Reshoots and Revenge

Brenna had been on plenty of commercial sets before, and she could say without bragging that most of them were dull enough to make a root canal feel like a carnival, but this one at least had the virtue of being about her actual profession, a dental hygiene spot where she'd been hired to make sure the actress holding the toothbrush wasn't doing something that would make a real hygienist weep into her latex gloves. She was twenty-three, two years out of her program, and she took the consulting work because it paid well and because, she admitted to herself on the drive over, there was a small chance Gregg would be there, since his agent had mentioned the audition weeks ago and he'd texted her a thumbs up emoji about it that she had probably thought about longer than the emoji deserved.

They had dated briefly when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-one, nothing dramatic, just two people who liked each other fine and wanted different things at the wrong time, and they'd stayed friends in that way where you still noticed when their name popped up on your phone.

So she pushed through the door of the rented studio in downtown Los Angeles, a converted warehouse space with a proper dentist chair bolted into the middle of it and lights hot enough to fry an egg, and the first thing she saw was Gregg laughing. He was twenty-six now, tall in the way that made chairs look badly designed, and he was laughing at something the photographer had said, the photographer being a woman Brenna had never met, leaning back against her tripod with a camera hanging off one shoulder and an expression that suggested she found Gregg genuinely funny and not just politely amusing, which was worse. Brenna felt a knot tighten in her stomach, quick and stupid and completely out of proportion, because she had no claim on this man, they had ended things with a hug and a promise to stay in touch, and yet there it was, sitting under her ribs like a stone.

"That's her, the consultant," the production assistant said, waving Brenna over, and Gregg turned, and his whole face did something warm when he saw her.

"No way," he said, crossing the room. "Brenna. They got you for this?"

"Apparently the toothbrushing in the last take was an abomination and someone suggested a professional," Brenna said, and he laughed, and the photographer watched them both with polite interest, and Brenna shook the woman's hand and learned her name was Iris, twenty-five, still photography, very firm grip, very level green eyes that took Brenna in the way a camera takes in a scene, all at once and without apology.

The day went the way shoot days go, which is to say slowly, with a great deal of standing around while men in polo shirts argued about whether the light was warm enough, and during the long stretch after lunch Brenna found herself standing next to Gregg at the coffee table, reaching for the same creamer, and her hand brushed his arm, a complete accident, knuckles against forearm for maybe half a second, and he turned and looked at her, really looked, and the look lasted a beat longer than a look between two people who were just friends usually lasted. Neither of them said anything about it. She poured her coffee and he poured his and they talked about a movie he'd seen, and the whole time she was aware of her arm like it was glowing.

She told herself the jealousy was ridiculous. She told herself it again when she caught Iris showing Gregg something on the back of her camera and he leaned in to look, their heads close together, and the knot came back and gave a little twist, like it was checking in. Brenna was, she would admit later, not a person who handled wanting things quietly. She wanted the commercial to go well, she wanted to be seen as more than the woman who knew which end of the toothbrush went in the mouth, and underneath all of that, in the basement of it, she wanted Gregg to look at her the way he'd looked at her two years ago, and she wanted it badly enough that it embarrassed her.

The wrap came at seven, and the crew packed up with the efficient boredom of people who had done this a hundred times, and Brenna lingered, gathering her notes, and when she finally headed for the door she realized Gregg had been pulled into a phone call by the director and had stepped outside, and Iris was in the back room, the small one with a couch and a rack of props, coiling a cable with the absent skill of someone whose hands knew their job.

"Forgot your case?" Iris asked, nodding at a bag by the couch that was, in fact, Brenna's, left there during the morning setup.

"Oh, thanks, yeah," Brenna said, picking it up, and then, because the room was small and Iris was looking at her with those level eyes, she added, "Great shots today, by the way. I saw a few on the monitor. You've got a good eye."

"You too," Iris said. "You move like you actually love teeth. Most consultants look like they're doing their taxes."

Brenna laughed, surprised. "I do actually love teeth. Is that weird?"

"A little," Iris said, smiling now. "It works on you, though. The loving-your-job thing. It reads well on camera, which is funny, since you're not the one on camera."

"Well, you're not so bad yourself, behind it," Brenna said, and then heard the sentence and wondered what exactly she had meant by it, because it came out warmer than she'd planned, and Iris looked at her for a moment with an expression that suggested she'd heard the warmth and filed it somewhere. "I mean, professionally," Brenna said.

"Sure," Iris said, in a tone that meant she had absolutely not heard it professionally. "See you tomorrow, teeth girl."

The second evening of reshoots went faster, the director having made peace with the light or simply surrendered to it, and by six they were done, and Brenna stood in the main room with her bag over her shoulder doing the arithmetic of courage, which was that she could go home and eat cereal over the sink, or she could do the thing she'd been turning over in her head since yesterday. She waited until Iris had packed the last lens, and Gregg had come back from the restroom, and then she said it, all in one breath, like ripping off a bandage.

"Do you two want to grab a drink? There's a bar two blocks from here, I've been meaning to try it, and I don't actually know anyone in this city who isn't a tooth."

Gregg looked pleased, which was his default setting, but it was Iris Brenna was watching, and Iris looked at her for a second and then said, "Yeah, I'm in," and as she said it she reached out and touched Brenna's hand, briefly, two fingers on the back of it, deliberate enough that it could not be an accident and light enough that it could be denied. "Lead the way."

Brenna's arm did the glowing thing again. The bar, as it turned out, was narrow and loud and had a neon sign that said OPEN in a font that suggested someone had ordered it wrong, and they took the table at the back, Gregg on one side, Iris across from them, and somewhere between the first round and the second Brenna realized that the knot in her stomach had loosened, and that what had replaced it was something warmer and considerably more dangerous, and that Iris was watching her over the rim of her glass with exactly the same level attention she gave a viewfinder.

The second round arrived and the third, and somewhere in the middle of the third Iris told a story about a car commercial she'd shot in Bakersfield where the lead actor had insisted on doing his own driving stunts and had put the picture car into a drainage ditch inside the first hour, and Gregg laughed so hard he had to put his glass down, and Brenna found herself laughing too, the real kind, the kind that made her eyes water, and she thought, with the clarity that three drinks and a neon sign bring, that she had spent two days treating this woman as an enemy when the woman was actually just funny and good at her job and, as an added complication, extremely easy to look at. "So then the producer," Iris said, wiping her eyes, "the producer turns to me, dead serious, and asks if I got the shot."

"Did you?" Gregg asked.

"Oh, I got the shot," Iris said. "It's the best frame of my career. Car, mid-air, ditch, actor screaming. It's framed on my wall. He signed a release eventually." Brenna snorted into her drink and told her own story, about a sleep-aid commercial where she'd had to keep a straight face while an actor brushed his teeth with the brush backwards, bristles against his own knuckles, for eleven takes, and Gregg said, "I remember that one, I was on that set, that guy was a menace," and Iris pointed at him and said, "Wait, you were the backup lead on that, I've seen your name in the credits," and the three of them spent a while discovering the strange small overlaps of their working lives, the shared sets and shared crews, the way Los Angeles turned out to be a town of maybe two hundred people wearing different lanyards.