The food arrived while Ronan was still working through the pages. Riley took his plates with an easy word of thanks and set to eating, and the whole time, over the top of his chopsticks, he watched the kid’s face.
’He likes it. Look at him, he’s floored.’ Riley chewed, reading every flicker that crossed the kid’s expression. ’Did my homework before I got on that plane. Five years signed to a house like Circle, and still a nobody on their board, barely a name in the system. A kid like that, first time he sees a real offer put in front of him, this is the exact face he makes.’ He kept his own face flat and pleasant. ’He’s sold. I made sure of that.’
And he wasn’t wrong. Across the table, Ronan was happier than he’d let himself be in a long time.
He lifted his eyes off the papers. "Are you serious about all this? It’s really generous, for an agency the size of CAA. Especially for somebody who’s a nobody right now, like me."
Riley smiled around a mouthful and swallowed. "Dead serious, Ronan. You’re worth every line on that page. And listen, you might be a nobody today, but I’m telling you, that’s not gonna stay true for long."
Ronan gave a small, rueful smile. "I appreciate it. It’s just... this is the first time anybody’s put an offer like this in front of me. My old agency never came close. Not once."
Riley watched him over the table. He already knew that piece of it. Henry had told him how Circle had cut the kid loose, right before the read of his life.
"I’ll tell you what I think." Riley aimed a chopstick at him. "Your old agency was blind. Flat-out blind, missing what they had sitting right there. So forget ’em. Wipe ’em clean off the board. We start fresh, you and me, CAA behind us." He winked, then reached for a piece of the fried chicken and tore into it.
Ronan just looked at him, quiet.
"I looked into you, kid. Your whole run." Riley talked around the chicken, easy about it. "Five years signed to Circle, and in five years the best they ever got you was extra work. And I sat with that a while, because it does not add up." He tipped his head. "So which is it? They just never put you up for anything real? Or is there some kind of politics running over there, somebody keeping a boot on your neck?"
He didn’t wait for an answer. "Because with the talent you’ve got, you should’ve been booking real parts years ago, not filling out the back of a frame. I watched that tape, man. Watched you go down as Thomas." He shook his head. "I’m not ashamed to say it got to me. Teared me right up. There’s no world where talent like that stays buried under a place like Circle. None."
Ronan opened his mouth and came up with nothing. "That..." He couldn’t say the true thing. That the talent Riley kept marveling at only woke up inside the «Immersion System», and that without it he was the same middling extra he’d always been. He couldn’t confess that to a living soul. And even if he tried, there wasn’t a person on earth who’d believe a word of it.
Riley wasn’t finished anyway. "And it’s not just the acting. Look at you." He gestured across at Ronan’s face with the chopsticks. "The bone structure, the eyes, the nose, that mouth. Jawline you could cut something on. How in the hell are you not famous already? Makes no sense to me."
Ronan finally found something. "I honestly don’t know, Mr. Brooks. I guess everything’s got its right time. Maybe there’s a reason I’m not famous yet. Maybe it just isn’t the moment."
Riley nodded slowly, chewing on that. "Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. Something to that. Everything’s got its season, right? Same as anything else." Then he leveled a look across the table. "But do me one favor, kid. Drop the ’Mr. Brooks.’ It’s Riley. We’re not doing formal here. Besides..." A grin. "You’re about to be my client anyway."
Ronan smiled to himself. The man was getting a little ahead of the both of them.
Riley caught the smile and read it his own way. "What, the offer’s not doing it for you? You looking to back out on me here?"
Ronan’s hands came up fast. "N-no. No, not at all. The offer’s great, honestly. I like it, I really do."
Riley laughed, low and pleased, at how quick the kid jumped to it. "And now you’ve gone and shown me your whole hand, kid. Tells me you want this more than I do." He sat back. "Which, for the record, makes me a happy man."
"That..." Ronan didn’t have the rest of it.
"Rule number one." Riley held up a finger. "In any negotiation, you keep a poker face. Every single time. You make the person across the table the one sweating it, the one desperate to land you, and then you lean on ’em a little and find out where their limit is. You never let them see how bad you want it."
He chuckled and shook his head. "But hey. I get it, you’re green, and there’s a reason for that. Kid your age?" The chopstick came up again. "You ought to be sitting in some college lecture hall right about now, not across a table from me."
Ronan rubbed the back of his neck. "So, after I finished high school, I did try for college. But living on my own, I just couldn’t swing it. Figured I’d rather work than sign up for a mountain of student debt I’d be paying down for the next twenty years."
Riley nodded, and there was real understanding in it. "Yeah, I hear that. Student debt’ll bury you. That’s no small thing." He set his chopsticks down. "You said you’re out here on your own? Where’s your family at?"
"Dallas." Ronan turned his water glass on the cloth. "I’ve been on my own about three years now. We all used to live here in LA, over in Little Tokyo, but they moved out to Texas when my dad took over his parents’ business."
Riley’s brows went up. "So you’ve been running your own life since what, sixteen?" He let out a low whistle. "Man. I didn’t move out of my folks’ place till I was twenty-four. That’s admirable, kid. Real admirable."
Ronan’s ears went a little warm. "It’s pretty normal for Americans, though, isn’t it? Kind of a rite of passage over here. Move out, stand on your own."
"Tradition, sure." Riley shook his head. "Doesn’t make it easy, though. Not at that age."
They ate as they talked, the conversation loosening into easier things, the personal kind, the two of them feeling each other out the way people do.
Then Riley set his fork down and looked across at him. "So. What do you say, Ronan. You gonna let me be your agent?" His eyes were warm on the kid, nothing pushy in them and nothing cold, just a man doing his level best to put the person across from him at ease.
Ronan smiled. "I’d have to be an idiot to turn this down, Riley." Riley, not Mr. Brooks. "I’m in. Happy to sign with CAA."
That lit Riley up. He stuck his hand across the table, and Ronan took it. "Pleasure to be your agent, Ronan. And I’m telling you right now, the decision you just made? You are not gonna regret it. Not for one day."
* * *
Across town, in a very different kind of room, the mood was nowhere near as warm.
The office belonged to Mark Kelly, up on one of the higher floors of NBS’s headquarters in Los Angeles. Mark was the producer on «Castaway in Time», forty-five and already gone white at the hair, with dark, tired eyes set in the kind of face you’d walk right past in any network building in the city. At the moment those eyes were fixed on the two people who’d spent the better part of a week wearing him down: Hill and Jenny.
"Henry. Jenny." Mark dragged a hand down his face. "You two have been in my ear about this nonstop. Every time I turn around. You want me to hand the male lead, the male lead, to some unknown kid nobody’s ever heard of."
"And I’m telling you, Mark, you’re not gonna regret it." Hill didn’t give an inch. "I’ve seen what this kid can do. Ronan’s got every last thing that part needs, and then some."
Mark’s eyes cut to Jenny and found her nodding right along. He blew out a long breath. "Then why not Thomas? He read for Thomas, he was good, fine, cast him as Thomas. Why does it have to be the lead?"
Hill glanced at Jenny. She gave him the nod.
"Because Thomas isn’t where he belongs." Jenny leaned in. "I’m telling you, Mark, Ronan’s a better fit for that lead than Johnny Miller ever was. And you saw the tape, same as we did. You know I’m right."
Mark looked, if anything, more worn out than before. "You keep saying that. You keep saying it." He pressed his fingers into his eyes. "You understand what you’re actually asking me to do? I’d have to get on the phone with Johnny Miller’s agent and tell the man his client just got bumped off the lead."