Chapter Text
Benedict was drawing the bougainvillea outside the window when his laptop chimed.
He'd been at it for forty-five minutes, long enough that the Negroni on the desk had gone warm and the natural light coming through the Chateau Marmont's curtains had shifted from white-hot to golden hour, and he'd been trying to get the particular density of the blossoms right, the way they clustered against the stucco like something between a Vuillard interior and a skin rash, when the Zoom waiting room pulsed green and reminded him that he was supposed to be preparing for a chemistry read, not rendering Mediterranean flora in 4B pencil while wearing a Loro Piana T-shirt that made him look like a seasonal decoration. Red and white horizontal stripes. Eight hundred and forty dollars, gifted at this morning's Vanity Fair shoot. Combined with the Oliver Peoples, the effect was less serious actor preparing for a prestige NEON film and more Where's Waldo applies to drama school. He'd meant to change. He'd gotten distracted by the bougainvillea, because he always got distracted by the thing that was beautiful and immediate and directly in front of him, and the chemistry read had seemed, an hour ago, like a problem for future Benedict, and now future Benedict was here and still wearing the shirt and running out of time to do anything about it.
He set down the pencil and pulled the laptop closer.
He took a sip of his Negroni. The glass was sweating onto the desk, leaving a wet ring on the stack of annotated sides for Northern Sky. His handwriting covered the pages: blocking notes, emotional cues, a doodle of a mountain range that had started as the Canadian Rockies and become, through distracted iteration, something closer to the Himalayas. A second doodle next to it, this one a small bear. The bear was wearing glasses. The bear looked knackered.
Five days. Twelve reads. Four callbacks. Two scenes each, running the same material until the words had gone soft and featureless, coins rubbed smooth. One from the first act, where Leo and Yuna meet in the research station kitchen and Leo tries to charm his way past her defences. One from the third act, where Leo's cover is blown and Yuna has to decide whether any of it was real. The first required intelligence and friction. The second required the ability to break open, cleanly, in front of a stranger on a screen.
Benedict had been good in every single read — generous, present, alive. And every single read had been fine. Every single read had been competent. Talented women doing talented work opposite him, and the scenes would breathe for a line or two before the frequency between them drifted and the thing Mia was hunting for slipped back underwater, and Benedict would catch Mia's face in the top-right thumbnail going very still. Mia Hansen did not waste words on things she could communicate with the angle of her chin.
His phone buzzed.
Anthony: How's the read going?
Benedict: Which one. I've genuinely lost count. They're bleeding together like a Rothko.
Anthony: The NEON thing. Henry says final batch today.
Benedict: Final batch. Last three. Then Mia either picks someone or I live on this mountain alone for four months talking to moose, which honestly at this stage I would welcome.
Anthony: You sound tired.
Benedict glanced at the mirror above the minibar. The Loro Piana stripe. The Oliver Peoples. Eleven days of press, three time zones, a magazine shoot that had involved him standing in a pool fully clothed for reasons no one could articulate to his satisfaction.
Benedict [Voice Note]: I did a GQ shoot this morning where a man with a ponytail asked me to "embody the tension between imperial nostalgia and queer futurity" while I stood in chlorinated water in a Tom Ford suit. I've then spent the afternoon doing deeply emotional audition work for a prestige indie about glacial retreat. My brain is experiencing tonal whiplash at a cellular level. I'm drinking a Negroni at five p.m. in a shirt that makes me look like a lighthouse. I am fine.
Anthony: Get some sleep after.
This was Anthony-speak for I love you and I'm worried, rendered in the dialect of tenderness expressed exclusively through logistical imperatives. Benedict put the phone face-down.
The Zoom waiting room chimed. Mia appeared first, perfectly lit in her Brooklyn office, the wall behind her arranged with a careful intentionality that knew exactly which Criterion posters communicated serious filmmaker and which ones communicated trying too hard. Then Sharon Rhodes and Tony Vidal, the executive producers, their shared screen a split of Sharon's immaculate Brentwood home office and Tony's considerably less immaculate kitchen in Silver Lake, where a child's drawing of what appeared to be a dinosaur was taped to the fridge. Jules Blumenthal, the screenwriter, appeared from somewhere in Vermont with a glass of red wine and the glazed, caffeinated expression of someone who had been rewriting pages since dawn. Kendra Hargrove, the casting director, logged in last, briskly, camera already on, headset already in, a posture that had done nine hundred of these and would do nine hundred more and was constitutionally incapable of being one minute early to any of them.
"Right," Mia said. "Last three. Benedict, how are we?"
"Transcendent," he said. "I've reached a higher plane of audition consciousness. I can see through walls. I may be clinically dissociating."
"You look like a candy cane," Sharon said.
"Thank you, Sharon. That's the Loro Piana effect. Eight hundred quid to look like a seasonal confectionery."
"The last reader is Sophie Baek," Mia said, cutting through it. "She's calling in from Seoul. Four in the morning her time, so let's be respectful of that. She's between shoots on the HBO show."
"Precious Things," Kendra added, and Benedict placed it. Three seasons, rapturous reviews, frank and unflinching and the sort of television that made you feel slightly exposed for having watched it. He'd meant to watch it. He'd been told to watch it, specifically, by Eloise, who had texted him a link three years ago with the annotation this is what acting looks like, for future reference.
He hadn't watched it.
"She was remarkable in the solo reads," Kendra said. "Really remarkable."
"Let's see," Mia said, which meant stop managing my expectations, Kendra.
The waiting room chimed. A new rectangle filled the grid.
Sophie Baek was calling from a small, warm apartment. White walls. A single bookshelf behind her, spines in Korean and English, a potted plant on the top shelf catching the blue glow of a desk lamp. She was wearing a white T-shirt, plain cotton, no jewellery, her dark hair pulled back, and her face was. Right. Her face was the kind of face that reorganised the category. Bright, watchful eyes. A jawline that could cut paper. She was looking at the camera with an unhurried composure that had assessed the room in the first half-second and already knew where everyone ranked. No performance of eagerness, no social warmth deployed pre-emptively, none of the micro-adjustments Benedict had been watching actresses make all week, the tilt of the head, the widened eyes, the laugh loaded and ready before the conversation even began.
She looked, in summary, completely unimpressed.
Benedict took a sip of his Negroni and set the glass down on the wrong side of the desk, where it would definitely leave another ring on the annotated sides.
"Sophie, hello," Mia said, and warmth entered her voice for the first time all afternoon. "Thank you for being so flexible with the time difference. We appreciate it."
"Of course. Happy to be here." Clean, low, precise. The consonants clipped with a faint London substrate underneath something more layered.
"Benedict Bridgerton," he said, leaning toward the camera. "I apologise in advance for the shirt. I did a magazine shoot this morning and they put me in this and I forgot to change, and now I look like I should be hidden in a crowd scene in a children's book."
Sophie looked at the screen. At the shirt. At the glasses. Back to the screen.
"It's fine," she said.
"It is absolutely not fine. I look like a barber pole."
"You look like you're on a Zoom call."
Nothing. No laugh, no smile, no generous social offering. The flattest, most perfectly timed dismissal he'd received all week. Tony coughed. Jules took a sip of wine.
"Fair," Benedict said. "Brutal, but fair. Have you been to Los Angeles before, or—"
"A few times."
"Thoughts?"
"On Los Angeles?"
"On anything. I've been in this hotel for eleven days answering the same press questions. I'll take opinions on public transit infrastructure at this point."
Something appearead in the corners of her mouth. The faintest muscular suggestion of amusement, detected and suppressed before it could fully arrive. "I think we should probably do the scenes."
Benedict filed this away. A twitch. Deniable. He'd take it.
"Scene twelve first," Mia said. "The kitchen. First real conversation. They've been avoiding each other for two days. Yuna is territorial, Leo is trying to be disarming, and she is having none of it. The tension is intellectual, not romantic. Not yet. This is two people who are too smart for each other deciding whether the other one is a threat. Whenever you're ready."
Benedict pushed the Negroni out of frame. Rolled his shoulders. The hotel room dissolved; the striped shirt dissolved. He let Leo settle in, Leo's openness pitched a few degrees warmer than his own, Leo's ease a conscious performance within the performance.
He looked at Sophie's face on the screen and said: "You don't lock the door."
Sophie's expression shifted by a fraction. The composure didn't break; it hardened, a woman whose solitude had been interrupted and who was deciding exactly how much annoyance to reveal. "The nearest person is a ninety-minute drive. What am I locking it against?"
"Bears."
"Bears don't use doors."
"Mountain lions."
"Also doorless. Is there a thesis arriving, or are we just tallying wildlife?"
Her timing was lethal. She'd landed it dry and flat, with the cadence of someone reading a bus timetable, and Benedict's next line rearranged itself in his mouth.
"The thesis is that you're either remarkably brave or remarkably indifferent to your own safety, and I'm trying to work out which."
"You don't need to work out anything about me." Sophie's voice dropped half a register. "You're here for a month. You'll write your book, or whatever it is you're doing. I'll finish my research. We'll be politely peripheral to each other's lives, and then the snow will come and you'll leave."
"Peripheral," Benedict repeated, letting Leo turn the word over, amused, a little stung. "That's very clinical."
"It's very accurate."
"What if I don't want to be peripheral?"
"Then you'll be disappointed. That's not my problem."
"You could at least show me where the coffee is."
"Second shelf. Filters behind the sugar." A beat. "Don't use my mug."
"Which one's yours?"
"The one you're about to reach for."
"You can't possibly—"
"The green one."
Benedict paused and let Leo's surprise land, let the recognition that she'd read him that quickly, that precisely, register as a small, involuntary crack in Leo's composure. In the top-right thumbnails, Sharon had a hand over her mouth. Tony had leaned so far forward his chin was nearly resting on his desk. Jules had set down the wine.
"You're very territorial about kitchenware," Benedict said quietly.
"You're very comfortable in spaces that don't belong to you."
"Can we run that section again?" Mia said. "From 'what if I don't want to be peripheral.' Benedict, don't concede this time. Push her."
They ran it again. Sophie adjusted on the fly, the irritation sharpening into something more cornered, more specific, and Benedict leaned into Leo's recklessness with an edge he hadn't found in any of the previous reads, a stubbornness that was personal underneath the character's charm. The exchange escalated past the scripted lines into a silence that neither of them broke.
"Good," Mia said. Her voice was very quiet. "Okay. Scene thirty-seven."
The confession. The scene Benedict had been dreading all week, because it required Leo to be skinless, to stop performing entirely, and every previous read had played like two people in parallel emotional corridors, technically proficient, emotionally adjacent.
Sophie glanced at her sides, then placed them face-down on her desk. Going off-book. Four in the morning in Seoul and she was going off-book for a chemistry read.
Benedict put his pages down.
"I need you to understand," he said, and his voice cracked on understand, cracked genuinely because the performance was dissolving and the person underneath was coming through the floor, "that everything I told you about the book was a lie. The book doesn't exist. I'm a journalist. I was sent here to investigate what happened to Dr. Gordon, and I should have told you that the first night, and I didn't, because—"
"Because you needed access."
"Because I needed you. Specifically. Not a source, not a story. You."
Sophie let the silence hold. Held it longer than anyone had held it all week, long enough that the absence of her voice became its own weight pressing on the call, and then she said, very quietly, with a stillness that made Benedict's ribs ache from two continents and twelve time zones away:
"You needed a version of me that didn't know what you were." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "That's not need. That's a cover story."
The Zoom grid was very quiet. Sharon was crying, silently, one knuckle pressed to her mouth. Tony had taken off his glasses and was staring at a fixed point on his desk. Jules was gripping her wine glass with both hands and her eyes were wet. Kendra, who had done nine hundred of these and would do nine hundred more, was completely still, her pen frozen halfway to the notepad. And Mia. Mia's face was unreadable for one second, two seconds, and then Benedict caught it: her chin dipping, but the wrong direction from every other chin-dip this week. Her eyes were full.
The scene ended. The silence held for three more seconds.
"Sophie," Mia said. She cleared her throat. "Thank you. That was. We'll be in touch once we've completed the remaining reads."
"Thank you for the opportunity," Sophie said. Warm, professional, already reaching for something off-screen. Her tea. Her four-in-the-morning tea.
And then, just before she disconnected, her eyes flicked to Benedict's thumbnail on her screen, and her mouth did the thing again. The twitch. Barely perceptible, gone in a quarter-second, the kind of micro-expression that might have been a compression artefact or a trick of the low light in her apartment, except that it absolutely was not, because it reached her eyes and stayed there for exactly long enough to ruin him.
The rectangle went dark.
The grid collapsed. Six faces. Sharon said, "Jesus Christ," and Tony said, "Yeah," and Jules said, "Holy Shit." Kendra was already writing.
Benedict leaned back in his chair. The Chateau Marmont reformed around him: the Negroni, the damp ring on the annotated sides, the dying Los Angeles light through the curtains, the bougainvillea he'd been sketching an hour ago, the sound of someone in the corridor arguing about a parking validation. He looked at the dead square on the screen where Sophie Baek's face had been.
"Well," he said. "It's obviously her."
Mia picked up her phone, already typing, and she was smiling, which Mia Hansen categorically did not do in professional settings unless she'd found the thing she'd been hunting for. "I know."
"Can we skip the remaining two?" Sharon said. She was still wiping mascara from under her left eye.
"We should be thorough," Kendra said, but her voice carried no conviction whatsoever.
They did the remaining reads. Courtesy laps. Both actresses were warm, polished, and deferred to him with a gentleness reserved for franchise leads, which meant the banter scenes had no teeth and the confession scenes had no blood. Benedict gave them everything he was supposed to give them and thought about Sophie Baek's silence, the held beat before cover story, the way she'd placed her sides face-down on the desk. In the grid, everyone else was thinking about it too.
Benedict closed his laptop. His hands were doing something — a fine tremor, barely visible, the residue of having been, for fifteen minutes on a Zoom call at five o'clock on a Friday, completely and inconveniently alive. He picked up the Negroni only to set it down; he picked up his phone instead.
He opened the family group chat. Typed: I think I just met my Yuna.
Deleted it. Some things were too new to survive the Bridgerton discussion board.
He texted Anthony instead: I think it's going to be a good film.
There was a reply in under ten seconds.
Anthony: Get some sleep.
Benedict looked down at the Loro Piana stripe, the eight-hundred-dollar candy cane currently decorated with a small splash of Campari and the ghost of chlorine from the morning's pool shoot. The Oliver Peoples sat crooked on his nose. He pushed them up with one finger.
The sketch of the bougainvillea was still on the desk, half-finished. He picked up the pencil and started a new one underneath it, working quickly, from memory: a bookshelf. A desk lamp. The suggestion of a jawline in three confident lines.
He stopped himself after the lead began to draw the shape of her mouth, because that was insane.
He kept the sketch.