Chapter 10: The Distance
The lavender scent in the hotel sheets was a cheap imitation. It was cloying, artificial, a poor ghost of the real fragrance that clung to the curtains in a Brooklyn bedroom. Matt tossed onto his back, the expansive king-sized bed feeling more like a taut raft on a dark sea.
Reshoots were a special kind of hell. Twelve-hour days of repetition, of tweaking a performance he’d already given, of existing in a limbo between production and post. The Vancouver skyline outside his window was a grid of cold, distant lights. He’d been here twenty-one days. He’d talked to Dee every one of them.
Texts. Photos of his craft service plates (“They call this pasta, Dee. I call it a cry for help”). Voice notes she’d send back, her laugh echoing as she described a client’s disastrous home haircut attempt. They were careful calls, often scheduled around his breaks and her appointments, conversations that pulsed with everything they weren’t saying. They were building a new geography of each other, one mapped through time zones and digital signals.
It was 2:07 AM. His body was exhausted, but his mind was a racetrack. He scrolled through his camera roll, past a hundred set photos, and stopped on a screenshot he’d taken from her Instagram earlier. It was a picture of her workspace in Claire’s living room: scissors fanned out, a cup of tea steaming, a single sprig of lavender in a jelly jar. The caption read, “Making do. Miss my kit. #NYC.” He’d stared at the word “miss” for a long time, wondering what, exactly, it contained.
The logic was thin as the hotel room air. He knew she’d be asleep. It was 5 AM in New York. But logic had stopped governing this thing between them weeks ago, back in a rain-soaked street.
He tapped her name. The phone rang, a brutal sound in the silent suite.
It rang once. Twice. His thumb hovered over the end call button, a flush of shame heating his neck. This was selfish. This was too much.
“Hello?” Her voice was thick with sleep, a husky, unfiltered sound that traveled straight through him.
“Hey.” He closed his eyes. “Shit. I woke you up.”
A rustle of sheets. A soft, breathy sound that might have been a yawn or a sigh. “Matt? S’okay. I was… yeah. I was asleep. Everything alright?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know.” He sat up, running a hand through his hair. “I just… needed to hear your voice. That’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
“It’s two in the morning there.”
“I know.”
“You have a 6 AM call time.”
“I know that, too.”
She was quiet for a moment. He could hear her shifting, picturing her in that childhood bed, the floral wallpaper, the glow of her phone screen on her face. “Okay,” she said, fully awake now. “So talk to me. What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Everything. This scene today. My character is supposed to be realizing he’s in love with his best friend. He’s been an idiot for years, and it’s this big, quiet epiphany in a coffee shop.” Matt let out a short, humorless laugh. “The director keeps telling me to tap into a sense of peaceful certainty. And I just… can’t find it. All I can tap into is this sheer, frantic panic that I’ve wasted so much time. That it’s all going to slip away. That I’m here, and you’re there, and we’re just… talking.”
The confession hung in the transcontinental silence. He’d never said it so plainly.
“Peaceful certainty, huh?” Dee’s voice was softer now. “That’s asking a lot of a guy who bought out a bodega’s bacon supply because he was nervous.”
He smiled in the dark. “That bacon was strategic.”
“It was delicious.” She paused. “You’re not wasting time, Matt. You’re doing your job. I’m doing mine. We’re… in the in-between. It’s okay if it feels uneasy.”
“It feels like hell.” The words were raw. “I keep replaying that stupid double date. The look on your face when I walked in with Natalie. I felt like I’d kicked a puppy. A puppy I was apparently in love with and was too dumb to notice.”
“Don’t rewrite history,” she said, but her tone was gentle. “You didn’t know. I didn’t let you know. We were both experts at the dance. The what-ifs will drive you insane.”
“Too late.” He stood, walking to the window. The city was a silent, glittering sculpture. “I have two more days of shooting. Then I’m on a plane. Then I’m in New York. Our date.”
“You remember.” Her voice held a smile.
“I have a calendar alert. And Trey has a calendar alert. And my driver has a post-it note. It’s the only thing on my horizon that doesn’t involve a mark or a lighting setup.” He leaned his forehead against the cool glass. “What if it’s weird?”
“The date?”
“Yeah. What if we’ve built this up in our heads for three weeks and we sit down and… we don’t know what to say? What if we’ve already said it all at 2 AM on the phone?”
He heard her take a slow, deliberate breath. “Then we’ll order dessert first and laugh about how we’re idiots. Look, Matt. It’s us. We’ve never not known what to say to each other. Even when we were saying all the wrong things. The words aren’t the problem. It’s everything around them.”
“The space between the words,” he murmured.
“Yeah.”
He could feel his heartbeat slowing, the frantic energy dissipating into the simple fact of her presence on the line. “What are you wearing?” he asked, the question slipping out, playful and intimate.
He asked, the question slipping out, playful and intimate.
A beat of silence stretched, filled only by the hollow static of the connection. Dee’s breath hitched, a sharp, audible intake he felt in his own chest. “That is not the question I awaited.” Her voice had changed, lower, textured with something new. “Should I draw a picture of a particularly sexy attire or you wouldn’t believe me anyway?”
She got a flush of heat down her belly; this topic wasn’t safe. It was absurdly too much and it was exhilarating.
Matt’s own breath caught. He’d crossed a line, and the ground on the other side was unstable and electric. He could see it, the dark of her room, the shift under her sheets. The careful, friendly scaffolding of their calls was gone, vaporized by eight words.