem before spending eight hours performing with her voice.
A question materialized, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.
How was she supposed to relax and be herself when herself was a ball of anxiety and imposter syndrome wrapped in decade-old skinny jeans?
Herself was currently trying not to spontaneously combust under the intense scrutiny of the most intimidating person she’d ever met.
“Let’s go,” Vivian said, leaning out of the booth. “We don’t have time to waste.”
She said it so casually, like she hadn’t left Bryn reeling. Like she hadn’t weirdly given her a compliment that was both clinically dispassionate and sounded like an order.
Head spinning, Bryn tried to collect herself.
She was still terrified, but now it was a different kind of terror.
The pressure wasn’t just to be good enough anymore.
It was to be herself, on command, for an audience of one who had just, against all odds, given her a reason to believe she could.
Swallowing hard, Bryn followed Vivian into the heat of the booth.