Every Summertime - Part I
Summary: Fresh off a breakout role, Y/N is cast in the year’s most anticipated romcom. She’s ready for the spotlight—until she finds out her on-screen love interest is Harry Styles, and the lines between fiction and reality start to blur.
Part II
Content Warning: none :)
Word Count: 4,311
This is a 5 part story that I've started writing last year and finally had the courage to post lol, I hope you guys like it 🤍
The kitchen smelled faintly of orange peel and clean linen. Y/N stood barefoot by the sink, towel-drying her favorite mug—the one with a tiny chip on the handle that she always used anyway—when her phone rang.
She nearly didn’t answer. It was past noon, and she’d promised herself a day off: no emails, no self-tapes, no endless doom-scroll through industry chatter. But then she saw the caller ID: Miriam Klein – Agent.
She grabbed it immediately.
“Hey,” she said, balancing the mug on the drying rack. “What’s up?”
“I hope you’re sitting,” Miriam said, too calm in that way she only got when something big was about to land.
“Not yet,” Y/N replied, already walking to the kitchen table.
“Okay. Here’s the deal. You’re being asked to read for Every Summertime.”
Y/N sat down hard. Her heart did the exact thing it always did when something she’d dared to want actually started to happen.
“You’re serious?”
“I’m very serious,” Miriam said. “It’s happening. Big studio, full greenlight, same producers from Before the Fall. Sadie Bloom’s doing the script.”
Y/N blinked. “As in Sadie Bloom, the Sadie Bloom?”
“Yes. She adapted the novel herself. It’s been buzzing for months. Everyone’s been asking who’s playing Ivy. They’ve done weeks of auditions already, but apparently they’ve been holding off on final callbacks because the director wanted to take a look at a few new names. You’re one of them.”
Y/N leaned forward, elbows on the table. She’d read the book a year ago, cover to cover in two days, sobbing over the last few chapters and immediately texting Mara to do the same. It was that kind of story—summer and heartbreak, family and longing, slow-burn romance and two people who find each other just as their lives are unraveling in opposite directions.
She had loved Ivy. Had quietly imagined playing her, though she never said it out loud. The role was delicate. Not easy. The kind of part that asked for both lightness and real emotional weight. She hadn’t seen a female lead written like that in a long time.
“What’s the catch?” she asked, finally.
“No catch,” Miriam said. “Just that the room is tight. They’re only seeing three people, total. You’re one of them.”
Y/N’s chest felt tight in the best possible way.
Then Miriam added, as an afterthought, “Oh, and Harry Styles is already attached. He auditioned a few weeks ago and got cast as Theo.”
She blinked again. “Wait—he auditioned?”
“Yep. Just like everyone else. He read three times. Apparently, he worked his ass off for it.”
“Oh wow,” Y/N said. “I mean, I figured it’d be someone big, but I didn’t think…”
“I know,” Miriam said, “but I don’t want that to throw you. You’ve got just as much shot at this. They asked you. That means something.”
Y/N nodded, even though Miriam couldn’t see her. “Okay. Okay, yeah. Send me everything.”
She spent the next two hours reading the sides, walking through the scenes quietly in her living room, letting the language settle into her skin. Ivy was just as rich and warm on the page as she was in the book—witty and careful and emotionally bruised but still hopeful. She understood her immediately. Not just as a character, but as a person.
By the time Mara and Gia showed up at her apartment uninvited—with iced matchas and a chaotic playlist of "songs you can fake-date to"—Y/N had already color-coded the script, flagged three emotional beats she wanted to dig deeper into, and made a Pinterest mood board for Ivy’s wardrobe.
“You’re disgusting,” Mara said, watching her set up a ring light for practice. “You just got the call and you’re already in prep mode.”
“You don’t understand,” Y/N said, breathless, holding the script to her chest. “It’s Every Summertime. It’s Ivy. And they asked for me. They didn’t even make me chase it.”
Gia threw herself on the couch. “Wait, and Harry Styles is Theo? Like, officially?”
“Yes. But that’s not the point.”
“That is absolutely the point,” Gia muttered.
Mara leaned forward. “Do you think he’s going to remember your name? Or like… do that thing where he knows way too much about your performance in something you did three years ago?”
Y/N rolled her eyes but couldn’t help smiling.
“I don’t care if he remembers me,” she said, and she meant it. “I just want to walk into that room and be Ivy. That’s the only thing I care about.”
And she meant it. This wasn’t about him. It was about her. And if there was even a small chance that this role—the one everyone in the industry was quietly circling—could be hers, she was going to show up ready.
No matter who else was in the room.
The studio was quiet in that specific, clinical way only casting buildings managed to be—sterile, over-air-conditioned, and filled with soft voices and the occasional sound of someone clearing their throat in a hallway.
Y/N arrived fifteen minutes early.
She always did, not because she wanted to impress anyone, but because she hated walking into a room while her heart was still racing. She liked having a moment to breathe, to ground herself, to flip through her pages one last time and pretend that this was all normal—that she wasn’t sitting in a casting office about to read for the role every young actress in the industry was dreaming about.
She kept her headphones in while she signed in at the front desk, though no music was playing. Sometimes she liked the illusion of noise, the space it gave her from being approached or spoken to. Her hair was pulled back in a low bun, clean and simple. She wore a soft cream knit top tucked into well-tailored navy trousers—comfortable, but confident. She hadn’t overthought the outfit. She’d learned the hard way not to try and look like the character. The work had to speak louder than the styling.
She sat down in the holding area, a sleek gray couch pushed against a glass wall. There were no other actresses waiting outside. That meant they were being seen one by one. Intimate. Focused. Possibly recorded.
Her heart thudded softly against her ribs.
She reread the scene again, even though she didn’t need to. The one where Ivy and Theo were walking through a parking lot at night after an argument they didn’t totally finish. It was quiet and tentative and messy—full of unfinished thoughts and sideways glances, two people trying not to say the thing they were thinking. The kind of dialogue that lived in pauses, in breath, in what wasn’t said.
She loved it.
“Y/N?” a woman called gently, peeking her head out from a side door.
She stood quickly, smoothing her pants as she walked.
The room was bright and white and warmer than she expected. A camera on a tripod faced the taped floor marks, and a few people sat behind a folding table covered in notebooks, iced coffees, and half-eaten snacks. The director—Elaine Kim, a sharp, perceptive woman Y/N had read about in interviews—looked up from her notes and smiled.
“Hi, Y/N,” she said, warm but professional. “Thanks for being here.”
“Thanks for having me,” she replied, stepping into the light and placing her water bottle gently on the ground beside the mark.
And then she saw him.
Harry Styles sat on the folding chair just behind Elaine. He was relaxed in that effortlessly casual way some people managed to be—wearing dark jeans, a light blue sweater, sleeves pushed to his forearms, his hair a little messy like he hadn’t tried to fix it before walking in. He was holding a copy of the sides in one hand, a pen tucked behind his ear.
He looked up when she walked in.
And smiled.
It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t flirty. It was quiet. Just… acknowledgment. Recognition. Maybe even a little curiosity.
She gave a small nod back—professional, polite, but not overly familiar.
Elaine gestured to the center mark. “So this is the parking lot scene. Let’s start from the top and just run through it once. No pressure. We’ll play with it after.”
Y/N nodded and shifted into place.
Harry stood, moving to his own mark opposite her, flipping his page to the correct scene. Up close, he looked exactly like you’d expect him to—but also not. Less glossy. More present. There was something focused in his expression. Something serious.
They locked eyes for the first line.
And something clicked.
It wasn’t fireworks or electricity—not yet—but it was ease. He listened, which was rare in reads like this. He responded, didn’t just deliver lines. He watched her mouth when she spoke. He took a second before replying. His body language changed with hers. And when she shifted her tone halfway through a sentence, he adjusted like he’d already lived in this character for months.
When the scene ended, there was a beat of silence. Not awkward. Just thoughtful.
Elaine leaned back. “That was great,” she said. “We’re gonna try a version where you lean into the frustration a little more, Y/N—like Ivy’s holding in a thousand things she doesn’t want to say. Can you try that?”
“Absolutely,” Y/N replied, already feeling her body recalibrate.
Harry stayed quiet, letting her take the lead.
They read again. Then again. They tried new beats, changed pacing, added a half-second pause in the middle of a breath and watched the tension stretch out like taffy between them.
It was the most fun she’d had in weeks.
When they wrapped, Elaine stood and clapped her hands once. “That’s great, guys. Thank you so much.”
Harry turned to her and gave a small, genuine nod.
“You were really good,” he said simply, in a soft voice that made her want to double-check if she’d imagined it.
“Thanks,” she replied. “You too.”
They exchanged one more look. Just a moment of eye contact. No lingering. No flirtation. Just… mutual awareness. Two people who understood what this scene could be. Who knew that if they ended up doing this together, it would work.
It wasn’t chemistry in the cliché way.
It was trust.
And that, she knew, mattered more than anything else.
The moment she stepped outside the studio building, the sun hit her straight in the face. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been inside until the daylight made her squint.
She didn’t rush home right away.
Instead, she walked three blocks up and sat on a quiet bench tucked next to a tiny bakery she used to visit when she was still auditioning for short films and background roles. It felt like a good place to land for a second. Familiar. Neutral.
She took out her phone and opened the Notes app—not to write anything in particular, just to look busy, to give her hands something to do while her body caught up with what had just happened.
The read had gone well. She knew that. Not in the arrogant, self-congratulatory way. But in the honest, I-was-present-and-I-did-the-work way. She had hit the beats she wanted. Had felt the tension she built in the back of her throat as Ivy. Had watched Harry adjust and lean into the shifts in energy, the kind of give-and-take that felt real.
She hadn’t felt that kind of scene partner chemistry in a long time. Not the fake “oh my god we just clicked” type people always said in interviews, but the real kind—the kind that made you breathe differently when the camera was rolling.
Still, callbacks were a strange kind of limbo. You left everything in the room and walked out with your hands empty, unsure if what you gave was the version they wanted.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Mara.
MARA:
Did it happen?? Did you cry? Did he cry?
She smiled but didn’t reply yet.
She wasn’t ready to open the door to speculation and “what ifs.” Not yet. Not when her heart was still beating in callback rhythm, not regular rhythm.
Instead, she ordered an iced tea, sat with her thoughts, and let herself do the hardest part of the job: wait.
Two days passed. Then four.
By the fifth, she had convinced herself she didn’t get it.
It was ridiculous—how the brain worked. She could feel confident one minute, and then in the next, be absolutely sure she’d imagined the connection, that the casting team had probably already offered it to someone else. Someone with a bigger name. A better following. A longer résumé.
She went about her days normally—pilates, meal prep, overdue errands—but there was a thin string of tension running through everything she did. An invisible thread tied to her phone, which she kept just slightly too close. Just in case.
Mara and Gia didn’t help.
GIA:
I keep checking Deadline for a casting announcement like I work there. Do you think you’d know before they publish?
MARA:
Should I casually follow the director on Instagram or is that too obvious?
Y/N replied only with a gif of someone staring out a rainy window.
She wasn’t trying to be dramatic. She just didn’t want to break the spell.
The call came on a Friday afternoon.
She was folding a blanket over the back of the couch when her phone rang—and this time, unlike before, her stomach dropped the second she saw Miriam’s name. Her breath caught in her chest.
She answered slowly.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Miriam said, a smile already in her voice. “You ready?”
Y/N didn’t speak. Couldn’t.
“You got it.”
It took a full second for the words to land.
“What?”
“You. Got. It. Ivy Carter is yours.”
Y/N stood still in her living room, one hand still holding the corner of the blanket.
“You’re serious?” she whispered, barely able to say it.
“I’m serious. They just called. Elaine said—and I quote—‘She is Ivy.’ You nailed it, Y/N. It’s yours.”
She sat down, knees folding underneath her like they couldn’t hold her up anymore.
A full breath left her chest. A real one. The kind that only comes when something you’ve wanted quietly, patiently, for longer than you let yourself admit… actually becomes real.
“Oh my god,” she said softly, tears springing to her eyes before she could stop them. “Oh my god.”
“I’m so proud of you,” Miriam said. “Start wrapping your head around it. You leave for pre-production in two weeks.”
Y/N laughed through the tears. “You’re really just gonna say that like it’s nothing.”
“I’m saying it like it’s everything.”
She hung up and sat for a long moment, letting her body catch up to the news. Letting the weight of it settle gently, instead of crashing.
She didn’t need to scream. Or jump. Or call everyone she knew.
She just needed to sit there, quietly, hand over her heart, and smile like she hadn’t in a long time.
Because she had done it.
Not because someone asked for her. Not because of luck. Not because she was “someone’s pick.”
Because she earned it.
She didn’t text them. She could’ve—God knows they’d been obsessively waiting for an update—but this felt bigger than a three-line message or a gif. This deserved real faces. Real reactions. Real yelling.
So she told them to come over.
No context. Just “Please come by tonight, I made dinner. And wear something cute.” Which, in their language, was code for something is up and we’re not taking it lightly.
By seven o’clock, her tiny apartment smelled like garlic and lemon and the fresh rosemary she’d tucked into the sauce just because she could. She wasn’t a show-off cook, but she liked the rhythm of it. Stirring, chopping, laying the table—things that made her feel grounded when everything else was floating.
She’d even lit candles. Mara was going to be suspicious the second she walked in.
When the buzzer went off, her stomach jumped. Nerves, again. Not the kind from auditions, but the kind you get when something good has happened and you finally get to say it out loud.
She opened the door before they even knocked.
Mara walked in first, hair piled up in a claw clip, carrying a bag of chips and a bottle of prosecco. Gia followed, dramatically overdressed in a vintage floral maxi dress with a belt that jingled when she walked.
“Okay,” Mara said, eyes scanning the apartment. “What is this vibe?”
“Why are there candles?” Gia added, narrowing her eyes. “Are we mourning something? Are we casting a spell?”
Y/N grinned. “Sit down.”
Mara raised an eyebrow but dropped onto the couch without another word. Gia flopped down beside her, kicking off her boots and reaching for the chips before the bag was even open.
Y/N took a deep breath.
Then she grabbed the script off the counter, walked over, and dropped it gently on the coffee table in front of them. No words. Just the bold-font title staring back at them:
Every Summertime
FINAL SHOOTING DRAFT
CONFIDENTIAL
There was a pause.
Mara leaned forward slowly. “No. Way.”
Gia blinked. “You got it?”
Y/N nodded, and just like that, the room exploded.
Mara let out a shriek so loud she startled herself. Gia screamed into one of Y/N’s throw pillows. Someone knocked over the chips. Y/N just stood there, laughing and trying not to cry again while her two best friends lost their collective minds.
“YOU’RE IVY?!” Mara yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“You’re fake-dating Harry Styles in a movie based on that book?” Gia yelled right behind her. “Do you understand what you’ve done to me emotionally?”
“I can’t believe it,” Y/N said, the words still tasting new. “They called this afternoon. It’s mine.”
Mara paced a circle around the living room like she needed to walk off the adrenaline. “I’m so proud I think I’m going to vomit. This is not a joke. I might actually cry.”
Gia was already pouring prosecco into mismatched glasses. “To Ivy Carter! To our girl! To the woman who is going to be impossible to sit next to in a movie theater because I will be whispering ‘that’s my best friend’ the whole time.”
Y/N finally sat down between them, letting their joy fold over her like a blanket. Her cheeks hurt from smiling. Her stomach still fluttered every time she pictured that moment on the phone—You got it.
“Did he say anything to you?” Mara asked suddenly, already fishing for gossip.
“About me getting the part?”
“No, about like… your aura or whatever. Your essence. Did he cry when he looked into your eyes?”
Y/N laughed. “We just read the scene. Nothing dramatic. He was focused.”
Gia sipped her drink. “So you’re telling me he wasn’t completely in love with you already?”
“I’m telling you he was doing his job. And so was I.”
“Boring,” Mara muttered. “But fine. We’ll allow it. For now.”
Y/N rested her head on Gia’s shoulder, letting the room go quiet for a moment. She watched the candle flicker on the coffee table. The script sat between them, the pages fanned slightly from being flipped through too many times already.
This was real.
No more waiting. No more wondering. She was Ivy. She was going to spend the summer fake-dating a man half the world was obsessed with while bringing to life a character she’d secretly been carrying in her chest for months.
And she got to share that moment—with them.
“Thank you,” she said, suddenly serious. “For making this feel… big. It’s easy to pretend it’s not. To try and act like it’s just another job. But it’s not. It means something.”
Gia reached out and gently clinked her glass against hers.
“We know it means something,” she said. “We’ve always known.”
The building didn’t look like much from the outside—just another converted studio space in the middle of a quiet block in West Hollywood. The kind of place you’d walk past without thinking twice unless you were part of it. Inside, though, it was buzzing. Quietly. Like a hum under the surface.
Y/N was greeted by a production assistant with a headset and an iced coffee in one hand, who led her down a hallway lined with framed posters from past films and into a bright, high-ceilinged room that smelled faintly like paper, Sharpie ink, and someone’s very expensive cologne.
The long table was already half-filled when she walked in.
Labeled name cards sat in front of every chair. A stack of fresh scripts lay at each place setting. Crew members milled around the edges—producers, assistants, someone from hair and makeup who gave Y/N a small, polite wave as she walked past.
It was her first table read for a major studio project. And even though she had already been cast—contracts signed, emails exchanged, fittings scheduled—it didn’t quite feel real until now.
She spotted her name about halfway down on the left side. Y/N Y/L/N — Ivy Carter. Seeing it printed, so simply, gave her a little jolt in the chest. She ran her hand over the card before sitting down.
She glanced to her right—and there he was.
Harry Styles, sitting just one seat away, wearing a soft gray hoodie and black trousers, flipping through the top pages of the script like he hadn’t already read it a dozen times. His hair was slightly damp, like he’d just showered. He looked relaxed but alert—attentive in that calm, still way he had in the callback room.
He looked over when she sat and gave her a warm smile.
“Morning,” he said.
“Hey,” she replied. “Nice to see you again.”
“You too. Congratulations, by the way.”
She blinked, a little caught off guard. “For what?”
“For getting the part,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I heard they saw a lot of people. Said you were the easiest decision they made.”
It was such a quiet, sincere compliment that it took her a second to respond.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling back. “That means a lot.”
Before she could say more, the room began to settle. Elaine, the director, took her spot at the head of the table and greeted everyone, her voice calm and no-nonsense, but not cold.
“Thanks for being here,” she said. “This is going to be a long day, but a good one. We’ll read straight through, pause halfway for a break, and then meet the department heads after. But for now, let’s just live in the story.”
A few people clapped quietly, and then the rustling of scripts filled the air as everyone turned to page one.
The table read began.
The first scene was a quick one—an establishing moment in Ivy’s flower shop, full of overlapping dialogue and neighborhood energy. Y/N found her rhythm quickly, her voice soft at first but steady. It was strange, hearing the lines spoken aloud by real people instead of looping them over and over in her head. They lived differently in the air.
Then came the first scene with Theo.
It was early in the script—scene eight—a chaotic rental pickup gone wrong. Ivy arriving to find out the place she thought she’d have to herself for the summer had been double-booked by a tired, borderline-annoyed journalist who couldn’t believe she still arranged flowers for a living.
Y/N delivered her first line.
Harry replied in character, voice a little lower, a little dryer than his usual one. It was subtle. American, but not distractingly so. Wry, but not smug. He nailed the tone. The sarcasm. The guarded frustration. He even underplayed the joke in a way that made it land harder.
Their back-and-forth built naturally. A little sharper than in the callback room. Quicker. Like two people who had known each other long enough to know exactly how to get under the other’s skin.
By page twenty-four, someone at the far end of the table laughed out loud during a bickering scene.
By page thirty, they were all leaning in a little closer.
They broke for coffee halfway through.
Y/N stood in the corner of the room, quietly sipping a too-hot green tea and listening to the murmur of conversations happening around her—crew members catching up, producers on quick phone calls, someone from casting laughing softly near the door. She felt out of place for exactly forty seconds before Harry walked over.
“How’s it feeling so far?” he asked, nodding toward the table.
“Honestly?” she said. “Like I’m still dreaming it a little.”
He smiled at that. “I know what you mean.”
There was a pause.
“You’re really good,” he said. “You’ve got this way of landing emotion without forcing it. It makes the scenes feel… like real moments. Not written ones.”
Y/N raised an eyebrow. “Was that feedback or a compliment?”
He shrugged. “Both, I think.”
She laughed, and he smiled wider.
The second half of the read went even smoother. Their final scene of the day—the one where Ivy and Theo slow dance under string lights in the middle of an accidental town party—ended with a pause so soft, no one moved for a second afterward. Not even Elaine.
When she finally looked up from her script, the director just gave her a small, meaningful nod.
The whole room felt different after that.
She didn’t say anything on the way out. Didn’t want to break the stillness. But as she stepped into the hallway, script tucked under her arm and nerves finally quieted, Harry caught up with her and said simply:
“See you on set.”
And she believed it. Not just that she’d see him—but that this story, this world, this version of herself she was stepping into… it was real now.
And it was only just beginning.
