Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  “Make awkward small talk. Doesn’t matter what you actually say as long as you look haltingly tentative,” Miles said from beside the camera.

  “Um, hello,” Mal said, looking very convincingly unsure of himself.

  “Hi.”

  He cleared his throat. “Nice, um, nice party, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, rather.” I glanced behind me as Nancy entered the women’s room. “This, um, reminds me of that time you accused me of stalking you.”

  “Me too. Small world, isn’t it?” He cringed like he knew he was bombing badly, which of course was perfect for his character.

  Ford exited the men’s room and Mal stepped closer to me, one arm curving protectively between me and the “stranger” before he realized what he was doing, and dropped it suddenly.

  “Great, great!” Miles enthused. “Do it again.”

  * * *

  MAL

  Fate is doing this to torture me. This was my thought as I spent hour after hour having to moon at Gwen, talk to Gwen, surreptitiously pass Gwen’s banquet table to leave a cut flower by her plate, under director’s orders to surreptitiously brush her bare shoulder as I went.

  Torture. A true test of my resolve to leave kink and therefore Gwen behind.

  Seeing her now and knowing I could no longer run my fingers through her hair anytime I wished made my fingers ache. Knowing I could not steal a kiss when the camera was off made my jaw clench. To have her so near but to know we were a million miles apart in our heads made me want to reach out and shake some sense into her…or maybe just reach out. Maybe I needed to get myself into therapy to cure myself of these urges.

  No. I just needed to be stronger, that was all. It was time to grow up and quit living in a childish fantasy world. Difficult to do when they were requiring me to play an elaborate game of “let’s pretend” in front of the camera. So be it. It wouldn’t be the first time I did something unusual or difficult for the sake of the band. I found myself somewhat entranced watching Roderick Grisham ply the acting craft. He was so convincing, so thoroughly anguished, needy, broken, angered, jealous even though all they were doing was dancing, or walking, or whatever tiny segment of action the cameras were capturing. Then the camera would go off and he was instantly Roddy Grisham again.

  I finally remarked on it during a break. “I’m still astonished how you do that.”

  “Do what, my boy?”

  “Go from good to evil and vice versa in the blink of an eye.”

  He chuckled. “You don’t seem the type to believe in simplistic manifestations of moral absolutes.”

  He caught me off guard. “Well, not as such—”

  “There’s no secret, really. We all have the ability to be hero or villain, to evoke sympathy or revulsion. It’s all in knowing the audience. It is all context.” He shrugged. “After all, what is a soldier but a hero to his homeland and a villain to his enemy? I would have thought someone with your stage name would embrace the complexity of the human need for violence.”

  His voice and accent were remarkably similar to an old headmaster of mine, but I respected Grisham far more. “Say that again,” I heard myself say, as I tried to wrap my head around his words.

  “That I expect you would grasp the subtleties of the human need for violence?”

  “What do you mean, ‘human need for violence’?”

  “I mean we are not a domesticated enough animal not to fight one another. Without some urges to violence, we have no way to defend ourselves, and both the hero and the villain depend upon the same capacity for it. Is that not obvious to you?”

  “I suppose I had not thought about it in quite those terms,” I admitted.

  “The capacity to harm is the capacity to defend,” Grisham said.

  I knew he was talking about it in the context of defending the nation from invasion, but I could not help but hear the words echo as I thought about the conundrum I had presented Axel with, my urge to cause pain followed by my urge to soothe and protect.

  They gathered us around a banquet table when the filming at that location was finished, to go over the schedule. I stared at the paper they handed me instead of at Gwen, who was still in her ball gown but had switched her shoes to Nike trainers.

  “Next up,” Nancy said, “Crew A, to the house with Miles and Roddy. Crew B, to the soundstage for one last pickup of audience at concert. Gwen, you weren’t originally in that, but we want to get some of you in there, too. You guys will finish it pretty quickly and then join us at the house.”

  “No, no,” Miles said, “the lip synch sequences, soundstage. Did someone forget?”

  Nancy gave him an annoyed look. “I thought you said you wanted to do it by the swimming pool instead.”

  “Oh, right. Yes, apparently a total imbecile did forget: me. Whatever. How about you remind me of tomorrow’s call order, too, before I fuck that up royally, too.”

  Nancy pulled out another stack of papers and handed one to him and then distributed the rest around. “You can’t fuck up location tomorrow because it’s all at the house. Full crew at four a.m., we’ll do all the shots that require the largest number of people, including the stunts, let them go by lunch; Roddy, Gwen, and Mal in the afternoon, and then we’ll grab the last Gwen and Mal shots before we wrap.”

  I could see why such a detailed schedule was necessary. Instead of filming the scenes in the order they would appear sequentially, the shooting schedule was determined by other logistical necessities.

  I looked back at the call sheet for the rest of today and realized once I handed my tux to wardrobe I was free to go. The wardrobe assistant was waiting at the coat closet nearest the ballroom where she had all the hangers she could ever need. Our regular clothes were there.

  Axel and I went back there to get out of our costumes. “Did Christina tell you what came in the mail?” he asked as he picked up his folded clothes.

  “No, was she supposed to?” I put the jacket on the designated hanger.

  “Wedding invitation. Well, strictly speaking a save-the-date card, and a letter asking for advice on where in LA to hold the reception.”

  I looked at him. “Whose wedding?”

  He pulled his shirt over his head. “Layla’s. She invited all five of us.”

  “Really.” So that was why she had been trying to get in touch? “Who’s the lucky fellow?”

  Axel smirked at me but not because he was kidding. “Her girlfriend. Hey, are you going to come hang around during the lip synch sequences?”

  I pulled my jeans on, zipping them carefully. “I don’t relish hearing ‘Razor Sharp’ five hundred times today, thank you.”

  “You don’t want to make sure I don’t do anything untoward toward Gwen?” he joked.

  Before I quite realized it, I had pushed him against the wall, my hand on his chest. “Don’t you dare.”

  “You’re mighty possessive for someone who drove her away.”

  “I’m not possessive. I care deeply about her well-being.”

  “All I’m going to be doing is, like, artfully dragging a flogger over her shoulders and swirling a knife around. Really.”

  I backed away from him, pulling my jacket on, unable to even comment on what he was about to do. I could picture it perfectly in my mind like a starving man fantasizing about a steak. I felt the yearning I thought I’d quenched but that had been rekindled and gradually stoked all day long now roaring like a bonfire. I hurried away from him without meeting his eyes. “See you in the morning.”

  I went directly home. My condo had a small yard, more of a garden, really, between a tall cedar fence and even taller hedges. There was a flagstone patio and a barbecue grill I had never used.

  It would do.

  I scoured the house for every Ariadne Wood book I could find. I hadn’t taken much with me when I’d left England, but a few of her paperbacks and one dog-eared, highlighted, and underlined copy of On a Midnight Far had been among the things I had.

  I tore the paperbacks i
nto several pieces each, my shoulder muscles straining until the spines gave way, then dumped them into the bowl of the grill, doused them with whiskey, and lit them. It took a few tries to get it going, but then the flames leaped up, consuming more, faster.

  I took a swallow straight from the whiskey bottle before I thought maybe I should quit drinking, too. Fine. I upended it into the flames, sending them upward.

  I shed my jacket, let it fall to the stone behind me, and reached toward the fire. The same trick I used to do with a candle and the tip of my finger all those years ago I could do with the tongues of flame and my entire hand. My arm.

  The odor of singed hair made my eyes water. And the pain told me I was alive, whether I deserved to be or not.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My True Soul

  GWEN

  The third day of shooting started early, so early the sun wasn’t up yet, because they wanted to film some night scenes with the exterior of the house. I was starting to see why Miles was never without a cup of coffee in his hand. The wardrobe person checked her notes and took out a box with ten diamond engagement rings in it. “Let’s find one that fits.”

  That wasn’t the most intriguing element of my wardrobe for that day, though. That would be the breast shield the color of my skin that she molded to my chest. On top of that I wore a shirt that had been mostly torn open. The idea was that they could film the shirt all torn open like that without any of my actual skin being exposed, though it would look like it in the finished shot.

  Wardrobe also dressed a stuntman to look like Mal, in a dark wig, black leather jacket, and jeans. They filmed him trying and failing to beat down the front door. The guy threw himself at the door pretty hard, too, hard enough that I worried he might actually succeed in breaking it. But it didn’t, which set up the whole plot point about smashing the window.

  The crew had installed a special plate of glass between the back patio and the sitting room, and they had a prop guitar painted to look like Mal’s. The stunt coordinator was an older guy with a curly gray ponytail, round glasses, and a baseball cap. He handed the fake guitar to Mal. “We only get one take on this, so we’re going to film you swinging and hitting the glass several times and it won’t break but we’ll get lots of footage of the swing that way.”

  “It’s not breakaway glass?” Mal asked. “I thought they made these out of sugar for movies.”

  “Oh, they do, for props like bottles, but for a window that we need to film you through, it has to be crystal clear. This is tempered glass like a car windshield. When we film the smash, there’s a popper at the bottom that’ll do the actual breaking of the glass.” He pointed out something on the floor that I couldn’t see. “The pieces mostly fall straight down and you won’t get too much spray into the room, but Gwen, Rod, you’ll want to turn your faces away. Well, you’ll turn away reflexively, I bet, but just in case. The pieces will be mostly little pebbles but you still don’t want to get one in your eye or your mouth.”

  We walked through the sequence a few times, with Roddy and I positioned so that he had grabbed me from behind as I tried to flee and Mal swinging the guitar in slow motion. They’d already filmed a fight sequence with a stuntwoman before I got there and now they checked the position to make sure we matched up.

  And then we did it. They filmed Mal several times running up to the glass and then finally the big smash. The noise was sudden and terrifying: the popper sounded like a gunshot, and Mal came flying into the room, hair wild, brandishing the guitar.

  The crew broke out into applause and then immediately set about cleaning up the broken glass.

  Roddy helped me to stand up straight. “Are you quite all right, my dear?”

  My eyes were glued on Mal, who was standing there, breathing hard. A props person took the fake guitar away.

  “Just a little startled,” I said, putting my hand over my heart and forcing myself to look at Roddy and breathe, but all I could see in my mind was Mal, wearing his fury like a cape, like that time he’d played the Linder Mage. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  When I looked back, Mal had vanished. I felt his absence like a sudden chill, like the fire had gone out.

  Nancy came up to us. “Whew! Nothing like a little excitement at six in the morning. Might as well have you two do some close-ups of the struggle while we’ve still got some darkness in the bedroom.”

  They ended up having to shade over the bedroom windows from outside because the sun was coming up too fast, but I guess that worked.

  The hardest part about filming the fight scenes is my body kept thinking roughhousing and Roddy tearing my shirt open was foreplay, so I had a few flushes of arousal. Fortunately they were easy to hide, and I had technical aspects of the action to focus on, like one segment of close-up where they filmed him trying to pry the engagement ring off my finger, I kept my hand balled in a fist and then was supposed to punch him in the eye with the ring.

  I took the ring off to do the actual contact to Roddy’s face, of course. They’d show a separate shot of my fist with the ring, then of the punch, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the ring was missing from the shot.

  Yes, it felt weird walking around wearing a super-classic diamond engagement ring. The fake stone was fairly huge so it would show up well on camera. I found myself staring at it during the lunch break down in the rec room. Had Mal been serious when he’d said we should stay together but not do BDSM anymore? Could I have traded one for the other?

  No, it never would have worked. I would have always felt a part of me was being crushed. If he was truly going vanilla, I had to get over him.

  Nancy came and sat beside me. “Nice rock, eh? A real one that size would’ve tripled our entire props budget.”

  “Yeah, I bet it would. So, tell me something. Why does Miles have a reputation for being such an asshole? He seems fine to me.”

  “Miles is a demanding man and when he feels strongly about things, he’s not afraid to express himself,” Nancy said between bites of chicken salad on a plastic fork. “But he hasn’t had anything to fight over or anyone to fight with here. If anything, he was thinking, ‘ugh, these rock stars are going to be lazy party animals.’ But, no, they’ve been total troupers. Especially Mal.”

  I hid a smile. “You’d be the first person ever to say Mal’s easy to work with.”

  Nancy chuckled. “Is he normally not so…cooperative?”

  “I guess it’s the same thing. When he feels really strongly about something, he can be impossible.”

  “Demanding men can be impossible, but when they’re at their best, they’re unstoppable,” Nancy said, and then licked the last bit of chicken salad off her plate. “Okay, right back to it for me.”

  They filmed a few sequences with Mal and Roddy struggling with each other. Then we had to do various shots of us running up the street away from the house, hand in hand, escaping.

  The first time I put my hand into Mal’s, it felt like touching a live wire, like the current that ran through us magnetized us together. His eyes met mine and neither of us looked away until we realized the director was trying to get our attention.

  What are you thinking, Mal? Are you having second thoughts about what you said?

  He didn’t let go of my hand for several minutes, even when we weren’t filming, even when we were walking back to take our places.

  Miles waved us over toward the gate at the street level. “How about a few with Gwen inside the gate, Mal on the outside. Gwen reaching a hand through the bars, Mal looking at her with angsty yearning in his eyes. Oooh, yes, nailed it.”

  Then he had us both on the same side of the gate. “Now how about some angst-ridden gazing into one another’s eyes. Mal, put your arm around her, two lovebirds about to fly from this cage. That’s it.”

  Being pressed this close to him but having to pretend to be professional, when part of me wanted to just kiss him, or slap him maybe, or shake him until he saw sense, or cry on his shoulder, was difficult. T
hen again, having the appropriately distressed face of a woman being ripped apart inside, that I could do.

  Mal looked equally distressed by my distress. I thought maybe he was just getting the hang of acting, until in a quiet moment he bent his head toward me. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m not all right,” I whispered. “Heartbreaker.”

  “Gwen—”

  “Okay, good,” Miles shouted. “Last bit in this segment, Mal, you playing the guitar solo here in the middle of the street. Where’s that guitar? The real one, not the prop. I know he’s miming but come on, people.” While the crew was busy with Mal, I went back to the rec room to wait. Roddy was there sipping water from a bottle. I got one myself and sat down with him.

  “You all right, my dear? You look a bit emotionally taxed.”

  “You could say that,” I said with a sigh.

  “Let me guess. Things with our hero are not as smooth as they could be?”

  The understatement startled me into laughing. “Hardly anyone knows but we broke up less than a week ago.”

  “Oh my. I hadn’t realized it was quite that severe. He clearly dotes on you.”

  “Yeah, he loves me so much he told me I should leave him for my own good.”

  Roddy raised an eyebrow. “More honor than sense?” He patted my hand. “You poor dear.” His cell phone rang and he waved me an apology as he answered it and hurried to the far side of the room to speak with whoever it was. His agent, perhaps.

  Everyone else was outside or in the trailer, so I wandered upstairs and was surprised by the sound of a camera shutter clicking.

  “That’s beautiful,” said a man with a very large camera held up to his face. He had another camera hanging from his neck. “Put your hands on your hips? Give me a coy smile?”

  I did it without thinking and then looked around. None of the rest of the crew was in sight. He lowered the camera and I recognized him: Beau Lavern. I had a sudden sinking feeling—this was the same guy who had been overbearing at that record release party, too. “Excuse me, are you supposed to be here?”