Vivian channeled her surprise into cocking her head to one side, but she stopped her lips from twitching into an amused smile. She stood, but she couldn’t shake the feeling fluttering in her chest. Anxiety? Nerves? Anticipation? Unable to name it before they started for the guesthouse, Vivian had the unnerving sensation of walking into something completely blind.
* * *
Hours in the booth disappeared. When Iris signalled it was time for lunch, Vivian almost lost her entire mind and suggested skipping it so they could continue recording. Yenni Montoya might be a hemorrhoid of a person to work with, but she’d weaved so much tension and longing into the scenes leading up to the love scene, Vivian had to focus on keeping her breathing measured.
It made no difference that she’d already recorded the book once before. There was a new energy. Something wild and intangible that vibrated in her belly and slammed against her ribs fighting to break free. She chalked it up to the dynamic of duets and rushed through lunch.
Back to work, Bryn’s energy shifted to match the tonal change in the novel. After several scenes full of gimmicks to keep Maggie’s bar open, they were somewhere new. Maggie was alone at Magpie’s, wiping down the old mahogany bar her grandfather had built. Each grain and divot and blemish told a story. Decades of laughter and tears and the great Dart Tournament of 1997 that ended in a disastrous brawl.
What Vivian’s character Jo didn’t know, but Vivian did, was that Maggie had decided that she was fighting the inevitable. That her efforts to save Magpie’s were as useful as screaming at the tide and demanding it stop washing ashore. That she’d failed. Failed her grandfather’s wish that the place live on without him. Failed in her own dream of running Magpie’s as a lesbian bar.
Vivian watched Bryn perform a critical moment for her character. Bryn’s face creased while Maggie accepted that defeat looked like a big check from a developer and the end of an era. Like her own character, Vivian was in the shadows, watching a woman struggling not to break. And even when she accepted that shattering was inevitable, she planned how to catch all her own pieces before they hit the floor.
In the scene, Maggie heard the creak of worn floorboards behind her. She tossed the rag next to the sink and started washing her hands. And then it was Vivian’s turn to enter the scene. For Jo to catch Maggie before the hairline fractures intersected.
“Maggie,” Vivian said softly as if she were afraid to frighten the woman with her back to her.
So in the moment, Bryn closed her eyes as if demanding that the tears not form. She furrowed her brow before she made her face a mask. “You should go home, Jo,” Bryn said in a devastatingly soft voice. The voice of a woman used to carrying everything alone. “There’s nothing left for your story here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Vivian replied, tone unwavering.
In the story, Maggie turned to face Jo, her back against the bar. “If you go now, you don’t have to be here when I tell them tomorrow.” Bryn’s watery eyes found Vivian, performing the lines while capturing her in her gaze. Dialogue memorized, Bryn didn’t let Vivian go when she said, “If you’re not here, you don’t have to write the real ending for Magpie’s for your story. You can pretend we didn’t close. That it’s not over?—”
“It’snotover,” Vivian said in a rush, body leaning forward like she might grab Bryn by the shoulders the way Jo reached for Maggie.
When Bryn laughed, it was brittle and cynical, so unlike Maggie. So unlike Bryn. “Look around you, Jo. This was our best night, and I didn’t even break even?—”
“Give me another month?—”
“For what?” Bryn’s voice cracked, and Vivian felt it in her chest like splintering ice. “To accumulate another month of debt? To try trivia night again and only have three people show up? That’s not?—”
“Another month to give this time to work, Maggie,” Vivian pleaded. “What’s one more month compared to the years you’ve poured into this place?” She made the mistake of meeting Bryn’s soft blue eyes, brimming with the same yearning to believe that Maggie embodied. The same desperate need for rescue fighting against the instinct to go it alone. “Please,” Vivian begged, though she didn’t cup Bryn’s cheek the way Jo reached for Maggie. “Let me help.”
Bryn’s breath caught in her throat, making Vivian’s chest burn. Her fingers ached to reach out. To comfort. To steady.
“I don’t need…” Bryn wrestled with all the voices in Maggie’s mind until a fragment of truth broke free and sliced Vivian’s—Jo’s—heart wide open. “I don’t know how to…”
What Maggie wanted to say was that she didn’t know how to accept help. That it was never offered without hidden conditions. Never accepted without consequences. Bryn performed an internal struggle for her captive audience of one. Embodied the fear of allowing a microscopic, terrifying ember of hope catch.
“You don’t have to know how,” Vivian promised, pulse alive and breaths coming too fast. Jo understood what Maggie couldn’t say, but she didn’t need to hear the confession with her ears. Maggie didn’t know how to accept help. She told Jo as much with the trembling hands that found Jo’s waist. With the eyes welling up with the fear of hoping again. “You don’t have to know how. You just have to say yes.”
In the text, Maggie moved first. A tentative lean toward Jo. She dropped her shoulders. Not in submission but in a display of trust.
Jo cradled Maggie’s face in her hands as if she were handling something infinitely precious and irreplaceable. Vivian recited her lines without looking at the manuscript. “You just have to let me in,” she whispered, attention on Bryn’s wide eyes.
“I…” The tremor in Bryn’s voice was a seismic wave crashing against Vivian’s sternum, threatening to pull her under. “I can’t offer you anything,” she confessed, shame marring her flushed face and dimming the light in her eyes. “I’m a sinking ship, Jo. Even offering you my friendship is probably?—”
Jo slid one hand over Maggie’s cheek, running her fingers over the base of her neck before she made a fist in Maggie’s hair. Before she held her with all the conviction a single person had ever felt about anything. Before she held her close, lips parted, and unleashed the truth she could no longer contain.
Vivian breathed against the microphone like it was Bryn’s waiting mouth. “It’s not your friendship I want.”
Bryn gasped a “Jesus” that wasn’t in the text, but Vivian kept going. Body surging with the incomparable electricity of being so deep in character that she couldn’t see the booth or the headphones or the recording equipment. She was in a dark, empty bar with Bryn’s thigh sliding between hers. With Bryn’s head tipping back and her lips parting and her entire body silently screaming for Vivian’s kiss.
And then the manuscript called for a kiss. There was nothing for Vivian to do but hold her breath and watch Bryn describe the simple act that meant so many things.
Bryn’s voice, low and husky, filled the silence. Vivian struggled to hear it as narration, but she was too far gone. She was in Jo’s body with Maggie’s mouth yielding and her body pressed to hers. Jo’s hold was so firm, promising without a word that she’d never let her fall. Never let her break. Not alone. Not ever again.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Vivian’s voice was strained.
