Chapter 10: The Ask

Halliday set the container down, still closed, and followed him.

Doyle didn’t look back to see whether he was coming. He went out by the garden side of the house and along the covered walk, where the blinds were down and the walls had been painted the same color as everything else on the property, and stopped at the far end of it, past the last window. Nobody came back here. The crew ate in the tent at the back of the lot between setups, and the sandbag that had split against the wall two days ago was still sitting in its own grit.

Halliday had assumed he was being walked through the scene.

The cigarette was down to nothing between the man’s fingers. He looked at it, dropped it on the carpet, set his heel on it, ground it out, and left it there.

“You read for Glassmoor.”

It took a second to place it. “Yes.”

“That part was written for you. Every way you look at it, it was yours.” Doyle said it easily, the way a man repeats a thing he has said before. “You were never getting it. Dax had it before you walked into the room. Everybody sitting there knew that but you.”

Halliday said nothing. He was aware of his hands and made them stay where they were.

“You want to know why.” Doyle looked him over, unhurried, from the collar up, the way he had at call. “Because that’s how it works. Somebody has to carry the room, and it wasn’t going to be you. Not then.” A pause. “Now it could be.”

“Sorry?”

“Stick with me.” He said it like a courtesy he was extending. He tipped his chin back toward the house, at the fake windows and the painter’s fake life on the other side of the wall. “Any room in this city. Not this. Bigger than this. You want features, I can put you in the room where they’re decided. Second lead to start with. There’s more than that if you’re steady.”

There was a burn in the carpet now, the size of a coin.

“Thank you,” Halliday said. “That’s not — it isn’t something I’m looking for. If we’re not doing the scene, I should get back—“

“There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing.” Doyle didn’t raise his voice. “I’m just not satisfied with you.”

Halliday looked at him and said nothing. It wasn’t the acting. He’d had half of that since the second take; the rest of the morning he had kept himself from finishing the thought. Doyle had finished it for him.

“It’s a good part,” Doyle said. “You understand how many people wanted it. If you can’t play it, there are people waiting who can. I get calls about that part. I get calls all week.”

Fuck. Halliday held his face still and looked at the man’s collar and thought, with care, you absolute fucking asshole.

He’d done it before. He was practiced at it: one hard hit while you were still standing, and then the hand out with something in it. Two years younger and Halliday would have been saying thank you.

And he was old enough to be Halliday’s father. That was the part that kept coming back — old enough to be his father, and this was how he spent his lunch hour, and it had plainly never once occurred to him to worry about what a man catches.

“Make the right calls while you’re young,” Doyle said, comfortably, as though he’d just handed over something that had cost him. “You’re going to be something. I have a good feeling about you, June.”

Then he moved in, half a step, and put his hand out for Halliday’s shoulder, the same way he had that morning, except that at call there had been sixty people in the room.

Halliday shifted his weight and let the hand go past him, and smiled.

“That’s kind of you,” he said. “I don’t think I’m old enough to know what to do with an opportunity like that. I’ll go get ready.”

He walked back along the walk with his hands in his pockets and didn’t stop and didn’t look back at the mark on the carpet, and the whole way he could feel the man watching him. That part was ordinary.

If he’d been free to do it, he would have put a hand flat in the middle of the man’s chest and walked him into the wall. He wasn’t free. There were sixty people on that floor, and a schedule, and a contract he couldn’t afford to turn into a problem — and the one person it would cost him most to have standing in the middle of all of it was the one paying for it.

—

Owen had the container open and waiting when Halliday sat down, and he was watching him.

“What.”

“Did he yell at you.”

“No.”

“You were gone twelve minutes.”

“He gave me notes.” Halliday picked up the fork and put food in his mouth. It had gone cold and a little sweet. “Eat yours.”

Owen looked at him a while longer, and then did, because he wasn’t getting anything else.

—

The afternoon was the same scene they’d spent the morning on.

“Same setup,” Doyle said. “We’re not getting what we need out of it. Take it from the top.”

Nobody argued. It was the director’s call, and he gave a reason that sounded like a reason — the light had gone soft against the paint, the first pass was muddy at the edges, both true, both things that happened on a set every week. The AD wrote it on the board. The crew reset the light. Wardrobe came in to steam the jacket again, because it was a jacket that needed steaming. Two grips moved a C-stand and talked about lunch. Nobody looked at him.

Calloway was sitting on the low bed with his script on his knee. He looked across the room at Doyle, and Doyle, in the middle of something with the script supervisor, brought his eyes up, met it, went back down to the page, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Back to one,” the AD said.

Halliday found his mark and put his fists together behind his back, where nobody could see his fingers.

The blocking had him come in from the doorway, cross to the painter at the easel without being heard, and hook an arm around his neck. He was supposed to put his mouth near the man’s jaw and talk there, close and quiet enough that the boom wouldn’t pick it up, because the shot was from behind and nobody needed the words. He had done it eleven times that morning. That was the entire reason it worked.

He came in on the marks. He stepped over the pillow. He put his arm around Calloway’s neck and set his forehead against his and stayed there.

Calloway smelled different than he had the week before. Softer. Flowers, or close to it, sitting strangely on a man built the way he was. Then Halliday stopped thinking about that, because he had three seconds to decide something and no better plan than the one in front of him, and that turned out to be enough to make it for him.

“Mr. Calloway,” he said, into the side of his face, mouth barely moving.

Calloway didn’t turn his head. “What.”

“Doyle made me an offer at lunch.” The words went past Calloway’s ear at the volume of a breath and were gone. “He wants me to say yes to something. Work. After this. He made it sound like a gift.”

Calloway’s shoulder moved once, one breath, and then nothing.

“I told him no.” Halliday kept his face where the frame wanted it and made his voice as small as it had ever been. “I don’t know what he does with a no. He could have me taken off this, and if he can’t do that, he could—“

“He doesn’t have that.”

Halliday’s face did something without asking him first.

“Casting isn’t his. It never was.” Calloway’s mouth was at his temple. He sounded like a man reading off a page in front of him. “I picked you.”

“Cut—!”

Doyle came around the side of the monitor with both hands spread, showing the room something. “Halliday. Halliday. What was that.”

Somebody pulled the light off him.

“You want to tell me what happened to your face just then. I asked for a man in love. I don’t know what that was. I don’t know if you’re bored or you’re slow, but if you can’t hold a look for four seconds, I don’t know what you’re doing standing on my floor.”

Sixty people in that room, and not one of them was doing anything else.

Calloway looked over at Doyle. His hand went flat on the mattress beside him, and his weight came onto it.

Halliday’s hand came out and closed on the hem of the hoodie, and stopped him where he was.

“Don’t go—“