“Someone was saying you left crying, and then you were gone for so long…we just wanted to make sure everything was okay,” Pilar said.
“Actually, we kind of thoughtyoumight be responsible for it,” Annie said pointedly to Shane. Lilah got to her feet, too, wobbly as a baby deer, perching on the side of the bed like she didn’t trust her legs to hold her.
“Not this time,” she said breezily. It was only when he looked back at Lilah’s flushed face that the implication settled over him, heavy and queasy: she’d cried over him before, and they all knewit.
“Looks like you’re in good hands now,” he said. “I should head back out there.”
Lilah nodded mutely. Her friends eyed him up as he passed, and he met each of their gazes in turn, confident, but not confrontational. They clustered around Lilah, but she was looking only at him until the moment he closed the door.
23
After Shane left, Lilah’s friends tried to grill her about what was going on, but she was too drunk and exhausted to give them any kind of coherent response. Soon enough, they’d bundled her into a car and sent her on her way. She leaned her cheek against the glass of the window, eyes half-shut, teetering on the edge of sleep.
She had thought she’d pass out as soon as she crawled into bed, but she’d tossed and turned for hours, her headache worsening, throbbing in time with a single word:Shane. Shane. Shane.
When she woke up the next morning, she lay there brooding for a long time. The loss ofNight Callstung even worse inthe light of day, a congealed lump of fear and self-pity and hopelessness lodged beneath her ribs. She ruminated over every step of the audition process—the lines she could’ve delivered differently, the missed opportunities to charm in conversation. But she was too exhausted to sustain her self-loathing spiral as long as she wanted to. Once it ran its course, she was able to let it go.
She sat up, her hangover hitting her like a frying pan to the face, and she knew immediately that the whole day would be a wash. As she trudged through the steps to make herself feel marginally more alive—shower, coffee, toast, gallons of water—she tried to ignore the low, persistent throb of loneliness that accompanied her, like an old injury that had never fully healed.
These were the times she most missed having someone. Spending the day cuddled on the couch or lounging in bed, no obligations besides napping, fucking, watching bad movies, and eating takeout. Something more attainable, in theory, than nearly every other facet of her life, something painfully mundane—but still somehow perpetually out of reach.
For as long as she could remember, her approach to relationships had been driven by the fear that she’d make the same mistake her parents had, finding herself trapped with someone who barely tolerated her out of fear of being alone—which meant, by extension, she’d accepted she might always be alone.
Instead, she’d prioritized her career, seeking fulfillment via the escape of losing herself in a character, the security of financial independence, the fleeting validation of success before the goalposts shifted once again. But that, too, was a relationship that often felt just as toxic, breaking her heart harder and more frequently than any man ever could.
The prospect of one day finding a romantic connection that nourished rather than drained her, that added value to her life,that made her feel safe and accepted and understood, sometimes seemed like even more of a fantasy than the most ridiculous storylines onIntangible. The brief glimpses she’d caught of it—last night; over the holidays; in Vancouver; nine years ago—made its absence all the more painful. The fact that those moments had all been with Shane—Shane—felt like a cruel joke.
As if he could sense she was thinking about him, her phone buzzed with his name—his real name now—as soon as she settled on her couch.
SHANE:how are you feeling?
Lilah rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, unsure how to respond.
LILAH:better
Still bad, but better
She hesitated, then added:
Thank you for last night
SHANE:glad to hear it. & anytime
I saw TBS is doing a best of Kate and Harrison new year’s day marathon, in case you’re in the mood for a walk down memory lane
LILAH:you know I don’t like to leave repression avenue
Still, she found herself flipping to the channel anyway. Her own face immediately filled the screen—the third season, shecould tell immediately, based on the length of her hair and the jacket she was wearing.
She was behind the wheel of a car, Shane in the passenger seat. That fucking car. They’d spent hundreds of hours crammed in there, shooting pages and pages and pages of dialogue. Whenever they weren’t rolling, they’d sit in icy silence, without even their phones to distract them, staring out the window at the motionless landscape.
She vividly remembered all the times she’d seethed in annoyance as he joked around with the crew, jealous of how easy it was for him to keep everyone’s spirits up when the day ran long, self-conscious about how standoffish she must seem in comparison, when she was just trying to preserve her energy and stay focused between takes so they could all go home as soon as possible.
But watching it now from the outside, years later, she didn’t see any of that. All she saw was Shane, devastatingly charming, and funny, and charismatic—and all of it directed at her. How was it possible she’d found him so irritating back then? And the way he was looking at her…it wasn’t real, obviously. He couldn’t stand her in those days, either. But on camera, it read as undiluted yearning.
As the episode continued, she realized which one it was. Kate had been possessed by the ghost of a scientist who was unable to move on until she completed the study she’d been working on for years. Lilah had been stuck rattling off so much technical jargon she was sure the writers must have been messing with her. To make matters worse, she’d been fighting a miserable cold, her head feeling like it was stuffed with cotton, making it a struggle to retain even her easiest lines.
They were in the scientist’s lab now. Lilah practically had war flashbacks from how long it had taken them to shoot this scene.After finally getting the two-shot, they’d reset for her solo coverage, Shane out of range of the cameras. As soon as they’d called “Action,” he’d held up his palm, where he’d Sharpie’d the buzzwords she’d been stumbling over, grinning wickedly as the crew cracked up. It had ended up on the blooper reel at the wrap party, of course, and she’d laughed along, even as humiliation brewed in the pit of her stomach all over again at the pleasure he took in openly mocking her.
