23
After Shane left, Lilah’s friends tried to grill her about what was going on, but she was too drunk and exhausted to give them any kind of coherent response. Soon enough, they’d bundled her into a car and sent her on her way. She leaned her cheek against the glass of the window, eyes half-shut, teetering on the edge of sleep.
She had thought she’d pass out as soon as she crawled into bed, but she’d tossed and turned for hours, her headache worsening, throbbing in time with a single word: Shane. Shane. Shane.
When she woke up the next morning, she lay there brooding for a long time. The loss of Night Call stung even worse in the light of day, a congealed lump of fear and self-pity and hopelessness lodged beneath her ribs. She ruminated over every step of the audition process—the lines she could’ve delivered differently, the missed opportunities to charm in conversation. But she was too exhausted to sustain her self-loathing spiral as long as she wanted to. Once it ran its course, she was able to let it go.
She sat up, her hangover hitting her like a frying pan to the face, and she knew immediately that the whole day would be a wash. As she trudged through the steps to make herself feel marginally more alive—shower, coffee, toast, gallons of water—she tried to ignore the low, persistent throb of loneliness that accompanied her, like an old injury that had never fully healed.
These were the times she most missed having someone. Spending the day cuddled on the couch or lounging in bed, no obligations besides napping, fucking, watching bad movies, and eating takeout. Something more attainable, in theory, than nearly every other facet of her life, something painfully mundane—but still somehow perpetually out of reach.
For as long as she could remember, her approach to relationships had been driven by the fear that she’d make the same mistake her parents had, finding herself trapped with someone who barely tolerated her out of fear of being alone—which meant, by extension, she’d accepted she might always be alone.
Instead, she’d prioritized her career, seeking fulfillment via the escape of losing herself in a character, the security of financial independence, the fleeting validation of success before the goalposts shifted once again. But that, too, was a relationship that often felt just as toxic, breaking her heart harder and more frequently than any man ever could.
The prospect of one day finding a romantic connection that nourished rather than drained her, that added value to her life, that made her feel safe and accepted and understood, sometimes seemed like even more of a fantasy than the most ridiculous storylines on Intangible. The brief glimpses she’d caught of it—last night; over the holidays; in Vancouver; nine years ago—made its absence all the more painful. The fact that those moments had all been with Shane—Shane—felt like a cruel joke.
As if he could sense she was thinking about him, her phone buzzed with his name—his real name now—as soon as she settled on her couch.
SHANE: how are you feeling?
Lilah rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, unsure how to respond.
LILAH: better
Still bad, but better
She hesitated, then added:
Thank you for last night
SHANE: glad to hear it. & anytime
I saw TBS is doing a best of Kate and Harrison new year’s day marathon, in case you’re in the mood for a walk down memory lane
LILAH: you know I don’t like to leave repression avenue
Still, she found herself flipping to the channel anyway. Her own face immediately filled the screen—the third season, she could tell immediately, based on the length of her hair and the jacket she was wearing.
She was behind the wheel of a car, Shane in the passenger seat. That fucking car. They’d spent hundreds of hours crammed in there, shooting pages and pages and pages of dialogue. Whenever they weren’t rolling, they’d sit in icy silence, without even their phones to distract them, staring out the window at the motionless landscape.
She vividly remembered all the times she’d seethed in annoyance as he joked around with the crew, jealous of how easy it was for him to keep everyone’s spirits up when the day ran long, self-conscious about how standoffish she must seem in comparison, when she was just trying to preserve her energy and stay focused between takes so they could all go home as soon as possible.
But watching it now from the outside, years later, she didn’t see any of that. All she saw was Shane, devastatingly charming, and funny, and charismatic—and all of it directed at her. How was it possible she’d found him so irritating back then? And the way he was looking at her…it wasn’t real, obviously. He couldn’t stand her in those days, either. But on camera, it read as undiluted yearning.
As the episode continued, she realized which one it was. Kate had been possessed by the ghost of a scientist who was unable to move on until she completed the study she’d been working on for years. Lilah had been stuck rattling off so much technical jargon she was sure the writers must have been messing with her. To make matters worse, she’d been fighting a miserable cold, her head feeling like it was stuffed with cotton, making it a struggle to retain even her easiest lines.
They were in the scientist’s lab now. Lilah practically had war flashbacks from how long it had taken them to shoot this scene. After finally getting the two-shot, they’d reset for her solo coverage, Shane out of range of the cameras. As soon as they’d called “Action,” he’d held up his palm, where he’d Sharpie’d the buzzwords she’d been stumbling over, grinning wickedly as the crew cracked up. It had ended up on the blooper reel at the wrap party, of course, and she’d laughed along, even as humiliation brewed in the pit of her stomach all over again at the pleasure he took in openly mocking her.
But what if she’d had it wrong?
What if he’d been trying to help her?
She drew her knees to her chin, wrapping her arms around them, something unfamiliar aching deep inside her. Close to loneliness, but more pointed. Emptier. Like her rib cage had been replaced by a black hole.
She wished he was there with her now. The urge to invite him over was so powerful that she had her phone in her hand before she knew it. She stared at it for a long time.
Sure, she could text him, but then what? He’d come over with food, and he’d make her laugh, and he’d smell so fucking good, and she’d fall even more in love with him than she already was.
She sat upright with a jolt, nausea surging through her.
No. She didn’t love him. She didn’t. It was impossible to be in love with someone she wasn’t even dating. Someone she’d hated for years.
And even if she did, she had no idea how she’d begin to tell him. To dig up the courage to lay herself bare in front of him like that, after everything they’d been through. After pushing him away again so recently. The prospect felt impossibly heavy, like she was a beached whale, crushed from the inside by the weight of her own tangled emotions.
Despite her best efforts, he refused to be consigned to a messy, complicated footnote in her past.
She let herself consider, just for the hell of it, what it would mean for him to be her future, too.
Obviously, their chemistry had always been explosive—to the point where it sent other people running for cover. She wasn’t interested in that kind of chaos anymore. But, while she’d never stopped feeling that spark, it was hard to deny that the past few months had felt different, and not just from the way things had been with him before. From the way they’d been with anyone.
As she tossed around the word “boyfriend,” though, it didn’t quite fit. It felt too juvenile, too simple, barely skimming the surface of everything their relationship had come to encompass.
But the only other title she could come up with was “partner,” and he was already her partner. Even after they’d stopped sleeping together, even when the sight of him made her blood boil, they’d still spent the better part of a decade side by side, sharing scenes and screens and red carpets and interviews and magazine covers, her name linked with his above all others. Not for much longer, she realized with a pang.
And then there was the last and biggest thing: the show. The fact that the two of them together, for real, would attract the kind of invasive attention that made her stomach turn. That would reset all the work she’d done to balance her mental health with the reality of being a public figure.
There was something about the inevitability of it, too, that grated on her now as much as it did then. It had poisoned her relationship with Shane from the very beginning; she’d resented him for how badly she wanted him, and resented herself for being so predictable.
Her phone buzzed again.
SHANE: you’re watching, aren’t you
LILAH: maybe
SHANE: you looked really cute in that lab coat
Her throat tightened.
She couldn’t tell him. Not right now, anyway. Not until she figured out what the fuck she even wanted from him—from them. The last thing they needed was to complicate things again.
And maybe she wouldn’t ever have to. Maybe, if she was very, very lucky, it would pass.