“Great. I’ll be reading Stella’s lines.”
“Even though Samara is here?” Dana asked.
“I’m just observing this morning,” Samara replied.
Dana nodded, trying to play it cool but feeling even more nervous now than she had been before.
“We can get started whenever you’re ready,” Faye told her. “We’ll run through it casually at first and see how you do. Then, I might ask you to go again and do it a little differently.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready whenever.”
“Let’s start with Bray telling Stella that she’s beautiful,”Faye instructed.
“Okay,” Dana repeated and took a deep breath before she began. She looked straight at Samara to deliver the words, since she was there, and said, “You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Faye, as Stella, replied plainly. “So are you. Sexy.”
“Sexy?” Dana said.
“Yes. I like this.”
The script called for Stella to run her hand through Bray’s short hair, and Dana kept staring at Samara, even though Faye was doing Stella’s line. Samara stared back at her inquisitively.
“So do I,” Dana said as Bray and squeezed the script she still hadn’t needed to refer to in her right hand as she stared at Samara, mustering all the courage she had to hold her gaze. “You can keep doing that for the rest of the night, if you want.”
“So, what doyoudo?” Faye asked.
“I’m a food blogger.”
“A blogger?”
“Yeah. I got a job out of college as a fact-checker for an online magazine and met someone who had a side hustle as a blogger. She taught me a lot about it, and then, she quit her day job at the magazine because she was able to support herself,” Dana said.
“With blogging? There’s money inthat?”
Dana laughed how she had heard Bryce laugh the day before, and said, “Therecanbe. But my guess is you knew that. You were teasing me, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” Faye said. “But you do it full-time now?”
“I do. It started on the side, but it took off. Now, I do it full-time. It’s mostly just me writing about the food I eat. I have some recipes out there that I like to cook, but that part of the blog is pretty new. People like my takes on restaurants. I sometimes just pack up my car and drive for as long as I can stand and stop off at the first restaurant I see, which could be a dive, a barbecue joint attached to a gas station, or the fanciest place in town. Then, I go home, and I write about it. I make enough to get by, but I’m not at the A-list level of foodbloggers or anything.”
“So, no sugar mama for me, either?” Faye said with no joking in her tone.
Dana tried to not let that throw her off, so she laughed again and said, “No, but my goal would be to get that kind of visibility on the blog and have a comfortable life. I don’t care if I get rich or anything; just comfortable is fine with me.”
“Me too,” Faye said Stella’s line and then added, “Okay. Let’s stop there for a moment and move ahead a bit.”
“You don’t want me to redo any of it?” Dana asked.
“No, not necessary,” Faye replied.
Dana nodded and looked over at Bryce, hoping to get some kind of signal. Bryce gave her a smile, but Dana didn’t know her well enough to read it.
“Take it from the dance part,” Faye instructed.
“Sure,” Dana said, knowing what she meant.
“You don’t need your script?” Samara asked.
