Chapter Seventeen #2
And maybe getting older is realizing you never stop asking the magic for one more thing. Because you aren’t the same person who asked for tickets to a midnight showing or for a job in publishing. You’re a new version. Something different. Something changed.
Now that the adrenaline of coming to the hospital, seeing Serena is okay for myself, and missing my interview is in the rearview mirror, my overcrowded brain is pushing James to the forefront.
In a moment of exhausted weakness last night from the guest bed at Serena and Leonora’s place, I googled him and searched for his name on social media to see if he had been tagged in any photos or if news had broken about new projects.
Nothing.
I thought about texting him, just to check in, to tell him I was in Portland and ask if he had made it to LA, but I was too tired in every way to follow through.
At the minute-and-a-half mark of the song, just as the horn line crescendos so loudly it almost drowns out Jennifer Saunders’s voice, the music stops, interrupted by an incoming phone call from a familiar number.
“Juniper.” Catarina’s voice is cheerful but strained. “I’ve got one last thing I need from you.”
—
I’m exhausted from the red-eye when Dad deposits me at the studio door. I look and feel like a paperback book dropped in the bathtub, but a flight attendant was kind enough to bring me tea with honey when I explained the situation, so at least my voice isn’t completely shot.
The situation being, of course, Catarina calling me at the hospital to let me know “something happened to the recording of the pivotal reunion scene from Forest Dark, ” and could I please come ASAP and re-record it before the terrible teeny-bopper cover band with rich parents takes over the recording studio this afternoon?
For the record, I asked for clarification on the something that happened when she called, and Catarina was at a loss.
“Just one chunk, completely gone, ” she said. “The sound engineers are baffled, but if you wouldn’t mind…”
I don’t mind, not really. Serena is stable and due to be discharged by the evening, so I’ll come back to Tatum Sound, get my lines done (again), and then go to Dad’s and figure out the rest of my life (again).
But instead of a sinking-stomach feeling, it’s a happy thought. Nearly elated. Or as much as one can be excited after catching a red-eye from Portland to Denver and then to Tatum regional.
Catarina texts to say she’s running behind, but that the studio is unlocked, my room is ready with the tablet loaded with the missing scene, and I should get to work, please and thank you.
It’s shocking how normal it feels, closing the heavy door behind me and stepping into the booth that has already been stripped of the Meadow mood pictures.
It feels routine, settling the headphones over my ears, adjusting the mic, glancing through the scene, and rehearsing how I’ll say certain lines (again) in my head.
It feels right, the way I dissect the pages for emotional cues and ways I can use my voice to convey all the emotion Arabella feels running toward her vampire boyfriend and seeing him for the first time in months on her way to rescue him before he exposes himself and his nature for the world to see and condemn.
I smile a little, knowing that I can make the performance better if I do the “Method acting” approach James and I were so good at playing.
Feeling a little stupid, I tell myself it’s for the plot, take the headphones off, open my booth, and start jogging a couple of laps around the room to get my heart rate up and make my voice appropriately, aerobically breathy.
I’m just thinking how nice it is that Catarina is late—so she isn’t here to witness me running tight circles with my Arabella-like, inelegant gait—when the door suddenly swings open before me and I run smack-dab into its very solid surface like a fly into a windshield.
A lot happens in the span of three seconds: I fall down dramatically (duh), and then the door bounces off me and smacks into the person entering with such force that the two coffee cups they were carrying drop to the floor but—remarkably—do not spill all over the carpet.
And then James Neely—and I can’t tell whether he’s the Freakin’ variety or the Just variety—is looming over me holding his shoulder like it’s been dislocated and I am sitting in a puddle of emotions but not coffee, which I suppose is an improvement.
Also, I want it noted on some ledger somewhere that I am not crying, for once, even if my insides are suddenly lighting up like a billboard that’s just regained power after an outage.
But the emotions come out all wrong, of course, because they don’t adhere to the right place, right time paradigm, either.
So instead of saying, I’m so happy to see you, or the less socially acceptable but more true, I’m sorry I ran away but I talked with my best friend and we agreed I should “do you” again in every sense of the word and I guess I was wondering if you’re still open to that … I lash out.
“I’m not going to apologize,” I tell him as my heart soars into my throat and then plummets downward like a parachute-less skydiver somewhere into the vicinity of my stomach. “I was rehearsing and Catarina didn’t say you would be here. I couldn’t have known that you were coming.”
Has he always been this big? Was he this large in the bed in the cabin in the woods when we—
No. No. We are so not going there at this time, Juniper. Get your shit together.
James is standing frozen with his back against the door, still clutching the shoulder that got walloped upon his entry, and my thoughts are still spilling across the floor of my head like marbles, so in a panic I grab the one that snaps out a very grumpy, “Are you seriously going to act like that hurt? You’re a superhero.
You’re practically Captain America post-serum. ”
James drops his arm from his shoulder and looks down at me. I expect him to be mad—my tone came out super churlish after all—but instead he looks -looks at me and…
There’s no confusing it. Longing and desire and hunger.
And now I’m blinking up at him, still sprawled on the floor as he smiles softly at me, a Just James quirk of the lips, as he reaches down to lift me to my feet.
“Max gave up his powers,” he says. And then, his voice dropping impossibly deeper. “Hello, Juniper.”
He leans down to pick up the two coffee cups, handing one to me, and I realize the reason they didn’t burst on the carpet is because they are hardy thermoses that can open and close with the press of a button and only look like travel coffee cups.
“Juniper-proof,” he says, still with the softly upturned lips.
My insides are singing, but the wires are still crossed to my mouth, apparently, because even though I feel lit up like a Christmas tree at the thought of him knowing I would be here and going through so much effort to bring me spill-proof coffee, I say in a flat voice, “We should record the scene. Catarina said there’s not much time. ”
James nods, still infuriatingly, beautifully non-reactive to my grouching.
“The preteen band,” he says. “She told me.”
His eyes are full of something when he asks, “Do you want to record this? For social media? Our final go.”
“I don’t feel like editing anymore,” I say. “And we’re probably still too far off to make the bonus anyway—”
“Make it a live then,” James interrupts, and my grumpiness finally falls away to make way for complete shock.
“You want to do a live?”
“I want you, ” he says. “And because of that, yes, I would like this project to succeed so that—”
“Wait,” I say, and I step forward and put the hand not holding the Juniper-proof coffee on his chest. My fingers flex there without permission, damn them, but my voice is steady when I say, “We have to get the scene done first. I can’t…after. Just after, okay?”
I prop my phone atop the mini fridge and brace it against James’s sling bag, typing a quick description in the live text box to let people know this is an emergency last-minute recording. Maybe James is right and we’ll get a few more followers from it.
And as it turns out, I didn’t need to jog around the studio to get my heart rate up: I simply needed James to look at me from his booth, to adopt his William face and voice and say through the headphones, “Play with me?”
I don’t quite forget about the phone and the streaming live, but I also can’t see how many people are watching from here, either, so I let it fade into the background as the fabric of time and space bunch together to put the James Neely and Juniper Green of Romeo and Juliet here in Tatum, Colorado, still relatively next to each other, still sharing a stage of sorts.
“Leave it here,” James-back-then said, his breath hot. “You can leave it all on the stage if you want. Nobody can come and pick it up if you want to leave it here, not even you if you wish it hard enough.”
But this time there is something I want to take with me when I leave the stage, something I want to take forever.
James watches me as I read Arabella’s dialogue, and I’m not having to strain to rush her voice and make it sound desperate to get to William to save him and to save herself in the process.
They’ve been split for the entirety of Forest Dark, and it has become abundantly clear that the separation was a mistake, a miscalculation.
I feel Arabella’s frantic energy in my chest as I huff my way through her internal monologue.
“As I race toward him, it’s like no time has passed at all, like the months we were apart were a pebble in my shoe that I’ve now shaken loose and can’t feel anymore.
Forgotten in the breadth of a moment, in the way his eyes—tinged with the slightest hint of red—close as he inhales deeply and acts as if he’s going to step directly into the sun.
“I wish I could shout my thoughts into his head, but my gift and my curse is that I can’t. So I run faster, harder than I ever have before, until my body collides with his.”