Page 19 of My Twin Sister's Ex

“I guess that depends on who you are,” Bennett said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re all different. Some of us go to college. Some of us don’t. But we still need mechanics. If everyone went to college and got white-collar jobs, no one would be left to fix the cars.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way.” It was small, but Bennett was starting to change something inside me, and I wasn’t so sure it was a bad thing. In fact, it felt pretty amazing, this new way of seeing the world. I’d been so blessed with all I’d been given. Talking to Bennett helped me realize that. He’d been through a lot with his mom dying, and I admired his strength. It had made him who he was today.

“Wouldn’t this world be a boring place if we all followed the same path?” Bennett asked.

“I guess it would. We’d be like a bunch of robots.”

“Exactly,” Bennett said.

“Are you ready to start running through these lines?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Let’s just read through it first, and then we can start talking about the blocking.” And where we would stand when we performed our three different kisses. My heart rate picked up just thinking about it.

“Sounds good.” Bennett nodded. Did he seem nervous, or was it just me? Bennett hadn’t struck me as the kind of guy who was easily rattled. He was so rough and impenetrable. Life had made him that way. Jackilyn had said that his mom had died when he was younger. Growing up without a mom had to make a person tough.

We read through the first few pages, skipping over the actions, including the kisses. “That was great. You’re a natural.” Bennett was actually a lot better than I’d realized. He had real potential. But he was far from perfect. We had our work cut out for us if we were going to win this competition. And, thankfully, Bennett seemed willing to do the work. At least he did today. Hopefully, he’d still feel this way the next time we met up to practice.

“I am?”

“Definitely,” I said with confidence. “It’s still going to be a lot of work to get all this memorized, though.”

Bennett’s gaze grew determined. “I’m not afraid of hard work.”

“The first step is to get us off book,” I said, all businesslike. “Then we can start working on putting the emotion into it and polishing everything up without having to look at the script every five seconds.” It helped to keep my tone professional and serious. That way, I didn’t turn into an awkward, blushing idiot. You’d think by now that I would be used to handling kissing scenes like they were no big deal. But I still had to put on this confident persona to keep myself from acting nervous.

And this time, it was way worse. Because Bennett had just finished dating Jackilyn, and he was smoking hot. I could feel the waves of heat rolling off of him. His eyes smoldered when he looked at me, and I could hardly bear it. Why would Jacki ever want to break up with this beautiful boy?

“This may sound like a dumb question, but how do you get off book?” Bennett asked.

“That’s actually a great question. Not dumb at all. There are lots of ways to get lines memorized, but I’d say the best is repetition and time. One of my friends taught me a trick where you record yourself reading only your lines, and you listen to that over and over.”

“That’s a great idea.”

“Yeah. Then you can listen to it when you don’t have a chance to sit and read. Like when you’re walking somewhere or driving,” I said.

“I’d probably listen while I read my lines too.”

“I’ve done that before,” I told him. “It’s helped to have the recording going because my mind tends to wander, and the recording keeps me on track.”

“It feels overwhelming to think that we have to memorize all of this,” Bennett said.

I was beginning to understand why he struggled to memorize his lines in the past. Maybe he just hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. Or he didn’t believe that he could. “It gets easier the more you do it. Like anything worth doing, it takes a lot of hard work and practice.”

“I didn’t realize how hard this class was going to be when I signed up for it,” Bennett groaned.

“Hey! It’s okay. We’re going to get this memorized, and it’s going to be great. I swear.” I hoped I wasn’t spouting a bunch of false promises.

“I know it’s really important to you that we do our best on this project,” Bennet said.

“It’s important to both of us,” I said.

Bennett leaned back from the table, studying me. “I know this is probably the most obvious thing I’m going to say all day, but you’re a lot nicer than your sister.”

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