Chapter 7: The Call from Andrei
The engine of the black SUV purred, a low vibration beneath her. Becky hadn’t driven anywhere. She was still parked outside Y/n’s building, her hands clamped on the steering wheel at ten and two, staring up at the twelfth-floor window. The light was still on.
Her palm itched.
She could still feel the frantic, rhythmic thud against her skin, like a bird trying to break through glass. It was a physical echo, a phantom percussion. She looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else.
“What was that?” she whispered to the empty car. The scent of jasmine from her own air freshener fought a losing battle against something else—something woodsmoke and clean and metallic. Y/n’s cologne, lingering on her own clothes, on her very hand. She inhaled sharply, her chest tight.
She needed a voice. Two voices. Ones that wouldn’t look at her with devastatingly quiet, light-green eyes.
Fumbling, she connected her phone to the car’s system. She navigated to a group call, her thumb hovering over the contacts for Engfa and Charlotte. Her two anchors. The only people who’d understand the surreal intersection of a film set and a feeling.
It rang once, twice.
“Sawasdee ka, Becky!” Engfa’s voice came through first, bright and warm, the sound of a well-lit kitchen. “You’re calling late. Everything okay?”
A second click. “Becky? Is the schedule changed again?” Charlotte’s tone was softer, edged with immediate concern.
“No, no schedule,” Becky said, the words tumbling out. She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb, the window with the light disappearing from her rearview. She needed motion. “I just… I need to talk. I did something weird. Or something weird happened. I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Engfa said, her voice shifting into listen-mode. “We’re here. Talk.”
Becky drove, the neon signs of Bangkok bleeding into streaks of pink and blue. “You know the silent scene? The one Niran’s obsessed with?”
“The one your mute producer is directing,” Charlotte stated. There was no judgment, just fact.
“Yeah. That.” Becky swallowed. “She… we rehearsed. Tonight. At her apartment.”
A beat of loaded silence crackled through the speakers.
“At her apartment,” Engfa repeated, slowly. “Interesting location for a professional rehearsal.”
“It was her idea! I mean, I asked to see her place, and then… we just… did the scene.” Becky’s knuckles were white on the wheel. “It’s just a touch. One touch. That’s the whole block. But when we… when I…”
“When you what, Beck?” Charlotte prompted gently.
“I touched her collarbone. Her jaw. It was in the moment. It felt right for the character.” She was lying, and she knew they could hear it. “But it was wrong. She shook her head. And then she took my hand and… she put it right over her heart.” Becky’s voice dropped to a breathless rush. “Char, Fa, it was going crazy. Like a hammer. And she just held it there, making me feel it. Then she typed ‘that’s all there is to it’ on that stupid robot phone and I just… fled. I literally fled her apartment.”
The only sound was the hum of the road and the soft static of the call.
“Wow,” Engfa finally breathed.
“Yeah. Wow.” Becky bit her lip. “What does that mean? What is she trying to say without saying it?”
“It sounds,” Charlotte began, choosing her words with care, “like she showed you the truth of the scene. The subtext. It’s not about a touch, it’s about the… consequence of the touch. The vulnerability it unlocks.”
“But why show me like that? With her?” Becky’s frustration bubbled over. “It’s professional direction, right? That’s a thing a director does, to get a performance?”
Another pause. Engfa spoke next, her voice quieter. “Becky, when I was directing Charlotte in ‘Northern Star,’ there was a scene where she had to cry. I didn’t take her hand and make her feel my heartbeat. I talked to her about loss. We used a memory. That’s direction. What you’re describing… that’s something else.”
The confirmation felt like a door swinging open into a room she was afraid to enter.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” Becky admitted, the confession sounding small in the luxurious car. “With her. She’s so… closed. But then she does something so violently open. And she can’t even talk to me. How does this even work?”
“Ah,” Engfa said, and Becky could picture the knowing look on her face. “The silence is the thing that scares you.”
“It’s not that it scares me, it’s that it’s a wall! I live in words! I trade in them! How do I know anything if I can’t hear a tone, a laugh, a sigh?”
“You felt her heartbeat,” Charlotte said simply. “That seems like a pretty clear tone.”
Becky fell silent, turning onto her quiet street.
Engfa sighed, a rustling sound like she was settling in. “You know, when Charlotte and I first worked together, years before ‘Northern Star,’ there was a moment. A real one. I felt it. She felt it. And we both… ran the other way. For two years. We were so scared of complicating the work, of misreading something, of being vulnerable in a way the script didn’t call for.” Her voice was textured with old memory. “We perfected the professional distance. It was safe. And it was empty.”
“What changed?” Becky whispered, pulling into her building’s underground garage. The world became concrete and shadow.
“We grew up,” Charlotte offered, a smile in her voice. “And realized that the fear of the real thing was worse than any on-set complication. The work got better, not worse, because we stopped pretending.”
“But your person,” Becky said, cutting the engine. The sudden quiet was immense. “Your person could talk to you. You could argue, you could whisper, you could say ‘what are we doing?’ in the middle of the night.”
“And we did,” Engfa laughed. “And it was messy. Language isn’t a shortcut to understanding, Becky. Sometimes it’s just more things to misunderstand.” She grew serious again. “You want this thing with Y/n to be authentic, right? Not another scripted romance. Well, the map for that isn’t written. It’s in the silences you’re so afraid of. It’s in the notes she writes and the way she looks at you and the fact that she trusted you with her heartbeat, which is probably the loudest thing she can say.”
Becky leaned her head back against the seat. The phantom thud against her palm had faded, replaced by a deep, aching warmth.
“I don’t know how to start,” she confessed.
“You don’t start,” Charlotte said. “You just stop running away. You showed up at her apartment tonight. That was a start. You just got scared by how real it felt.”
Becky nodded to herself in the dark. “Yeah.”
“Be gentle with her,” Engfa added. “And for god’s sake, be gentle with yourself. This isn’t a scene you can nail in one take.”
They talked a while longer, the conversation easing into lighter topics, until the tension in Becky’s shoulders had unwound. After goodbye, she sat in the silent car, the only light from her phone screen.
She opened a new text message. The cursor blinked.
She typed three words: Thank you. For tonight.
She deleted them.
She typed: I think I understood the scene.
Deleted.
Her thumb hovered. Finally, she settled on something simple, a thread to hold onto. She typed and sent it before she could overthink it.
The heartbeat was the best direction I’ve ever gotten.
She climbed out of the car, the heavy door thudding shut behind her. As she walked to the elevator, her phone, clutched in her still-tingling hand, remained dark and quiet. She didn’t expect a reply. The silence, for the first time, didn’t feel like a wall.
It felt like a space waiting to be filled.