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“She’s our special guest this week,” Jasper said. “She’s a local writer.”
Hollyn’s gaze cut his way, and she grimaced again, her tics flaring.
“Oh, fun,” Kenzie said, her tone a little too bright, a whole lot condescending. “Well, I don’t mean to interrupt y’all. I just need to borrow Jasper for a few minutes. You don’t mind, do you?”
Jasper’s fist curled. “Kenzie, I’m rehearsing—”
“It’s fine,” Hollyn said quickly. “We’re wrapping up in here. I’ll tell them to run the last game without you, Jasper.”
“Hollyn—” he started. But she was already turning to head back in.
Only when she disappeared did he realize his mistake. He’d introduced her. As Hollyn. As the special guest. As a writer. What he had not introduced her as was his girlfriend.
Fuck.
Kenzie turned back to him. Her face shifting into one of concern. “Wow. What’s wrong with her?”
The question snapped in Jasper’s face like a firecracker, jarring him. “What?”
Kenzie pointed at her face, making a circle around it. “Is she okay? She looked like she was having a seizure.”
His jaw clenched. “It was a tic.”
“Oof,” she said with a wince. “Bless her heart. That’s going to be hard to hide onstage. How are y’all going to work around that? Is the show for charity or something?”
Jasper could feel his anger about to boil over. Kenzie could be self-involved but he’d never known her to be cruel. “Why are you here?”
She smoothed her lipstick and glanced back over her shoulder to make sure they were alone. “Right. So I got a deal with Netflix for the Aurora Boring character.”
“I heard. Congratulations,” he said with zero enthusiasm.
“Thanks. It’s an amazing opportunity,” she said in that voice she probably used in media interviews.Amazing opportunitywas such a fucking cliché. “But we’ve been auditioning actors for months, trying to fill the Eddie Ecstatic role, and no one has been the right fit. We had one guy we thought would work but then it fell apart. People either play it too over the top or too goofy. And the chemistry between the character and mine gets thrown off.”
Eddie Ecstatic had been his role in their sketch. Her character couldn’t show excitement about anything. His would find a thrill in anything. “Okay.”
“I know the original audition didn’t go how you wanted it to, but I showed the director and producer some of your videos you’ve been putting online. And I’ve convinced them that you’re the guy for the role. That you’d just been having a bad day the day of the audition.” She bit her lip, smiling behind it.
Jasper stared at her, the words not computing. “What?”
“Jasper!” she said, a little shriek in her voice. “They want to give you the part! It’d be a costarring role.”
“They want to give me the part,” he repeated, voice flat. “On a Netflix show.”
“Yes!” She clasped her hands together and beamed a smile at him. “And it’s the right choice. I realized we messed everything up when we tried to date. We sucked at being in a relationship, but we’regoldenas comedy partners. I play the role better when I’m playing off of you. And probably vice versa. The mistake we made in that audition is that we didn’t audition together.”
Jasper’s knees decided they didn’t want to hold him up anymore. He sat down hard on top of the cooler. “Holy shit.”
“I know, right?” she said, bouncing a little on the toes of her expensive stilettos. “It’s pretty much a done deal. They just want you to fly out to LA so you can do a scene with me for the director and producer. They want to lay eyes on you. I know you’ll nail it. And”—she looked him up and down—“you still look fantastic, Jas. You’ll be perfect on camera. And they’ll do all this to you.” She swirled her hand around her head. “You know, the designer haircut, the wardrobe, the polish.”
His head was spinning. The room was actually tilting in his vision. They wanted to offer him a role in a TV show. One that he would possibly have a part in writing since it had characters he and Kenzie had created. It was…the dream.
“So, you in?” she asked, a hopeful note in her voice.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to get his vision to clear. “How am I supposed to say no to that?”
“Yay,” she said and pulled her phone from her purse. “How quickly can you be ready? The audition is Friday, but it would help to get you in town a few days earlier so I can introduce you to some people. And maybe go shopping so we get the right outfit for the audition.” She scrolled through. “We can get a flight out tomorrow that goes through Dallas.”
Jasper’s brain snapped back online. “Wait. You need me to go that soon?”
