Living the Role

It was a little after 11 AM when Ronan let himself into his apartment, and it was good to be back.

He could sleep here without a call time waiting on the other end of it. He didn’t go to the bed yet, though. Three weeks had gone by without a word home, and Elise would have plenty to say about three weeks.

He dropped his bag inside the door, got his shoes off, and had a hand on the laptop when his phone started going in his pocket.

Unknown number.

"Who’s this now?" He put it to his ear. "Hello?"

"Hey, Ronan."

A woman. He’d heard the voice before, he was nearly certain of it, but not certain enough to guess at a name.

"Uh, sorry. Who is this?"

"Oh, that’s nice." She let it sit a second. "You really don’t know my voice when you hear it?"

It was the tone that gave her away. Nobody else took that tone with him.

"Jane?" He sat down on the edge of the bed. "You’re calling me already? You literally just got that number off me."

"Why, am I not supposed to?"

"You’re supposed to." He pushed the laptop away. "I’m just trying to work out what I did to rate a call this quick."

"Nothing." She was enjoying herself and doing nothing to hide it. "I wanted to see whether you’d given me a working number or a made-up one."

It was so far from where his head had gone that he laughed at it.

"I’m not going to hand you a fake number. You’re literally my celebrity crush."

The line went quiet on him.

"A crush. Huh." She said it back at him, slow.

He couldn’t tell what he’d just walked into.

"So what, you were counting yourself lucky?" She went straight on. "With your mouth on mine like that in the sex scene?"

The heat went up the back of his neck, and he was glad she couldn’t see any of him.

"Why are we suddenly on this?"

"Why not? It’s not a banned subject."

He got up off the bed and went over to the window.

"I don’t know— I figured you might not be okay with it, so I’ve kept off it."

"Not okay with it?" She laughed at him. "Please. I’m a professional, Ronan, and it was work. There is nothing in it to go strange about."

He gave it up. He’d been giving up on reading her for weeks and this wasn’t the call where it was going to come clear.

"...Alright."

"Anyway. I’m letting you go, you sound half dead. Get some sleep."

"I will."

And she was gone.

He stayed at the window with the phone still in his hand.

"There’s something I’m not getting here." He said it to the glass. "She’s different. That’s not me imagining it."

The thought that came after it was one he put down himself. That Jane might have a thing for him. It wasn’t possible. She’d spent her whole career in rooms full of men better looking than him, men with names on them, and not one of them had ever cost her a night’s sleep.

He shook his head and let it go.

Whatever he’d had left in him for calling home had gone with the phone call. He pushed the laptop aside, dropped back onto the bed, and slept.

* * *

Three weeks went by after the Golden Oak Ranch, and by the end of them the production had six episodes finished.

It was going well, and most of the reason was the cast.

Episodes 4, 5 and 6 each had an intimate scene between Ronan and Jane, and neither of them found any part of it difficult anymore. They went in knowing the choreography, they hit it, and they came out again, without any of the stopping and resetting that scenes like that usually cost a schedule. None of it looked acted either.

Ronan had changed one thing on his end. He turned the Sensory Fidelity down before every one of them, all the way down. Once had been enough. He wasn’t sitting in the straw with blue balls in front of the crew a second time.

Then word came down from production. After Episode 6, everybody had a few days off before the next block started.

The pilot of «Castaway in Time» was going out on NBS shortly, but the days off weren’t for that. They were for promotion. The network wanted its cast free in the run-up to the premiere, so it opened a gap in the shooting schedule and handed the days to publicity.

Most of it landed on Jane. She was the name on the show and the reason anybody would turn on for Episode 1, so NBS had her booked out end to end: appearances, interviews, and «The Tonight Show Starring Timmy Fallon» in New York on top of all of it.

Ronan wasn’t going on any of it. Nobody knew who he was, and nobody was going to watch a show because he was in it.

Riley had gone after the Tonight Show for him anyway, and had told him so. But the Tonight Show was NBS’s own, which meant the people deciding who sat on that couch were the same people paying Ronan by the episode. Their answer was that they’d put him on after the pilot aired, or once people knew the name. Not before.

’I’ll be watching that, though. Jane on «The Tonight Show», sitting there with Timmy. I should get Elise on it, and my parents, and the guys from work. Somebody’s going to ask her about the cast and then maybe my name comes out of her mouth on national television.’

He ate while he thought about it.

Then Jane came across the lot toward him.

"You heading home?"

He gave her a look that asked what else a person would be doing.

"Yeah. Soon as I finish this." He tipped his fork at the plate. "There’s nothing left to do here. Work’s done."

She nodded. Then: "Take me with you. I want to see where you live."

That was not what he’d braced for.

"You want to see my place?"

She nodded again.

"Alright." He laughed at her. "Fair warning, it’s small. It’s not going to be anything like whatever you’ve got in your head."

"Even better."

He looked at her a while longer.

"Then put a hat on. Sunglasses too." He was serious about it. "Somebody gets a picture of you walking around with me, you’re the one who has to answer for it, and the show’s about to air. Neither of us needs that."

"I know how it works."

"Where’s Veronica?"

"Veronica?" She waved it off. "I gave her the day off."

He shrugged and went back to his food, and when he was done they left together. Not before she had the cap on and the sunglasses down, though. He waited for that. Then she got in the car with him.

* * *

Nobody looked twice at her on the walk from the car, and nobody looked twice at her coming up into the building either, which was about as much luck as the Kenmore Arms had ever given him.

Jane stopped inside the door and stared.

"This is where you live?"

"I told you it was small."

She was still turning her head, taking it in. "How much have you got in the bank right now?"

He put his keys down. "Five episodes have paid out so far. $24,000 each, after the tax and the commission come off. Episode 1’s gone, all of it, the car and what I owed the landlord and the bills behind that. Rent and everything else since then." He worked it out. "About $90,000 left."

"$90,000." She turned around on him. "You have $90,000 and you’re living here? You could take a decent place anywhere in this city tomorrow."

"Why not here? It’s cheap, and—"

"No." She cut him off. "Don’t hand me some sad little reason. There’s no privacy in a building like this, I can hear whoever’s next door from where I’m standing, and I’ve been standing here two minutes." She looked up. "Is that a leak?"

She shook her head at the ceiling.

"I’ll find you somewhere better."

He stood there and let that land on him.

"I’m fine here. Honestly. My friends are all a few blocks over, I can manage—"

"You own a car." She rolled her eyes at him. "You can drive to them whenever you feel like it. Assuming you’ve got friends here at all."

He looked at her carefully then, and took his time about it.

"Why do you care this much about where I live?"

That stopped her.

"I—" Her eyes went off him. "I’m concerned about you. As a colleague."

"I don’t believe that for a second."

The color came up in her face, and the ridiculous idea he’d been putting down for weeks finally stood up in front of him.

"Do you like me?"

"Like you?" She was scrambling now. "Are you serious? N-no, don’t be— no."

And she said all of it to a point somewhere past his shoulder. She couldn’t look at him. This was the same woman who had held his eyes through every heated scene they’d shot, and now she couldn’t meet them.

He didn’t stop to think.

He took her face in both hands and kissed her.

Her eyes went wide for half a second—then her mouth opened under his.

Their mouths already knew each other. Weeks of choreographed kisses on set had trained them, but nothing about this was choreography.

Whatever thin line had been holding them apart in a room with no camera simply vanished.

She came into it hard. Her lips parted wider, tongue meeting his, and the soft, broken sound she made went straight down his spine.

Her hands shoved up under his jacket, fingers digging into his back as she pulled him flush against her. He felt the full press of her body—soft, warm, already yielding—and his hands left her face, sliding down the column of her throat, over her shoulders, and settled hard at her waist, locking her there against him.

The sunglasses came off her head and hit the floor, and neither of them picked them up.

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