Yours - RTSA 52

It was never just coffee.

Rocking the Second Act is a live, evolving draft — I tweak, polish, and occasionally rewrite chaos in real time.
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Lily fell into step beside me as we hurried through the Wharekai to join the queue.

Neither of us had managed breakfast, and she’d forgotten her lunch. I’d forgotten I had a post-production meeting in twelve minutes, which, in fairness, had felt like an entirely future-Veronica problem when I’d been trying to locate a missing charger, two matching shoes… and whatever the fuck Finn had done with his school bag.

The queue snaked halfway across the foyer. You had to weave between crew, camera gear and people already pretending to be other people.

Just a normal Tuesday, really.

Then I saw Zack.

He emerged from the front of the queue balancing two takeaway coffees, jeans hanging low on his hips, battered band T-shirt disappearing beneath an open flannel shirt. His hair had reached that beautifully scruffy stage where every stylist on set would have sworn blind it took forty-five minutes to achieve, despite the fact he’d almost certainly just run his hand through it once and called it a day.

My stomach performed one of those irritating little swoops it insisted on doing whenever he appeared unexpectedly. Fuck.

He looked up and saw me, and the swoop deepened as his smile arrived slowly, the corners of his eyes crinkling before the rest of his face caught up. His gaze flicked over me in a heartbeat, taking in the oversized handbag threatening to slide off my shoulder, Lily beside me, the queue, my expression, the situation that was my hair… whatever fresh chaos I’d apparently wrapped myself in this morning.

He’d missed absolutely none of it.

He lifted one coffee a fraction.

Yours.

Then tilted his head towards the meeting rooms.

Don’t be late.

He nodded at Lily and kept walking. I watched him disappear into the corridor.

“Mum?”

“Hm?”

“...he’s not going to stay over at ours, is he?”

The second swoop of the morning felt completely different.

***

“Veronica.”

The meeting room lurched back into focus.

“Aye, welcome back.”

One eyebrow had quietly made its way halfway up Alasdair’s forehead. A ripple of laughter travelled around the room.

Oh fuck, this was brilliant. I’d mentally wandered off in the middle of my own post-production meeting, my brain apparently deciding now was an excellent time to imagine Zack standing in our kitchen, kids shooting awkward glances at each other.

“Sorry.”

“I said,” he repeated, entirely unbothered, “I thought you’d like to know your wee story’s attracted a bit of attention.”

That finally managed to drag me fully back into the room.

“Attention from who?” My thoughts immediately flew to whatever fresh hell Bash and Zack might have cooked up via their latest live. What the fuck had they done now?

But then I watched as Rebecca exchanged a look with Alasdair that immediately made me suspect conversations of the Behind My Back variety being had. Oh, this was worse.

“Nothing official,” she said. “Not yet. But there’ve been a few conversations.”

“About?”

“The rough cuts.”

Oh bollocks. They’d shown rough cuts to people outside of us? My hurriedly inhaled breakfast threatened a dramatic return to daylight.

“Fuck. Who’s seen them?”

“A select few,” Alasdair said. “Distributors. Partners. The sort of folk who get excited by these things before the rest of us have finished arguing about colour grading.”

I looked around the table. Everyone was looking really fucking relaxed about this startling news.

“So...?”

Rebecca's grin was becoming actively irritating. Why did these people love not just saying the fucking thing?

“So… they like it.”

I waited. None of the fuckers elaborated. I didn’t care for the silence, quite frankly.

“Which scenes?” I asked eventually.

Alasdair, smug fuck, smirked, reached for the keyboard, rewound the timeline a few seconds and hit play.

Me as Rose laughing. Zack as Gary looking at Rose with that mixture of exasperation and complete adoration he’d somehow perfected somewhere around take seven.

The pool table scene.

Even after filming it, even after watching it from behind monitors for an entire day, there was still something faintly surreal about seeing myself climbing onto and riding Zack Salinger in front of half the New Zealand film industry. In my bra.

The scene finished, thank fuck, and Alasdair let the silence sit for a moment before dragging the playhead backwards again.

This time it was Kat and Kevin.

Tender and sweet, a relaxed folding in together of two lives who’d known each other forever. A different kind of relationship altogether.

When the second scene ended, he swivelled his chair slightly towards me.

“Do you know what both of those scenes have in common?”

“The possibility of giving my children lifelong psychological damage?”

A snort escaped somebody down the table. Jake.

“No,” Alasdair said dryly. “Although we’ll no doubt be hearing from their therapists in due course.”

Laughter rippled up and down the table this time.

“I’ve watched the pool table scene at least fifty times now,” Alasdair continued, scrubbing backwards a few frames before letting it roll again. “It shouldn’t work as well as it does.”

He pointed at the screen with one finger.

“This is what happens when everybody keeps their nerve.”

Rebecca couldn’t quite hide her satisfaction. Admittedly, she wasn’t trying very bloody hard.

“It’s also what’s making everyone talk. We’ve had conversations with half a dozen different people over the last week and, without fail, every single one of them has ended up in exactly the same place.”

She glanced at Alasdair, smirk dialed up to eleven.

“Rose and Gary.”

“Every fucking time,” Alasdair muttered, but I caught the quirk of his lip.

The conversation rolled on without me. Distribution. Audience engagement. Emotional investment. I caught fragments as they drifted past, but they refused to settle into anything coherent.

Instead… I became aware of Zack beside me. Our chairs were close enough that the outside of his leg rested lightly against mine beneath the table. We’d been like that for most of the meeting.

Rose and Gary.

Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone else might see it, and suddenly every shared glance, every private joke, every unconscious inch we’d drifted towards each other over the last six months felt horribly visible.

Around the table they were still talking but I wasn’t listening anymore.

*

By the time I escaped to my office, the meeting had taken on a life of its own.

Rebecca had handed me a page as we left, a summary of her thoughts for season 2, telling me to have a think before we caught up later in the week. I wasn’t even sure I’d looked at it properly before wandering back upstairs.

I looked now. Immediately wished I hadn’t.

Halfway down the page, nestled amongst half a dozen possible story threads for the following season, sat five words.

Rose and Gary - Romance Arc.

I stared at them for a long time. They shouldn’t have bothered me — they were only words for fucks sake. One possible direction amongst dozens. Nothing had been decided… nobody had even asked me what I thought.

So why couldn’t I stop hearing Rebecca?

Every single conversation has ended up in exactly the same place… Rose and Gary.

A knock on the open door lurched me out of the spiral.

“Busy?”

I looked up, bracing for impact. Zack leaned against the doorframe with a coffee in one hand and the sort of grin that usually meant I was about to regret encouraging him.

“Kahu and I just watched two seagulls having enthusiastic sex in the carpark.”

I rolled my eyes.

“...good afternoon to you too,”

“No, seriously.” He pushed off the door frame and wandered in, placing the coffee in front of me. “Absolutely no shame. Middle of the bloody footpath. One of them looked me dead in the eye.”

“I’m fairly sure that’s not how birds work.”

“I’m telling you, Veronica, there was feathery mid-coital eye contact.”

I laughed despite the maelstrom in my head.

“There she is,” he murmured, ridiculously pleased with himself. He moved closer, reached out almost absent-mindedly and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear before his hand settled against the side of my neck.

“C’mere.”

There it was again — that impossible knack he had of making a single word sound like the safest place on earth.

I went without thinking. Somewhere along the way that had become our rhythm. He pulled me closer, I folded into him, his forehead settling against mine before his arms found my waist as naturally as mine wound round his neck.

A few months ago we’d barely touched — now he didn’t seem to know where he ended and I began.

And God help me, that was the problem.

His thumbs drifted lazily beneath the hem of my top, warm against the small of my back, and I felt my whole body soften into him. His mouth brushed mine once, then again, never asking, not taking, simply waiting until I met him halfway like I always did.

And I did. Of course I bloody did.

He smiled against my lips, that tiny satisfied smile that always appeared when I stopped fighting the world for five bloody minutes, and the kiss deepened almost without either of us deciding it should. He eased me backwards until the edge of the desk nudged the backs of my thighs.

The familiar scrape of denim against mine, the warmth of his chest, the scratch of stubble I’d kissed often enough to know exactly where it softened beneath his jaw.

“Every time something wonderful happens, you absolutely unravel, Lark.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he was talking complete bollocks, but found myself smiling instead.

Then he chuckled to himself, shook his head and tucked me back against him, his mouth brushing the spot beneath my ear that never failed to undo me.

“Good thing...” His voice was little more than a murmur against my skin. “...I know how to put you back together.”

Rose and Gary.

The words slipped back in before I could stop them.

Every conversation ends up in exactly the same place.

His hand slid beneath my hair and I kissed him because I loved kissing him. Because —

How much of this had he quietly handed to Gary without either of us noticing?

My body stayed exactly where it was while my mind drifted somewhere else entirely. I hadn’t realised it had happened until his kiss softened and I found him watching me instead, his forehead still resting against mine, one hand warm against the back of my neck.

“Hey...” His voice had lost its teasing. “Where’d you go?”

It would’ve been so easy to tell him. To hold up Rebecca’s notes and admit that somewhere between the meeting and my office I’d become terrified of what everyone else was seeing.

I even opened my mouth to say it, but instead I pasted on a smile.

“Just… long morning.”

He held my gaze for another second, and for a moment I thought he’d clocked it, but then he kissed my forehead — completely unaware that he’d just become the thing I was trying to protect.

“Come to mine later?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled, kissed me once more and disappeared back into the corridor.

For a long moment I simply sat there, both hands wrapped around the coffee he’d somehow known I needed before I’d admitted it to myself.

Outside, Whetū carried on around me.

Laughter rang down the corridor. A phone rang. A trolley rattled past my office door. The ordinary soundtrack of people making television while I sat trying to decide whether I was about to become the biggest pain in the arse on the North Island.

Rose and Gary.

Every fucking time.

Maybe Rebecca was right. Maybe this was exactly what audiences wanted.

That wasn’t the problem. The problem was what happened next.

I knew how television worked. If people responded to something, you gave them more of it. More scenes. More glances. More longing.

More motherfucking Rose and Gary.

Ordinarily I’d have been the first person in the room arguing for exactly that.

Except this wasn’t ordinary. This was Zack.

Less than a year ago he’d nearly drunk himself to death. We’d built Second Verse around four women putting the band back together and rediscovering the parts of themselves they’d thought were gone forever. The romances mattered, but they were never supposed to become the destination. They were simply one more sign that these women were alive again.

If we forgot that now...

I stared down at the words Rose and Gary. Maybe I was overthinking it. God knew that wouldn’t exactly be a first.

But if I didn’t say something now, I’d spend the rest of the day talking myself out of it. By tonight I’d convince myself it wasn’t my place. Tomorrow we’d all be too busy. Then the moment would be gone.

I blew out a slow breath and pushed back from my desk. One conversation. That’s all this was.

I just wanted to make sure we weren’t asking too much of him.

Coffee in hand, I stepped into the corridor, wandering in the direction he’d gone.

Up ahead, the rehearsal room door was ajar. I’d barely taken another step before I heard Jasmine.

“...I’m serious, Zack.”

Then him, sharper than I’d heard in weeks.

“Jesus Christ, Jas. Lower your voice.”

I stopped.

When she spoke again, Jasmine’s voice had softened, but there was no mistaking the resolve underneath it.

“You’ve barely got your feet under you. You don’t get to swap one obsession for another and call it healing. How do you know this isn’t just another addiction?”

A long silence followed.

Then I heard him exhale, followed by the familiar rasp of a hand against stubble. He always rubbed the back of his neck when he was trying to find words that didn’t seem to exist.

“She’s not a fucking bottle, Jasmine.”

“I’m not reducing her.” Her reply came gently, almost immediately. “I’m talking about you.”

Another pause settled between them.

“What is this?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know.”

His answer came so quickly it sounded as though he’d been carrying it around for weeks.

“It’s...” He broke off with a frustrated breath. “It’s like...” He gave a small, awkward laugh. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever had before.”

A beat.

“Sorry.”

Jasmine laughed.

“Jesus, that’s awkward considering I used to be your wife.”

A reluctant chuckle escaped him.

“Yeah.”

I listened, the humour slipping away as naturally as it had arrived.

“That’s exactly what worries me,” Jasmine said. “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen from you before.”

I heard her take a deep breath.

“So I’ll ask you again.”

I heard Zack shift his weight.

“Are you in love with Veronica?”

Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

I turned before he’d even had a chance to breathe. The coffee sloshed over my hand as I hurried back the way I’d come, my footsteps swallowed beneath the noise of the studio.

I wasn’t running. I absolutely wasn’t fucking running.

I just...

I couldn’t be standing outside a rehearsal room listening to a conversation that had never been meant for me.

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