After My Protector Kissed Me in Front of My Ex

The corset was killing me.

Not metaphorically. The wardrobe department had laced it two inches tighter than the fitting, and every time I drew a full breath, the boning bit into my ribs like a reminder that beauty in this industry was always a little bit punishment. I stood at the edge of the soundstage in full period costume — ivory silk, hair pinned up with about forty pins I could feel individually — and ran my lines in my head for the fourth time that hour.

This role mattered. I needed it to matter in the right way, the kind that had nothing to do with who was backing me or what I'd traded to get here. Director Elliott Shaw had made it clear from the first table read that he didn't think I could carry the emotional weight of the third act. He'd said it with a smile, the kind that comes with plausible deniability. I'd smiled back and gone home and worked until two in the morning for six weeks straight.

So I was focused. I was composed. I was exactly where I needed to be.

Then I looked up.

He was standing at the far edge of the set, just past the lighting rigs, in the soft industrial shadow where the crew kept their equipment cases. Jeans. A worn canvas jacket. A sketchbook tucked under one arm like it had always lived there.

Dawson Walker.

I felt it before I processed it — a pull in my chest, low and sudden, like a string being plucked on an instrument I thought I'd put away. Three years. He'd been in London for three years, and now he was just standing there, watching me with that same unhurried expression, the one that had always made me feel like he had nowhere else in the world he'd rather be.

I looked back down at my script.

My hands were completely steady. I was proud of that.

---

They called a thirty-minute break after the next setup, and I was halfway to my trailer when I heard him say my name.

"Calliope."

Just that. Like no time had passed at all.

I turned around slowly. Up close, he looked the same — a little more settled, maybe, the way people get when they've spent time somewhere that agreed with them. He had a new scar on his chin, small and pale. His eyes were the same warm brown I'd spent two years of college memorizing without meaning to.

"Dawson." My voice came out even. Good.

"You look incredible in that costume." He said it simply, no performance in it. "The whole thing. You look like you belong in it."

"That's generally the goal."

He smiled. "Still take your coffee black with one sugar?"

The fact that he remembered that — the specific, useless fact of how I took my coffee — landed somewhere it shouldn't have. I kept my expression neutral. "Sometimes."

"I've been back two weeks," he said. "I