by Virna DePaul
Focus, Tessa! Focus! I ordered myself. I could think about food later.
Weaving quickly through the chaos so I wouldn’t lose my nerve, I glanced around, searching. Ellis wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I spun around in a circle, biting my lip when I still didn’t catch sight of him.
“You the backup hair girl?” a woman with a clipboard asked as she pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Um…” I stared at her, mind whirling, “…yes?”
“You don’t know?”
I pulled back my shoulders and lifted my chin and said again, “Yes, that’s me.”
“Great,” the woman said, giving me a strange look but pointing toward the back of the warehouse nonetheless. “Start with Room 3. Someone back there will tell you what to do next.”
Okay, so I’d just go back there and ask one of the actors if they’d seen Ellis. Surely they would know where he is. If I needed to style someone’s hair in the process, well, I hope they liked ponytails, because that was about the extent of my professional hair knowledge.
“Hair person,” I told people who didn’t even glance twice at me as I walked toward the dressing rooms. “That’s me. Hair lady.”
Finding Room 3 was easy. I poked my head in the door and asked, “Hey, do you know where El—”
“Tessa?”
Ellis looked up from his phone. He was sitting alone, in a styling chair in front of a brightly lit mirror. I stared at Ellis from the doorway, unable to move, unable to speak.
Suddenly, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready at all. It never crossed my mind that Ellis himself would have been inside the first dressing room. I expected to find some stranger I would never see again who would tell me where I could find Ellis. I would then collect my thoughts, rehearse what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and maybe even fix up my hair and makeup so I didn’t look like I’d just rushed over here after being fucked by two sex gods in the back of a VW van.
I would have made sure that everything was ready, that everything was prepared, that everything was perfect before I finally found Ellis. And yet here I was.
Ellis pushed himself up from the chair and assessed me with a raised eyebrow. “What are you doing here?”
My heart raced and my palm, still resting on the door handle, grew slick with nervous sweat. I sucked in a deep breath.
"Look, Tessa,” Ellis said, moving toward me, “I’m at work, and I really shouldn’t be—”
“You had to have always known.”
It was the first thing that popped into my panicked mind, a line from the script Ellis had given me for the audition.
“What?” Ellis watched me as I closed the door behind me and turned to face him. I locked eyes with him and even though my body screamed at me to look away, hell, to run away, I remained where I was, blocking the door.
“You had to have always known.”
Ellis crossed his arms.
“Tessa, I really don’t have time—”
“You had to have always known.”
The confusion on Ellis’s face only increased as I stood there. But it wasn’t just confusion. There was something else…and it was the something else that made my throat tighten and my chest ache. And then his expression changed. Wariness slid into the confusion.
“Known what?” he asked slowly. And I knew it wasn’t random. Those two words were part of the script. He’d read it, too.
My voice wavered, but still, I continued saying the lines that were the honest to God truth. “Haven’t you seen the way I look at you?”
Recognition hit Ellis’s eyes, as if he’d been testing me and confirmed I was reciting the lines from the script. Hope washed over his face, then his expression went blank.
“Those are just lines,” Ellis said, his voice soft, yet firm.
“No,” I insisted. “They’re, I mean, yeah, they’re lines, but they’re not—”
“That’s enough, Tessa. I don’t have time to practice lines with you. I have to work.”
Ellis stepped closer to me, and I caught a whiff of his scent. My knees trembled, and I leaned back against the door to steady myself, the trembling growing stronger when he reached around me to grab the door knob.
“Someone wrote those ridiculous lines from a ridiculous soap opera with ridiculous romances that we both know don’t happen in real life. It’s all make-believe.”
I stared up at him as he sighed, briefly closing his eyes before looking down at me.
“People don’t suddenly realize their love for one another when it’s been staring them in the face the whole time,” he continued. “It’s a trope we studied in theater class and it’s cheesy and cliché and ridiculous.”
He tried to turn the door knob, but I stopped him.
“Then I’ll be a trope,” I said, jutting my chin up in defiance. “And I’ll be cheesy and cliché and ridiculous. I don’t give a damn anymore.”
“Tessa.”
“Because I write the script. Me,” I pointed to my chest. “Nobody else gets to write it for me.” I then pointed my finger at Ellis, jabbing it into his chest as emotion I hadn’t expected poured out of me. “Not you and not anyone else. Me.”
Ellis hesitated. I had gone terribly off script. None of this was rehearsed or practiced. I felt myself flying off the rails per usual, but for the first time in my life I didn’t have the urge to stop or run or leave. I was going to stay right where I fucking was.
My voice was louder, more emphatic, as Ellis just stood there, looking shocked. “I’m going to write the script of my life, Ellis Finley, and I’m going to say whatever the hell I want to say.”
Ellis dropped his hand from the door knob but only to cross his arms over his chest. A hint of a grin tugged at the corner of his perfect lips, and it was only then that I breathed a little easier.
“And what is it that you want to say, Tessa Stewart?”
Well, there I was: on my own, speaking just as myself, my true self. There were no black words printed on a white page to follow, to read aloud, to practice and rehearse and refine. There was no director behind a camera, behind the blinding lights of the stage, behind the casting table. There was no direction, no instruction, nobody to tell me what to say or how to say it.
There was only me. Not the New Tessa. But Tessa.
Just Tessa.
“I want to say,” I started softly, nervously. I cleared my throat and tried to keep my heart rate somewhere below “dying on an elliptical” speed. “I want to say that I—I—”
I was searching for the perfect words, but there were no perfect words. There were only my words.
“I love you, Ellis. And not just as a friend. I mean, I do love you as a friend. My best friend. But I also love you in every other way it’s possible to love another person.”
Ellis’s breath hitched, but he remained silent, so I kept going.
“I’ve loved you for a long time,” I continued, the words suddenly flowing and tumbling over one another. “I think I loved you, whole heartedly loved you, the moment I met you in the dorms the first day of our freshman year. And, well, that was what I wanted to say.”
Waiting for a response was agony, pure agony. I had put myself out there. I had walked off the cliff and I was hanging there, out above the open air, waiting to see if I would fall or if someone’s arms would catch me. Ellis still said nothing and I couldn’t take it any longer.
“So, um, I said what I wanted to say and, well…”
My voice hitched and I turned away to open the door. Then I froze.
No. No.
I wasn’t running away. Not again.
So I turned back to Ellis and even though nerves made my chest feel like there was a heavy rock sitting on it, I said, “Ellis, I said I love you. Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Ellis
Tessa insisted this was real, that this moment wasn’t one of the movies we like to watch on her couch every weekend, but part of me wasn’t convinced. Surely the wall behind her would f
all like any set wall if I shoved hard enough. Surely her disheveled hair was arranged by a hair stylist and her flushed cheeks were the result of a brush and blush from the makeup chair. Surely the words she spoke, that I never ever expected to hear from her lips, were not her own.
Because they were too perfect. Absolutely too perfect.
But as I stared down at my best friend, I knew I was wrong. I knew it the moment she started to run away, but then stopped herself to face me again.
This was real life.
She was done running. And so was I.
“Ellis?”
Her eyes were imploring, yearning, begging as she looked up at me from beneath those long, soft eyelashes. She was waiting for me.
There was only one thing I could say: “Lock the door.”
Tessa’s face showed immediate confusion. “Huh?”
“Lock the door,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice even despite the buzz of adrenaline that coursed through every inch of my body. “Because I love you. I adore you, Tessa. And I want to show you how much.”
Tessa’s apprehensive eyes left mine for only the second it took to glance down at the door knob. Then she reached out and locked the door.
Instantly, my lips found hers. Tessa’s arms wrapped around my neck to pull me closer. It was all desperation and need as we groped at one another, each trying to get closer, tighter, hotter.
“Why were we so stupid?” Tessa gasped as I lifted her up. Her legs locked around my waist and she flipped her hair out of her face so she could pepper hot, wet kisses all along my neck.
“I was the stupid one,” I said as my fingers dug into her ass.
Her hips ground against my crotch in response, and I groaned as I set her down on the makeup counter, compacts and brushes clanking noisily to the floor. Tessa shook her head, leaning back against the mirror.
“No.” She was breathing heavily, chest heaving behind her white blouse. “I was the stupid one. I forced Old Tessa to stay locked in her chrysalis.”
My fingers moved before I could stop them. They gripped each side of her blouse and yanked it apart, buttons scattering in all directions. Tessa’s back arched as she reached back eagerly to unhook her bra strap. I couldn’t wait that long. She gasped as I tore that in half, too.
“Are you kidding me?” I practically lunged forward to suck her hardening nipple into my mouth, something I dreamed of doing for years, and couldn’t get out of my mind since I saw them bouncing, slick from one guy’s wet fingers as another guy fucked her. “I should have made a move years ago.”
I only pulled my hands away from kneading her breasts to allow her to yank my shirt up and over my head. Once I was free, I scraped my teeth against her tit and matched her own moan with one of my own as her fingers moved hurriedly to my jean button.
She gasped as I circled my tongue over her nipple the way I saw she liked from her other guy. Then her petite fingers finished with my zipper, slipped into my jeans, and wrapped around my hard cock. She stroked me fast, palm swirling over my head on each upward pull. We needed each other, that was obvious. Her fingers stopped to pull off her shorts and toss them over my shoulder, leaving her just in a thin pair of lace underwear. My cock hardened painfully when I pulled the light material aside and found her already wet for me.
Yeah, we needed each other and we needed each other fast.
Once I was sheathed with a condom, I grabbed Tessa’s hips and lifted her again as she held her hands on either side of my face and guided my lips to hers. She bit my lower lip, tugging on it greedily, as I carried her to the closest full of gowns and masks for a Venetian masked ball planned for the soap. Hangers clanked together as I pinned Tessa’s back to the wall behind the rack of clothes.
Fingers caressing my cheeks, hair disheveled against velvets and furs and feathers, beautiful eyes staring back at me, Tessa stared at me.
My voice was just a whisper as I said, “How about we just agree that we are both very, very stupid people, who should have done something about this years ago?”
Tessa kept one hand on my face as she reached down between us and guided the head of my dick toward her pussy. She pushed herself down onto me and her eyes fluttered closed as her fingernails dug into my neck. “The stupidest,” she gasped.
I chuckled, and she opened her eyes to smile at me. Her eyes were filled with nothing but desire. I licked my lips and thrust into her as I held her tight against the wall. She gripped the metal rack above us with white knuckles as I fucked her, holding absolutely nothing back.
“Both of us idiots,” I said, growing breathless as sweat dotted my back.
“The…” Tessa’s tits bounced as I drove my cock even deeper inside of her. “…the absolute dumbest.”
Tessa’s thighs, still wrapped around my waist, were quivering as she clung to my shoulder. She pushed her hips down to get more of me, all of me. Desperate whines escaped her wet lips as she writhed against the hanging costumes.
“Ellis,” she pleaded, voice constrained.
The sound of my name on her lips almost made me come right then and there, but I needed to see her come first. I needed it like I’d never needed anything else in my life.
I buried my face against the crook of her neck as I pulled her down onto me and whispered her name into her ear in the tight space between the costumes that was ours and ours alone. I felt her tighten around me.
“Tessa,” I murmured again as her moans grew louder and more high pitched.
Her fingers twisted in my hair and her fingernails scraped against my scalp as I sucked at the salty skin along her neck. I fucked her, hard, needing more and more and more. I held myself back from exploding inside of her as she clutched me to her tighter and tighter and tighter.
“Fuck,” she breathed in the tight, hot closet, “fuck, fuck, I’m—oh, god, I’m—”
Tessa’s back arched, her glistening breasts pressing against my own slick chest, her hips grinding down on me with an uncoordinated desperation. I held her ass with one hand and reached up to pinch one of her nipples.
She clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams as she came, convulsing against me. I didn’t stop fucking her as she dug her fingernails deep into the back of my neck. She sagged against the wall, leaving only my hand holding her up as I drove my cock deep into her.
Moments passed, and then she opened her eyes and looked at me through hooded, pleasure-filled eyes.
“Ellis,” she whispered, touching her fingertips against my chest.
It was everything I ever wanted to hear. I groaned harshly and sagged against her as I came, pure white blinding my vision. The costumes slipped from the hangers and we tumbled down to the floor as my knees gave out.
“Ow,” she mumbled as I ended up on top of her.
“Are you okay?” I asked, worried that I had hurt her somehow.
From under a deep burgundy velvet dress, Tessa pulled an intricately painted and decorated Venetian mask with lace and feathers adorning it.
“I’m fine.” She laughed, holding the distinctly cracked mask up for me to see. “But I think I broke this.” She looked up at me with tender eyes. “Should I try to fix it?”
I took the broken mask from her delicate fingers and tossed it haphazardly into the far corner of the closet
“Nothing needs to be fixed,” I said before kissing her gently. I traced her beautiful naked body with the pads of my fingertips, eliciting goosebumps even in the hot enclosed space. Each and every one was perfection in my eyes.
“Nothing?” Tessa whispered.
I smiled at her with love. “Nothing at all.”
Chapter 18
Tessa
"So how exactly do we get this thing started?” Jamie asked.
Jamie, Cade, Ellis, and I all stood at opposite corners of Ellis’s massive California king bed in his swanky LA penthouse. We all stood fully clothed. We all stood with arms crossed in varying manners across our chests. And we all played a game of awkward eye tag as
we glanced at one another only to quickly break that eye contact and stare at our own unsexy socks.
We all had no clue in the slightest how to proceed.
I now had my three guys for the sex study, which was due to start less than a week after the application date, so I’d suggested we do a practice run with all four of us. The doctors running the experiment were expecting a real foursome, not four people who’d never bumped uglies as a group together.
But as the silence between the four of us stretched on, interrupted only by the occasional throat clearing or nervous shuffle of feet, I was starting to reconsider my plan.
“Well,” I finally said when no one else spoke up, “we could all start by taking off the shirt of the person to your right.”
There was a series of silent blinks as we each looked to the person to our right. I would take off Jamie’s shirt and Cade would take off mine.
“Eh, how about the person to your left?” Jamie said, eyeing Ellis, the person to his right.
“Or the person across from you,” Ellis suggested.
“Okay, forget that.” I rubbed my eyes and sighed. “Let’s just all take off our own shirts to start, okay?”
After a moment of hesitation, I again was forced to lead the way. What had turned all these hot, sexy men into high school virgins all of a sudden? I half expected them to suggest we turn the lights off. I gripped the hem of my shirt and tugged it over my head before tossing it to the center of the bed.
“Your turn, fellas.” I grinned, holding my arms out so they could see I was only wearing my bra now.
They glanced between one another before taking off their shirts. Ellis had the chest of a Hollywood action hero from the 70’s, fit and full with just a small spattering of brown curls above his low slung jeans. Cade was all toned muscle and tanned skin. His skin looked warm and soft and yet somehow like the idealized marble statue of a Greek god. And Jamie. Hooey Jamie! Burly and big and hard. He had the kind of chest you wanted to drag your nails down, to see your mark amongst the tattoos and red curls. Heat pooled between my legs as I looked (probably gawked) at each of them.