Page 100 of Take Two

They’d stared at each other. Just smiling at each other like a couple of goons until Callie was ushered offstage.

Whilst Mae was trying to figure out how to get to her, a man with a headset crouched beside her row.

‘Mae?’ he asked.

She looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘Callie Price has asked me to come and get you,’ he said. ‘She’s in her dressing room.’

Mae hesitated for half a second. Was she ready for this—to talk to Callie? Well, what the hell else had she come all this way to do, really?

She stood and followed the man.

Backstage was narrow corridors and grey carpet. Someone hurried past holding a garment bag. Mae followed the runner, trying not to shake.

He stopped at a door with a handwritten sign taped to it: CALLIE PRICE.

‘You can knock. She’s waiting for you,’ the runner said and vanished back down the corridor.

Mae stood there, suddenly unsure. She went to knock and then put her fist down. Then put it up again.

The door opened.

Callie was already out of her TV dress. Just a faded T-shirt and jeans, hair pulled back, makeup wiped off. She was the definition of loveliness.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ Mae said.

Callie stepped aside. ‘Coming in?’

Mae walked in, telling her trembling knees to cut the shit as Callie closed the door behind her.

The room was tiny, with a cluttered vanity unit filling one end and a short sofa filling the other.

Mae turned to her in the tiny space between, and they stared at each other again. With a smaller gap between them, it was even more stirring. It took all of Mae’s nerve to hold it. To look at Callie.

‘You’re here,’ Callie said finally.

‘You sent for me,’ Mae replied with a nervous shrug.

‘I meant in the studio. In London.’

Mae folded her arms. ‘Yeah. I finally made it.’

A corner of Callie’s mouth twitched, then fell.

‘So, you saw it,’ Callie said.

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘They reshot it,’ Mae said. ‘Themebit.’

Callie went very still. ‘Yeah.’

‘With someone else.’