CHAPTER 20 –
Miles’ POV
I snapped my fingers. A stagehand hurried over with a fresh script. Dogeared pages, creased from many hands.
“This next performance requires true emotion,” I said flatly. Hailey’s eyes narrowed.
I was done playing with shallow roles for her to simply emote through. The real test began now.
The script was from my hit movie with Lindsay Ford – the one that earned her the Best Actress award last year. An honor she deserved after the grueling month it took her to nail that pivotal scene.
“The Boss’ Uncanny Girlfriend,” I stated, watching Hailey’s face for a reaction. Her eyes widened as she recognized the title of the critically acclaimed blockbuster romance.
I would have her perform Lindsay’s part – the emotional crux that truly defined the character’s depths. If Hailey thought her previous “tests” represented the heights of dramatic hurdles, she was in for a rude awakening.
She accepted the script pages silently. I could see the brief flicker of intimidation, the momentary self-doubt as she grasped the magnitude of what I asked of her. But to her credit, she made no protests, no pleas for an alternate challenge. She merely steadied herself with a calming breath and began studying the lines.
I folded my arms and settled in to observe with hawkish attentiveness. This scene meant everything – both in laying bare Hailey’s true capabilities, and gouging out any lingering vestiges of respect I might have begun affording the infuriating waif.
At last, after several tension-fraught minutes, Hailey seemed to find her grip on the character. She shifted her stance, chin lifting with a subtle cockiness that made my jaw tighten.
Then, incredibly, she opened her mouth and began delivering an interpretation of the scene that… heated to outright transcendence.
“You… you bastard,” she hissed in a low, shuddering rasp. Every syllable brimmed with the ragged anguish of a heart torn asunder. Moisture glistened in her eyes, but she blinked it away with a tremulous snarl.
“I can’t decide which chokes me more – the despicable depths of your depravity in using me this way… or the soul-withering fact that some tangled roots of my affections still cringe for you in pity.”
Hailey clutched her head, and when her features contorted in a visceral wince, I could feel the phantom lances of the character’s agony piercing my own breast. Her voice climbed, visceral and Rawly unrestrained:
“You’re… you’re a BLACK HOLE, Nathan! A cosmic void that endlessly slams more and more bodies into its singularity, coldly disintegrating them into formless streams of hawking radiation spat out from the other side!”
She unleashed a deranged peal of laughter that bordered on hysteria.
“And I let myself get sucked into your event horizon of deceit all over again – stripped atom-by-atom until nothing was left of me but guttered shreds of ego and agony SCREAMING as they got crushed out of existence!”
By now, Hailey was trembling so violently, I instinctively leaned forward. Not in anticipation of the inevitable collapse of her performance – but rapt by the searing sincerity of this upstart child’s EMBODIMENT of such profound, wounding soul fire.
Lindsay herself had toiled for over a month, subjecting herself to workshops and harrowing immersions with my team of acting coaches before summoning the precise alchemy of paradoxical fury and yearning this scene demanded. Yet here Hailey stood, channeling the cauldron of wants and agonized love scorned with heart stopping intensity that bordered on supernatural.
And the true heights were still to come.
“B-but that’s just it, isn’t it?” Hailey croaked, dropping to her knees. Tears streamed freely down her pallid features. “For all your heat and gravity, you’re nothing but a lightless void in the cosmos.”
She let out a keening, anguished whimper that pierced straight into my soul.
“One that leeches everything it touches of warmth… of the glow and wonder that makes life worthwhile in the first place.”
For a shattering instant, Hailey simply knelt before me, overcome – trembling hands pressed over her mouth to stifle the raw emotion still spilling out.
Then, slowly, she gathered herself enough to lift her bleary gaze directly into my own…
… and I drowned in the softly radiant desolation burning there. An entire cosmos of heartbreak and soul-rending pathos only she could perceive within those amber depths.
“I gave you everything,” she whispered in a voice brimming with quiet lamentations. “Every last shard of light inside me. And in the end… your darkness still swallowed it all.”
Silence thundered in the wake of her capstone. Almost impossibly, I found my own eyes stinging with involuntary moisture, throat constricted tightly against some unnamed swell of emotion.
Throughout the sacred space of live theater, I’d witnessed sublimity and pathos summoned from the depths of the most hallowed thespian giants. Consummate artists plying their craft with such naked authenticity that audiences wept, spirits soared, zeitgeists shifted on the foundations of mere HUMAN EXPRESSION.
Yet NOTHING – not Olivier or Brando or the Grecian masters themselves – had ever clawed so brutally into my jaded, withered atrocity of a soul.
Heaved me bodily into the eye of a howling vortex of passion and turmoil as this untrained lady had with but a few cathartic verses of text.
Hailey remained in a kneeling pose of supplication and ruin, the only sounds her softly ragged breathing.
Unwilling – or perhaps unable – to break the tenuous spell holding us both in its sway until someone intervened.
My mouth worked uselessly as I strove to my words back into some semblance of coherent order.
What madness… was this unruly newcomer, this COLT channeling into something beyond simple role immersion?
Beyond even the most transcendent artistry I’d ever witnessed.
Did she even grasp the enormity of the gift she so casually wielded – this feminine shape forged from pure chaotic creative energies?
Elemental, unsullied by pretense or pomp or artifice – simply twisting the ethereal stuff of profundity into substantive force?
For a dizzying heartbeat I stood on reality’s recipe, equilibrium shattered as the true scope of Hailey’s talents loomed terrifyingly before me.
Then a rough cough jarred me from the haze, senses abruptly snapping back into focus.
I turned toward the stagehand who’d interrupted – a fresh glint of wrathful purpose kindling in my depths.
No… I would NOT succumb to this impudent naif’s unexpected magnificence.
Nor would I shrink from my destined path of maliciously breaking her as punishment for the temerity of scorching my soul so Rawly.
My breath escaped in a hiss of mingled awe and cold loathing.
Hailey’s light was too incandescent – too unapologetically brilliant in its artistry – to be permitted flourishing.
This was precisely why such astonishing talents must be crushed quickly and without mercy.
For a crater’s sake, this fresh-faced trollop had channeled the very essences of anguish and profundity with more authenticity in a few minutes than legends wielded over entire celebrated careers.
Made me FEEL things I’d mastered exorcising from my psyche decades ago!
Unacceptable.
If Hailey’s ascendance remained unchecked, she would soon eclipse and obliterate everything – rend asunder all the deliciously cold, withholding cruelties and agonies I prized beyond any fleeting triumphs of artistry.
Teeth grinding, I poured the full immensity of my will into restoring the rigidly unfeeling, impervious facets of my persona.
Subtly rearranging my stance and countenance to thicken the emotional barricades I sensed this upstart waif breaching.
I would break her rote, I vowed with silent conviction.
Would schism every last bit of pretense and light this “natural talent” thought herself immune to shattering… until SHE cracked first.
Regarding Hailey with newly impervious disdain, I gave a slow, denigrating clap of mock applause.
“Not bad for an amateurish first stab. Your… indulgent passion did make for a decent mid-range performance, I suppose.”
I could sense the speculative looks from the crew – clearly taken aback by my lukewarm reaction.
Igor chocked on his drink and g’aredvat him.
But Hailey appeared neither surprised nor indignant. Instead, her expression remained hooded, somehow unflustered by my practiced belittling’s and rudeness.
Dangerous.
I tilted my head in a scrutinizing leer. “Of course, Lindsay spent weeks of intensive coaching to truly land the… nuances and textures of the scene. All in the name of connecting with the deeper resonances of heartbreak and loss.”
My smile took on a mocking edge. “We’ll have to do considerably better at hitting those thematic depths if you intend to justify upstaging my last muse. Unless mere pyrotechnics are the extent of your artistic ambitions.”
From the corner of my vision, I glimpsed knowing headshakes and speculative whispers rippling through the crewmen.
They’d beheld Hailey scalding the very dregs of their jaded souls – seen theatrical lightning split my once-impregnable sangfroid.
And they recognized my machinations for what they were: frantic, desperate gambles to reclaim control of a dynamic spiraling wildly askew.
To make Hailey’s accoladed talent heel and obey through the only currencies I knew – mockery, denigration, and the faintest threat of agonizing cruelty yet to come.
But as I drank in the resilient poise of my unbowed protege, I sensed with a lurch of grudging awe that such tactics may no longer hold sway over her spirit.
My novice had experienced something numinous and transformative.
Tasted the succulence of true artistry in its most primal form – and found sustenance from a deeper wellspring than any I could satisfactorily obstruct or divert.
More unnerving still, Hailey’s eyes met mine with brazen lucidity. Accepting my implicit challenge in their depths with a thrumming undercurrent of reciprocated promise.
This was no longer a master-student dichotomy, but a combat of equals. Of opposing polarities destined to collide in an earth-shattering maelstrom to determine whose essence emerged triumphant.
Without warning, a shudder of terrified exhilaration rippled along my nerves.
I had unleashed something inexorable. Something the likes of which I’d only dreamed in my wildest fevers of inspired madness.
And now, inexorably, I would be dragged toward a single path – one which demanded Hailey’s radiant spirit be purified through agonies beyond her mortal ken… or else it consumes and extinguish me utterly.
I know I saw it in her since the first time we met.
She has the fire in her!
She’s even better than Lindsey!