Bette pulled out her own phone, to tap a message out to Tina that she was in the warehouse of the Tribeca set.

As she was doing so, she overheard a man’s voice on the other side of the screen.

“I’ll fly out in a few hours. I’m in someone else’s set. We share the same special effects master …” he was saying. As he rounded the screen, he stopped abruptly when he saw Bette, head bent over her phone.

“I’ll call you back,” he said. “I said I’ll you back!” he added, barking into the phone.

Bette raised her head to look up from her phone, sensing someone was staring at her.

“Umm… I’m Scott,” he said, introducing himself as he strode over, hand extended towards her to shake her hand.

Bette glanced coolly at him, ignored his hand, which hang limply in the air for a second, before he hastily withdrew it. She looked down again at her phone, tapping out, “ok,” then sent her reply to Tina. Tina had expressed surprise at Bette’s message that she was waiting in the Tribeca set, and then had explained that the meeting she’d told Bette about had moved to a nearby café’. She expected that they would wrap up in about ten minutes, however, and that she would walk to join Bette in the set. She asked Bette to wait until she got there.

Bette paused a beat before dropping her phone into her suit pocket.

“Umm… may I?” Scott asked gesturing to the chair loosely positioned across Bette’s.

He pulled the chair closer to him when she shrugged.

He swallowed drily, and palmed his hands on his jeans, as if to dry them. The air between them fairly crackled with his nervous energy and it thickened as Bette remained silent, eyes narrowed into pin-pricks. To Scott each second seemed to tick by slowly, like the atmosphere of an approaching storm out in the Midwest, where he’d grown up.

“Umm… I, ahh… would just like to,” he started haltingly.

“I don’t give a shit about what you’d like,” Bette cut in icily.

He swallowed again. “Look … I never meant to hurt her.”

“You are a lying bastard.”

He looked away from her, and absentmindedly ran his hand over the back of his head, biting his lip, thinking that he desperately wanted to explain to her about what had happened with Tina all those years ago, for some reason.