Watching Derek - Chapter 1 - Table Read

[venicedude]

Watching Derek - Chapter 1 - Table Read​

Six people around a table, and Derek was the only one who had not read the script.

He probably should have.

Adam had walked him through the broad strokes over coffee the week before. His roommate, Manny, had already been cast, playing Leela's closest friend and one of the film's central characters. Derek's role was much smaller. He appeared only briefly until the final act, but Adam had said those scenes were the hinge the whole story turned on.

Derek had laughed.

"Manny I understand," he'd said. "Me?"

Adam had smiled.

"Trust me."

There would be nudity. A sex scene. Adam had said both plainly enough that Derek hadn't felt the need to ask what either word meant.

The rest had been easy.

Adam's films were the ones professors assigned in directing classes when they wanted to prove ambitious student work didn't have to look like student work. His last short had played festivals. Actors from outside the department had started auditioning for his projects. Being asked had felt flattering in a way Derek hadn't entirely expected.

He had downloaded the script three nights earlier.He had even opened the file. Then he'd looked at the page count, decided he'd rather hear it with everyone else, and closed it again.

He told himself it was because he trusted Adam.It was also because some part of him had wanted a few more days in which nudity remained a category rather than a set of instructions.

The apartment gave it away first.

Not Adam's place, not some rented classroom or black-box theater, but his and Manny's living room, their kitchen table, their mismatched chairs pulled into a rough circle around six copies of the script stacked like place settings. Someone had brought a whiteboard and leaned it against the wall with scene numbers already written across it. Two work lamps threw light from angles the room did not usually have, and the place where Derek had eaten cereal that morning now looked like someone else's apartment wearing his apartment's furniture.

He had known they were filming here. Adam had asked weeks ago, and Derek had said yes without thinking much about it.

He had not expected the transformation to begin before anyone picked up a camera.

Manny sat two seats down on the same side of the table, reading the title page with the quiet concentration he seemed to bring to almost everything.

Derek knew things about Manny the way you knew things about someone you had split a refrigerator with for fourteen months. The way he left the third drawer open an inch. The documentary he put on some nights when he couldn't sleep, always with the volume low enough that Derek could hear the murmur through the wall but never the words. The dry, economical way he made a joke land exactly once and then let it die instead of repeating it for effect. Derek knew Manny was gay the same way he knew Manny was left-handed—a fact filed early, never revisited, sitting in the same drawer as doesn't eat cilantro and runs at six in the morning even when it's raining.

They got along. Easily, and without either of them needing much from the other, which Derek had always privately considered the correct way for two guys to share a lease.

He had not, before tonight, thought very much about what acting opposite Manny might actually mean.

Adam opened with the film itself. He talked about Cassavetes, about Ramsay, about the camera's relationship to the body. He talked about observation as a form of desire, about the difference between what a person performs and what a person actually feels, and Derek understood roughly a third of it, which felt like an acceptable percentage for a Thursday. Zoe sat beside him with a legal pad and a mechanical pencil she clicked without ever writing anything down. Benji had his headphones looped around his neck like a scarf. Noah was already highlighting his copy in neat, confident strokes. Leela poured herself water and leaned back in her chair the way someone leans back when they've done this a hundred times and found it comfortable each time.

Derek had known Leela two years, since a screenwriting elective where they'd bonded over a professor they both privately thought was a fraud. She was direct, easy to be around, not performative about being easy to be around, which was rarer than people thought. He was glad Adam had cast her opposite him. He'd told himself that twice already this week, and he told himself again now, watching her settle into her chair like the evening belonged to her.

Then Adam handed out the scripts.

Derek's character description sat clean at the top of the page. DEREK — the straight roommate. He noted the economy of it, the way it gave him nothing to push against, and turned the page.

The first scenes were fine. Kitchen-table stuff, Manny moving through backgrounds, small true details about shared apartments. Then he found the third scene, and understood almost immediately that this was the one everything else existed around.

He read it once. Then again, slower.

Oh, he thought. Okay. So we're actually doing that.

Then he set the script down on the table, picked up the coffee Adam had poured him, and took a long, neutral sip.

The scene was explicit — not the impressionistic, tasteful version he'd built in his head, but specific. The characters kept their real names. Derek and Leela were in bed, and while they had sex, Manny watched from a chair on the other side of the room. It ran for pages. Adam had written the stage directions in the same level, unbothered voice he used for everything, which made it stranger than if he'd tried to be provocative about it.

Two-thirds down the third page, one line stopped him entirely. He read it, looked away, and made himself come back to it.

Derek is visibly aroused.

Not implied. Not softened by any of the words people usually reached for. The sentence that followed described exactly what the camera was meant to see.

They're going to film my hard-on, he thought. Adam wrote it into the stage directions. They're going to film my actual hard-on and put it in the movie.

He kept his face doing what it usually did. He was good at that, generally — better than most people he knew — and he used the skill now, turning his script over and back like a man checking a receipt.

He read it a third time and let the whole shape of it settle. Leela naked. Himself naked. Her legs on either side of his hips, her body over his, riding — the word was in the stage directions, calm and exact — while Manny watched from the chair. No clever framing. No strategic blocking to obscure anything. Just bodies, movement, observation.

Is has to be simulated, he thought. The question had a strange, weightless quality.

Or am I supposed to actually fuck her?

He read the stage directions again, more carefully this time, looking for any language that suggested a pause or a cut or an angle change that would indicate a break in the action. There wasn't any. The scene played out in real time, continuous, from Leela straddling him to the moment after. Adam had written it as a single, unbroken stretch of physical intimacy.

Even if it's simulated, he realized, she's still going to be sitting on his lap.

My cock is going to be between us. Erect. In front of everyone.

He let that sit.

She's going to feel it.

The thought arrived with disconcerting clarity.

Whatever happens. Whether I'm inside her or not. She's going to feel exactly how hard I am, in real time, while the camera rolls and Manny watches and Adam takes notes.

He put the script down and stared at the ceiling again.

Leela reached across the table for the water pitcher. "Good material," she said, to the room generally, in the tone of someone reviewing a menu.

Derek laughed, half a beat too loud. "Yeah," he said. "Sure."

Adam looked at him—not with judgment, which Adam rarely brought to anything, but with the same cataloguing attention he brought to everything, like Derek was a shot he was already composing. Derek held the look until Adam moved past it.

"Take your time with it," Adam said. "First reads always run a little hot."

They worked through the script front to back. The early pages were manageable — good dialogue, a couple of real jokes, Manny drifting through backgrounds with a mug in his hand. Derek let himself relax by degrees, almost forgot what was coming, the way you almost forget a dentist appointment until you're already in the parking lot.

Then they reached the scene.

Adam read the stage directions in the same unbothered voice. Leela delivered her lines with the ease of someone for whom this kind of table read was Tuesday. Derek heard himself read his own lines in a voice that was too even, too considered, a voice performing calm rather than possessing it.

Manny said almost nothing. His character had no dialogue in the scene. He sat with the pages in front of him and followed along while the others spoke around him, and he did not look up once.

When they finished, Adam talked about what the scene was doing — Manny's watching as intrusion and permission both, the difference between being noticed by someone who barely registers you and being seen by someone who actually wants something from the seeing. He mentioned Shortbus. He mentioned Winterbottom.

"It only works if Manny's watching reads as real," Adam said. "Not theatrical. If it reads as acting, we lose the whole film."

Derek looked down at the page without reading it.

The conversation drifted into logistics — schedule, locations, whether the bedroom would need a second lamp. Benji asked about room tone. Zoe talked aspect ratio with the settled confidence of someone who'd already been thinking about it for a week. Derek contributed where he had something to contribute, made a joke that landed fine, and told himself, in the tone he used for telling himself things, that he was fine.

The room emptied by stages. Leela hugged Adam on her way out and said the script was genuinely good, and Derek could tell she meant it. Benji followed. Zoe stayed behind, deep in a lens discussion with Adam that had the quality of something they'd both been saving up all evening.

Which left Derek and Manny alone in the kitchen.

Derek stood at the counter, staring at the coffee maker without seeing it. The script sat on the couch where he’d left it, pages still open to scene four. He could see the block of text from here, dense paragraphs of action description that he’d eventually have to memorize.

Manny was loading dishes into the dishwasher. The clink of ceramic against the rack was the only sound.

“I am going to have leftover pasta,” Manny said, holding up a container. “You want some?”

“Sure.”

They ate at the small table by the window, the one Derek had found at a thrift store junior year and carried six blocks on his shoulder while Manny laughed and told him he was going to throw out his back. The streetlight outside cast a pale orange glow across the tabletop.

Conversation stayed safe. Manny talked about his cinematography class, the professor who couldn’t remember anyone’s name, the documentary he was supposed to edit by Tuesday. Derek nodded and asked questions and didn’t hear half the answers.

After dinner, they watched an old sitcom together. When it ended, Manny got up from the couch and said goodnight. His door clicked shut down the hall.

Derek went to his own room, sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, and began, quietly and against his better judgment, to think.

This is not what I agreed to.

Or is it?

Adam told me what was going to happen.

There would be nudity. A sex scene. Derek had heard both things without really picturing them. Nudity had meant what it usually meant in Adam's films—a bare back crossing a room, someone dressing after sex, enough skin to tell the audience what had happened without asking them to watch it happen. A sex scene had sounded similarly abstract. A kiss that lingered. A body beneath a sheet. Careful framing doing most of the work.

He had never imagined six uninterrupted pages. He had never imagined Leela straddling him. He had never imagined Manny sitting six feet away, watching every second of it.

He wasn't going to back out. He noticed that about himself immediately, filed it, and found it mildly uncomfortable in its own right — that some part of him had already decided this before the rest of him had finished being surprised.

He had known Adam for three years. He'd watched Adam talk a roomful of people into things they hadn't planned on doing — not through pressure exactly, but through a quality of certainty that made resistance feel like a failure of imagination. This was, probably, an extension of that. Derek could trace the logic of how he'd arrived here. That didn't make the script less concrete.

The sex itself was — he turned it over carefully — probably navigable. Leela was easy to be around, direct without being aggressive about it, and he trusted that she'd handle whatever the scene required with the same matter-of-fact competence she brought to everything else. But what the scene would actually require in practical terms was a question he still couldn't fully answer. Do we actually do it, he thought.

Like, do I actually — is that what's happening. Is that what I just agreed to, actual sex, on camera, in front of everyone?

He didn't know. The stage directions were clear about some things and artfully vague about others, and he hadn't been able to ask during the read-through without making it obvious that he was rattled, which he wasn't, he was fine, he just needed to know whether he was going to actually have sex with Leela in front of four people or whether there was some technical convention for this he'd never had occasion to learn.

At some point he was going to have to ask someone. He had no idea how to phrase it.

He moved past it, toward the thing that had been sitting underneath everything else since he'd read that stage direction.

His cock. That was the real problem. Not the concept of nudity — he'd processed nudity, nudity was just a body — but the uncontrollable reality of what his body was going to do in that room, in front of people, while a camera recorded it.

Everyone in that room is going to watch me get hard.

Leela and Zoe and Benji and Noah and Adam are all going to be standing there looking at my cock while it gets hard. That is the scene. That is what I said yes to.

He put his arm over his eyes.

The thought had a slightly nauseating quality when fully assembled like that. He took it apart and looked at each piece.

Zoe was the one who worried him most in the practical sense, because Zoe would be behind the camera, which meant Zoe would be the one deciding what to point it at.

What if she goes in close? What if the shot is just — what if she just points it right at —

He stopped. There was nowhere useful for that thought to go.

Benji was friendlier, which somehow didn't make it better. He is going to have headphones on, and he is going to hear every single sound I make.

Every breath, every sound, recorded in real time.

And then there was Manny, and Derek's thoughts snagged there in a way they hadn't with anyone else, and he noticed the snag and immediately went looking for somewhere else to put it. It wasn't a big deal. It wasn't anything. Manny was gay, which meant Manny watching him would not be the same as Zoe watching him, not clinical, not collegial, something else entirely that didn't come with a comfortable name attached — and his brain had apparently decided this warranted its own separate file, which was fine, noted, closed.

The others are going to watch because they're making a movie.

Manny's going to watch because—

No. That wasn't fair. Manny was a professional.

It's not a thing. Manny's a professional. It's not a thing.

He let that go and arrived, finally, at the question that had been waiting underneath all the others since the table read, the one he'd been circling instead of naming.

What if I can't get hard?

There it was. The scene required an involuntary thing from his body on command, in front of five people and a camera, and his body had never once in his life been asked to perform on a cue. It did what it did on its own schedule, generally at moments of profound social inconvenience, and had shown no prior evidence of being biddable.

People can't get it up when they're nervous; That's, like, medically established. And I am going to be the most nervous I have ever been in my life, on a set day, at a set time, with a call sheet.

He turned this over and found no comfortable place to put it down. There was no version of the day where the pressure wasn't the exact condition most likely to defeat the thing the pressure was demanding.

Oh god, what if I get hard too soon? What if I cum when Leela touches me and everyone –

No.

It occurred to him that his body had never once in its life shown the slightest interest in cooperating with his plans. Why would it suddenly become professional because Adam had written a screenplay?

He lay still and thought about his body in ways that were not entirely productive. He was in reasonable shape, moved through the world with some physical confidence, had never had particular cause for anxiety on this front.

But a film set was clinical in a way that ordinary life wasn't, and clinical meant the kind of attention that didn't have social tact built into it. Whatever Zoe chose to frame, she'd frame without embarrassment. And Derek had no idea what the baseline was, what any of them had seen before, what the implicit frame of comparison even was.

He had always privately categorized himself as having a— and here his brain produced the phrase, reliable as ever — boyfriend dick. The right size for regular, good sex. Nothing overwhelming, nothing that required advance warning or caused anyone a problem, nothing borrowed from a different genre entirely. Functional. Proportionate. The kind of thing that held up fine in ordinary life.

I have a boyfriend dick. It is a perfectly good dick. It is fine.

A film set was not ordinary life. A film set was Zoe making choices behind a lens and Adam watching a monitor and everyone else in the room forming whatever impression they formed, and Derek with no say in any of it.

What does Leela think about this?

Like, what does she actually — does she have opinions about — He stopped. That was not a useful line of inquiry. Leela was a professional and a friend and she had said good material without a single visible tremor and that was all he needed to know.

He tried to think about anything else. His communications paper due Thursday. The grocery list he kept forgetting to write.

Down the hall, barely audible: the low sound of Manny's television, something indistinct and quiet, the kind of thing you put on to fill silence.

He stared at the ceiling and thought again about the stage direction — aroused — and what it would mean in practice, concretely, for that to be on camera.

But he was going to do the film. He gave his word. Adam was talented and Leela was a professional and everyone in that room was counting on him.

I’m fine. It's just a film. People do this.

His mind kept coming back to the apartment. His bedroom.

The film would be shot here. In his space. In his own bed, in the room that had always been his private sanctuary, the only place in the world where he could close the door and be entirely unseen.

In a matter of weeks, that door would be open. Zoe would be behind the camera. Benji would be monitoring sound. Adam would be somewhere in the shadows, watching the monitor.

And Manny will be in the corner. Watching.

End Chapter 1.

You can follow the story and the rest of my writing here.

 

[venicedude]

Watching Derek, Chapter 2: Blocking​

The crew arrived at four on a Saturday, and by four-fifteen Derek’s bedroom no longer entirely belonged to him.

He’d cleared it that morning the way Adam asked — laundry off the floor, the desk pushed against the wall, the window blinds more open than Derek would ever have chosen on his own. He’d stood in the doorway afterward and looked at the room and felt something tight in his chest. The bed was the same bed. The comforter was the same comforter, the gray one his mother had bought him freshman year. But the room felt different, and Derek didn’t like that he’d done that to his own room with his own hands.

Then Zoe came in with two cases of equipment and a roll of gaffer’s tape, and the room stopped being his in a more concrete way.

“We’re not shooting anything today,” Adam said, to the room generally, once everyone had found a place to stand. He had a notebook open against his forearm and didn’t look at it. “No performances. I just want to see how the scene occupies the space. Where people are, where the camera is, what’s possible.”

Occupies the space. Derek turned the phrase over. It sounded like something you’d say about furniture.

Zoe was already moving along the far wall with a light meter, tilting her head at angles that meant something to her and nothing to Derek. She crouched by the window, stood, crossed to the closet door, and made a small sound of dissatisfaction that she didn’t explain. Benji had a boom mic propped in the corner and was saying something into it, low, listening to it come back through his headphones, adjusting a dial, saying something else. Noah stood by the door with a clipboard, marking things down that Derek couldn’t see and didn’t ask about.

Everyone moved through the room doing their jobs. Nobody seemed to care that the job, this time, was Derek’s bedroom.

“Okay,” Adam said. “Let’s start with where they are when the scene opens. Derek, Leela — up, both of you, beside the bed. Fully clothed, don’t worry about anything else yet, I just want the blocking.”

Derek stood beside his own bed in his jeans and a T-shirt, and Leela came to stand facing him, close, closer than the ordinary distance between friends, and for a moment it was almost nothing — except that Zoe was three feet away angling a monitor toward them and Adam was watching with the stillness of a man doing math in his head.

They worked the opening of the scene fully dressed for the better part of twenty minutes — where Leela’s hand went first, how Derek turned toward her, the angle of his shoulders, the exact moment he was meant to reach for her. Adam called out small adjustments the way a choreographer might, an inch here, a beat there, and Derek found this part almost bearable. It was blocking in the ordinary sense, the kind he imagined happened on every set, everyone still wearing their own clothes, nothing at stake yet but geometry.

“Good,” Adam said finally. “That’s the shape of it. Now we start losing layers, because the blocking changes once skin’s involved — light distributes differently, and I want to see that before we get to actual rehearsal. It’s mutual — you’re undressing each other, not yourselves. Leela, start with his shirt.”

Leela reached for the hem of Derek’s shirt and drew it up and over his head, and Derek raised his arms to help her, an automatic, almost domestic motion, and she dropped the shirt onto the nightstand without looking at where it landed. Benji adjusted a dial. Zoe leaned in slightly, studying something in the middle distance of Derek’s chest that had nothing to do with Derek.

“Now you,” Adam said, and Derek found the hem of Leela’s sweater and drew it over her head the way she’d done his, down to the tank top underneath, and set it over the footboard.

Derek understood that this was going to keep going, piece by piece, handed off between the two of them rather than simply removed. That there was a version of the afternoon where he ended up in his underwear in front of five people who had scheduling conflicts and lens preferences and nothing more, and that this version was already underway.

“Talk me through the blocking again,” Zoe said to Adam, not looking up from the monitor. “Where’s his weight once she’s undressed him the rest of the way.”

“Here,” Adam said, and touched Derek’s shoulder, lightly, repositioning him half an inch, the way you’d adjust a lamp. “Weight back. We’ll work out the rest once we’re at the bed.”

Derek’s shoulder felt the shape of Adam’s hand for a second after Adam moved away. He noticed this and set it aside, the way he was setting aside most of what was happening to him this afternoon — noted, filed, not now.

They worked through it in stages after that, and each stage cost him something the last one hadn’t. Leela’s hands found his belt next, and his found the button of her jeans, an exchange that had the strange, formal quality of a dance neither of them had chosen the steps to. The leather slid free of the buckle with a small sound that seemed enormous in the quiet room. Adam would say a sentence and something would change — a hand moving to a different clasp, a piece of clothing folded away — and each individual instruction was so reasonable, so obviously in service of a shot Adam was building in his head, that objecting to any single one of them would have meant objecting to the whole afternoon, and Derek had already agreed to the whole afternoon, in his kitchen, over a table read.

Losing the shirt had been nothing. Having Leela unbuckle his belt was different — she worked the buckle with more patience than he’d have given it himself, and Derek stood there being unbuckled and felt nervous, and in an unfamiliar way. By the time his jeans came off in her hands, and hers in his, he was aware of his own pulse, and could feel a low insistent presence at his throat that had nothing to do with cold.

“Last beat,” Adam said, once they were down to their underwear. “This is the one from the script — Leela kneels. We’re not doing the actual beat today, I just want to mark it, see how it reads in the frame.”

Leela knelt.

She did it plainly, the way she’d done everything else this afternoon, dropping down in front of him on the rug, and Derek looked at the crown of her head and understood that there was nowhere neutral left to look. Her fingers came to rest at the waistband of his boxers, resting there, not moving, marking the position the way a director marks a chalk line on a stage.

“Hold there,” Adam said. “Zoe, are you good?”

“Give me a second.” Zoe crouched lower, adjusting the monitor, framing something Derek couldn’t see. “Yeah. That’s the shot. I want to be in close for this one — tight on her hands, tight on his waistband.”

Derek stood very still. Leela’s fingers didn’t move. Manny hadn’t moved either, across the room, watching this with the same stillness he brought to everything, and Derek was aware of him the way you’re aware of a held breath — not because anything was happening, but because everyone in the room seemed to understand that something was going to happen in a moment just like this, and this was only the rehearsal of the shape of it.

This isn’t the real thing. This is blocking. This is math. Nobody’s doing anything.

It didn’t help as much as he wanted it to. His mind had already gone ahead of the room, to the version of this exact moment where her fingers didn’t stop, and he had to work, deliberately, to drag it back.

“Good,” Adam said. “That’s the mark. Let it go.”

Leela’s hands lifted away, and she rose to her feet without hurrying, and the whole sequence, start to finish, had taken perhaps fifteen seconds and involved nothing at all — no clothing removed, no line crossed that anyone in the room would have named as significant — and had still managed to leave Derek feeling as though something had happened to him that he hadn’t fully consented to watch.

He stood there in his boxer briefs in his own bedroom while Zoe studied his waist through the monitor with an expression of pure technical interest, the same expression, he imagined, she’d bring to a lamp she was deciding whether to move six inches to the left.

“Turn a little more toward the window,” she said. “I want to see what the light does across your stomach.”

She’s talking about my stomach like it’s a wall she’s deciding whether to paint, he thought, and turned anyway, because that was the job, apparently, standing here and letting his stomach be considered.

He turned. The light did whatever it did. Zoe made a small satisfied sound and adjusted something on her rig, and Derek stood very still and understood, in a way that hadn’t been available to him during the table read, that his body had started to become something other than his body. It was becoming a shape in a frame. A problem of light and angle that Zoe was solving with total professional absorption, and there was something in the absorption itself — the fact that it wasn’t about him at all, that it was purely about the image — that made it worse, somehow, than if she’d been looking at him the ordinary way.

Nobody in the room was uncomfortable except him. He kept checking for it — a glance held too long, a beat of hesitation before someone spoke — and kept not finding it. Benji had headphones on and was frowning slightly at a sound only he could hear. Noah was writing something on his clipboard about continuity, mouthing the words to himself. It was, for everyone but Derek, simply the afternoon’s work, and the ease of that — the sheer unremarkable normalcy everyone else brought to a room he could no longer feel steady in — sat strangely alongside his own quickening pulse, like two different scenes happening in the same space.

“This is as far as we’re going today,” Adam said, glancing at his notebook for the first time. “I don’t need more than this to block the rest. Now let’s get the geometry of the middle of the scene — Leela, straddle him, just to establish where everyone’s limbs actually are. This isn’t performance, this is math.”

Oh shit, Derek thought, watching her get into position. Here we go.

Leela climbed over him without hesitation, settling her weight across his hips, and Derek held very still and thought, with a growing sense of dread, about the thing his body might decide to do in the next several seconds with absolutely no consultation from him.

Somewhere behind Leela’s shoulder, he could hear Manny breathing. He had spent four days worrying about this exact configuration. He had pictured it in the dark, in his own bed, in a state of significant productive anxiety, and none of that anxiety had prepared him for how procedural it would actually feel — Adam murmuring adjustments about hip angle and camera line, Zoe crouched at an angle studying the space between their bodies like it was a diagram, Leela glancing down once to check her own balance and then back up at Adam, waiting for direction.

His body did nothing.

He noticed this with a strange relief that immediately curdled into a different kind of worry entirely — a worry that hadn’t occurred to him at all until this exact moment, standing directly inside it. He’d spent days afraid of becoming visibly aroused in front of everyone. It hadn’t occurred to him to be afraid of the opposite.

Oh my god, he thought, staring at the ceiling past the crown of Leela’s head. In a few days we’re going to do this naked.

What is I can’t get hard??

“We’re good here for now,” Adam said, already moving to the next thing, already thinking about Manny, and Leela didn’t move yet, just leaned down slightly, close enough that only Derek would hear her.

“I’m not hard,” he said, very quietly, mostly to himself, mostly appalled that this was a sentence he was saying out loud in his own bedroom.

Leela smiled, unbothered, like he’d told her something mildly funny about the weather. “Do you want to be?”

“Don’t I need to be?”

“Not yet.” She said it kindly, settling back on her heels, already reaching for her sweater off the footboard. “This is blocking. Nobody’s asking your body to do anything today. Save it.”

Leela climbed off him and pulled the sweater back over her head without any apparent thought for the last four minutes, already glancing toward Adam to see what was next, and Derek sat on the edge of the bed and felt, for the first time all afternoon, something like his own footing.

“Manny,” Adam said. “Come here a second.”

Manny had been sitting by the closet for most of the last hour, in the chair from the living room — gray, left behind by a previous tenant. He’d said almost nothing all afternoon. He’d watched the blocking the way he watched most things, quietly, and when Adam called him over he stood and crossed the room without hurrying.

Adam studied the chair, then the bed, then the chair again, the way Zoe studied light. Zoe came and stood beside him, and the two of them looked at the distance between the two pieces of furniture with the specific concentration of people solving a problem that had nothing to do with anyone’s feelings.

“He’s too far,” Zoe said.

“Yeah.” Adam nodded slowly. “We lose the eyeline. If he’s back there, the coverage doesn’t read as watching. It reads as sitting in a room.”

They moved the chair without ceremony. Adam picked it up by the back rail and set it down again, closer, and Zoe said “more,” and he moved it again, and the whole exchange took perhaps eight seconds and involved no one’s opinion but their own professional judgment about sightlines and coverage. Nobody paused. Nobody looked at Derek to see how he felt about it. It was blocking. It was math.

Derek looked at where the chair had landed.

Three feet from the bed. Close enough that he could have reached out and touched the armrest without fully extending his arm. Close enough that whatever expression Manny wore while sitting in it would not require a long lens or a careful frame to read — it would simply be there, visible, at ordinary conversational distance, the way he’d see Manny’s face across the kitchen table.

Manny sat down in the chair without comment, testing it, the way you’d test a chair you were about to spend a long time in. He looked toward the bed once, briefly, an entirely neutral, professional glance, and then looked back at Adam, waiting for whatever came next.

Derek sat very still and did the math himself.

Three feet. He had walked past that exact stretch of floor a thousand times, carrying laundry, carrying coffee, carrying nothing at all, and it had never once had a measurement attached to it. Now it did. Now it was the fixed distance between the place where he would be lying and the place where Manny would be sitting, watching, for as long as the scene required, and no amount of professional matter-of-factness in the room changed that fact.

The room was still, for a moment, everyone busy with their own version of the same object — Zoe checking it against her monitor, Adam checking it against whatever was in his head, Noah noting something on his clipboard, Benji unbothered, already coiling a cable.

Derek looked at the bed. He looked at the chair.

Three feet.

He felt something he couldn’t identify. A nervousness, sure. But not a type he had experienced before.

They wrapped for the day not long after. Zoe packed her cases. Benji coiled his cables and looped them over one shoulder. Noah closed his clipboard and said something to Adam about Tuesday. Manny said goodnight in the doorway, quiet, ordinary, the way he said goodnight most nights, and went to his room.

Derek showered and turned off the kitchen light and went to his bedroom. Finally his again. Except for the chair, which the crew failed to move back into the living room.

Later, Derek lay in bed and tried to think through Tuesday without thinking about Tuesday.

He could picture the whole thing too easily: five people in the room, the camera beside the bed, everyone watching to see whether his body did what the script required.

His cock stirred under the blanket.

Derek went still.

Nerves, he told himself immediately. Anticipation. His body knew what Tuesday would require of it, and apparently had decided to start practicing early.

Yup, that’s it.

He pictured the scene again.

Leela over him, close enough to feel the response before anyone else saw it.

His cock tightened.

And Manny three feet away.

Close enough to see all of it.

His cock stirred again.

Derek rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket higher.

Nerves.

Obviously.

You can follow the rest of the story and read more of my writing here.

 

[venicedude]

Turned on while rehearsing a sex scene in his underwear, Derek gets a hard-on. He can't help wondering: does his roommate Manny see it?​

When rehearsal began on Tuesday, Derek thought he had already done the hard part.
He’d survived the blocking. He’d stood in his underwear while Zoe studied his stomach like a wall she was deciding whether to paint, and Leela had unbuckled his belt with the patience of someone opening a package she wasn’t in a hurry to get to, and Manny had sat three feet away and watched all of it. Derek had gone to bed the night before and laid there with the gray chair sitting in the dark, and he had told himself, more than once, that whatever came next was simply a repeat of what he’d already gotten through.

He found out he was wrong within the first ten minutes, and it took him most of those ten minutes to understand why.

Today we’re finding the scene,” Adam said, standing just inside the bedroom door with his notebook closed under one arm instead of open against it. “I want you actually listening to each other. Reacting. Don’t perform being nervous — actually be present, and let whatever is true come through.”

It sounded, on the surface, like less. Fewer instructions. Fewer technical corrections about hip angle and camera line. Derek heard less and felt something in his chest unclench slightly, the premature relief of a person who has misunderstood what is being asked of him. And while it was a rehearsal, it was not a full un-dress rehearsal. He’d still be in his boxer briefs.

Zoe set up at the foot of the bed with the camera, and didn’t say much. Benji checked levels once and then went quiet, headphones on, his face doing nothing. Noah sat by the door with his clipboard closed. Nobody was measuring anything today. Nobody was moving furniture. The room had a hushed, concentrated quality Derek associated with exams, or with the moment right before a plane starts moving.

Manny was in the chair. The same chair, the same three feet, and Derek had thought, walking in, that he’d already absorbed whatever the chair meant. He discovered, sitting down on the edge of his own bed in his underwear beside Leela, that he had only absorbed the idea of it. The chair with someone actually in it, watching an actual attempt at the scene rather than a diagram of one, was a different fact entirely.

“We will start with the bed scene, henever you’re ready,” Adam said, and stepped back, and the room went quiet in a way it hadn’t managed to during blocking, when there had always been a next instruction coming to interrupt whatever was building.

Leela turned toward him on the bed, and Derek made himself look at her instead of at the room.

“Hey,” she said, in the character’s voice, which was mostly her own voice with something quieter laid over it.

“Hey,” Derek said back. “You good?”

It wasn’t in the script. She let it stand for a second anyway, in character, her hand coming to rest against his jaw the way the stage direction described it — and then, so quietly it was almost just breath, “You’re doing fine. Stay with me.”

Stay with me. Derek turned that over even as he was supposed to be reacting to it, the actual line and the whispered aside occupying two different channels of his attention at once. He hadn’t expected there to be a version of Leela underneath the performance, feeding him instructions the crew couldn’t hear. He was grateful for it and unsettled by it in roughly equal measure.

They found the shape of the scene the way Adam had asked — unhurried, letting the silences sit instead of rushing through them to get to blocking Adam could adjust. Derek had expected this part to be easy, a formality before the harder physical material, and instead found himself oddly undone by how much attention it required. Leela’s hand stayed at his jaw. Her thumb moved, once, in a gesture that wasn’t in the stage directions and that he understood, somewhere underneath his focus on the scene, must simply be her, an actor’s instinct rather than a direction, and something in his chest responded to it before his mind caught up with what it was responding to.

“Good,” Adam said quietly, from somewhere behind the camera. “Keep going. Don’t rush it.”
“Lie back,” Leela murmured, in the scene now, her voice dropping into the register the script asked for.

Derek lay back against the comforter his mother had bought him freshman year, and Leela came with him, and the scene did what the scene was always going to do, which was ask her to climb over him and settle her weight across his hips the way blocking had already mapped out, except that blocking had been math and this, apparently, was something else.

She did it without ceremony, settling her knees on either side of his hips, her hands on his shoulders, her weight solid and real and unmistakably there. The position was not inherently sexual — she was sitting upright, looking down at him with the same calm expression she wore for everything — but it was close enough, proximate enough, that Derek’s brain did a rapid inventory of every point where their bodies touched. Her thighs against his. Her hands on his shoulders. The warmth of her, on top of him, in just a bra and panties.

This is fine. This is acting. This is rehearsal. This is —

Leela shifted almost imperceptibly, settling her balance.

His body answered before his mind did.

A low warmth. A tightening he recognized instantly and rejected just as quickly.

No.

No, no, no…

He tried to adjust beneath her without making it obvious, shifting one hip a fraction of an inch as though he were simply getting comfortable.

It was already too late.

Leela didn’t look down.

She didn’t pull away.

She didn’t pause.

For the briefest instant, he felt her body make the smallest unconscious adjustment, the kind people make when new information quietly becomes part of their understanding of a situation. Then she delivered her next line exactly as written, her voice unchanged, her eyes still on his.

She knew.

Of course she knew. She was sitting on him. There was no way she didn’t know.

Heat flooded Derek’s face.

Well… at least she’d noticed.

If she hadn’t. . .

Nope.

Not going there.

She’d noticed—and, with the effortless professionalism she’d shown since the table read, decided not to make it exist.

“Hold there a second,” Adam said.

Derek’s stomach dropped.

Hold there meant exactly what it sounded like.

Don’t move.

Don’t fix it.

Don’t hide it.

Stay exactly where you are.

His cock twitched once beneath her.

Oh, Jesus.

He closed his eyes for the briefest instant.

Leela remained perfectly still, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, waiting for whatever Adam wanted to study in the frame. If she was aware of Derek’s growing panic, nothing in her expression acknowledged it.

“Is this the angle you want?” she asked, as calmly as if they were discussing where to place a coffee mug.

Adam studied them for another moment.

“That’s good,” he said quietly. “Let’s go again from the top.”

Only then did Leela climb off him.

She didn’t glance at him. Didn’t offer reassurance. Didn’t pretend reassurance was needed. She simply turned her attention to Adam’s next note.

Derek sat very still for the half-second it took him to remember how to breathe. And then he quickly covered his crotch with a pillow.

Oh my god.

Did anyone see what happened?

Oh shit. Did Manny see that?

He didn’t look. That was the first thing he managed to do correctly — not looking, keeping his face arranged, reaching for his water like a person taking an ordinary break between takes. But not looking took the kind of effort that told him something about how badly he wanted to look, and not-looking became its own separate exercise in self-control, distinct from whatever his body had just done without permission.

When he finally let his eyes move, carefully, without turning his head, Manny was exactly where he’d been. Still. Attentive. Giving away nothing.

That told Derek nothing, and somehow made it worse than if Manny had reacted visibly. A flinch, a look away, anything at all would have been information.

Fuck me. He has to have seen it. He was three feet away and he was looking right at us the entire time. There is no freakin way he didn’t see it.

He realized, turning this over, that he had spent the rehearsal acutely aware of Zoe’s camera, of Benji’s headphones, of Adam’s attention — a diffuse, generalized awareness of being watched by the production as a collective, undifferentiated thing. He had not, until he got hard, been aware of Manny specifically as a separate category of watching. Now he was, and he understood, distantly, that this was new, that something in the room’s arithmetic had shifted without his noticing when it happened.

“Again,” Adam said. “From where she touches your jaw. Same thing — don’t rush it, listen to each other.”

They went again. Derek tried to hold the scene the way he’d held it the first time and found himself doing something subtly different — monitoring, at the edge of his attention, exactly where Manny’s eyes were, a low background process running underneath the actual performance he was supposed to be giving.

Stop it, he told himself.

Be here. Be in the scene.

It made the scene harder to be inside of, not easier. He’d thought knowing where Manny was looking would help him manage it. Instead it split his attention in two, one half trying to be present with Leela the way Adam wanted, the other half keeping some permanent low channel open to the chair three feet away, checking.

“Hey,” Leela said again, hand at his jaw, patient, waiting for him to actually arrive in the scene instead of performing having arrived.

“Hey,” he said back, and made himself mean it this time, and felt something in the take shift, loosen, become more real in exactly the way that made the whole thing more dangerous rather than less.

They ran it four more times. Each take was quieter than the last, in the way rehearsal sometimes gets quieter rather than louder as people stop being performing and start acting. Adam said less each time.

Again.

Stay with that.

Good, keep going.

Zoe adjusted her angle twice. Manny said nothing, which was ordinary—his character had no lines in this section—but Derek noticed it anyway.

Nothing else happened with his body. He watched for it now the way he might watch for a cough he was trying not to let out, knowing the vigilance itself could bring it on.

After the fifth take, Adam went quiet in a different way — not the attentive silence of someone absorbing a good take, but the more inward quiet of someone working through a problem. He stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the two of them without immediately saying anything, and Zoe lowered the camera and looked at him with the patience of a person who had learned to recognize creative silence.

“Something’s not working,” Adam said finally, mostly to himself. “It’s good. You’re both doing exactly what I asked. But when we get to the actual — “ he gestured, vaguely, at the bed, at the two of them, at the specific stretch of the scene they hadn’t even attempted yet, the part where the stage directions stopped being ambiguous about what Leela and Derek were doing together — “when we get there, I don’t think this blocking gets us what the scene needs. I don’t think it’s a performance problem. I think it’s a writing problem.”

Nobody said anything. Leela reached for the sweater at the foot of the bed and pulled it back over her head, watching Adam with mild professional curiosity rather than concern.
“I’m going to go home and take another pass at the middle of the scene,” Adam said. “The part where they actually — “ he didn’t finish the sentence, which by now didn’t require finishing. “I have some ideas. I’ll have something new for you tomorrow.”

“Different blocking?” Zoe asked, already thinking ahead, the way she always was.

“Maybe. I don’t know yet. I need to sit with it.” Adam looked, for a moment, at all three of them — Derek, Leela, and then, briefly, Manny, in the chair — with the attention he brought to everything, the look of a man doing inventory of what he had to work with. “Good work today. Really. I mean that. This just isn’t quite it yet.”

Derek felt something in his chest lift, cautiously, before he’d fully decided it was allowed to.

Yes! He’s rewriting the sex!

Not the jaw-touching, not the lying-back, not any of the part that had already turned out to be harder than he’d expected — the actual center of the scene, the part he’d been dreading since the table read, the part with no clever framing and no strategic blocking to obscure anything. If that wasn’t working, if Adam thought it needed rethinking, then whatever came back tomorrow might be smaller. Simpler. Something with fewer places for his body to embarrass him in front of five people and a chair three feet away.

Thank God. Maybe it gets easier now.

The thought felt like an exhale.

The rehearsal came to an end. Zoe powered down the camera and started coiling cable. Benji pulled his headphones off and rubbed one ear. Noah asked Adam something about tomorrow’s call time, and Adam answered without fully turning his attention away from whatever he was still working out privately.

Derek pulled his shirt on, grateful for it in a way he hadn’t expected to be, the ordinary fact of fabric against his skin suddenly and specifically comforting.

Manny stood, leaving the chair where it was, same as last time. He said something quiet to Noah on his way past the door, and Derek watched him go, understanding that he had learned exactly nothing about what Manny had or hadn’t seen.

At least the rewrite gave him something else to think about.

It had to be simpler than what was already on the page. It basically had to be.

Down the hall, Manny’s door was already closed. Derek stood in the kitchen and let himself hold on to the small, undeserved optimism of a person who did not yet know what tomorrow’s pages would actually say.

-End Chapter 3-

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[venicedude]

Chapter 4 - Revisions

Monday morning came too bright.
Derek woke to sunlight filling the room at the angle Adam had chosen, the chair still parked opposite the foot of his bed like a parked car waiting for a passenger. He’d never moved it back. He’d meant to. He’d stood in the doorway twice yesterday evening and looked at it and thought about moving it and then he’d gone to the kitchen and poured himself water and told himself it didn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand. Adam, group text: Coffee meeting on set, 9:30. I have the revision.

Oh, thank God..

Adam had said the scene wasn’t working and now there was a revision and whatever it was, it had to be less than what they’d rehearsed. Had to be. This was Adam pulling back, finding something subtler, something with more implication and less flesh.

Derek brushed his teeth and pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and didn’t think about the specifics at all.
---
Manny was already in the kitchen when Derek emerged. He stood at the counter with his back to the hallway, pouring hot water into a French press, and the domestic ordinariness of it—his black t-shirt, his bedhead, the familiar way he held the kettle—settled something in Derek’s chest that had been jangling since yesterday.

“Morning,” Derek said.

Manny glanced over his shoulder. “Adam’s on his way.”

“I saw.” Derek took a mug from the cabinet, the blue one he always used, and set it beside the French press. “Revision’s ready.”

“Mm.”

“You’re not curious?”

Manny pressed the plunger down with a slow, deliberate motion. “I’m curious about what Adam thinks the problem was.”

The phrasing made Derek pause. “What do you mean?

The kettle clicked off. Manny poured coffee into Derek’s mug and then his own, the steam rising between them in the morning light. His brown eyes were steady,
thoughtful in that way Derek recognized—the way that meant Manny was turning something over, not ready to hand it to anyone else yet.

“Nothing,” Manny said. “We’ll see.”
---


Adam arrived at nine-twenty with a messenger bag and the same focused, cataloguing energy he brought to every room he entered. Zoe was with him—she’d driven separately, Derek gathered, or maybe they’d met at the door—and she settled into the corner of the couch with her legal pad and her mechanical pencil and her quiet, watchful presence. Benji arrived a minute later, with his headphones around his neck, Leela came last, walking into the apartment with a cup of coffee she’d picked up somewhere and the same easy, unbothered composure she’d had all through yesterday’s blocking.

“Morning, boys,” she said. “Adam, tell me you didn’t pull an all-nighter.”

“I pulled an all-nighter.” Adam set his bag on the kitchen table and began distributing the new pages. “But I think it’s right now.”
Derek took his copy. The pages were warm from the printer. He looked at the first page without seeing it, still riding the quiet relief that had been with him since he’d woken up, the sense that the worst was behind him and whatever came next would be manageable.

“Okay,” Adam said, when everyone had their pages and their coffee and a place to sit. “Let me walk you through what changed.”
---
“The problem with the scene as written,” Adam said, “was that it was symmetrical. Derek exposed to Leela, Leela exposed to Derek, both of them exposed to Manny. The camera moved between them equally. The attention was distributed. And that’s—fine. It would have been fine.”

“But fine isn’t what you want,” Leela said.

“Fine isn’t what I want. The film is about watching. About the power of being seen. About what happens when someone wants to look at you and you can’t control what they see.” Adam tapped the pages in front of him. “The original scene diluted that. Manny’s character is attracted to Derek’s character. That’s the engine of the scene, that’s the tension, that’s what makes it work. But the way I had it structured, Leela’s character was exposing herself too—she was as vulnerable as Derek was. And that undercut what I was trying to do.”

Whoa. Wait.

Derek’s mug paused halfway to his mouth.

No. No. No. No.

“She should be in control,” Adam continued. “Leela’s character should be the one who decides what Manny gets to see. She’s not sharing herself. She’s sharing Derek. She’s saying: you want to look at him? Fine. I’ll show him to you. But only what I choose to show. Only when I choose to show it.”

“Empowered,” Leela said. It wasn’t a question.

“Exactly. It’s a dominant female role. She controls the exposure. She controls the pace. She should be fully dressed—she shouldn’t take off a single thing. But she undresses him completely, and then she—” Adam paused, looking for the right word. “Demonstrates him. Shows Manny exactly what his body can do.”

What the fuck?

The room was quiet.

Derek’s coffee had gone cold in his mouth. He swallowed mechanically and set the mug down on the counter behind him with a small, careful click.

“Adam,” he said, “what exactly does she do?”
---
Beat by beat.

They went through it beat by beat around the kitchen table, the same way they’d done the original script, but this time Derek’s blood was making a low roaring sound in his ears that made it hard to focus on Adam’s calm, analytical delivery.

Scene opens the same way. Derek and Leela in the bedroom. Manny enters, takes the chair. The tension is already there—Manny’s want, Derek’s awareness of it, Leela’s recognition of both things. Then Leela moves. She undresses Derek. Not herself—her clothes stay on, every layer, every barrier. She takes her time with him. His shirt. His belt. His jeans. His boxer briefs. Every piece of clothing peeled away while Manny watches, until Derek is standing in the center of the room with nothing between him and Manny’s gaze but air.

“Then,” Adam said, “she brings him to the bed. She sits him down. And she—” He glanced at the page. “She touches him. With her hand. Slowly. While Manny watches.”

The phrase with her hand sat in the middle of the table like an object nobody wanted to pick up.

“She gives him a handjob,” Leela said, her voice matter-of-fact. “Let’s just say it.”

“Yes.”

“In front of Manny.”

“In front of Manny.”

“While I keep all my clothes on.”

“Yes.”

The three of them sat with that for a moment. Derek, Leela, the words in front of Manny.

“That’s the scene,” Adam said. “That’s what we’re building toward. Derek is exposed—totally exposed—and Leela controls every aspect of that exposure. She controls what Manny sees. She controls how long it lasts. She controls when it ends. It’s about desire, but it’s also about permission. About who gets to decide what another person’s body reveals.”

Derek picked up his coffee. His hand was steady. His hand was completely steady.
“I’m the only one who’s naked,” he said

“Yes.

“For the whole scene.”

“From the undressing onward, yes.”
“Everyone else is—Leela’s dressed, Manny’s dressed, the crew is dressed, everyone’s got clothes on except me.”

Adam’s expression didn’t change. “That’s the structure of it. The exposure is asymmetrical. That’s what makes the dynamic work.”

Asymmetrical. The word was clean and academic and it landed in Derek’s stomach like a stone.

“And I’m—she’s going to—” Derek stopped. Swallowed. “The handjob. That’s—we’re not simulating that?”

Adam’s expression flickered with something Derek couldn’t quite read. “Leela will be touching you. With her hand. The camera will see it. Manny will see it. There’s no penetration, so the modesty barrier isn’t relevant—it’s manual stimulation. We’ll need to capture the physical reality of it.”

The physical reality. Meaning: Leela’s hand on his cock. His actual cock. Moving. While Manny watched.

“This is the revision,” Derek said.

“Yes.”

“The revision that’s supposed to be easier.”
Adam tilted his head slightly. “I didn’t say it would be easier. I said it would be better.”
---
Leela leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table.

“Let me make sure I understand the character’s motivation,” she said. “I’m not doing this for my own pleasure. I’m not getting off on it. I’m—showing him off. Like he’s something I own.

“Not own,” Adam said. “Something you have. Something you’re willing to let Manny see, because you understand what it means to want something you can’t have, and you’re generous enough—or cruel enough—to give him the image without the access.”

“Generous and cruel at the same time,” Leela said. “I like that.”

“I thought you would.”

Derek listened to them discuss the psychology of Leela’s character as though they were talking about lighting choices or lens selection—with interest, with curiosity, with the particular pleasure of people who found artistic problems genuinely satisfying to solve. Leela’s character was in control. Leela’s character was empowered. Leela’s character was dominant, generous, cruel, complex.

Derek’s character was naked.

Not complicated. Not empowered. Not in control of anything at all.
---
Zoe spoke for the first time since they’d sat down.

“The visual language changes completely.” She was looking at her copy of the new pages, her legal pad open beside her, already sketching something—blocking, maybe, or sightlines. “If Derek’s the only one exposed, the camera has to treat him differently. More focus. Longer holds. We’re not cutting away to Leela’s body because there’s nothing to cut away to. Every shot of her is shot of her clothed. Every shot of him is—”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“More intimate,” Adam said.

“Yeah.”

“More sustained.”

“Yeah.”

Derek pictured it. Zoe behind the camera, framing him—alone, naked, exposed—while Leela’s hand moved on him and Manny watched and Adam studied the monitor. No cutting away. No breaks. No reprieve.

This isn’t happening. This is not happening.

“I want to think about lens choices,” Zoe said, and Adam nodded, and they slipped into a technical discussion about focal lengths and focus pulling that Derek couldn’t follow and didn’t try to.

Benji was already making notes on his copy of the script. “Room tone’s going to be different for this. Less movement. More—stillness. The sound of skin. The sound of breathing. It’ll be intimate in a way the original wasn’t.”

“The original was intimate,” Noah said from his corner. “This is something else.”

“What?”

Noah’s pen tapped against his clipboard.

“Clinical. In the original, there were two bodies. Now there’s one. One body being—observed. Examined. It changes the energy completely.”

Examined. The word sat in Derek’s chest like a splinter.
---
Leela found him in the kitchen while Adam and Zoe were still talking about lenses.
She came up beside him at the counter and refilled her coffee from the French press and didn’t say anything for a moment. Her presence was steady, undemanding—the same professional ease she’d brought to everything so far.

“You’re spinning,” she said quietly.

Derek looked at her. “What?”

“Your brain. It’s spinning. You’ve got that look.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I’ve done enough of these to recognize it.”

“Enough of—”

“Intimacy scenes. Nudity scenes. The ones where the actor’s body is the whole point of the shot.” She said it without embarrassment, without any particular weight at all. “It’s different when you’re the one being looked at. When there’s nowhere to hide. Your face is doing the thing where you’re trying to look fine and you’re not fine.”

Derek’s throat tightened. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. And that’s okay.” Leela set her mug down. “Here’s what I know: you trust me, right?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“And I’m going to be dressed. Which means every moment of that scene, I’m going to be the person in the room with the most control. I’m going to be the one deciding how fast, how slow, how much. You don’t have to perform anything. You just have to be there and let me move through the choreography.”

“The choreography,” Derek repeated.

“That’s all it is. Marks to hit. Moves we’ve rehearsed. I’m not going to do anything we haven’t talked about. I’m not going to push. I’m going to touch you in exactly the ways we’ve agreed on, and you’re going to let your body do what bodies do, and we’re going to make something that looks incredible on camera.” She met his eyes. “That’s the job.”

He wanted to believe her. The way she said it—calm, practical, stripped of any drama—made it seem possible. Like the exposure was just a technical problem. Like being naked in front of everyone while she put her hand on him was something you could rehearse until it became normal.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

She smiled slightly—not patronizing, just warm. “Good. Now take a breath. You’re holding your shoulders like you’re expecting a punch.”

Derek exhaled. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding anything.
---
The conversation drifted naturally into the mechanics of production. Zoe wanted longer lenses and shallower focus. Benji was already thinking about room tone and breathing. Noah made continuity notes while Adam talked through coverage. Within minutes they were discussing Derek’s body the same way they’d discuss a doorway or a window—as something that had to be photographed correctly.
Derek listened to them plan his exposure the way they’d plan any other shot. The angle of the light. The depth of the focus. The way the silence would sound. His body was just another technical element—a subject, a surface, a thing to be captured and framed and lit.

Only Manny wasn’t talking about technical elements.

Manny sat at the end of the table and read the new script and didn’t contribute to the conversation about lenses or lighting or sound. When he looked up, his eyes went to Derek—just for a moment, just a flicker—and then back down to the page.

Derek felt it.
---
The crew dispersed gradually.

Zoe had a class at noon. Benji had to return equipment to the media lab. Noah went with them, still making notes on his clipboard, his pen moving in the same precise strokes. Leela hugged Derek on her way out—the same quick, one-armed thing she’d done yesterday, a gesture of solidarity—and said, “We’ll talk through the choreography before we shoot. Just us. Make sure you’re comfortable with everything.”

“Thanks,” Derek said.

She looked at him for a moment longer than necessary, something knowing in her expression. “It’s going to be okay. You’d be surprised what you can get used to.”

Then she was gone, and Adam was packing his messenger bag, and the apartment was quieting down.

“Good work today,” Adam said. “The revision is stronger. You’ll see it when we run it.”

Derek nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

Adam paused at the door. “The undressing—we’ll block it next time. Just the mechanics. Figure out the rhythm. You’ll be in your underwear for that part, same as yesterday.”

“Right.”

“And then the touch—” Adam’s voice was careful, clinical. “We’ll simulate the motion without contact until you’re comfortable. No pressure. We build up to it.”

Derek’s throat was dry. “Okay.”

“Good. I’ll send out schedule updates tonight.” Adam looked at him—that cataloguing attention, the sense of being read by someone who was always a chapter ahead. “You’re doing well. I know it doesn’t feel like it. But you are.”

Then he was gone, and the apartment was quiet.

***
Derek stood in the empty kitchen for a long moment before Manny appeared in the doorway, still holding the script pages.
“So,” he said. “How are you actually feeling?”
Derek shrugged. “Processing. I need a distraction.”

Manny nodded once. “Okay. I’ll make some pasta. You pick the game.”

Good. That’s normal.

They fell into the routine without talking about it again. Manny cooked. Derek filled two glasses with water and found the game controllers in the basket under the coffee table. By the time they sat down with their plates, it almost felt like any other Monday night.

Almost.

Derek missed turns he normally made without thinking. Manny won by an embarrassing margin, then won again. Neither of them mentioned it. The movie played in silence behind them, and sometime before the third race Derek realized they weren’t really playing anymore. They were just letting the evening pass.

Later, lying in bed, Derek closed his eyes and walked through the scene the way Adam had described it.

Leela stayed dressed. She reached for his shirt. Before she’d finished the first button—

Manny’s already watching me.

Derek’s eyes opened. He hadn’t meant to picture it that way.

Okay. Try again.

He closed his eyes.

Leela’s fingers found the button.

Manny was still there.

Watching.

End Chapter 4. More to cum.

Thanks for reading Redbook. You can check out the rest of the series, see updates, writing on my free Substack at redbook3.substack.com


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[venicedude]

Watching Derek - Chapter 5 - New Exposure
Redbook | Substack

Damon Redbook

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Tuesday’s call sheet said BLOCKING — REVISED SEQ. 14, and Derek read it three times before he understood that the words didn’t get any smaller no matter how many times he looked at them.

He’d had two days to live with the rewrite. Two days of Adam’s voice in his head — asymmetrical, that’s what makes the dynamic work — and two days of doing the math himself, alone, in the shower, in the kitchen, on the walk to his communications seminar where he’d sat through forty minutes of a lecture on audience theory without absorbing a single sentence of it. He’d told himself the shock would wear off.

It had, mostly. What was left underneath it was something flatter and more permanent, the difference between the idea of a thing and the thing itself.

Today was the thing itself.
• • •
He was still fully dressed when they started. Leela stood by the window in the same gray sweater she’d worn to the table read, arms loosely crossed, watching Zoe fuss with the monitor angle. Zoe was in her usual black, crouched at the foot of the bed with a level of technical absorption that made the room feel, for a moment, almost ordinary — people doing a job, adjusting equipment, waiting for light. Benji taped a mic to the headboard and didn’t look up. Manny took the chair without being told to, three feet out.

Derek’s stomach still did the thing it always did at the start of a day like this — a general, undifferentiated awareness of being about to be looked at by every single person in the room. Zoe would be looking for light and line. Benji would be listening for every sound his body made. Noah would be filing it all away as continuity notes. It was a wide, shapeless kind of dread, spread evenly across five people, and for the first few minutes of blocking, Manny was simply one more name on that list — no more specific a threat than Noah’s clipboard.

“Same starting position,” Adam said. “Same sequence. We’ll stop at the briefs today. The full nude pass comes later. Let’s find the rhythm of this first, then we’ll mark the rest.”

Leela walked him through it, undressing him piece by piece, the way she had before — except there was no reciprocal beat this time, no hand finding the hem of her sweater in exchange. His shirt went to the nightstand. The kiss followed it — light, almost tender — and then her hands moved to his belt. It made the same small, enormous sound it had made the first time. She stayed dressed through all of it, unhurried, sleeves pushed up to her elbows now. Her fingers found the button of his jeans, then the zipper, and she sank to her knees as she worked the denim down over his hips and thighs. Derek stepped out of them, and by the time the jeans hit the floor, he was down to his boxer briefs — exactly where today’s version of the scene needed him to stop.

Leela sank to her knees in front of him and let her fingers come to rest lightly at the waistband of his boxer briefs.

“We’ll mark it at the waistband for now,” Adam said. “Zoe?”

“Coming in low from the left.” She crouched lower, adjusted something on the rig. “Yeah. I can hold Leela’s face and Derek’s crotch in the same frame.”

She watched the monitor for a second. “It makes it more intimate. You see exactly what she’s doing to him and exactly how close she is while she does it.”

Yeah. Like it wasn’t intimate enough already.

Derek found a hairline crack near the light fixture that he had never noticed in fourteen months of living underneath it and gave it his full attention, the way you give your full attention to something specifically so you don’t have to give it to something else, until Adam said let it go and Leela’s hand lifted away.
• • •


The second time through, he felt it start.

He felt it arrive the way weather arrives — a pressure change first, then the thing itself. Heat gathered low, his cock beginning to harden beneath the boxer briefs, an event happening to him rather than one he was authoring. Leela’s fingers were still resting where they’d been marked at his waistband, and he saw, distinctly, the moment she registered what was happening, the smallest adjustment in the set of her fingers, not a flinch, just an acknowledgment, filed and set aside.

Manny’s right there.

Three feet. Watching. There was no version of the room’s geometry where Manny hadn’t seen it happen, wasn’t seeing it right now, and Derek’s whole face went hot with a certainty he didn’t need anyone to confirm.

He didn’t look at the chair. He kept his eyes forward, because looking at Manny would mean finding out what Manny’s face was doing, and Derek wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

That not-knowing turned out to have its own gravity. Some separate track of his mind had already started running without him, assembling a version of Manny he couldn’t actually see —

Did he look away, the second it happened, the way you’d look away from something private? Or did he keep watching, because that’s the job, because that’s what the chair is for? Was he surprised? Had he expected it? Was he embarrassed for me? Did it do anything to him at all?

He had no data for any of it. He had only the fact of the three feet and the certainty that something had passed across Manny’s face that Derek would now never get to see, and the not-seeing was somehow worse, leaving more room for his mind to fill in than actually looking would have.

“Good,” Adam said, from behind the monitor, in the tone he used when something was working. “Keep going. Don’t fight it.”

They ran it again, and the same thing happened, faster this time — his body ahead of him before he’d finished bracing for it — and faster still his mind was back at the chair, trying to finish the sentence it kept starting about what Manny might be seeing. By the fourth take he wasn’t deciding to think about it anymore. It was simply where his mind went.

Nobody commented on any of it. That was somehow the strangest part — that his body had now done the thing three times, visibly, three feet from a person whose attention he could feel like a change in the room’s temperature, and the room had simply continued being a room where a scene was being rehearsed.

• • •
“You’re doing fine,” Leela said, during the break, handing him a water bottle she’d already opened, dropping down onto the edge of the bed beside him like they were between classes rather than mid-scene.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She took a sip from her own bottle, unhurried, entirely at ease. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

That was all. She didn’t explain what she meant, didn’t ask what he was doing or why it was working, and he was grateful for that in a way he didn’t examine too closely. No post-mortem. No acknowledgment, even obliquely, of what his body had done three times now in front of five people. Just water, and the small, easy nod she gave him before she got up to go find Zoe about something.

He glanced, once, toward the chair.

Manny was writing something in the margin of his own script, pen moving in small, unhurried strokes, and didn’t look up.

Derek looked back at Leela’s water bottle sitting on the nightstand and did not look at the chair again for the rest of the afternoon.
• • •
They wrapped a little before six. Adam seemed pleased in the low-key, cataloguing way that was as close as he got to visibly satisfied.

“Good work today,” he said, packing his notebook. “That read as real. We’re close.”
Derek pulled his shirt back on and let the fabric settle against his skin, grateful for it in the way he’d become grateful for clothing lately.

Manny left without looking at him, pausing in the doorway to say something quiet to Noah about tomorrow’s call time. Derek noticed the not-looking, catalogued it, and let it go. Mostly.

The room emptied around him by degrees. Zoe packed the camera. Benji coiled cable. Noah gathered up his notes. Derek stayed in the bedroom a little longer, watching the room become his again.

A few minutes later, alone in the kitchen, filling a glass of water he didn’t especially want, the afternoon started replaying itself in the wrong order. Not what had happened to him. What he hadn’t seen.

He had spent the whole afternoon refusing to look, and now all he had were questions. Manny had been three feet away for every take. He had seen Derek’s body respond three times, maybe more clearly than anyone else in the room, and Derek had no idea what had happened on Manny’s face when it did. He could imagine a dozen versions — Manny looking away, Manny watching without reacting, Manny seeing it and understanding exactly what it meant — and every one of them was something Derek had invented because he hadn’t let himself look.

He drank the water. The question didn’t go anywhere.
• • •
That night he lay in bed with the chair sitting exactly where it always sat now, and let his mind walk forward into whatever came next.

The nude rehearsal was out there somewhere, still unscheduled, still just a line on a call sheet nobody had dated yet. No underwear. No fabric left for anyone’s thumbs to mark a line at. Just him, standing there, in front of five people and a chair three feet away. Adam hadn’t said when. Adam hadn’t said much of anything about it at all, which was somehow worse than a date would have been — a date he could count down to. This just sat there, permanently pending, ready to be tomorrow’s call sheet or next week’s.

Don’t look. Just get through it. Do not. Do not give yourself something else to think about.

It didn’t land the way it had the last few nights. Not looking hadn’t stopped him from thinking about Manny at all.

The question that had been sitting quietly all week — did he see — had already stopped being the real question. Of course he’d seen. That part wasn’t in doubt anymore and hadn’t been since the second take. What replaced it, lying there in the dark, was something with no obvious edges to hold onto: what, exactly, was he looking at. Not whether. What. Derek turned it over and found that he had absolutely no way to answer it, and that the not-knowing had a texture completely different from the embarrassment, quieter and much harder to put down.

He tried, uselessly, to reconstruct it.

Every version he built dissolved the moment he tried to hold it still. He had no footage of Manny’s face. He would probably never have any. He was constructing an entire person out of three feet of empty space and his own refusal to look.
But it was coming. Not tomorrow, maybe — but soon, and soon had started to feel like its own kind of countdown, one with no visible numbers on it.

I will be naked. Totally fucking naked. In front of everyone.

In front of him.

No boxer briefs. No mark. Just standing there, entirely open, Manny three feet away with nothing between his eyes and whatever Derek’s body decided to do.

Where is he going to look?

He let the question widen, this time, instead of stopping it early the way he usually did.

My face?

Beat.

Or my cock?

He lay very still with that, the two halves of the question sitting side by side in the dark, and understood there was no way to know which one was true, and no way to stop asking.

Down the hall, faint and indistinct through the wall, Manny’s light clicked off.
Derek lay there a long time, looking at the chair, and did not, quite, stop wondering.

End Chapter 5. More to cum.

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[venicedude]

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Watching Derek, Chapter 6: When I Look at Manny

Derek is finally figuring out how to get through the scene. Then he realizes what happens when he looks at Manny.​

Derek’s car died at the worst possible light — halfway through a green arrow, three cars stacked up behind him, no explanation he could offer anyone for a four-year-old Civic that had never once given him trouble. It took eleven minutes, two dead-battery jokes from a guy with jumper cables, and a full-body sweat he did not need before a rehearsal day to get it running again, and by the time he found parking he was already late enough that he didn’t bother checking his phone to find out by how much.

He came through the apartment door with his backpack still half on, one strap caught under his elbow, keys still in his hand instead of in the bowl, already starting the apology before he’d fully cleared the doorway — and stopped, because the room didn’t need it. Nobody looked up like he’d kept them waiting. Zoe was on the floor by the outlet, sorting cables. Benji had one earbud in, testing levels against nothing. Manny was in the chair, three feet out, scrolling his phone with the particular stillness of someone who’d been sitting there a while and had made peace with it.



“Sorry — car wouldn’t start, I had to —”

“We started blocking without you,” Adam said, not unkindly, waving him further in. “Catch up. Leela, walk him through where we left off.”

Right. Okay.

He dropped his backpack by the door and tried to get his breathing back to something normal. His own room didn’t look like his room anymore — hadn’t for two weeks now. The bed sat a foot off the wall for the dolly track. A stand light was clamped where his desk lamp used to be. His hamper had been exiled to the closet because it kept ending up in frame. He noticed it fresh every time he walked in, the small vertigo of arriving somewhere that used to be private.

Manny glanced up from his phone as Derek passed the chair — just a glance, easy, the kind of look you’d give a roommate crossing in front of the TV — and went back to scrolling. They’d argued for ten minutes that morning about whether the dishwasher was actually clean or just rearranged. Now here they both were again, in the same room in entirely different capacities, and neither of them had said a word about the gap.

Leela was already on the bed, cross-legged, barefoot, in the same gray sweater she’d worn to the table read. “Hey. We’re basically just starting — you didn’t miss anything.”
“Good.” He wasn’t sure he believed her, but it helped anyway.

“We’ll do a run-through first,” Adam said, not looking up from the monitor. “No recording, just blocking. Leela, you’ll undress him same as yesterday — we’re keeping him in his briefs today, saving the rest for the actual pass. Derek, your job’s the same as always. Be present. Breathe. Let your body do whatever it does.”

Whatever it does. Sure.

“Let’s run it,” Adam said.
• • •
Leela crossed the room and put her hand flat on his chest, the way she did before every take now, a small ritual that had started meaning something to him even though he couldn’t have said what.

“Ready?”

“Yeah.”

She pulled his shirt up over his head, and he raised his arms automatically — they’d blocked this, his body knew where his arms went before he did — and the shirt came off. Her fingers found the button of his jeans next, the same small click, the same slow drag of the zipper, and then she was working the denim down over his thighs and he was stepping out of it, left foot, right foot, and the jeans joined the shirt on the floor.

Boxer briefs. That was where today stopped.

Okay. Okay. This is fine. Everyone is being very professional. This is normal.

“Good,” Adam said. “Now the new beat. Leela, come down.”

She knelt.

Not beside him. In front of him, on both knees, on the carpet Derek vacuumed every Sunday, and her face came level with his hip, close enough that he could feel her breath through the cotton before she’d touched anything at all.

She’s — okay, she’s right there. Her face is right there.

Her hands came up and found the waistband. Thumbs hooked under the elastic on either side, not pulling yet, just anchored, and she looked up at him from that angle with an expression that was entirely doing its job — a woman about to undress a man, professionally, for the fortieth time.

“This is the beat where she takes him the rest of the way,” Adam said, from behind the monitor, in the flat, procedural voice he used for anything he considered purely technical. “We’re marking it today. Not shooting it. Hold there, Leela — that’s the shot. We don’t need the rest.”

Her thumbs stayed exactly where they were.

She’s not doing anything. Her hands are just resting there. Nothing is actually —

His body didn’t care what was actual and what was marked. He felt himself thicken against the fabric an inch from her face, and understood, with a fresh wave of dread, exactly what this shot would look like once they did shoot it — Zoe’s lens right down at this height, tight, unblinking, the exact moment his body decided what it was going to do while Leela’s face hovered a breath away from finding out.

How hard am I even going to be by the time we actually roll on this. Is it going to be obvious the second the fabric comes down, or is it going to happen right there, on camera, an inch from her nose —

And is Manny going to be watching that too. Is he going to just sit there in the chair and watch my dick get hard three feet from her face.

He had absolutely nowhere to put his eyes that didn’t involve looking down at the top of her head or up at the ceiling like a man trying to solve for the square root of something.
He looked at the ceiling.

Somewhere underneath the panic, a smaller, stranger worry surfaced — that the room needed to stay warm, that if it was cold when they actually shot this, nothing about him would look the way it was supposed to look, and there’d be no fixing that in a close-up. He filed the thought away as something to mention to Noah later and immediately felt insane for having thought it at all.

“Good,” Adam said. “That’s the shot. Up, Leela.”

She rose, unhurried, wiping her palms once against her thighs. “You good?” Pitched only for him, genuinely checking.

“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure that was true. “Weird one.”

“They’re all weird ones.” She was already turning back toward the bed. “You get used to it.”

He was starting to worry that she was right.
• • •
“Let’s pick up the handjob blocking,” Adam said. “Through the fabric, same as before. Let’s go for a take.”

Derek lay down. His bed. His sheets. Leela climbed up beside him, fully dressed, and propped herself on one elbow, and her hand came to rest on his stomach — the same starting point, the same warm pressure through cotton.

“Noted. Derek, look at Leela.”

He looked at Leela. Her face was calm, steady. She gave him the small smile and mouthed breathe, and he breathed, and her hand began to move.

The run-through was slow, technical. Adam stopped them frequently to adjust positions, to check eyelines, to ask Zoe about the focus pull on a particular angle. Leela’s hand moved over his stomach, his chest, his thighs, never quite reaching where the scene would eventually require it to, and the whole thing felt almost manageable.

Almost.

Because every time Adam called for a reset, every time Leela pulled her hand back and waited for the next instruction, Derek’s eyes drifted across the room. To the chair. To Manny.

Manny was watching. His hands were still on his thighs. His posture was still composed. But his eyes were on Derek.

Derek looked away first.

“Let’s go for a take,” Adam said.

Leela’s hand moved down over his stomach. Lower. Her fingers traced the line of his hip, the crease of his thigh, the place where his leg met his groin, all of it through the fabric, and then her palm settled and pressed and closed around the shape of him.

Okay. Okay. That’s — that’s her hand. On me. Through the shorts, but that’s — that’s actually happening.

He was getting hard. He could feel it starting — the rush of blood, the heat, the involuntary response his body had been practicing for weeks now. Her fingers were sure, moving with the same matter-of-fact competence she brought to everything, and he was responding, filling, lifting into her palm.

Already. That’s — that’s really fast. That’s faster than usual. That’s —

“Good,” Adam said. “Stay with it.”

Leela’s hand kept moving, slow, deliberate, the outline of him clear against the cotton now, and Derek’s breath caught — he heard it catch, heard the small sound escape him — and somewhere across the room Benji was catching it too, and somewhere near the door Adam was watching the monitor, and somewhere in the chair Manny was —

Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him yet. That’s not the blocking.

He looked at Leela instead. Her expression was calm, professional. She was doing her job, and Derek was hard now, unmistakably, the shape of it plain through the fabric for everyone in the room to see, and somewhere in the back of his mind a voice was saying everyone can see this, Zoe is filming this right now, and he pushed the voice down and breathed and stayed present.

“Cut,” Adam said. “Good. Let’s reset.”

Leela’s hand withdrew. Derek lay still and stared at the ceiling and did not look at anyone.

I’m hard. I’ve been hard for — how long was that? Three minutes? Four? And now we’re just resetting and everyone’s standing around while I lie here with a hard-on tenting my underwear.

No one commented. Zoe adjusted the camera. Benji checked his levels. Noah made a note. Leela flexed her hand and resettled it on Derek’s stomach.

Just another day in the life.
• • •
Take two was the eye contact.

Adam had blocked it carefully during the eyeline tests — Derek’s glance across the room at a specific moment, Leela’s hand slowing but not stopping, the camera cutting between the two of them. Derek knew exactly when to look, exactly how long to hold it, exactly when to bring his attention back to Leela.

What he didn’t know — what he couldn’t have prepared for — was the way Manny would look back at him.

The cue came at the two-minute mark, quiet, barely more than a breath. Now. Derek turned his head and looked across the room.

Manny was already looking at him. Not at the general middle of the bed — at him, his face, and then, for one unhidden second, lower, and back up again before Derek could be certain he’d seen it at all.

Derek had no framework for what he was looking at. Something shifted in his chest, a warmth, a pressure, a response that had nothing to do with Leela’s hand.

Manny didn’t look away.

Derek held the glance. Held it a beat past where the blocking said he should return to Leela. The room was silent except for the small sounds of Leela’s hand moving through the cotton and Derek’s own breathing and the faint hum of the camera.

He got harder. He felt it happen — the pulse, the heat, his body answering something that had nothing to do with the hand still on him. It was Manny. Manny’s eyes, not wavering, not retreating, not hiding.

I’m getting harder because he’s looking at me. Because of him.

He held it one more second, long enough to feel the whole shape of what was happening to him, and then he did the thing he was starting to know how to do.

He looked back at Leela.

Not away from Manny, exactly — through him, past him, choosing her face the way you’d choose a handhold on a wall you’d already started falling from. He found her eyebrows, the slight furrow of concentration, the small private rhythm she mouthed under her breath, and he stayed there, and the take kept going, and his body, still thrumming, settled slowly back into something he could carry.

“Cut,” Adam said quietly. “Good. Let’s reset for the next one.”

Derek turned his head back to Leela’s empty space on the pillow beside him. His heart was pounding. His skin was too warm. He was still hard — harder than he’d been, and he could see in the corner of his eye that Leela had noticed, and somewhere behind him the monitor was showing all of it, and somewhere across the room Manny was still in the chair, watching, not looking away.

I looked at him and it happened and I came back anyway. I came back on my own.

It didn’t feel like relief exactly. It felt like finding a muscle he hadn’t known he had.
• • •
They did four more takes.

Derek’s body didn’t get the memo that the scene was supposed to be professional. He was hard through all of them — through the resets, through the pauses, through the moments when Adam called cut and Leela’s hand withdrew and the room was just five people standing around a bed with an obvious tent in a pair of boxer briefs. His.

No one said anything.

Leela handed him a bottle of water between takes and said “you’re doing fine” in the same calm voice she’d used since the table read. Zoe adjusted the camera and said something about the light catching the fabric. Benji asked about a particular sound — a small hitch in Derek’s breathing he hadn’t known he was making — and Adam said “keep it, that’s good,” and Benji made a note.

Every time Derek’s eyes drifted toward the chair, he found his way back to Leela’s face, and every time, it worked. She was still there to be found. Looking at her still meant not looking at him, and not looking at him was still, somehow, a thing he could choose to do — over and over, take after take, until it started to feel less like an accident and more like a skill he was building in real time.

I can do this.

He wasn’t sure yet whether that was good news.
• • •
The last take ended around four. Adam called it, easy and unhurried, like the whole afternoon had gone exactly the way he’d expected it to. Zoe powered down the camera. Benji started coiling cable. Leela climbed off the bed, stretched her arms over her head, said something about needing food that wasn’t microwaveable, and was out the door inside two minutes — the same unbothered exit she made every day, sweater and all.
Derek pulled his jeans back on slower than he needed to, giving his body time to catch up with the room actually being over. His hands weren’t quite steady, in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

By the time he found his shirt, the rest of them had cleared out too — Zoe with the camera bag over one shoulder, Benji already texting someone about dinner, Adam trailing behind still talking about tomorrow’s shot list, satisfied in the low-key, cataloguing way that was as close as he got to visibly pleased. Nobody made a thing of any of it. Nobody ever did, which was somehow still the part Derek was having the hardest time getting used to.
• • •
Alone, he sat down on the edge of his own bed, in the room that had briefly stopped being his, and let the last four hours catch up with him all at once.

Oh God. Is it obvious?

They’d all been right there. Not reviewing anything after the fact, not squinting at a monitor to find it — right there, live, five feet away, while it happened. Adam calling the shots from behind the camera. Zoe with her eye pressed to the eyepiece the entire time. Benji close enough to hear his breathing change. Leela close enough to feel it.

Will everyone be able to tell Manny did that to me?

He turned it over and couldn’t find an answer that held still. Adam had called it good — clean, professional, exactly what he wanted — and had moved on, which could mean no one noticed, no one knew.

But he knew.

He knew the way his body had responded. He knew what had made him harder — Manny looking at him from three feet away, not looking away, not even pretending to.
It was real. And it was confusing.

This is messed up. I looked at Manny and that happened. But I can do this.

Just look at Leela. Stay with Leela.

End of Chapter 6.
Next Week: Nowhere Else to Look

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[venicedude]

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Watching Derek

Watching Derek, Chapter 7: Nowhere Else to Look​

Derek can’t explain what happens to his body when he looks at his roommate Manny. But what happens when he has nowhere else to look?​

Derek noticed that Adam had a legal pad instead of pages, which should have been a good sign. New pages meant a rewrite, meant Adam had already decided something. A legal pad meant they were still figuring it out together, and for the first ten minutes of Thursday’s rehearsal — gathered in the living room instead of the bedroom, mugs and scripts scattered across the coffee table — that was exactly how it felt. Five people having a conversation about a problem, the way you’d talk through a plot hole or a scheduling conflict.

“Before I get into this,” Adam said, tapping the pad against his palm, “I want to say something about yesterday.” He looked between Leela and Derek, and held it a second longer than a passing compliment usually got held. “That was some of the best work we’ve done. Both of you. The read was real — nobody watching that footage is going to be thinking about two actors doing a job. I want that on the record before I say anything else, because what I’m about to bring up isn’t a note on either of your performances. It’s a geometry problem. It’s entirely on me.”

Leela smiled, unbothered, already expecting to like whatever came next just from the preamble. Derek said thanks, and meant it, and filed the rest of the compliment away without quite believing it belonged to him — the reflex of a person who was privately sure that whatever had worked the other day had worked by accident and might not be reproducible on command.

“Not a script change,” Adam went on. “A blocking problem.”

Zoe was already nodding, which meant Adam had run this by her first, in the car probably, or over text the night before. She had the stillness she got when she’d already agreed with something before it was fully said.

“The issue with the blocking is where the audience’s attention lives,” Adam said. “Right now, whenever the intimacy between the two of you deepens, the audience settles into it. Which is good — that’s what we want them to feel. But once they settle in, they stop carrying Manny. He’s still in the scene. But he becomes something they periodically remember instead of something that’s shaping every second of what they’re watching.”

Derek noticed everyone was nodding as Adam spoke.

“The scene isn’t about Leela and Derek,” Adam went on. “It’s about Manny. What his watching does to Derek. And what it does to himself. If Manny fades whenever things get good between Derek and Leela, we lose the whole engine of the scene. I want the audience aware of him the entire time. Even when the camera isn’t on him. Especially then.”

Derek glanced, without meaning to, at Manny. And then glanced away just as quickly.

“I don’t want to touch a line of dialogue. I think the scene is right. I think the problem is geometry.”

He turned the pad around so they could see the diagram — three shapes, a bed, a chair, an arrow. Ordinary, at a glance. The kind of sketch you’d find on any set for any scene, nothing on the page that would mean anything to someone walking past.

“If Leela’s beside him, she’s competing with Manny for the same visual space. Derek can look at one or the other, but there’s a real geographic choice being made every time, and the audience feels the choice being made.”

Derek wrinkled his brow.

Well, if she’s not beside me, where else can she be?

He got his answer, and just as quickly wished the mystery had not been solved.

“What if she’s behind him instead? Supporting from behind — her hands still doing everything they’re doing now, her voice still right there — but she’s out of Derek’s direct sightline. Manny becomes the only thing in front of him.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

“So Manny’s not competing with anything,” Zoe said slowly, working it out loud. “He’s just — there. The whole time. Nothing to look at instead.”

“Right. The audience never gets distracted from Manny. Neither does Derek.”

What. The. Fuck.

For a second the room kept talking without him. Adam had already moved into logistics — feet, angles, whether Benji’s boom would need to come in from the other side now, Zoe saying she wanted a second camera on Manny for the shoot and that Noah could run it once she set the frame – and none of it reached Derek cleanly, the way sound goes soft and far away right before you understand you’re about to be sick. He noticed the temperature of the room. He noticed his own hands, doing nothing, hanging at his sides, waiting for an instruction that wasn’t going to come in a form he could follow. Somewhere in the last three minutes, without anyone deciding to take anything from him specifically, something had been taken, and the room had already moved on to solving the next problem.

Wait.

He didn’t say it. There was nowhere to attach the word that wouldn’t require explaining the rest of the sentence out loud — wait, I need her face, I need somewhere else to put my eyes, please don’t take that away — and by the time he’d finished not saying any of it, Adam was already closing the pad.

“Let’s go see how it actually sits,” Adam said. “Diagrams only tell you so much.”

The diagrams have already told me too much. There will be nowhere for the camera to look. Except at me. Except at my cock.

There will be nowhere else for Manny to look.

They migrated down the hall the way they always did, everyone already knowing their job well enough not to need direction — Zoe first, camera bag already over one shoulder, Benji coiling a cable he’d need again in ten minutes. By the time Derek reached his own bedroom door, Leela was already climbing onto the bed, testing the geometry with her body before anyone had officially asked her to.

“I like it,” she said, up on her knees now, glancing between the headboard and the chair Manny hadn’t sat in yet. “It’s cleaner. And it’s not asking me to do anything different, really, just from a different angle.”

“It shouldn’t change your performance at all,” Adam said. “Same choreography. You’re just facing the same direction he is instead of facing him.”

Derek turned that over while the room kept moving around him, Zoe already crossing to the corner where the chair usually sat, measuring something with her eyes that she’d measure again in a minute with the actual tape.

Same choreography, except the one thing that’s kept the choreography survivable disappears from where I can see it.

He understood, standing there, watching Zoe pace off the new angle, that he was the only person in the room doing this math. Everyone else was solving a coverage problem. Adam was pleased with himself in the quiet, contained way he got when a solution clicked into place — not smug, just satisfied, a craftsman looking at a joint that finally sat flush. Zoe was already three steps into blocking the actual camera move. Leela was testing her own balance on her knees, unbothered, already rehearsing a position she hadn’t been asked to think twice about.

None of them were losing anything.

I stopped it by finding her face, Derek thought, watching Zoe drag the chair four inches to the left and study the result. That’s the whole trick. That’s the only trick I have. Look at Leela, not at the chair. It’s not going to work if she’s behind me.

He didn’t say any of this. There was no version of saying it that didn’t require explaining what, exactly, he needed protecting from, and he had exactly no interest in being the person who made Adam’s clean solution into a conversation about feelings.

“Let’s mark it,” Adam said. “Leela, get up behind him — knees on either side, same as always, just rotate the whole unit ninety degrees. Manny, chair’s coming in closer too, since we’re not splitting his attention with anything else. Three feet becomes —” he glanced at Zoe.

“Two and a half,” Zoe said. “I want him tight in frame once we lose the two-shot option.”

Two and a half feet. Derek did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way his body had started doing all its own arithmetic lately, distances and angles converting themselves into information before he’d decided to want the information.

---

The first pass was, on its face, nothing. Leela climbed up behind him, adjusted her knees against the outside of his hips, and settled her hands against his chest from behind, exactly where they’d always gone, only from a new direction. Her voice was right there at his ear, warm, murmuring the same line she’d murmured a dozen times from the front. Nothing about the physical mechanics of it should have been harder.

Derek discovered, within about four seconds, that his survival strategy had been built on a faulty assumption: that Leela’s face would always be there to look at. He had come up with a mechanical solution. Face there. Look at face. Everything else becomes bearable.

Her face was no longer there. Her voice was there, close and low, doing exactly what it had always done. Her hands were there. The rest of her was arranged around him in a way that left, directly in front of him, unobstructed, entirely and only, the chair.

Okay, he thought. Okay. New plan. Improvise.

He tried her voice first. Closed his focus down to it, the way you’d close your eyes at the dentist and try to be somewhere else through sound alone — the pitch of it, the shape of the words, the small huffs of breath between lines. For about ninety seconds it almost worked. Her voice really was the best part of her, steady in a way that asked nothing of him.

Then Adam said, “Good — now let your eyes go where the scene wants them,” and the sentence was so mild, so purely technical, that it took Derek a full second to understand what it was actually asking.

Where the scene wants them. Where the scene wanted his eyes was two and a half feet in front of him. There was no more front-of-Leela to retreat to. There was only forward.

He tried closing his eyes instead. Adam let it run for one take before he said, gently, from behind the monitor, “I need them open for this one, Derek — Manny’s reading you in real time, the eyeline only works if it’s live,” and Derek opened them and understood that he had used up an entire strategy in eleven seconds.

He tried, next, simply not looking at anything specifically — a kind of soft, unfocused stare aimed vaguely at the middle distance, the visual equivalent of white noise. This worked exactly as long as it took Zoe to notice.

“He’s going blank,” she said to Adam, not unkindly, purely as information. “I’m not getting anything in the eyes. Can we get him actually present instead of just facing the right direction?”

Present. Derek thought about that word while Leela’s hands moved against his chest, patient, waiting for him to solve a problem she couldn’t see the shape of.

Present means looking at Manny. Present means actually looking at him and not doing the thing where I make my eyes into a wall.

He tried holding onto the physical sensation instead — Leela’s palms, the warmth of her breath at his ear, the small anchor of this is a person I trust touching me, focus on that, focus only on that — and for two more takes it got him partway there, got him through the opening beats without his eyes doing anything Zoe would flag. But the scene didn’t stay in the opening beats. It moved forward, the way scenes did, toward the part where Leela’s hand found its actual mark and his body had to answer for itself, and there was no sensory anchor sturdy enough to survive that while the only thing in front of him was Manny’s face, unmoving, two and a half feet away, watching.

This isn’t working.

None of it is working.

He kept going anyway, take after take, each one a slightly different version of the same failed experiment — voice, then stillness, then sensation, cycling through his short list of tricks like a man trying every key on a ring for a lock that didn’t match any of them. Adam called adjustments. Zoe called adjustments. Somewhere in the fourth or fifth take Derek noticed, with the sinking clarity of watching yourself run out of road, that he had stopped being able to tell which parts of what he was doing were performance and which parts were simply him, failing, in front of everyone, in real time.

Somewhere around the fifth take his chest had started to feel too small for his own breathing — a tightness gathering just under his sternum that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with failing at something in front of five patient, professional people. He noticed himself taking shallower breaths to compensate, which only tightened things further, a small closed loop nobody else in the room could see.

By the sixth take his hands had started, faintly, to shake.

Nobody else seemed to see it. Leela couldn’t see it from behind him. Zoe was watching a monitor, not his hands. But Derek could feel it, a low tremor at the ends of his fingers.

“Let’s go again from the top of the beat,” Adam said.

I can’t.

The thought arrived whole, with none of the negotiation he usually gave himself, none of the you’re fine, it’s fine, push through it that had carried him through every other version of this. This one came out flat and total, a door closing rather than a door he was choosing not to open.

No, I can’t do this. Stop.

“Can we —” His voice did something wrong on the first word and he had to start over. “Can we take five?”

The room stopped. Leela’s hands lifted off him immediately, no hesitation, no question. Adam looked up from the monitor with an expression that had nothing performative in it at all — just attention, immediate and total.

“Of course,” Adam said. “Take whatever you need.”

Derek sat down on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor and understood, with the humiliation of a fact you can’t argue with, that he had just stopped a rehearsal because he could not make his own eyes behave. Twenty-four years old. Reasonably competent at most things. Undone by his roommate in a chair two and a half feet away and his own inability to look somewhere else.

Zoe didn’t say anything. She crouched by her bag and did something to a cable. Benji found a reason to check a level he’d already checked. It was, Derek understood, its own kind of kindness — everyone finding somewhere else to be looking for exactly as long as he needed them to.

He didn’t look at Manny. Obviously.

I have nothing left.

The voice thing, the not-looking thing, the just-feel-her-hands thing. None of it works if he’s the only thing in front of me. I don’t have another idea.

---

Adam didn’t crouch down and ask him anything. That, more than the break itself, was the thing that let Derek’s pulse start to come down — the absence of a question he had no idea how he’d have answered.

“This happens,” Adam said instead, to the room in general, in the same even register he used for lens choices. “Sustained eyeline work does this. It’s not really an acting problem — it’s technical. Most people have never had to hold someone’s gaze this long without something else to occupy them. The instinct is to perform your way through it, and performing is exactly what reads as false on camera. Zoe can tell you. She’s watched actors seize up on eyelines that weren’t a fraction this loaded.”

“Constantly,” Zoe said, not looking up from the monitor, adjusting something with two fingers. “It’s the hardest thing to shoot. Harder than the actual sex, half the time.”

It had the strange effect of making Derek feel less like a specific problem and more like a known one — a category of thing that happened to actors, filed and studied, rather than a private failure that had just been on display for five people.

“There’s a standard fix,” Adam said. “You isolate it. Strip everything else out — no choreography, no dialogue, no scene to get right or wrong. Just the hold. It’s a real exercise. I’ve used it on actors for far less charged material than this — two people holding eye contact for sixty seconds is one of the hardest things you can ask a person to do on camera. It’s not you.”

It’s not you. Derek turned that over. It wasn’t, obviously, the whole truth — but it was enough of a door that he could walk through it without having to explain what was actually on the other side of it.

“Leela, stay put,” Adam said. “Zoe, keep it rolling — I want it on the monitor after, so he can see what it actually looks like from the outside versus what it feels like from in there.”

So everyone’s still here. Derek’s stomach did something complicated with that — relief that he wasn’t being pulled out of the room like a patient, cut immediately by the fact that the room now had an explicit, sanctioned reason to watch him fail at the one thing he’d already failed at once, this time on purpose, this time with no scene to hide the attempt inside.

“Manny, same as always — hold whatever’s actually there, don’t perform it,” Adam said. “Derek, just look at him. Not searching for anything. Not bracing for anything. Let your eyes land and stay landed. We’re not filming a take, we’re just watching what a held gaze does, so your body learns it’s survivable before we ask it to carry a whole scene.”

Here we go.

Derek lifted his eyes.

Manny was already looking back.

For a second it was exactly what he’d spent the whole afternoon fighting — the reflexive urge to glance away, to find literally anywhere else, the floor, the window, the water stain on the ceiling he’d started to know by heart. He felt the urge arrive and, for the first time, made a decision about it instead of simply obeying it.

Don’t.

Just this once, don’t.

He stayed.

Manny’s eyes were steady, unreadable the way they’d been unreadable for weeks — no visible verdict in them, no flinch, nothing Derek could translate into relief or alarm. Just attention, fixed on him and going nowhere else. Derek had spent so many rehearsals treating that attention like weather to be endured that he had never once considered what it would feel like to simply stand inside it instead of flinching from it.

Breathe.

He exhaled, but did not move his eyes. He kept looking. Manny kept looking back. Nobody moved. Adam had gone quiet in the watchful way he went quiet when something real was starting to happen in a room he didn’t want to interrupt.

Derek’s chest did something he didn’t have a word for yet — a warmth that started high, under his collarbone, and dropped, slow and unmistakably purposeful, the way heat moves when it’s traveling toward committing to something. He noticed it before he could name it. His breathing changed first — shorter, higher, up near the top of his chest. Then his own pulse, suddenly loud in his ears, keeping a time that had nothing to do with the stillness of the room around him.

It had nothing to do with Leela. She was sitting a few feet off the edge of the bed, knees pulled up, watching this the way she watched everything, unbothered, uninvolved. Her hands weren’t on him. There was no choreography running, no line to hide inside, no scene to explain whatever his body did next — nothing but the plain fact of it: his eyes on Manny’s eyes, held there instead of fled from, and heat gathering, low and specific, in answer to exactly that and nothing else.

Oh, no.

Shit.


The full chapter is too long for LPSG. But you can finish reading for free on my Substack.

 

[venicedude]

Watching Derek, Chapter 8: What is Manny Thinking?​

Damon Redbook

Dukes had six screens going and Derek couldn’t have told you what was on more than two of them. He’d been coming here with these guys since freshman year — Tyler, Dax, Casey, and Jonah, four-fifths of the infield, all of them still on the team with him even now, loose and a little soft around the edges the way you only got to be in the off-season. A wobbly high-top by the rail, a pitcher already half gone, wings nobody had touched since the first basket arrived.

“So,” Tyler said, sliding a beer across the table without being asked. “How’s the movie.”

“Fine.”

“That’s it? Fine?”

“It’s going fine, man.”

“You’ve said ‘fine’ about this thing every day since you started this,” Dax said. “At some point that stops being an answer.”

Derek shrugged and drank his beer and let them have their fun, because they were going to have it regardless of what he gave them. Jonah wanted to know if it was true — that some girl in the movie was actually going to get him off, on camera, hand and everything — and Derek said yeah, that was the scene, and Jonah slapped the table like he’d just watched someone get picked off first.

“Who?” Jonah said. “Who’s the girl?”

“Leela. She’s a year above us, she’s in the theater program.”

Dax set his beer down. “Wait. Leela — brunette, was at Kowalski’s stuff sophomore year? That Leela?”

“I don’t know whose stuff she was at, man, I just know her from a couple classes.”

“Does she have a tattoo of a flower on her wrist?”

“Yeah, she does.”

“That’s her,” Dax said, already grinning, already turning to the rest of the table like he’d found something. “She dated Brad. Like, for a while. A year, year and a half.”

“Brad who used to play short before you,” Casey said, unnecessarily, since everyone at the table already knew exactly which Brad and exactly why it mattered.

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” Jonah said, delighted, dragging both hands down his face. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me all week.”

“I don’t know why that’s relevant,” Derek said, already knowing exactly why it was relevant, already feeling the shape of the joke arriving before anyone said it out loud.

“Dude, Brad.” Jonah said it like the name alone finished the sentence. “You remember locker room talk sophomore year. Guy was working with different numbers than the rest of us.”

“That’s not — I don’t need to know that.”

“I’m just saying,” Dax said, grinning into his beer, “she’s got a baseline. And it’s a high one. You might want to manage expectations.”

“I’m not — this isn’t a competition, it’s a film.”

“It’s a little bit a competition,” Jonah said. “She’s gonna have her hand on you and somewhere in the back of her mind there’s gonna be a whole other data set she’s comparing you to.”

“Jonah.”

“I’m just saying, as your friend, I’d want to know that going in. That’s a kindness. I’m doing you a kindness right now.”

Casey asked if there was a stunt double for that, an intimacy coordinator, something, and Derek explained, patiently, that this was a six-person student production with a four-thousand-dollar budget and the answer was no, there was not a stunt double for that.

“I still don’t get why you said yes,” Casey said, not unkindly. Genuinely baffled, the way you’d ask a guy why he’d volunteered for a triathlon nobody was paying him to run.

“Adam asked me first. Before anyone else.”

“So?”

“So he’s good. He’s actually good, Case. You’ve seen his shorts.”

“I’ve seen one of his shorts and it was about a lighthouse.”

“It was about grief,” Derek said. “Using a lighthouse.”

“Sure it was.”

He tried to explain it properly, because some stubborn part of him wanted them to actually get it instead of just riding him about it, and found the words arriving in the order he’d used on himself for two weeks now — Adam was talented, genuinely, not film-school talented but actually talented, the kind of talented that made people want to be near whatever he made. The production had built the whole back half of its budget around this sequence, half the crew had rearranged their week around it, and he’d said yes to Adam before any of it had a shape, and everyone had kept building around that yes ever since. Pulling out now didn’t just mean pulling out. It meant a hole in the middle of somebody else’s film that he’d have put there himself.

Also I don’t want to be the guy who bails on him.

He didn’t say that part.

“It wouldn’t be right,” Derek said instead, out loud, mostly to Casey. “Not this deep in. Not on a scene this big — half the movie’s basically built around it at this point.”
“Boy Scout,” Jonah said, shaking his head, delighted with himself, and the table laughed, and Derek let himself laugh too because it was, when you said it out loud like that, a little bit insane.

The conversation drifted the way it always did at Dukes, sideways and back — somebody’s fantasy team, somebody’s ex bartending two blocks over, whether the Dodgers had any business being up by four — and Derek let himself relax into the specific, uncomplicated comfort of a table where nobody had blocking notes for him. It lasted about ten minutes.

“Okay, but real talk,” Casey said, tearing the label off his beer in long strips, “who’s got the worse job here. You. Or the guy who has to sit there and watch you do it.”

“There’s a guy who watches?” Dax said.

“There’s a whole scene,” Casey said. “Derek told me. His roommate plays it. Just — watches. The entire time.”

“Oh, that’s so much worse,” Jonah said immediately. “I’d rather be naked. Easy. A hundred percent. I could get naked in front of anybody, that’s nothing, that’s just a body. Sitting there having to keep a straight face while my roommate — no. Hard no.”

“I don’t think it’s about keeping a straight — “ Derek started.

“You’d have to hold it the whole time,” Jonah went on, warming to it, gesturing with his beer. “That’s its own job. Watching somebody’s whole thing is way harder than doing your own thing.”

“Manny’s actually good at it,” Derek said. “Like, genuinely good. It’s not just — he’s not just sitting there.”

Dax’s eyebrows went up, mild interest rather than anything sharper, and Derek heard himself a half second too late — the specific, unrequested defense of it, the fact that he’d reached for Manny’s name before anyone had asked him to — and reached for his beer instead of saying anything else.

“Wait, is Manny gay?” Casey said, apropos of nothing, the way a fact surfaces mid-conversation without ceremony. “I feel like somebody told me that.”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “He is.”

“Huh.” Casey said it like a piece of trivia clicking into place, nothing more, and reached for a wing.

“Well, yeah, but does he get hard?” Tyler said.

He said it the way he said most things at this table, loud, easy, already grinning at his own bit before anyone reacted, clearly expecting the usual groan-and-move-on. And the table did groan — Casey saying oh my god, man, Jonah cackling into his pitcher, Dax shaking his head at the ceiling — but Derek didn’t say anything at all, and the not-saying-anything went on a half second longer than it should have.
“I mean,” Derek said finally. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Tyler said, delighted by this new angle. “You live with the guy.”
“I don’t — that’s not really something I’d — “

“I’m just saying, if my roommate had to watch me do that, I’d want to know if he was into it or just professionally suffering.”

“He’s an actor,” Derek said. “He’s playing a character who’s into it. That doesn’t mean — “

“Sure, sure,” Tyler said, already losing interest, already turning to ask Dax something about the Saturday lineup, the question already spent as far as he was concerned, tossed off and forgotten in the same breath it took to ask it.

Does Manny get hard?

It sat there anyway. Derek picked his beer back up. Somebody said something about the game. He nodded at the right moment and had no memory, thirty seconds later, of what he’d nodded at.

I don’t know.

He turned it over, mildly appalled at himself, the way you might discover you’d never once checked whether a smoke detector had batteries in it. All those days of rehearsal. All those days of Manny in that chair, two and a half feet away, watching him with an attention Derek had spent every one of those weeks trying not to think too hard about — and it had never once occurred to him, seriously, as an actual question with an actual answer, to wonder what watching was doing to Manny. He’d wondered about Manny’s opinion of him. He’d wondered, in the dark, humiliating hours of it, whether Manny thought less of him, or more, or something with no clean name. He had never once wondered whether Manny’s body was doing anything at all.

Why didn’t I ever ask that?

He was still turning it over an hour later, on the walk back, past the bars and the closed-up taco place and the buildings where nothing that happened in them meant anything, and it followed him up the stairs of his own building and stood next to him at his own door while he found his keys, patient, entirely unbothered by the fact that rehearsal wasn’t until tomorrow. It would still be there tomorrow.

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