Find a quiet spot, turn the page, and let’s see what this story has been hiding 🌙 ✦ For some reason, Naomi’s name sounded familiar.
Adrian couldn’t tell whether he had heard it in the old life.
As he had learned by now, memories did not vanish cleanly, but getting them back required the right trigger.
Even then they came in fragments, easily mixed with other things until truth and guesswork blurred together.
Eventually, he stopped trying to force it.
What he could say was that he respected her.
Naomi had recently turned thirty.
Before that, she had modeled, worked in fashion design, assisted at a fashion magazine, and kept pursuing acting no matter how many doors stayed closed.
She had landed her first role at eighteen.
She had gone from Australia to Hollywood, gone through more than enough disappointment, and still had no breakout project to show for it.
Yet she had not quit.
Late in 1997, she landed a lead role on NBC’s Sleepwalkers, but the network canceled its national run after only two episodes had aired.
Her finances, never especially healthy, crashed after that.
By now she had maxed out two credit cards, lost her health insurance because she couldn’t keep up with the payments, and bounced from apartment to apartment.
Without Adrian’s offer, she would have spent the previous night in her old car.
And still, she had not given up.
“My mother acted for a while,” Naomi said when Adrian carefully asked what she planned to do next.
“Stage work.
I was ten when I saw her perform, and after that I decided I wanted to act too.” She didn’t answer him directly.
Instead, she started at the beginning.
“Maybe everyone wants to perform a little,” she said.
“To be seen, to be different, to hear applause.
I had a perfectly decent assistant job once, and I walked away from it for a role.
If I’d known then what things would look like now, maybe I would’ve been too scared to do it.
But at this point, I just want to keep going.
If I quit now, all the time and effort I’ve put in starts to feel wasted.” Her voice was calm.
None of the desperation from the eviction was visible on her face.
The determination in her tone was.
At the same time, she had curled unconsciously in the chair, arms around her legs.
She seemed determined and vulnerable at once.
“You’ll make it, Naomi,” Adrian said.
“A lot of people fail because they stop one step too early.
You have more than enough to do something with this.” “Thank you.” She lowered her head, then lifted it again.
“I’ll ask my agent to move quickly.
Once I find work, I’ll move out.
Until then, you should come back here.” “What?” Adrian had been preparing to look generous.
That stopped him.
“The room isn’t that small,” Naomi explained, her voice fading a little near the end.
“We can put another sleeping bag on the floor.
I can sleep there.” It took Adrian only a moment to understand.
She didn’t have much confidence in the audition her agent had arranged.
If she didn’t get the part, she probably wouldn’t be able to rent a new apartment for a while.
But she also couldn’t keep occupying a place that belonged to someone else while he paid for a motel.
This was her compromise.
It solved part of the problem and preserved what little pride she had left.
As for the awkwardness it might create, they couldn’t afford to think too far ahead.
After the conversation they had just had, they at least understood each other well enough to share a fragile kind of trust.
“All right,” Adrian said.
“On one condition.” He didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
“I sleep on the floor.” No matter what else was true, he wasn’t letting a woman sleep on the floor while he took the bed.
That was how their strange shared life began.
The apartment still had a little room to move around, but it was one room.
With two people in it, awkward moments were inevitable.
Naomi might catch Adrian half-dressed in the morning, or he might walk in just as she came out of the bathroom.
In a one-room apartment, privacy took planning.
There was no dramatic solution to that.
A man and a woman under one roof, in a room this small, were going to run into each other’s bodies from time to time.
Fortunately, both of them had enough self-control and enough humor to keep the air from turning poisonous.
Adrian told her about his family too.
His parents, himself, his sister.
Because Leanna Vale was only a few years younger than Naomi, he talked about her the most: how she liked using her older-sister status like a badge, and how she still called him “Sleepy Piglet” when she wanted to annoy him.
The nickname came from childhood.
Being reborn as an infant had not made Adrian magically competent.
For a long while, his body was a baby’s body, helpless in every humiliating way that came with it.
His brain had still been developing too, and whenever he tried to think too hard, exhaustion dragged him under as if his own body had pulled the emergency brake.
He spent far more time asleep than awake.
He did not tell Naomi all of that.
Even his simplified explanation made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth.
Sometimes Naomi bought groceries and cooked.
She was no restaurant chef, but her food had a clean, homey quality that made eating in a relief.
Adrian didn’t have to live off cheap takeout every night.
On those evenings, he often played guitar and sang for her.
His voice was not flawless, but it had a texture of its own.
Puck performed too, when the mood struck him.
The little dog was clever, and Adrian had trained him through boredom and too many quiet nights.
If Adrian shaped his fingers like a gun, pointed at him, and said, “Bang,” Puck would roll onto his back, legs in the air, playing dead.
Usually five or six seconds late.
Sometimes only after a treat.
It was ridiculous enough to work every time.
Naomi adored him.
Small, round, fluffy creatures had an unfair advantage in the world, especially when they behaved.
Puck adored Naomi right back.
Sometimes all she had to do was call his name, and the dog would abandon Adrian’s lap without shame and leap into hers instead.
That part wounded Adrian more than he cared to admit.
There were other wounds too, or at least regrets.
Naomi was beautiful.
Thirty did not dull her.
If anything, it gave her a warmer, more compelling confidence, and she had kept herself in excellent shape.
There was a mature ease to her that Adrian found hard not to notice.
He was eighteen, healthy, and male.
Living under the same roof, he sometimes looked longer than he should.
Naomi noticed now and then, but she rarely said anything.
If they had not been living together, Adrian would already have tried asking her out.
Instead, he redirected himself by thinking of another girl: Jordana Brewster.
She was the first girl in Los Angeles he had seriously wanted to call.
Unfortunately, he still had no cell phone, no landline in the room, and every call meant walking to a pay phone.
Add the fact that she spent much of her time in New York, and the number he had worked so hard to get remained unused.
Still, the daydreaming did not take over his life.
Most of his attention went to finding work, finding roles, and finding chances.
After Coleman’s betrayal, Adrian had wondered whether he could really adapt to this business.
Whether he should leave before it ground him down.
Without everything that had happened, he might have drifted for a while.
He had arrived in Los Angeles without a grand ambition.
He could have saved enough money, done the road trip he wanted, and spent ten years wandering toward a purpose.
The laziest reborn man in history, if such a title existed.
But after the audition, Frederick’s warning, Coleman’s betrayal, and the impulsive decision that put Naomi in his apartment, something changed.
Adrian wanted to keep going.
He was not an idealist.
Two lives had taught him too much about reality for that.
Naomi had also told him plenty about the industry: parts taken from her, chances lost, and one major network show she had walked away from in a younger, more naive moment because she did not want to spend two or three years tied to a soap.
There were other things she did not say.
Adrian could guess anyway.
A woman as striking as Naomi could hardly move through Hollywood without people testing boundaries.
Whatever opportunities had come her way, none had turned into lasting security.
What stayed with him most, though, was a story about how little connections meant when trouble actually arrived.
Few people knew Naomi had gone to school with Nicole Kidman.
Yes, that Nicole Kidman: Tom Cruise’s wife, the striking woman from Batman Forever.
Adrian had been dragged to see that movie more than once, and even in the old life, he had heard both names.
Naomi had acted with Nicole and had even been around her before the wedding.
On paper, that sounded like a powerful connection.
But knowing someone famous could lead to an introduction or a meeting, not force a casting decision.
That was the lesson.
The world had never been fair.
Still, people had to hold on to something.
Friends.
Family.
Lovers.
Loyalty, pride, love, or simply doing the right thing.
Maybe people who sanded themselves smooth and never held a hard edge survived more easily.
But people with nothing firm inside them rarely reached the top.
Adrian was not there yet.
But he didn’t want to run.
He didn’t want to lose before he had truly tried.
If Naomi could keep standing after all this, why couldn’t he?
So he pushed harder into background work and kept his eyes open.
Opportunity, after all, favored the prepared.
“What the hell is this?
We had this settled.
Now we’re about to shoot, and I’m being told he has a scheduling conflict?
Who does that kid think he is?” On a Warner Bros.
soundstage in Burbank, a bearded middle-aged man was shouting hard enough to turn heads.
“Eric, calm down,” an assistant said, lifting both hands.
“Eric.” “Calm down?
We have all these people waiting, the scene ready to go, and one phone call says he can’t make it.
How am I supposed to calm down?” “Maybe we can shoot something else first,” the director suggested.
“Or switch to another script.
The continuity won’t really conflict.” “Absolutely not.” “But our schedule is tight, Mr.
Reese,” another assistant said carefully.
“Then find someone to replace him.” Eric Reese cut the air with one hard gesture, then strode toward the background holding area.
“Listen up.
Does anyone here speak Italian?” The background actors had already started shifting when he came over.
They couldn’t hear everything, but they had seen enough.
The question made several eager faces stall.
This was Los Angeles.
Extras who spoke Spanish were everywhere.
Italian was another matter.
Reese asked again, louder this time, his brow drawn tight.
Then an arm rose from the crowd.
“I do, sir.” The young man looked somewhere in his early twenties, calm-faced and sharp-featured, with an odd mix of youth and maturity that made people look twice.
“You do?” Reese switched to Italian without warning.
“How well?” “Pretty well, sir.” Adrian answered in the same language, measured and steady.
“My high school girlfriend was Italian-American.
I learned a lot from her.
I can handle ordinary conversation and write simple sentences.” Reese beckoned him over, then had him turn around twice.
Adrian cooperated without looking either eager or frightened, and something approving flickered in the producer’s eyes.
“All right.
What’s your name?” “Adrian Vale, sir.” “Good.
Adrian, I have an important supporting role for you.
You have an agent?” Adrian nodded.
“Good.
Call him.
We need a contract.” ✦ ✦ ✦ Ready for more?
CREATORS’ THOUGHTS TheBacklot Thank you for reading.
I hope this chapter drew you further into the story.
Stick around, because there’s still a lot waiting just ahead.