Chapter 2: Midnight Comments and a Decision
The silence in her bedroom was a different creature than the one in her studio. This silence was thick, personal, pressing in from the dark corners. Dee lay on her back, the duvet tangled around her legs, the cool linen sheet stark against her skin. The blue light of her phone washed over her face.
It was 2:17 AM.
The video played again. It was the seventh time. Maybe the eighth.
She watched her own hands turn his face toward the camera. She saw the micro-expressions fly across her own face—a flicker of panic in the eyes before the laugh, a tightening at the corner of her mouth. She watched him go still. She heard the strange, fragile hollow in her own voice when she gave her flippant answer.
But him. She watched him. The way his eyes hadn’t left her reflection. The way he’d said “Right. The contract.” The quiet weight of it. The way he’d turned his face into her hand.
She stabbed the pause button. His face, frozen on the screen, looked back at her with an unnerving directness.
Her thumb scrolled down, into the churning sea of comments. The live session had ended hours ago, but the conversation was still boiling.
THE TENSION IS UNREAL. I felt like I was intruding on a private moment.
He’s in love with her, it’s so obvious. Did you see his face when she touched him?
Dee, girl, RUN. That man is a hazard to your peace.
It’s just banter, you people are unhinged. He flirts with everyone.
Someone check on Dee. Her soul left her body at the 14:30 mark.
This is better than any rom-com I’ve seen this year.
He loves the way her hands feel in his hair. He’s said it in three different interviews. WAKE UP PEOPLE.
She threw the phone onto the mattress beside her. It landed face-down, muting the glow. The room plunged into near-darkness, lit only by the thin line of moonlight slicing through a gap in the velvet curtains.
“Unhinged,” she whispered to the ceiling.
But the word felt hollow. The comments, the collective gasp of a million strangers, was just an echo. The source of the sound was him. His words, hanging in the lavender-and-cinnamon air.
What if it wasn’t unrequited?
Her professional mind, the part that built a brand from confidence, scoffed. It was a line. A piece of perfect, playful escalation from a man who knew how to hold a camera’s attention. He’d left for a meeting with studio heads. He was probably asleep in his pristine, minimalist Hollywood Hills home, utterly unaffected.
The rest of her—the part that remembered the exact pressure of his cheek against her palm, the specific blue of his eyes in the mirror’s depth—burned.
She sat up, fumbling for the phone again. She didn’t open the video. She opened her messages. Their thread was a years-long tapestry of logistics and silly memes. The last exchange was from yesterday.
Matt: Land at 3. Can you fit me in at 4?
Dee: For you, Mr. Movie Star? I suppose. Don’t be late.
Matt: Wouldn’t dream of it.
Her thumbs hovered over the screen. She could type something casual. So, that got weird. Thanks for the content. Followed by a laughing emoji. She could diffuse it, bring it back to their safe, flirty baseline.
She deleted the draft.
Another comment flashed in her memory: He’s a private man off-screen, but with Dee, he reveals his vulnerable side. A fan had written that once, a perennial observation on her posts. Was that true? Or was it just another story they told themselves?
She thought of the time he’d shown up here, not for a cut, but after his father’s funeral. He hadn’t cried. He’d just sat in that same silver chair, in the dark, silent studio, and she’d made them both terrible coffee. He’d talked about football for an hour. Then, as he was leaving, he’d squeezed her hand so tightly her knuckles ached. “Thanks, Dee,” he’d said, his voice rough. That was all.
That was vulnerability. This… this thing tonight felt like a seismic shift in the bedrock beneath them.
Her phone buzzed in her hand, lighting up the room.
A new iMessage notification.
Her stomach dropped.
Matt: Can’t sleep.
Two words. Nothing more.
She stared at them until the screen timed out and went black. The darkness felt alive now, pulsing with those two syllables.
He was awake too. Across the city, in his perfect, quiet house, he was also staring at a screen. The knowledge was a live wire.
She didn’t reply immediately. She let the silence between their phones stretch, a mirror of the silence in their two separate rooms. She counted her own breaths. Ten. Twenty.
She picked up the phone, the glow making her squint.
She picked up the phone, the glow making her squint. Her thumbs moved, typing out a reply before her brain could filter it.
Dee: Well you can laugh at the comments to the video I uploaded, they are savage, Bomer. I start thinking that half of my followers are only there to get a sneak peak at you. That is very humbling 😂
She sent it, the laughing emoji glaring back at her like a lie. She held her breath, watching the three little dots appear immediately. They pulsed, then stopped. They pulsed again.
Her phone rang.
The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet room. The screen flashed with his name, a photo she’d taken of him mid-laugh years ago. She inhaled sharply, the air catching in her throat. She swiped to answer, bringing the device to her ear.
“You never call,” she said, her voice thankfully steady.
“Texting felt insufficient.” His voice was a warm, tired rasp through the line. It sounded like he was in a big, empty space. “Also, I’m a little drunk on one very expensive Scotch. Don’t judge me.”
“Never.” She slid down against her headboard, pulling the duvet up. “The studio heads run you ragged?”
“They always do. My brain wouldn’t shut off after.” He paused. She heard the soft clink of ice in a glass. “So. The comments.”
“A riot, right?” She launched into it, the safe ground of shared amusement. “My personal favorite is the one that said my soul left my body. Like, completely ejected. They pinpointed the exact timestamp.”
He chuckled, a low, resonant sound that traveled straight down her spine. “I saw that one. The winner for me was ‘check on Dee.’ As if you weren’t the one holding the shears.”
“I’m the dangerous one here, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Another sip. Another quiet clink. “Someone said it was better than a rom-com. Should I be offended? My last one grossed eighty million.”
“They’re saying the acting was more convincing.” She grinned in the dark, falling into the old rhythm. It was easier like this, voices in the dark, shields up.
“Ouch. Accurate, but ouch.” He was quiet for a moment. “Do you ever read them and think… maybe they see something we’re both too stubborn to look at?”
The question landed between them, gentle and devastating. All the laughter in her throat dried up. She stared at the stripe of moonlight on her floor.
“Sometimes,” she admitted, the word barely a whisper.
“Yeah.” He let out a long, slow breath. “Me too.”
Silence stretched, but it was different now. Charged. Filled with the things they’d spent years meticulously not saying. She could picture him, probably in that sleek chair by his window, looking out at the city lights, tie loose, hair still perfectly imperfect from her hands.
“The ‘what if it wasn’t unrequited’ line was a good one,” she said, aiming for lightness but hitting something softer. “Very cinematic. Great delivery. A little cruel, but great.”
“It wasn’t a line, Dee.”
Her fingers tightened around the phone. She didn’t speak. Couldn’t.
“It also wasn’t… I don’t know what it was,” he continued, his voice softening, blurring at the edges. “A moment. A truth. A question I’ve wanted to ask for a long time. Throwing it out there with ten thousand people watching was probably the most cowardly way I could have done it.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“Feels like it right now.” He paused. “Do you want an answer?”
Her heart was a frantic, trapped bird. Yes. No. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” The honesty was brutal, and a relief. “That’s the hell of it. We have this… perfect thing. This friendship. It’s the most real part of my life. And I’m terrified of fucking with the formula.”
Tears, hot and sudden, pricked her eyes. She blinked them back, glad he couldn’t see. “The contract,” she said, a weak echo of her earlier joke.
“The contract,” he agreed, a sad smile in his voice. “It’s a good contract. Reliable. Nobody gets hurt.”
“Except maybe us,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” The ice clinked one final time. “Maybe.”
They sat in that shared, painful honesty for a long minute. The intimacy of it was more profound than any physical touch they’d ever shared. It was the sound of his breathing syncing with hers over the miles of city between them.
“We should probably sleep,” he said finally, his voice thick.
“Probably.”
“I’ll see you next time I need a trim.”
“Or before. You don’t need a haircut to say hello.”
“I know.” He sounded like he was smiling. “Goodnight, Dee.”
“Goodnight, Matt.”
The call ended. The silence in her bedroom returned, but it was transformed. It was no longer empty. It was full of his confession, her admission, and the vast, unresolved space between them. She placed the phone on her nightstand.
She lay back down. The comments, the video, the tension—it all seemed to recede. What remained was the echo of his voice saying It wasn’t a line, and the terrifying, exhilarating understanding that their perfect, safe thing was already broken.
And neither of them knew how, or if, to build something new from the pieces. Not yet. The momentum of that truth carried her into a fitful sleep.