TWENTY-SIX
Therapist: Stress of a job is a trigger for a lot of people.
Jay: I’m always going to struggle, aren’t I?
Therapist: It’s what makes addicts some of the strongest people you’ll ever meet.
Jay
We were days from the film crew getting here and my body wanted an outlet. I scrolled my phone’s contacts and knew I was searching out the people I’d got my drugs from before. I would have used. I would have partied.
The reality was I’d always done it at this point in the film. They took my mind of the script, off the pressure, off the depth. Swimming in someone else’s emotions, encompassing their whole self for days on end, fatigued a person, even a person like me who loved doing it.
I was about to give in to the exhaustion, and I needed a lifesaver. Mikka provided that.
“Jay!” Mikka snapped her fingers.
She was standing in my room holding my script and glaring at me as she played Lela’s part. “Focus.”
I nodded.
Her eyebrows slammed down as she looked over her lines. She threw her hair over her shoulder and tensed to play the part. She vibrated with anger, her hand shaking at me as she screamed, “I don’t want my love to be our ruin. I want to love someone that doesn’t have to risk their life to be with me.”
“That’s not the way love works.” I murmured the words and knew how truthful they were. This story was one of racial injustice, of interracial marriage and the systemic racism that plagued our nation.
It would leave audiences raw, hurting, wondering, I hoped, about their complicity in the discrimination.
“In this town,” she whispered, tears springing to her eyes, “our love doesn’t work at all.”
I grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. I ran a thumb right under her ear and leaned in to whisper, “It’ll work anywhere because love overpowers hate.”
“Promise me you’ll remember that.”
I nodded and leaned my forehead to hers as I bled the next words. “I promise.”
They would flash back to this scene when two men beat me to death. My body would be the sacrifice that a small town needed—a white man dying for the love of his black girlfriend while she wept beside him.
It was a racial Romeo and Juliet of sorts.
Those two words had to carry impact, had to show he’d die without fighting back, had to show every sliver of love a man had for his woman.
Embodying all that and speaking those words to Mikka was easy.
She whooped beside me. “You do it better every time.”
“I do everything better every time.”
She laughed so hard her cheeks turned red. This was Mikka in the film industry, though. She had the eye for a good script and knew how to make it even better. Like me, she loved how powerful a movie could be. “You’re so arrogant.”
“Confident.”
She rolled her eyes. “Confident enough to get all these lines in one take within two days?”
“A challenge?” I lifted an eyebrow at her. “What do I get if I win?”
She shrugged. “I don’t care. I want my planner back and a promise that you’ll do every meeting on the calendar for the next two months with no fight. We need you out there for this movie.”
I narrowed my eyes and leaned back on the dresser as I stared down at her. “Fine. I want you to move in with me.”