Chapter Eight #2
“I’m sorry,” I say. “If it would help, I can resign. Maybe get someone with more name recognition. Someone who is a better narrator. Then at least if the project tanks, you won’t have had to do so much unpaid hand-holding.”
“I’m afraid I’ve made the situation out to be much more dire than I intended,” Catarina says. “I only want you to be aware of the stakes. Nobody’s life is on the line here. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles, as they say. I’m hoping it crumbles in our favor.”
—
The moment James walks out of his recording room, I’m at his heels.
“We need to talk about socials,” I say. “Now. Yesterday. Last year.”
James doesn’t stop walking.
“We’re still doing that? Have you looked at our numbers? They’re terrible. We won’t make it to the bonus threshold anyway, so what’s the point?”
“ Yes we’re still doing ‘that,’?” I say with air quotes. “If by ‘that’ you mean the one task you’ve agreed to at least five times and reneged on just as many.”
“I have not gone back on my word,” James says, something low in his voice that makes my hackles rise.
“You might as well have,” I say. “You’re not trying at all, and everyone knows it. Even Catarina agrees.”
“I’m trying,” James says, stopping to face me, his voice annoyingly calm now. “I’m doing the best I can with lackluster material.”
“Lackluster—” I break off and try to loosen my fingers from the mug I’m clutching like a stress ball. “If you think it’s so easy to make a social media campaign, you try it.”
James’s gaze drops to my hands and the now cold tea. His mouth tilts up in a smirk.
“Careful. I didn’t bring an extra shirt today.”
His tone is dick-ish, and I can tell he’s proud of himself by the way he turns to continue his walk down the hall.
“Careful,” I echo at his back, also dick-ish. “I wouldn’t want to post screenshots of your inappropriate emoji usage on the official pages to garner interest. I’m sure everyone would be interested in both the time of day and the vegetable in question.”
And of course I don’t mean it. My angry brain thought it was a joke. But James whirls toward me so abruptly, half of my tea sloshes onto the floor from the stopped momentum.
“You can’t.”
He growls it, cold and calculated and laced with danger and…something else. I can’t identify the something else in his voice, but I can see it in his eyes as plainly as the billboards that have borne his face: fear.
It’s a testament to my astonishing self-centeredness that I didn’t hear how it would sound to him, how he would worry that his phone number would be included in a screenshot, that such a post might make the rounds on celebrity gossip sites.
I’m hoping this project with The Meadow is a stepping-stone to a career I love, but James already has a career, a public one that would love nothing more than the barest whiff of a scandal to garner clicks and views and discourse.
I think about the litany of articles, the ones I’m just as guilty of clicking as the next person.
The private information, the photos of him going for what I’m sure he assumed were secluded walks with his then-girlfriend, the masses of video edits in which he is spliced romantically together with every costar he’s ever had that always garner omg, if only it were true comments.
Gross invasions of privacy as far as the Internet can see, and I just joked about adding toit.
“James, I would never,” I say. Acting on instinct, I put my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to say. I would never. I swear it.” I hesitate. “I swear on Mom’s shirt.”
A quick scan of the hallway proves that we’re the only ones in the studio. James and I are—again—alone with what feels like more baggage than a jumbo jet could carry between us.
He’s still tense, his arm twitching beneath my hand as he leans back against the wall.
“I know you wouldn’t,” he mumbles. “I just—”
“Really,” I say, eager to agree. “I know you don’t actually know, but I can promise you that I would never.
You could renege on the whole social thing right now and I wouldn’t.
You could steal my shirt and wear it to one of those color runs where they throw paint at you and I wouldn’t.
It was a stupid thing to say, beyond stupid, and I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
He straightens, and my hand falls from his arm.
“I know what it would mean for you,” I say, unable to stop the babbling. “I mean, I believed the ridiculous ratatouille story, but would anyone else?”
It’s another poor attempt at lightening the mood, but this time it isn’t misplaced.
James’s smile is small, but it’s there.
“His latest project is deconstructed chicken potpie,” he says, his voice slow. “If we had texted last night, it probably would have been the strutting chicken emoji.”
“Well, even that could…” I start, then think better of it. “You know what, never mind. I’m going to learn to keep my mouth shut.”
“Probably not the best call seeing as how you’ve been hired for voicework,” James quips.
“True,” I say, laughing out my relief.
And it’s easy to talk to him like this, I realize.
If we could just bottle this for our various social media channels we would hit our numbers no problem.
I think in an alternative life we meet here first: No messy faked intimacy on an old college stage holding us back from being us.
No bad feelings, regretful feelings, just the teasing, the prodding that may or may not be meant to hurt.
I bet if we met now, we could maybe, possibly even—
Oh my god.
The idea comes like lightning, like magic.
I can’t believe I didn’t see it before, and the thrill of it—the rightness of it—robs me of any kind of diplomatic delivery.
“We should date,” I blurt. “Oh my god, we should date. ”
James blinks. Blinks again. When he turns away from me, I think it’s to leave the building, but instead he begins to pace, his legs wobbly like he’s drunk.
He looks like he’s considering it, like he’s mulling it over, but when he turns toward me, his face is dark and sure, any ground I gained from my apology and joking gone in an instant.
“No.”
It’s not a growl, but it’s just as absolute.
I roll my eyes.
“Not really date,” I say. “Calm down. I mean like…like a PR stunt, you know? Just so we can get our views up.” My voice starts to rush as my brain latches onto the idea. “Because Catarina says that the whole project might depend on it and—”
“Absolutely not.”
His face, relatively expressionless just a second ago, looks revolted, like I’ve just recommended that we eat live lizards on our next video to raise views.
“It’s not real, though,” I say. “It’s acting, right? You know it’s genius. People would tune in for that.”
I gasp as the ideas zap into my brain faster than I can catch them.
“We could re-create some of the horrid outfits they wear in the books at department stores for dates. We could go for hikes in the mountains and rent a sports car for a day. Oh! Maybe we see if we can’t dupe their prom looks.
I wonder if we could take a couple days off and go to, where was it William went to hide in book two when he was being a grumpy old vampire? Germany? We could go to Germany.”
“Juniper—”
“Don’t say no,” I beg, and this time I grab both of his arms. “ This will work, ” I say.
“Please? I swear you can have final veto on everything. We won’t post anything you don’t want going on the Internet.
And when the project is over and we each have our chunk of change from blowing the follower minimum out of the water, you never have to hear from me again. I swear it.”
He’s watching me again, like he does. Intently. Absolutely. It makes my stomach flip, but I push past it and put on what I hope is a charming smile and not a diabolical one.
“What’s one more game of pretend?” I ask.
I finally broke down and watched Disassembled. I meant to only watch the opening scenes, to observe how James acted on a camera that wasn’t my phone or a dinky digital number from Best Buy used to record his plays, but I was so taken in by his performance, I stayed up late to finish it.
There were lots of parts I liked—I could see how it was nominated as much as it was—but the scene that got me was when James’s character, Max, has his dark night of the soul when he realizes that his lack of powers means it’s better to call for help than charge into a burning building himself to try to save his fiancée.
His face in that scene was a master class in nonverbal expression.
The way his eyes scanned the ground for an answer of his choosing, the way he bit his lip, released it, and then—like it was killing him—took the phone from his pocket to dial 911 rather than running up flaming staircases in search of his late-working beloved.
James is glaring down at me like that now. His mouth twisted in thought, he looks tormented, like I’m also an answer he doesn’t want to face. I don’t have time to contemplate if I’m somehow the representation of his dark night of the soul, because he asks the last question I’m prepared to answer.
“What’s in it for me?”
I don’t have an answer, even a bullshit one.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Except my eternal gratitude and my solemn promise that when it’s all over, you’ll never find me crying on your dressing room floor or in your headset or on the side of a mountain again.
You won’t have to find me at all. I swear.
We can split ways friends. Richer, social-media-savvier friends who tricked the masses to promote our project. ”
I trace the swallow down his throat.
“Is…is that what you want?”
No. I want him to want to do this. With me. I want to pull hard on the threads of time like reins and take us galloping back into the past where we could have been friends—actual friends—instead of whatever awkward acquaintanceship we’ve found ourselves in.