AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a submission for the Winter Holidays contest. I had to hurry and finish this to get it done in time. Would have made it longer, but I'm sure you'll like it anyway. If you do, make sure to vote!
*
Fatigue set in well before the last shot, which seemed to take forever. Those of us not wrapped for the night stood shivering in the night as our once-warm coffees sat cold and forgotten on the steps. The cabin was lit only by a couple 1K's, casting a sliver of light on the gloomy staircase which leads to the porch. The poor girl had run her lines a hundred times and we all had hopes that each take would be her last, and she would finally get the warmth she and the rest of us wanted. And shooting a week before Christmas didn't help.
I don't know why they saved this shot for last. It is such a simple shot, made complicated only by the extremely late hour. She walks up to the door, looks inside, then opens the door. That's it. Doesn't take two hours to shoot.
But what do I know, I'm just the writer. They've already gutted the thing to save time and to cover up laziness, but as long as I don't completely freeze my balls off, I'll gladly accept a reshoot at this point. The actress has already flipped out once, the camera's last battery has drained twice as quickly as expected because of the cold and the director herself is getting noticeably loopy. We didn't have long before yet another probably-critical shot would get scrapped.
It wasn't supposed to go this way.
I took this gig as a favor to an old flame. Why I thought it was a good idea to do a favor for my ex, in spite of how much her husband approved of the idea, is beyond me. She was the sort that attracted damaged people, and that should have served as a warning to me as well.
But Rea didn't seem the type. Not at first, anyways. She my ex's friend, the director of the movie. She struck me as the sort of normal girl that everyone knows and no one dislikes. She's not all that social and nobody can remember the last boyfriend she even had. Not that she's gay, but she just hasn't done a whole lot of dating, and she sees no pressing need to do so. She likes her work, this I can tell, and she's good at it too.
She's about the least offensive person you'll ever meet.
Even now, with everyone on their edge, she is still coping like a saint. She yells wrap, and it sounds like the ending of a suspended note that had been hanging in the air all night.
I helped the crew pack the lights and bring them back into the main cabin in no time, and I found Rea by he fire arguing with Jay, the production designer. She was past her patience, but didn't have the energy to stand up to the production designer for much longer.
If Jay had a super-power, it would be bitching. Never in all my experience on movie sets have I encountered a more argumentative, time-wasting gum-flapper than this one. The sound of her voice grated on everyone. She had the look of a girl I might otherwise find insanely attractive in a librarian sort of way, with her thick-rimmed glasses and her dark, chin-length Velma-like hair. I imagine a version of her not tainted by whatever boyfriend broke her heart and made her a hateful bane on the planet. I would take her home myself, if only she wasn't so vile.
I moved to the fire while everyone continued packing things away. "If you don't need me anymore, I'm just gonna go back to my cabin and..." I started to say to Rea.
"Could you hang on a minute? Jay, we'll finish this in the morning, ok."
"What time? You need to tell me what time so that I can know when to start setting up my stuff. I can't have people in the kitchen when I'm trying to get it ready for the breakfast scene. If we don't start with that scene, I can..."
"Jay. 8am. I will see you at 8AM. Got it?"
"Ok, I was just emphasizing that..."
"Good night, Jay."
Jay made a brief glance at me, as if for support, which took me aback for a moment. Then, in a firm and calculated but dramatic gesture, she stood up and walked out.
"I didn't envy you tonight, Rea."
She laughed and took another sip of her hot chocolate, then held it in her lap. She was sitting cross-legged and looked positively exhausted. Her tiny ears poked out from her long but unkempt hair, and I found her disinterest in brushing to be very endearing.
"Thank you for all the help," she started again. "You've done way more than you were expected to."
"It's no biggie. You forget, this thing's sort of my baby too. I just wanna make sure it's as good as it can be."
I was only sort of lying. I did see it as my baby, and I did want to make it awesome, but I felt like too much had been lost from the project. A whole scene was cut because someone -- guess who -- couldn't find a dead mouse, and so the scene wouldn't have worked. Had miss prissy-pants told me in advance she was having trouble finding a dead mouse for that scene, I would have helped. After all, I didn't write anything that I thought would not be realistically filmable for a student film.
"I really want a shower badly." That's when it changed. I couldn't put it out of my mind anymore, because she looked different to me.
Again, this whole project was just a favor to an old friend. I didn't know Rea and, frankly, I assumed she would be terrible at making this film. She is, after all, just a student. She's 23, about to be the first graduate with a degree in anything creative among her entire family. All of the men in her family are engineers and business types, and the women all do some form of social work. Very strange to me to meet someone struggling to be creative when she has no roots for it whatsoever. It's a story I relate to.
Yet she has proved to be very talented, and unperturbed by the unreliable and outright lazy attitude of many who were supposed to be helping her this week. Most of all, I respect her. She kept her composure when even I would have gone ballistic.
"O joy," she joked. She grabbed a phone from the mantle beside the fire and said, "Jay forgot her phone again."
"She'll be back here in the morning though, right?"
"Not without this, it's her alarm." She was laughing as she tossed it back down on the carpet. "I just don't even care. I'm so tired of picking up after people."
"Do you even really need her help tomorrow?"
She sighed. "I don't know, I really just want to take a shower and sleep."
"You want me to walk you?"
She turned and smiled, then looked down. She had the look of a girl who just caught a cute guy checking her out. "No, I'll be ok. It's not far. You can take this to Jay, though, if you want to. It's the last cabin on the end."
That was probably the first moment I knew I wanted Rea.
*
"Jay?" I said into the dark cabin. I thought I had gotten the wrong one until I heard some clicking, followed by muffled expletives.
I opened the door, and the light I let in revealed Jay, kneeling before the fireplace. She was trying to start her fire, but she clearly wasn't getting very far.
I was opening the door when I said her name again, and she screamed. When she saw it was me, her face curled and without looking at me, she said, "what do you want?"
"I didn't mean to scare you, but you forgot your phone."
"I didn't forget it," she said, walking to grab it from me quickly. I could see as she came close that she was in her pajamas, and she knew I could see it too.
"I'm sure you didn't. I'm sorry. I'll see you tomorrow."
I was already on my way back out, when she said, "Wait." She grabbed my hand.
