Ronan grumbled through a little more of it, then let himself take the place in properly. And he had to admit, it was nice in here. Better than nice. There was no weight to him at all. He hung in the dark like he was floating in warm water, light and loose, every ache from the fight already gone out of him.
But the longer he drifted, the more one thing started to nag at him. He’d been in here a while. A long while. Long enough that when he tried to count it out, it felt like hours had passed.
"Okay, what’s going on?" He turned a slow circle in the dark. "When do I actually wake up? Feels like I’ve been floating in here for hours now."
Just as the wrongness of it started to settle in, the recovery finished on its own.
[Recovery complete.]
[Returning you now.]
One of the stars, the brightest one in the whole field, swelled brighter, then brighter still, until the light reached him and folded over him completely. It was warm, and it was gentle, and it didn’t feel like anything worth fighting. So he didn’t. He let it take him.
For a moment it was like being drawn up through a long tunnel. Then, before he’d even caught up with it, he was awake, back in the casting office and down on the floor.
The director, the writer, and the reader guy were all right there, looking down at him.
’Oh no.’ Panic shot through him. ’Did I just sleep for hours in front of them? No. No way, please no.’ He scrambled up, an apology already halfway out of him.
Jenny was the first to catch his eyes open, and some of the worry went out of her face. "Oh, good. There you are. You’re back with us."
Ronan got his feet under him and bowed, low and quick, before anyone could say another word. "I-I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me, I swear that’s never—"
Hill leaned back and waved him off before he could bow any deeper. "Whoa, easy. Sit down before you go over again. You were out a minute, maybe two. That’s the whole of it. Nobody in this room’s holding it against you."
Ronan’s head came up. ’A minute or two?’ He’d heard the man right. Minutes, not hours. He hadn’t been lying there in front of them for hours at all. ’So that place I came from runs on its own clock. Felt like hours to me in there, and it’s only been a couple of minutes out here.’
Jenny watched him a moment, like she was still making sure he’d hold up. "I had a hand on your pulse while you were down. Near as I can figure, you went so far into the part your body couldn’t keep up, and it put you out. It happens. More than people think."
Ronan dipped into another bow, unable to stop himself. "I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine how that looked from where you were sitting." He was sure of it now, that he’d wrecked the whole thing, going down cold in the middle of his own audition.
That got a laugh out of Jenny, and she put a hand up to wave him back upright. "Would you stop that? There is nothing to apologize for, and I mean that." She held his eyes until it landed. "If anything, you earned the right to pass out. That was one of the best reads I’ve had in this room in a long time, and I have sat through a lot of them. Everyone else who came through today, I’ve already forgotten. You, we can’t stop talking about."
Hill didn’t dress it up any. "You blew us clean out of the water, kid."
Felix was still grinning like he couldn’t get over it. "I was sitting right across from you feeding you the pirate’s lines, man, and I still forgot none of it was real."
Ronan stood there and let it land on him. Something was moving around in his chest that he couldn’t put a name to. Warmth, maybe, or something close to pride, except he’d never had reason to feel either one about his own acting. Five years in this business, and this was the first time anybody had told him he was good at it.
"R-really?" It was all he could manage.
Hill and Jenny traded a look. The kid honestly couldn’t believe a word of it.
"Really." Hill dropped his forearms onto the table and got to it. "And it’s not just talk, either. We want to give you a part right now, today. It’s only that it’s not going to be Thomas."
And just like that, the warmth drained straight back out of him. ’Not Thomas?’ His stomach turned over. ’So that’s what all the nice words were building to. They liked watching me, fine, but they still don’t see me as him. Here’s the part where they let me down soft and slide me into something smaller.’
He couldn’t keep it off his face. "So I didn’t fit Thomas after all."
Jenny caught the dread on his face and cut it off fast. "Oh, no. God, no, it’s nothing like that. You were a great Thomas. That’s not it at all."
"Then..." Ronan didn’t know how to finish it.
Jenny shot a glance at Hill, and it was plain the two of them were enjoying this. "We just think there’s a part that suits you even better than Thomas does."
Hill picked it up, and this time there was nothing playful left in it. "We want you for the male lead."
"What he said." Jenny turned her hands over.
For a second Ronan was certain his ears had it wrong.
"You... you’re actually handing me the male lead?" The words barely made it out of him.
The look on his face was worth every second of the setup, and neither of them tried to hide how much they were enjoying it.
"We are." Jenny pulled her notepad back in front of her like the matter was already settled. "So start getting your head around it, because you’re the one carrying this show now. The contract side isn’t really our department. Once we lock you in, the network’s business affairs people put the deal together, and they’ll run all of it through your agent. So whoever’s representing you, have them reach out to us and—"
"A-actually..." Ronan got the words out before he could think better of it, quieter than he meant them. "I don’t have an agency anymore."
Jenny’s brows went up. "Wait. You don’t have an agency anymore?"
It caught her off guard. Nobody walked into a room like this off the street. The actors who got these appointments came up through agencies, submitted by whoever repped them.
Hill looked just as thrown. "Then how’d you even get in the door for this? The sides go out to the agencies. They’re the ones who put their people up for the part."
Ronan’s ears went a little hot. He didn’t love saying it out loud, but he said it anyway. "My agency dropped me. Two days ago. Right before they did, they gave me one last audition as kind of a send-off, and handed me the sides for Thomas."
That landed on all three of them at once.
Hill kept his face even, but inside he couldn’t get past it. ’That agency let go of a monster. An honest-to-god monster, the kind you build a whole show around, and they just handed him over. Are they blind, or just stupid?’
Jenny and Felix were somewhere in the same place. They’d just watched the whole thing. Whoever had cut this kid loose had done it right before he turned in the best read any of them had seen all day.