73
STILL THE MAIN CHARACTER
Holly
“Plot twist: I kept the guy.”
The coffee atThe Backlot Dinerwas still shit, but Holly was grinning like it’d personally funded her emotional breakthrough. Her knee bounced under the tiny café table, fingers drumming against the cardboard cup like she’d swallowed a drumline. Glitter still clung to her hairline from earlier, catching the light every time she moved, and she was humming without meaning to, vibrating with a kind of giddy, electric energy that made the entire world feel slightly overexposed. If anyone had asked, she would have denied everything. But internally? She was one good pop chorus away from launching into a victory montage.
Someone cue the slow-motion hair flip.
She hadn’t meant to end up here. She’d walked out of the studio after the post-show interviews wrapped, needing air that didn’t taste like stage smoke and other people’s expectations.Five minutes to recalibrate.That was the plan. What she hadn’t anticipated was how loud happiness could be inside her body. It buzzed under her skin, warm and relentless. She felt untetheredin the best way, as though the universe had tried to test her and she’d responded by slow-dancing with it in six-inch heels. Main character energy: restored and fully charged.
A shadow fell across the table, deliberate rather than accidental.
Holly didn’t look up immediately. She already knew the shape of that shadow, with its long lines, trailing the faint scent of something understated and European. When she finally lifted her gaze, Nick was watching her with the calm assessment of a man evaluating a performance mid-number.
He lowered himself into the chair opposite her with the unhurried precision of someone who understood that time adjusted to him, not the other way around. Designer coat. Artfully grown stubble. Expression composed enough to pass for indifference, if you hadn’t seen the way his eyes missed nothing.
“You’re glowing,” he said mildly. Not a compliment. A diagnosis.
“Careful,” she warned him, eyes full of mischief. “I hear it’s contagious. Wouldn’t want you tofeelsomething.”
Nick’s gaze didn’t waver or warm up. It simply held, attentive in the way a conductor listens for a wrong note before it’s been played.
“I feel things,” he said evenly. “I just don’t let them interfere.”
The corner of her mouth twitched.Of course he didn’t.Nick employed emotional minimalism as an art form. Holly leaned back in her chair, stretching her legs out beneath the table like she had all the time in the world.
She was absurdly aware of how different she felt sitting across from him now compared to how she would have been a month ago. Braced for critique, for the subtle narrowing of his eyes that meant she’d missed something, or cut down by the cool, immaculate phrasing that somehow made her want to work harder and punch a wall simultaneously.
“And what’s your professional assessment?” she asked lightly. “Has it made me sloppy?”
Nick considered her as though she had genuinely posed a technical question. His attention moved over her posture, her shoulders, the restless energy vibrating in her hands, the way she occupied the whole chair instead of perching at its edge.
“Not sloppy,” he said. “Settled. You’re not scanning.”
She blinked. “Scanning?”
“For exits,” he clarified. “For the moment it all begins to unravel so you can leave before you get tangled up in the mess.”
The words should have stung, but they didn’t. They landed cleanly, like a correction delivered without cruelty.
Holly huffed a soft laugh. “That’s a wildly specific read.”
“You prepare for disappointment before it arrives,” he shrugged, like he’d just read her the weather report. “It’s efficient. Also exhausting.”
Well, fuck.
She opened her mouth to deflect and found, for once, that she didn’t want to.
“I decided to try something new,” she said instead. “It’s callednot catastrophizing pre-emptively.”
Nick’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes sharpened with interest. Interest more than approval.
“Well it’s working. You danced differently tonight,” he continued. “Less calculation. More commitment.”
“It was a Cha Cha,” she said. “Commitment is kind of the brand.”
