Selfie by Amy Lane

“They had a cappuccino machine, and I got damned good.”
    I took another sip and shuddered, feeling some of the heat of the room seep into my bones finally. “You’re hired,” I told him lightly, and his courtesy laugh warmed me more.
    At that moment Simon stood up at the head of the table and called order, and I looked around at the room that had grown a little more occupied while we were talking.
    “Okay, folks—we’ve consolidated some of the sets to Soundstage One and added Soundstage Two. We also have three new locations to shoot at, and only one of them is accessible via golf cart from here. So returning people, you get to take the short tour, new people, you get the slightly longer tour. When the new people are done, we’re all motoring to the Global, the European Suite, and we’ll be served lunch and get a chance to mingle before we have our first reading. Hunter Easton and Kevin Hussain will be there, and they’re going to brief us on the basic story arc—you’ve all signed your NDAs, right?”
    “Yes, Simon,” came an amused voice. “None of us are going to the Pentagon with our secrets.” I looked and saw, oh my God! Blond, blue-eyed, the darling of the small screen and everybody’s favorite boy-wonder actor, Carter Samuels! The star of Wolf’s Landing had actually come in unannounced, which was pretty impressive given that he and his husband Levi Pritchard were together and their bodyguard was right on their heels.
    My eyes widened as I took in the three of them, the bodyguard looming large in the background. Carter’s career had taken off as a result of this show—and Levi’s had revitalized in the extreme. It was a good idea to remember that. I may have been coming from the big screen, but as of yet I hadn’t been beating the paparazzi off my lawn with a stick the way they had.
    “Thinking of trading up?” Noah murmured in my ear, and I grinned at him.
    “I already got the premium model,” I joked, and he gave me a “damned straight” nod in return. But Simon wasn’t done talking yet, and I didn’t want to be a shitty student on the first day of class.
    “You laugh!” Simon complained good-naturedly, because as I looked around most of the cast and crew were laughing. “But Finn Larson is going to meet us at the Global, and he’s going to be jumping up and down and screaming to make sure we understand—no spoilers, no dropping hints, not even to our special sources, you all understand?”
    “I understand Larson’s a douche bag,” Levi Pritchard muttered not so quietly.
    A mid-sized woman with Jilly-style maquillage and impressive heels spoke up. She was the only woman in the trailer not casually dressed in jeans or stretch pants, and her no-bullshit black business suit and bun told me that this was someone with clout.
    “You need to keep that to yourself,” she said sternly. “ Selves ,” she corrected with a look around at the rest of us. “We are a small cast and crew working in an isolated location—we need to be the proverbial big happy family or we will end up at each other’s throats, do we get that?”
    Conklin grimaced. “Thanks, Anna—we were going to try to keep the scary teacher lectures in reserve for the mid-season, when we get the fuck on each other’s nerves, but it’s good you broke that out now. We know what’s coming. Ladies and gentleman, if you haven’t met Anna Maxwell, she’s usually a little less uptight than this.” Ah—Anna. She was one of the show’s producers, so, yes, she did get to be the scary mean teacher, didn’t she?
    Anna rolled her eyes and visibly relaxed. “Yes, well,” she said, sending a comic glare at Levi and Carter, “if you had to work with these two overgrown fifth graders, you’d pull out your ruler and your dunce caps too!”
    General laughter, and Simon went on talking while Anna started pulling packets and folders from the desk at his back to hand out to us. Noah got a copy too, and as I glanced around I