The Role

by A. B. Wilson

  The private spa tubs on the balcony had sold me completely on this plan when he’d showed me all of the amenities on his phone after he’d woken me up. Now that he was proposing immediately jumping in, though, my first response was that old wives’ tale that said to always wait an hour after eating before any sort of physical activity. Although perhaps an exception would have to be made for scantily clad activity in a hot tub.

  “I’ll go grab my bathing suit.” I was dreading forcing myself back into the damp Lycra, especially after such a huge meal.

  “Why? It’s only the two of us, right? And it’s nighttime. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’m relatively sure that we’ve already seen each other naked.” He shrugged out of his robe by the door and headed outside, completely, gorgeously nude.

  “Well, crap. When in Rome, I guess,” I muttered as I followed him out to the baths, clutching my wine glass like a lifeline.

  It wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen me naked before. It was more that almost all of our sexual encounters since returning to L.A. had been exhausted, dreamy, middle-of-the-night sex in a dark room. The level of stress and pressure on both of us made everything fraught. We craved physical intimacy with each other, but it had been more comfort-seeking than lustful for the last few weeks.

  Markus was already immersed in the water, with his head tilted back to look up at the beautifully clear starry sky, by the time I pulled it together enough to join him.

  “Hey, you,” he said, twisting his head toward me when he heard me pad out. “Get in here. I’m getting lonely.”

  Why am I suddenly so shy? I took a deep breath and set my glass on the wide ledge of the tub.

  His eyes scanned me and he frowned at my hesitant approach. “Everything all right?”

  “Of course. I mean, I think so. Is it weird that I’m nervous about getting in there with you?”

  “No, I feel it too.” His voice was so matter of fact that I immediately calmed. “We’ve been so busy and under so much ridiculous pressure that everything seems brand-new again.”

  The relieved butterflies settled further as I stroked the lip of the tub and considered him. It was still unbelievable to me sometimes that he was mine. That this mythically popular gorgeous man wanted me. I shrugged out of my robe and let it drop to the wooden planks. “Shove over, sexy beast. You’re in my seat.”

  He scooted over and watched intently as I balanced on the edge before sliding in.

  “Jesus, you’re glowing,” he uttered in a low voice. “Get over here.”

  His demands sent a shockwave of desire rushing through me. Bossy Markus was hot Markus, especially in the bedroom—or bath, as it might be.

  “Give me your hands,” he growled and grabbed my wrists as I raised them in supplication, dropping them behind his neck.

  “That’s better, but you need to be closer. Sit.” That command almost undid me completely as he wrapped his hands around my waist and pulled me down to straddle his legs. The gentleness of his actions at odds with the demanding words.

  His head dipped to my neck and he traced a line from my earlobe to my collarbone with the tip of his tongue. I shivered from his featherlight touch and mindlessly began to rotate my hips against him in slow, small waves. The heat built and combusted between us. He pulled back with a groan and looked up at me, dazed.

  “You are so fucking beautiful. You have no idea what you do to me, do you?” he whispered then brought his lips to meet mine.

  The kiss started out gentle but immediately deepened and turned to something darker, more desirous, as our minute undulations started to speed up. It became wilder still as our teeth nipped and tongues stroked, fucking each other’s mouths, until we were both panting with need.

  He retreated a bit and it was my turn to lead and control the pace. I doodled patterns with water droplets on his chest and licked them up as I ran my greedy hands down his body. I reached his cock and began a slow stroke up and down his hard length. He shuddered beneath me and his hands clenched into tight fists as he fought to keep still.

  “Let go, Markus,” I whispered. “Touch me. I need you.”

  My words granted permission, and he surged up to capture my mouth with his. With more gentleness than I’d thought him capable of in that moment, he pulled me back to his lap, where he began to move my body against him, angling my hips to create a smooth, waveless pressure on my clit.

  The sudden intrusion of two of his fingers into my channel electrified my every nerve ending, and I clenched around them as I gasped out his name. His hoarse breath on my neck as he kissed his way to nip and tease the peaks of my breasts made me want to scream.

  Suddenly he scooped me out of the tub, my pussy screaming for him to let me come, and set me on the ledge of the tub. He smirked at me. “Something to say?”

  “Fuck. You. Markus. Shellenberg.” I whined as I squirmed against his tight hold on my waist.

  “Say please,” he ordered as he lowered himself into the water and dipped his head down to kiss my stomach.

  “Please!”

  “Please what, Alina?”

  “Please fuck me with your fingers, now!” I begged.

  “No.”

  My eyes shot open. “What?” I exclaimed.

  “The next time you come, it’s going to be on my tongue,” he whispered in a dark voice as he bent to his task. He kept a smooth, swirling motion around my clit with the tip of his tongue, first slowly then building and building me up until he slid three fingers inside me and curled his fingertips in a come-hither motion that undid me completely. I saw the stars above us imprinted on my eyelids as I came, convulsing on his hand.

  “You’re too good at that.” I shivered in the cool air as I came down from my high.

  “No such thing,” he responded as he held me tightly.

  We sat there for a minute, or maybe an hour, watching the stars move. I pulled back from him and stroked his cheek and jawline with a trembling hand. “Let’s go to bed.”

  He pulled me from the tub and wrapped me in a towel as if my liquified bones weighed nothing. Striding back into the house, he carried me into the nearest bedroom and laid me down on top of the covers. He crawled up next to me and sat back on his heels, taking in my flushed skin, pebbled nipples and sprawled legs. His dilated pupils and jagged breathing telegraphed the threadbare nature of his own control after making me come so spectacularly.

  “I need you, Alina. Let me be with you.”

  “Oh?” I responded lazily as the temperature started to rise again. I ran my hands over my breasts, circling and pinching my nipples. “And how do you want to ‘be with me’? With your fingers again? Maybe your tongue? Or is it something else you want?”

  “My cock. I need to fuck you, feel you come all over it. Let me, please.” His breathing intensified as we stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Yes.”

  The words had barely left my mouth before he was on me, growling. He bent to kiss me, first on my mouth then slipping over to my neck, where he drew delicate patterns with his tongue as he made his way down my body.

  “Now I need you inside me,” I whispered as I wound my fingers through his hair and tugged on the still-ragged ends.

  He groaned as he thrust home in one sure stroke.

  “Look at me,” he ordered breathlessly when he was fully seated inside me.

  I watched him as all joking disappeared from his gleaming blue eyes, only to be replaced by the same surprise, pleasure and joy that overwhelmed me. The feeling of my body joined with his, my nails gripping his shoulders, was almost too much to bear, and tears start to well up in my eyes as he began to move.

  “Me too, Alina. Me too,” he whispered. He reared back and began to rock harder against me, the shock of the aggressive movement pushing me back up toward the headboard.

  After a few more uneven thrusts, a bomb went off inside me as I convulsed, screaming his name. He made two more erratic, harsh strokes before he tightened and exploded inside me. He bu
ried his head in the crook of my neck and his shoulders started to heave. The asshole was laughing at me?

  I popped my head up in shock and managed to splutter, “Should I be offended? I don’t think anyone has ever laughed at me after sex.”

  “Jesus, shit, Alina. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing inside you.”

  We both lost it, cracking up in the euphoric aftermath of the most intense sex I’d ever had. Markus propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me, stroking my cheek, my nose and my chin. His eyes were soft now as he bent forward and kissed me as gently as a snowflake landing.

  “I care about you,” he said softly. “I know it’s right after we had sex, so maybe that negates it for you, but I’m serious. I’ve known now for a while how I feel about you. That this is real, not casual, and I need you to know.” He paused. “Fuck, this is awkward, I didn’t mean to say it. It’s just that I couldn’t keep it together anymore without telling you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Markus. I care about you too. And now you know.” I smiled through my post-orgasm haze and booped him on the nose in satisfaction.

  He shook his head at me. “Seriously, I knew this was the forever kind of real when you booped me on the nose the first time.”

  I snuggled down into his chest and felt him slowly, soothingly stroke from the top of my head to the small of my back. When his hand faltered and lay still on my shoulder, I chanced a quick look up. He’d fallen asleep, turned toward me with the faintest smile on his face. His sharp left incisor had snagged his lip and he looked for all the world like he was a heartbeat away from his world-famous smirk and a tackle to kiss every bad or scary thought straight out of my head. I rested my head back on the firm pillow of his chest. We may not have said the big L word, but this was everything.

  * * * *

  “Jesus, how many notifications can you get at one time?” Markus’ voice was exasperated when the pinging of my phone’s alerts took off as we got closer to L.A. and regular cell service.

  I snorted in derision, glancing up from my phone and rolling my eyes at him.

  “Is Michael harassing you again?” he asked.

  “Not Michael. Everyone and their mother, who apparently has seen photos of us at the resort in Ojai, writing obnoxious speculative tweets, blog posts and articles, then contacting me for comments about them.” I was proud of how calm I sounded, very mature.

  “What photos? Literally no one knew where we were and we had security.”

  “Well, they found us. I’m looking at the pictures now.” The tension in my voice was unmistakable and he did a double take as he looked over at me. My hands started to shake and I almost dropped my phone as I saw the worst yet.

  He craned his neck, attempting to see while still navigating the twisty backroad from the resort to the highway.

  “Pull over, Markus,” I ordered, my attention frozen on one very, very private moment immortalized on my screen for other peoples’ benefit.

  “Seriously? Now? How bad can it be?” he asked.

  “Now!”

  He pulled off to the side of the road and I wordlessly handed him my phone. Slowly at first, then more frantically, he swiped through picture after picture of us on our private vacation. Most were blurry, shot at a distance, and we were barely distinguishable from any other couple. Some, however, were closer, and they were the most concerning. A few from the lounge at the hotel showed us holding hands and laughing over drinks. Fine. But the ones shot with a telephoto lens of us in the tub on our private balcony were not fine at all.

  He looked over at me hesitantly. “Fuck, I don’t know what to say.”

  “No? How about, ‘I’m so sorry, Alina. This is incredibly fucked up. I can’t believe someone managed to photograph the two of us fucking in a hot tub and sold it to the world. Don’t worry, I will get my crack P.R. team right on this, and those assholes will suffer!’ That would be a great start.”

  He smiled at my admittedly terrible impression of him, then straightened up. “I am sorry, Alina. I should have done more to ensure security. We had a crew on site and that resort is known for its privacy measures. I’m not sure how these photos were taken.” He frowned and pulled out his phone, started typing. “I’ll text Claire immediately and have Roger file papers. We need to sue and he’ll know who to target. Have you called Vinny yet?”

  “Yes, I already texted him. He wants a call with your team to coordinate. Do it now,” I demanded and sat in silence, staring out of the window as I waited for him to slap out a fast order to Claire to call Vinny and get on top of this story, have the pictures pulled wherever she could, as soon as she could.

  “Claire says that she’s on it already, as is Roger, and they’re getting cease-and-desist orders out to all of the reputable outlets. She’ll call Vinny and bring him in as well. Will is also going after the independents. Between them and Vinny, they should have a statement in a half hour for us to approve,” he said after a relatively fast back-and-forth.

  “Fine. Let’s get back to your place. This will pass, right?”

  He grabbed my hand and brushed a kiss across my knuckles. “It will, I promise.”

  The rest of the ride was quiet as we descended back into the real world. Hopefully the stories would flame out and life would get easier when we started filming. Our getaway already seemed to be in the distant past, and my memories were now tainted by the media’s involvement.

  The one or two photographers who had been hovering around the entrance to Markus’ gated community had multiplied to a group of dozens, and I slid down in my seat as Markus navigated through the crowd and the guard let us in. I think we were both shocked by the increase, and neither of us spoke until we reached his house. Slowly, we unloaded the car, and he grabbed both of our bags to carry up to our room.

  I immediately ducked into the bathroom for a moment of privacy, but I had barely sunk to a seat on the closed toilet when I heard a soft knock. “Is everything okay in there? If you’re decent, can I come in?” he asked, his voice muffled through the closed door.

  My eyes itched and watered with the emotions of the last couple of hours. “Give me a second. I’ll be out shortly.”

  I had to take a few deep breaths and swallow hard before I could open the door, then I pushed past him, grabbing his hand and tugging him along with me over to the bed. We both sat heavily. “I don’t know, Markus. Maybe it’s that we’ve been really lucky, but the exposure we’ve dealt with so far has been annoying and a little upsetting, but mostly manageable. This is next-level privacy violations and I feel like we need to be more careful.”

  I lay back on the pillows and he followed me down, resting his head in his palm as he propped himself up. He jammed his other hand into his hair as my words settled in. “What does that even mean? ‘Be more careful.’ Become hermits?”

  “That’s not it at all, not what I meant. I— I don’t know. This is hard.” I curled up against him with my head on his chest and he wrapped his arms around me and kissed the top of my head.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, what you want to do and what I can do to help.”

  I sifted through my thoughts and chose my words carefully as I said, “It’s so many things, and I’m not sure where to start. This relationship happened so fast. I care about you—I do—but all of this chaos and exposure makes me feel vulnerable and unsure of what’s real when it comes to you and us.”

  “What do you need from me to feel safe and happy?” His voice was almost as shaky as my own.

  “To be honest, I’m really not sure. Maybe I need you to keep reminding me that everything is a moment in time, that security will not always be a standard accessory. It’s weirding me out that rumors keep flying around about us, and then two minutes later that you and Kate are getting back together. I don’t like feeling this insecure. I don’t like me very much right now.” I leaned back to look him in the eye.

  He pulled back and frowned a bit. “I promise to do that, and hopefully make you la
ugh at the situation too. It’s fucking ridiculous, right? We’re two completely normal people. Why the fuck would anyone care about the minutiae of our lives?”

  I forced a laugh. “Yeah, if they could see your jar of toenail clippings…”

  “Toenail clippings? You’re so disgusting,” he said in an incredulous voice as he started to tickle me.

  “Oh my god, Markus. Stop!” I couldn’t help shrieking through my giggles.

  “I’ll stop when you take it back about the toenail clippings,” he demanded.

  “Never.” I was gasping now, with tears running down my cheeks as he upped the tickling punishment by digging into my ribs. “Fine! You win. I take it back. I take it back! Happy?” He stopped tickling me and I pouted. I hated to lose.

  As he rested most of his weight on his forearms propped next to my head, he reached out to trace my eyebrows. “Yes, very. You know you have nothing to worry about as far as our relationship goes. We’re solid, right?”

  “I think so. I hope so,” I said quietly.

  Chapter Thirty

  Markus

  The next few days went by quickly and the press furor slowly started to die down as Alina and I laid very low, doing everything from her training and our rehearsals at my place. We spent hours lying on a lounge chair by my pool talking, telling stories from childhood, playing board games. It was our own private island, but it was hard to forget that we weren’t there completely of our own volition.

  We were starting to feel cautiously optimistic that the worst was in the past. Things were better on set and Michael was pleased with our ability to finally nail the choreography of our romantic scenes. He wandered around preening about his abilities as a talent scout. Seeing the hell that we were going through also brought the rest of the cast together. With the exception of one or two, they circled the wagons around us, and I was so incredibly grateful.

  It was the night before our first full day of actual filming and we were lounging in a post-coital glow surrounded by of a nest of twisted duvets and loving words. Alina had dozed off and I had gone to clean up when both of our phones seemed to explode—her phone ringing and mine with a thousand notifications. I cursed softly as I scrolled through the alerts, pissed off that I had gotten complacent. Everything we’d built now seemed in danger of being torn down and I dreaded Alina finding out.