Page 62 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

“If Sira has her way, I’ll be downgraded back to obscure B-roll in no time.”

“So she did give you the talk,” Yuki said, dropping a bowl in front of me. “Figured. Eat. It’s impossible to catastrophize properly on an empty stomach.”

I looked down into the bowl.

Nebs.

Of course.

“She showed me posts,” I said. “Apparently, I’m a pattern now.”

Lyn twirled her noodles.

“Patterns are her love language,” she said. “If she’s putting you in charts, it means she’s taking you seriously.”

“She also used words like ‘risk’ and ‘machine’ and ‘chewed up,’” I said. “Not super soothing.”

Yuki pointed at me with his chopsticks.

“Did she call you a mistake?”

“No,” I admitted. “She actually went out of her way to say I’m not one. Just that there’s going to be more attention and I need to stop standing directly in front of every camera on the tour.”

“That’s reasonable,” Lyn said. “Annoying, but reasonable.”

I picked up my chopsticks.

“I just… I feel like I walked into the background of someone else’s movie, and suddenly people are doing frame-by-frame analysis of my hair.”

“That’s because you did,” Lyn said. “You just also happen to have the director’s favorite seat.”

Heat crawled up my neck.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” Her tone dropped, losing some of the joke. “Look. From the label’s point of view, yes, you are a variable. A new element in a system they like to think they control. From ours? You’re the reason she hasn’t thrown a mic stand at anyone in weeks.”

Lyn’s tone was sarcastic, but not entirely.

“I would pay to see that,” Yuki said. “But yeah. You make her… different.”

“Different how?” I asked, poking at my noodles with my chrome chopsticks.

“Less sharp around the edges,” he said. “More… present. Like she’s actually here with us and not six months ahead, climbing some imaginary ladder in her head.”

Lyn nodded.

“You know how it was when you arrived,” she said. “She was tense all the time. Every set change was life or death. She’s still a perfectionist, but now she messes up a step and laughs instead of spiraling. That’s you.”

“That’s not just me,” I said automatically. “She’s—”

“It’s you,” Lyn said.

I slurped a mouthful of noodles to hide the way my eyes stung. The spice hit the back of my throat and forced me to focus on breathing.

“Sira told me that if it gets to be too much, I need to tell her before I bolt,” I said once I’d recovered. “Which, I mean, I don’t plan on doing.”

“That’s Sira for ‘I might be intense, but I’m not a monster,’” Lyn said. “She knows what this life does to people. She’s seen worse than you.”