Chapter 4: Nine A.M., Soundstage Six
The security guard at the gate waved Nancy through without checking a list, which felt like the strangest thing that had happened to her in two days, and she had signed a porn contract yesterday. He said, "Morning, Miss Thompson," and she said good morning back before she understood that she was on a list now. Her name existed somewhere official. She drove past the tram loading zone with her heart going quicker than the occasion justified.
Soundstage six was a corrugated metal building with a rolling door half open and a girl in headphones waving her in. Inside, the air was cold and smelled like dust burned off hot lamps. Four enormous white lights stood aimed at a grey seamless backdrop, and under them, in the middle of all that glare, sat a single wooden stool. It looked like a place where confessions happened.
"Nancy?" A tall man detached himself from a tripod, lean, somewhere past fifty, with reading glasses pushed up into grey curls and a camera hanging off his chest like a pulpit Bible. "Pavel. You're on time. Teresa said you would be, and I said nothing, because I learned not to argue with her."
"That was wise of you."
"It is the only wise thing I have done this decade." He shook her hand, then held it a moment and looked at her face with the frank, measureless attention of a man pricing meat at a market. "Good bone structure. They steamed the dress?"
"It's in the bag."
"Bag down, makeup stays off, sit." He pointed at the stool. "Teresa's orders. No makeup, no jewelry, no smiling with teeth. We are documenting the asset, not flattering it."
"Documenting the asset," Nancy repeated, and sat down on the stool under four thousand watts of light. "That's a new way to think about my face."
"You will hate how you look for ten minutes. Then you will see what the camera sees. Those are different things." He raised the camera to his eye. "Chin down. Eyes to me. Shoulders back, breathe out."
The shutter clicked. Clicked again. Pavel moved around her in a slow orbit, adjusting a light with one hand, shooting with the other, and Nancy did her best to sit like a woman whose body was an asset. The glare stripped everything. She could feel every line under her eyes, every pore, the faint crease the pillow had left on her cheek an hour ago. There was nowhere to hide in this light, which was presumably the point of it.
"You ate?" Pavel asked, mid-orbit.
"Toast. And a banana. Is that relevant?"
"Everything is relevant. Skin is made of breakfast." Click. "Relax the jaw. You are clenching like the light owes you money."
"I met that light's cousin yesterday. We have history."
That got a short laugh out of him, and after that it got easier. He shot her full length in the sundress, then from the collarbone up, then close on her eyes, then profile. He worked fast, without ceremony, and somewhere around the fortieth frame Nancy stopped performing and just sat, and she could feel the difference in her own body when she did, a settling, the same settling she'd found on camera yesterday around minute six.
"There," Pavel said, lowering the camera. "That one. Frame forty-one."
"I didn't do anything."
"Exactly. That is the entire skill and almost nobody has it." He waved her off the stool and turned to a laptop on a folding table, importing the card, and the images bloomed on the screen one by one. Nancy came to stand beside him and looked at the woman on the monitor with a strange doubling sensation. Bare-faced, lit like an operating table, and somehow the face looked awake. Hungry, almost. She wouldn't have guessed that about herself.
The rolling door rattled further open behind them, and heels came across the concrete at Teresa speed.
"Pull forty-one full frame," Teresa said, by way of hello. "And the profile. And whatever he means by asset shots, because legal will want standard nudity intake reference before Thursday and I want it on file today." She arrived at the laptop, glasses already on, and leaned in. "Pavel. The eyes. Zoom the eyes."
"I know," Pavel said. "I saw them at frame six."
Teresa was quiet for a moment, which on Teresa was practically applause. She tapped the screen twice with a fingernail.
"Those test. Those test so hard it's obnoxious." She straightened and pulled her phone out, thumbs already flying. "Okay. Thursday's board, listen, because I'm not repeating it. Scene one, dialogue opener, the coworker setup, wardrobe is business casual, you'll be fitted this afternoon. Scene two, the bedroom build, standard coverage. Scene three is the big one, the showcase, and I'm writing it around you, so I need your limits sheet filled out before you leave this building today. Everything on it gets honored. Everything not on it doesn't get attempted. That's how it works."
"Limits sheet," Nancy said. "I can do a form. Forms are my entire professional background."
"Then you'll be the most qualified person on this lot." Teresa scrolled her phone. "Ruben's confirmed, he's been confirmed since yesterday, don't let it go to his head. Now, the release on last week's footage sold the package upstream this morning, the buyer wants a campaign, three scenes minimum in the first quarter, and that number, if you're still standing Thursday night, gets a comma in a place you'll like."
"You said that yesterday."
"I was right yesterday too. I have a track record." Teresa pocketed the phone and looked at her properly, over the glasses, for one unbroken beat. "You slept?"
"Nine hours."
"Ate breakfast?"
"Toast and a banana."
"And you've had one night and one morning to decide with a sober head, and you showed up anyway, on time, makeup off, dress steamed." Teresa said it like a checklist she was closing out. "So I'm not asking if you're sure. I'm telling you what your own behavior already proves."
"I did wonder if I'd wake up and it would feel like a fever dream," Nancy said. "It didn't. It felt like the best Monday off I've ever taken."
"Your old office is going to lose its mind."
"My old office thinks I'm at a wine tasting. I'm letting them think it through Thursday."
"That," Teresa said, pointing at her, "is a producer instinct. I'm putting it in your file." She turned back to the laptop. "Pavel, everything to my folder by noon, and the nudity references, those go straight to legal, nowhere else. Nancy. Fitting at two, stage nine, ask for Dolores. Limits sheet to me personally, not to a runner." She was already leaving, phone up, voice dropping into the next call before she hit the door. "No, the campaign art wants her face, we're not cropping her out of her own..."
The door rattled. The soundstage went quiet again, just the hum of the lamps.
"She was complimentary," Pavel observed, scrolling through frames. "You should know that is rare enough to insure."
"It didn't sound like a compliment."
"It sounded like money. From her, that is the compliment." He clicked through to frame forty-one and enlarged it, and the woman's eyes on the screen were level and unbothered and faintly amused, and Nancy looked at her own face looking back and thought, that's the face from about four minutes in yesterday. That's the face after the fear ran out.
Then a familiar voice came from the doorway, unhurried, warm at the edges.
"Don't let her sign anything else while I'm not standing there."
Ruben came in out of the daylight with two coffee cups and a paper bag, in a plain grey t-shirt that made the whole architecture of him obvious in a way the linen shirt usually softened. Pavel, without turning, said, "Your partner is here. I am pretending not to notice so you two can do whatever it is."
"We're being professional," Nancy said.
"You're doing that very badly," Pavel said, and turned back to his laptop.
Ruben crossed the concrete and held out a cup. "House terrible, but hot. Studio policy." He looked at the monitor over her shoulder, at frame forty-one, and something crossed his face, quick and unmistakable, before the composure smoothed over it. "Yeah. Teresa's going to put that on a poster."
"You think so?"
"I know so. It's the same face you made at me yesterday right before," he stopped himself, glanced at Pavel's back, and redirected with visible discipline, "right before things went well."
Nancy laughed into the coffee. "Right before things went well. Is that what we're calling it in front of witnesses?"
"Professional courtesy." He leaned a hip against the folding table, and his voice came down a register, just for her. "I texted Teresa last night. Asked if she thought you'd show. She said, and I quote, she'd bet the building on it. I said I'd take that action if you didn't."
"You bet against me?"
"I bet against Teresa's building. I was hedging my exposure." He drank his coffee, watching her over the rim, those steady dark eyes doing the thing they did, the thing that had left her speechless in a doorway twenty-four hours ago. "So. Sober-decided?"
Nancy looked at the monitor, at her own bare face under the operating-table light, at the stool and the seamless grey and the whole cold clinical machine arranged around her, and she found she wasn't clenching her jaw at all anymore.
"Toast and a banana," she said. "And nine hours of sleep. And I'm here at nine a.m. sharp with no makeup on. What do you think?"
"I think," Ruben said, "that Thursday can't come fast enough."
He said it lightly, but the register underneath it wasn't light at all, and Nancy felt it land in the same place his voice always seemed to land, somewhere low and stupid in her stomach. She took a sip of coffee to give her face something to do.
"Careful. You're on record as a tested pairing."
"I'm on record as a man whose Thursday got better." He glanced at the monitor again, at frame forty-one, then at her, bare-faced in the cold light, and lowered his voice further. "For what it matters, and it shouldn't, the sober decision is the one I was betting on. The other version, the two a.m. panic call, I had a speech ready for that one. Very reassuring. Rehearsed it in the car."
"What's in the speech?"
"Mostly water. Hydrate, sleep, call me. Teresa would've hated it. No narrative value."
Behind them, from the doorway, a voice cut in.
"I can hear narrative value from here."
Teresa was back, standing in the rolling doorway with the daylight behind her, phone dark in her hand for once. She'd caught more of it than Nancy had realized. She stood there a moment, glasses on, looking at Nancy in the grey glare, at the stool, at the monitor, at the whole picture of a woman who had shown up on time with no makeup and a steamed dress and stayed.
Then she nodded. Once, slow, deliberate, the kind of nod she gave to a printed take.
"Good," she said. "That's all. That's the whole speech. Pavel, forty-one goes in the campaign folder, not the intake folder." She pointed the phone at Nancy on her way back out. "Limits sheet. Today. Don't make me come back."
The door rattled. Ruben exhaled.
"She nodded at you," he said. "I've had four scenes go to print in one day and she's never nodded at me."
"What does it mean?"
"It means you passed the thing she doesn't tell you you're taking. Showing up is the test. Everything after that is just scheduling." He drained half his cup and set it on the folding table next to the laptop. "So. The limits sheet. Do you want the walk-through, or do you want to find out the hard way what 'ambient domination lighting' means?"
"There's a form field for lighting?"
"There's a form field for everything. Teresa's forms are legendary. Hard no, maybe, yes, and a blank column for 'discuss on set.' I've seen performers fill out three pages." He picked up the paper bag he'd brought, set it beside the coffee, and nudged it toward her. "Also, eat that. It's a croissant. Skin is made of breakfast, and Pavel's right about more than he should be."
Nancy opened the bag. The croissant was still warm, and she realized halfway through the first bite that she'd had toast and a banana six hours ago and nothing since, and that her body had apparently been filing complaints she hadn't read. She ate while Ruben pulled a folded printout from his back pocket, actual paper, creased down the middle.
"Blank copy," he said. "I keep them in my car like other men keep tire gauges."
"That's grim."
"That's professional." He unfolded it on the table beside the laptop and spun it to face her, and Pavel, still pretending not to watch, slid his chair three inches to the left to see better. "Advice from a veteran, and it's the only advice I'll give you unsolicited. Don't write what you think will impress Teresa. Don't write what you think a porn performer is supposed to want. Write what you actually want, including the things you're embarrassed about, because the sheet is the only place on this lot where honesty costs you nothing and dishonesty costs you a scene."
Nancy looked at the form. Columns, checkboxes, a wide empty margin for notes. Her pen was in her purse, the same pen she'd signed with yesterday, and she fished it out and clicked it.
"The things I'm embarrassed about," she said.
"Especially those. Embarrassment is just a thing you haven't done yet."
"You have a poster of that in your car too, don't you."
"I'm having it made."
She hunched over the form, elbow out, and Pavel abandoned the pretense entirely and turned his chair around. The first sections were easy. Names of acts she'd done yesterday, checked yes before the ink dried. Things she'd never heard of, left blank for the discuss column. Then the margin, wide and white, and her pen hovered there.
She thought about the wall, yesterday, scene one. About the moment Teresa had called the flip and her body had said yes before her brain finished the sentence. She thought about the hand in her hair, and about how she'd spent ten years in a cubicle doing exactly what was asked and nothing that wasn't.
She wrote, in careful handwriting, in the margin: I like being told what to do on set. Like, actually told. Direct the scene at me, not just around me.
She stared at it. It looked enormous on the page, bigger than the contract had. Then she added, smaller: the hair thing. Yes to the hair thing.
She spun the form around to face Ruben.
He read it. Something moved through his expression, the same quick thing that had crossed it at frame forty-one, and this time he didn't smooth it over.
"Teresa's going to frame this," he said. "You just wrote a director's note to Teresa Brown on a limits sheet."
"I wrote what I want."
"That's what a director's note is." He folded the form along its existing crease and handed it back with both hands, formally, like a document. "Deliver it in person, like she said. And Nancy. When she reads the margin, she's going to rewrite scene three around that sentence before you're out of the room. You should know what you're starting."
"I know what I'm starting." She capped the pen and tucked the form into her purse, next to the contract, the card, and the brochure. Three documents, one bag. "I started it yesterday in a doorway."
Pavel cleared his throat and turned back to his laptop, giving up the fiction. "The croissant helped, by the way. The face got warmer at bite two. Frame forty-one remains the best thing I will shoot this month."
"Don't quit your day job," Ruben said.
"It is my day job."
Nancy laughed, and drank the last of the terrible coffee, and thought about the fitting at two, and Dolores, and a limits sheet burning a small warm hole in the lining of her purse, and decided that Thursday was a long way off and also not nearly far enough.
The limits sheet went with her out through the rolling door, and so did the croissant crumbs on her dress, which she brushed off in the parking lot with the dignity of a woman who had already been photographed at frame forty-one. Ruben walked her as far as the cars. His was a black sedan with a folded towel on the passenger seat and three blank limits sheets in the glove box, which she declined to verify because he'd told her about it and the telling was funnier than the checking.
"You're going to sit in your car and stare at your phone," he said.
"I'm going to sit in my car and make a professional decision."
"Same thing. Different ringtone." He tapped the roof of her hatchback twice, a little gavel, and left her to it.
She sat. The parking lot shimmered in the late-morning heat, and somewhere behind the soundstages a tram dinged its way past tourists who would go home tonight and tell nobody anything true. Nancy turned her phone over in her hand. The out-of-office was still running. Wine tasting, it said, with limited email access, which was a sentence she had written in a beige cubicle three days and one lifetime ago.
She pulled up the main line and dialed before the part of her that had survived ten years of Tuesdays could file an objection.
"Preston and Hale, this is Janet."
"Janet, hi. It's Nancy Thompson."
"Oh! Nancy. How was the tasting? Donna said you sounded relaxed on the voicemail."
"It was very educational." Nancy unfolded a napkin from the croissant bag and flattened it on her thigh to write on, then realized she had nothing to write. There was nothing to take notes on. "Janet, is Greg in his office?"
"He's in. Do you want me to transfer, or is this a, uh." A pause with a smile in it. "Is this a wine thing? Because if you're calling to tell us you found a really great merlot, Greg's going to bill you for the call."
"Transfer me. Please."
The hold music was the same four bars of smooth jazz the phone system had played since 2011, and Nancy listened to all of it, twice, while her free hand found the limits sheet in her purse and held the folded edge of it like a rail.
"Nancy Thompson." Greg's voice came on warm and puzzled at once, the voice of a man reading a caller ID that didn't match his expectations. "You're supposed to be unwinding somewhere. Everything okay? Don't tell me the flight got cancelled, we can't rebook you before Wednesday."
"I'm not calling about a flight." Her voice came out level. She was almost impressed by her own voice. "I'm calling to resign, Greg. Effective now. I won't be in Monday."
The line went quiet long enough that she heard the hum of it, the little electric ocean that lived inside every office phone.
"Resign," Greg said. "You. The one who alphabetizes the shared drive."
"That's the one."
"Did the winery offer you something? Because if a winery is poaching my best administrator, I want to know the market rate for alphabetizing."
"Nothing like that." Nancy looked out the windshield at the corrugated side of soundstage six, at the heat shimmer making the letters of the stage number ripple. "I found something else. It happened fast. I'm not going to go into what it is on this call, honestly, partly because you wouldn't believe me."
"Try me. I've been at Preston and Hale for nineteen years, Nancy, I believe everything."
She laughed, and the laugh came out bigger than she meant, and she let it. "I was on a studio tour. I got separated from the group. A production found me and hired me, and I signed a contract, and I'm standing about sixty feet from where it happened right now."
"And what production would that be?"
"The kind they don't put on the tour."
A longer silence. Then the specific sound of Greg sitting down in a chair that complained about it. "Okay," he said slowly. "You're being cryptic and slightly delirious, which is not like you, which is actually how I know you mean it. Resignations are supposed to be in writing, but you and I both know I can't make you come in and fill out a form."
"I can email it. Today, before five."
"Email it. HR will want a signature. You'll lose the vacation payout if you don't finish the notice period, you know that. Two weeks' notice and it's yours. Walk now and you forfeit it."
Nancy did the math without meaning to, old habit, the rent math, the grocery math, the math that had governed every Tuesday for a decade. Then she looked at the folded paper in her purse, the wide white margin, the sentence she'd written in it. I like being told what to do on set.
"Keep it," she said. "Consider it a donation."
"Nancy."
"I'm serious, Greg. Tell Donna the tasting was excellent. Tell accounting I'm sorry about the shared drive. Tell them whatever story you want, because I promise the true one is worse for everyone."
"Is everything all right? Honestly. That's the real question, and I'm asking it as a person, not a manager. You sound different. You sound like someone bolted awake."
She thought about it while the tram dinged again somewhere behind the stages. "Everything's all right. That's what's different."
Greg exhaled down the line, a long manager-shaped breath, and when he spoke again the puzzle had mostly drained out of his voice and something almost envious had taken its place. "Then I'll process it. Email the paperwork. And Nancy, for the record, the out-of-office said wine tasting, and there is a version of this call where I believe you found a vineyard job in one afternoon."
"There really isn't."
"No. There really isn't." A pause. "Good luck, whatever it is. If it goes sideways, the cubicle's still here. I can't promise I'll give it back, but I won't laugh when you ask."
"That's the nicest offer anyone's made me all week, and I've had a week."
She hung up. The car was very quiet, the kind of quiet she had never once managed to find inside that beige building, and she sat in it and felt the resignation settle through her the way the water had gone down on the loading dock, cold and clean and all the way through.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Ruben, sent ninety seconds ago: Did you tell them, or did you chicken out and check your email?
She typed back with her thumbs, grinning at the screen. Resigned. Effective now. Forfeited two weeks' vacation payout to do it.
Three dots. Then: Frame forty-one is going on the campaign poster and I want a print of this text message framed next to it.
She laughed, alone in the car, and started the engine, and drove toward a fitting she had a two o'clock for, unemployed and hired on the same day, which she decided was her favorite kind of math.
The fitting was quick and physical. Dolores was a small, fast-moving woman with pins in her mouth and no interest in small talk, and she took Nancy's measurements twice, frowned at the second set, and said only, "Wardrobe will love you and hate you equally," before handing her back her sundress and waving her out of the trailer.
Nancy was halfway to the parking lot when a production assistant in a black polo caught up to her at a jog.
"Teresa wants you in the office. Now-ish. She said tell her it's about the photographs."
The production office was a double-wide trailer behind stage nine, cold enough inside that Nancy's arms prickled. Teresa sat at a desk buried in printouts, and spread across it was Pavel's contact sheet, dozens of small grey frames of Nancy's bare face, arranged in rows. A red pen lay across the sheet like a scalpel.
"Sit," Teresa said, without looking up. "Close the door. You'll want it closed for this."
Nancy sat. Teresa slid a loupe across the desk toward her, then ignored it herself and bent over the contact sheet with her glasses.
"Do you know what a critical review is?" Teresa said. "It's the part where I earn my day rate by telling you which versions of your face are worth money and which ones are dead weight. Pavel loves everything he shoots. That's his job. My job is to look at forty-one frames and tell him forty of them are nothing."
"You said forty-one goes in the campaign folder."
"I said the frame goes in the folder. I didn't say the folder was safe." Teresa's red pen came down and tapped one frame, row two, sixth from the left. "This one. What is this frame doing?"
Nancy leaned in. It was her, chin lifted slightly, eyes half-closed against the key light. "It's... me squinting?"
"It's you looking caught. That's a usable expression and it happened by accident, which is the only way good expressions happen." The pen moved. "This one, dead. This one, dead. This whole row is a woman posing, and posing is what civilians do when a camera points at them and they panic. Dead, dead, dead." Three red slashes in five seconds. "Don't take it personally. I've killed better faces than yours."
"I'm not taking it personally."
"You are, a little, that's fine, everyone does." Teresa kept working, frame to frame, fast, the pen scratching. "Here. Row four. You're listening to somebody off camera. Who was talking?"
"Pavel. He was telling me about his cat."
"What about the cat?"
"That it hates the flash and hides under a table."
Teresa circled the frame twice, hard, and sat back. "And your face went somewhere real while you talked about a cowardly cat. Do you understand what that means professionally? It means you give the camera your actual face when you're distracted, which is rarer than you think and worth more than you think, and it means on Thursday I'm going to be saying ridiculous things to you between takes specifically to keep you distracted."
The pen moved on. Row five died almost entirely. Then Teresa stopped, at a frame near the end, and was quiet long enough that Nancy looked up.
"That one's close to forty-one," Nancy said.
"It's not forty-one." Teresa's voice had gone flat and precise. "Forty-one is the one where you stopped performing before you'd started. This is the one where you started performing and got it slightly wrong. See the jaw? Two millimeters. See the eyes? They're waiting for approval." She drew a single line through it, lighter than the others. "That's the shot every new performer gives me a hundred times a day. And the difference between this and forty-one is two millimeters, and the two millimeters are worth about forty thousand dollars a year, and nobody can teach them. Pavel can't. I can't. You have them or you don't."
"And I do?"
"You have them, and if you ever lose them I'll know before you do." Teresa pulled the contact sheet away, squared it, and set it on top of a stack of folders. "Final count. Forty-one, the cat frame, the caught frame, three from row six that Pavel will sulk about because I hated his lighting. That's the campaign. Everything else gets filed as intake reference and never looked at again."
She picked up her coffee, found it cold, and drank it anyway.
"Which brings us to the other thing. You've been walking around all day with a folded piece of paper in your purse, and Ruben texted me twice about it, which means it's interesting. Give it to me."
Nancy took out the limits sheet. It was softer at the creases now, handled. She put it on the desk in front of Teresa, and her hand stayed on it one second longer than it needed to.
"I filled out the margin," she said.
"I can see that from here, there's writing all over it." Teresa pulled it free and read the checkboxes first, fast, ticking down the columns with her eyes. Her expression didn't change. Then she got to the margin, and she stopped.
The office was very quiet. The air conditioner hummed. Teresa read the sentence twice, the way she'd read numbers, then read the smaller line under it, and set her pen down deliberately.
"Direct the scene at me. Not just around me." She looked up over the glasses. "You wrote this knowing I'd read it."
"Ruben said honesty is the only thing that costs nothing on that sheet."
"Ruben is right and I'm going to bill him for saying it first." Teresa tapped the margin. "Do you know what you started with this sentence?"
"He said something like that too. You're going to rewrite scene three."
"I already have." Teresa pulled a legal pad across the desk, and it was already covered in her slanted handwriting, and the top third had a heavy line drawn through it. "The showcase. Woman alone, man arrives, slow build, that's what I had this morning. It's gone. Scene three is now a directed scene. I'm on camera, on headset, and I run you through it in real time, beats, positions, pace, everything called at you personally, and the camera watches you take direction and turn it into what I want. That's the film. That's the thing nobody else on my roster can shoot."
"You drew that line through it before I handed you the sheet?"
"Ruben told me what you'd written at eleven this morning. He memorized it, which I found revealing and so will you." Teresa took the coffee again, then put it down. "Here's the part you should hear sober, since you're apparently permanently sober now. A limits sheet is a promise I keep. Every box you checked gets honored exactly, every blank in the discuss column gets discussed before we shoot, and the margin is a request I'm turning into the entire third act because it tests well and because it's true. That's the deal. I don't honor requests out of sentiment, I honor them because honest performers outlast scared ones."
"That's the second nicest thing anyone's said to me this week."
"First was Ruben, I assume. Everything on this lot is second to Ruben, it's insufferable." Teresa folded the limits sheet in half and filed it in a folder with NANCY T. THOMPSON block-lettered on the tab, and closed the drawer on it. "Fitting's done, you're free until Thursday, call time ten a.m. Stage nine, hair and makeup at nine thirty. Eat tonight. Sleep tonight. And Nancy."
Nancy stopped at the door.
"Frame forty-one," Teresa said, already reaching for the phone. "I've been in this business eleven years and I've seen maybe four of those. Don't go losing it in a fitting trailer."
She left the office trailer into heat that felt like opening an oven, limits sheet filed, face reviewed, employment total. The hatchback's seatbelt buckle was too hot to touch, so she held it with the hem of her dress and clicked it home, and drove back toward Burbank with the windows down.
The hotel was the same one she'd booked three months ago with a mouse-click and a coupon code, the chain place off the boulevard with a pool nobody used. The desk clerk was a different kid than yesterday. He handed over her key card without comment, and she carried it to the second floor feeling like a woman sneaking into her own life.
The room was small and beige and smelled faintly of carpet cleaner. Her suitcase sat where she'd left it yesterday morning, open on the luggage rack, one bra hung over the corner like a flag of surrender. She looked at it for a long moment. That suitcase had held two nice dresses and a swimsuit for a vacation that had lasted exactly one morning.
She dropped her purse on the bed and sat next to it.
The limits sheet was gone from the lining, filed in a drawer under her full name. In its place were the tour brochure and Ruben's card, and her phone, which she picked up and put down twice before she made herself stop performing even for herself.
He'd asked, once, whether she'd be sober-decided in the morning. She was. She'd been sober-decided by eleven. What she was now was something else, some state after the decision, where the decision had stopped being an event and started being the room she lived in.
She texted him. Just landed back at the hotel. Teresa killed thirty-six frames of my face and I've never felt more complimented in my life.
The reply came fast. Did she use the red pen or the phone?
Red pen. There was a loupe. I don't think anyone has ever used a loupe on me before.
That's the industry's highest honor. Eat dinner. Actual food. I'll know if you didn't.
She grinned at the ceiling. How would you know?
I have a source in the front desk. Not really. Eat anyway.
She did. There was a taqueria two blocks over that she'd walked past yesterday with her tour brochure, back when the brochure was a plan and not a souvenir. She ordered too much on purpose, carnitas and rice and a horchata, and ate at a plastic table under a string of lights, and halfway through she caught herself sitting differently, shoulders back, taking up space, and she let it happen.
Back in the room she showered, and the hot water found all the old aches and the new ones, and she came out and lay on top of the bedspread in the hotel robe, hair damp, watching the ceiling fan turn. Nine thirty. Her phone sat on the nightstand with his card next to it, the plain white card, the small printed number.
He'd said: if you wake up at two in the morning and decide something else, you can call me for that too.
It was not two in the morning. It was nine thirty-six, and she was deciding something else, and she didn't see any rule that said she had to wait for the dark to count.
She dialed.
He picked up on the second ring, and his voice came through warm and unhurried, no surprise in it at all. "So she does break streaks."
"Not the one you were hoping for. It's nine thirty, not two."
"Nine thirty counts. What's up?"
Nancy lay back against the pillows and looked at the fan. "I quit my job today. The real one. I called from the parking lot and forfeited my vacation payout to do it, and the strangest part is I felt the exact opposite of sick."
"I heard. Teresa forwarded me the text chain. She's printing it."
"She's what?"
"She has a drawer of things she finds historically significant. You're in it now. Congrats." There was a rustle on his end, the sound of a man settling somewhere. "So this is the check-in call. You want me to say it was a fever dream so you can sleep?"
"No." She said it fast enough that it surprised her. "That's the thing. I keep waiting for the part where I panic, and it's not coming. I keep expecting to miss the cubicle, and what I miss is the hotel breakfast, which I haven't even eaten yet."
"That's normal for week one. The panic shows up around scene six or seven, usually at two a.m., usually to your mother's phone number before it reaches yours."
"Your bedside manner needs work."
"My bedside manner is excellent. It's my two a.m. crisis counseling that needs work, and that's what Thursday's call time is for." A pause, and then his voice came down a register, quieter, the composure loosening. "Actually, since you called. Can I tell you something professional and slightly unprofessional at the same time?"
"That's my favorite genre."
"I've been doing this nine years. I've worked with forty, fifty women, some of them legends. Today you texted me about a red pen and I realized I'd been looking forward to it since ten a.m. That's not a thing I do. Teresa noticed before I did, which is mortifying, and I'm telling you because you wrote your honest thing in a margin and I figured the least I could do is match it."
The fan turned. The horchata was a warm sweet memory in her chest, or that might have been something else.
"Okay," she said. "My matching margin thing, then. Yesterday, in the middle of scene three, while you were doing the thing against the wall, I remember thinking the exact thought: I hope he asks about overtime. Not the scenes. The asking. And then today you texted me about a text message instead of a goodnight, and I liked it more than the contract." She pulled the robe tighter, unnecessary, just to have her hands do something. "So there's my margin."
"Well," Ruben said, after a moment. "Now Teresa's going to print this call too."
"She can't hear this call."
"She doesn't need to. I'm going to describe it to her in a tone of voice and she'll imagine the rest and be furious she can't shoot it." She could hear the smile in it. "Thursday, then. Nine thirty hair and makeup. Wear the sundress under whatever they put you in. And Nancy?"
"Mm."
"Two a.m. still counts. The streak's open."
She hung up and lay there a while, the phone warm against her ear now empty, the ceiling fan turning its slow circles. Somewhere across town he was doing whatever Ruben did at night, and on Thursday at ten she'd walk onto stage nine with a limits sheet in a folder somewhere and a scene rewritten around one sentence she'd written in a margin.
She got up, found the hotel notepad and a pen chained to it, and wrote on the top page: things that are true now. Under it she wrote, unemployed. Then, contracted performer. Then she looked at those two lines for a while and added a third, in smaller handwriting, because the notepad was hers and nobody was going to review it with a red pen.
I called him first.
She left it on the nightstand, turned off the lamp, and lay down in the dark with the fan turning and her body humming its low settled hum, and fell asleep before she could decide whether she was nervous about Thursday, which she decided was its own answer.
Thursday came the way good days do, too fast and too bright. Nancy was at stage nine by nine twenty, fifteen minutes early, wearing the sundress under a light cardigan with her hair clean and loose, and the guard at the stage door waved her through before she finished saying her name.
Hair and makeup was a chair by a mirror ringed with bulbs. A woman named Dee wrapped a cape around her and studied her face with clinical affection.
"No makeup yesterday, I hear. First scene, no makeup, that's either brave or stupid and Teresa says you're neither."
"I didn't have any with me."
"Even better. Clean slate." Dee worked fast, warm cotton and brushes, a little gloss, nothing else. "You've got the kind of face the camera does the work on. My job is just to keep it out of your way."
Nancy watched herself come back into focus in the mirror, the same face from the hotel mirror last night, from the loading dock, from forty-one frames on a contact sheet. It looked like hers still. She'd been half afraid it wouldn't.
The stage beyond was a different build from her first day. A wide bed with grey linen, a low sofa, two big soft lights diffused through silk panels. Warm where the photo studio had been harsh. Teresa stood near camera in the same utility vest, headset on, legal pad under her arm, arguing with a gaffer about the angle of a fill.
"Nancy." Teresa spotted her without turning around fully, some directorial sonar. "On time. I'm putting that in the drawer too."
"You have a whole drawer."
"I have a good week." She crossed over and held out a folder. "Scene breakdown. Read it in the chair. Three beats. One, you alone, waking, the room. Two, he arrives, you take direction from me and give it back. Three, the build, everything called live. Your margin is beats two and three. Questions?"
"What if I can't hear you over the, um."
"You'll hear me. I have a voice built for telling people things they don't want to hear." Teresa checked her watch. "You've got twenty minutes. Robes are on the rack. Hydrate."
Nancy read the breakdown twice at the rack, pulling the robe on over the sundress. The language was technical and precise, and in the middle of beat two there was a single line in Teresa's slanted hand: Performer responds to direction as foreplay. She read it three times. It made something tighten pleasantly under her ribs, the same sensation as the margin had made.
She was pinning her hair back when the stage door opened and she felt him before she saw him, which was new and ridiculous and true. Ruben came in dressed down, soft grey sweats and a black t-shirt, hair damp from a shower, a bottle of electrolyte water in one hand.
"Hey," he said, and stopped a polite six feet away, glancing at Dee and the makeup chair. "You look awake."
"Ten hours. Actual dinner. Carnitas."
"The source confirms it." He held out the bottle. "Sip that. Last thing before we roll."
She took it, drank, watched him over the top of it. He looked different out of the linen, more like the man from scene four, all that economy under the cotton. "I've been thinking about the breakdown."
"Beat two," he said.
"You read it?"
"I wrote half of it." He came closer, voice dropping under the ambient noise of the crew. "Teresa's going to call your pace, your angles, your breathing, all of it, right into your ear while we work. Some performers hate it. It flattens them. On the sheet she wrote that line about direction as foreplay, and I need you to tell me honestly right now, before forty people are watching, whether that's real for you or whether it's a good sentence."
Nancy thought about scene three yesterday, the wall, his voice giving her checkpoints, the way his steadiness had been half of what undid her. "It's real. I've been taking direction from you since the doorway, and you noticed I liked it before I did."
His mouth curved. "Good answer." He glanced at the set, then back, and something quieter came through. "We're going to do a chemistry beat before Teresa calls action. Two minutes, no cameras. Her idea, first time she's ever had it. You and me on the bed, talking, nothing else, so the first thing the camera catches isn't two strangers finding each other."
"Two minutes of just talking."
"You're allowed to say something unprofessional. That's what it's for."
She laughed, and set the bottle down. "Then I'll say it now. I've been looking forward to this all week and I've been pretending it was nerves."
"Same," Ruben said, and the simplicity of it went through her like warmth through water.
Teresa's voice cracked across the stage, headset to mouth. "Places for chemistry beat. Nancy, robe off, on the bed, sit up against the headboard. Ruben, with her. Cameras cold, I want it that way."
Nancy shrugged the robe off her shoulders and crossed the set in the sundress, feeling the crew's eyes move over her, and discovered she liked being seen, which she filed away as another true thing. The grey linen was cool against her thighs. She settled against the headboard and Ruben came up beside her, close, his shoulder against hers, his warmth immediately familiar.
Teresa stood at the foot of the bed with the legal pad, and for once she wasn't writing. "Talk. Anything. The cat. The traffic. Two minutes."
"Your cat hates the flash," Ruben said to her.
"He hides under tables. Cowardly cat."
"I had a dog like that. A greyhound. Beautiful animal, terrified of umbrellas."
"Nobody's brave about umbrellas," Nancy said, and he laughed, and his hand found hers on the linen between them, thumb moving over her knuckles, and the conversation drifted, hotels, taquerias, the absurd cuisine of craft services, and somewhere in it her body stopped performing readiness and just relaxed into the bed, and his into hers, their legs touching from knee to ankle.
"Okay," Teresa said softly, and Nancy looked up and saw her watching them over the glasses with the expression of a woman watching money print itself. "Cameras are warm. Don't stop talking. Roll on my mark."
The red tally light went on at the far camera, small and steady, a thing that had once terrified her and now felt like a lamp being switched on in a room she already lived in.
"And mark," Teresa said.
Ruben turned his head toward her, dark eyes close now, and spoke with the light on, his voice pitched for her alone even though the boom hung above them. "So," he said. "Tell me what you want me to do first."
Nancy took a slow breath, aware of the lens, the heat of the lights, Teresa's pad lifted and ready, his hand tight around hers.
"I want you to kiss me," she said, "and then I want you to listen very carefully to whatever she tells you."
Teresa's voice slid in over the headsets, warm and low, the direction beginning.
"Good girl. Ruben, her jaw. Nancy, lean back when he does. Slowly."
He kissed her, unhurried, his mouth familiar now, and under the lights with the tally burning red she leaned back against the grey linen, exactly as directed, and felt the whole stage lean with her.
Teresa's voice came through again, level and unhurried over the headsets. "Nancy, sit up. Pull the straps of the dress off your shoulders. Ruben, watch her do it."
She sat up. The thin straps slid down her arms under her thumbs, and the dress loosened over her breasts, and she felt the room watch her, twelve crew and one camera and one voice telling her exactly what to do next.
"Slower," Teresa said. "You're not in a hurry. He is going to wait."
Nancy slowed her hands. The neckline folded down over the swell of her chest, the cool air of the stage touching bare skin, and heat gathered low in her belly, sudden and real, because she wasn't choosing this pace. She was obeying it. Her nipples tightened under the fabric.
"Good girl," Teresa said. "Ruben, mouth on her breast. Nancy, put your hand in his hair and hold him there."
His mouth closed over her nipple, wet and warm, and she threaded her fingers into his damp hair and pressed. Her breath left her in a long, unsteady line. The camera's red light burned at the edge of her vision and she stopped noticing it entirely.
"Other one. Use your hand on her hip. Nancy, arch into him when he does."
She arched. His tongue circled, his hand pulled her hip flush against his thigh, and the two sensations arrived exactly on Teresa's beat, like chords. A sound came out of her, small and honest, and Teresa's voice followed it immediately.
"There. Again, same sound, louder. Ruben, earn it. Suck."
He sucked, slow, and Nancy gave the sound again, louder, her head falling back against the headboard. The dress slid to her waist. His palm slid under the hem, up her thigh, and stopped at the edge of her underwear.
"Ask her," Teresa said. "Word for word."
He lifted his mouth from her breast, his lips wet, and looked up at her. "Can I take these off you?"
"Yes." It came out fast, then she heard herself and added, "Please."
Teresa made a note on the pad without looking down. "'Please' stays in the film. Nancy, say what you want next. Out loud, full sentence, for me."
"I want his mouth between my legs."
The pad scratched. The stage was very quiet except for the soft tick of the camera and the blood in Nancy's ears. Being made to say it, being told to say it, had gone straight through her like a current, and she could feel how wet she already was, embarrassing and obvious, and she wanted it to be obvious.
"Off with the dress entirely. Lie back. Ruben, down the bed, take your time, and stop when I tell you."
Nancy kicked the dress free and lay back on the grey linen, bare under the diffused warmth of the silk panels, her honey-blonde hair fanned on the pillow. Ruben moved down her body with unhurried weight, kissing the soft of her stomach, hooking his fingers into her underwear and drawing it down her legs.
"Stop," Teresa said, when his mouth was an inch away. "Hold there. Nancy, look at camera one. Don't pose. Just breathe."
She looked. The lens was a small black eye forty feet away, and her body was open and aching and she breathed, and Teresa let the silence run three full seconds.
"Release. Eat her out. Slow at first."
His mouth found her and she gasped, one hand flying to the sheet. His tongue was patient, broad and warm, tracing her slowly exactly as called, and above his head Teresa's voice kept coming, steady, filthy in its calmness.
"Nancy, tell the camera how it feels. Short sentences."
"It's good." A breath. "He's so slow it's maddening. I want more."
"Ask him for more."
"Ruben. More."
"Tongue deeper. Fingers, two, when she's ready. Nancy, when you feel them, say yes so I know."
His tongue pressed inside her and his lips closed around her clit, and then two fingers slid into her, curling, and she said yes, yes, her hips lifting off the bed, the heat in her belly pulling tight into a bright wire.
"Hands out of your hair, Ruben. Nancy, hands on your own breasts. Hold them for me. You're not allowed to come yet."
"No?" The word came out half laugh, half plea, because the wire was already humming and he was still curling his fingers.
"Not until I say. That's the beat. Ruben, hold her right there, steady, no escalation."
He held. His mouth worked her in slow, even strokes, fingers pressed against the spot that made her thighs shake, and Nancy's hands found her own breasts, squeezing, her nipples hard under her palms, every nerve strung up toward a peak she was forbidden to reach. Sweat pricked at her hairline under the hot lights. Her breath came in short, visible pulls.
"You're doing beautifully," Teresa said, and the praise landed in her chest like a hand. "Fifteen more seconds of that, then I let you. On my word, not his. Ready?"
"Yes."
"Ruben, on my mark, take her over. Mark."
His mouth sealed over her clit and sucked, hard and sudden, his fingers driving deep, and Nancy came apart on the command, the orgasm crashing through her in waves that pulled a long, loud cry out of her, her back arching clean off the linen, his name and nothing else in her mouth.
"Hold the camera on her. Let it run out." Teresa's voice, softer now. "Breathe, Nancy. Good. Very good."
She came down in slow pieces, Ruben's mouth gentling against her, her hands sliding off her own breasts to the pillow. She was dimly aware of the crew shifting, of a light being nudged, and mostly aware that Teresa had just told her when to climax and her body had obeyed without consulting her.
"That was the warm-up," Teresa said, and Nancy heard the pad flip a page. "Scene's rolling, nobody cuts. Ruben, up the bed, on your back. Nancy, on top, but you wait for my count before you move. Ruben, trousers down, let her see what she's sitting on."
He rolled onto his back beside her, pushed the grey sweats down, and Nancy looked at him, at the thick, hard length of him she'd spent a whole week thinking about, and felt herself clench around nothing at the sight.
"Straddle him. Not on yet. Just rest against him."
She climbed over, knees astride his hips, and lowered herself until she was lying along his length, hot and slick against her, neither of them inside. The pressure alone made her gasp. His hands settled on her waist, patient, waiting exactly where Teresa had put them.
"Eyes on me, Nancy." Teresa had moved to the foot of the bed, close, headset to mouth, glasses catching the light. "Here's your line. Say: tell me when I'm allowed to ride you."
"Tell me when I'm allowed to ride you," Nancy repeated, breathless, hips barely rocking against him of their own accord.
Teresa smiled without warmth or mercy. "Not yet. Ruben, count to ten out loud. Nancy, hold through all ten. If you slip him in early, we go again."
"One," Ruben said, steady, his hands flexing on her waist.
The count ran through her like a countdown to something detonating. She held, trembling, slick against him, and answered each number in her head like a pledge. This was what she'd written in the margin, she realized dimly. This exact thing. Being told. Being made to wait.
"Ten," Ruben said.
"On my mark," Teresa said, pen raised. "Nancy, take him. All the way, one motion. Mark."
She sank down onto him in one long, filling stroke, and the cry she let out had no performance in it at all.
He filled her to the hilt and she came. Just like that. One full stroke, his cock buried to the root, and the wire that Teresa had kept her from all through the warm-up snapped clean through. Her whole body clenched around him, thighs clamping his hips, her cry breaking into a sob of release that echoed off the flats.
"Hold the camera," Teresa said, but her voice had changed. Nancy heard it through the haze, sharper, fascinated. "She came on insertion. Nobody told her to. Did you come, Nancy?"
"Yes." It came out wrecked, honest, her forehead dropped against Ruben's chest. "Oh my God, yes."
"Nobody told you to."
"I couldn't help it." She was still pulsing around him, small aftershocks rolling through her, his cock thick and hard and deep inside her, exactly where it had been all along. "You told me to take it and I took it and I just came."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.