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This was the place I always dreamed of working. But as I hurried past camera booms and Parisian sets and racks of costumes, I knew I wasn’t here to chase that dream.
I was after a dream far more dear to my heart. I was after a dream that terrified me even more than any casting call ever could. But I was here. And I was ready to make that dream mine.
I was running so quickly at this point that I passed the set for the soap and had to turn around, breathless and sweaty, to reach the door. The inside of the dark warehouse was busy with activity—interns and actors and set designers and producers and writers and assistants all bustled about—and there were tables piled high with delicious looking sandwiches and chips and brownies. Huh. If I got a role, I could basically eat for free.
Focus, Tessa! Focus!I ordered myself. I could think about food later.
Weaving quickly through the chaos so I wouldn’t lose my nerve, I glanced around, searching. Ellis wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I spun around in a circle, biting my lip when I still didn’t catch sight of him.
“You the backup hair girl?” a woman with a clipboard asked as she pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Um…” I stared at her, mind whirling, “…yes?”
“You don’t know?”
I pulled back my shoulders and lifted my chin and said again, “Yes, that’s me.”
“Great,” the woman said, giving me a strange look but pointing toward the back of the warehouse nonetheless. “Start with Room 3. Someone back there will tell you what to do next.”
Okay, so I’d just go back there and ask one of the actors if they’d seen Ellis. Surely they would know where he is. If I needed to style someone’s hair in the process, well, I hope they liked ponytails, because that was about the extent of my professional hair knowledge.
“Hair person,” I told people who didn’t even glance twice at me as I walked toward the dressing rooms. “That’s me. Hair lady.”
Finding Room 3 was easy. I poked my head in the door and asked, “Hey, do you know where El—”
“Tessa?”
Ellis looked up from his phone. He was sitting alone, in a styling chair in front of a brightly lit mirror. I stared at Ellis from the doorway, unable to move, unable to speak.
Suddenly, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready at all. It never crossed my mind that Ellis himself would have been inside the first dressing room. I expected to find some stranger I would never see again who would tell me where I could find Ellis. I would then collect my thoughts, rehearse what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and maybe even fix up my hair and makeup so I didn’t look like I’d just rushed over here after being fucked by two sex gods in the back of a VW van.
I would have made sure that everything was ready, that everything was prepared, that everything was perfect before I finally found Ellis. And yet here I was.
Ellis pushed himself up from the chair and assessed me with a raised eyebrow. “What are you doing here?”
My heart raced and my palm, still resting on the door handle, grew slick with nervous sweat. I sucked in a deep breath.
"Look, Tessa,” Ellis said, moving toward me, “I’m at work, and I really shouldn’t be—”
“You had to have always known.”
It was the first thing that popped into my panicked mind, a line from the script Ellis had given me for the audition.
“What?” Ellis watched me as I closed the door behind me and turned to face him. I locked eyes with him and even though my body screamed at me to look away, hell, to run away, I remained where I was, blocking the door.
“You had to have alwaysknown.”
Ellis crossed his arms.
“Tessa, I really don’t have time—”
“Youhadto have always known.”
The confusion on Ellis’s face only increased as I stood there. But it wasn’t just confusion. There was something else…and it was the something else that made my throat tighten and my chest ache. And then his expression changed. Wariness slid into the confusion.
“Known what?” he asked slowly. And I knew it wasn’t random. Those two words were part of the script. He’d read it, too.
My voice wavered, but still, I continued saying the lines that were the honest to God truth. “Haven’t you seen the way I look at you?”
