Page 27 of Love Scenes

He wants to get things right between us, and every time he’s so much as tried, I’ve been there with my arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, daring him to fail.

I haven’t been wrong to do that. I know I haven’t. He deserves to be held accountable. But I haven’t been giving him room to change either. He’s shown me he deserves that too.

“Joseph,” I blurt out when we’re out of his trailer and he’s well on his way to prosthetics. “You’re not gonna fuck this up today. All right? You’re ready. And you’regood.”

He turns around. Even with enough space between us for a school bus to safely park, I can see the way a smile sneaks up on him. He melts into it, slow and serene, the quiet reveal of gratitude on his face piercing straight through me.

“Nice thing is, if I do fuck up, I can blame you, right?” he calls back. “Thank Christ you’re astrong woman.”

Guy is oneof those people who can’t help but mouth along to whatever someone else is saying. Ever since I privately talked to him today about giving Tyler space to do her thing, he’s doubled down on his silent mimicry, the ghost of Tyler’s every sentence on his lips.

She’s asking Haven to be softer. To sit in the space longer and let her conversation with Joseph be more patient. It’s meant to be a slow-burn romance. Right now, it’s feeling rushed.

Joseph waits at his mark. He has an elbow leaning on the couch, and he’s looking around, tapping his foot to a beat only he can hear. Our eyes meet. I’m about to look away when he points to something behind me.

My father has come to set.

A small crowd is already forming around him, as it always does when Dad enters a room. Someone asks how he’s doing, and he fakes at grabbing his chest, then does a throwaway gesture, rolling his eyes, as if to say,Heart attacks! So hilarious!

One by one, the remaining crew shifts their attention to his arrival. Tyler stops midsentence, noticing Haven’s gaping.

“Alexander!” Guy billows. “What a lovely surprise!”

A shadow of annoyance crosses Dad’s face. “Hey, Guy. Good to see you!” He moves from his small crowd to accept Guy’s warm embrace.

In all the years Guy has been married to my mom, I’ve never heard him say anything but glowing things about my dad. He seems to genuinely like him. What he doesn’t know is that my dad cannot stand him. It’s the first thing Dad mentions after every function where they’re forced to interact. For a man well known for his easygoing persona, Alexander Ford is deeply rattled by someone even more easygoing than him.

Side by side they make a funny pair. Powell once pointed out that they look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in the movieTwins.It’s all I can ever think about when I see them together. One time Powell even photoshopped Dad’s and Guy’s heads onto the movie poster and sent it to Tyler and me in a group text. What I wouldn’t give to see them dress alike in real life.

“Let’s go ahead and take a five,” Tyler says, defeated.

Why waste time getting garbage footage when every person needs to get the Alexander Ford excitement out of their system? Free from responsibility, most swarm him like bees to a hive.

It’s only when the crowd redistributes that I see my little sister Sarai is here too. Somehow she’s even taller than she was the last time I saw her, which was only two weeks ago. Built like Tyler, shooting straight up with nothing adding on elsewhere, with jet-black curly hair and brown skin like her mom’s.

She makes her way over to me.

“My mom told me you guys are behind schedule already,” she says, so perfectly on the cusp of childlike sweetness and preteen edge that everything she does manages to make me self-conscious, even when it’s not meant for me.

“Basically. But we’re doing better now. Although Dad dropping in unannounced probably won’t help,” I tell her.

“I told him we shouldn’t come yet. Do you want me to make him leave? Because I will.” Her arms fold across her chest as she looks up at me, waiting for the go-ahead. She reminds me so much of myself as a kid when she gets like this. Desperate for respect. Eager to prove she can hang.

“Let’s wait a little bit before we go kicking Dad out. Let him have his fanfare.”

She rolls her eyes. “He needs it.”

Her ability to cut right to the heart of the matter is a large part of how I ended up here after all. When we were all huddled together at Cedars-Sinai, waiting to hear how Dad was doing after the heart attack, I looked around the room and realized that I’d turned down a part in this movie for no reason other than my own pride. I’d first refused the project based on some perceivednotion that doing period pieces would make me stuck in the genre forever.

Then it became about casting Joseph Donovan.

Then it was about how mad I was at all of them for not considering my show schedule.

But I’d just been killed offThe Seeker, and Dad was on the verge of death, and taking the movie meant spending time with the people I loved most in the world, and it seemed like the silliest, pettiest thing I’d ever done, not accepting a part that had been written for me to play.

I blurted, “What if I told you I could do it?” right as Tyler told Powell, “Haven Church is playing Elise.”

Tyler halted. “Wait, what did you say?”