Lauren sighed at the pang of guilt that slammed her and tried to explain. “It’s just that the whole thing, everything that night, was alcohol fueled, and skewed, and not a good representation of who I am as a person. As a stage manager, I mean. This”—she gestured between herself and Carly—“never should have happened.”

Carly blinked once, and a distance settled between them, her eyes glacial. “Understood. A total mistake to erase from the history books.” Carly breezed past her out of the apartment, seemingly unaffected.

While that should have been a good thing, an appropriate conclusion to their interaction, instead, it left Lauren feeling…listless, unsatisfied, and full of a tugging she couldn’t quite name. Just erased from the history books, huh? Wasn’t that what she wanted, though? Suddenly, she wondered.

Didn’t matter. They had a job to do. When her gaze drifted to Carly’s ass as they walked the length of the hallway, she reminded herself of just that.

It didn’t work.

* * *

Carly was over the judgmental attitude. Since when did being a stage manager come with such a healthy dose of superiority? She was quiet in Lauren’s care on the way to the theater. To cover the awkward silence, she sang quietly along with the radio, stealing an occasional glance at Lauren, who had her hair pulled partially back today, with the ends in a lazy curl. Nope. She would not crush on Lauren any longer. She shook herself out of it and watched the road instead.

What a complete cluster the morning had been. Though she was not thrilled with herself for staying out with Kirby and her boyfriend so late and missing her call time, she was equally annoyed with Lauren and the way she’d approached the situation. Not only that, but now her head wasn’t in the game. She’d had trouble connecting to anything meaningful in the scene work with Evelyn as of late and felt like a fish flopping in the sand when it came to her work on Starry Nights.

“You want to take our ten a little early?” Ethan asked her wearily, three hours later. He’d had a chip on his shoulder ever since she’d arrived to work, part of which she attributed to her absence, and part to the lack of cohesion between her and Evelyn. They simply weren’t in sync. He rubbed his forehead in a way that said his frustration with the scene was at a peak. They’d worked on the motivations leading up to the couple’s first kiss in act 1, but everything they tried seemed to fall flat.

Carly turned to Evelyn for her opinion on whether to take the break but was met with only a half-hearted shrug.