I guess it’s only an informal read and not a red-carpet event. Besides, Beau specifically told me he liked flawed women.Majorlyflawed, and I assume he meant beyond the wiry incoming greys and frayed jeans and nerves. What I’m really doing is walking into this room with my heart exposed.
The table read is being held in an event room upstairs at a North Sydney bar near the producer’s office. It’s all reclaimed wood, exposed air-conditioning ducts and copper pipes. Beau’s in the corner by a window, leaning over a bench, concentrating on the script with a pen in his hand. Jeans. Dark shirt. Black-rimmed glasses even better in person than in my imagination.
My eyes are drawn to that incomplete compass tattoo peeking out from the fabric of his rolled-up sleeve. A reminder of his unpredictability. Watching him work, I feel a rising sense of protectiveness—I know how worried he’s been, and I so badly want this to go well for him.
‘Excuse me,’ someone says, bustling past. She’s some sort of assistant, I think, and when she walks over to Beau and he looks up to talk to her, he catches me standing in the doorway. His genuine surprise kickstarts a wave of panic. It’s clear Harlow invited me without checking first that he’d even want me here, and when he places a hand on the assistant’s arm and signals to her that he just needs a minute, my old instinct—borrowed from pre-Fraser times—is to back out of this room and run.
‘I’m sorry,’ I begin as he arrives in front of me, my whole body on edge. ‘Harlow invited me. I didn’t know if you knew …’
‘I didn’t—’
‘I can leave!’I’m already leaving!But he reaches for me, pulling me into a space near the door.
‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Are you?’ I’m not fishing for compliments. Just reassurance.
‘Hepburn, I’ve been a wreck.’
That’s good, right?
‘How is it going? Have you rescued it?’
‘The screenplay? Ithinkit’s good? Harlow has been a godsend. She’s got an eye for a good story. It’s been a bit of a joint effort the last few days. I didn’t even get the chance to read the latest version before she printed it.’
I cannot fathom being that hands-off.
‘I’ve been worried about crashing your adult gap year,’ he admits. ‘You’re just getting started. You don’t need some man derailing you in front of a wall of camera flashes.’
He is hardly ‘some man’. The Bookies will argue over the semantics of this for days.
‘Technically it was me who crashed into you,’ I correct him, and he looks as if he’s replaying our first night in my Jeep in the rain. The way the storm lashed the soft-top, both of usdrenched from the downpour as he placed his hand over mine on the wheel.
It’s clear the reasons I might want to run from this have been bouncing in his brain for days, as they have been in mine. I have trust issues. Ridges. Josh. Fraser telling me we’d be married for fifty years and being so alive, and then sogone, so instantly …
‘I’m worried about the chaos of my career,’ he goes on, voice gentle and earnest. ‘The headlines say I’m a serial heartbreaker, but I’m not, Audrey. Every relationship I’ve had has come undone despite me. I don’t know if I can protect you from it all. I’d never forgive myself if—’
If what? If this failed and it drove me back into the arms of my liquid nemesis?
‘Beau, surely we can talk this through? Not now, obviously. You’re in the middle of—’ I sweep my hand around the room at piles of paper, pens, coffee cups and fruit platters as effortlessly attractive off-camera household names swan about in a way that April would rupture an internal organ over.
When he puts a hand on my arm, it thrills me to my core.Thrillsme.
But then the door behind me opens, sending a brisk breeze up my spine, made cooler by the clouded expression on his face as he looks over my shoulder. And I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Without even turning around, I can guess who is standing there. Perhaps we’ve known each other only a few days, but we seem to be able to read each other’s faces, and what I’m seeing here, writ large in the pain in his eyes, is not a serial heartbreaker at all. It’s the heartbroken.
I follow his gaze, my body knowing to step back and make room for the unfolding, in front of my eyes, of a reunion as epic as the cinematographers would craft this scene. In his eyes, I seewhat he saw the other day in mine.Still madly in love.I imagine I can hear the thunder of the heartbeat beneath the lion on his chest, bearing her name. And I keep expecting one of them to say something, but neither does. They are just … spellbound.
Beau’s arms fall to his side, body language that’s the very opposite of defensive. He is open. Willing. Trusting. Just seconds ago, that hand had been on my arm, and now it’s reaching over for a one-handed hug, crushing her to his chest as if I’m not even here.
‘What are you doing here?’ I hear him whisper. Theyou look amazingis implied, as his eyes sweep over long, straight, lustrous blonde hair, bright blue eyes behind designer glasses and a thick fringe. She is that extraordinary mix of cover-girl beautiful and creative intellectual, and I’ve never felt more underdressed, more underqualified, or more like an underdog.
‘Lucinda, this is Audrey,’ he says, remembering I exist, at least. As she turns to look at me, head cocked as if she’s sizing up her former fiancé’s fictional future love interest, I imagine something passes across her face along the lines of …Beau, this makes no sense.
Instead, she just nods. Perhaps she’s not seeing me as a rival at all. Probably thinks I’m the executive assistant, as she turns back to Beau, who looks as baffled by her presence here as he was by mine. ‘Sorry,’ she says, appearing authentically apologetic. ‘They were getting nervous.’
Have the producerscalled her in?
I imagine his hurt just as proof of it lands in his eyes. I knew with just that one sighting of him across this room that he was back on top of his game.Alivewith it. Confident in the way he was directing one of the actors, quietly reading a section of the script. Whatever work has transpired since I last saw him,it’s good. But, seemingly without even consulting him, they panicked and brought in the Oscar-nominated writing partner. The woman who made him doubt his own talent. The one responsible for the look on his face now as the brawny, tattooed Viper tries not to crack in front of us both.
