Just for a Moment

94 | Late Nights

The next morning, everyone wakes up around the same time, groaning and stretching. "Ugh, god," Julia grumbled. "We should all go buy sleeping bags at some point. They might help during these occasions."

"I don't think they'll make that big of a difference," Larry said. "It's not like they have a lot of padding."

"Well, we don't have enough sense to go back to our own apartments," Dara said, standing and stretching.

Everyone was up as they worked to clean up Joe's living room. Well, almost everyone. "Hey, where's Liv?" Joshua asked.

"Oh, um... that's actually a good question," Frankie said, looking around.

Somehow, they had missed the fact that she was no longer in the apartment with them. "I'm gonna go see if she's in her room," Joshua volunteered. He finished fixing up the throw pillows that he was holding and then left.

"I feel like they're married," Sofia commented.

"You know... that's not a bad assumption," Matt agreed.

The seven continued cleaning up all the trash, dishes, and half-empty cups for the time being until it was time to leave to remain shooting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Joshua quietly knocked on Olivia's door, not getting an answer. You idiot; if she's asleep, she's not gonna hear you. He tried the knob, which happened to be locked; he should've expected that. You're such an idiot.

He went into his apartment and through the connecting door. "Liv?" No answer.

He slowly grew concerned that she wasn't in here at all. What if someone somehow made it into Joe's room and kidnapped her? I mean, it's not unreasonable with all that's happened. He hated that that was the first explanation his mind went to, but it also wasn't illogical.

"Liv, you in here?"

It didn't take long before he finally found her, and his mind was calm again. She was laying on her couch with a few papers strewn everywhere; her keyboard was on the coffee table as well as multiple pens and her episode four script.

Joshua picked up one of the pages and read the title: Ideas for Nini's song. On the page were many scribbles of phrases that were two to three words long; most of them had dark lines going through them, indicating that she had scraped whatever thought she had written.

He picked up the paper wads that were on the floor and placed them on the table, just in case she wanted to come back to them. "Liv?" He gently shook her shoulders, not wanting to frighten her with being in her apartment unannounced. She was curled into a ball on the couch with a blanket nuzzled against her nose, covering half her face. Precious.

"Livvy?" He used a little more pressure, and she began to stir. Her eyes gradually opened, and she brought the blanket up to cover her whole head to block out the sunlight.

"Liv? Hey, it's time to get up."

"I don't wanna," she whined.

"You have to. Plus, I don't think filming is going to be that bad today."

"I'm tired," she said in a baby voice.

"How late were you up?" He thought back to last night and how they were all awake for hours, playing multiple rounds of Spicy Uno as well as the movie, which was another couple of hours. If she snuck away to work on her song, there's no way she could've gotten eight hours of sleep; hell, probably not even five.

"I don't remember," she mumbled through the blanket, closing her eyes once again. Joshua began rubbing her upper arm, knowing she was stressed even though her eyes haven't been open for a full minute yet. She blushed from the gesture, thankful to have the blanket to block her from his view.

"Well, I don't know if it was worth staying up extra," he chuckled. "We were already up well past midnight; I don't know how much later you could have been up."

Even though she was enjoying this little moment, Olivia knew she had to get up eventually. "Well, I wouldn't call it a total waste." She pushed the blanket off of her and sat up, so it was only over her bottom half now, inadvertently causing Joshua's hand to leave her too. Joshua sat on the arm of the couch. "I did manage to accomplish this." She dug around for a moment on the table and found the only page that was somewhat organized and handed it to him.

Joshua took it and quickly scanned the lyrics, noting her handwriting was sloppier than usual. "Wow. You wrote all of this last night?"

She nodded, not actually remembering what she had written in her sleep-deprived state; she just chose the page with the least amount of X's and/or crosses. "Yeah. I was stressing out since Tim said I only had about a week, and I had little to no ideas. Most of that came to me around four in the morning."

"If this is what you come up with when you're barely awake, I'd love to see what happens when you're 100% focused."

"Well, you've already seen that. We wrote a pretty great song together."

"Yeah, but this is your moment now," he said, handing the paper back to her. "This is gonna be a great hit; I can already tell."

"Joshy, this is a rough draft. Plus, you haven't actually heard the song."

"I have eyes, and I can read. That's enough to predict that this is going to be the most popular song from the show."

Olivia blushed and giggled, looking down at the page in her hand and reading over her lyrics. "Quite the bold statement to make. I wrote this when I was a zombie; for all we know, it could actually be total trash when rereading it later."

"Yeah, well, I know that whatever the final version is will end up being the greatest song on the soundtrack."

She chuckled again and leaned on his arm. "Thank you. That means a lot."

Joshua looked down at her and blushed to himself, so grateful for everything that has gotten him to this moment. "Ok, I guess we have to head out now," he said, not actually wanting to get up nor leave.

"Fine, fine." Olivia began stacking all the pages together, mentally preparing herself to make it through the day on what felt like ten minutes of sleep.

🍪🍪🍪

Holy shit... this book has 50... thousand... reads...

I feel like my whole brain exploded when I saw that number. How have that many people found interest in my book? Like... wut??

I'm always so blown away by how much attention this book receives; it's absolutely insane every time, and I feel so awkward trying to properly convey my appreciation because there are not enough words (at least that I know how to order correctly lol) that could be used to express how I feel whenever someone comments, votes, or adds this book (or any of my books) to their reading list(s).

This is the video I have chosen because it's a song that doesn't get the recognition it very much so deserves: