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“Sexually it could get me HIV. Do you have a body condom for my
job
, Jilly?”

She gave me a toothy grin. “Sure I do, doll. That’s what reality shows are for.”

I looked around like she’d just dropped state secrets. “
Jilly
!” I hissed. “For God’s sake—”

But she was relentless. “Yup. You’re single. You’re young. You’re closeted. If you don’t make this work—” she stopped to snag a leftover mousse cake off the discarded plate on the table next to me “—I could always boost your career by booking you on
The Bachelor
. It would be
phenomenal
—”

“I’d sooner eat toe cheese!” I snapped, and Jilly spit mousse crumbs all over both of us. And then burst into raucous, hysterical laughter.

“
Buahahahahahahaha
—”

“Jilly, calm down!” I patted her on the back and offered her a napkin.

“
Hahahahahahahahahaha
!”

“Here, hon, you’re scaring me!” Together we blotted off her face and her brushed linen suit, but the laughter—loud enough to turn heads—continued. Finally I just pulled her to my chest and held her, laughter muffled against my shirt until the noise stopped.

When she was done, I looked down and saw to my horror that she was crying. Here. In public. “Jilly?” I asked, in the sudden quiet of the room.

She’d taught me from the very beginning to always have tissues and a lighter on hand, and I fished the tissues from the pocket of my jacket because the napkins were all used up. She took them, and looked at me, tears spiking her lashes, mascara running down her face, and all other makeup with it. A wistful smile graced her features.

“It’s just,” she said brokenly, “that I remembered Vinnie, and the psycho cow. And . . . you just did it. You just did the psycho-cow thing, and I thought,
I have to tell Vinnie about that
.” She dabbed her eyes with her tissue, and I kissed the top of her head.

“Yeah,” I said, not sure what to do with this. Not here. Not in the crowded place. The words “I miss him too” hovered between us, but I couldn’t say them. Not because anyone would suspect the truth, but because, bless her, Jilly had finally gotten me to the place she’d been trying for. The place where I had something that mattered besides the big black hole of trying not to think about him.

I wanted to act. I wanted to be on the set with Carter Samuels and Levi Pritchard. I wanted to be Anna Maxwell’s favorite actor. I wanted Simon Conklin to give me stage directions and tell me what to do, and for Hunter Easton to write me beautiful boys with fractured souls. I wanted to be a part of this again, like I wanted my next breath.

Oh God, let me be somebody new.

She calmed down and then excused herself to the ladies room. I headed toward the gents to see what I could do about the T-shirt under my bomber jacket, and found Noah on my heels.

“It’s toast,” he said as I wiped futilely at it in the mirror. “What set her off?”

I shrugged, not wanting eye contact with him right now—not if it meant he was going to dip deep into my soul and see all my secrets.

“She had one of those, ‘I have to tell Vinnie’ thoughts, and then . . .”

“Remembered that she couldn’t,” Noah filled in soberly.

I gave up on the shirt. “Think the gift shop has something that doesn’t look like . . . like . . .”

“Like a cum rag in a clown orgy?”

I gasped, and the effort not to laugh, hysterically and out of control just like Jilly, pressed against my chest until I could hardly breathe. I don’t know what he thought, me hanging over the sink, hauling in breath and fighting for control over my own goddamned face, but he didn’t say anything. Just stood there, his hand on my back between my shoulder blades, rubbing circles until I could breathe easily again. I closed my eyes and—

His hand on my back.

It felt so good. I remembered Jilly, wrapped up in my arms, seeking comfort, and wondered—would Noah comfort me if I asked for it?

Subtly, I hoped, I squared my shoulders and moved away.

“Yeah,” I said, like I was responding to something when I wasn’t. “Is there any way you could go get me one of those T-shirts? I’d be grateful—”

I started digging into my pants pocket, looking for my wallet, but Noah waved me off. “I’ll expense it,” he said, not looking at me. He disappeared, and I took off my bomber jacket and my pricey long-sleeved microfiber thing that Jilly had picked out that morning.

God. Poor Jilly. I wish I’d warned her—I should have warned her. I’d been having
I have to tell Vinnie
moments for a
year
. In fact, since I’d woken up hungover and on YouTube, he was starting to answer back. I was beginning to see that hanging out in my house—my empty house—with nothing to do but watch his movies and nothing to report but grief, had been a way to
stop
having those moments. When his absence was slapping you in the balls with every breath, there was no way to forget, ever, that he was gone.

I leaned on the sink and closed my eyes, resting my forehead against the mirror, shivering a little in the chill.

Pull it together, Connor
, Vinnie’s voice said in my head.
You weren’t this much of a pussy for your
Warlock Tea
audition, remember? You were like, “Forget about it—I’ll blow this audition and we’ll go out for burgers,” remember?

Yeah, Vinnie. I remember.

But we didn’t go out for burgers, because you got a callback for that evening, and we were starving. I brought you sandwiches from home.

Yeah. We called it champagne and caviar on wheat.

Yeah. Go out and have yourself some of that, for me, okay?

Yeah, Vinnie. Okay.

“Connor?” Noah’s voice yanked me out of my communion with the dead.

“Hi, yeah, oh, I was just—” I jerked away from the mirror and smiled at him, holding my hand out for the bag. I wondered if anyone had come and gone while I’d been zoned out over the bathroom sink.

“You look awful,” Noah said, but his voice was all concerned.

“Bathroom lights don’t make anybody look good,” I temporized. “I don’t know how—”
I don’t know how I used to get blowjobs in bathrooms, because it probably makes your penis look like green cheese
“—to make that stop,” I finished lamely, well aware that Noah was rolling his eyes and shaking his head and looking irritated as hell. “Let’s see what the gift shop had to offer, shall we?”

Forest green with redwood-colored lettering, and a logo with a giant globe and trees growing out of perspective on the part where Washington would be.
The Global, Bluewater Bay
was wrapped around the circle. So, not imaginative, but it could have been worse.

“Wouldn’t you think they’d have a bay and not trees?” I asked inanely, unfolding the shirt and yanking the tag. I made the mistake of glancing at Noah for a reaction and saw that he was focused entirely on my face.

“Nope.”

That was helpful. I grimaced at him and realized his glare was focused on my chest now, my abs, and I blushed.

“I hope you got the large and not the XL,” I chirped, pulling the thing over my head. “I mean, even when I’m bulked up I
still
have a neck.”

“I got the XL,” he said without a note of apology in his voice. “Because you
should
be an XL, but you haven’t eaten in a year.”

I scowled at him and opened my mouth to tell him what I told Jilly—that I must have eaten because I could clearly remember working out—but he looked at his watch and started shoving my discarded shirt in the retail bag from the gift shop.

“Grab your jacket and hurry back into the ballroom,” he ordered. “I’ll be in there with a soda on ice, and make sure Ms. Lombard’s okay.”

I paused, not wanting this kid—this
kid—
to just order me around like this, but he leveled that “know thyself” glare at me and pointed an imperious finger. “Now
go
!” he snapped, and I found myself striding through the corridors of the hotel, wondering where it had all gone wrong.

Read-throughs aren’t supposed to be your favorite thing. Everybody sitting around the table, reading through the first scripts, getting a feel for what the episode—hell, the
season
is going to be like.

But I’ve always liked them.

It’s a terrible thing to confess for an actor, but I can’t actually visualize a movie from the script. I can’t visualize a character from the words on a flat page. Thank God for Jillian and Vinnie, or I would have spent my career performing shit.

But at the read-through, when I heard other actors doing
their
parts, suddenly I knew who I was. I’d look at the words, and they became me, and I didn’t have any other words for the process than that.

And as I listened to Carter, Levi, and Marianna read their opening scene, that magic thing happened, where the words took shape and built whole new people. When I looked at my part, I wasn’t Connor Montgomery, closet case in mourning, anymore.

I was Slade Lupin—and I was
magnificent
.

The story unfolded: the Wolf’s Landing universe developed a portal to another dimension, and suddenly the two females left of my pack and I were spit from our time and place and into Northern Washington.

And we were brokenhearted and furious.

“Slade,” said Wind (the little elfin blonde whose real name I couldn’t pull out of a hat right now). “We’re all alone here. I mean . . . the others . . . I saw . . . We saw—”

“We
all
saw!” I snarled, as the hotel room around me became an outdoor location shoot on one of the San Juan Islands. “We saw the bodies, Wind. They . . .” My voice broke, and the tiny part of me that
was
me had just walked into a viewing room in Cedars-Sinai, where the world turned gray. “They were bloody and lifeless and . . .” I shook my head, unable to go on—because the script told me so. And the script told me to start again. “And we can’t think of that right now. We
can’t
think of that right now!”

“But what are supposed to
do
, Slade!” Wind shrieked. I would shake her, on the set—but gently, because of the tiny part of Connor still in my body.

“We are supposed to
stay alive
,” I ordered. “And if we have to murder every alpha, beta, and cub between here and our entrance portal, we are supposed to go. Back. Home.”

End Scene.

And the world held its breath again, and I—Connor Mazynsky—swam slowly to the surface of my consciousness, and smiled at Wind, who was Lissa in real life, and Brenda, who was Swift in the show.

And the table erupted into applause, which was a first for this read-through, especially because we weren’t at the end of the episode.

I smiled shyly around and noticed Simon, nodding at Anna as though they’d seen something that confirmed their earliest impressions. Hunter Easton—silver fox and writer genius, who had merely regarded me from the far corner of the room skeptically—looked eager, like a school kid who had just discovered a book was
way
more interesting than he’d first suspected. Jillian nodded at them, encouraging them to like me as much as they wanted.

I glanced across the table, to the little group of PAs and bodyguards, etc., who were sitting and waiting on the rest of us. Some of them had their phones out, a few had books. A few of them had knitting, which always impressed me.

Noah had a paperback in his hand—but he wasn’t reading it.

He was staring at me, eyes liquid and deep, mouth set as though he knew something the whole world didn’t, and it cut him to the bone.

I looked away.

I didn’t want to know what he saw—and I couldn’t keep feeding myself the line that he was research or that his opinion didn’t matter.

It was very clear to both of us probably that his opinion
did
matter, and I didn’t want to ask myself why.

By the time Noah got us home, Jillian and I were both exhausted and taciturn. I expected to maybe forget to make myself a sandwich for dinner, but Noah parked the car in the garage next to the house and then, to my surprise, let himself inside.