Page 114 of The Maverick
She tilted her head.
"A showcase. Three hundred people. Real venue, proper sound system. I froze. Got through one verse and walked off the stage." I said it flat and factual, the way it was easier to say things that hurt when you were lying in a hospital bed with a bandaged leg and the adrenaline had burned off. "First real opportunity I'd had and I blew it completely."
Lexi was quiet for a moment. She looked at her tea.
"My second audition in LA," she said. "Do you want to hear about it?"
"Yes."
"It was for a studio picture. Real budget, real director, the kind of thing that could have changed everything right at the beginning." She paused. "I walked in, sat down in the chair, and the casting director asked me to read the first scene." She looked at me steadily. "I read it in the wrong accent. The whole scene. I'd prepared for the wrong version of the character. I'd had the sides for two weeks and I'd prepared the wrong arc entirely."
"What did you do?"
"I finished reading, thanked them for their time, walked out to my car, and sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes." Her mouth curved. "Then I drove home, learned the right version, called my agent, and booked the next thing that came in. Which was smaller and paid less and was not the studio picture." She paused. "And then the one after that was bigger. And the one after that was bigger again."
I looked at her.
"The showcase will come around again," she said. It wasn't consolation. It was just information, delivered with the certainty of someone who'd learned it through the evidence of her ownlife. "Those opportunities don't happen once. They happen until you're ready for them."
"How do you know when you're ready?"
"You go back," she said. "That's the whole answer. You go back."
The door opened.
Tommy came through it.
He looked—I ran the inventory the way I always did, because I was a woman who'd been trained by circumstance to assess damage quickly. A cut above his left eyebrow, butterfly-taped. Soot on his neck that someone had mostly but not entirely cleaned away.
His eyes landed on me and something in his face did the shift I'd come to recognize as the rearrangement that happened when he'd been in a different mode and then encountered me and had to come back from wherever he'd been.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said.
Lexi looked between us with the expression of a woman watching something she recognized and was not going to narrate.
"How is she?" Tommy said to Lexi, not taking his eyes off me.
"She's right here and she can tell you herself," Lexi said pleasantly.
"How are you?" he said to me.
"My leg hurts and someone told me a yacht exploded."
"Two someones, if you count the yacht."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"Tommy."
"She said it's a little funny," Lexi said, to no one in particular. "I was in the room."
"I didn't say it was funny," I said.
"Your face did," Tommy said.
