Page 91 of Love Scenes

A bolt of energy shoots through his arm, making him fumble his phone.

I am so on autopilot I ignore it, not even waiting for the host to get past me before I say, “I know you’d once asked for a lunch. I’m hoping this will do.”

I’ve mentally rehearsed and rewritten this line at least a hundred times. It needed to be short enough to get out without getting tripped up, yet meaningful enough for him to know my intentions. Which are to be absolutely anything more than we’ve been these last few weeks.

If he doesn’t want me to sit, he doesn’t say it, so I slip into the spot across from him, quick to put my hands into my purse and rummage around for nothing at all.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt. Tyler told me not to start with that.Itold me not to start with that. Seven seconds in and it’s flying out of my mouth. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” Joe forces out. “It’s okay.” When I look up from the nothing I’m searching for in my purse, he doesn’t meet my eye.

“I have to tell you right now that my mom doesn’t have a potential project for you. Neither of us were sure you’d show up if she didn’t give you a good reason. So we lied. I’m really sorry,” I say again, knowing this time it’s necessary.

“I would have come if you asked,” he tells me.

My entire stomach somersaults. This conversation is capable of going in too many directions, a lot of which could end badly for me, so I opt for a soft toss next, commenting on the beauty of the night. Sixty-eight degrees, a navy sky with the moon a glowing semicircle, big and glossy and bright. There’s a great, sweeping view of Los Angeles from where we are, countless building lights shiny as the stars this piece of sky doesn’t show.

“Not quite Ireland, but it can still take your breath away.” We both look out over my hometown.

“A lot of things here can do that,” he responds.

Our server comes to take our drink order. Joe doesn’t drink, I remember with a start, pushing away my hope to drown this burgeoning mistake in a river of tequila. He won’t so much as glance at me. This is a disaster. But if he has to endure the surprise of my presence and the potential awkwardness of this dinner completely sober, so do I.

We both ask for water. With the server still at our table, Joe says to me, “You can get a drink.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It’s quite fine. You wouldn’t be the first.”

“I don’t want to,” I say again, more insistent.

The server slips off and Joe starts to tap a familiar rhythm into the table: a slow arpeggio on repeat. I’m about to fill the anxiousquiet with another comment on the weather when he surprises me and asks, “Have you been well?”

I take a quick beat to admire him. The gentle flutter of his lashes. The way his every breath comes out in a definitive exhale, like each is a very deliberate choice. To think that I might only get to see his face up close in movies and on billboards, never again getting the privilege of running my finger across his jawline or laying my head on that shoulder? It’s too much to comprehend.

“I’ve been okay,” I say. “I miss having work to do.”And I miss you, I think but do not speak, hoping by the end of all this that it’s at least implied. “Have you... been well?” The phrasing doesn’t roll off my tongue like it does his.

“Sure,” he says, leaving out any follow-up details.

This small talk is a prison. In a desperate bid to escape it—forgoing all other easy topics like work or food or who came up with string lights—I pivot. “My mom told me something the other day. About when you auditioned forHorizons.”

“Did she?”

“Something about the music I would listen to in my trailer.” I can’t bring myself to say all she shared. It’s too vulnerable for this moment, our shields up as high as this building.

Joe’s posture shifts. He leans his elbows on the table, closing a bit of the distance between us. “Do you remember when I told you Calvin had a small memory he couldn’t share with Elise yet?” He asks as he stares at the lights lining the concrete half wall beside me.

“Of course,” I overlap, far too eager. With an intentional breath and a small prayer for grace, I don’t hold back. “I remember everything.”

“I wasn’t talking about them,” he admits.

Hearing what I suspected still knocks the wind out of me.He was talking about us.I wish I hadn’t been so scared then. I could have properly appreciated what that meant.

“The clearest memory I have of filmingA Little Luckis the sound of your voice coming in through my window, singing along to those old American rock tunes,” he tells me. “That’s why I started playing them on set. I was hoping it would make you... I don’t know. Make you not hate me. It’s absolutely shit, I realize now. And it’s exactly why I was such a fumbling, bumbling mess when we first started shooting. Because you showed me all the ways I’d been such a hack, and I didn’t know how to fix any of it.”

“Joe,” I interrupt, all rules out the window, no sense of pacing. “I want to know you. Everything there is to know. Even if I don’t like it. I apologize if that’s too forward, but I can’t sit through this whole meal without being clear. Especially when you say things like that.”

He places a hand atop mine to stop me from wildly gesturing. And finally, he looks at me. All our history in this look. The old hurt that made me hate him. My cold shoulder and his unending patience, peeling back my layers day by day, proving to me he’d changed. Every gentle touch we found between bigger moments of passion. Even the gaps we haven’t filled. All the stories I don’t yet know, and the ones told in scraps and shadows, waiting to be fully assembled. Everything’s here, laid bare between us.