Building the Nursery

by Amy DeMeritt

  “This was a bad idea.” All of us quickly lift our heads and look at Jaime, who is laying with her eyes closed and has a cute content smile. “I’m so comfortable. I think I’m going to fall asleep like this.” Sam gently runs her fingertips through Jaime’s hair and caresses her cheek, before laying back down, holding Jaime close to herself. “You can sleep.”

  Jaime releases a cute humming sound and tightens her arm around Awenasa. The rest of us relax and lay back down. We lay in silence, just enjoying the gentle warmth of the fire and each other’s embrace. I play with Madison’s hair and trace my fingers over hers and Awenasa’s clasped hands, but mostly, I just hold Madison close.

  I start to fall asleep, but Shannon sits up, waking me up with her movement. I look over my shoulder, and she kisses my lips, before whispering that she needs to check the food. When she returns, she’s carrying a large tray loaded with steaming bowls of stew and sliced and buttered toasted French bread. I sit up and help her set it down on the fireplace.

  Madison sits up and stretches, before bending down to kiss Awenasa, making her open her eyes with a smile. Awenasa looks over her shoulder and gently squeezes Jaime’s hand. Jaime releases a small hum and pulls Awenasa closer to herself, making all of us smile. Awenasa turns over onto her back to try to coax Jaime awake, but Jaime drapes her arm and leg over Awenasa as she nuzzles in her neck.

  Jaime hasn’t slept with us in over a month, since we’ve been home from the last concert tour. Well, except for moments we happen to be snuggling on the couch and we fall asleep. Awenasa caresses Jaime’s cheek and gently tugs her earlobe, making Jaime smile and slowly open her eyes.

  “Is it time to eat already?”

  “It is.”

  They sit up and Shannon passes each of us a bowl of soup and sets a wood bowl full of bread down in the center of us. I release a long low moan as I savor my first spoonful.

  “Oh, man, that’s good.”

  “Your wives cooking definitely makes it even harder to want to find my own place.”

  Before anyone can respond, the front door opens and the sound of the dance squad laughing and talking cuts through our quiet moment. They walk in a moment later with their hands weighed down with a lot of stuffed shopping bags.

  “Why are you girls so damn cute? Is the dining room table too normal for you?” I smile at Tonya’s remark and shake my head. “It’s full of fan mail.”

  “Is that stew?” Shannon smiles at Sara and nods. “There’s plenty left on the stove.”

  After quickly taking their bags to their bedrooms, they go to the kitchen and join us sitting around the fire with bowls of stew and the rest of the bread.

  “Did you finish your Christmas shopping?”

  “We did. We couldn’t walk into one department store without seeing your faces. Your fragrance and cosmetics posters and cutouts are everywhere. The gift sets they came up with are pretty cool. The lotion and body wash are nice additions.”

  “Yeah, we were pretty happy with those. They feel really nice. I told Judd I want to develop new scents inspired by our trip to Hawaii. When we’re in California to do the dance camp in Sacramento, Jaime and I need to go to the perfumery in L.A. to work on those. We’ll also have to do promotional work that week. They want to release the scents in June.”

  “NuGlow must be worshipping Russel Stone for convincing them to sign that endorsement contract with you.” Jaime and I laugh a little and smile at each other. “Probably.”

  “Kayla, don’t forget, we also have to do a photoshoot for Delilah’s clothing line while we’re in California. That’s only three weeks away.” She gives me a meaningful look and then looks at Sam, who blushes and laughs a little. “Ok, I’ll be tame.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sam comes running up to my dance studio above the garage, interrupting a training session with the dance squad, and pulls on my hand with a big grin.

  “Come on. I finished editing your knife dance.”

  “What knife dance?” The squad looks between us confused and Sam giggles and yanks on my arm. “Come watch. Kayla had to learn knife throwing for the movie, so she’s been practicing in the woods. Last week, we set up a bunch of cameras and targets in the woods. She created a fight dance and just went sexy badass in the woods.”

  All of us follow Sam back to the house and she leads us to the family room, with the video paused on the giant flat screen TV. My wives are already sitting on the couch waiting for us. Sam pulls me down between her and Madison and the squad fills in around us. When everyone is seated, Sam presses play on the video.

  We recorded this while it was snowing with a few inches of snow already on the ground. Sam did good with fading our house and backyard out of the video, so it looks like a whiteout blizzard behind me. I’m dressed in a pair of tight black combat style pants with knife holsters on both thighs with five throwing knives in each. The outfit is finished with a tight black neoprene jacket. My hair is up in a high ponytail and I have two white paint stripes across my cheeks.

  I walk into the woods stone faced, and as soon as I pass my first target, I start a dance fight with an invisible army. There’s a lot of acrobatic moves, lunges and diving rolls, kicks and punches, and a lot of knife throwing. In between dancing, I release knives in fluid bursts and movements, throwing them at boards we affixed to the trees. In one of my favorite sequences, I do a controlled roll, popping back up on my feet, and while I’m doing a spinning jump kick, I release a knife from both hands in opposite directions, taking out three invisible opponents at once.

  For the last sequence, I run a few feet up the trunk of a tree, before flipping backwards, and as I’m flipping in the air, I throw my last knife into the board on the tree directly behind me. I land, look around at each of my targets with knives sticking in them, grin, and then start walking out of the woods. The video ends with me disappearing into a whiteout blizzard that they added in editing.

  It took several takes to get the video recorded without missing any of my targets, but I’m really happy with it.

  “Ok, I need a cold shower.” Symone stands up and walks out of the room for a moment, before coming back with a big grin on her face, making all of us laugh. “Damn, that was really hot. When did you learn how to do that and how did we not know about this?”

  “Thanks. I’m supposed to train with some professionals to learn knife throwing when I have to go to California for the movie, but I decided to get a jump start on it. I watched some videos online to get the basics on the techniques and then just started playing in the woods when I go for my runs in the mornings. I’ve been practicing since we came home from Hawaii and the dance sort of developed while I was practicing. I think all of you may have been out shopping or something when we recorded the video. Sam wanted it to be a surprise, so we didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, it’s really cool. You’re posting it to your channel, right? Sam, did you edit that by yourself? It was really good.” Sam smiles really big at Symone. “Thank you, and yes, I’m working on uploading it to the channel right now. I did the video editing and Awenasa did the sound.”

  It really boosts my confidence in being able to actually pull off being in a big action movie to see everyone’s excitement and hear their words of praise. I’m really worried about my acting not being believable enough. I’m supposed to be doing all of my own fight and action scenes, so I’ve been trying to practice fight techniques and body and facial reactions for those scenes. I maintained a cool stone face for the video, but while I’ve been practicing in the woods, I’ve been experimenting with my expressions a lot.

  I typically set a camera up and record myself each time to see how it looks. It’s been interesting watching my progress. I felt pretty ridiculous in the beginning, but each time I rehearse, I get more comfortable with it and my reactions and expressions are becoming more believable. I’m hoping by the time I have actual people to interact with that I’ll be completely confident and smooth.

  “Hey, while
you’re all here, we want to run something by you. Hang on.” Madison hops up and runs out of the room. When she returns, she’s holding a stack of papers. “So, in that huge batch of fan mail from the PO box that the post office delivered to us, there were several drawings of all of you.”

  She scatters more than half a dozen drawings over the large coffee table and all of us sit forward to admire them. There’s a couple of just me, a couple of Jaime and I, and several of the entire squad.

  “Wow, these are really good. I could do without this one though.”

  Sara picks up a very erotic drawing of Jaime and I making out in bed, depicting a scene from our first fragrance commercial. It’s actually very explicit and the artist drew Jaime completely naked with my hand between her legs and she’s digging her fingers into my shoulder and squeezing my breast.

  “Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that one.”

  Madison quickly takes the picture from Sara and sets it on the floor upside down. Jaime is blushing and trying not to look at anyone, but as she looks up, our eyes meet and her face spreads into a beautiful closed lip smile.

  “So, we were trying to think of new creative ideas to help increase excitement for the big choreography events and to draw more attention to them. What if we hold a fan art contest for a new tee shirt design for the squad? We’ll have guidelines to try to avoid pictures like this.” Madison points down to the hidden explicit picture. “We can give cash prizes out to the top three designs and then we’ll use the one we like the most to make a new tee shirt for the squad.”

  “That’s a great idea. Art contests like that get picked up and advertised by high schools, colleges, and universities, because they’re good opportunities for their students. Online contest boards will collect and pin it to their sites and the media will no doubt pick it up as well. There’s a ton of opportunity for free advertising and marketing for this in so many different venues. This is brilliant.”

  My wives beam at Sara and they sit forward more. Everyone likes the idea and throws out more ideas for the contest and what guidelines we’d like to give and how much of a cash prize we want to offer. We talk for about an hour, making plans, with Shannon taking notes on a tablet to get everyone’s ideas down. Sara will have to talk to our lawyer to get all of the legal stuff worked out, then we’ll have our website and graphics designer build us a temporary website just for the contest that we can link to our different websites.

  “Kayla, I think I hear your phone in the other room.”

  Madison grabs my knee to get my attention. I jump up and grab my phone off the charger on the kitchen counter. Damn, I have a lot of new text messages.

  Julia: Hello, fictional wife. I was sitting at a very important lunch meeting when I received a notification that The Dancing Wolf had posted a new video. I literally had the most embarrassing fangirl moment with my agent, a movie producer, and the movie’s director sitting around me and watching me. I can’t wait to start this movie with you. I found out yesterday that if this movie does as well as they think it will, it’s going to be the first in an entire franchise. The writers already have two sequels written and they’ve left the last open for a possible fourth.

  I gasp and sit down on the couch with my jaw hanging open, trying to figure out how to answer this. Sam places a hand on my knee and turns my face to look at her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I shake my head and clear my throat. I read the last half of Julia’s text to them and everyone tosses out comments like, “that’s awesome”.

  “Why would she tell me that? What if I bomb and we don’t get the sequels? Oh, my god, I’m going to suck. This was such a bad idea. I’m going to ruin her acting career.”

  I stand to walk out of the room, but Sara jumps up and grabs my arms, forcing me back down on the couch. She pushes the drawings aside and sits on the coffee table in front of me.

  “She told you because she has full confidence in your abilities and she’s trying to boost your excitement for the project. You already know you can do the non-speaking scenes. You’ve had to act for several commercials and music videos and you’ve done great on all of them. Remember when you read lines with Julia? It didn’t take long for you to fall into a believable rhythm with her. Maintain the same level of confidence you have when you dance and you’ll be just fine.”

  “Ok, say I can pull this off. How long will I have invested in this? How frequently will I be working on these films?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, the movies are released once a year till the series runs out. Sometimes, there’s a year or more between films. It depends on the popularity, budget, and other projects the cast is working on. They have to schedule around all of you and schedule around other films needing the same studios.”

  “So, at least three to four years, if we’re popular enough in theaters?”

  “Probably. Check your phone – its constant buzzing is driving me crazy.”

  I take a deep breath and unlock my phone to check the other messages I didn’t get to yet because Julia’s message really threw me off.

  Giz: Just a warning – I’m probably going to kiss you the next time I see you. Jerry just told me that I was tapped for a song for your movie’s soundtrack, per your recommendation to the movie directors.

  Giz: Oh, Jerry also told me to plant another nagging seed of stardust and remind you of his wish to represent The Wives.

  I smile as I glance at my wives. After my wives performed on stage for my victory couple’s dance with Jaime for the TV ballroom dance competition, Jerry and several other agents contacted us to represent them or at least Madison. My wives were very excited about the offers, but declined. Madison and Sam want to finish college before we make any other big changes to our life, aside from having children.

  They are interested in starting a singing channel online together, but they’re not interested in the hectic schedules and jobs like what the squad and I deal with all the time.

  One of my big Christmas gifts to them was to have the top level of the barn converted into three “offices”. One section will be a sound studio for them to record and edit their songs. Another section will be an apothecary for Shannon and Awenasa. And then a cool science lab for Sam to play in.

  After I’m done with the traveling dance camps for the TV show with the squad, and I’m home doing rehearsals with Julia, we’ll have the contractors here to convert the barn.

  Me: That’s great news – the song, I mean. Did you receive the song yet?

  Giz: I get to write my own. They’ve given me some guidelines on tone, mood, and so forth, but otherwise, it will be my song. It’s going to be for one of your action scenes.

  Me: That’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear it.

  Giz: Thanks for this. I know your wives aren’t ready for what Jerry and the other agents want, but if they ever want to collaborate on some songs, I’d love to get them on my next EP.

  Me: You’re welcome. I’ll let them know about the collaboration offer. Maybe you can come help break in the new sound studio after its built.

  Giz: Hell yes! I’m going to write a song to do with them.

  I tell everyone both pieces of news and Madison smiles really big while she runs her fingers through her hair.

  “That could be fun. Did you forget to respond to Julia?”

  “Oh, shit. Yeah.”

  Me: A franchise sounds amazing and terrifying. Your insider information wouldn’t happen to include a timeline for this, does it?

  Julia: You’re going to be great, Kayla. There’s nothing to be worried about. I’m pretty sure they’ll want to start filming on the second movie right after the first movie hits the theaters. If all goes well in production and post-production, we’re slated for a movie release for Thanksgiving weekend. So, maybe January. But I’m only guessing.

  Me: Ok. Have you seen the script?

  Julia: No. I’m working on it. I’ll let you know when I’ve successfully wrestled one from their hands. You shoul
d turn on the entertainment news on your TV.

  I quickly jump for the remote and turn on the news. The news anchor is in the middle of ending her last segment, but a picture of me descending from the helicopter in Hawaii for the USO event is taking up a giant screen behind her.

  “In September, celebrity dancer, Kayla Johann signed onto what Hollywood insiders are calling the next Jason Bourne action thriller franchise with a touch of the sexy allure of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

  The image changes to a cut and pasted video of highlights from the dance we did for the military, the mud race we did, my fight with Tommy when he almost killed me at my wedding, and pieces of my knife dance Sam just uploaded to my channel only an hour ago.

  “Hey, they didn’t ask permission to use that!”

  Sam slaps my leg and shushes me.

  “Some critics have questioned the risk of casting an untrained actress for one of the co-leading roles in a film that has the potential to break box office sale records. But, honestly, how can you watch Kayla Johann in action and not want to see more? Kayla Johann hasn’t received professional dance training, however, with her dance partner Jaime Monroe, she won the largest national TV dance competition against the nation’s best internationally accomplished ballroom dancers. Only moments after their win, Julia pulled Kayla off the stage, hand picking her co-star for the upcoming film, The Sharps Unleashed. She may be untrained, but Kayla Johann is one of the most exciting stars taking over the entertainment industry and she has yet to disappoint once. Insiders promise this movie will give us all of the best parts of Kayla that we’ve come to love. We’ll get her total badass side with her doing all of her own fight scenes and stunts, as well as that insanely sexy seductive side of her that makes us drool. Julia Milner and Kayla Johann will be spouses in the film and we’ve been promised at least one very steamy sex scene between the two gorgeous women. Thanksgiving tables across America will be abandoned to feast on the visual pleasure of Kayla Johann and Julia Milner doing what they do best – being sexy and kicking ass. When we come back…”