The Shadow Beside the Warmth

Lia stood in the living room for a moment that stretched impossibly long. The phone was still pressed to her ear even though the line was dead. The fairy lights above the window blinked their soft gold rhythm. Outside, the city hummed with its ordinary, indifferent noise.

Then Emma appeared in the hallway doorway, her hair already half unraveled from the style she'd worn it in all day, one hand raised absently to untangle it. "Lia, have you seen my necklace? The silver one, I left it on the"

Lia spun around and held a single finger to her lips with such intensity that Emma stopped mid-sentence, her hand frozen in her hair. She stared at her roommate, reading the expression on her face  something wild and barely contained  and immediately fell silent, pressing herself against the doorframe and watching with wide eyes.

Lia lowered the phone slowly from her ear. She set it down on the coffee table. She looked at Emma.

"That," she said, with the deliberate, breathless weight of someone delivering life-changing news, "was Chase Lopez on the phone."

Emma's eyes went wide. "Chase Lopez."

"Chase Lopez." Lia nodded. And then, because she could no longer contain it: "I got a part, Emma. He sent my audition tape to one of his partner companies and they want me. On set. Tonight." The last word came out in something between a laugh and a scream, her hands flying up to cover her mouth for a moment before she let the smile take over her entire face, wide and bright and entirely unguarded. "They want me tonight."

Emma crossed the living room in three steps and threw her arms around her friend. Lia grabbed her back just as fiercely. They stood there in the middle of the small, cluttered living room of a girls' dormitory on a side street in the middle of a city that had been telling them no for months, holding each other and laughing the kind of laugh that was really crying that had decided to go a different direction.

"That is incredible, girl," Emma said into her shoulder. "That is so beyond incredible. We are celebrating when you get back tonight, I don't care how late it is." She pulled back and gripped Lia by both arms, looking at her face with an expression of pure, uncomplicated joy. "You better get ready. You are not showing up on your first night looking like us." She gestured broadly at both of them and they dissolved into laughter again.

Lia grabbed her jacket from the couch and her bag from the floor and disappeared into the bathroom in a whirlwind of energy. Emma stood in the living room for a moment after she left, her smile still on her lips, a warmth in her chest that she chose not to examine too carefully  the warmth of being happy for someone, and the very small shadow that sometimes lived beside it when you were still waiting for your own good news.

She went back to looking for her necklace.

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