21. Raven
— ? —
Raven
Chris Park sat in my trailer doing the Times crossword between setups, wearing the title People had given him three years running, America’s Boyfriend, with exactly the right amount of embarrassment, and I was supposed to be falling in love with him on camera.
He was, by every objective measure, exactly the man I should have been able to fall for.
Gorgeous in a way that photographed like a minor crime.
Funny without needing you to notice he was funny.
Kind to the crew, generous in a scene, the sort of costar who fed you the good angle instead of stealing it.
Half the women in America had built entire interior lives around him, and I got to do a love story with him for three months, and I felt, when he touched me, roughly what I felt toward a well-designed lamp. Admiration. No current whatsoever.
Our chemistry read had been so good the director applauded. Actually applauded, both hands, in a room full of people. The studio started building the press tour before we’d shot a frame.
“The internet wants you two married by spring,” Mia reported, scrolling shipping edits on her phone with the grim focus of an analyst. “Someone’s already written sixty thousand words of fanfiction. About your chemistry read. Not the movie. The audition.”
“We haven’t filmed anything.”
“Doesn’t matter. Someone leaked phone footage and now you’re a couple in the hearts of forty thousand strangers who have chosen usernames about it.”
Chris was doing the crossword next to me in my trailer, unbothered. “Fourteen down is ‘ossify,’” he said without looking up. “And we should probably fake-date for the press tour. Purely logistically.”
“No.”
“I’m very charming. Ask anyone. Ask the fanfiction.”
“You’re also my friend, which is the entire story, and I’m not blowing up the best work friendship I’ve had since Mia so you can sell tickets.”
And he was the best work friendship I’d had since Mia, the easiest one, the ones that happen fast and cleanly.
We did the Times crossword at lunch. He rated craft services daily, a Michelin inspector working a grudge (“The hummus today is coasting. Yesterday’s baba ganoush walked so this hummus could phone it in”).
There was, between us, precisely zero romantic weather.
Which is exactly why it was Chris, and not the director, who figured out what was wrong with my kiss scenes.
Which was information in itself, if I’d been willing to read it.
I made friends slowly, guardedly, with the caution I’d learned the hard way: the people closest to you are the ones best positioned to do the most damage.
Chris had gotten past all of that in three weeks flat, precisely because there was no charge to it, nothing to guard against, no part of me bracing for the moment the friendship picked up the power to hurt.
Easy is how love is supposed to start, everyone says.
Nobody warns you that easy can also just mean safe, and that safe, for some of us, is the one thing that never quite catches fire.
Because my kiss scenes were dying. Spectacularly. The chemistry read had crackled, and now every take of the central romantic scene arrived stillborn, and the director kept resetting the cameras with the baffled patience of a GPS that keeps rerouting into a lake.
“Cut,” he called again. “I don’t understand. Your read was perfect. Now you’re kissing like cousins. Distant ones. At a reunion neither of you wanted to attend.”
Chris pulled me aside while they reset. “You’re playing every beat at somebody who isn’t me,” he said, quiet, no judgment in it. “Have been for three weeks. I’m not offended - honestly I’m impressed by the consistency, it’s very committed work. But who is he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Raven. You’re looking straight through me to some guy standing behind camera left who isn’t there. In every single romantic take. It’s like doing a love scene with a woman who’s on the phone.”
“Maybe I’m just a bad actress.”
“You’re a spectacular actress. You’re just spectacularly in love with somebody who isn’t me, and it’s showing up on film, which means we have to fix it or the movie’s a documentary about a woman thinking about her ex.”
I didn’t answer, but my face apparently answered for me, because he squeezed my shoulder and let it go.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Try closing your eyes on the kiss. Might trick your brain.”
“That seems rude.”
“Ruder than imagining somebody else the whole time?”
I didn’t have an answer for that, because he was right, and we both knew he was right, and the worst part was that I couldn’t even locate the exact moment it had become true.
Somewhere in the phone calls in the dark, somewhere between the coffee that appeared on my porch and the man who left restaurants early to spare me his coordinates, Josh had quietly repossessed the part of me that was supposed to be available for pretend love scenes with America’s Boyfriend.
My body had made a decision my better judgment was still arguing against.
After we wrapped for the day, Chris dragged me to a bookstore in Los Feliz.
“Wrap gift,” he said. “You mentioned you collect first editions.” The fact that he’d retained a detail I’d mentioned once, three weeks ago, while both of us were soaked under fake movie rain, was the entire reason we were friends.
I was actually enjoying myself, had my hands on a first edition of The Age of Innocence that was singing to me, when I saw Josh across the store. In the young adult section, with three teenage girls, all four of them talking over each other about a book on a shelf.
The girls were gesturing wildly. Josh was listening with total absorption, asking questions that only made them talk faster. He looked happy. Loose. Nothing like the lacquered star he’d made himself into for a decade.
“That’s your ex,” Chris observed, appearing at my elbow with his own stack.
“Yes.”
“Want to leave?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
Josh looked up then and saw us. Froze for a beat. Then lifted his hand in a polite, careful wave (I see you, I’m not coming over) and turned back to his students. Professional, respectful, exactly the boundary I’d asked him for.
So why did it land so wrong?
He started herding the girls toward the exit, giving Chris and me a wide, deliberate berth, clearly steering the whole flock around us to spare me the encounter, and walked directly into the doorframe.
Not a graze. Full contact, shoulder and temple, glasses knocked sideways, a display of poetry chapbooks wobbling on its stand, deciding whether to faint.
He caught the display one-handed, righted his glasses with the other, and exited with the composure of a man pretending the door hadn’t just assaulted him, while all three teenagers detonated with laughter on the sidewalk behind him.
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste it.
It didn’t work. The laugh came up anyway, the real one, the ugly involuntary one I couldn’t perform if you paid me, and I had to fake a coughing fit into my own shoulder to smuggle it out of my body before Chris caught it.
He caught it. Of course he caught it. He noticed load-bearing structures for a living, and my entire carefully engineered indifference had just failed a stress test in front of the one man in the store trained to spot the failure.
Chris watched me watch the entire thing. “So,” he said. “That’s the guy the kiss scene keeps losing to.”
“I’m not-”
“Raven. You haven’t looked at a single book since he walked in.
And you almost pulled an oblique not laughing when he lost a fight to architecture.
” He handed me the first edition I’d been clutching (already paid for, while I’d been busy staring), hugged me goodbye, and told me to figure it out before reshoots.
In my car outside my place, I called Josh before I’d technically decided to.
You can date all the appropriate men you like. It’s the person you call from the car who gives you away.
“Who were the girls?”
“Maria, Anna, and Jessica. Some of my students. Scary talented - Jessica’s fifteen and already been accepted to three film programs.” A pause. “Also they saw the doorframe thing. Jessica’s informed me it’s going in her next short. The working title is When Doors Attack.”
I gave up and laughed. “You walked into a door, Josh.”
“The door moved.”
“You’re a professionally trained physical performer. You did your own stunts in a franchise.”
“The door. Moved.”
“I wasn’t scary talented at seventeen,” I said, quieter, following my own thought somewhere I hadn’t meant to go.
“You were. You just didn’t know it yet.”
“You didn’t even know me at seventeen.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve seen the proof. You turned into who you are, which means it was always in there, waiting for the software update.” I could hear him smile. “I’d have known at seventeen. I’d have been insufferable about it.”
He said it like a joke, and it was a joke, and underneath the joke sat the thing that kept dismantling me: he’d have believed in me before I believed in myself, at seventeen, at twenty-two, at any age you named, and for eight years he actually had.
I’d built my entire self on that belief before he forgot he’d ever handed it to me.
And now here it was again, casual, over a bad car connection, a man telling me my talent had always been in there waiting, the last two years wiped clean off the board, him still somehow claiming the right to be the person who saw me first and clearest. The maddening thing was how badly I wanted to let him.
I didn’t answer that, but the warmth went through my chest anyway, and I sat in my parked car a long while after we hung up, holding a book I hadn’t chosen, thinking about doors that moved and a boy who’d rather concuss himself than make his ex-wife uncomfortable in a bookstore.
The story about the fund should have made all of this simpler, and instead it sat in the back of every good moment that month.
It was a small ugly question I couldn’t fully answer: whether the woman I’d rebuilt, the one getting applause in audition rooms and whispered about for a nomination, was mine or a gift he’d quietly bought me.
I wanted him, and I hated that the wanting now came with an asterisk.
The worst part was that the whispers had gone quiet almost as fast as they started, died down in a way I didn’t think to question at the time, and I let myself stop looking at it, because looking at it meant deciding whether to ask him, and asking him meant admitting I still cared what he’d done.
Maybe Chris was right. Maybe I owed someone a phone call.
Maybe I owed myself one too.