“When a puppet lingers a beat behind, he becomes a rebel soldier,” he drawls, flicking a scrap of paper across the seat, every line of his suit and his mouth shouting arrogance and mockery. You fail, as always, to keep the slow warm smile from leaking around the edges of your mouth, and you cover his hand with your own. Complacency of the Learned, Volume II, page four hundred and seventy-eight in the hardcover edition. You fought for that line in every single draft, and winning that battle probably cut your life expectancy short by at least three years.

“Yo, dude,” you retort, pronouncing the words with all the dignity of Shakespeare, “look at me I’m being a hero and sitting on my ass on the couch at the same time. And no hands.”

He snorts. “Knew you watched it sober.” He eyes the tinted window, and you watch the muscles tighten in his jaw, think about tracing them, but you worry about staining the silk of your gloves. “I need to refine that stuff for the next film. I mean, not that it’s not awesome already –”

“Indeed, everything that you touch turns to gold,” you interject.

“– but She’s not going to let that slide past the censors again,” he finishes. The arms of his sunglasses have gotten thicker over the years, eye-catching red plates and monograms embedded in them, and you know it’s to distract from the crow’s-feet forming underneath them. Not least because more and more foundation is going to your temples every day.

“If you need any assistance, my dear, consider my services always available,” you say, and drop his hand to trace a pattern on his knee instead. Letters, as you usually trace when bored. He shifts a little, breath skipping a beat, and his trousers hike up enough for you to see that he’s wearing the socks you knit him. You pretend not to notice, watch him shake his head.

“I am the master at secret messages. It is me.” It’s missing the almost-sarcastic biting arrogance that caught your attention years ago (and what a déjà-vu-ridden night that was); if you were going to write this evening down, you might say it’s heavy with evidence in the form of the corpses and cut-off fingers of his competition for the title among the Hollywood crowd.

“Surely you don’t presume to usurp me,” you sniff instead, withdrawing your hand in an exaggerated huff, and win the faint flicker at the corner of his mouth that you occasionally forget does not constitute a laugh in the parlance of the wider world.