Chapter Seven #5
I take his answering groan as acquiescence and flop myself into the flowers, not at all worried about ticks or the way my shirt is bunching around my jeans. I do worry about James, though, who looks tortured in the heartbeat before stretching out beside me.
“And why is this fun?” he asks.
“Because,” I say. “It just is.”
“I’m going to need more than that.”
“Shouldn’t it say something that an immortal vampire with all the time and resources in the world found it a pleasant enough way to pass the hours? That’s a pretty high recommendation if you ask me.”
“I think it was the company he was most interested in,” James says. “Not so much the activity of lying in the dirt.”
“ Shhh. You’re ruining this for me. I’m fulfilling a teenage fantasy. Do you think you could make your skin sparkle? Like a morally conflicted, self-described disco ball serial killer?”
James’s laugh is a little too loud, and it makes me proud.
—
We are back in the recording booth. Together.
I’m not sure if it was my idea or James’s, but we’re both scrolling through our tablets standing side by side checking to see which scenes Arabella and William have together that we haven’t already recorded individually for The Meadow.
I’m trying my best not to remember the way our shoulders touched while we lay in the meadow and how each brush shot little bolts of electricity down my arms and straight to my fingers like lightning might come from beneath my nails.
“Baseball scene?” James asks, and if he notices how I startle a bit, he doesn’t let on.
“Surprisingly little dialogue from William in that one,” I say, clearing my throat in the hope that it will help clear my head, which it doesn’t. “Basically he just tells Arabella to put her hair down.”
James rolls his eyes. “I think there’s some vampiric trash talk and showing off on the field first.”
“Oh, come on.” I bump my shoulder against his. “Like you wouldn’t show off if you had superhuman speed and could run the length of a mountain in half a second.”
James doesn’t dignify that with a response beyond a small snort.
“What about…the prom scene?” My throat feels funny, and I remember the list and that I am a hired professional, damn it, and make myself continue in a normal voice, “The one after William tries to leave her at the hospital? That one is pretty charged, emotionally speaking. Plus it’s at the end, so that’ll be nice to have squared away. ”
There’s something in James’s face, but he tucks it away so quickly, I can’t make out the expression.
“Sounds good.”
It’s all he says.
We try to go straight into the dialogue, but maybe the magic in the world is upset with us, because—again—I sound laborious and wooden even to my own ears and…dare I say James does, too?
We give it another couple minutes of reading, but James seems distracted, like he’s on autopilot, and if we were closer—if we didn’t just have a bucket of my tears, a couple of impressive coffee stains, and elbow brushes in the meadow to our collective name—I might pry.
But instead, I just click off my mic and James follows suit.
“Wanna try the thing we did last time?” I ask. “The dialogue from memory just to get the vibes right?”
James flicks his eyes up to mine but doesn’t so much as flinch toward the door of his booth.
“And the movement?” he says.
I take the headphones totally off my ears.
“Huh?”
James tilts his head. “The movement, the physicality of the scene.” He pauses. “The dancing?”
Everything inside of me warms.
“Ahh, the patented James Neely sack-of-potatoes method,” I say, and I let myself smile, just a little, and tell myself it’s to hide the geyser of nerves in my stomach. “Are you asking me to dance?”
He steps out of the box and now I can read the emotion that sits firmly between his intense gaze and his mouth: desperation.
But whether it’s to dance with me or to avoid me altogether, I can’t tell.
I still can’t tell, even when we meet in the middle of the studio directly between the two booths and stand toe-to-toe, just…looking.
I swear he’s taller than he was in college. I idly wonder if too much muscle can elongate the spine somehow as James opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, to ask, How do we want to do this? Or maybe, I don’t want to do this.
But instead he inhales deeply, setting his hands on my waist in a way that makes me feel like I might be swept into one of those Barbie movies circa the early aughts with animated swans and princes with handsome hair and even handsomer hearts.
His face looks like he’s lost a war, but I can’t see it for long, because I find when I put my arms around his neck, I’m practically squished into his chest.
“So, you work out, huh?” I ask into his well-defined pecs.
James snorts somewhere in the vicinity of my hair.
“Arabella dialogue, Juniper.”
It’s enough to break the ice, my stupid quip, and whatever hunger was on James’s face a moment ago has been replaced with sardonic pleasantness when I lean back to look at his face—at William’s face, I tell myself—and say some version of Arabella’s lines.
“I don’t understand how you think I could just turn my back on you.”
James doesn’t miss a beat, staring back down at me with a subtle shift in countenance that I’ve come to recognize as his William face and replying, “I don’t understand how you think I could stay if it is only going to cause you pain.”
We sway together side to side like we really are at an awkward high school dance. I shift my hand a little on his neck, fearful my hands are going to get sweaty and he’s going to feel it and ew.
“There are lots of different kinds of pain,” I reply. “This one is the most preferable.”
“The least evil is still evil,” James says as William, and it’s such a good line that I actually stop swaying and look up at him.
“That’s good,” I tell James. “It really sounds like something William would say.”
“Probably written in his diary,” James says, his mouth quirking up as he looks down at me. “Next to the running list he keeps of every single mistake he’s ever made in his hundred-plus years of existence.”
“He alphabetizes them on his birthday each year as a treat.” I laugh.
“And for Christmas, he ranks them on a scale of one to one hundred.”
We keep doing this, I realize, as we sway and finish the framework of the scene. James and I seem to be caught in our own dance, one where we take three steps toward each other and friendship and looking, and then three steps back so we’re right back to where we started.
Because James’s hands linger on my waist just long enough when we part that it feels like a leap forward, but when we’re done recording the actual lines and he leaves his booth in a hurried way with only a quiet, “See ya later,” to me and nothing more…
It makes me want to add a new line to the list just so I can have the satisfaction of scratching it out.