Chapter 40: The Producer's Proposal
Leo’s office was cold. The sun poured through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was a sterile, museum light that warmed nothing. It gleamed on the polished concrete floor, the steel desk, the sharp edges of a Eames chair. The scent was citrus cleaner and, underneath, the faint, warm ozone of expensive electronics. Catriona stood just inside the door, her bare feet on the cool floor. She’d been summoned directly from the pool, a towel wrapped around her sarong. Aidan was beside her, still in his gym shorts, his skin smelling of salt and effort.
Leo didn’t look up from his monitor. He clicked a key, and the sound was like a bone snapping in the quiet. On the large screen, Catriona saw herself from yesterday afternoon. The muted, golden light of their bedroom. Her kimono sliding open. Her hands, patient and sure, guiding Aidan into a trembling Chloe. Her own face, focused, instructional, alive with a terrible authority.
He paused the playback. Her frozen image, half-teacher, half-madam, stared back at her from the screen.
“Sit,” Leo said, finally swiveling in his chair. He gestured to two low-slung leather chairs opposite the desk.
They sat. The leather sighed, swallowing them. Catriona kept her back straight, the damp towel a lump in her lap.
“The metrics,” Leo began, tapping a tablet, “are fucking insane. The ‘virgin’ tag always pops, but this? The ‘instructional’ angle? The warm-up? The comments are speculating about a behind-the-scenes series. They want to know who the blonde is. They’re calling you ‘The Professor’.” A slow smile spread across his face. It didn’t touch his eyes. “Turns out, you’ve got a better eye for story than half the fuckwits I’ve hired with film degrees.”
Aidan shifted beside her. “She’s always been smart.”
“Smart’s not the point. Instinct is.” Leo leaned forward, elbows on the glass desk. His gaze pinned Catriona. “You managed fear. You turned a liability into a premium feature. That’s not performing. That’s producing.”
The word hung in the citrus air. Producing. It landed in her stomach, a heavy, hot coin.
“What are you saying?” Her voice was quieter than she wanted.
“I’m saying I’m expanding. The ‘Aidan and Cat’ exclusivity is a strong brand, but it’s a niche. The Chloe clip shows the potential of a wider universe. A curated universe.” He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. The printer ink was stark, the paragraphs dense. “I want you to head that curation. Scouting. Initial vetting. Training. The… preparatory work, as you called it. You get them ready for him, for the camera. You shape the narrative.”
Catriona’s eyes scanned the text. Party A (Catriona MacLean) shall act as Lead Talent Producer… responsibilities include… entitled to twenty percent of net profits generated by scenes directly developed and produced under this agreement…
Twenty percent. The numbers she’d seen flashing on Leo’s screens made that figure astronomical. It wasn’t just money. It was a lever. A foothold in the machine.
“And me?” Aidan’s question was flat.
“You remain the exclusive male talent for all scenes featuring Catriona. That brand integrity stays. But for the new talent she brings in, you’re the lead. The constant. The king.” Leo’s smile flickered. “You also get twenty percent of the new profit pool.”
A king with a banker. Catriona kept reading. Her blood was a low roar in her ears. Then she saw it. Clause 7b.
In recognition of the integrated nature of production and performance, and to ensure optimal flexibility, Party A agrees to make herself available for any scene deemed critically integral to a production narrative by Party B (Leonardo Ventures, LLC), irrespective of previously established preferences or partnerships.
She read it twice. The cold office seemed to drop another ten degrees.
“Irrespective of previously established preferences or partnerships,” she echoed, looking up at Leo.
He held her gaze. “It’s standard. Sometimes a story requires a twist. An extra girl. A second guy. If it’s critical for the arc, I need my producer to be a team player. To lead by example.”
The air vanished from the room. The only sound was the low hum of a server stack in the corner. Catriona felt Aidan go rigid in the chair next to her.
“A second guy,” Aidan said. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s a hypothetical,” Leo replied, his voice smooth as the glass desk. “But the ‘only Aidan’ rule is a production constraint. This clause removes constraints. It tells me you’re both all in. That this isn’t just a kink anymore. It’s a business.”
Catriona stared at the clause. It was a tripwire. Her one rule, the single, non-negotiable line she’d drawn in the sand of this entire filthy enterprise, rendered optional. A variable in Leo’s narrative calculus.
She thought of the power.Twenty percent. Shaping stories instead of just being shaped by them. The authority to look at a frightened girl and say breathe, and have it mean something. She thought of the dangerous strangers she’d feared before Aidan—faceless, limitless men. Leo was offering her a suit of armor made of money and influence, but the price was letting him choose, one day, who she took inside it.
“And if we say no?” Aidan asked. His knuckles were white where they gripped the chair arm.
Leo leaned back, spreading his hands. “Then you’re talent. Great talent. You get your standard rates. You film your exclusive scenes, which the audience will eventually find repetitive. I’ll hire someone else to produce the expansion. They’ll use other male talent. The ‘Cat and Aidan’ brand becomes a nostalgic subset. A relic.” He nodded to the paused screen. “You’ll have made a very popular home movie.”
The threat was elegant. Without this, they diminished. They became obsolete. The villa would move on, a new producer would pair other men with Chloe and the next girl and the one after that. Aidan would watch from the sidelines, his exclusivity a shrinking island.
Catriona looked at Aidan. His jaw was a hard line, a muscle ticking in his cheek. She saw the war: the guilt, the possession, the raw, animal urge to say fuck off and drag her out of this cold room. And beneath that, the ambition she knew lived in him too, the engineer’s appreciation for a system that worked, for a plan that scaled.
She turned the page over. There was a blank line for her signature. One for his as a witness.
The silence stretched, thin and brittle.
“I need to think,” she said.
“Of course,” Leo said, as if he’d expected it. “Take the afternoon. The villa is quiet. But Catriona?” He waited until she looked at him. “Producers make decisions. They don’t just have things done to them. This,” he tapped the contract with a blunt finger, “is the decision.”
He dismissed them with a turn of his chair back to the monitor.
Outside, the Mediterranean heat was a physical slap after the office chill. They walked in silence towards the pool, the turquoise water shimmering, a cruel parody of paradise.
Aidan stopped by the deep end, staring into the liquid light. “He can’t make you sign that.”
“He’s not making me. He’s offering me a promotion.”
“With a clause that lets him pimp you out to anyone he fancies!” Aidan’s voice was low, fierce. “That’s the one thing, Cat. The one fucking thing.”
“I know.” She wrapped her arms around herself. The towel was still damp. “But it’s a hypothetical. A lever he holds. He might never pull it.”
“And if he does?”
She didn’t answer. She watched a leaf drift on the surface of the pool, circling aimlessly. She saw the ghost of the librarian, shelving books, her deepest rebellion a dog-eared page of erotica. That girl would have fainted at the sight of this contract. This woman, standing here with the scent of chlorine and sex on her skin, calculated.
“If I don’t sign,” she said slowly, “someone else becomes producer. Someone else trains the girls. Crafts the stories. Controls what we are. They’ll phase you out. You know it. I become just another girl in your sequence. You become replaceable.”
Aidan was silent. He knew it was true.
“If I do sign,” she continued, the logic unspooling, cold and clear, “I’m in the room where the decisions are made. I have a vote. I have profits. I have… authority. Over the narrative. Over what happens to Chloe, and the next one. I can protect things. Shape them.” She finally looked at him. “The price is a possibility. A maybe. The price of saying no is a certainty. Our decline.”
He turned to face her. The sun was in his eyes, but she saw the pain there, the conflict. “It was supposed to be us. Just us. Filthy and private.”
“It stopped being private the first time you hit ‘record’ for someone else,” she said, and the words were merciless. “This just makes the fiction official.”
She left him by the pool, the contract a phantom weight in her hand. She went to her room, now empty—Chloe had been moved to her own suite after the shoot. She sat on the edge of the bed, the same bed where she’d given the lesson.
She took a pen from the nightstand. A cheap, plastic thing.
She stared at the line on the contract.
Producers make decisions. They don’t just have things done to them.
She thought of the power to say breathe. She thought of the terrifying, thrilling weight of the glass dildo in her hand, an instrument of control.
Her hand did not shake as she bent over the page. The pen hovered for a heartbeat, a black mark waiting to be born.
Then she set it down. She wasn’t signing yet. Not until she’d rewritten clause 7b in her head a hundred times, found its weaknesses, its loopholes. Not until she’d talked to Aidan without the heat of the moment, to see what was left of us beneath the brand.
But she knew, with a certainty that was both terrifying and calm, that she would sign. The girl who craved safety through submission was gone. In her place was a woman who understood that in this world, the only safety was control. And you had to buy it, piece by piece, with whatever currency they valued.
She left the contract on the desk, the blank line accusing her, and went to find Aidan. The negotiation wasn't with Leo anymore. It was with the man she’d once asked to ruin her, and with the ruthless producer she was deciding to become.