They’d both pulled all-nighters the night before, Ted cutting together the second Starfighter in the editing suite in their garage and Phoebe at the kitchen table, trying to make her presentation perfect. Ted sat down in the chair across from her, blond curls sticking out at wild angles from his head. He ran his fingers through them and yawned. His Stones T-shirt was inside out. Was it an accident or a deliberate bid to get two wears out of it? Maybe both. Secreted away was that iconic tongue, lolling between Mick’s plump, red lips, and Phoebe thought of it there, licking Ted’s chest. Whoosh. She felt a wave of heat surge through her body and come to a throbbing point between her legs. How long had it been since they’d licked each other?

She stuck out her tongue at Ted. He smiled and yawned again. The heat melted away.

“I feel like we’re turning into vampires,” she said. Two very chaste vampires.

“What if we are?” He tore off a banana from the bunch on the counter and peeled it. He took a big bite.

“Both of us? At the same time?”

For the last year or so, it was Phoebe keeping one foot in the real world. She was the one who left set—the Salt Flats or sometimes nearby Lancaster standing in for the desolate Outer Ring; the hangar in Sylmar for interiors—and sat in traffic for hours to meet with Frank and the other Omega execs. Oh sure, when they needed an extra $5 million for visual effects on the second film, Ted put in an appearance, too, and Phoebe watched as the suits buzzed with an incoherent excitement that belied the fact that they were the ones with the money, ergo the power. But mostly it was her keeping up with the humans.

“On the plus side,” Ted said, “when we have kids we’ll be used to it.”

Phoebe laughed darkly. “Used to what? Having the life sucked out of me?”

“I was going to say the sleep deprivation.”

These last six years in LA had been a blur. They could finally afford a nicer place than this two-bedroom cottage in Van Nuys with the green shag carpet and pink tiles in the bathroom, but who had time to drive around with a real estate broker and figure out what they wanted in a home? And what did they want? So far, they wanted this—a life making movies together, with an editing bay in the garage and a spare bedroom full of stingers and cheeseplates, rolls of duvy and snot tape, and the rest of their gak piled high to the ceiling.

“I can’t decide whether to keep the projections for Asia,” Phoebe said.