Page 9 of Heat Unscripted

I pulled my hand back. It was controlled. I’m sure it was controlled. But faster than the moment called for, my arm dropped to my side like I was guarding something. The jar was hers now, fully in her palm. No reason to touch her again.

“One teaspoon before each session,” I said. My voice was level. My voice is always level. “You can stir it into tea too, but the heat kills some of what’s good about it.”

She was looking at me and I couldn’t read it. Her hand had closed around the jar but the rest of her hadn’t moved, still curled in the chair, still half-buried in pages, still completely steady, which made my own sudden lack of steadiness feel like a fault in the machinery.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s really thoughtful.”

“It’s practical.” It came out harder than I meant it to. I turned back to the sideboard, where there was nothing that needed me. “A narrator with a wrecked voice tanks the whole production. A jar of honey costs nothing next to a week of delays and re-records.”

Quiet behind me. I could feel her looking at the spot between my shoulder blades.

“Of course,” she said after a moment. Careful. I knew the tone. It was the one she used on the hard character beats,when the Rogue said one thing and meant a heavier one. “Very practical.”

I made myself turn around. Made myself meet her eyes, because anything else would have told her something I wasn’t going to tell her.

The room smelled different. Not by much. The Beta Neutral still lay over everything, thin and chemical, but under it something warm had come up. Chamomile, still, but fuller now. Sweeter. Like cream left on the heat a beat too long, going toward something you’d want to taste.

I was making it up. I had to be making it up. The air handling in here was excellent, the exchange rate set high on purpose so nothing built up in the room, and I had never once in my life smelled something that wasn’t there.

“The third act transitions,” I said, and my voice held, because my voice always holds. “We should get through them tonight. Technical rehearsal’s tomorrow and I’d rather have the through-line locked before we block the live segments.”

She held my eyes. One breath. Two.

Then she dropped them to the pages in her lap, and it was over. Should have been over. Would have been over if I hadn’t caught the small shake in her hands as she turned the page, or the fact that the smell that wasn’t there hadn’t fully gone, or the fact that my own body hadn’t fully come back down.

“The third act transitions,” she said. “Show me where you think the Rogue’s choice lands.”

I took the chair across from hers. I opened my folio. I walked the through-line the way I work everything, beat by beat, every turn weighed, every choice checked for whether it held.

I didn’t think about how her fingers felt against mine.

I didn’t think about my own scent going sharp, or about my body reacting to a half-second of contact like it meant a damn thing.

I didn’t think about any of it.

We kept working. The script came together under both of us, her gut for character and my frame for structure, as smooth as it always was. After a while I called a car to take her home. At the door she stopped with her coat half-buttoned and the jar tucked into her bag, and she looked at me with something that wasn’t quite a question.

“The honey,” she said. “It really was thoughtful.”

“It was practical.” I’d started using the word like a shield.

She gave me that small crooked smile that rearranged her whole face, and stepped out into the corridor.

I shut the door.

I stood there in my quiet, perfect room, with its dead echo and its scheduled light and its excellent ventilation, and I breathed.

The pepper in my scent still hadn’t settled.

Under the chemical, under the chamomile, under everything that should have been nothing about a normal night of work, something warm and sweet hung in the air. I didn’t have an answer for it. Nobody had asked me a question, and I wouldn’t have known what to say if they had.

So I let it go. I was good at letting go of things that didn’t fit how I’d decided the world works.

I went back to my desk. I read through the notes for tomorrow’s rehearsal. I didn’t sleep well. I couldn’t have said why.

SIX

Tuck