The messages depressed her, so Crimson looked back at the bed. Mark was a surefire cure for depression, even lying there sprawled and limp as he was, his mouth open and his fingers squeezing invisible triggers as he dreamed. Crimson envied Mark for a lot of reasons. For one, his name sounded almost human. There wasn’t a civilian in the world named Crimson, but there were plenty of Marks. If he had a last name, he’d be indistinguishable from one of them.

For another thing, everything about Mark was uncomplicated. Their relationship was uncomplicated. Mark always hit his target, which meant he didn’t spend a lot of time floundering about like a beached whale, trying to figure out what he did in life. Not like Crimson, who still didn’t know quite why she was in the mess she was in.

That’s one reason she liked going to bed with him. Mark made everything simpler just by being there. And hitting his target every time was a huge asset in sex, too. Crimson could just lie there and clutch at his neck and try not to set fire to his hair as he set fire to the rest of her. They didn’t kiss. They just fucked, quick and sharp. He said the unusual heat that her body generated made the experience worth repeating. He didn’t wax poetic about it. Uncomplicated, as always.

Crimson moved away from the window and padded into the kitchen to find a coffee cup and some instant. She watched the water pour from the faucet, envying its clarity, and held the cup in her hands until it was warm enough to release little waves of steam. Taking a sip, she closed her eyes and let the scent of it — dark and rich — guide her into a trance. Today was as piercing and pregnant with possibilities as the aroma and depth of a full cup of coffee.  But the color of it was so dark that she couldn’t pierce the veil. What, exactly, was she anticipating with such ferocity?

It couldn’t be work. It was weird enough that Crimson even had a job, and the one she had chosen — ringing up customers at a laundromat — was not exactly the stuff of excitement. Perhaps she was destined to break her perfect record of never letting her hands heat up and singing a garment by mistake. Crimson was very careful about her body temperature, and it had been her earnest expression and pleading tone that had finally persuaded Kara Flanagan, the owner, to give her a chance. Since then, Kara had grown to trust her, even befriend her, but at the outset it hadn’t been easy to convince her that a Starborn needed a job.

The job kept her busy, though, and it kept her from falling in with the rest of the veterans in their endless circles of hedonism and entitlement.  It would be so easy to slip into that madness. Parties every night, liquor and sex on the government dime, an endless wallowing in the damage that the war had done to all of them. Most veterans had nothing to hold on to when they came out of the war. They had only each other. But Crimson was different. Crimson had her memories.

Mark was awake now, bumping about in the bedroom with his telltale early-morning stretches and shifts and groans. “Crimson?” he called out, unsure and blurry with sleep.

“I’m in the kitchen.”

“Great!” She could hear the grin spread across his face, turning up the edges of that fuzzy touch of mustache that he thought made him look manly. “Could you get me a cup of coffee?”

Presumptuous little starbaby. “There’s a refresher on the table next to the bed.”

He poked his head through the doorway, all beady, needing eyes. “I don’t want a refresher, I want coffee.” She already had a second cup in her hands and was heating it. He saw and grinned. “You’re the best. You know, my mother always used to say, natural living is best.”

“That’d be good advice,” she said, watching the cup until steam was rising up from the surface of the water, “if I believed for a moment that you had any idea who your mother was or what kind of living she espoused.” She tossed him a packet of instant and handed the mug over.

He tore the packet open with his teeth and sniffed at it appreciatively. “That’s what I like to think she would have said,” he declared, turning up his nose. “Besides, in the absence of a real memory, why not choose the one I like best?”

Crimson shrugged. “I guess I can’t fault you there.” She sipped her own coffee and gazed at Mark. Rumpled from sleep, with an easy, lazy grin on his face, he was still sexy. Despite his infuriating sense of entitlement, despite the touch of peach fuzz that prickled at her skin when he slid down her body to bury his mouth between her legs. He was all lithe muscle and dextrous hands, and she loved fantasizing about him, loved when they found themselves at the tail end of a party, keyed up and in the perfect position to be alone together. That’s what had happened last night, what had led her to lead him home by the collar and throw him down on the bed. Aphrodisiacs and privacy, drugs and loneliness, and the desire to just forget everything with some good low-down and dirty fun.

“So what did we miss last night, do you think? We left pretty early.” Mark shuffled the coffee cup between two hands.

“I saw Beam, I think. She was dancing with… was it Violet?”

“No, someone else with weird hair. Crusher?”

“Crusher! That’s who it was. God, I’d hate to think of the state of her apartment after they had sex.”

“Seriously. Those two are the real reason for the no-contact policy. They could take down a building.” Mark rolled his eyes. “I thought Beam looked good, though. She seems to have shaken off whatever it was that kept her laid up for a week.”

“From laid up to just laid.” Crimson nodded. “Progress.”

Beam had taken a bad drug a week ago that had induced some painful war flashbacks. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch.  Beam had crumpled to the ground in the poorly lit dance hall, screaming for cover. “A pocket,” she kept crying out, “a pocket, right behind me, why isn’t anyone answering?” Crimson had been one of those who had held her hand and assured her that no spacetime pockets were forming, that the war was over and she was safe and among friends. The whole episode had turned Crimson’s stomach, and she had gone into one of her swearing-off-drugs phases. They usually lasted a week or two. Now that Beam was better, she’d probably stay straightedge for another few days, then start up again.

Starborn didn’t react to drugs the way humans did. The effects could pass through them and shift away; there were no addictions or withdrawal symptoms to fear. But even so, Crimson wasn’t overly fond of them. She felt cheap when she used, as though she were sinking to the level of every common caricature ever painted of the Starborn, and the high or the trip never seemed quite worth it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you tried very hard to resist. Like seeing a bad movie, you could either go with the flow and at least enjoy the company, or you could back out and be the one who ruined the party.

Sex was different. Sex had the forbidden appeal that drugs lacked. The no-contact policy was something of a joke — it was instituted to keep Starborn from reproducing on the chance that they might breed a fully powered Starman. It was not only scientifically absurd but not something any Starborn much wanted to do. They’d all shouldered enough responsibility to last them a lifetime, and given their experiences as children, they weren’t thrilled about the concept of being parents. But they still lived in a world where trust was a scarce commodity, and who among the human race could possibly live with a Starborn, even if they wanted to? So the rule was, Starborn weren’t supposed to sleep with other Starborn; in reality, that’s all that ever happened.

And it happened often, and more freely than human values would ever permit. That was the culture. It started at the clubs. The lights and sound, the dance and drugs, shook you out of your stupor and jangled your nerves until you were riding high on the edge of disaster, hyperconscious and frightened. You looked for a cushion, a warm body to fall against and a pair of eyes that understood what you were feeling.

Mark understood. Mark had been there, when the world was a faraway cipher, when they’d blazed through unfamiliar jungles on planets that lurked in Earth’s shadow, off to destroy the people who had created them, allowed to think of no other task. And Mark’s body knew hers, instinctively. They melted together like metal in open flame. His hips ground pleasure after pleasure out of her, and his face remained immutable, passion untouched by emotion. Crimson gasped, clutched at him, and let the whirlwind rip her bare.

And then they stood in her kitchen and made small talk about last night’s party. This was life. They had no reason to expect anything else.

“You want another before work?” Mark said to her. He ran a hand down her arm, shoulder to elbow. Crimson watched his fingers and felt sharp heat, both new and remembered, slap at her insides.

She raised her eyes to meet his. There she saw a lazy, noncommittal desire, and it wasn’t enough to move her. She shook her head.

His hand fell away. “Whatever you say.”

Mark was easy that way. Crimson smiled. “Another time,” she said, collecting his coffee cup to rinse it in the sink.

“This about Beam?” His head was cocked in curiosity.

“About me,” she said. “About work.”

The two were the same. She didn’t work for money, she worked for herself. Mark, like most of them, didn’t work at all. No need, not with the pensions a grateful world had bestowed upon them in the wake of the Rallions’ sudden and complete exeunt of the planet. The children had banished their parents, and like any children in a parentless world, they went wild. The Starborn were nothing but Lost Boys, and if that made Crimson an unlikely Wendy, well, she’d take that role. Not because she wanted to be anyone’s mother, but because she remembered her own.

Andy hated nothing so much as he did clouds.

Clouds were never harbingers of great things to come. He had his theories about the whys and wherefores, but the facts were clear. He had a forty percent chance of being given a dirty look when it was cloudy. That chance was less than twenty percent in fair weather. And he’d watched the stock market for a period of seven months, pegging it to the weather. There wasn’t an economic downturn that was preceded by a clear day. Cloudy days were, in fact, far worse than rainy days. Rainy days ended up with a clearing sky; clouds just got worse before they got better.

And there were clouds above him today, and sure enough, a homeless man gave him a dirty look as Andy stepped on a stray soda can and crunched the poor guy awake. Andy turned, gave him an apologetic shrug, but the man just huddled back into his makeshift bunker and muttered to himself. Andy suspected the air pressure. It got into you the minute you were awake. No looking at the sky needed. That’s the way it seemed to work.

He was on his way uptown to Columbia, where a triad of scientists in thick glasses with pocket protectors had requested his help analyzing the social habits of fruit flies. That was the way things went in his business. Sometimes he got to solve crimes or save lives, but most of the time it was watching insects mate and calculating the chances of the poor bugs getting laid when they shook their left wing first as opposed to their right. In the end, though, it didn’t really matter to him what numbers they wanted him to crunch. Numbers were numbers, and he knew his way around numbers.

An ambulance speeded around the corner, wailing like a distressed mother, and Andy jutted his chin out at it, his feet stopping their steady shuffle to gird him in a moment of triumph. He was vindicated. Crappy things really did happen on cloudy days. He’d have to spend some time looking at accident reports and tracking them against the weather. Of course, accidents were a hard thing to analyze. So much went into them. He could say the same about the stock market, though, but that had been a relatively long testing period. And the dirty looks were pretty decisive.

The hiccupping wail shorted out and died less than a block away, and, his curiosity piqued, Andy decided to slip around the corner and rubberneck. The orange flash-flash of the ambulance’s lights reflected against the windows of the corner brownstone, like the neon sign outside some macabre burlesque. Come right in and see the horror. So Andy did.

Just a block from the park, on a posh block of townhomes, the ambulance had stopped. It sat at the edge of a cordoned-off section of street. Just beyond the police barriers lay a big yellow school bus, diagonal to the street, as though it had lost control and skidded off to the side. One wheel was boosted up onto the curb, and Andy saw as he edged closer that the windshield had been veritably smashed in. A few dozen people stood outside the barriers, gasping, making murmuring sounds of sadness and horror. Andy pushed through them, threading his way to the front of the throng with a hand on a shoulder here, an “Excuse me” there. The crowd was too grief-stricken to pay him notice; they just stepped aside. And it was easy enough, once he’d found his way to the front, to realize why.

The paramedics were lifting the body of a kid, a college student by the looks of it, onto a stretcher already lined with a black body bag. His head was cracked, and dried blood caked it, matting down shocks of black hair. Beneath him lay the remains of a jaunty old bicycle, one wheel still spinning from the force of the impact. A guitar had smashed into several pieces across the pavement, too, and strings curled up in bizarre helixes from the shards of polished wood. As Andy watched, a policeman sighed heavily and put a hand on the spinning bicycle tire, bringing it to a halt.

Grief swept through Andy, and he raised a hand to his face, palm scratching against sandpaper stubble as he sought to wipe away errant tears. He wasn’t an emotional man, but the mood of the crowd was overwhelming, and a bit of their emotion seemed to seep into his bones as he stood and watched them cart the boy away.

It was only when the crowd was finally dispersing, with gentle guiding hands on shaking shoulders and words of comfort murmured, that Andy saw a downturned blonde head of hair on the steps of the next apartment down. It was a woman, slumping and doubled over on the staircase. She was crying, her shoulders heaving with sorrow, and one twisted hand clutched the railing as though she feared the ground beneath her might give way. Nobody was comforting her. She was sitting there all alone.

Andy’s heart lurched. He found himself moving toward her with the heavy, unresponsive limbs of a sleepwalker. As he approached, she lifted her head, and he caught a glimpse of a Cupid’s bow mouth and a sculpted, porcelain profile. Her eyes glittered even through their redness. She drew her free hand through her hair, trying to push it out of her face, and it was then that she noticed the man approaching her.

“Did you know him?” His voice sounded strange, guttural and choking. He almost didn’t recognize it.

She turned plaintive eyes up toward him. “I killed him,” she declared.

* * *

Andy should have known better, but he couldn’t help but glance back at the bus. The driver, or the man who looked very much like he was the driver, was in handcuffs near a police car just to the left of the shattered windshield. And the woman was sitting out here without any possessions, purse or handbag or briefcase. Still, he glanced, and she noticed. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I didn’t kill him kill him. But… but it’s still my fault.” A new round of sobs wracked her, and he watched her bite her lip, fighting for composure.

He found a seat on the steps next to her and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees as he gazed sideways at her. “What do you mean, it’s your fault?” he asked, trying to sound as kind and sympathetic as he knew how. He sort of hated to see this woman, this stranger, cry. A face so delicate ought never to be contorted in tears.

“He lives below me,” she said. “Lived below me, I mean. Oh, God.” She hugged her knees, trembling, trying hard to keep composure. “He was a music student. Used to practice… all hours of the night.” She hiccupped, gasped and swallowed hard. “This morning he was playing his damn guitar at six a.m. I was so mad.”

She slapped a hand to her face, digging the heel of her palm into her eye socket and clutching her skull. “I was stomping on the floor, trying to get him to shut the hell up. I had a headache. And at one point I…” She scowled, stamping her foot on the step in remembered anger. “I shouted down that I hoped…”

She gestured toward the scene, and she raised her head, her eyes meeting his for the first time. The intense, tear-stained blue nearly cost him his breath.

A deep breath, then half shouted in an effort to get it all out. “I shouted down that I hoped he’d get hit by a truck.”

Then the tears were upon her again, and she lowered her face. “And look at this!” she managed to gasp out before she was sobbing uncontrollably again. She buried her head in her hands, doubling over on the step, a prisoner of erratic breaths and flowing tears.

Andy gazed at her. It seemed beyond the pale to him that she’d actually consider herself responsible for this. And it seemed horribly unfair, too, that she should be here all alone, punishing herself for a stray thought.

“You know that’s impossible, right?” he said gently when she had calmed a little. “You know there’s no way this is your fault.”

“But what if I caused it somehow?” Her eyes were huge and pleading, like silver discs reflecting the sky. “What if my thinking it was some sort of negative energy, and…”

“Has it ever happened before?” he said. “Have you ever wished anyone dead, and then they turned up dead?”

She recoiled both at the question and the matter-of-fact clip of his voice. “No, of course not.” Her lip curled, a withering petal.

“But you’ve wished people dead before.”

Now she was shocked. “Not seriously, of course not–”

“Just stay with me.” He kept his eyes cool and grave on hers. “There are studies. Basically, they say it’s normal and common to have occasional violent thoughts. Just the throwaway kind. That’s all this was, right?”

“I guess,” she said, her voice laced with trepidation. In the strangeness of the line of questioning, she’d forgotten to cry.

And you’ve done it before, just like everyone, right?”

A flash of defensive anger blinked through her features. “Yes, but…”

“Then how come you’re not leaving behind a trail of bodies?” he asked. “Because if you were seriously able to wish someone dead, don’t you think you’d have done it before this?”

“I don’t….” She scowled. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying, the numbers don’t lie.”

“What?”

“Look.” His hands began to move, creating blocks of space as he spoke “There’s a correlation between what you said and what happened, right? But there’s no data to support causation. You can assume causation more easily when there’s a higher rate of correlation. But in this case it’s only one instance. So the probability of you actually causing this accident is low enough to render it statistically nil.”

She stared at him a long moment without moving. Then, her eyebrows turning up in the center of her forehead, she leaned back. “Is this your way of comforting me?”

Andy fidgeted. “Is it working?”

In answer, she thrust out her hand. “My name is Laina,” she said.

* * *

He thought the best thing for her would be to get away from the scene, and she willingly went, glancing over her shoulder at odd intervals. Andy knew by now he’d be late for work, but this woman needed someone, and here he was. He was relatively surprised at himself for not paying more attention to the swing in her walk, her confident gait and the way her leggings hugged her hips. He noticed them, made a note of them, and then consigned them to the back of his mind. This was not the time to calculate his chances.

They sat with street-vendor-provided coffee on a bench on the outskirts of the park. Her face regained some rosiness as she drank, and she sniffed the steam with the look of a young girl returning to a familiar place. “Thank you,” she said. “This is just what I needed.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But honestly?” She tilted her head, and for the first time the edges of a smile inched toward her lips. “Your comforting style is a little weird.”

He wasn’t sure how to take that. “I just go with what I know,” he said unsurely, taking a gulp of coffee and searing the inside of his mouth.

“Numbers.”

“Well, yes. Statistics, to be more precise.”

“You’re very strange.” A musical lilt through her voice, and she tilted her head. “When people think of comfort, they don’t often think of statistics. You know that, right?”

“I suppose. But I don’t understand why.” He lifted his head, hollow cheekbones flushed with the heat of the drink. “They take the risk out of life, make it so much less frightening. Statistics are so good at showing us how irrational our fears really are. Didn’t they help you?”

She mulled the question, looking down into her drink as though expecting the answer to be lurking at the bottom among the loose coffee grounds. “Actually, I think it was you who helped me. You don’t exactly come across as a mathematician.

“Well, that’s good, I suppose.” His brow furrowed. “Are you going to be all right? Do you have someone who can be with you? You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I have an appointment with my astrologer,” she said. “And then work. That will keep me busy enough.”

His eyes widened at astrologer, but Andy bit his tongue. “Good,” he said. In a minute he’d have to check his watch, and probably leave her behind to head off to Fruit Fly Land, but it didn’t seem right to do it just yet. He wanted to linger, to stay with her for a little bit longer. Just to make sure she was all right.

“You never told me your name.” Her voice, quietly alluring, broke through the fog of his mind.

He turned. She was looking straight at him then, and with a sudden lurching of his heart, he at once realized fully how attractive she was and how wrong it was of him to realize that at this moment. Still, as he watched the color rose steadily in her cheeks, he had to wonder if the attraction was just his own.

“Your name,” she prodded again.

“Sorry.” He let himself smile. “Andy.”

“Andy what?” Her hand flexed on the coffee cup.

“Andy Williams. No, not that one.”

At this, a laugh burst from her throat, subtle and low, like water falling. “Isn’t that one a million years old?”

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t want there to be any doubt.”

She got to her feet. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Andy Williams. I’m Laina Hall. And thank you again for taking the time.”

When she walked over to the nearby trash can to dispose of her coffee cup, this time he did let himself enjoy the way she walked.

* * *

Work was… worklike. He was greeted by the trifecta of bespectacled scientists and given reams of data to look at, and he spent the rest of the day on spreadsheets and graphs, analyzing the trends. How soon after feeding did the fruit flies show intention to mate. What the likelihood was of a successful encounter compared to the amount of sunlight, the humidity, the number of female flies. Andy noticed halfway through that there’d been a sharp drop in matings after one of the longer-lived flies had finally lost his battle with old age. He wondered briefly if insects felt grief. But that would require a whole new study. Like he had said to Laina, one instance didn’t make the whole case.

He let his mind wander over a brief coffee break, a longer sojourn at lunch. It was an intriguing question, whether a thought bearing out into reality could be more than coincidence. Certainly thoughts and reality had a relationship, and there had been studies (most less than scientific) about the effect of mass thought. But most people thought about already-likely outcomes anyway. Was it because of a baseball team’s fans that they won a game, or was it because they won a game that they had fans rooting for their success? Cause and effect could get convoluted too easily, and correlation, in this case, wasn’t much of a sign of anything.

More likely was the human desire for certainty, for meaning and patterns. The capacity to learn was very much a product of pattern-matching. If you put red and yellow together, you’re going to make orange. How do you know? Because every time you’ve put red and yellow together before, orange has resulted. The correlation is high enough that statistically it’s near-certain that the combination is the cause. But there’s no real certainty. Sometime, thousands of years in the future, someone might put red and yellow together and get green, and then everyone would have to rethink the visual spectrum. A physicist might say that was impossible. But to a statistician, it was simply improbable to the point of being ludicrous.

Andy rather enjoyed those moments of doubt. He liked the idea that someday someone might make green out of red and yellow, that there was no mathematical reason it couldn’t happen. It was that tiny sliver of fear that reality might someday fall through that brought a charge to the normal and expected. Statistics were the paradox of predictable and unpredictable. One weighed the risks and chose the most likely outcome, but there was always, and would always be, a chance of chaos. Uncertainty was the only certainty. It made life exciting.

For example, he’d walked that same route from apartment to campus two hundred and thirteen times last year, when he was doing work for the physics department. Not once had he met a beautiful blonde with a swing in her walk. But that didn’t make it statistically impossible that he would. And today he had.

The future was uncertain, and that made it scary — but occasionally beautiful.

* * *

He walked back at sunset, the purple haze of New York’s reflected lights turning the cloud cover into something almost comforting. Clouds were worth the hassle at sunrise and sunset, he thought idly. The rest off the day they blocked the sunlight and stars, but when the sun was low in the sky they went from obstacle to matte background, casting the world in pleasant pastels. Life was full of uncertainties like that. Even something as annoying as a hazy day could become an object of beauty.

And even a man like Andy Williams could find a gorgeous blonde waiting for him on his way home.

Laina was standing against the thin, scalloped rail that served as fencing around the park. In a red T-shirt and blue jeans, she looked so thinly dressed that it was a wonder she wasn’t shivering. But not the barest tremble shook her limbs as she pushed herself off the railing and walked toward him. The mop of blonde hair was carefully teased and arranged now, and wispy edges tickled her face as she moved.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Her smile was infectious.

“Were you waiting… for me?” A nod. “How did you know I’d…?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t. I just figured.”

Andy wasn’t entirely sure how that worked. “Are you doing all right?”

“Much better. Thank you.” She nodded firmly. “I spoke to his parents. They’re so broken up. God, there’s no rhyme or reason to this sort of thing, is there?”

“No.”

“But there’s statistics.” She cocked her head. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. Too many numbers, not enough art. If it were all switched around, maybe life would make more sense.”

He felt a smile dawn on his face. “You may be right.”

“Anyway.” Moving closer, still swaying in that rhythmic way, Laina gazed up at him. She was nearly as tall as he was, but there was still that distance that allowed her to look up through a sheaf of thick eyelashes and catch his eye. “You helped me this morning. And you bought me that coffee. I’d like to return the favor.”

Her hand found his, brought it forward and opened his fingers to turn up his palm. “Let me buy you a drink,” she said, pressing a slip of paper into it. “Give me a call this weekend.”

Andy swallowed hard. “You’re asking me out,” he said.

“What if I am?” A coy smile.

He ruffled his hair and looked down at the paper. The digits swirled and swooped like ribbons. “I’d say yes,” he murmured.

“Then call me.” Her hand came down on the paper, and for a moment of quiet she squeezed his hand and smiled at him. Andy himself wore the dumbest expression possible, all stone stare and open mouth. Then she was brushing past him, saying “Bye,” and he was standing petrified in the night. It took him a good minute to let the grin overtake his face and the leftover warmth in his hand shoot energy through his body. He walked the rest of the way home at double speed.

The future was an uncertain– but occasionally beautiful– thing.

That’s why it’s somewhat easier to look at Ryan Markey today. We’re both getting our makeup done, and there is nothing quite like a tall, well-built man wearing what looks in this light to be cherry-red lipstick. Not that I look much better. But it eases the tension.

Today we film the episode where Luke Hathaway meets Andrew Starr for the first time. Well, technically they met for the first time in the episode we filmed yesterday, but we’re going to start by filming the cliffhanger shot that ends that episode– Andrew Starr will walk into the room, expecting to see his ex-girlfriend/source, Ellen, and will see me there instead– and go on to this episode’s scenes to save time and costume changes. It’s a stupid detail, but I mention it because it’s the reason Ryan and I have to look at each other for extended periods of time and say nothing.

It’s a bit of a hilarious piece of soap opera life. You’ll film, thirty times over, a scene that consists solely of staring at each other for five seconds. Ryan steps in the door. My hands are folded over my chest. He glares. I glare. They bring the camera in instead of him, and I glare at the camera. He does the same thing. Then all over again after sound and light checks.

At one point during the interminable staring contest, I flare my nostrils at him. He cracks up, doubles over laughing. We have to stop for a few minutes while he gets his breath back. Carl’s frowning at us, but everyone else thought it was pretty funny.  I’m pleased with myself. And I still think his laugh is just like Cheerios. Classic and clean. It wouldn’t even get soggy in milk.

We move on to the scenes where we’re actually talking. Basically Luke takes Andrew for a ride, convincing him through most of the episode that he believes his cover story about being a therapist eager to help the poor troubled Brian Hathaway. Andrew digs for information, and Luke keeps dodging, until finally toward the end of the episode I lay down the law.

“Because you’re no therapist, are you, Andrew Raymond?” I say, using the alias he’s been peddling in town. I pound my fist on the table. “You’re not even Andrew Raymond.”

He jumps a little at the sound, and our eyes meet. His face is flawless. He’s got caught, scared, defiant, determined to see this through all in his face, all without saying a word. He’s so believable, I almost forget he’s an actor. I  have a churning urge in my gut to apologize for yelling at him.

Then Carl’s shouting cut, and we’re back in makeup for a few minutes before going on.

Elena mops Ryan’s forehead with a cloth to pull off the beads of sweat. Ryan blows air out through pursed lips and closes his eyes. I’m staring again, and I nearly jump out of my skin when he says out of the blue, “Hey, Sullivan.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks? For what?”

His eyes open, I think. It’s barely a movement. He whispers even though Elena doesn’t speak English beyond Hello and Thank You. “For making this easier to deal with.”

There’s at least a quarter of a second in which I don’t know what he’s talking about. Ignorance is bliss, but it’s over as soon as it starts. Unfortunately, I still don’t know what to say in response. I nod and turn away.

Carl wants us back on our marks and off we go. Now Luke’s confronting Andrew Starr with what he knows about his true identity and Andrew’s fighting back as hard as he knows how. Ryan and I worked on this scene over the weekend, and we know just what to do; the timing, the motions, the way the words fly back and forth. It’s a brilliant take, he knows it, I know it, and I can see the smile he sends me through his eyes. Carl’s blown away, as evidenced by the number of times he doesn’t interrupt us. When he finally says cut, it’s in a voice that’s borderline spooked.

“Fucking Daytime Emmy material,” I hear someone say. Can’t turn my head. Too busy fielding the streams of sunshine coming from Ryan’s eyes.

It’d be so easy to grab his face in both hands and feel the light layers of his hair filter through my fingers like so much dust and lean in to touch to taste his oh god what the hell am I thinking about ?

Just before I turn away I see confusion register in his face. I shake the image away as Carl pumps my arms and congratulates me profusely on a great performance, I nailed it, what great chemistry. He doesn’t know the half of it.

Next scene and Ryan’s not as comfortable as he had been, which makes me feel terrible. I was supposed to be making things easier. At least the emotional intensity’s down a bit in this scene, as Luke tries appealing to Andrew’s humanitarian side. “You have to think about this,” I say to him. “You’re messing with real people here. A real family with feelings that get hurt, with hearts that break. Are you sure this is the kind of person you want to be?”

I feel like I’m tripping over broken glass.  Where did that come from? All of a sudden I can’t see.

Is this the kind of person you want to be?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

“Cut, cut, cut!”

Carl’s running between us all of a sudden waving his script like it’s a handkerchief and he’s on the shore saying goodbye to a parting ship. “What the hell was that? Where did it all go? What happened to you two?”

Ryan looks away. I look away. We both know the answer and neither of us are telling.

“Sullivan! What the hell was that? You look like a bee flew up your butt. Take this seriously, man! This is your brother we’re talking about. This could seriously hurt him. Think about it. Seriously!”

“That’s the third time you’ve used that word,” I drone. A camera guy sputters and then chuckles outright. It’s a convenient distraction, as Carl wheels and starts in on him, his script-hanky now brandished like a floppy sword. For a moment, it’s just Ryan and me on set. Inevitably our eyes lock.

God, it would be so easy.

Help, he mouths.

It’s OK, I mouth back. Don’t know whether I mean it, don’t have time to find out. Not sure it matters. We’ll be fine.

His face relaxes and he mouths, Thank you.

The you lands his lips in a pucker. And it would be so damn easy.

I’m about ready to break something. I haven’t felt this helpless in years.

Then, of course, he smiles, and I’m stronger than a thousand Mexican wrestlers and could eat Mike Tyson for breakfast.

The next take goes perfectly again.

–

And now I’m in the men’s room in the furthest stall from the door with my pants around my ankles staring at my almost-hard-on and panicking.

Because it would be so easy to sift my fingers through the reef of blond hair and pull his face to me and kiss his smile into a pucker again. Because I want to know what his skin feels like beneath the collarbones that flirt with me from the raised ridge of his shirt. Because it’s gotten to te point where I can’t not think it, outright and loud.

I’m attracted to him.

Ryan Markey turns me on. And he seems to be turning me, period.

But I don’t know if that’s the person I want to be.

That’s me. I’m one of the kids, Luke Hathaway. My character’s a thrillseeker. He likes wine, women, fast cars, and more women. I have at least two illegitimate children. One of ‘em moved away when his mom’s actress wanted to bump herself up to a movie career; the other one is on recurring status and occasionally appears like a fifteen-year-old set decoration to pout and scream at me.

Ryan Markey plays Andrew Starr, who I guess is unrelated to Brenda but is also a hotshot reporter. He’s out to uncover the dark side of my onscreen brother, Brian Hathaway, who is addicted to gambling and is apparently this season’s social-issue story. He found out through his former girlfriend, Ellen, who is now of course Brian Hathaway’s girlfriend. They had a sweet little love story, and once she had Brian in her clutches, Ellen immediately called her ex and said “Have I got a scoop for you!” Thus Andrew Starr’s entry into “In Every Life.” And I guess every life includes mine.

Let me tell you something. They say it’s a lot easier in these enlightened times to come to grips with the fluid nature of sexuality. Bull. Back in the day, if you felt a twinge in your pants when you looked at a guy, you chalked it up to admiration or envy and left it at that. Now you have to start worrying and wondering. Is it the media’s influence? Is it attraction? Is it admiration? Is it some sort of trauma left over from your father not hugging you enough? Maybe you were just spacing out and happened to be looking in his direction.

Well, I felt a twinge, and I’ve been worrying and wondering ever since and have come to no conclusions. All I know is that in next week’s script, Luke Hathaway is going to come to his brother’s defense and try to convince Andrew Starr into going the hell home. That means I’m working with Ryan. And if I work with Ryan feeling this confused, I’ll never get comfortable enough to do my job well enough that nobody can tell just what weird shit has been going through my mind.

So I call him. Say, “I wanted to run through some of the scenes next week. Make sure we have a good handle on the dynamic.”

He sounds surprised. “You’re pretty by-the-book, aren’t you, Sullivan?” And he laughs.

I have a long-standing theory that laughs are like breakfast cereals. Now stay with me here. What’s a laugh? It’s dry or it’s light, it’s sweet or brittle, it’s cold or warm. It can even be nutty. I’ve heard oatmeal laughs and cornflake laughs, even the occasional Super Cocoa Sugar Frosted Flakie laugh. But this is a laugh I’ve never heard before. It sounds like Cheerios. Strong and dry, round, and somehow classic. Like every other laugh out there is just a cheap derivation of this one original laugh.

I make a point not to mention that to him. But I do convince him to come over.

–

Sunday afternoon. He comes down the street. Walking, no less. What kind of guy in L.A. walks anywhere? He waves at me. He’s wearing jeans with cowboy boots and a loose-fitting gray shirt. God, the way his shirt moves around him. It’s like something out of a perfume ad.

I feel a twinge, and I worry and wonder. Again.

“This is your place?” he says as he wanders in, kicking off his boots near the mat. “It’s nice. I like the plants.”

The plants, don’t tell anyone, are my pride and joy. They’re a set of little bonsais and ferns in a hydroponic dish under lamps, and they look kind of like they’re suspended in space. I have them alongside the front hall. It’s a great effect.

Not that I tell him anything like that. “They’re just plants.”

“No, they’re nice. It has a sci-fi feel to it that I like. And I just like plants.”

“You have a garden?”

“Nah.” His eyelashes flutter. Well, he blinks. Still, you get the feeling that he’s blinking because his eyelashes flutter, not the other way around. “Where others have a green thumb, mine’s pitch black. But I just like the idea of them. They’re sturdy, all their parts are in order, and they breathe out what we breathe in. They just work really well.” Flutter, flutter. He bites his lip a little bit. “I’m sorry. I’m getting philosophical and I’m barely in the door.”

Damn it. When he’s shy like that…

“No, philosophical is good. It means you’ll give the scene a decent amount of thought.” We walk into the kitchen.

He laughs again. Cheerios! My brain is full of Cheerios. “I’m actually more of an instinct actor.”

“I can’t work like that. You impress me.”

“Well, how do you work, then?”

“Like I said, I give it serious thought.”

He comes around to lean gently on the island in the middle of my kitchen. His outfit, the blue and gray, matches the room’s colors. Like he belongs here. Oh, my God, I’m noting how he matches my interior decoration. I’m going to hell in a handbasket.

He looks around. “Gee, Sullivan. I had you pegged as a slob. This place is…”

“I like to be clean,” I say. “It’s just the way I am.”

“Oh.” He looks kind of uncomfortable.

It takes me a minute to realize what’s unnerved him. That phrase — “it’s just the way I am.” We’ve been repeating it, in one form or another, for the entire conversation.No, in most of our conversations. We haven’t talked about work, or sports, or even politics. We’ve been asking each other questions. We’ve been finding out about each other. Slowly, deliberately, we’ve been getting to know each other.

I know I haven’t been able to restrain my curiosity about him. And now that I think about it, he’s been doing the same thing. And if that weren’t bad enough, something else occurs to me: He’s realizing it too. And it’s making him worry and wonder, too.

That means it’s not just something that’s happening to me. It’s something happening between us.

I don’t know if that should be a comfort. It’s not. I’m more scared to death now than I was five seconds ago. Because if it’s something between us, it’s not going to go away no matter how many scenes we film, how many heart-to-hearts we have. It’s just going to get deeper and more intense. And I haven’t got any way to stop it from happening.

I offer him a drink. We run through the script and exchange a couple of halfhearted ideas. He’s pretty bright. He thinks about things like camera angles, things I leave to the directors to futz with. I wonder if he’s really as instinctive an actor as he says.  Then again, maybe if you can make sunlight hit your hair in  a way that undoubtedly makes teenage girls swoon, you’re that much more aware of what you look like.

Of course, we don’t know how Carl’s going to block it yet, so it hardly matters what we decide here and now, but I think we’ve built up a good consensus about how the antagonism between our characters is going to play out. I’m feeling eminently comfortable after a few minutes’ practice. Hell, I’m an actor. What am I worried about? I’ll pull it off.

I notice him glancing at the clock, and I ask if he’s got somewhere to be.

“No,” he says, “it’s the game.”

Who knew he was a big fan of college basketball? Something else I didn’t know. There seems to be so much.

We switch on the game in the den. He leans forward, puts his chin on his hands, and watches intently.  Every so often his shoulders shift and he mutters a “yeah” or a hiss, depending on what happens. It’s like he’s there, totally engrossed in the action, trying to direct it psychically. Hoping his flinches and small cries will make a difference.

It’s dim in here. I watch the screen reflect in his eyes. At one point I realize I’m holding my breath and try to let it out slowly, but it still rushes out in a puff.

He looks over.

“What?” I say.

“You tell me.”

“All right, I will.” I grin. “I’m thirsty. You want another drink?”

“I’m good for beer,” he says. “Do you have… any juice?”

The way he says it is so funny. Like a little boy asking his mommy for something extra at snacktime. I burst out laughing. “Sure, I got juice.”

I hurry into the kitchen and try my damndest not to let my hand shake as I tilt the orange juice carton over to pour him a glass. My damndest isn’t enough, I guess, because I spill it all over my nice shirt. My nice, dry-clean only shirt. I’ve got to stop buying them.

He hears me holler and comes into the kitchen, concerned. “Oh, God,” he says at the sight of the brand-new tie-dye I’m sporting. “I’m sorry.”

Like he’s the one who spilled it? “Don’t worry about it. I’m just a klutz,” I say.

“But you were getting it for me.”

I can’t stand that expression of consternation “Look, things could have been worse. I could have gotten it all over your shirt instead. That would be a shame.” I grab the end of his T-shirt and stretch the material between my fingers. It’s soft and pliable and feels great as it moves over my hand. “That must be really comfortable. What kind of material is that?”

“Not sure,” he says, looking down at it proudly. “It’s my favorite shirt, though.”

Then he looks up.

And I look up.

I’m holding the end of his shirt.

And nothing moves in my kitchen for a good thirty seconds.

“I’m going to go change,” I announce, turning as quickly as I can and striding into the hall toward the bedroom.

“Jordan, wait.”

What does he want me to wait for? I’ve got orange juice on my nice shirt. The stain will set. But it’s the first time he’s called me by my first name. I can’t not turn around.

“Don’t…” He stops. “Don’t worry about it, OK? N… nobody will know. Nobody knows better.”

So much for denial. “I know better. I know better and you know better. And you came over anyway.”

“You invited me.” What are we even arguing about? I don’t know, but I’m heading back toward the kitchen, back toward him, and I’m scowling as he goes on. “Why did you do that? It wasn’t because you wanted to work on your character dynamic, or whatever bullshit excuse you made up on the phone to get me here.”

His tone’s not quite accusatory, but I feel put on the spot nonetheless. I look down. That orange juice is definitely going to be a stain now. Damn it.

I suppose the one comfort in all of this is that he looks as distinctly uncomfortable as I feel.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t really know why I invited you over. I just wanted…”

“You wanted what?”

Then, simple as spring, out it tumbles. “I wanted to see you.”

He blinks another moment, then shakes his head. “But you see me every day.” The reason isn’t good enough for him, which is good, because it’s not good enough for me. “Why did you want to see me today?”

“I don’t know,” I say again, blankly. “I thought…”

“You do know,” he says. He’s close. I-can-see-his-pores close. “You just don’t want to say it.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” I feel like I’m getting shot at here. “You just told me not to worry about it!”

For a moment I think I’ve successfully confounded him. He stands there and frowns, his hand opening and closing. But then he looks up and says, “Do you want to know why I came?”

I don’t recognize my own voice. It sounds like a bullfrog’s croak. “Yeah.”

“I wanted to see where you live.”

There’s something soft in his eyes that hurts to look at.

“I wanted to see you here,” I say softly. Somewhere inside there’s the identity I’ve grown over these several years, the me I show to everyone. He’s in a box and he’s screaming and knocking on the sides, but no one can hear. He can’t stop this now. “I wanted to see how you looked in… in my space.”

“How do I look?” Barely a breath.

I can’t tear my eyes away from his. “Like you belong.”

I want to touch him. I want to touch him. I want to touch…

No. No. Stop.

“Go home, Ryan,” I say. “I’ll see you at work.” It’s a universe of hard work to turn away from him.

“Jordan…”

“Go home.”

He leaves somewhere between then and midnight. I don’t know. I spend the next few hours curled up on my bed, my head hurting and my hands aching. This thing won’t be stopped. It can’t be stopped. There’s nothing I can do about it now.

The question comes from a girl in an “I Heart Marriage Equality” T-shirt, such a bright neon shade of pink that I think my retinas are going to burn out just looking at her. And luckily her question is not directed toward me, but at Ryan Markey, who looks like he’s just been hit with an arrow. Poor schmuck. These fan Q&As can be brutal.

“Um…” He leans into his microphone and it’s the kind of effeminate movement that will be on YouTube for months to come. I know what they do on those Internets. I see him loosen his collar. Rookie move.

Then he’s all smiles again. “Are you?” he asks, and the girl, who’d sat down, looks around to realize the whole place is laughing. She turns as pink as her shirt and tries to hide inside it. Ryan sits back, and I’m jealous as hell. I should have thought of that.

The next question is for Annie, and it’s a normal one. I mouth to Ryan, “Nice one.” He grins and gives me a thumbs-up. For a moment it feels like he’s just another pal.

Maybe I can make this work after all. Maybe we can be buddies. Maybe I was just nervous because I haven’t worked with him before, and once we start sharing scenes more often this stupid bizarre stomach flu of a feeling will go away.

Maybe I’m fooling myself, though.

All right, here’s the thing. The camera thing has gone away. I’m no longer taking these internal extreme close-ups of things that I shouldn’t be focusing on. Instead, he makes me nervous as hell. I don’t even know what I’m scared of, I just know that when he shows up I go all to pieces. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is. I don’t think I’ve let on to the rest of the cast or crew, but then again, I’m an actor. That’s what I do. And if acting’s about anything, it’s about discipline. Show must go on and all that. Poker face.

Anyway. I lost my train of thought. So we’re signing autographs, and the girl with the pink T-shirt comes over and looks really sheepish. I can’t help watching this out of the corner of my eye. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, I just wanted–”

Ryan actually leans over the table and puts a finger to her lips. She’s T-shirt-pink again as he says, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?” and winks. The guy fucking WINKS. Who the hell winks and gets away with it?

She’s cross-eyed looking down at his finger on her lips and she sort of nods and slinks away clutching her autographed poster like it’s the last thing on earth she has to hang on to. Oh, that poor girl. She’ll spend the rest of her life wondering. And poor Ryan Markey. He’s going to end up with a gabillion fan blogs speculating about his secret gay love life.

Assuming he was joking. Assuming he didn’t mean it.

Oh, what the hell is that about? Look at the guy. What part of that screams “gay”?

And what the hell do I care about a co-worker’s love life, no matter who it involves?

All of a sudden I really feel like punching something.

See, this is what this has done to me. Ryan is messing me up inside. I can’t think anymore without thinking about what I’m thinking and then thinking about that. There’s something that scares me about the way I react to him, and I keep thinking, if I can just figure it out and understand it I’ll be halfway to getting rid of it. I’m sure it’s nothing. He reminds me of a childhood friend, or we met fifteen years ago in a K-Mart, or he has just about the most incredible face I’ve ever seen on anybody of any gender at any time in my life.

Oh, shit. Shit on a fucking stick. With horseradish.

I’m imagining it. I’m Jordan Sullivan, soap star, and I don’t get crushes on co-workers. It’s policy. Leaving the gender thing aside.

(Except for I’m not really Jordan Sullivan, I’m really Gordon Solomon, so how much of the rest of it is a lie, too?)

“Jordan.” Voice light like pastry puffs in my ear. Hand on my shoulder…

I jump and wheel. Ryan steps back and he’s looking at me blank as a rebooted computer screen. “Sorry, did I startle you?”

Relax relax relax. “No, man, you’re fine. Sorry. Fans make me jumpy.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “That’s got to be the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to me in a while.”

“You handled it OK.” See? No problem. Conversation with him’s no problem. “I would probably have jumped six feet in the air and come down screaming NO at the top of my lungs.”

He gives me a sideways smile. “Emphatically heterosexual. Good to know.”

“Hwha?” It’s a less than dignified noise that sort of snorts out my nose like a sneeze.

He just keeps on smiling. Does he even know what he’s…

Holy shit NO you motherfucker you are not walking away! “Wait wait wait wait. What does that – does that mean–”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he says, and he gives me this look that at once paralyzes me and makes me feel like a gigantic fool. “I’m messing with you.”

There’s a grain of doubt rolling around in the back of his voice that makes me think he’s maybe not so convinced of that himself. Not sure if that scares me or makes me feel better.

We walk along the sidewalk toward the bus. His hair is sort of caramel in the light. I wonder how he was raised that he got to be this way. This unbelievably infuriating, intimidating way. I wonder where he came from. I can see him as a farm boy, learning to jump from tire swings into lakes. Or maybe a kid from the city, hanging out on steps outside AC-less apartments. Or maybe nothing.

I keep walking with him. For no less stupid a reason than this: I want to know.

please note this IS fiction. Any resemblance to anyone the author knows (in Biblical or other senses) in real life is purely coincidental.

They say condoms aren’t sexy.

For real? Condoms? Condoms aren’t sexy?

Condoms are the sexiest part of sex.

Your mouth is swollen from kissing. Your tongue has the taste of your lover on it. Your bodies have been flush together for minutes that felt like hours and seconds all at once. Fingers have touched and tweaked in sensitive places and hips have bumped and rolled and moved in tandem. You’ve been so close, so warm and so together that you thought you might fuse into one.

And it’s all gone.

For a heart-stopping time-dragging moment you’re not together. You’re not even touching.

It’s agony. You need him so badly you can’t breathe.

And you’re watching him tear open a plastic wrapper, watching him kneel on the bed. Still you can’t touch.

Because thin latex skin is rolling over his skin and you can see each detail each inch as his cock is swallowed up in the luckiest piece of plastic in the whole world because it gets to surround him so tightly just like you want to, you can see what it’ll feel like as he pulls it, pinches the end, makes sure the bottom is secure so it won’t break. It’s masturbation and exhibitionism and holy fuck you want it to be you.

And it will be. Soon, very soon, you’ll be the sheath around him, you’ll be the comfort and the warmth that he eases into. You’ll feel him nestled deep inside you. You’ll make him pant and cry and moan. Soon. Very soon.

Soon, but not yet.

So all you can do is watch, your mouth dry but everything else wet. Feeling the seconds tick by in long, stammering steps.

It’s the instant before the dam breaks. Before he takes you in his arms and turns you into a diamond reflecting a thousand layers of sensation. It’s the soul-freeing moment before you take flight.

It’s the orgasm you have before you orgasm.

The sexiest part of sex.

So you know, we go home exhausted some nights, and some nights we go out for drinks as co-workers. This is one of those nights, when we just ignore the paparazzi and let down our hair.

The bar’s a good place. Usually it’s pretty busy, but we’re in that weird lull between football and baseball season, and Lakers fans are few around here. That’s OK. It means I can get my beer and sprawl all over the really comfortable couch they have in one corner.

Except for Ryan Markey’s beat me to it.

It’s like my eyes are a camera again, and the camera’s doing a long, slow sweep up his body, like this is some sort of soft-core Playgirl porn. I see his boots first, then the cuffs of his jeans. Up, up, up forever until his waist, then shirt, shoulders and a pair of eyes that react when I get to them. He jumps up to a sitting position, and I have to wonder if my jealousy about the couch is that plain to see.

I sit down– it’d be rude not to. “Thanks, man,” I say. He nods, and we sit in silence a bit, watching Marie and Annie laugh themselves silly about something us guys are too dumb to understand.

“Do you–?” I ask, letting my gesture at the girls complete the sentence.

He shrugs. We grin. I get a feeling like fizzing soda in my insides, and I drown it in beer.

“You’re good,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Your work.” He gives a sort of half-assed smile, like he’s shy. What the hell is he doing being shy? He’s a goddamn heartthrob. “I saw you in that film about the nun.”

“Oh, my God, that piece of crap? Independent no-budget nothing, right when I moved here. I’m sorry you wasted your eyes on it.”

“Well, it was crap, no denying that,” he says. “But you were the best thing in it. I actually kind of used to try and mimic your delivery and the way you work with the camera at my own screen tests.”

I stare at him. There’s a funny symmetry to this. He watched my camerawork and I’ve been shooting him in my mind the whole day. “Did it help?”

“It got me an agent,” he said. “But when I was at my audition for this job they called me on it. ‘You’re not playing Luke Hathaway, you’re playing Andrew Starr. Stop acting like Luke.’ I think it was Barbara who said that.”

“Ouch.” I cringe.

“I know, pretty pathetic, right?”

“No, not you.” I rush in to fill that void, as though him thinking I find him pathetic is not acceptable for a single second. “I mean, if I’m doing the same thing as Luke that I was as that minister–”

“Priest.”

“–Whichever. It means I haven’t grown at all.”

“I didn’t mean that!” He’s as hasty and nerve-wracked as I am right now. “It’s not that you haven’t gotten better. I was trying to… never mind.”

And then I click into camera mode again. His hand is moving against his forehead, which is kind of reddened, and he scratches the boyish cuff of hair there. His cheeks are splotchy with color, and he shifts in his seat. Then he turns to me and swallows, and I’m watching his Adam’s apple move against the skin of his throat.

Our eyes catch. I can’t breathe.

Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no.

I won’t admit this. I won’t let it happen. I’m up and over to Marie flirting with her something awful. It’s safe with Marie ’cause she’s married. She can take it. Annie, on the other hand, looks vaguely jilted. She keeps looking at me reproachfully. And out of the corner of my eye, I see Ryan Markey put down his beer, look pensive for a few seconds, then get up and leave.

Good. He can go away. Because this isn’t happening.

But Monday’s a workday, so all of that goes by the wayside. We’re in makeup, trying to memorize our lines. I have a scene with Mark today. He and I are fighting over the girl. Look, I know the face I have to put on for the magazines. We love the storylines, we love our characters, we really care about the state of daytime drama. It’s bullshit. I’m sorry, I really do love my job, but let’s face it. Luke Hathaway is as far from a real person as you’re going to get. I mean, “I swear I’ll do everything in my power to stop you”? For real? People don’t say that these days even if they mean it.

But people do watch it, and that means I’m getting my face powdered up and mouthing “everything in my power” over and over with my caffeine-starved Monday morning brain. My kingdom for a cup of tea, swear to God.

So this is when I notice it, right? It’s when Ryan turns the page of his script and finds the paper isn’t really willing to comply. So he scrunches up his forehead– and I see this all out of the corner of my eye, since I have to look away to get the eye makeup (yes, they give us eye makeup, but I digress)– and he finally licks his forefinger and flips the page up.

And his face gets this very serene, pleased look on it. I think to myself, just an idle thought in the corner of my mind, if I were a photographer, I’d want to shoot him like this. Because with his eyes angled down like that and a bit of blush on his cheek like that he really looks almost like something out of another world. Just really fucking beautiful. And then I think about something else again.

It’s maybe a half-hour later when we’re well into shooting and I realize I’m still framing him in my head, getting good camera angles, appreciating the way he tilts his head and the heaviness in his stride. I’m filming a documentary on Ryan Markey in my head, and I’m the director and the cameraman. It’s bizarre.

I’ve worked with Ryan for what, about three months now? We don’t know each other that well, but mostly that’s because we haven’t shot together. He’s starting to get tangentially involved with the Hathaway clan– well, “Andrew Starr” is… and so now we’re shooting at the same time of day if not in the same scenes yet. This is the closest I’ve gotten to him.

I’m not quite sure I know what it means, if it means anything. But I come away from the day with the feeling that if nothing else, Ryan Markey’s a nice thing to look at. If only I didn’t have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that that’s not all there is to it.

The streets hop with agitated energy. There’s a traffic jam in the rotary. Was there a car crash? I figure someone’s overheated, because everyone’s overheated today. The jam goes right around the fountain, and the drivers all look at it kind of jealously, wishing they could abandon their cars and toss off their ties and jackets and go for a wild naked romp under the water’s frigid sprinkles.

One girl is skipping against the tide, picnic basket tucked under her arm. how can she have that much energy on a day like this?

I’m feeling hot and beleaguered. Adults ought to have summers off, too. Nobody wants to work in the summer.

The girl skips past me and I notice a dog peeking out from her picnic basket, like Dorothy on her way to Oz. I have a strange desire to follow her. What would happen if I did? Might I start skipping behind her, too? Might others follow me? And then there’d be a huge line of merrily skipping working stiffs, all ending up in the park for a picnic?

We’d wind our way, like a big cheery conga line, through the neighborhood. Office buildings would clear, cars would sit abandoned, as we one by one joined the throng of impromptu delinquents. And the food that would come! Housewives would emerge from brownstones with crates of freshly baked cookies. The ice cream man would follow our parade. Deli chefs would carry piles of platters wobbling treacherously in their steady hands. By the time we ran cheering through the park’s gates, the whole town would be doused in the aroma of pastrami and popovers, and we’d sit beneath the trees, laughing and eating until our buttons popped one by one and we fell happily asleep.

It occurs to me that I’m smiling now.

From Seventh Sanctum’s Quick Story Generator

The theme of this story: dark character study. The main character: stressed politician. The major event of the story: failure.

What happened in the movies didn’t happen here. That’s what Mac had learned long ago, in his first year in the legislature. Lawmakers didn’t have crises of conscience on the floor and change their votes; the voices of the people didn’t get heard in a dramatic moment worthy of Capra. Vote-herding was a carefully orchestrated series of barters. You could swear to your constituents up and down that you would never vote for a bill containing entitlements, but then the leaders get you on the floor and say we’ll pass the bill you want so badly to pass but only if it’s folded up in our entitlement package. You end up breaking a promise either way. But then there will be the day when you need to do the same thing, put another guy in the same position, and if you wouldn’t play the game before ain’t nobody who’s going to play the game with you now.

So this is what he tried to tell Danny when Danny first got elected, all wet behind the ears and blushing like a kid at his first dance. Danny had preached the social justice gospel and after playing his first couple of weeks at being Elden County’s own personal Robin Hood, the leadership had sort of assigned to Mac the unenviable task of breaking him in.

Breaking in a young turk just elected by an upstart urban district was not a matter of sitting him down and explaining how the game worked. It was a months-long process, Mac knew, and it started with this – nodding sagely and leaning back with arms crossed as Danny, thrilled to have such a well-known mentor, rattled off to him his policy prescriptions for changing the whole wide world starting with his small patch of city. The kid was delusional.

“The way I see it,” he was saying, “all you’ve got to do is to identify the things that need work, and then you have the workers who can do it, and once you spur the employers into giving them a living wage and convince them that the infrastructure investments are worth your while, and you have a solution to two problems in one!” His hand swept boldly up and then to the side and down, and he knocked over his water glass with a loud chord of clinking ice.

“I will say one thing for you, Danny,” Mac said, watching the cloudy gray stain expand across the tablecloth. “You do have vision.”

“And what’s wrong with vision?” He pouted like a child. “Vision’s what people need. It’s what they ask for.”

Mac forced a chuckle. “I didn’t say anything was wrong with it, son. I said you had it. What you need now are the tools to make it work for you.”

Danny nodded emphatically. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Yes, yes, indeed.” A drop of water was hanging heavy from a corner of the tablecloth. Mac felt like he couldn’t breathe until it fell. Impatient, he grabbed it and squeezed. “Yes, indeed. That is indeed why you’re here.”

“So what do you think?” Danny said, eyeing his chicken with a slightly befuddled air. “How do you implement something like this?”

Mac tucked his napkin into his collar. It rustled against his tie. “First of all,” he said, ignoring the itch beneath his chin, “you understand that you didn’t invent this wheel.”

Fork halfway to mouth, Danny paused.

“That is,” Mac said, mouth half-full of beef, “you’re riding on a hell of a merry-go-round, son. You think we haven’t been on this horse before, but we’ve seen a lot. And those of us who haven’t seen it will pretend we have. Nobody wants to hear from a little freshman that he can do their job better than they can. You understand.”

“Then they should hear it from you,” Danny said. “You have the experience. Say this.” He got up out of his chair and wavered dangerously over the table. “Say you’ve had a crisis of faith. You understand what needs to be done now.”

This time Mac didn’t need to force the smirk. “I’m an old dog, Danny. I don’t learn new tricks.”

“Then you’re asking to be put out to pasture.” Danny folded his eyebrows into thick brown knots. He waved his hand again, and Mac had a moment of dread for the refilled water glass. “The metaphor’s wrong, but you know what I mean.”

“Change or die? That’s a mighty threat coming from you.”

“Not a threat. Just what always happens. Didn’t it happen when you were new? Old man, sitting in place as the world ran forward and just becoming irrelevant? Are you irrelevant, sir?”

Mac felt the toughness of the meat coat his throat with sour acid. He forced it down, chewing instead on his answer.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” Danny went on. “I know what you’re afraid of, I know what they’re afraid of. They’re all old dogs. So afraid of getting put to sleep. Let me ask you this, sir. Did you get into this for yourself? Of course you didn’t. Then why in the hell are you going along with this stupid housebreaking plan? Because you’re afraid they’ll retaliate if you don’t. Because you’re afraid you’ll lose your seat, lose your power. That sounds pretty selfish to me. Me, I’m not afraid to lose my power. I believe I won’t. I believe in my city and my voters and my ideas. Maybe they will lead me off a cliff but I will climb back up and keep fighting and I will not fail.”

“Enough of this foolishness.” The churning in his gut had gone from bad to worse. “You talk like this, you stick to this lone-wolf garbage and you have already failed. Success takes work, son. It takes compromise and planning and it takes allies. You are lucky enough to stick around here, you’ll learn that just as I did. Learn to play the game and you might get something done.”

The wildness in Danny’s eyes vanished in an instant. “I already have,” he said, sipping his water.

Three days later, when the vote came, Danny voted with the leadership. And as he said “aye,” he turned his head and gave a slight smile. Mac hadn’t realized he’d been staring at the kid until just that moment.

He was fairly sure he’d failed at something, but he couldn’t tell what. And he was fairly sure, too, that Danny had gotten something done.