not going to go and cheat on me—she doesn’t want to be the villain. If you’re the one who cheats in a town like ours, good luck at the grocery store.” He took another sip. “So she gets a church instead. She’s at stuff every night, she’s at stuff all weekend, she comes home quoting the Bible and looking at me like, ‘What, you don’t get it?’ Like I’m the asshole, all of a sudden, for not wanting a Jesus tattoo.”
Orla could see him mentally braking, trying not to fly through the windshield of his rant. He took a long breath. “But I’m lucky, actually,” he said. “You have no idea how many times I wanted to come and find you, to tell you...” His face colored and he waved the train of thought away, like he thought he was wasting her time. Then he grinned, the grin she remembered from when they were fifteen. “I always thought you and me could take over the world,” he said.
If she had been on her third drink, or even further into her second, Orla might not have felt the sudden sting of intuition: like when he had called her a star at the barricade, this line sounded too planned. But she was not on her first drink, either, so she could push the thought away. She buried the instinct beneath what she wanted. And that made three.
* * *
When they got back to the building, Danny trailed just far enough behind Orla that the doorman thought they weren’t together. He looked into Danny’s eyes and flicked his head like the young guy he was, instead of murmuring “Evening” with his eyes down, as usual. He had mistaken Danny, Orla realized, for one of his kind, not hers. Danny shook the doorman’s hand and asked him his name. Orla heard it, filed it away, and forgot it again by the elevator.
On the way up, she looked at Danny. He still had a better smile than any actor she’d met that year, and theirs were highly tended to—his had just grown in that way, even and bright. But he had gained weight, considerable weight, and his jeans—crayon blue, with too many pockets—made her want to die a little. His hair was thinning, and she could tell that he worked hard to create the illusion that it wasn’t. That hurt to think of, too: him at the mirror, biting his lip, arranging pieces here and there, a man forced to ape grooming motions after a boyhood of effortless looks, of barely a glance in the mirror.
The apartment was empty for once. Floss and Aston were shooting on location, having brunch on a Tuesday afternoon, when nobody served it. The restaurant had been closed for the occasion, stocked with extras who were told to pretend it was Sunday. Mason had called last night to ask that they be prepared to fight. “We’re finding in edit that we’re a little low on conflict,” he said, his voice fizzing out of Floss’s iPhone speaker. “So if you guys could work something up, maybe about the way Floss dresses, that girl Aston talked to at the Grammys...” Orla had watched as Floss and Aston both looked at the floor. They used to laugh when Mason asked them to argue, used to have to search for things they didn’t agree on. But they had been bickering all week about the same topics Mason suggested. When their fights spilled into the living room, Orla went still on her side of the fake wall, wondering why she was the one trying not to be heard.
Danny’s eyes lit up as he came into the apartment. He picked up a mug on the counter, looked at it like it was an artifact, and carefully put it back down exactly where it had been. “It’s smaller than I imagined,” he said. “But they say it’s always like that with TV shows, right?”
“Sort of,” Orla said. “This is just where we live, though, so it’s a little different.” She ran into her room ahead of him and kicked tangles of underwear-inside-yoga-pants under her bed.
Danny followed her in, filling the doorway. Because there was nowhere else to go, she sat down on the bed. So did he. Their shoulders came to rest against each other.
He turned his face toward her. Orla’s heart began to pound. “What’s she like?” he said.
“Who?” Orla could not believe, could not believe, could not believe they were this close.