Psions - Refelections

The flashbulbs went off like a flashbang the second the car door opened, and Julia Jameson smiled the way she was told to smile by her manager: wide, easy, a little surprised, like she still couldn’t quite believe any of this was happening to her. Even three years and two blockbusters into that smile, the paparazzi believed it every single day.

“Julia! Julia, over here!”

“Is it true you’re in talks with Marvelous Studios?”

“Julia, who are you wearing tonight?”

She pressed a hand to her chest like the attention genuinely startled her, a gesture she’d practiced in front of a mirror so many times it no longer felt like practice and gave a little laugh. “Y’all are gonna get me in trouble,” she said, letting the Texas creep back into her vowels just enough to feel folksy and disarming, a woman too sweet and too scattered to possibly be capable of thinking for herself. “I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast, let alone know who I talked to about what months ago!”

It got the laugh it was supposed to get, fake but friendly.

She signed four autographs, posed for a dozen photos, and actually stopped for a real 5 minutes to talk with a girl in a wheelchair. She was the bravest person Julia had met all year, and she let her know, for Julia meant that one. Security finally cleared her through the hotel’s side entrance and the doors sealed shut behind her, muffling the noise into something distant and underwater.

The moment they did, something in her shoulders dropped an inch. Not all the way, there were still people looking at her, but at least they were in the business and knew a part of her outside was for the cameras.

“You were great out there,” said Priya, her assistant, falling into step beside her with a tablet already lit up with the next four hours of Julia’s life laid out in fifteen-minute increments. “The interview ran long, but Monty loved it. Said you were ‘authentically charming.’”

“Authentically,” Julia repeated, and something dry and tired flickered behind her eyes for exactly the second Priya looked down to swipe to another page, and then it was gone again, tucked neatly away. “That’s me. Ninety percent authentic charm, ten percent professional smiling.”

Priya laughed, because she thought it was a joke, but Julia knew the joke landed differently for herself.

The interview itself, an hour earlier, had gone the way they usually went. A bright, cheerful woman across from her asking soft-lobbed questions about her “process” and her “journey,” and Julia answering in the voice she used for cameras, caught off guard and a little disorganized, throwing in a laugh whenever a question got close enough to something real that she needed to knock it off balance. Nobody watching would have guessed that underneath the run-on sentences and the wide eyes, she’d been tracking exactly how many minutes were left, exactly which follow-up question was coming, exactly how to steer it somewhere safer before it arrived.

She was good at her job. That was the problem some days. She was good at all of it, the charm, the deflection, the seamless performance of being slightly less put-together than she was, and some days she couldn’t entirely remember which parts of herself were left once the performance ended.

“Monty wants five minutes before your next thing,” Priya said, glancing up from the tablet as the elevator doors opened onto the top floor. “He’s already in the suite.”

“Wouldn’t that be a surprise if he wasn’t”.

Monty Green was waiting by the window when she walked in, phone pressed to his ear, wrapping up a call with the cheerfulness he used on people he needed something from. He hung up the second he saw her, all easy warmth, the kind of smile that had gotten him very far in an industry built on exactly that kind of smile.

“There she is.” He crossed the room and kissed the air near her cheek. “You were phenomenal down there. Truly. I mean it.”

“You say that every time.”

“Because it’s true every time.” He gestured her toward the couch, already reaching for the folder tucked under his arm, and Julia felt her stomach tighten before he’d even opened it, practiced instinct reading the shape of the conversation before a word of it had been said. “I’ve got something. Something big. And I need you to actually hear me out before you make that face.”

“What face?”

“That one.” He sat across from her, folder open now, sliding a stapled contract across the low table between them. “Marvelous. Not one film, a multi-picture deal. Three films minimum, with an option for more if the first one lands the way they predict in the box office. Six figures per picture, Julia, and I don’t have to tell you what a deal like this does for someone at your stage.”

She scanned the top page without really reading it, looking for words that were about to ask more of her than she wanted to give. “How long does that lock me in for?”

“Four years, on paper. Five with the option.” He said it lightly, like it was a small detail, like it wasn’t nearly half a decade of her life laid out on a table between them. “Plus press for each one. Plus the convention circuit, which is its own contracts entirely. Look, I know the timing isn’t perfect-”

“Monty.”

“-but this is the kind of offer that doesn’t come around twice, and if we pass on it, somebody else steps into exactly the career you’ve spent three years building, and-”

“Monty.” Her voice came out sharper than she meant it to, sharp enough that he stopped. “When was the last time you asked me what I wanted instead of you bringing me what you think I want?”

Something flickered across his face. Not quite offense, not quite guilt, something instinctual and smooth sliding into place to cover whatever had been underneath it. “Julia. I want what’s best for you. That’s my whole job.”

“Your job is ten percent of what’s best for me,” she said, and heard, how much steadier and plainer her own voice sounded without the drawl in it, without the wide-eyed softness she wore like a costume everywhere else. “I haven’t had more than two days off in a row since the last press tour. I don’t remember the last time I picked what I ate for dinner I don’t even remember what city I’m in half the time. And now you want me to hand four more years of my life away and call it an opportunity.”

“It is an incredible opportunity.”

“It’s also my life, Monty.”

He opened his mouth to answer, spewing a more persuasive version of the same argument. Something about the gesture, calculated, so certain that the right words could simply override whatever she wanted, made something in Julia’s chest pull tight, hot and overwhelming, a pressure she didn’t have a name for building behind her eyes so fast it frightened her.

“I need you to just-” she started and didn’t get to finish.

The room folded.