Off Script

FROM THE AUTHOR

"When I was younger, I spent most of my afternoons after school, with my grandmother Irene. We would spend hours watching her stories on the big television in the living room. And we would discuss at length as if it was real, whether the return from the dead Roger was really the real one. There would often be a twin that would suddenly appear, and the show would spend time explaining why Ruth who gave birth to the original one, didn’t know she had had twins. Or poor Marlena who became possessed by the devil. The ice princess that could freeze the world. And I could go on about those outlandish plots.

But what I most remember is how special those afternoons with my grandma sitting side by side sharing those stories were.

Off Script is a second chance romance set in the world of daytime drama. It’s also a tip of the hat to those outlandish plot stories that sparked my imagination. I do hope you will enjoy the story of Sabrina and Taylor finding each other again so many years later."

—Emma Parks

PROLOGUE

Paris, October 2016

The bar was half-empty when Sabrina Fox walked in, which was exactly what she wanted. She’d spent three days at the film festival surrounded by people—networking, pitching, performing the careful dance of someone trying to make it in an industry that ate people alive. She’d shaken hands with a producer that afternoon who’d looked over her shoulder the entire time, hunting for someone more striking than her. Tonight, she wanted wine and poetry and no one asking what her “five-year goal” was. She claimed a stool at the end of the bar and set down the book she’d bought that afternoon from a used shop in the Marais. Her hair had come loose from its ponytail on the walk over; she pulled the elastic out, gathered the long blond length of it, and tied it back up without thinking. Then she looked at the wine list, which was entirely in French.

“Um.” She pointed. “The Sancerre. Sank-air?”

The bartender’s eyebrows moved a quarter inch. He looked at the list. He looked at her. He said something rapid and French that she couldn’t catch a word of, poured the glass, and set it down with the particular gentleness of a man making a point.

“Thanks,” Sabrina said. “Merci.” That one, at least, she was sure of.

She didn’t usually read poetry—her mother would say it was impractical, wouldn’t help her career—but something about being in Paris made her want to be a different version of herself. Someone who read poetry in bars. Someone interesting. Even if the only French she could remember was from high school. She was three pages in, understanding maybe half of it, when someone sat down beside her.

“Hi.”

Sabrina looked up. The woman had dark hair to her shoulders, pushed back from her face like she’d been running her hands through it all evening, and dark eyes that didn’t quite settle. She was pretty in an understated way, and she was holding her drink with both hands. She also looked as though she’d talked herself into this on the walk across the room and was already regretting it.

Sabrina let the pause sit one beat longer than was kind. She’s nervous. Which was oddly endearing, and which decided it for her.

“Hi yourself.” Sabrina said, mouth quirking.

“I heard you order.” The woman winced. “Sorry. That came out like I was listening. Well…I was listening. It’s a small bar.”

“I butchered it.”

The woman grinned at her. “You did. He was very French about it.” She placed her drink on the bar, giving it a half turn as she did. “I’ve been here four days and the only thing I can say correctly is the name of my hotel, and I’m not confident about that.”

“Festival?”

“Festival.” The woman’s shoulders came down half an inch, the relief of finding common ground. “You?”

“Three days in. Two more meetings tomorrow, and then I’m free. Then I get to go home and find out whether any of them meant it.” Sabrina tipped her glass. “Actress?”

“Actress.” A short laugh, self-deprecating. “Allegedly. I had a screening. Eleven people came. Four of them had worked on it.”

“That’s four more than most,” Sabrina offered.

“That’s a generous way to count.”

Sabrina found herself smiling in return. The woman’s gaze dropped to the book, and then to the wall behind the bar, and then back to the book again. “Can I ask what you’re reading? Or is that—” She stopped, shaking her head briefly. “That’s the second thing I’ve said that sounds like I’m spying on you. I’m going to stop talking.”

“Please don’t.” Sabrina turned the cover toward her. “Poetry. In French. Which as you can tell, I don’t speak.”

“Then how—”

“I’m feeling my way through. Trying to remember my high school French. It’s going badly but I’m enjoying it.”

“I don’t understand poetry.” The woman said it like a confession. “I’ve tried. It always feels like a test I’m failing.”

“Maybe you’re reading it wrong.”

“There’s a wrong way to read poetry?” Her brows pulled together.

“I don’t think poetry is meant to be understood. It’s meant to be felt.” Sabrina dog-eared her page and turned to face the woman fully. Decision point. She could shut this down—go back to her book, her solitude, her original plan. Or she could see where this went. “I’m Sabrina.”

“Taylor.” The woman’s smile arrived all at once, relieved and grateful, and it changed her whole face. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Sabrina felt something spark—not just attraction, though there was that too, but recognition. This woman looked like how Sabrina felt, successful on paper, lonely underneath, pretending she knew what she was doing.

“One drink,” she said.

One drink became three. Three drinks became the bartender pointedly clearing his throat at two in the morning. They talked about films and ambition and the particular loneliness of pursuing something you wanted so badly it scared you. Taylor was funny in a self-deprecating way that felt genuine rather than performed. She had opinions about everything and apologized for half of them. Sabrina noticed that she touched the stem of her glass when she was about to say something she wasn’t sure of, and that she checked Sabrina’s face after every joke, and that she stopped doing both around the third drink.

“You don’t have to apologize for having opinions,” Sabrina said, somewhere around hour three.

“I’ve been told I come on too strong. That I should be more...” Taylor gestured vaguely. “I don’t know. Less opinionated. More palatable.”

“Fuck palatable. Palatable is boring.” Sabrina grinned at her.

Taylor’s laugh was surprised, delighted. “I like you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Not yet.” Taylor’s dark eyes held hers and didn’t look away this time and Sabrina felt it—the shift from interesting stranger to something more.

They left when the bartender made his final stand, insisting he needed to close. Outside, the Paris night was cool and damp, the October air sharp in Sabrina’s lungs. The Seine reflected streetlights in ribbons of gold.

“I should go back to my hotel,” Taylor said, making no move to leave.

“You should.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want you to either.” The words came out before Sabrina could second-guess them. It wasn’t like her. But something about this night—this woman—made her feel braver than usual.

They walked. Along the river, through empty streets, talking and not talking, the silence as comfortable as the conversation. At some point, Taylor’s hand found hers. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m staying near the Latin Quarter,” Sabrina said when they’d walked long enough that the sky was starting to lighten at the edges.

Taylor threw her a quick glance. “Can I walk you home?”

“I’d like that.”

The walk took another thirty minutes. By the time they reached Sabrina’s building, dawn was breaking properly, painting the buildings in shades of rose and gold. They stood on the front steps, neither quite ready to let the night end.

“This was—” Taylor started.

“I know.”

“Can I see you again?”

Sabrina felt her heart do something complicated in her chest. Yes. Obviously yes. She was intrigued by this woman with her nervous hands and her laugh that sounded like surprise.

“I’m here for three more weeks,” Sabrina said. “I’m supposed to leave after the film festival.”

“Me too. So—” Taylor stepped closer, and Sabrina could smell her perfume, something subtle and warm. “Tomorrow? Later today, I mean. Whatever this counts as.”

“Later today.” Sabrina reached up, brushed a strand of hair from Taylor’s face. The touch made Taylor’s breath catch. “Come find me.”

“Where?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Taylor kissed her then—soft, tentative, a question more than a statement. Sabrina answered by pulling her closer, by kissing her back with all the want she’d been carefully containing for the past six hours. Taylor made a small sound against her mouth—surprise, pleasure—and Sabrina felt the shivers dance over her skin. When they broke apart, Taylor was smiling. “I’ll find you.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Sabrina watched her walk away, this woman she’d met hours ago who already felt important in a way she didn’t have words for. She stood on her doorstep as the sun rose over Paris and thought: This. This is what I came here for. Not the festival. This.

Three weeks later, Sabrina woke to the smell of bread and an empty bed. She knew before she opened her eyes. The hotel room had a different feel to it. She reached across the sheets anyway. They were cold. She sat up.

The poems were gone from the nightstand. In their place was a single sheet of hotel stationery, folded once, propped against the lamp where she couldn’t miss it. She looked at it for a long time before she picked it up. Outside, the bakery was three hours into its day, the river was where it had always been, and somewhere over the Atlantic a plane was carrying a woman toward the rest of her life. Sabrina unfolded the note. She read it once. Then she read it again and again, her mind refusing to let the words mean what they meant.

CHAPTER ONE

The ghost was late again.

Taylor Whitmore stood at the operating table while her director Kyle Morrison paced behind the monitors, pulling off his headset and putting it back on. Kyle was twenty-six, had never met a direction he couldn’t shout, and wore a film-school scarf even in summer. Today’s was burgundy. It had begun the morning artfully draped and was now strangling him.

Taylor adjusted her grip on the plastic scalpel, which was growing tacky beneath her fingers. She tried not to think about how her hand had once held an actual award. Heavy. Golden. Given to her by someone whose name she’d been too stunned to remember. That was six years ago. The award lived in a box in her closet now, underneath a broken humidifier and a yoga mat she’d used exactly once. Six years ago, she’d held that Golden Globe award in trembling hands and thought: This is it. I’ve made it. This is the beginning. The first of many. The proof she’d made it, that the years of struggle and rejection had been leading somewhere. She’d been catastrophically wrong about that. And slowly, without quite noticing when it happened, she’d stopped expecting lightning to strike twice.

Lying on the operating table, Jessica Scott—today’s doomed socialite—mouthed along with everyone’s dialogue. Including Taylor’s. The boom mic dipped into frame for the fourth time in ten minutes. Somewhere beyond the fake hospital walls, Taylor’s co-star Evie Swift was rehearsing her latest death scene, something involving poison and what sounded like Lady Macbeth’s greatest hits.

This was Northern General. Chief of Surgery Elena Cartwright’s domain. A hospital where patients recovered from brain tumors and died from paper cuts, and mortality rates rose whenever contracts came up for renewal. Taylor had been performing miracles here for three years. Temporary, she had told herself after the first contract. Strategic, after the second. She had stopped naming it after that.

“Taylor.” Kyle hurried toward her, clutching his tablet. “I need more intensity in the diagnosis. Remember, this isn’t just any patient.”

“It isn’t?” She continued to hold the fake scalpel in mid-air.

“The patient is your missing ex-husband.”

Taylor glanced down at Jessica, who was supposed to be unconscious but had given up and was now humming an unrecognizable tune, her eyes firmly closed.

“My ex-husband.” This is what you get when you don’t read the new pages.

“Robert,” Kyle said. “After embezzling two million, he faked his death, had plastic surgery to look like a woman, and has been hiding from the Castellano family.”

Taylor tried hard not to roll her eyes. “And he resurfaced as a comatose socialite on my operating table?”

“It’s the last place they’d look.” Kyle said it with enough confidence to make her briefly question whether she was being the unreasonable one. “And remember, this isn’t only a medical crisis. Elena recognizes the man she once loved beneath the reconstructive surgery.”

Jessica looked up long enough to give Taylor a grin and a quick thumbs-up.

None of what Kyle was saying made any sense to her. She should have been used to the often absurd plot points but something about today made her want to argue. “How does Elena recognize him? He has a different face. A different body. Presumably a different voice.”

“The eyes.” Kyle pressed a hand to his chest. “She would know those eyes anywhere. Love doesn’t see the surgery.”

Taylor stifled a groan and bit her lip beneath the surgical mask that still hung on her face. “So let me get this straight. He paid for the surgery so the mob wouldn’t recognize him?”

“Yes but love sees through it.” Kyle’s smile was triumphant.

Taylor stared hard at her director and blinked twice. This is ridiculous. “He’s in a coma, Kyle. Elena can’t see his eyes.”

Stumped, Kyle stopped. His mouth opened, closed. He looked down and began scrolling through his tablet with great purpose.

Taylor placed the scalpel on the instrument tray and stepped a few feet away, hoping to somehow find some calm before continuing with the scene. Easy…This is a soap opera. Not Broadway.

James Somerset appeared beside Taylor in full Dr. Abbott costume, carrying a croissant he had almost certainly stolen from a producer’s private breakfast tray. He was handsome in that effortless way that probably made casting directors weep with gratitude. His dark hair was swept back from a face that belonged on a magazine, warm brown skin, and eyes that suggested he found everything mildly amusing, including himself. Three years of working with him had taught Taylor that James always knew things before she did and always had snacks.

“Did you read the pink pages?” he murmured.

“The ones that arrived at eleven last night?”

“Those would be the ones.” He tore off a piece of croissant. “Elena has been harboring secret feelings for the patient without understanding why.”

Taylor dropped her voice. “Convenient timing, considering Jessica is renegotiating her contract.”

“Survival instinct.” James nodded toward the table. “Her chances improve dramatically whenever someone falls in love with her.”

Taylor caught movement near the soundstage entrance.

“Ah,” James said. “The spirit world has released Marcus.”

Marcus Roy shuffled onto the set in surgical scrubs with a modified leaf blower strapped to his back. He looked apologetic and slightly drunk, which suited Dr. Harrison Newman. The character had been dead since season twelve and now appeared whenever the living doctors required cryptic advice or the writers needed to fill eight minutes. Marcus winked at Taylor.

She reminded herself that murder involved jail time and her rent was due Thursday.

“Places!” Kyle shouted. “Marcus, you enter through the east wall. Taylor, you’re not merely performing surgery. You’re realizing the patient is Robert, Elena’s former soul mate.”

“He erased the face she knew,” Taylor said. “That seems less romantic than you think.”

“Some part of her recognizes him. A flicker. A pull she can’t explain.” Kyle clutched his chest again. He did that whenever he believed he had said something profound. “This is romance, Taylor.”

“It’s a woman in a coma. No, wait. It’s a man disguised as a woman in a coma.”

“It’s poetic.” Kyle turned his attention to the monitor.

For God’s sake. She let it go. There was no winning the argument and no point in trying, and somewhere underneath the absurdity was the thing that kept her here. A script told her what to feel, a strip of tape told her where to stand, and at the end of it someone called cut. There was mercy in that. She didn’t have to decide anything. She’d spent a lot of her life deciding things and getting them wrong.

The cameras rolled. Taylor delivered the diagnosis with the proper urgency. She hit the mark beside the operating table, lowered her voice at the right moment, and allowed Elena’s hand to hover over the patient’s cheek before pulling it back. Wanting, but restrained. Kyle loved restrained. It could be stretched across twelve episodes.

“Cut.” He stared at the monitor, pleased. “Excellent. That longing felt completely authentic.”

“Thanks,” Taylor said. “I was thinking about lunch.” It wasn’t true. She didn’t tell him what was true, which was that the restraint hadn’t been acting, exactly. She was good at wanting things and not reaching for them. She’d had practice.

James joined her as they headed for craft services, weaving around cables and crew. Taylor handed off the scalpel to a prop assistant without breaking stride. The knot between her shoulders loosened a little, the way it always did once the camera stopped looking at her.

“Rough morning?” James asked.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You only torture Kyle when you’re questioning your life choices.” He held out the remains of the croissant. “Do you want to talk, or should I distract you with gossip about the new cast member?”

Taylor stopped. “What new cast member?”

James lowered the croissant. “Kyle hasn’t told you.”

“Told me what?”

“The network wants to shake up Elena’s romantic dynamics with fresh energy.”

Taylor fought to keep her face blank. She had learned to do that at twenty-two, during her first network audition, when a producer had looked her directly in the eye and asked whether she could be prettier.

“Fresh energy,” she repeated. “That’s network language for ‘people are bored and we need them to stop checking their phones during the surgery scenes’.” Taylor’s fingers tightened around her paper coffee cup. The lid clicked under the pressure. “Do you think this is fresh as in romantic dynamics?” she asked. “Or fresh as in let’s see whether the audience notices Elena vanishing around Episode Fifty-Two?”

James’s expression changed. The gossip disappeared from it. “Your contract is up mid-season?”

“Thank you. I’d almost managed to forget.” She fought off the nerves. No one had mentioned renewal. No lunch with the executive producer. No calls from business affairs. No junior executive phoning to say everyone adored her while declining to discuss numbers.

“There still hasn’t been any renewal talk?”

She shrugged and immediately wished she hadn’t. The movement felt too loose. Too careless. “No. Apparently they enjoy suspense in every department.”

“I’ve heard some contingency talk.”

“Contingency.” Taylor tasted the word. “I’m a weather system now.”

James snorted once, then sobered. “It doesn’t mean they’re replacing you. It means they like having options they don’t have to commit to.”

Taylor took a sip. The coffee was cold. “That’s my favorite kind of love.”

James bumped her shoulder lightly. “You’re the face of Northern General.”

She made a face. “Samuel thinks he’s the face of the show.”

“Samuel thinks he invented television.” James replied.

“Faces get recast. Sometimes the audience hates it for a week and then the new Elena survives a ferry explosion and everyone’s like, ‘Sure, that’s Elena. Love her.’”

“You’re spiraling.” James studied her with concern.

“I’m assessing risk.”

“You’re doing it with jokes, which is how I know you’re spiraling.”

She looked down at the coffee cup. A crease had formed beneath her thumb.

“Listen to me. If they’re testing something, remind them why you’ve carried this show for three years. You show up. You know your lines. You make everyone around you better. Make it impossible for them to picture the show without you.” James suggested.

Taylor nodded. Showing up she could manage. It didn’t require admitting that she needed the job. Or that the Golden Globe money was gone. Or that three steady years on a soap had become the only thing standing between her and a career assembled from guest spots, conventions, and interviews about the parts she almost got.

“So,” she said, “who is she?”

“Kyle’s being secretive. That usually means famous or complicated.” James’s eyes narrowed as he studied her.

Taylor stared back. “What?”

“You’ve gone pale.”

“I’m fine.” It came out a beat too fast. She forced her fingers away from the cup. “I was wondering which of my exes has decided to pursue a career in Canadian daytime television.” She wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular. Liar. That was what she told herself, and it held for about a second before it stopped holding. A name she hadn’t said aloud in years was suddenly close. She loosened her shoulders and arranged her mouth into something unconcerned. “I’m going to get another coffee and check Monday’s call sheet. I’m sure everything is fine.”

“Famous last words.” James let her go.

Taylor made it to her dressing room and closed the door before checking her phone. There were three messages from Dee, her agent.

Saw the casting news.

Interesting.

Call me when you have a minute. Actually, call me now.

Dee used interesting when she meant either lucrative or catastrophic. Taylor had never known it to mean anything in between. Her phone rang before she could call.

“Taylor.” Dee’s voice had been carefully emptied of emotion. “I’m assuming you haven’t seen the official announcement.”

“What announcement?”

The pause lasted one second too long. “They’ve cast Sabrina Fox as Elena’s new love interest. She starts Monday.”

Sabrina Fox.

The floor didn’t tilt. Taylor knew that objectively. But for a long moment, she couldn’t feel her feet, couldn’t hear anything except the white noise roaring through her skull. Sabrina Fox. Paris. Ten years ago. A film festival where they’d both been young and hungry and completely unprepared for the way they’d collided. Three weeks. That was all they’d had. But those weeks had contained enough intensity to fuel a decade of regret.

“Taylor?” Dee said. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded steady. Years of training had to be good for something. “I’m just processing.”

“I didn’t know until this morning. Had I received any warning—”

“It’s fine.”

Her hand had begun to shake. She pressed it flat against the vanity. “I’ll handle it.”

“Are you sure? I could call the network. Explain that there may be creative conflicts.”

“No.”

The word came out hard enough to stop them both. Taylor looked at herself in the mirror. Elena Cartwright’s perfect hair. Elena’s composed face. Her own frightened eyes. “I don’t run anymore.”

“Okay,” Dee said eventually. “Call me if you need anything.” The call ended.

Taylor stayed in the chair. Monday was four days away. Four days to learn how to stand across from Sabrina Fox without remembering the room near the Seine. Four days to find a version of herself who could stand across from Sabrina Fox and feel nothing. That version doesn’t exist. She’d spent ten years trying to build it and never quite finished. On the vanity, her phone lit up with the official casting announcement. She left it where it was. She wasn’t ready to see the face. Not enough time. Definitely not enough wine.

LezLibros
This is an engaging and surprisingly hilarious soap opera romance with a little bit of hurt and a lot of sapphic tenderness. … The loyal side characters really brought depth to the book. I loved the chemistry between Taylor and Sabrina, and their humor made the book fun to read. Little angst, slow burn sapphic romance that is definitely worth a read!

Fiona S.
Off Script is one of those stories that has me swinging between wanting to punch a certain EP's lights out to laughing or whooping with joy. Buckle up readers, this one is going to take you on a ride.

TheLesbianReview.com
This very sweet romance had me smiling repeatedly. The related stories, of their rediscovery of attraction and the professionally threatening antagonist, makes for an involved and emotionally charged romance.