Page 26 of The Producer: Aaron

She beckons me with one hand to go upstairs to change, and I can’t help but smile and shake my head. Either I accept her like this, or I will choke her.

When I finally go down to the living room, I can’t find her, so I venture a look toward the pool and find her there, sitting on the deck chair with the pizza box between her legs, sipping a soda.

“Don’t even think about it. I don’t eat pizza with my hands,” I tell her when she sees me coming and starts separating the slices with her thin fingers.

“Can you stop acting like an old man and start relaxing?”

There it is again, her definition for me that I missed.

I sit astride the deck chair in front of her and watch her pick up a slice of pizza and put it in her mouth, savoring it with her eyes closed. A drop of grease slips from the side of her lips and, with all the ease of her twenties, cleans it with the back of her hand. I don’t think I ever made such a gesture even when I was five, but my childhood was not exactly like that of my peers.

I grab a slice from the cardboard box and bite in despite my body’s almost physical protest.

“See? It wasn’t that difficult,” she tells me with a full mouth and then smiles, nodding at the sweatpants I’m wearing. “So you don’t just have elegant clothes. You also have something like us mere mortals in the closet.”

“It’s not that I’m an alien. Every now and then, I enjoy a little rest and do it with something comfortable,” I object.

She raises an eyebrow to call my bullshit.

“Really? When have you had a moment of rest since I came to live here?”

“Tonight?” I admit with a half-smile. It’s not that I have many opportunities to wear these clothes.

“As I thought.” She smiles at me.

The silence lasts for a few minutes. It is not one of the embarrassing ones. In fact, it is almost relaxing. When I open a can of soda I took from the fridge, I’m almost tempted to go back to get a glass of wine, but then I change my mind. Drinking before her and telling her that she should not get drunk sounds a bit hypocritical.

“Why did you decide to save my career?” she asks me out of the blue.

I observe her for a few seconds and try to decipher the expressions that cover her face. Worry, embarrassment, and maybe even a little humiliation, but at the same time, curiosity.

“Money,” I answer without too many words.

I notice her surprise. Perhaps she tried to give an answer to this question herself, so I explain it to her.

“Hunters of Shadowsis the most important show in the broadcaster’s streaming division. The sponsors are breathing down our necks because of your out-of-control behavior, but atthe moment, they have not yet come to close their wallets. I had two choices, get you on track and continue with a show that keeps the whole company afloat or decide to fire you and, in fact, shut down the show before even shooting the fourth season. I have chosen the money I need to continue the streaming project.” I am brutally sincere with her. She is not dumb. She is far from it. Coating the pill or belittling the problem is not helpful to either of us.

She looks down, clearly ashamed of the situation. She is young. She made a mistake, and she will learn from it.

“I’m sorry. I don’t do it on purpose to end up in the newspapers… I mean, I don’t do it because I want to be a diva. I wanted you to know,” she whispers, and I can feel all the guilt that permeates her words.

“May I know why you get drunk when you go out and know you’re going to make the front pages of the newspapers? You are not stupid. After the first time, you should have learned.” I’m sincerely intrigued by this behavior which seems completely unusual compared to her personality.

She looks up and blushes.

“Alcohol helps me relax enough so that I’m not a total disaster when I have to interact with people.”

I dwell on her words, but I cannot understand them. “Are you shy? Is that you can’t talk to someone?”

“Not exactly. When I go out with someone, who knows my job, they always expect me to have something super interesting to say. When they realize that, in reality, my life is not as exciting as everyone thinks, they lose interest in me very soon and find someone else to chat with. I’ve gotten to the point where I get performance anxiety when I have to go out because I already know I have to be the funny, sexy girl with a sparklingpersonality; otherwise, my conversations with people last five minutes. Alcohol helps me overcome my initial nervousness. The problem is that it also erases my sense of limitation, and I don’t notice when I go from relaxed to completely drunk,” she admits.

“You’re an actress. Your job is to interact with people. How can you be anxious about dealing with normal conversations?” I ask incredulously.

“Being an actress is easy. You learn the lines, you act, you become someone else. You play the part of the independent, sarcastic one, the person who always has a joke for every situation. When I go out with someone, they expect me to be exactly like that, but in reality, I am the one who fails to be brilliant when I answer their questions. Have you ever thought of the perfect joke in response to someone, hours after you had that conversation when it’s too late? It happens to me every time, and alcohol helps me not to feel the pressure of having to impress someone. When I drink, I become the person with the perfect response at the perfect time.”

It is challenging to imagine her inability to communicate with people because I have never seen this side of Dakota. In fact, it is the exact opposite, and I wonder what her true personality is.

“You’ve never had this problem with me. You always answer me without ever missing a beat.”

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