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“As I said. Main stage in five. I’ll take you.”
I dart into my office to get my laptop and the shooting script for this week. We scurry through the complex toward the cavernous sound stage that houses several of the reoccurring sets.
“Did Bobby say why he wants me?”
Beth flicks her wrist. “Niks wants a woman’s perspective on the goings on. I think it was her that asked for you and Deidre, and Bobby sent me runnin’.”
In a corner of the sound stage under rafters crowded with massive lights, a line of hardwall flats blocks the live set. I stumble when it hits me where they’re filming—the hot set I saw my first day here, Donal Cam’s bedchamber. Luckily, my script, not the laptop, falls from my hands to the floor.
This is not happening. I am not about to walk into the consummation scene between Donal Cam and Nieve.
ChapterTwenty
Beth retrieves my script and whispers in my ear. “Go on in. It’s a closed set, so I’m to stay out here.”
I feel as if I’m walking through a wall of molasses, every limb straining to move through viscous resistance. I slip around the wall of flats and stop dead. There’s Jack, naked as he was before the firelight on the first night we made love, on top of Niks. He groans and seems to thrust into her with a rhythm so familiar, I nearly scream. Beneath him, Niks arches. Her cry is an elongated wail of pleasure that curls through the air to punch me straight in the gut.
I know it’s not real. Every move has been directed by Alan Rafier. Jack is not fucking Niks.
But he is. Everyone that sees this scene yearns for Donal Cam to make love to Nieve with passion the viewer can enjoy vicariously while they watch.
“And cut,” says Alan.
Jack practically leaps off Niks. Bath robes sweep in like a pair of huge white birds to cover the actors. Beth was right, only essential production people are on this side of the barrier. I hang back in the shadows, away from Donal Cam’s candlelit love nest. Alan, Niks, Jack, and the intimacy coordinator cluster on the edge of the bed, deep in discussion.
I shake all over, biting back tears and doing my damnedest not to vomit. Seeing my Jack giving Niks what he can’t give me is agony.
“There you are,” says Bobby, invading my pocket of misery. “Niks has a bee up her ass about this scene being too objectifying. She wants Nieve to be simultaneously virginal and a ball-busting goddess.”
I swallow hard and will my voice not to shake. “Is she asking for more dialogue?”
“For starters. I think she also wants to ride Donal Cam like a rodeo cowboy, but here’s what I’m thinking…”
I barely hear him through the fog of disgust rolling through my head. Niks might as well jam the flag of Norway up Jack’s ass and claim him as her own. I nurse fleeting hope the intimacy coordinator will throw ice water on Niks’s intentions.
Bobby quotes a line of Nieve’s from the book that didn’t make it into the script.
“No,” I say. “Not the best.” I know the words that will give Nieve some serious power. “You should use her internal monologue at the end of the chapter, ‘As you take my body, I claim your soul, Donal Cam. ‘Tis I that holds the greater gift.’”
“Yes,” says Bobby. “That packs a helluva punch.” He acts out a light knuckle bump on my shoulder to illustrate his point before flitting over to feed Niks the new line.
I fade as far from them as possible, using cameras and booms as a wall of protection. As soon as Bobby returns, I’ll ask to leave before I’m forced to watch another second of skin on skin between Jack and Niks.
They reset the scene with a burning golden light bearing down on the couple. To my horror, the next beat will be the mutual climax of the happy pair.
Alan calls out a series of moves and actions. The intimacy coordinator doesn’t raise any objections. There’s no romance in the technicality of the rehearsal, but naked rubbing naked is more than I can take.
“I want no doubt that Donal Cam and Nieve are bound forever,” says Alan. “Take the audience with you into your moment of supreme abandon.”
They rehearse. Every kiss, every stroke of a hand over flesh, knocks me sideways. I’m hyperaware of my own breathing, the way I’m standing, my racing heart. Pulling off casual and disinterested is less attainable by the second.
Cameras roll. I’m forced to watch the man I yearn for disappear into a haze of ecstasy with Niks Tellefson.
Why does Jack have to be so convincing? I drop my eyes to the floor, hoping it looks like I’m being discreet instead of pixilating into a million tiny pieces. When a hand grips my arm, I nearly cry out.
Deidre LaRochelle leans in to whisper. “You’ve gone a lovely shade of ivory.”
“I don’t want to stare.” Or see what’s happening on the furs a stone’s throw in front of me.
