Chapter 56
AUDREY
Whenever I imagined attending a Hollywood-esque table read—which was never—it wasn’t a forty-minute flight from home, and it definitely wasn’t without having gone to a hairstylist beforehand.
Yet here I am, in jeans and a simple green swing top, imitation Birkenstocks, and wild hair, having left it to air-dry this morning while I got sucked into my music.
I guess it’s only an informal read and not a red-carpet event. Besides, Beau specifically told me he liked flawed women. Majorly flawed, and I assume he meant beyond the wiry incoming greys and frayed jeans and nerves. What I’m really doing is walking into this room with my heart exposed.
The table read is being held in an event room upstairs at a North Sydney bar near the producer’s office.
It’s all reclaimed wood, exposed air-conditioning ducts and copper pipes.
Beau’s in the corner by a window, leaning over a bench, concentrating on the script with a pen in his hand.
Jeans. Dark shirt. Black-rimmed glasses even better in person than in my imagination.
My eyes are drawn to that incomplete compass tattoo peeking out from the fabric of his rolled-up sleeve. A reminder of his unpredictability. Watching him work, I feel a rising sense of protectiveness—I know how worried he’s been, and I so badly want this to go well for him.
‘Excuse me,’ someone says, bustling past. She’s some sort of assistant, I think, and when she walks over to Beau and he looks up to talk to her, he catches me standing in the doorway.
His genuine surprise kickstarts a wave of panic.
It’s clear Harlow invited me without checking first that he’d even want me here, and when he places a hand on the assistant’s arm and signals to her that he just needs a minute, my old instinct—borrowed from pre-Fraser times—is to back out of this room and run.
‘I’m sorry,’ I begin as he arrives in front of me, my whole body on edge. ‘Harlow invited me. I didn’t know if you knew …’
‘I didn’t—’
‘I can leave!’ I’m already leaving! But he reaches for me, pulling me into a space near the door.
‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Are you?’ I’m not fishing for compliments. Just reassurance.
‘Hepburn, I’ve been a wreck.’
That’s good, right?
‘How is it going? Have you rescued it?’
‘The screenplay? I think it’s good? Harlow has been a godsend. She’s got an eye for a good story. It’s been a bit of a joint effort the last few days. I didn’t even get the chance to read the latest version before she printed it.’
I cannot fathom being that hands-off.
‘I’ve been worried about crashing your adult gap year,’ he admits. ‘You’re just getting started. You don’t need some man derailing you in front of a wall of camera flashes.’
He is hardly ‘some man’. The Bookies will argue over the semantics of this for days.
‘Technically it was me who crashed into you,’ I correct him, and he looks as if he’s replaying our first night in my Jeep in the rain. The way the storm lashed the soft-top, both of us drenched from the downpour as he placed his hand over mine on the wheel.
It’s clear the reasons I might want to run from this have been bouncing in his brain for days, as they have been in mine. I have trust issues. Ridges. Josh. Fraser telling me we’d be married for fifty years and being so alive, and then so gone, so instantly …
‘I’m worried about the chaos of my career,’ he goes on, voice gentle and earnest. ‘The headlines say I’m a serial heartbreaker, but I’m not, Audrey. Every relationship I’ve had has come undone despite me. I don’t know if I can protect you from it all. I’d never forgive myself if—’
If what? If this failed and it drove me back into the arms of my liquid nemesis?
‘Beau, surely we can talk this through? Not now, obviously. You’re in the middle of—’ I sweep my hand around the room at piles of paper, pens, coffee cups and fruit platters as effortlessly attractive off-camera household names swan about in a way that April would rupture an internal organ over.
When he puts a hand on my arm, it thrills me to my core. Thrills me.
But then the door behind me opens, sending a brisk breeze up my spine, made cooler by the clouded expression on his face as he looks over my shoulder.
And I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me.
Without even turning around, I can guess who is standing there.
Perhaps we’ve known each other only a few days, but we seem to be able to read each other’s faces, and what I’m seeing here, writ large in the pain in his eyes, is not a serial heartbreaker at all. It’s the heartbroken.
I follow his gaze, my body knowing to step back and make room for the unfolding, in front of my eyes, of a reunion as epic as the cinematographers would craft this scene.
In his eyes, I see what he saw the other day in mine.
Still madly in love. I imagine I can hear the thunder of the heartbeat beneath the lion on his chest, bearing her name.
And I keep expecting one of them to say something, but neither does. They are just … spellbound.
Beau’s arms fall to his side, body language that’s the very opposite of defensive. He is open. Willing. Trusting. Just seconds ago, that hand had been on my arm, and now it’s reaching over for a one-handed hug, crushing her to his chest as if I’m not even here.
‘What are you doing here?’ I hear him whisper.
The you look amazing is implied, as his eyes sweep over long, straight, lustrous blonde hair, bright blue eyes behind designer glasses and a thick fringe.
She is that extraordinary mix of cover-girl beautiful and creative intellectual, and I’ve never felt more underdressed, more underqualified, or more like an underdog.
‘Lucinda, this is Audrey,’ he says, remembering I exist, at least. As she turns to look at me, head cocked as if she’s sizing up her former fiancé’s fictional future love interest, I imagine something passes across her face along the lines of … Beau, this makes no sense.
Instead, she just nods. Perhaps she’s not seeing me as a rival at all. Probably thinks I’m the executive assistant, as she turns back to Beau, who looks as baffled by her presence here as he was by mine. ‘Sorry,’ she says, appearing authentically apologetic. ‘They were getting nervous.’
Have the producers called her in?
I imagine his hurt just as proof of it lands in his eyes.
I knew with just that one sighting of him across this room that he was back on top of his game.
Alive with it. Confident in the way he was directing one of the actors, quietly reading a section of the script.
Whatever work has transpired since I last saw him, it’s good.
But, seemingly without even consulting him, they panicked and brought in the Oscar-nominated writing partner.
The woman who made him doubt his own talent.
The one responsible for the look on his face now as the brawny, tattooed Viper tries not to crack in front of us both.
‘I don’t need help—’
‘I’m sure it’s fine!’ she says. ‘Honestly. I believe in you, Beau! Always have. Let’s workshop it?’
She pulls a marked-up copy of the script from a Louis Vuitton tote, and I’m crushed on his behalf.
If she really believed he could handle this, and if the producers did, she wouldn’t be here.
I find myself nodding at him encouragingly, hoping he’ll read my silent vote of confidence.
The knock everyone’s socks off. The prove it!
‘Audrey! Nice to see you again!’ Harlow says, leading lady and best supporting writer.
She guides me to sit opposite Beau and Lucinda before she throws her script down and takes a seat on his other side.
So now I’m staring at him, flanked by glamorous exes, questioning why the hell I thought this was a good idea.
The table read begins. And the further into the first act they go, the more invested everyone becomes in the emotion of the characters, the storyline, the stakes.
Harlow is good. Even just reading the part.
It’s not only me becoming more enamoured with her the more nuance she brings to the new main character. It’s everyone.
That character is flawed in ways that I am not.
She’s vulnerable about things I haven’t experienced.
She’s suffering, not with what I’ve been through, but with equally difficult, devastating things.
Every so often, Beau glances at me, keen for my nonverbal feedback.
He watches for my reaction whenever she’s funny or hopeless or hopeful …
She is not me, and I am grateful for that, but I can see my influence all over her. Maybe I am his muse, after all. I try to convey well done as we exchange a discreet smile across the table, both of us delighted at how this seems to be going.
They reach the end of the first act, and the producer speaks up. ‘Take ten, but well done, everyone. Good work, Beau.’
Lucinda puts her hand on his arm, perhaps ready to congratulate him on his success, but he barely registers her beside him.
Because he has turned the page … and suddenly the room tilts.
Panic shoots through his face as he devours that page, and the next.
Then he picks up Harlow’s script and compares the two.
I watch as his shoulders slump and he sits back in the chair and covers his face, defeated.
Finally, he looks at me, in obvious despair, then turns slowly and says, ‘Harlow, can I have a word?’
She looks excited. Buoyed no doubt by her impressive performance and how relieved everyone is that this movie is back on track.
He stands up, the legs of the chair scraping across the wooden floor, takes her by the wrist, and pulls her out of the room with strong, purposeful strides, slamming the door in their wake.
I’m left sitting here alone, across from Lucinda, who is flicking through the script, too.
After reading a page or so, she looks up at me through that perfect fringe and says, ‘I never knew he could write like this,’ which I assume is meant to carry some sort of subliminal message about the source of his inspiration.
This would all be awkward enough, but it’s clear we have bigger problems, because the room falls silent as people realise, in the manner of dominoes, that there is an enormous row erupting outside.
We only hear bits of it as Beau and Harlow compete with the noise from the bar downstairs and the Sydney traffic outside the window.
Harlow’s voice is heated. I’m sure everyone catches the words drowning in writer’s block and distracted for days, because half the room looks in my direction.
Beau’s voice is too low and muffled for me to understand through the closed door. Next Harlow is shrieking something about how this is the pivotal scene for the entire film, while Lucinda practically cranes her neck to see the exchange. And then her eyes flick back to me.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
She spins her annotated script around and pushes it across the table. ‘You tell me.’
I slide it towards me and read through the scene that Beau and Harlow are raging over. It’s clearly the powerful midpoint reversal in the plot. The part when the hero first really sees her. When she first lets him in. The part where she turns herself inside out and shows him everything.
‘Okay, everyone,’ the producer calls, clapping her hands. ‘That’s time. Someone drag them back in here, will you? Let’s take it from the clifftop.’
It’s the part where she trusted him …