Page 93 of Play Room Actor

My gaze drifted back to the screen, and I paused. “This clip is almost fifteen minutes long. You filmed me for that long?”

Luca gave an awkward grin and nodded. “Sorry?” His blue-gray eyes grew wide as he fidgeted with his damp platinum-blond hair.

“That sounded like a question.”

But Luca had a certain charm—something fresh and disarming—that I couldn’t help but find amusing.

“You’re an actor,” he continued cautiously. “For Nico’s play, you wouldn’t even need to learn any lines.”

“I’m not acting here,” I pointed out.

“No one has to know that.”

“Ugh!” Juri groaned, clutching a bottle of iced tea from the fridge. “Just delete the clip if he doesn’t want it.”

“We’re not there yet,” Luca insisted, turning back to me. “Do you know Nico’s play?”

“No,” I said, holding out my empty glass, which Juri filled with iced tea.

“Oh! It’s great! It’s about a woman who falls madly in love with a dead man.”

“Let me guess—I’d be the dead guy?”

“Yes!”

The sound of a key turning in the front door interrupted us. “Hello!” Nico called as he came in and closed the door behind him. When he saw the three of us standing in the kitchen, he raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“And here comes the writer!” Luca announced. “I’m just trying to convince Dominic to be in our play.”

Juri grabbed his cigarettes and disappeared out onto the terrace.

Nico, now heavily laden, set his shopping bags on the counter and unloaded the groceries into the fridge. “What role? There’s only one male speaking part, and it’s an old man.”

“No,” Luca objected, holding up the video. “This is better!”

Nico paused, watching a few seconds of the clip. “Oh … that’s good! Can we use this?”

Both of them turned to face me, their enthusiasm overwhelming. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, so I shrugged. “Sure, whatever,” I muttered, heading back out to the terrace and collapsing into my chair, feeling drained.

Juri stood at the railing, smoking and typing something on his phone. When his cigarette burned down, he came over to stub it out in the ashtray next to me.

“You look totally burnt out,” he said as he sat down beside me.

“Yeah, I guess I am. If I were a smoker, I’d bum a cigarette off you right now.”

Juri cackled. “I wish I’d never started.”

A faint smile tugged at my lips but disappeared as a dark thought shot through my mind. “I wish that too.”

“What did you start?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. But it wasn’t nothing. I was about to burst from all the crap bottled up inside me. “I just got mixed up in something.”

“What kind of something?” he asked.

“Chemsex parties.”

Juri fell silent, so I turned to look at him. He met my gaze knowingly and leaned back in his chair as he lit another cigarette.