I eventually noticed that one of the actresses, Casey Greene, was always watching me. She was very attractive and had a no-nonsense attitude about her that gave her a reputation for being a bit cold and intense. I’d been feeling cold and intense lately, so she intrigued me. I finally accepted her invitation to join her for lunch one day, and we ate sandwiches from the catered lunch on the set away from the rest of the group. She was a tremendous flirt, in a cold and intense kind of way, and I finally told her I wasn’t good at relationships, and if that was what she was hoping to find, it wasn’t going to work.

Her response nearly made me choke on my ham and cheese. “I wasn’t looking for a relationship, I was just hoping for a good time. No strings.”

“Oh, I see … That can be messy, you know. It’s a good time for a while, and then there’s a falling-out and a leak to the press … ” I was stalling because I didn’t know what else to do. This was my chance, falling right into my lap. Too good to be true.

She shrugged. “There’s no basis for a falling-out if there are no expectations.”

She came home with me that night, and the next, and the next. She later moved in and became what she called my “roommate with benefits.” No commitment, no expectations, just someone to hang out with when no one else was around, and someone to sleep with when we had the desire. I continued drinking, she didn’t care, we continued working, and after the film wrapped up for good, we were back on separate projects.

This arrangement did not satisfy me the way I’d expected it to, but it beat living alone, so I stuck with it. My current project got stalled by a tech labor strike, so I started reading for hours on my balcony, ignoring everyone and everything else in my life. Casey would come home and either make or order dinner, and usually I’d tear myself away from my book long enough to eat. She told me she was getting worried about me but that in keeping with our no-commitment arrangement, she wasn’t going to get on my case. “Just let me know if I can help.”

The labor dispute was settled, we went back to work, and a couple weeks later we wrapped the project. My next project wasn’t scheduled to start for another couple of months, so I was again stuck with a lot of time to fill. Books were starting to pale as an escape, and I began to run out of options to occupy myself.