Not love, AJ admonished herself. Sexual attraction. Which was why she could know everything she knew about him and still sit here with her heart rate elevated like a fucking idiot.
It was a little sad how age and experience could at once provide the names for certain feelings and rob them of their poetry. There had been so much about that summer AJ had been too young to understand. Even so, they’d neverreallycrossed the line. That kiss—
AJ blinked.
Right or wrong, she had never wanted anyone to touch her more.
And it had only happenedonce.Sometimes, AJ wasn’t sure it had happened at all.
Theyhadbeen friends, though. Even the hardest part of AJ could not deny the sheer number of hours they’d spent together.
Nor could it excuse the way he had left her to wonder. That wasn’t how friends treated each other. That wasn’t how a kind or a respectful person treated any other human being.
AJ could feel Noah studying her from across the table. She refused tolook over, though her skin warmed reflexively under his gaze. She knew he could easily ignore her, given that he was a celebrity and she was a normal—and the fact that he didn’t showed a modicum of decency.
But what good was that? It did nothing to change the empty folding chair, or the ten pounds she’d dropped senior year, or the sleepless months she’d spent after September 11, terrified he had been deployed to Afghanistan. Humiliatingly, AJ had wept when she read his name on a Juilliard revue flyer the following fall; then she’d avoided Lincoln Center for three years.
This would be the worst of it, AJ told herself. Noah was going to be one of the show’s principals, and there was no reason for their two characters to ever interact. Once they began filming, they’d hardly see each other and—
“Excuse me,” said a red-faced intern. “Anjalee would like to know if Navi is a weaver.”
“She’s a robot,” muttered Xiaobo.
“Halfrobot,” added Toni.
All eyes were on Em now, waiting for any hint that Anjalee might be a weaver—or Alara. But Em turned to Ian and asked, “What was the name of the original episode that introduced weaving?”
“ ‘Fire & Water,’ ” said AJ and Noah at once.
Their eyes snapped together, and AJ’s pulse surged at the intensity of his stare. That was the episode they’d been watching when she first admitted her dad had a drinking problem. She had trusted him more than anyone, and he’d fuckingvanished—
“You two are nerds,” said Dave, and AJ yanked her eyes back to her own bible printout.
Across the table, Noah’s hand fisted on top of his.
“That’s a good one to watch, if you haven’t seenAstronauticals,” said Em.
He doesn’t know,AJ reminded herself.He doesn’t actually know what you’re thinking.
But just to be safe, she kept her eyes down for the rest of the discussion.
Todd’s Coverage, Episode 1:“A Man, a Dog, and a Wormhole”
Gilamede’s crew are scavenging through space debris when a life pod emerges from the Kendar Wormhole; inside, the crew discover a man and a dog. The man is hunting a fugitive, Alara, and claims to have tracked her escape pod to Gilamede. When he falsely accuses the crew of harboring the fugitive, tempers rise and the Captain confines him to the brig. Curious about the stranger, the crew visit him one by one, and learn he is from the future.
Todd Gould knew hewouldn’t be directing on his first day, but this was super boring, even by unpaid internship standards. He and his fellow interns had been plugged into their editing bays since threep.m., watching footage on Avid Media Composer and logging dialogue…as in, literally writing down every word said on camera like a bunch of low-rent stenographers.
As they worked, Em Tyner and Ian Farnum cycled through like fathers pacing a delivery ward.
Ian seemed more chill—the whole unscripted thingwashis wheelhouse. But Em had only ever worked on scripted shows and was deeply out of his comfort zone. Fox had given this property to him. It was his reputation on the line. Every hour or so, he’d storm into the control room and say something like “Do we haveanythingusable?”
Todd couldn’t wait until the day he got to exclaim pointlessly to some interns.
And the answer was no. So far, none of the interns sifting through the eight hours of source footage destined to become the pilot episode had so much as smiled.
While they’d each been assigned a room to log on the crale, Todd hadalsobeen asked to write coverage, summarizing the day’s events for Ian and Em. They had all but named him intern captain.
As intern captain, Todd didn’t want to complain, but he was pretty sure his room was the worst.
