Page 46 of Love Scenes

Yet all I can think about is how I have to nail this first day. They’ve fired a twenty-three-year-old with a huge following and cast me, a second-generation hack job who was once called box office kryptonite by a well-respected critic with no known mean streak. It’s now as much my responsibility to make this movie work as it is Joseph’s. And while I’ve fucked up takes in front of countless actors, I’ve never screwed up a moment for my mother.

My mother, who stepped out of the spotlight for almost twenty years. My mother, who is putting so much on the line for this film: money, pride, her identity. My mother, who trusted me to be the one to save this sinking ship. My mother, who was once shamed by this industry and saved all that shame up to place on me for no good reason.

Inside the parking garage, I recline my driver’s seat all the way back and stare at the ceiling of my car.

“Siri, play the albumFear of the Canyon.” Midway through track three, “Blush”—which has become an underdog favorite of mine for the fact that it’s all about how sex with me was so unsatisfying it consistently made the both of us blush—there’s a knock on my window.

Joseph peers down at me right as Kearns sings out, “In the bedroom there’s a hush. Not a sigh, only blush.”

I don’t immediately put my seat into the upright position. It’s better to see Joseph at this very humbling angle, looking up into his nostrils, which are ever so slightly different shapes.

“Don’t mind me,” I say, trying to find his face dissatisfying. I can still feel the way his hand pressed into my arm outside the salon. How everything inside me started to burn while we looked at each other.

“It’s hard not to when you’re putting on a free concert.” He opens my car door. “His voice is even worse without the window blocking it from my ears. Tell me he didn’t rhyme ‘bedsheet’ with ‘deceit.’”

I turn off the music. “He did.”

“He seems like a delight.”

“He was, actually. That’s the thing.”

“Really?”

“Yes,really. He was a pretty nice boyfriend to have.”

Joseph looks impressed. “What the hell happened to make him go around singing songs like that one?”

“I don’t know.” I’m ready to move on. It’s as mystifying to me as it is to everyone else. For some reason, the way Joseph looks at me—full of open curiosity and a willingness to understand, as if maybe we can crack the code together—makes me continue.

“We broke up because he told me we’d grown apart and he was tired of everything always being the same. I was working a lot with the show, so I thought that was fair. I wasn’t around enough. We never did anything fun. I thought it was a mature decision. I even respected him for it. Then he dropped a twelve-track ode to my every failing, and it turns out I’m the world’s biggest fool, because after three and a half years together, he was still holding up this idea of me. Girl incapable of feeling, because life’s been served to her on a platter. Even after all the time we spent together. That’s all I ever was to him. The best part is that his first album was full of songs idealizing women, then tearing them down. And I thought I wasdifferent.I wasspecial. But no, I was only a good idea that got old.”

My actions catch up to my thoughts, and I realize I’m saying all of this to the last person on earth I want to be discussing Kearns with, and here I am pouring my heart out nearly unprompted. I unbuckle my seat belt and slide out of my car, avoiding making contact with Joseph’s body. “Anyways.Let’s get to work.”

Joseph chases me through the parking lot and toward his trailer. “Why are you walking so fast? Wait up a minute.” He manages to get around me as we reach his trailer door.

He opens it for me, and I step inside, ready to collapse onto his couch like I’ve done so many times prior.

Instead, anxiety locks up my limbs. This little trailer with its ugly boring furniture means too much to me. I don’t want to screw this up for my mom and my sister and my stepdad, but I also don’t want to screw this up for Joseph and his morning tea and his classic rock and his framed picture of his beautiful dead mother that he loves so very much.

“I can’t do this.” I turn to leave, but Joseph angles himself around me, pressing his body against the exit.

“Whoa, whoa. Hold on now. What’s really going on?”

We’re inches from each other, a phenomenon that has honestly never happened in my real life. It’s something I’ve had to do for every love story I’ve ever filmed. The moment where the two people are unnaturally close, holding a conversation with their chests pressed against each other. I should move, back all the way up into the counters on the other side of the trailer, like any real-life person would. We shouldn’t be talking about this with our breath blowing on each other. But it’s so nice to feel his body against mine. To see the veins in his neck pulling taut. To smell his soap and his deodorant.

To watch a bead of sweat form along his hairline.

“I’m not ready for this,” I tell him. “I haven’t done any real research. I’ve never done a period piece. I won’t be as good as the rest of you. No one in my family seems to trust me to do anything right. Why would they trust me with this?”

Joseph waits, letting my words hang in the air until I’m sure there’s nothing more to add. Then he asks, “Do you know what I did last night?”

“Why would I know that?”

He smiles. “I watchedA Little Luck.”

“Shut up.”

“I swear to God I did.” His gaze softens. “You’re brilliant in it, Sloane. That movie would have been a wash of hog shit if there was anyone but you with me. I’m bloated, half–in the bag, and grieving, and you still helped me to pull out a semi-decent performance.” His hands work the edges of his shirt, pulling on a loose thread. “If you think you’ll be anything less than spectacular in this, then you’ve been listening to entirely too much of that American boy’s pathetic music.”