Page 24 of Take Two

The specific weight he puts on my name immediately makes me suspicious.

“What?” I ask, lifting a brow.

“When was the last time you ate an actual meal?”

I stare at him. I take the pause to genuinely consider the question, which probably already tells him everything he needs to know.

He stares right back with the patience of a man who has had this conversation before and knows exactly how it ends.

A production assistant rushes past carrying an enormous armful of binders pressed against her chest. Somewhere further down the hallway, a voice calls for a department head with the calm urgency of something needing immediate resolution. Near the elevators, another conversation breaks out about location permits and transportation logistics, two people talking over each other in that particular shorthand that develops on long productions.

The entire building feels alive in that specific, purposeful way that only happens when something is actually being made. Intentional chaos organized around a common goal. I genuinely love it, even when I’m sitting in the middle of it slightly bewildered and holding a sandwich like it’s my last meal.

I think that’s the part most people never fully see or appreciate. People see the premiere. They see interviews, photographs, red carpets, and the finished film that eventually appears on a screen in a darkened room. They see the product of painstaking hours of hard grind.

They don’t see the machine required to produce it. Everywhere I look right now, people are solving problems. Someone is adjusting costumes for tomorrow’s shoot. Someone is coordinating the transportation schedule for the location near the arena. Someone is planning set dressings and flagging continuity concerns and arranging something else entirely that I don’t have enough context to identify from where I’m sitting. Someone is making sure the right people are in the right place at the right time, and none of it happens through any kind of magic.

It takes an astonishing number of people working in coordination to make a film, and every single person in this building is depending on everyone else to do their job with care and precision.

“You disappeared again.” Jasper’s voice cuts cleanly through my thoughts, accompanied by a snap of his fingers.

I blink and look up.

He’s holding the schedule in one hand now and watching me with the patient, slightly resigned expression. This man knows me, has spent the last two years studying precisely how my brain operates and has made a kind of professional peace with it.

“I was listening,” I say, looking down at my sandwich and weighing whether to take another bite.

“You were absolutely not listening,” Jasper says, taking a step closer and studying me with something that edges toward actual concern.

I glance at the sandwich. Then back at him.

“That’s fair.”

A laugh escapes him before he manages to contain it. “I asked when you last ate. You still haven’t given me an answer, and it has been three minutes.”

I think about it again, retracing the day backward in my memory.

“I had coffee,” I say slowly, with the careful delivery of someone not entirely confident in their own recollection.

“Cyaire.” Jasper says it with a click of his tongue that manages to convey an impressive amount of gentle exasperation in a single syllable.

“I’m fairly certain there was a muffin involved at some point,” I add, waving my sandwich vaguely in the air as I speak, which probably undermines the credibility of the claim.

Jasper closes his eyes for a moment and presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “That was six hours ago.”

“Then technically I did eat,” I say, and take another deliberate bite of my sandwich.

He opens one eye.

I smile pleasantly as I chew. He doesn’t return it.

“You’re impossible,” he finally says, once he’s watched me finish the rest of the sandwich and apparently confirmed that I am, in fact, capable of feeding myself.

“You say that like it’s new information,” I reply, folding the wrapper neatly and pressing it into my palm.

Jasper shakes his head, knowing he’s not going to win this particular exchange, and hands me the schedule.

“Good news,” he says, with the brisk efficiency of a man eager to return to his natural territory, which is logistics.