Now I'm lying in the center of my nest with Bash's hoodie against my chest, Adrian's blanket over my shoulder, and Elias's pulled close at my side. All of it is mine. All of it is theirs. All of it belongs to us in a way I can no longer trace back to a beginning.
Somewhere along the way, while I was moving lamps, stealing decorative pillows, and eating food they ordered because they knew exactly what I wanted, this stopped being a place where I was staying until things settled down.
Without realizing when it happened, I started thinking of it as home.
I want them home.
I close my eyes.
My body is tired and pleasantly loose, continuing the slow climb toward the heat my omega has been preparing me for. The last thing I register before sleep takes me is the scent of all three of them surrounding me.
Chapter 35
Adrian
The skylights come on early, casting pale shafts of light across the soundstage floor, and the first thing I notice is the monitor station.
It's unattended.
Someone has left a paper coffee cup on the edge of it, which never would have happened before yesterday. Before yesterday, there was always a laminated call sheet anchoring that corner and a person making sure it functioned. Now there's a coffee cup sitting on empty space and three crew members standing near the lighting rig, all of them slightly off their marks and waiting for something none of them can name.
I do a slow scan of the floor.
The habit is automatic, built from years of walking onto sets and reading them before anyone speaks. What I'm reading this morning doesn't require any particular skill to interpret.
The floor markers near camera position three are misaligned by roughly six inches. It's not a crisis, but it's the kind of thing that would have been corrected before anyone arrived if the right person had been here first. Two background actors are blocking themselves into each other in the left-frame staging zone. The clapperboard operator is standing near the wall with the board resting against his leg, his phone in his hand, and the expressionof someone who hasn't received a cue yet and isn't entirely sure when to expect one.
A set has a sound even when it's quiet. Years of working on production floors teach you that whether you want to learn it or not. This one sounds like a held breath. Not the productive tension of a shoot running close to the wire, but something more uncertain, like an engine trying to turn over.
“She set that up Tuesday,” Bash says from somewhere near my left shoulder.
I don't turn. “I know.”
He's looking at the staging zone where the background actors are standing in the wrong positions. He doesn't have to specify which system or which corner. Neither of us does. We've both been doing this all morning, spotting the gaps she used to fill before anyone else knew they existed.
He falls into step beside me, and we walk the perimeter of the floor together.
The lunch truck is twenty minutes late. When the assistant director mentions it, I pull out my radio and spend three minutes tracking down a catering coordinator who has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the delay. I don't retain most of it because I'm only half listening. My attention is on the clapperboard operator, who finally receives his cue from a PA who has clearly had to chase the information through two separate people before getting an answer. Twenty minutes ago, that PA would have already had what she needed.
Near the south wall, the grip team is working through an equipment question. Their voices are low, and the discussionkeeps circling the same question from different angles, the way problems tend to when the person who usually resolves them isn't there. Even from here, I can see one of them repeatedly glancing toward the area near the prop station.
He's not looking at anything specific.
He's looking at the space where someone used to be.
It's everywhere on the floor.
Small, constant, and unspoken.
That involuntary reach toward a person who isn't there.
I've been watching it happen all morning, and every time I notice it, I think about the phone call Elias mentioned last night. I think about the director sayingwe didn't realize, and I think about Maya asleep in her nest while an entire production discovers how much work she was carrying before any of them arrived.
The assistant director appears at my shoulder when we've finished our second loop around the soundstage. “Jordan and Carla are in the production office,” he says, pointing toward the trailer pushed against the far wall. “They'd like a word if you have twenty.”
I look toward the trailer and then at Bash. His expression is neutral, but his chin dips a fraction. From Bash, that translates to:I already know what this is.“Lead the way,” I say.
The walk across the soundstage doesn't take long.
