Vivian nearly chuckled to herself. Bryn had stumbled into a craft well-suited to her. She’d never run out of voice.
“But, um, I don’t know, it seemed like we really capturedthatfeeling….” She dropped her fork to wiggle her fingers.
Intentionally obtuse, Vivian cocked her head to one side. “Tentacled?”
Bryn’s cheeks, slim and freckled and already flushed from the heat, darkened. When she smiled, Vivian looked away again.
“Butterflies is such a boring way to describe it,” Bryn continued, undeterred. “It’s more like….” She leaned back, focused as if her entire life depended on getting the words just right. “You know that feeling you get on a rollercoaster?”
Vivian reached for her iced tea, anticipating a metaphor about the ups and downs of love. The thrill of the ride. Something trite.
“Not the drop. The drop gets all the attention just because you think that’s what’s giving you that rush.” Bryn gathered steam like an old-fashioned locomotive pulling out of a station. “But it’s not. It’s the anticipation. The moment when the chain stops clicking and you’re at the very, very top.” Her eyes stole the light as if by magic because they were sitting in the shade. Bright and blue and electric. “When absolutely every single outcome is still possible. When everything is silence and weightless possibility and you’re holding your breath waiting for the world to tip.”
Reflexively, Vivian held her breath. Bryn described the seconds before a death-defying drop with the hope of a painter capturing the sublime beauty of a mundane hill. Before she could stop herself, Vivian wondered who’d ever made Bryn feel like that. Whether there was ever really a love that felt like playing with the cosmic balance of life and death.
Throat dry and jaw aching to clench, Vivian deflected from what already felt too risky. “I don’t ride roller coasters.”
“Ever?” Bryn speared her next bite like she hadn’t just described something so intensely thoughtful and beautiful. “Not even when you were working in Burbank? That can’t be far from Disneyland.” She chewed. “Or that other theme park. Magic Mountain?”
Vivian finished her iced tea. “No.”
Undettered, Bryn’s chatter persisted.
“I guess you don’t have to rely on comps if you’ve experienced some big falling in love moment.” She shrugged. “I thought I had once, but it turns out she just wanted to steal my credit to buy a jet ski.”
Unsure whether Bryn was joking, Vivian caught a chuckle that burned the roof of her mouth and swallowed before it could escape.
“You were engaged, weren’t you?” Bryn went on because somehow she could eat faster than Vivian without taking a breath or talking with her mouth full.
“Have you been studying my Wikipedia page?” Vivian snapped, more out of reflex than annoyance.
Bryn stopped short as if her brain had slammed on the brakes and her entire being jerked forward. Embarrassment visibly wrapped itself around Bryn, making Vivian wish she hadn’t sounded so harsh. “Sorry, I was just trying to?—”
“It’s fine,” Vivian replied before Bryn turned any redder and burst into flames. “My engagement to Chester was brief. We were both way too young and caught up in our own burgeoning careers. It wasn’t as serious as it may have appeared.”
What Vivian didn’t share was that her relationship with Chester had been a sham. An overkill response to fears that she and her actual partner, a woman she hired as her personal trainer to give them plausible cover for always being together, would be outed. The world had been different in her twenties and she was already hiding so much about herself. A whitewashed name, the intentional destruction of her Miami accent, and never mentioning her Cuban heritage. What was a little more?
She’d convinced herself that she’d hidden her personal life to keep it for herself, but she was too old to hide from herself now. She’d hidden being a lesbian for the same reason she let herself be convinced to swap del Castillo for Taylor: marketability. By the time she came out in her late thirties, no one cared. It was brief clickbait about a has-been. No fanfare. No horror. No late-night jokes.
“Let’s get back to work,” Vivian said, attention on her phone screen.
Bryn looked at her, eyes brimming with worry that she’d ruined something. Vivian didn’t have the energy to assuage her unnecessary concerns. They had more important things to think about than Vivian dragging herself over a pothole-filled memory lane.
* * *
After the most productive day they’d had yet, Vivian went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Eyes closed under her rose quartz mask, she tried to ignore the drone of her humidifier. It was annoying. Everything was annoying. Even her Egyptian sheets felt like fucking sandpaper. Irritated, she pushed her gemstone mask to her forehead.
With a sigh that bordered on a groan, she reached for her phone, the glow of the screen the only light in the room. Before her brain had fully consented to the act, she opened her audiobook app and downloaded Bryn’s monster romance. It was going to be vapid, of course it was, but it was also going to be boring. That would put Vivian right to sleep, and that was the only reason she’d reached for her phone.
The first thirty seconds were almost physically painful. The audio was so thin and echo-ridden, Vivian couldn’t believe it had passed minimal quality checks. Something that sounded like a faint hiss made Vivian’s jaw clench. Her professional sensibilities were so offended, she almost gave up and started a sleep meditation.
But the sound of Bryn’s voice, despite having listened to it all day, kept her from reaching for her phone to shut it off. Vivian couldn’t help dissecting it. She put in her earbuds to hear it better. To cement the connection. No, to improve her ability to critique Bryn’s performance. Vivian wasn’t a coach or a director, but perhaps she could offer advice. If Bryn failed, Vivian failed. And Vivian couldn’t abide that.
Beneath the shoddy production, Bryn’s voice was… sweet. No, that wasn’t the right word. It was that damn vulnerability that couldn’t be drowned out even with horrendous production values. It was the same tone she’d used when describing the roller coaster. Was she even performing? Was it just the natural shape and texture of her voice?
Vivian sank back against her pillows, covering her eyes again. The story’s plot was ludicrous. A lonely botanist stumbled upon an injured moss-covered man-beast in the woods. The writing was terrible, but Bryn found a kernel of genuine longing in the schlock and nurtured it with that earnest, breakable voice until it bloomed into something true.
Instead of drifting off from boredom, Vivian listened until she was rooting for a highly empathetic human to take a chance on a sentient pile of vegetation. Until all she could do was tip into the voice of the woman she’d spent all day desperately trying not to notice.
