Page 9 of Sizzle Reel

“Not yet. Still in limbo.” I look up, spotting the edge of Romy’s laptop case, which peeks out of the black Herschel she left on the floor. “Are you writing anything new?”

Romy wipes her brow in a flourish, and the bleached streak in her hair lifts with her hand. “I wish. We got a different budget for the show and I need to adjust a scene or two.”

Romy’s thesis is about a claustrophobic novelist on deadline who gets stuck on the L.A. subway. All her characters from previous books manifest as real people to help her escape. It’s about intersectionality and is surreal and super cool, but the festival directors feared that they wouldn’t be able to pull off any scene changes in their venue, so she’s been trying to write out the scenes that take place off the train for a week now.

“Did I already ask if you had projectors?” I ask.

She pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes. “We do, but there’s no way I could capture the surrealism without the sets.”

I point to myself. “Am I real to you? Use the projectors as the background and I can capture the surrealism on film easy.”

She furrows her brow a moment and then leans back, shaking her head. “Luna, I can’t ask you to do all that work.”

The microwave beeps and Romy turns to it.

“It’s nothing. I need to get back behind a camera anyway. Just readjust the play as you had it and send me the script again. I’ll get them to you A.S.A.P.”

She noticeably relaxes, and it warms my chest. “You’re the best.”

She hands me my sandwich. The smell has my stomach aching, a reminder that I need to work on that whole actually-eating-three-balanced-meals-a-day thing.

“How about a movie tonight?” I ask.

She smiles. “Just get your ass out of this place before eightp.m.”

“I’ll be sure to ask Alice.” I squeeze her hand. “Thanks, as always.”

She shrugs. “Make me your slutty brownies and I’ll forgive you.”

I make my way to the office, already halfway through the sandwich when I reach my desk. Wyatt’s munching on a protein bar, the same kind that he said last week was mankind’s worst invention. He smiles when I approach.

“Hey, neighbor. I never asked—how was meeting Valeria?” he asks.

“She was cool. Very into contemporary female art.” And touched my hand, I think, and my stomach flutters.

“Yeah, she’s awesome, isn’t she? She’s all over that intellectual stuff. Did you see Stroke? Her Oscar movie?” I shake my head, earning myself a wide-eyed stare from Wyatt. “Well, she plays a woman who uses art therapy to piece together this night she disappeared as a kid at a traveling carnival. It’s the most harrowing film I’ve seen in years.”

“I’ll have to check it out.”

“You know, she—”

Alice pops her head out of her office. “Luna! I want you working in my office today.”

Wyatt and I exchange a glance. Having an assistant work in a manager’s office is…not really something anyone does. As long as we do our work, we’re fine to be in our pod. Steven even told Wyatt once he didn’t want to see his face for more than an hour total a day.

“I’ll have to use my iPhone,” I say.

“That’s fine. I have a spare laptop.”

I forward Alice’s incoming calls to my cell, give Wyatt a shrug, and head into Alice’s office. When the door shuts behind us, my heart’s hammering like the walls are closing in, even though we’re surrounded by glass. It’d be bad enough to be in such close quarters with a normal person, but Alice’s personality takes up the space of five people.

“Just so you know, I’m not pressuring you either way, but you’ve been a great assistant,” Alice says.

I look to the laptop screen. We have plenty of emails to answer, thank god.

“Thanks.”

Alice looks at her own screen, her sudden frown barely visible from the corner of my eye but taking up the whole room. “Can you believe those emails from John’s fucking lawyer?”

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