‘But I’m not what you came here to find. You didn’t come here for friendship. You came here for love.’
Despite the language they’d used, it was going to be very difficult to edit this together in a way that didn’t suggest they were star-crossed lovers. I was going to have to make some very pointed music choices. Maybe do some work in post so no one noticed the tears in their eyes.
Just for a moment, guilt crept in.
I pushed it back down. If me engineering their separation was enough to keep them apart forever, then they never really had anything in the first place.
But, ‘Let them go,’ I told Suzette, when she asked if she should insist on the two of them staying to film ITMs. ‘We’ll do pickups tomorrow. Let Dylan walk her home. Let them say goodbye.’
Cece was red-eyed and withdrawn when I filmed her ITM the next day. I had to push hard to get more than a few sentences, and what I did get came through tears.
Romeo-Dylan wasn’t much better. He didn’t cry, but he’d sunk deep into himself, and drawing him out took more work than usual. ‘It was tough, saying goodbye to Cece,’ he said, looking past me instead of at me, voice distant. ‘It was really, really… tough.’
Once I had what I needed, I waved at Frida to turn the camera off. ‘I’m sorry, mate. I know how much that friendship meant to you.’
‘I’m sure Cece and I will be friends on the outside.’ Romeo-Dylan still sounded very far away. ‘But it was nice. Having someone to talk to.’
I glanced at his hands. His fingers weren’t tapping, but his fists were clenched.
‘It’s hard,’ I said. ‘When friends suddenly disappear out of your life.’
‘Very.’
Romeo-Dylan’s shoulders were slumped when he left. It wasn’t subtle body language. He might as well have a sign sayingI HAVE REGRETSpinned to the back of his shirt.
I wondered how he and Cece had left it, when he walked her home. How long he’d hugged her. How tight he’d held her. How hard it was to let go.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. I’d had five whole hours of sleep last night. I should be more in control of my thoughts than this.
And I had a plan to focus on.
I shut myself in the war room for the afternoon, getting prepared for that evening’s shoot. Technically, it was work I could outsource – ‘Take a fucking break while you have the chance, Murray!’ Suzette snapped at me – but I gave the majority of the crew the afternoon off instead. This stunt required precision.
‘Oh, Murray, no,’ Lily breathed.
I hadn’t put a chair under the door handle this time, and she’d snuck in almost silently. The grin spreading across her face was fifty per cent delighted, fifty per cent wicked, one hundred per centher. ‘Not the Adjudication Station special.’
I put the notecard I’d just finished writing into the box. I didn’t say anything, but I let my eyes flicker briefly up to hers.
‘You are a bad man.’ She sat down at the table opposite me. ‘Murray O’Connell, you are a bad, bad man.’
‘You shouldn’t be in here.’
‘I couldn’t resist.’
Blood in the water. I was so close.
‘I had to ask you about the whole friend thing with the Romeo and the fainter,’ she continued. ‘I can’t believe you were running a whole plotline on the side and you didn’t tell me.’
Her tone was mostly still delighted, but it was the accusatory edge in there which thrilled me. That hatred of not knowing what was happening, that very specific type of FOMO –thatwas how I was going to break her.
‘You didn’t need to know,’ I said mildly. ‘Lily Fireball isn’t involved in the Convent plot.’
‘I will be. Or have you lost count of the episodes? We’re in Episode Seven. Fucking Greg is only making boy-Dylan keep me for eight.’
I had not lost count. There was a reason I was pulling this stunt – a version of the first stunt that Lily and I had ever pulled together – now.
Manipulation was about two things: knowing people’s pressure points, and knowing when to exploit them. In an ideal world, I would have set a longer, more gradual fuse on this play, to let Lily’s worry over my exhaustion and her addiction to string-pulling build and build and build.
