by Christa Wick
Who the hell fell in love over the course of a week, anyway? Especially when they had closed themselves off from the world and, therefore, reality.
The kisses Declan had been planting along her neck turned more sensuous, his hold on her arm more proprietary. She opened up a little distance between them.
"What about the film you want made?"
"It was a gentleman's agreement, sort of. They don't have an option on it, so they can't stop me from making it somewhere else." He shrugged. "Or I can make it on my own, it's a lot more doable than even five years ago between lower tech costs and things like Kickstarter."
The nonchalant lift of his shoulders was totally fake. She'd picked up a few of his giveaway gestures and that was the first one she'd learned to recognize. Left shoulder lift, no big deal. Right shoulder, no big deal and a genuine query of why the hell was she worried about something. Casual lift of both shoulders and a quick fall indicated a "meh" level of concern, an issue he didn't like but the world wouldn't end because of it. However, both shoulders going up and flexing backwards before they fell again meant he was definitely concerned.
"You said I could read the script," she reminded him. Her interest hadn't waned, but Declan had kept her thoroughly distracted since making the offer.
His mouth puckered at her unspoken request.
"Feeling vulnerable?" she asked.
He closed his eyes, the pucker flattening before curving into a smile. His cheeks flushing a soft rose, he opened his eyes again and hooked her gaze.
"Yeah," he confessed.
"Welcome to the club." Wrapping her hands around the back of his neck, she leaned in and kissed him before placing her cheek against his, her lips near his ear. "May I please read it?"
"You would make an excellent interrogator," he teased, securing one of her wrists and ghosting his lips across her palm, her fingers curling reflexively at the warm sensation.
She laughed and shook her head. "Only if I'm interrogating you."
"Better be just me," he grinned back.
He stood up, drained his tea like he was downing a brace of whiskey, then looked at her. "So where do you want to read it?"
She cocked her head, studying him, her gaze picking out the small tension lines at the corner of his eyes and again at his mouth. His feelings were anything but nonchalant on the status of the script. She looked around the room they were in, discounting it. As beautiful as the decor was, it was more for writing code or solving math problems.
"The screening room," she said after a few more seconds of thought. "I'd like to take my tablet in with me."
He nodded, the tension lines deepening.
"Jeez, Bain. I'll sign a non-disclosure agreement if you'd like," she teased, hoping the joke would ease his mood.
His brows bobbed as if that might be a good idea, but then he managed a soft smile and teased back. "Just don't make any copies -- and don't think I won't strip search you or look through your tablet files."
A strip search was a game they hadn't yet played and the idea produced a tickle between her thighs. She blinked at him then pushed lightly at his hip as if telling him to get on with fetching the manuscript.
He left the room and she followed suit a second later, taking both of their glasses back into the kitchen and replenishing hers with more tea before going to the princess suite she still hadn't slept in and grabbing her tablet.
By the time she made it to the screening room a few minutes later, the script was on the couch they had made love on her first night in his home. Stuck to the front page was a Post-It note.
Find me when you're done. Few calls to make.
The mention of his needing to make a few calls tightened her chest, but she pushed the worry aside. Picking up the script, she flipped to the back and saw that it was one-hundred twenty pages. Under standard conventions, that meant the movie was intended to run about two hours, each page representing about a minute on film.
The pages weren't as dense as a book page. The line spacing was bigger, so were the margins. As with any script, a lot was left for a team to fill in -- set designers, costumers like herself, the cameraman and, above everyone else, the director.
Returning to the first page, she began to read with a deliberate slowness. The story alternated between two worlds, both of them dark. The main sets were a bleak forest filled with magical creatures and a grimy urban studio apartment filled with a troubled mind and the afterglow of hallucinations.
By page ten, she had a vision of both sets. A few pages after that, she had Declan cast in the two primary roles -- an Oberon like fairy king and the all too real schizophrenic scribbling out lines in the run down apartment building, the shades drawn and only a candle to cast its feeble light on the paper, the electrical wires stripped out of the walls to prevent "interference."
By page thirty, she had her tablet out and her sketching app open. She started with an outline of Declan's body then thinned it. He would have to lose weight for both roles if he planned on starring in the film. A pointed beard and long hair for the fairy king, blond like his natural color, would thin his face, as would a little shadowing in the cheeks.
She sketched in a black velvet suit with silver trim and silver buttons, the color and fabric adding to a sense of sleekness and giving it the gothic edge the script called for. The headdress came next and it was where she went wild with the design.
Silver beads framing the edges of gossamer wings, real bird feathers -- peacock for the all-seeing but shortsighted nature of a vain and lonely king. Next she added a touch of short raven feathers and once red roses on the verge of turning black.
Halfway through the script, she stopped and had a little cry, seeing where the ending was going for the equally lonely young man in the dark room.
A knock at the door to the screening room had her quickly rubbing at her eyes to hide the evidence of how deeply the writing had affected her.
"Come in," she called and drew a deep breath.
Declan opened the door, his face as tight with tension as she'd ever seen it.
"Are you okay?"
She nodded and offered up a feeble smile.
He didn't seem convinced. "You've been in here three hours, Mel."
Her brow furrowed and she tapped the tablet's screen to wake it from the sleep it had fallen into. He was right. A two-hour script should have taken her an hour or less to read, but she'd been in the room for three hours.
She nodded at the tablet as an excuse. "I started thinking what it would look like. I'm only halfway through the script. Is there a happy ending?"
His mouth pinched then smoothed as he answered. "In a way."
"You've got to get this made," she said as he moved to join her on the couch.
Taking a seat, he pointed at her tablet. "May I?"
She nodded, but saved the file she was working on first then navigated to the folder she had made for the script. Handing him the tablet, she returned to reading the script.
"It's like you were looking inside my head," he said after a few minutes. "These are really great, Mel."
She offered a pleased smile and turned back to the front of the script, her index finger stuck between the pages she had last been reading.
"There's no writer credit on the front page."
She heard him exhale, the sound not so much a sigh as all of the air leaving a man -- something infinitely sadder than a sigh could be.
"I've adapted and supplemented it from another writer's work."
Melanie listened to the silence between his words. There was so much he wasn't telling her. Putting the script aside, she curled her hand against his thigh and placed her head on his shoulder.
"The young man in the apartment -- you only refer to him as W."
W for writer?
"Willie..." he answered. "Willie wrote a lot of the fairy king's story."
"And you wrote Willie's," she intuited. "After he died?"
Declan nodded, his throat bobbing as he swallowe
d something down. Fresh tears threatened and Melanie drew a deep breath.
"You really have to get this made," she repeated.
Declan lifted his head and looked at her, his wistful smile mirroring the one she had drawn on the fairy king's face.
"Someday," he said, returning her tablet.
Chapter Thirty-One
With Declan having a few more calls to make, Melanie returned to reading the script. The one thing that struck her as odd was that there were no female characters. The gloomy king with his gloomy male servants, the infant child abandoned in the king's woods by persons to starve to death or be eaten by wolves and W -- always alone, even his hallucinations populated only by other men or ravenous insects.
Chewing over the odd feature of an all male cast, Melanie flipped to her "Fatshion" folder and opened up an existing template of her body. The folder was filled with outfits she had designed for herself but would never make.
But she loved imagining herself in them.
She started adding in the lines of a flowing velvet skirt and bodice in the same black with silver trim that she'd done for the fairy king. The sleeves were a sheer black silk with stiff cuffs in a gun metal gray. Instead of the king's heavy headdress, she made a simple net of pearls and moonstone, a small pendant hanging in the center of her forehead.
Feeling the stroke of a finger against her neck, she shrieked and almost threw the tablet across the screening room.
"Sorry, baby girl."
Declan climbed over the back of the couch and down to the front row of recliners where her tablet had mercifully landed on a cushion instead of the hard flooring. Returning via the aisle, he slid next to her but kept hold of the tablet.
He tapped the screen, waking it.
"Is this saved?"
"No," she answered and suppressed the urge to glare at him when, instead of giving the tablet back, he tilted the screen so she could tap in the commands to save the file.
Settling the device on his lap, he backtracked in the folder and started opening up the finished images. "I thought your big dream was to be a costume designer?"
"It is," she answered, feeling a little defensive.
"I didn't see you putting any of these outfits in your closet."
Who was playing interrogator now?
The suppressed glare emerged on her features as a scowl.
"You should be selling these," he said, deftly moving the tablet out of reach when she tried to snatch it from him. "Instead, I bet I'm the only one who has seen these."
She squeezed a reply past tight lips. "Not exactly."
Her father had seen one -- or at least its original. It was the prom dress she had dreamed up when she still thought there was a chance one of the boys at her high school would ask her out.
She reached for the tablet again and he let her have it -- but not without cost.
"Come on, Mel," he coaxed. "I showed you mine."
The hook sank exactly as he knew it would. She shoved the device back into his hands and he spent a few more minutes looking through the images, his face a series of soft smiles, wistful looks and devilish grins.
Powering the tablet off, he handed it back to her with an announcement.
"We're going out -- shopping."
"For what?" She hesitated to ask, knowing there could only be one answer.
He gestured at the device. "For everything -- machines, fabric, everything. I definitely want to see you in that scarlet number."
Her cheeks turned the mentioned shade but she didn't argue with him. He was, for an unknown amount of time at least, giving up a dream he had been nurturing for years. All she had to give in return were parts of herself -- her time and appreciation, her body, even her insecurities and aspirations.
"Fine," she agreed and started making a mental list. "But you're paying."
Getting a professional machine, shopping for fabric and other supplies, and having lunch at an outdoor bistro where Melanie felt like everyone dining, driving by and walking on the sidewalks was staring at her was a four-hour marathon. When they returned to Declan's home, all she wanted was a very long nap.
He was happy to oblige. Mentioning some papers he needed to clear out of the room in which he planned on setting her work area up, he gave Melanie a slow kiss and a pat on the butt then disappeared with a stack of bins he'd purchased to hold the papers.
She shook her head as she walked up the stairs. A dozen eighteen-gallon totes to hold "some papers." If he'd really been as celibate as he claimed following his early Hollywood days, he probably had a huge porn stash to pack up.
She shook her head again, this time harder in an attempt to dislodge the image of Declan thumbing through a porn magazine, his big cock in his hand and oozing pre-cum. It was almost impossible to rid her mind of the image. She had every line of his amazing body memorized. And she would have given sworn testimony that the muscles of her pussy had memorized every last tactile detail of his cock. Just a flash of imagination had her contracting reflexively, need surging through her body.
Pulling the top cover over her and shoving her hands beneath the pillow, she took deep breaths until she drifted off to sleep. A few hours later, Declan woke her to a light dinner before he brought her back upstairs for a long soak in the tub, the bubbles near overflowing and his touch gentle and teasing.
When they crawled back into bed together, they made love. The tone between them had changed, at least for the night. When their bodies met, it was more relaxed, less wild. The heat was slow to reach its burning point, but when it did, the fire stayed with them through the night, even as they slept.
Waking the next morning, they found the tide of public opinion had turned in their favor.
For a little while at least.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Stepping out of the shower the next morning, Melanie caught her cell phone before it vibrated off the counter from an incoming text message. She missed seeing the sender's ID so she set the device aside, unwilling to ruin the relaxed state the shower had brought by one of the small trickle of texts that continued to come in from the more persistent or new crazies.
She toweled off and reached for the big fluffy robe she'd brought from her apartment when the phone started moving across the counter again. She picked it up to see Cammie's name.
Texts from her best friend had been few. Calls between them had been even more scarce but lasted as much as half an hour. That was about as long as Cammie could keep herself from mentioning all the stuff floating around about Melanie and Declan.
The world was royally pissing off the dancer with its treatment of her best friend. But she had a hard time realizing Melanie just wanted to keep her head buried in the sand as long as she could.
Thumbing the device on, she navigated to her messenger app and selected Cammie's name.
"I promised myself I wouldn't send you any links. But check this one out -- just stay away from the comments."
The second text also came with a link.
"Okay, read this comment."
Another thirty seconds later, the phone vibrated with a third text, complete with links.
"These two comments."
Girding her loins, Melanie tentatively clicked the first link to find a blog post with a photo of a very big girl with a very hot guy. He wasn't a model but he could have been. Instead, he was a clinical biologist and the woman, whose blog it was, noted she was getting her doctorate in psychology. The rest of the post detailed her love affair with the hot guy, whom she had married the year before.
Melanie could feel the pain the blogger had felt as she detailed how most of her family and friends thought he was too handsome for their relationship to last. Many of his family and friends suggested the same opinion, some subtly, others with an open hostility.
But there they were, happiness evident in their pictures together. The wedding on a Hawaii beach with the few family and friends who believed in them all along, the hike up Mt. Shasta, date night selfies of them
, heads pressing together and both of them wearing big grins that lit up their eyes and the air around them.
The last picture, an ultrasound of the baby growing inside the woman, almost made Melanie drop the phone as her eyes blurred with tears.
And then she read the last line and had to sit on the toilet as her head started to spin.
This world I see reflected online is not the one I want my daughter to grow up in. #iamwithmelanie
Melanie wiped at her face and clicked the second link Cammie had sent, this one a comment to the original blog post showing a proud, thick chick wrapped in the arms of a blue collar wet dream, his biceps bulging as he lifted her off her feet. Link three was a cowboy's wife, link four was a firefighter's fiancée. All of them repeated the hashtag.
#iamwithmelanie
"Did you look?" Cammie texted.
Melanie managed a short text, the screen still blurry from the emotions churning inside her chest and gut. "Yes."
"I bet that Shayna bitch is shitting jet engines right now."
Melanie belted out a laugh. Leave it to Cammie to come up with a visual that would forever be implanted in Melanie's mind.
"Probably," she texted back. "Thank you for this. Now excuse me while I go find my man and have some wild, passionate sex with him."
The phone buzzed one last time as Melanie placed it in the robe's pocket. She didn't need to read the message. She could hear her friend's "hell yeah!" from halfway across the city.
The afternoon passed as planned, her riding Declan or his strong body draped over hers as he turned her into a rippling pool of liquid need.
The next few days saw the #iamwithmelanie movement gain massive momentum. Cammie, after finding out about Melanie's Fatshion folder convinced her to post a few images online. That led to a registered letter from a European fashion house being delivered to Declan's address because there was no other way to contact Melanie if she didn't recognize the incoming number.
Then a certain plus-size comedienne with a big box office draw reached out to Declan, again with a registered letter, to inquire about his interest in starring opposite her in a romantic comedy. He laughed about it, but Melanie could see the faint glimmer of relief that not all of Hollywood was turning its back on him.