by Lara Archer
But she still wasn’t dropping her robe.
Jake brought his swiveling to a halt then, and spread his arms in a “what’s up?” gesture. “Not working for you?” he said cheerfully. “Well, then, on to Plan B.”
He started singing the melody of the Saturday Night Fever theme, and with another shift of his pelvis, launched into some 1970’s disco moves, shimmying his hips, shooting out his index fingers in John Travolta style. He looked ridiculous now with his ass flashing and his (admittedly rather impressive) penis bobbing, and he clearly knew he looked ridiculous, and that—just as clearly—was the point. He was trying to break the ice.
At least he got a laugh out of Eli the sound guy.
And, holy crap, the red light on Camera 3 was lit, and Onyx had her eye to the lens, filming away. She was also dancing along in time to Jake’s humming, shaking her hips in her black leather booty shorts and fishnets.
Amber stepped over to her hurriedly. “That absolutely, positively does not go on YouTube,” she hissed in an undertone. “Do you understand me?”
“Shh,” said Onyx. “This is for science.”
“Not on YouTube.”
“Fine,” Onyx conceded reluctantly, and then lifted one painted-on black eyebrow. “But the Smithsonian is going to want it someday. As an important historical document.”
Amber watched Jake cross one leg over the other and pull off a lightning-fast double spin. The man was very impressive. “Agreed,” she said. “Everyone will want it. But you still have to delete it.”
Onyx sniffed. “You have no soul.”
Amber patted her shoulder. “I had to sell it to get these two to agree to do the film.”
“Fine.”
Amber made a note to chaperone that camera down the hill herself before Onyx had time to make a copy for personal use.
Well, no question, Jake was loose and ready to go. Unfortunately, Ruby was still in her bathrobe and rooted to the spot.
Jake looked at her and frowned.
“So, not a disco fan?” he asked. “You’re a tough audience. Okay, I’m gonna pull out all the stops.” He started humming an off-tune Hava Nagila and prancing through the steps of the hora. “Check out these moves, baby,” he crooned to Ruby, who was smiling just a little now, then switched to doing the Charleston, hands criss-crossing in front of his flapping knees before he turned and waggled his chiseled butt at her. He went back to the bump and grind then, this time with his palms extended to the skies doing Jazz Hands, and his hips doing a full lascivious circle with a huge pelvic thrust at the end.
Ruby laughed suddenly—a deep, rich tenor laugh. “You crazy,” she said. But she gave her belt a pull, and stripped off her robe and let it drop to the ground.
Thank goodness.
And, damn. That was some body she’d been hiding under there.
Onyx actually whistled.
This morning when Amber had walked in on Ruby and Nick, she’d looked away as fast as humanly possible. But now her job required her to look. Ruby Torres dropping a bathrobe was like Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her clam shell, only with duskier skin and much more bodacious curves. She was absolutely luscious, even in broad sunlight. The woman didn’t have a flaw. Couldn’t she at least have had scaly elbows, or some cellulite or something? Even just a little chipped nail polish would have helped.
Jesus. No wonder Nick had jumped at the first possible chance to bang her.
And no doubt he was going to thoroughly enjoy the next few hours, with a professional duty to keep his eagle eye on her through his camera lens.
Jake grinned even wider than before, and gave Ruby a frank, cheerful stare head to foot and back up again, with a bit of a breathless pause at the level of her astonishing breasts. “Holy Mary—I believe I have found my motivation for this scene!”
Ruby gave him a sassy look, with her hands on her bare hips. “Don’t you go harassing me now, mijo.”
Jake shook his head, still grinning. “Oh, no, ma’am. This is not harassment. This is pure aesthetic appreciation, one human being to another. This might possibly even be worship.”
Pure aesthetic appreciation or otherwise, his penis was definitely interested. It began very conspicuously to rise. And as it was an already-impressive penis while flaccid, it became downright impossible to ignore as it grew.
Jake laughed, aware of the direction of everyone’s eyes. “Pay no attention to Little Jake. He’s just simple-minded. Refuses to communicate directly with my brain.” He waved his hand in the air above his burgeoning erection, as if trying to blow out a fire. “No, seriously, this is physiological. Absolutely nothing I can do about it.”
“Understood,” said Nick, and Amber wanted to punch him in the face.
Or in a considerably more sensitive spot.
“It’s okay,” said Ruby, who was, surprisingly, blushing a bit. “And it’s Not-So-Little Jake, by the way.”
Jake bowed with a flourish. “Thank you, my lady.” And he straightened up and grinned. Amber had never known anyone so completely comfortable with his body. “But if you’d rather have me wear one of those sling things, I can strap my buddy down.”
Ruby hesitated a second. “No,” she said, “it’s okay. We don’t need to be trying to hide straps.” She even smiled again. “This is all about the nakedness, right?”
Amber noticed Nick’s shoulders shaking–damn the man, he was laughing. She looked fully over at him for the first time in a while, and discovered his head wasn’t turned to look at naked Ruby. He was fiddling with Camera 2 now, adjusting the height of the tripod.
Well, that was…gentlemanly, or something. Or confusing.
Confusing, definitely. Nick didn’t do gentlemanly.
Focus, Amber. Focus. “Okay. Jake and Ruby. Here’s what I need you to do. Remember this is about exposing the vulnerability inside you. Not just about…Not-So-Little Jake. I want you both to stand here, without your clothes on, and try to think of a time in your life when you were most scared.”
Ruby’s eyes flashed wide, and her face seemed to pale. “Jesus! You serious?”
“Vulnerability,” Amber repeated. “That’s where fear comes from.”
“No kidding,” muttered Ruby, and she shook out her arms like she was trying to shake off an attack of nerves.
Amber paused. So...what’s the famously unflappable Ruby Torres so scared of?
Jake took half a step towards his co-star, concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ruby breathed in hard. Shut her eyes. “This is great—I’m just perfect.”
“Look, Ruby,” said Amber. “If this is too much for the first day, we can stop and try something else.” She really hoped Ruby wouldn’t choose that option, though—she wasn’t entirely sure how they’d make up the time.
“No worries, chica. We got sunshine today, and we don’t want to waste it.” The Oakland tough-girl brassiness was coming back into Ruby’s voice. “I’m a pro. I’m ready.”
“Great. Listen, why don’t we skip straight to doing some dialogue. Just to see how it goes. You both know the script, but feel free to improvise if the lines don’t seem natural to you—we want it to feel real.”
“Got it,” said Jake, grinning.
“Got it,” said Ruby, without the grin.
“We’re at our midpoint here,” Amber said. “Mike’s taken Jessie up on the dare to face each other naked. They’ve been friends a long time, but they’ve held back so much from each other.”
Amber stopped short. Jesus, where had her subconscious been while she was writing this script? Friends who’ve held back from each other? Friends getting naked?
She didn’t dare look in Nick’s direction, and she had to swallow hard before she could speak again. “This is make or break for them,” she continued, trying to keep her voice steady. “So it’s scary as hell.”
“Scary as hell,” repeated Ruby, shaking out her arms again.
Jake and Ruby started in on the dialogue—all those words abou
t trust and taking chances—and Amber felt like she’d fallen down a mineshaft. How could she not have realized what she was really writing about when she put those lines on paper? If anyone had asked her at the time how she felt about Nick, she would have sworn he was just a friend, her artistic partner in crime. Hell, when she writing these words, she hadn’t even decided to break up with Louis yet. Even when she stripped off her shirt in the meadow yesterday, she would have said she was just following a spontaneous, wild impulse. Totally unpremeditated.
But holy crap—there it all was, being voiced out loud by a couple of actors.
Deep down inside, she’d wanted something more from Nick. Something much more. Her subconscious knew it. But her conscious mind had just been too stupid to catch on.
Oh, please, please God, don’t let Nick be paying attention to the dialogue.
At the moment at least, Nick was absorbed in filming, sliding quickly from Camera 1 to Camera 2, zooming in for a close up. His shoulder brushed hers as he moved, which was a pretty regular occurrence when they worked together so closely. Though it didn’t usually make her jump out of her skin like it did today.
And, oh Lord—it didn’t usually ignite a burst of heat under her skin.
Against all reason, a surge of need welled up. Despite her anger, despite how disgusted she was with Nick’s behavior, despite how confused she was by her own feelings, something deep inside her just wanted Nick to turn and put his arms around her again.
Like he was supposed to be doing that. Like he belonged to her.
Like the world was never going to feel right unless their bodies were wrapped up tight together, skin to skin.
Stupid subconscious. And stupid, stupid body.
She just wanted to cry.
Focus, she told herself again. Do your work.
She’d made a mistake with Nick, that was all. Gotten caught up in a stupid, unexamined little schoolgirl fantasy. A perfectly natural curiosity to explore, that she’d now tested out, and discovered was nothing but a dead end. It might hurt at the moment, but that was a predictable price to pay for not having much actual experience with men. She could learn from this, grow wiser, and her work would be the richer for it.
Do your work.
Just do your work, and everything will turn out okay.
The only problem with that plan, though, was that the work wasn’t going right either.
In fact, it was going rather horribly at the moment.
The actors looked gorgeous together, no question, and the lines were all getting spoken in the right order. Jake, actually, was doing beautifully, moving and talking and looking like a real, live human being, with genuine passion and tenderness and thoughtfulness in his gaze. Every muscle in his gorgeous, naked body seemed to be shifting forward, yearning for his partner. Audiences would eat him up.
But Ruby—something was off with her.
She seemed stiff, somehow. Wooden. More like a mannequin than a flesh-and-blood human. She might be physically exposed, but her inside was shut off from view. Where was the loose, breezy, unguarded side she showed in Harlem Midnight, when she got that Oscar nom?
Jake had moved in to kiss her now—getting the tentative, terrified, half-exhilarated quality of it just right. And Ruby tilted her head back and rose up on her toes, nice and slow, just the way she should be doing—but her face was all wrong. There was no emotion in it. She might as well have been leaning in close to her cell phone to get a better look at a text.
“Cut!” called Amber.
Jake stayed intent on Ruby, but Ruby jumped back a foot and swiveled her head towards Amber, like she was startled out of her skin. “Sorry,” Ruby said, and bit her lip. “That was me, wasn’t it? I’m just—not focusing right now.”
“Okay,” said Amber, trying to sound upbeat. Maybe they shouldn’t have started with this scene, weather or no weather. Or...maybe this whole damn movie was a big mistake.
No. No, not going to go there. True artists do not panic.
She managed a smile. “That’s fine. We’re just warming up here. And this is....” She waved her hand between Jake and Ruby, both of them standing there naked with almost total strangers. “I’m sure it’s pretty weird.”
“Yeah,” said Ruby, rolling her eyes. “Definitely all kinds of weird.”
“Well, great,” said Amber. “Use that. Use the weird.”
“Right. Totally. Use the weird.”
Was that sarcasm? Amber decided to ignore it if it was.
“Just pick up where you left off,” she said. “Jake, go in for the kiss again, but both of you, let yourselves feel how hard it is for these friends to cross that scary, weird barrier between what they’ve been together and what they could be.” Please, God, let Nick not be listening to what I’m saying right now. Please let him be thinking about...filing next year’s taxes or something. Even focusing on Ruby’s insanely perfect breasts would do.
Jake and Ruby looked at each other, both of them breathing a little harder than before.
“Good,” said Amber. “Imagine that you’re two big magnets coming together. All that push and pull and everything wobbling around—like you don’t know if you’re going to smack together or fly apart.”
“Magnets. Right,” said Ruby. She was shaking out her arms again, so maybe it was fear putting the edge in her voice, not sarcasm.
Jake was right back to gazing intensely at her face. Immediately, the tension was there, the vulnerability, the desire, the sense of one human being trying to reach out to another and willing to jump off a cliff to get to her, not knowing if he’d reach the other side. He really was amazing, the way he got right into a character’s skin and made him real.
And Ruby—well, she seemed to be making some kind of effort to concentrate, closing her eyes tight for a moment and taking a very deep breath. Pulling herself together. When she let the breath out, definitely, a change came over her. A light sparked in her eyes, and her face actually had expression this time.
Her gaze met Jake’s directly. With a pretty convincing imitation of desire.
Amber held her breath. Come on. I know you can do this.
Jake’s arms went around Ruby’s supple waist and drew her closer, and...okay, if nothing else, it definitely looked hot. Really quite stunning, actually, to see two such ridiculously good-looking people together like that. Even if Amber’s stomach still churned with the knowledge that one of those ridiculously good-looking people had been in Nick’s arms just this morning.
Do. Not. Think. About. That.
Find your Zen.
Ruby seemed to be getting into the mood of it now. Which, given how unbelievably sexy Jake was, shouldn’t have been very hard. Parting her full lips, Ruby arched her back sensuously and pressed her breasts into Jake’s sculpted chest. She gave her thick mane of hair a shake, and ran her tongue slowly over her bottom lip and—
“Cut!”
Ruby flinched visibly.
“Sorry,” said Amber. “Really, that was better. More lively, at least. But it felt a little...um, self-conscious. Like you knew the camera was on you.”
Ruby blinked at her. “Yeah, well, I do know the camera’s on me.”
“But your character’s not supposed to know. She’s just living her life, not making a music video.”
Oh, and that got another flinch.
Amber tried again. “It’s just that...what you’re doing—it looks a little too...posed. You know, calculated. Fake.”
Okay, maybe that wasn’t the gentlest way to have put it. But it was true—Ruby was acting sexy, creating a facsimile of desire with the shell of her body. Her fans might be thrilled to see it, no matter what. But Amber needed her to show desire from within.
“Look,” said Amber. “Just let it flow. Don’t try to make it pretty. Don’t try to force it to be sexy. Be authentic.”
Ruby nodded, but her face looked stiffer than ever.
Jake stepped forward then. “Hey,” he said. “Amber, can you maybe give us a c
ouple minutes here? Without the cameras? So Ruby and I can talk?”
“Sure,” said Amber, motioning to Nick and Onyx to shut everything off.
Jake led Ruby out of sight behind a boulder, but the murmur of their voices made it clear they were talking intently.
Onyx punched Eli on the shoulder. “C’mon,” she said. “I need you to…uh, identify some species of toadstools for me.”
Eli looked alarmed at being addressed by a female. Especially a scary female like Onyx. “I don’t know anything about toadstools,” he said.
Onyx rolled her kohl-lined eyes meaningfully in Nick’s direction. “So guess.” She grabbed Eli by the elbow and dragged him off down the hill. “Move.”
Which left Amber alone with Nick.
Great, so even Onyx could tell there was something off between them, and thought it needed to be fixed. Immediately.
As if it could be fixed.
Nick, not surprisingly, was suddenly very absorbed in checking his light meter again. And, oh good God, this was awful. Any other day, she could have talked to Nick about what was happening with Ruby, have him reassure her, or give her a reality check, bounce ideas back and forth. But in the past twenty-four hours he’d gone from being her unfailing rock to being a big pit of quicksand.
She actually hoped Eli and Onyx would hurry back so there’d be more people there to not talk to, so it wouldn’t be so conspicuous that she wasn’t talking to Nick.
Nick fiddled with his meter for a few more seconds, but then he looked up at her abruptly. “Hey, kiddo,” he said softly, his eyes kind of hooded like he knew she wouldn’t want him looking at her. “Can I offer some advice?”
Her stomach jumped. And then twisted.
Advice. Oh, yes, she definitely wanted advice from Nick Turner right about now.
But, actually, given how badly things were going with her actors, she couldn’t exactly afford to turn it down. “Sure,” she said tightly. “Shoot.”
Hesitantly, Nick looked her in the eye. “Don’t take this wrong, but...ease up a little, okay? Ruby’s feeling a lot of pressure right now, I think, and you being hard on her’s not helping her relax.”
“Ruby?” she said. He thought she was being hard on Ruby? And just like that, the hot seething ball of jealousy she’d managed to tamp down thus far burst into flame. “Ruby needs help to relax? Well, I really think that’s more your department than mine, cowboy. What do you say we all go back down to the cabins for a couple hours and you help her get the tension out?”
