Quirks & Kinks

by Laurel Ulen Curtis

  He smiled a sexy smile, the edge of his top teeth cutting minutely into his plump bottom lip, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

  “We’re going to be in a lot of intimate situations today. Don’t you think it’d be better to get acquainted with touching one another now rather than on camera in front of hundreds of thousands of people?”

  Were that many people actually watching this show?

  “Right, right, good idea,” I pretended. “I remember now.”

  Logical as his reasoning was, it meant nothing to me. Right then, in that moment, with his minty, sweet, musky smell enveloping me and threatening to never let go—and influence potentially stupid actions—I thought hugging was a monumentally bad idea.

  But I’d built most of my life on bad ideas, and I wasn’t about to stop now.

  Lifting up onto my toes and raising my arms in time, I wrapped myself up around his shoulders, settling my nose into his neck like it was meant to go there. He was tall to my short, but his strong arms wrapped comfortably around the low line of my waist and lifted, pulling my already straining toes off the ground and seating the front of my body firmly against his.

  It wasn’t vulgar or explicit in any of the usual ways, but I felt every inch of his body that lined mine as if it were a piece of snug, knit clothing. It didn’t smother or suffocate, but instead supported and hugged all of the places that most desired it.

  I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed or how many gulps of Anderson filled air I’d sucked into my lungs when he finally set me on my own feet and untwined his limbs from around me.

  Refusing to believe that a bereft longing in his absence was the cause of my resulting shiver, I focused on the temperature.

  There was a fucking draft in this room. Surely that was the reason I now felt all cold and trembly.

  “Right. Yes. Okay. Good hugging,” he stuttered as he backed slowly toward the door. “See you out there.”

  I managed only a nod and awkward salute before slumping down and free-falling into the chair behind me.

  Orrrr . . . sprawling ass over face on the floor.

  Fuck! Ow. I could have sworn there was a chair behind me.

  This was not good. One hug and I was in serious danger of injuring myself.

  Shallowly, I prayed, asking God to give Anderson some kind of abnormality or imperfection. I’d take anything, but for some reason, all I could picture was a third nipple.

  GETTING DRESSED DIDN’T TAKE long and makeup didn’t take much longer. Which was good. I had enough anxiety in my body to fill an entire day’s worth of time. That didn’t leave much time for anything else.

  The script sat unread in my lap, words blurring together from one into the other, none of it actually registering in my hormone addled brain. Honestly, I was a little mad at myself for reacting so strongly to a stupid hug, but I hadn’t had sex in years. Apparently, all that deprivation had heightened my sensitivity.

  Deprivation and sexy, green-eyed men.

  “Hah!” I laughed out loud, scaring the people around me with the transition of my one woman conversation from internal to external. “Well, that makes perfect sense. Kryptonite is fucking green.”

  And on that note, it was cigarette time.

  Jumping from my chair in the makeup room, I jogged toward my dressing room until I got tired and then succumbed to a slow walk. It was an agonizing twenty step journey.

  One, lonely cigarette sat waiting in my pack when I found it in my purse, but it was all I needed for the time being.

  Grabbing my lighter, I headed back in the direction I had just come, out the door, back down the hall past the makeup room and toward the exit. Ashley turned the corner from the set, opened her mouth to ask me where I was going, and then noticed the contents of my hand.

  “Don’t be long,” she instructed instead of questioning me. “Howie wants everyone on set in fifteen minutes.”

  “No problem,” I agreed, lengthening my stride to avoid running into anyone else before I found the solace of the outdoors.

  Sunlight poured into my brain with the snap of a door handle, and my free hand came up palm out to shield my extra-sensitive eyes.

  Not expecting to run into anyone out there, I didn’t check my surroundings before turning to the building to look away from the sun and lighting up my waiting cigarette.

  “Ahh!” I screamed at the feel of a foreign hand on my shoulder, jumping and turning and very nearly dropping my one and only smoke on the dirty ass ground.

  “Jesus Christopher!” I screamed at the sun-shadowed figure in front of me. “I almost fucking dropped it!”

  “Good!” Anderson snapped, turning me around so that he was facing the sun. Now that the sun wasn’t in my eyes I could see every single one of his angry features. Aviator sunglasses sat perched atop his cute nose, and a single bead of sweat was starting to form at the apex of his hairline.

  “What’s your deal? If you don’t like my smoking, go somewhere else!”

  Aggravation tightened the circumference of my veins, forcing my muscles to tense in reaction. Jesus. Maybe swooning over him wasn’t going to be a problem. I couldn’t take it if he tried to nag me every day of my life.

  Clenching his eyes tight, he seemed to reboot.

  “You’re right. God, I’m sorry. You just caught me out here . . .” he started to apologize, fading out inexplicably mid-sentence.

  I tried to figure out the answer on my own, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t seem to find him sporting any contraband.

  “I caught you out here what?” I asked, but he waved me off with a shake of his head.

  When he didn’t answer, I started guessing. “I caught you out here . . . playing with barbie dolls?”

  He smiled. “No.”

  “Jerking off?”

  “Hah!” he laughed. “No.”

  “Torturing kittens?”

  With a shake of his head, he rejected that too.

  “Well, you’re gonna have to help me out here. I’ve plum run out of guesses.”

  He bit into his bottom lip, let his head roll back on his shoulders. Roughed up his perfectly styled hair enough to piss off the hair people. “Thinking. I was thinking . . . God,” he struggled to admit. “I was remembering.”

  “Remembering what?” I dug, tilting my head to the side.

  “College,” he answered with a self-deprecating snort. “I was remembering what it was like to be in college.”

  “Okayyyy,” I replied, drawing out my word for a lack of anything else to say. College didn’t seem like some excruciatingly painful experience, but I wouldn’t really know.

  Backing up against the building with my cigarette at my side to keep the smoke out of his eyes, I admitted, “I never went to college.”

  “No?” Anderson asked with relief, turning and leaning against the building next to me.

  “Nope,” I confirmed with a shake of my head, looking down at the ground to hide my slight blush of embarrassment.

  “Hey,” he called, bringing my eyes from the ground to his with one word. “College isn’t for everyone, you know?”

  “Ha,” I laughed without humor. “Try telling that to my parents.”

  “They wanted you to go I guess.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Seems like they really wanted you to go.”

  “They did. They do,” I corrected myself.

  “They still want you to go?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded, too busy talking to smoke. Instead, I watched as the paper slowly turned to ash, embers and heat eating it away. “They keep telling me it’s never too late.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Yeah, I know. Except I don’t want to go. This is it for me, you know?” I lifted my eyes and turned my head to the side to look directly at him. “I know I don’t have a lot of fame, or even a lot of success, but doing this, even struggling like I am, it feels right. Do you know what I mean?”

  Slowly, he nodded, the line of h
is throat seeming to bob with emotion. “Even if all you do is this right here, it’ll be worth the effort.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed, feeling an indescribable warmth claw its way up my throat with the knowledge that he got it.

  “This . . . difference of opinion. Has it hurt your relationship with your parents?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it hasn’t changed my opinion of them or their opinion of me, if that’s what you mean. But they’re disappointed. I guess they didn’t really see it coming.”

  He pitched his head to the side in question, studied me closer. I buckled pretty easily under the pressure.

  “They had me really young. There was a lot of pressure to raise me right, give me all of the opportunities they never had. That kind of thing. I worked pretty hard to be everything they wanted me to be.”

  “Until,” he surmised with a raise of his brows.

  “Yep,” I nodded. “Until. Total dirty word in the Reynolds family. Everything was great until they got pregnant with me at sixteen. I was the perfect daughter until I told them I didn’t want to go to college. They still had one chance to raise one kid right until Ashley told them she wanted to come work for me.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘untils’.”

  “It sure is,” I agreed, looking down again and catching a glimpse of the time on his watch. “Oh shit.”

  I dropped my unsmoked cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out.

  “What?”

  “We’ve gotta go now if we don’t want to hear an earful. We’re supposed to be on set in two minutes.”

  Putting both of his palms to the bricks he pushed to stand up, only to snap right back.

  “What the hell?”

  Trying again, he was served the same result.

  “Hold on,” I instructed, leaning around him to look at the wall.

  Aha.

  “Your shirt is stuck to the bricks.”

  Back and forth, back and forth, his head went from side to side trying to find a way to see his back. It wasn’t happening.

  “We’re just going to have to take it off. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier to get it detached.”

  Not thinking, and certainly not protecting myself, I reached for his buttons, working them out of their holes until I’d gotten all six of them. Sliding my hands inside, I officially lost my mind.

  I was undressing him.

  When I opened his shirt, all my twisted dreams came true, the tight peak of a misplaced nipple winking slyly at me from the center of his chest.

  I rubbed my eye with the heal of my hand and blinked rapidly, trying to bring my wandering imagination back to reality.

  No matter what I did, it wouldn’t disappear.

  Reaching out as though of a mind of its own, my thumb tweaked it, just barely scraping over the top edge. “You really have a third nipple,” I murmured more to myself than to him.

  “Uh, yeah,” he confirmed matter-of-factly. Blasé. La di da. Like people had third nipples every day.

  God, what did I know? Maybe they did.

  Studying me more closely as I continued to fondle him, he asked, “Do you not read the script at all?”

  “Huh?” I was distracted.

  “The script,” he repeated, knocking my hand away, sliding the sleeves from his arms, and turning to the wall to work on untangling the fabric.

  Bye, bye, you strange glimpse of heaven, I mentally told his disfigured chest.

  “It’s all about how Miranda likes to do all kinds of interesting shit to Gary’s nipple.” My eyes shot from the phantom image of his naked chest up to his eyes. He’d obviously gotten his shirt free and slid it back on while I was busy fantasizing. “His third nipple.”

  Right. Gary’s third nipple. Not Anderson’s.

  Fuck, I was losing my mind.

  “Actually,” he amended, “It’s about people with minor physical deformities finding comfort and relief from persecution in their lovemaking with similarly unconventional people. Miranda’s passion for Gary’s third nipple is only one of the scenarios.”

  I just stared. Dumbfounded. Fucking impressed. I certainly hadn’t gleaned that interpretation from the damn thing. Of course, as he’d pointed out, I hadn’t actually read it.

  “Come on,” I reminded him. “We’re going to be persecuted if we don’t get our asses inside!”

  Chuckling, he held open the door and gestured for me to proceed him inside. If I’d had time, I might have stopped to swoon over the existence of chivalry.

  But I didn’t.

  So, instead, I ran down the hall, ducked quickly into my dressing room to grab my script, and ran the rest of the way to the set to find Anderson already there like an overachiever.

  I bet he already knew his lines too.

  “Alright, kids,” Howie called, just as I made it to their huddle. “We’re going to start with the physical stuff today and come back to the intro. Gary and Miranda have to leave early, and I want to be able to consult with them during their scene if we need to.” Turning to Anderson, he asked, “You ready?”

  When he replied with a respectful, “Yes, sir,” Howie and I both smiled.

  Talk about a noticeable difference.

  “What about you?” he asked me, ruining my happy bubble.

  “Um—”

  Anderson saw me struggling, and tried to step in.

  “Sir, you see, she was outside . . . um . . . rescuing a bird?”

  It was sweet.

  And really fucking unbelievable.

  I shook my head in shame.

  “What?” Howie asked, understandably confused.

  “Torturing kittens?” Anderson offered, making me laugh at one of the worst possible times.

  Howie’s eyes studied me, and I broke down. “I’m not completely ready. But I will be.”

  Amused by something I couldn’t figure out, he winked and let me off of the hook. “Good enough for me.”

  “We’ll start with the lovemaking,” he offered. “All you have to do is lay there and react to him.”

  I raised my brows and laughed. “I’m pretty sure he expects more effort than that.”

  Anderson’s mouth turned up at the ends and the black of his eyes ate away at the green. His body promised me things—things I wasn’t ready to know; that the extra effort would be worth it.

  Man, I was in trouble.

  Hot, raspy breaths bathed the line of my spine all the way to the dented dimples seated just above my butt. Anderson blew soft puffs of air into the hollow between them, and then shocked my system with a touch of his lips.

  I knew it was fake, and I knew all of this action was meant to culminate at my very imaginary tail. I knew it shouldn’t be turning me on, but sweet baby Jesus it was. It really fucking was.

  I couldn’t discriminate properly between real and make believe, and my sluggish, aroused mind struggled to remember that the man behind me was no more enjoying his actions than I should be. He was acting. Doing our job. He was just really freaking good at it.

  “Love this part of you,” he murmured into my skin, further igniting my senses and making me push my ass toward his face. If I had an elongated tailbone, and needed it serviced, Gary would be the man for the fucking job. At least, Anderson’s interpretation of him would be.

  Stretching for it, yearning for it, I clenched my hands in the sheets and threw my head back in—

  “Cut!”

  Fuck.

  Eyes shut tight, my forehead dropped to the surface of the bed below me, and if I wasn’t mistaken, Anderson’s forehead briefly did the same on my back.

  “Okay. We got that, guys. Change positions so we can do the take of Miranda’s attention to Gary,” Howie instructed like my world wasn’t tilting even further on its axis. Becoming one with my character was part of the process, but my body was taking it an entire step further.

  Anderson moved gently, careful to manage his weight as he picked his body up off of my legs and shifted to laying on his back next to me. Crawlin
g into position straddling him, I avoided his eyes, afraid of seeing something I didn’t like.

  The rational part of my brain claimed that signs of real arousal were what I didn’t want to see, but I knew deep inside of myself that the absence of it was what I actually feared.

  “Great. Yep,” Howie interrupted my thoughts. “Positioning looks great, Easie. Just start with the kiss and work your way down slowly, okay? We’d rather have more material than less, so take your time.”

  “Can I get a lighting adjustment?!” he yelled off to the side, causing a couple of guys to scurry into action from the wings and me to have to sit straddling Anderson in awkwardness.

  “So . . .” I offered, finally trailing my eyes up to his. Warmth bathed my skin from the affection I found waiting there as he studied me. His eyes didn’t meet mine, but rather, moved from one of my features to the next, starting at the line of my neck, working their way up my throat, and settling at the middle of my mouth.

  “So . . .” he echoed, scrunching his nose in that adorable way before focusing his eyes on mine.

  With the conversational ball back in my court, I struggled to make something witty out of the nexus of chaotic thoughts running laps around my brain. Howie and the set gods took pity on me.

  “Okay, guys. We’re ready again.” After allowing a few seconds for the set to go silent—and giving me time to take a deep, cleansing breath—he gave us the green light.

  “And action!”

  Reaching up before I could lean forward, Anderson fingered the ends of my long, fake brown hair. I’d seen him notice the obvious change when we were outside, but we’d gotten too involved in other things to have time to mention it.

  He looked at me longingly, the way Gary needed to look at Miranda and the way she would want it. But for me, it got me dangerously lost in the moment.

  My eyes held his as I leaned forward, hovering just above his mouth momentarily. Something happened in those fleeting seconds, as our attention focused on one another. Electricity surged through my chest forcing a deeper, darker breath, and his free hand tightened noticeably on my waist.

  Too overwhelmed by the power of the sight of him, I clenched my eyes tight and touched my mouth to his. Partially conscious of the rules of a stage kiss, I moved thoughtfully, tasting every inch of his exposed lips, but being careful not to delve inside. Until his hips shifted upward and brushed meaningfully into mine. Hard and unyielding, his arousal was unavoidable, and the surprise of it all elicited a gasp.