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“As opposed to?” I ask him.

“The kind where it’s insular because it’s full of cannibals.”

“Right.”

Brynn comes out as Tate is dragging over the little desk table and laying out the spread. There are burgers and a couple sandwiches, fries, onion rings, a platter of fruit, and four slices of chocolate cream pie.

Brynn grabs her food and a bottle of water and retreats to the chair in the corner, pulling up her legs to sit cross legged and balance her food in her lap.

Everyone else takes what they want and finds a place to settle in to eat it, but there’s nothing comfortable about it. The food is hot, salty, and good, perfect after such a long day, but the silence in the room is fucking deafening.

Even Tate, who can usually chatter through just about anything, is quiet, glancing between all of us like he wants to break the tension but doesn’t know how.

In the end, he finds the remote and turns on the TV, scrolling through channels with one hand and eating a club sandwich with the other.

“Wait,” Callan says all of a sudden, gesturing to the TV with a French fry. “Calamity.”

Tate laughs delightedly and puts the remote down. “It’s like it’s fate.”

I roll my eyes. “We don’t have to do this now.”

“We absolutely do.”

Calamity is a movie I was in back when I first started acting regularly. It’s an old film about the end of the world, and it’s not good at all. But the movie or show being good or not never factors into whether Tate and Callan will watch it or not.

Over the years, they’ve developed a ritual where whenever something I’m in comes up on the TV, we stop and watch it.

Some of them are good, amazing even, and some of them are like Calamity. Low budget, bad acting, and worse effects.

“This one is about an asteroid hitting the Earth,” Tate is saying, looking at Brynn. “But somehow at the same time, that’s the only way to get rid of the beginnings of the zombie apocalypse.”

She makes a face at that, shaking her head. “Riveting.”

“It is.” Tate keeps going, ignoring the sarcasm. “The best part is our boy in the role of the roguishly handsome bad boy, who ends up doing his best to save as many women in the town as he can, before he’s tragically killed by falling debris.”

“Spoilers,” Callan murmurs.

“Better to know what she’s getting herself into. At least he doesn’t get turned into a zombie.”

If Brynn has any opinion on that, she seems happy to keep it to herself. She keeps eating, but she watches the movie all the same, and I can’t help but watch her as she does.

Little expressions play out over her face as things happen on the screen, and when she rolls her eyes at some of the cheesier dialogue, I have to wonder if she’s seen any of my stuff before. Maybe she’s the opposite of Tate and Callan, and she makes a point to change the channel if something I’m in comes on.

It’s not like I can ask her, and not like it matters either way. Bringing it up would just open a can of worms I don’t want to deal with, but part of me does want to know.

As much as I’d never admit it, to her or anyone else, I’ve followed her career from the start, listening to singles as they dropped and marking the way her songwriting and singing have matured as she’s gotten older.

The movie playing makes the silence more bearable, at least. Tate teases me about the movie, trying to get me to re-enact some of my more memorable lines. When the scene comes where I throw myself in front of a blonde woman with huge tits, he laughs so hard that he nearly chokes on his pie, even though he’s seen it before.

“My favorite part is how you just let that teenager get bitten by the zombie,” he says between guffaws, “to save Brittany from having to watch it happen. So noble, so gentlemanly.”

“Fuck off, Tate.” But it’s easy to laugh along with him.

At least until the trash from the food is cleared away and we’re left with the question of sleeping arrangements.

“I’ll take the floor,” Callan says immediately. “I don’t share. I just need a pillow and a blanket.”

“I definitely need more than that,” Tate chimes in. “It’s a big enough bed. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but I think we can all fit.”