Page 65 of Love Scenes

And holds.

And holds.

Long and loaded and shifting from clinical into meaningful into something hopeless and unstoppable.

“Andcut,” Tyler whispers.

Joseph doesn’t break from me right away. His stare lingers, hand still under my chin. After he lets me go, I have to actually shake my head side to side like I’ve been lifted from a trance.

When Joseph and I didA Little Luck, I plunged completely into that world, believing in my love for him. Then our director would call cut and I’d shoot right back up to the surface of myself, fully in my own body, scowling at my drunk costar.

Now, I’m waffling, caught between two places, seeing nothing but Joseph in moments when I’m supposed to see his character. Watching the way his arms flex as he moves, knowing things about his body that Elise doesn’t know about Calvin’s yet. The ways he likes to be touched. How he breathes when he’s worked up. Heavy and drifting. The low, dangerous growl in his voice that comes out only then. Sometimes I get scared it’s written all over my face, so I pull back further than I should until I’m not Elise or Sloane but a third-party bystander to the scene.

Tyler rests a hand on my shoulder, moving us away from Joseph. “We’ve been talking a lot about exchanges of power. How Elise leads with the knowledge that she has the upper hand. Right? But this is the moment it switches. For one moment, Elise accepts that she can’t stop this. And I see the war of that in you, but I don’t see the surrender. Give in a little. Not all the way. That’s for the moment after the Stuart date. This is a tease.”

She leaves me to give her notes to Joseph, preferring to talk to us separately, always loading our heads with secrets and leverages to use against each other in the scene. How can I make Elise give in a little when I don’t know the line anymore? What’s a little when I’ve already gone so much further than that? Above the beltisn’t casual. Joseph was right. Not that it matters, because we’ve blurred that line like we’ve blurred every other. I’m afraid my version of giving in a little is actually giving in too much.

I shouldn’t even be thinking like this. I’m the one who told Joseph not to think too much, and here I am thinking myself into a corner. I should just take Tyler’s note and insert it into Elise’s world. This is right before her date with Stuart. Before everything goes wrong and she takes off for home and falls into his arms. And it’s a scene we absolutely need to finish today.

The professional in me leaps to the forefront, determined to get this right. When we run it again, I stand rooted in the world of Elise, leaving Sloane so far behind I don’t even talk to Joseph between takes.

At the end of the scene, Joseph presses his lips onto mine. Soft and wanting. It’s easy to push him back, because if I don’t, I won’t stop. Forget the lights and the dozens of crew people scattered about. This is what will make me lose it.

This exchange is meant to be cut off. Left hanging.

And it is.

It has to be.

When we breakfor dinner, making such great time we’re likely to wrap early, I signal to Joseph that we have to go to his trailer. I have reached my limit of pushing back against my own desire.

I follow behind him, not bothering with our usual spaced-out getaway, instead rationalizing this as us needing to talk about the gala tomorrow. Which we do. Whenever a scene has felt too close to home, I’ve jolted myself out of it by allowing a little room topanic about the celebrity jam band. Not the best of acting choices, but effective nonetheless.

He closes his trailer door and we meet each other with lips parted, teeth bared. It’s almost ridiculous how quickly the top half of his clothes come off. Hiscostume.The parts that are the most Calvin, shed, finally giving me only Joseph. Above the belt, at least.

He lifts me up under my legs and presses me back into the door, my legs wrapped around him. My lipstick smears onto his cheek, something we discovered yesterday to much panic. Most of my shades are nontransferable, but this one is not. Luckily I was able to sneak off to the makeup trailer and get wipes and a fresh tube of red for such an occasion. Now the products live in one of his cabinet drawers.

He pulls back to let me see the lipstick imprints, knowing how much it made me laugh the last time. After we’d solved the crisis, of course.

I take to kissing every part of his face, aside from where the prosthetic scar has been carefully placed. Each eyelid. His nose. The space in front of his earlobes. I go until there’s no more lipstick left to transfer.

It reminds me of being fifteen, my first boyfriend and me meeting up together at the park, having no real idea what to do with each other’s bodies but feeling pretty confident with the mouth half of things, so just kind of living there, kissing each other in the most creative ways we could come up with in a public space.

While I know exactly what to do with the other half of myself these days, it’s refreshing to subsist on silly things like covering Joseph’s face in lipstick.

Still, after we move from the wall to the couch, him on top of me, my right hand gets curious, reaching beneath his belt buckle.

“Easy,” he says, breathing heavy as I stretch past layers of fabric.

I play coy. “What?”

He laughs, lipstick stained and throaty. “This was your rule, miss.”

“Was it?”

He pins both my hands at the side of my head now. “It was.” He plants kisses on me in the same way I did to him, though he leaves no mark on my skin. Still, I feel it. Everywhere. Even in the places he doesn’t touch.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” I ask. “Because I’m not.”