I sneered. How could he have auditioned for it?
He’d just used the same trick, letting the casting director feel his shark muscles, abs and mermaid lines.
“Okay then,” I held out my hand and said lazily. “Since you’re sorry, give me the role back.”
His face flushed and he seemed frozen in time. He stared at Scarlett helplessly. She immediately exploded and stood in front of him, her petite body radiating boundless energy.
“Calvin, are you sick? You’re incompetent, yet you insist on forcing Zachary to his death? How did Zachary offend you?!”
A wry smile curled my lips.
Ignoring the lingering bitterness in my heart, I asked, “Oh? You didn’t know?”
Scarlett clearly knew. She loved to “cultivate.”
From my first audition, when she led me through line practice and character development, to now, when she coaxed her little puppy to sleep and posted on X app, the routine was exactly the same.
She loved watching a young man slowly blossom under her care, like a game of victory all her own.
She called it a sense of accomplishment.
I was willing to accommodate her preferences and pretended to be the way she wanted.
But ultimately, my pretense wasn’t convincing enough and she no longer liked it.
Now, she had found a new “replacement.”
That tone-deaf little puppy with a perpetually aggrieved expression. When she forced the song she’d originally written for my stage comeback onto her little puppy, I didn’t object.
She pressured me into a late-night variety show, euphemistically calling it “rekindling my popularity,” but it left me stranded in the studio for four straight nights, which caused a relapse of my old kidney injury and hospitalization.
I finally made it onto the trending search list for the first time in a long time, but she called me “squeamish” and didn’t come to see me.
She spent every night with her puppy and danced passionately at bikini parties.
Until that day, I had just been discharged from the hospital when a thick file was slammed in my face.
“Are you crazy?! You hired a group of trolls to discredit Zachary?!”
I flipped open the report, which was filled with revelations about Zachary’s misconduct on the set and it topped the trending search list.
But I had never seen this data before. Seeing that I didn’t respond, Scarlett raised her hand and slapped me.
“Calvin, why are you so petty? Did you know that Zachary had a depression episode and self-harmed?! I’m telling you, if Zachary doesn’t recover, I’ll never let you, a piece of shit, go!”
The slap mark on my face burned and I sneered.
“Let’s check the data source.”
I contacted the hacker and ten minutes later, the IP address was found.
“These were all trending searches Zachary bought himself to ruin his popularity.”
Scarlett didn’t believe it until I showed her the screenshots from backstage. Her face grew colder and colder.
“I’m sorry... I’m jealous. I’m just so scared.”
Zachary’s fingers and lips trembled as he nervously picked at the shallow scar on his wrist until it bled.
“I’m afraid of losing popularity, afraid of losing resources. I’m afraid of losing Scarlett.”
Rich in holes and contrived, Zachary’s acting was so fake, yet Scarlett believed it. Her eyes welled up with heartache and she rushed over to hug him tightly.
"Zachary, you’re so silly…”
She looked up at me.
“Brother Calvin… why don’t we just let this go?”
I froze for two seconds and suddenly remembered the last time she called me Brother Calvin. It was when we were kids.
She looked at me like that, tears welling in her eyes.
“Brother Calvin, I don’t have a mom and dad anymore. You’re all I have.”
At that time, I was willing.
Hearing it now, it felt like a knife ripping my heart out.
