Chapter Fifteen
Just when I think that today is already going to be the worst—because I have to act normal around James after a day of hand-holding and hand kissing and roughhousing with wolves—the gods laugh and the magic surges and Catarina says we have to record “some intimate scenes.”
Today.
Together.
“We’re so close to the end,” she says. “I’ve earmarked four separate scenes I think would benefit from some shared recording space, but you know that already. Do you two want to rehearse a bit? Banter back and forth and see if you can get a rhythm before we begin recording?”
James and I are in booths opposite each other, about ten feet of space and some glass between us.
“Sounds good to me,” James says.
“I don’t need a warm-up,” I tell Catarina, but I’m looking at James. “I’m good to go.”
James’s eye twitches.
“Let’s get to it, then!” Catarina is all cheer and enthusiasm.
For her, this is the almost-end of a project; for me, this is the culmination of weeks of stalling and putting off my next steps…Not to mention nearly a decade of wondering what could have been if James and I had reconnected that night.
It’s an end, hard stop. Or it will be if I can just make it through two more days of recording.
James begins to read his William lines, and it’s so subtle, how he accomplishes William’s voice, but after weeks of hearing his regular cadences, I can tell the difference.
His vowels are rounder, his tone a touch lighter and more syrupy than usual, like he’s trying to enchant Arabella and the listener into a stupor without their noticing.
“Arabella,” he says into the microphone. “You’re being ridiculous. I’ll see you tomorrow at school. You won’t know whether I’m here or not because you’ll be sleeping. ”
That last part sounds irritatingly like James to me.
We’re reading the scene where William has snuck into Arabella’s room so they can argue about whether or not they should be seen in public together.
William is worried for Arabella’s safety since he’s a vampire.
Arabella is worried that she’s going to literally die if she doesn’t get to spend more time with William, her first-ever boyfriend. Same-same.
She’s trying to make a case that the answer is for him to sleep over, for them to spend their nights together until they figure out what to do about their days.
“I’ll know,” I say as Arabella.
“You won’t. Humans don’t have cognizant abilities while sleeping.”
“And vampires do ?”
James really is good at his job. Because when he says the line I know by heart, the one I’ve read dozens of times, “No. Despite what you’ve heard about coffins, vampires don’t sleep. They can’t at all. Not even if we tried. I’ve tried,” it’s like it’s brand new.
He sounds both unsentimental and horribly, horribly sad. He sounds aged, like he really might have the weary soul of a centenarian trapped in a much younger, much less human body.
It stops me for a moment, his skill, but I hope it comes off as an artful pause before I deliver my next line: “But surely you can rest.”
“Let’s try that line again, Juniper. I think we want that line to sound—and forgive me—a hint suggestive while still being chaste.
A difficult paradox to portray, I know, but that’s Arabella for you!
Maybe make it sound more curious than sympathetic, that might be a good start.
James, do you mind starting with I’ve tried, to kick her off? ”
The scene is only four pages long, but we spend the better part of an hour going inch by inch through Arabella’s lines. Catarina is ever kind, ever encouraging, and though my fears of being fired from the job are far behind me, it feels like I’m doing something wrong in a major way.
Typical, I suppose, that if this is the race I must finish running before starting the next, I’m going to end this one flat on my face two feet from the finish line.
We’re approaching the two-hour mark when Catarina says we should take a short break. When she steps out of the recording booth to make a call, James takes his headphones off and folds his arms.
“ Juniper, ” he says in admonishment.
“Don’t Juniper me,” I say, resisting the urge to hurl my headphones at James. “You don’t sound super lovey-dovey, either.”
“It’s not supposed to sound lovey-dovey,” James says.
“It’s supposed to sound like…like longing and repression.
You know how it is. Like when you’re in high school and you take a nap with your crush and it feels like the most momentous thing that has ever happened to anyone on Planet Earth, and it could be more, but it won’t be. ”
I blink at him and James cocks his head at my expression.
“Platonic sleeping?” He says it like it’s an obvious point of reference, which for him, maybe it is. His face falls a bit when I don’t answer. “You’ve platonically slept— just slept—with someone you liked, yes?”
When I still don’t answer except for a slight shrug, James drops his head into his hands.
“ Christ, ” he mutters. “Is the entire world ignorant ? What was wrong with the boys you grew up with? Were they monks? Saints? ”
“I’m hardly a femme fatale now, ” I say. “So I’m not sure where you’re getting this image of me platonically sleeping with my gender of attraction in any capacity other than maybe bus rides on field trips.”
James is staring at me with such ferocity, it’s almost like I can hear the words in his head before he says them aloud.
“We have to fix it.”
“What?”
He gestures at me. “You. We need you to have a point of reference. You clearly are having a difficult time imagining the scene because it’s never happened to you.”
“Oh, okay,” I say sarcastically. I slam the headphones onto their stand and come out of my booth toward him. “Well, who is it going to be, then? Do you want me to get on Tinder and make a profile that says, Enjoys long walks on lake beaches and platonic snuggling, and see who bites first?”
I’m mad, and I can’t even tell why I’m mad, but I know it’s all aimed at James and the smug look on his face and his exemplary acting abilities and the way I stayed awake half the night wondering if he would text me and he never did.
James looks not dissimilar from when he figured out that my favorite song was from an animated ogre movie sequel: amused.
“Me, Green. I was suggesting we platonically sleep together.”
I freeze.
“But…but our day is over. ”
James shrugs, like this is neither here nor there, when yesterday he made it very clear it was everywhere and all encompassing, our agreement.
“Technically, we said a day,” James says. “Which I think every dictionary in the world would define as twenty-four hours and we only used a little over half of that.”
I’m gaping at him, I know, but I can’t help it. I’m stunned.
“You’re suggesting we…what? Use each other as a science experiment so that I cannot suck at this one scene ?”
“It’s for the work,” James says. “And nothing will happen, I promise you. We’ll just sleep, Juniper. It’s not a big deal.”
It is a big deal. Such a big deal that when the workday is over, I come home and lie to Dad. I tell him I’m staying the night at Catarina’s place to watch her daughter while she has a girls’ night.
“Come sleep in your own bed when she’s back, kid,” Dad says. “No sense in staying the whole night if you don’t have to.”
“She’ll be back really late, I think,” I say. “I don’t want to risk being too tired to drive.”
If it was not a big deal, if I didn’t have seventeen thousand insects—they might be butterflies, they might be wasps—flying in my stomach, I’d have told him the truth.
Or I’d try to. I’m not sure what the truth is, because when I pack a tote bag of essentials, I bypass my usual raggedy T-shirts and dig out the silky forest-green pajama set from Serena and Leonora’s bachelorette party.
They’re not sexy pajamas. The top has a Peter Pan collar, and the shorts are plenty long enough to cover my butt and then some, and I never wear these unless I’m going to be in a situation where I want to look decent while sleeping. Which is never. Until now.
It’s for science, I remind myself. For the art. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting not to look like a lump while conducting research. Even if it is James. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
I repeat that to myself when I pull into the driveway of James’s house at the bottom of the steep hill and he’s waiting for me, hands in the pockets of his pajama pants, which are—hilariously, horribly—a nearly identical color to the ones in my bag.
He taps on my window.
“I’m driving you up,” he says. “Can’t have you careening off the side of the mountain at this hour. Might scare the deer.”
“Practical,” I say.
The house tour is short: a laundry room behind a closed door, a guest room with an attached bath, the living room, a small kitchen whose counters are almost entirely taken up with huge red canisters of flour and sugar, and the master bedroom.
“The bathroom is right through that door,” James says. “If you want to change.”
I do, and when I come back out, James is just coming back into the room, two glasses of water in his hand.
The master bedroom is all wood and handwoven textiles and natural tones that blend from one color to the next in a seamless landscape of browns and greens and whites.
I laugh a little when I see houseplants near the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard deck: They’re reaching toward the outside like they, too, want to return to the forest.
This house really is only half tame.
There are four small lamps—two on the bedside tables, the other two on a desk in the corner and beside a thick, leather armchair stacked high with folded blankets.
Tiny antique frames cover the wall behind the massive bed, and in the dim light I can see painted landscapes and starry skies and—
“Wolves?” I laugh. “Ironic.”
James walks to the side of the bed closest to the doors and sets his phone on the charger there, along with the glasses of water.