The Reunion by Kayla Olson(36)
I’ve got to get out of here. Five more minutes until Bryan will expect us at the table again—it’s more than enough time. I make a beeline for the ladies’ room. As soon as I enter, though, I hear a voice echoing from behind one of the locked stalls: Sasha-Kate. Her tone sounds secretive, even a little sultry. She must have heard me, too, because a second later she says, “Gotta run—I’ll call you back after.”
I duck into the second stall before she comes out and things get awkward. I’m not in the mood for small talk, not with her, not while feeling all the things I’m feeling for Ransom, and especially not after overhearing enough of her phone call to know it sounded much more suited to a private hotel room than this very public bathroom stall.
Just before I head back out, my phone buzzes. Ransom: this is torture Agreed, I type back. Still on for catching up later?
The typing bubble pops up, then disappears. A moment later, he writes, think we can get away with gelato on the beach without anyone noticing?
Another message immediately follows: also come back now, bryan’s giving your empty seat the death glare I laugh out loud, and it echoes from the tile. On my way, I tap out as I walk. And I’ve got beach at my house, let’s use that I hit send before I fully think through the implications of what I’ve just done. The idea of Ransom in my living room, on my back porch, on the stretch of sand between my house and the Pacific Ocean, all of it—suddenly I’m a tangle of anticipation, of nerves and excitement and the on purpose of it all.
But it’s not a date, I remind myself. He wants to catch up, which is fine, totally fine. It’s been fourteen years and we’ve only just reconnected. There’s a lot to catch up on.
Everyone’s seated when I return. Bryan trains his death glare on me, not my seat—his eyes are so lovely and kind until they’re staring intensely down his narrow, picture-perfect nose at you, and then they’re lasers. Worse, he doesn’t acknowledge me verbally—there’s no Nice of you to join us, Liv to distract from the glare, nothing to soften the hard silence. Once I’m seated, he simply says, “Now that we’re all here, let’s begin.”
Despite that uncomfortable moment, the rest of the afternoon soon turns into one of the best I’ve had in a while. It takes forever to go through the feedback—so many pages of notes from Dan and Xan all the way up to the Fanline executives—but overall, everyone is thrilled with the table read, especially the performances given by Ransom, Sasha-Kate, and me.
When all is said and done, Ford stretches his arms out over my shoulders and Millie’s, who’s sitting on the other side of him, and pulls us into something resembling a seated side hug. “You killed it today, my dudes,” he says, seemingly unbothered that the production team was decidedly neutral on his own performance.
“Liv killed it, anyway,” Millie says. If that’s bitterness I detect in her voice, I’m pretty sure it’s not directed at me. “I sound ‘like a heartless extraterrestrial who was picked up off the street and handed a script five minutes ago,’ apparently.”
Yeah, ouch. Production was decidedly less neutral about Millie.
“I’d like to see Bob Renfro try singing ‘Midnight’ while wearing four-inch heels,” Ford says under his breath, and Millie laughs—but Bob Renfro’s comments, though scathing, were spot-on. Millie wasn’t exactly cast for her acting skills back at age five, and they haven’t improved much since then.
Ford unsuccessfully tries to get a group together for dinner—Sasha-Kate rushed out as soon as we finished, and Ransom says he has plans. My heartbeat picks up in my throat, knowing I am the plans.
“Livvie? You in?”
“Can’t tonight, Ford, sorry. Rain check?”
“Holding you to it,” he says. “Guess it’s just me and Millie, then.”
Millie’s cheeks are on fire. “I wish I could, but… um… public places have become a logistical nightmare this week.”
Ford wisely doesn’t push it. With the amount of publicity Millie’s getting these days, his personal life would be a wreck if they were caught out together just the two of them, even as friends—no one cares about truth, only headlines. And those headlines would absolutely make their way to Juliette in a heartbeat, even on a remote film set in Iceland.
Which is precisely why, even though my phone lights up with a text before we’ve even left the studio—your place it is, how about 7:30?—Ransom and I leave every bit as separately as we arrived. I don’t want us in headlines.
Not when the fandom is still reeling over Gemma, those leaked texts blasted to every corner of the internet this weekend.
Not when there’s not even an us to be written about.
My place at 7:30 sounds perfect, I reply as I slip into the back of Jimmy’s Mercedes. Should I pick anything up for us? Too late, I realize my phrasing sounds a little too close to date territory, like I’m suggesting dinner.
It’s not a date.
To snack on, I’m about ready to add, but his text comes back so quickly it’s like he was waiting for mine: got it covered, see you tonight For this not being a date, I’m feeling surprisingly fizzy inside.
The first time I felt feelings for him start to flare up, so many years ago and especially on that flight to Shanghai, I had to train them out of me when it was clear he didn’t think of me like that—as anything more than a best friend, a particularly close costar. He never would have gone after Kylie, the tour director’s daughter, if he had; never would have confided in me all the details of his feelings for her from first hookup to messy breakup.