Chapter Three #2
“Thanks,” I say, tone a touch icy, “but I don’t need a lawyer. I’ll just look it over myself.”
James doesn’t take back the card.
“You do, actually,” he says, and if my voice is tinged with ice, his contains whispers of fire. “You should always seek counsel before signing a contract.”
“I can’t afford it,” I say bluntly, hoping he’ll feel badly and dropit.
He doesn’t.
“I’m paying for the consult,” he says, keeping his palm flat as he pushes the card back toward me. “As an apology. Consider it a very delayed gift…” He hesitates. “From Romeo to Juliet.”
Oh, so we’re doing this now. Here. I would have much preferred the grass outside the studio with my throbbing ankle, to be honest. At least then it would already be over.
“They’re both dead,” I say, trying to sound funny, but I clearly fail to pull it off because James’s eye twitches. “They’ve been dead a long time. What is there to apologize for?”
We’re still too close. Close enough that I can see and hear him swallow.
“I should have found you,” James says, and I can’t tell if I imagine his voice is a little raspier. “Afterward, when the play was over. I should have gone to check on you. To make sure you were okay after…”
So he’s not going to bring up the agent asking about me or the small fact of him having a girlfriend.
It’s not that kind of apology. Maybe he doesn’t remember, it occurs to me.
Maybe it was such a non-thing to him, the agent mentioning my talent, that he doesn’t even know I’ve spent the forever since wondering if that moment could have changed my entire life.
And as for the girlfriend, maybe that’s just something actors do. Maybe they go around kissing people so often, it means less to them than it does to a regular type of person.
“There was nothing to check on,” I say breezily. “And therefore there is nothing to forgive.”
I gather all the courage in the world and—because he won’t take the card from me—tuck it into the front pocket of his jeans, careful not to touch anything.
“You already promised to do the social media,” I remind him. “That’s thanks enough.”
His eyes flicker.
“If your concern is financial compensation,” he says carefully, “Genie will be able to negotiate your base salary to more than what we would have made with the social media clause.”
James reaches forward like we’re going to shake hands, but instead he gently and firmly pulls my arm up by the wrist and pushes the card back into my palm.
“Besides,” he adds, “you don’t want to accidentally sign another shitty contract.”
It takes me at least three heartbeats to feel his burn.
I momentarily forgot I told him about how I lost On the Same Page when we were talking through the magic headphones during the audition.
And the way he says “another shitty contract” makes the snow in my voice freeze to solid take-down-the-unsinkable-ship glacier ice.
“My concern is not just about financial compensation,” I bite out. “It’s an opportunity.”
“For what?” he asks, and it sounds like a challenge. “To throw it all away again because you won’t take my advice?” He inhales. Deeply. “Take the damn card, Juniper. Let Genie get you the cash you’re owed and leave the rest.”
This daydream of a scenario—the one where a job falls into my lap and promises a different future—is starting to feel too much like a fairy tale.
The old ones where someone gets their toes cut off or a little mermaid turns into sea foam.
A cautionary tale of why you shouldn’t trust the world to right itself.
And to top it all off, there is the small matter of James Neely standing in my bedroom, and I’d be lying by omission if I didn’t say I’d thought of a moment just like this one the night he kissed me on the stage with that secret kiss meant to help me “leave it here.”
Because that’s another terrible, terrible thing about having fiction and imagination be your biggest coping mechanism: It takes you a split second. That’s it.
In the time it takes you to inhale, you have imagined an entire world that rolls out like the plot of a book, one where you become friends with the angry Romeo and you hang out in each other’s bedrooms and living rooms and favorite coffee shops.
One where the glimpse of emotional depth—the understanding that was so hard to find in your college peers but you found in him —turned into a keycard with 24/7 access to the kind of person who would never think of you as too much or too weird or “too” anything.
And you returned the favor, of course. It takes nothing at all to imagine a future where the boy on the stage becomes the boy at your side and you find yourself never alone again, part of a pair instead of a single data point floating in the endless blank space of an empty graph.
I’m so used to writing myself into the stories I wish I were living, I accidentally blur the lines just enough to forget what is real.
Combined with a terrible sense of timing—always too early, too late, but never just right, like some sort of time-challenged Goldilocks—it’s a miracle I can sort out reality from the tendrils of fiction always crawling through my head.
But this is what I know is true: I have a shot.
It feels like the last shot, a comet out of the clear blue sky that has landed in a still-simmering crater at my feet.
Maybe it’s magic, maybe it’s coincidence, or maybe Catarina was right and I finally—like a broken clock—was in the right place at the right time through sheer statistical probability.
But this project is the only opportunity I’ve seen since college that feels at all like the life I envisioned for myself.
And only James Freakin’ Neely is standing in my way with his grumpy, asinine, ex-superhero self.
“You know what?” I say. And I hate— hate —how the angry tears are crawling their way up my throat.
“I don’t want your stupid card.” I drop it and watch as it falls at a diagonal into the hallway like it, too, can’t bear the tension in the room.
“And you already agreed to do the social media, so don’t try to back out now under the guise of helping me.
I don’t want it: you or your help, frankly.
But it’s both of us or neither of us, and I need this. ”
“You don’t have it in writing.”
I don’t understand him. “What?”
To his credit, James looks the tiniest bit guilty when he says, “You can’t hold me to it. Legally, I mean.”
My mouth literally drops open before I spin away from him, eager to put space between us in lieu of doing what my body wants me to do, which is shove him hard enough to fling him back into the past, back into a bad memory, back and back again until I never met him and never thought… whatever I thought.
“I—” It’s as far as I get before my brain blanks at the audacity of this man.
“I’m sorry,” he says from behind me.
I don’t answer him. Couldn’t even if I wanted to because I might actually grow claws and growl and that would be awkward.
“That was a dick move,” James says, and he sounds…
regretful? “I don’t have it in me. I know I gave you my word, but I was hoping we could come to some other agreement, some other way I could help you move forward without the insipid videos and photo ops and all that.
Like Genie. Or Genie and something else.
Just…” He shrugs and repeats. “Something else. Anything else.”
It should make me feel sympathy, his edge of brokenness, but instead it makes me dig my fingernails into my arm.
“And what does that mean, your word?” I ask. “Should I get it in writing? Have a lawyer look that over, too? How do I know you won’t agree to ‘something else’ and then take it back?”
“Juniper—”
“No,” I say, my heart twisting for reasons I don’t understand. “You don’t get to call me by my name. You didn’t know it then, so you don’t get to know it now.”
James steps into the room and eats up half of the oxygen by doing so.
“Then?”
“Yes, then, ” I say, and shit, it’s all going to come out, isn’t it? All of it. It’s going to make me look pathetic and needy and—
There’s no stopping it.
“In college,” I say, “the night we met and then unmet. The night that agent said, Gee, that Juliet girl did really well, and you said nothing about me and took all the credit for yourself.”
My voice is rising and it’s like there’s a charge going through my entire body, but James looks unnaturally still.
“My life could have changed then, just like yours,” I thunder on. “Because you signed with him, right? Right? ”
He barely has the chance to nod before I’m at it again.
“Maybe your agent would have just given me a pat on the back or something and that would have been it, but I’ll never know if that could have changed everything because you decided to pump me up and use me to finish the play and then chuck me to the side when I wasn’t useful to you anymore.”
James runs his hands through his hair, once, twice. I hate how long his fingers look. I hate how I notice how long his fingers are. I tell myself not to notice.
It doesn’t work.
But he doesn’t look caught or found out. He doesn’t look surprised that I know about the conversation.
He looks resigned. He looks reconciled.
“You heard,” he says, and though it seems physically impossible, I swear his voice is deeper.
“I did,” I say.
“I wondered if you did. I looked everywhere for you the second I could get away.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing.
“You weren’t at the after-party,” he adds, a tad accusatory.
I roll my eyes at him.
“You mean the sad grocery store cookies they were going to set up backstage? No thanks.” I uncross my arms to gesture at him with a flap of my hand. “And as if you stayed. I bet you were out of there the second your girlfriend’s uncle signed you as a client.”
James takes another step toward me. It looks involuntary, like he’s being pulled.