**~ Daniel ~**

The first thing I did when I found out I'd be working with Rylan Harvard was call my therapist.

The second thing I did was pour myself a green juice and pretend I wasn't screaming internally.

"Rylan?" I asked my agent, Ari, as if maybe I'd misheard. Maybe she meant Ryan. Or Dylan. Or literally any name that didn't belong to the most insufferable human being to ever wear ripped skinny jeans and smugness like cologne.

"Yes," she said, too cheerfully for what she'd just unleashed upon my life. "Rylan James. He's going to play Ash Blackwell opposite your Mercy Steele. It's going to be explosive. The fans are already manifesting it on TikTok."

Great. Nothing says career peak like being paired with the guy who once told Rolling Stone that my acting was "pleasantly inoffensive, like vanilla ice cream... if vanilla ice cream had daddy issues."

To be fair, I may have fired back in Vulture and compared his last music video to "an Urban Outfitters clearance rack hallucination."

But he started it. I just finished it. With tact. And a three-point vocabulary upgrade.

"Tell me this is a prank," I said, because I've known Ari since I was seventeen and still rocking side-swept hair and boy band charm. She once convinced me to dye my hair silver "for the aesthetic," so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she was just torturing me for sport.

"Daniel." She sighed. "This is huge. You know what kind of exposure this series is going to get. Prestige-level. Streaming giant. Executive producers with actual pull. And the character of Mercy? He's gonna be a fan favorite. The internet will eat him up."

"Yeah, and then throw him back up when they realize I'm acting opposite a walking tabloid headline."

"He's not that bad—"

"He flipped off a child last year at the People's Choice Awards."

Ari groaned. "The kid asked if he was Machine Gun Kelly. It was a reflex."

Still, I wasn't totally convinced that co-starring with Rylan wouldn't end in bloodshed. Or worse: fan edits of us staring longingly at each other under dramatic lighting with a Halsey song playing in the background.

I knew how this worked. The fandoms would unite. Someone would name us "RyDan" or something equally cursed. Someone would write a 40-chapter slow-burn enemies-to-lovers fic that somehow gets more engagement than the actual show.

And my face would be memed into oblivion before the pilot even aired.

Ari, sensing my internal spiral, softened her voice. "Look. Just meet with him, okay? Go to the table read. Shake hands. Pretend you don't want to strangle him. You're an actor, babe. Act."

And with that, she hung up.

***

I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, brushing a hand through my hair like that would help me come to terms with my fate.

I wasn't even wearing a shirt. Just boxers and shame. And a silk robe that screamed "midlife crisis" even though I was twenty-six.

"Okay," I muttered to myself. "It's fine. It's fine. You've worked with worse. You survived that indie film with the guy who only communicated in method acting and raw liver. You can survive this."

But could I?

Rylan James was chaos incarnate. The kind of guy who showed up to fashion week in a fishnet tank top and called it "post-modern masculinity." The kind of guy who once got into a public screaming match with a paparazzo outside a Taco Bell and somehow came out of it more famous.

He's talented, sure. But he's also a walking HR complaint.

And now I'd be spending every workday exchanging tension-heavy one-liners and choreographed fight scenes with him. For six months.

Six. Months.

That's 180 days of smirking, shoulder bumps, forced chemistry, and watching him pretend to brood while I pretend not to hate him.

I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly, like every self-help podcast had ever told me to do. Breathe in the serenity, breathe out the career-threatening anxiety.

But serenity was hard to summon when all I could picture was Rylan's smug little smirk—the one he wore like it was custom-made, straight from the runway of "I Know I'm Hot and You're Mad About It." I could already hear the click of iPhones, the whisper of fan theories, the avalanche of gifs that would turn a single glance between us into queerbaiting discourse by Tuesday.

I reached for my coffee, took a sip, then remembered it was green juice and gagged a little.

What fresh hell had I signed up for?

I wandered into my closet, hunting for something that said professional but indifferent, like I'm not trying but somehow I still look better than you. I landed on black jeans, a slightly wrinkled white tee, and a leather jacket I'd once justified buying because "Ryan Gosling would wear it." Ryan Gosling wouldn't be caught dead in it. But I didn't have time for second guesses.

As I headed out the door, I grabbed my sunglasses—not because it was sunny (it wasn't), but because I refused to let Rylan Harvard see the soul leave my body in real time.