fic: and your skin is something that i stir into my tea (rpf)
and your skin is something that i stir into my tea
rpf. these stories happen all the time; just because you have not heard them does not mean it didn’t happen. anne hathaway/scott speedman. rated r. 3501 words.
notes: i just realized i had not posted fic in close to two months. that is sad, sad times. and i think i have been working on this one for the better part of a month? haha, whoops. anyway, this is much in the vein of every other rpf fic i have written where no, none of this actually happened, but these people are rather hot and i feel like they probably should get it on, idk. also, a long time ago viennawaits wrote her own take on this pairing, a little bit elementary, and i love it to pieces and credit it for why i even bothered writing these two, haha. OKAY. BYE NOW.
you're not going to fall in love are you?
not with someone who’s always leaving.
(OUT OF AFRICA)
You’ve got your guys and you’ve got your girls and you’ve got the connections and the little beginnings, middles and ends they create for themselves.
You’ve got the things that happen.
This happens. This happened.
So there’s that.
-
First, a movie happens.
A screenwriter sits down one day, maybe in a coffeeshop, maybe in a diner, maybe in a cluttered den only he himself is privy to. But he sits and he writes and he churns out page after page of HE SAID - , SHE SAID - , of the exposition, the rising action, a climax, and the fall.
Maybe he was the sort of writer that saved the resolution for last. Or perhaps not. He might have been the sort who started with a vision of the end in mind and built up and up and off of that.
A script is written. That happens.
Faxes are sent and calls are made and something like movie magic occurs and suddenly there is a whole list of names attached to these sheets of bound paper - a producer, the money, a director, a sound mixer, titles endemic only to Hollywood.
A cast is assembled. Auditions happen.
They meet.
Yes. That happens.
-
Before he even read the script, words were thrown around, two words in particular: sexual frankness.
He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. He didn’t think he liked the imagery it inspired. Sexual frankness. He thought of the French, he thought pretentious, he thought full-frontal nudity. He thought Chloe Sevigny swallowing around some guy’s dick or whatever.
He was pretty damn sure he didn’t want to be that guy.
He auditioned anyway.
“What the fuck else you got on your plate?” his agent had barked.
His acquiesce was his answer.
-
“Anne,” she said. Her shoulders were set back and she had a long neck, a swan’s neck.
“Scott,” he said and when he took her hand her grip was firm. He had not shaved in close to a month and her eyes had roamed over the stretch and curve of his jaw and chin.
“Marvelous,” she chirped.
-
Before, what he knew of her was this: her mouth was too big, almost grotesquely so, and one time she was a teenage princess and another time her Euro boyfriend ripped her off or, like, pretended to know the pope, or something, and went to prison and then she was nominated for an Oscar - but not because of the shady, incarcerated boyfriend, rather because she played some faux-ugly drug addict or whatever.
Not bad for the under thirty crowd.
Like he would understand that.
(“You get close to the top, right? But, buddy, it’s like, it’s like fucking treading water, okay? You gotta work at it, you gotta keep moving, you gotta - ”
He needs a new agent).
-
The film is to be shot in Cape Town, South Africa.
He had imagined that Anne would arrive for their flight dressed as though heading off on a safari deep into the Serengeti. He thought there would be khaki shorts with too high a rise and long, pale legs that led down to feet clad in fashionable heels with no function. She would wear a white Oxford shirt tucked in and there would be a hat. He would want to hate her for all of this, the ostentation, the declaration of Hollywood and high fashion and the promise, the threat, that he would be stuck with this for the next handful of months.
Instead Scott does not recognize her from across the airport terminal until she stands beneath the sign for their gate and she bites her bottom lip in a gesture of confusion and concentration.
Her jeans are tight and dark; they hug her thighs in a way he likes more than he would ever care to admit. Her t-shirt is striped, black and white and black and white and faded. The worn cotton clings to her chest, the neckline cut down in a deep V; a knotted red scarf hides any flash of skin and flesh from him. Her hair is messy, a ponytail loose at the nape of neck and her face is clean and bare.
Anne’s mouth slices open wide in a smile when she spots him. She waves. He lifts a hand back and twin clusters of lines crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
It isn’t that he does not like her. He doesn’t even know her. It’s just that there are some things Scott is sure of, and chief among which is the simple fact Anne is not what he wants.
-
Rehearsals were in Los Angeles.
Rehearsals are never enough to get a feel for a person.
It’s called practice for a reason, he reminds himself later.
(Then, then, Los Angeles and the glare - the sun, a windshield, lens flare - he had thought her overblown, he had thought her theatrical, and she, Anne, she had opened her mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed).
-
On the plane, Anne reads from a pamphlet.
“Do you like whiskey?” she asks him. Scott shifts in his seat, his seatbelt still buckled and tight low on his hips.
“Beg pardon?” he says. The shades are drawn on the window next to their seats. Anne sits by the window; Scott has the aisle. First class, and there is leather, oversized seats but still not enough leg room. There’s an ache in his knee that started in Los Angeles and has persisted since their connecting flight in London. He rests his left cheek on his shoulder as he turns to look at her.
“Apparently, the charming resort we are booked at is renowned for its, uh, Whiskey Bar? And Wine Bar? But that’s not what I’m talking about.” She thumbs back a couple of pages and bites her bottom lip, knits her brow. “360 whiskies. Like, I am hardly a booze connoisseur or what-have-you, but that sort of strikes me as a whole lot of whiskey.”
He snorts and smiles into the sharp curve of his shoulder. Anne flips back to whatever page she had been reading and Scott can see photographs of open-air cafes and a beach and he’s pretty sure she didn’t see his grin.
“The pool looks nice,” he says softly. Anne stills and the corners of her mouth crinkle in a smile without teeth.
“I thought so too,” she finally says.
-
Scott packed a couple Hemingway paperbacks, still brand new - their spines rigid and clean, the pages stiff and unturned. He throws a Grisham in, a measurable guarantee that it will be read before any of the other novels are cracked open.
“They’re called best-sellers for a reason,” he once sneered to an ex. She had mocked him, teased him for his reading selections while she sat there with her thousand page tomes of Dostoevsky or what-the-fuck-ever.
“So pedestrian,” she had said.
He remembers: he had not liked that. He had not liked that at all.
-
“Are you in love with him?” Scott asks, his voice canted lower and rougher than usual. An unexpected wind kicks up and he wonders if it will ruin the shot.
Anne has an arm wrapped tight around her waist and a hand raised to her eyes, against the glare of the afternoon sun. She shakes her head slightly, her mouth firm and serious.
He knows that the unspoken question here is supposed to be, “Do you love me?” - that this is the big dramatic scene or whatever, amid all the dust and the brown and the unending stretch of flat sky and dry, aching heat.
Their eyes meet and he knows they got their shot.
-
The dust continues to kick. Filming is canceled for the rest of the day. The screened-in porch off of the hotel restaurant proves a refuge to cast and crew alike. Anne curls neatly in a wicker armchair with faded striped cushions. He settles into the chair next to hers, its mate, and their feet share the matching wicker ottoman. He opens his book.
“You like Hemingway?” Anne asks. She wears those sunglasses, the huge ones, round and oversize, the sort of sunglasses you might find in a senior center, a shuffleboard court, on his grandmother, on women older than his grandmother, the women of Palm Beach, of apartments on the Upper East Side he has never seen.
“Sure,” he says, noncommittal.
“What’s your favorite?” She poses the question like maybe she’s an expert. He can’t see her eyes or much of her eyebrows behind the plastic tortoiseshell of her glasses.
He pauses, plays like maybe he’s mulling the question over in his head.
“I guess the one with the bullfights - I really liked that one,” he says, the timbre of his voice slow and lazy, thick as the same heat that engulfs the open porch, the same heat that creeps in unbidden, paired with the bursts of green in the stalks of thirsty plants and drying grasses.
“The Sun Also Rises,” she says. It’s not a question. He does not acknowledge it.
He still can't see her eyes.
-
Anne hides from the sun.
Out here, her skin stays pale and untouched. Scott does the opposite. He relishes in it, likes how at the end of the day his skin feels taut, rough and baked and pulled tight across his warmed muscle and bone.
He will wake in the morning, throw back the curtains and stretch.
He wonders if she does the same.
-
The film wraps that day. They celebrate.
Their hotel has a bar and lounge on the first floor. The lounge opens up in a wall of glass and ajar French doors. There are low-hanging lamps lit by low-watt bulbs and the couches are a red plush that strikes Scott as out of place.
Anne dances. He drinks. Anne drinks and she dances, but Scott only drinks. He drinks and he watches and if there is a degree of self-consciousness to her she does not show it; either she buries it well, or maybe, and perhaps more likely, she simply does not possess it. He settles into the out of place red plush couches and he watches.
There is something wild about her.
Untamed might be the better word for it.
Later, she insists on shots that she calls Lemon Drops at the bar and the taste is too sweet, too tart as it goes down and he insists on a shot of Jack to balance it out.
Anne agrees.
She drinks and she dances and he settles into the out of place red plush couches. There is a formula at work here, a formula those who frequent scenes such as this are well-acquainted with - there is a closing of perimeter, a lessening of distance between two people.
He nurses a beer and his spine is slick with sweat. Her arms raise and her hips have found a rhythm all their own.
Her teeth gnash into a smile, her knee bumps against his and she dances over him.
Two separate points on a grid, and the line has been drawn; they have been connected.
Her knees settle on either side of his thighs and her hips still move, a counterbeat to the music and he watches, he watches still.
-
They shot the sex scenes early on.
The director referred to them as “love scenes,” but after that week of shooting, Scott found little sexual and even less romantic or love-fueled to be found in the proceedings.
It had all the spontaneity and passion of a routine physical, a game of anesthetized pre-pubescent Twister.
Your right hand on her left hip.
Her mouth on your mouth.
Raise her leg but lower your own.
There had been little thought the first time he kissed her. It was quick, dry and passionless. He had given it little thought, and they were forced to reshoot it a dozen times.
Finally, it was Anne who said: “For God’s sake.”
She took his face in both her hands and her mouth had opened wet and wanting over his and his lips and tongue moved back in kind.
He had not thought then either.
-
She smells like alcohol and girl and sweat.
“I thought you girls were supposed to be better behaved than this,” he drawls, his mouth thick, up the column of her throat, along the whorl of her right ear. A strand of dark hair catches against his upper lip.
There is an undignified start of a giggle from her. She braces her weight on her knees and the curve of her ass brushes against the top of his thighs. His hand fits easy in the crook of damp skin behind the bend of her knee.
“Us girls, huh?” she says on a grin. Anne presses a hand flat against his chest and leans back a little, her eyes bright but still a little guarded. His fingers rub idly up the back of her thigh; his other hand grips the smooth fabric of the couch. The hand on his chest presses firmer against him and then slides down. Her hand slides back up as he inhales tight. She toys with the line of buttons before smiling, all straight white teeth and stained lips.
“So ladylike,” she hums and undoes his top button, the one just below the valley of his throat. The pads of her fingers are warm against the now-exposed skin of his chest. Anne rakes through the light patch of hair and her smiles grows.
She settles her hips down against his and he grunts. He’s half-hard against the seam of his jeans - against her, and that scrap of a skirt rides up even more, he’s half-hard against her, between her legs - and there’s a drop of sweat slicking down his spine. He thinks she has to feel this - he lifts his hips and shifts just a little beneath her and his hand slides higher up her thigh; his fingers catch the hem of her skirt.
Anne leans in. Scott looks up at her.
“Was I supposed to say please first?” she asks.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he breathes and her mouth is too close to his own.
A remix of an old, familiar pop song starts up and out of the corner of his eye he can see a handful of people swaying on a small square of dance floor. No one’s watching here. No one watches in Los Angeles either, not him at least, but they’d watch her. They would watch Anne, all pale skin and vintage couture or whatever the fuck that means anyway - dark hair and big eyes and maybe she is a big deal and maybe he’s not.
It doesn’t matter.
She rocks her hips against his, a simple back and forth motion, and Scott nibbles at her bottom lip.
Scott knows how these things work. He thinks he knows how these things work. They are on the edge here, they are walking a fine line. If he opens his mouth to her, if she opens hers, if they allow the spit-slick tangle of their two tongues - it’s all over. Tomorrow is going to ache enough as it is, a painful hangover as a reminder paired with the heat of embarrassment.
Anne sighs quietly and he can feel the scratch of fingernails against the nape of his neck.
She kisses him and he kisses back.
-
The final shot of the film takes place on a landing strip.
A plane idles in the distance and the propellers beat. The plane is inoperable, a prop, but the propellers still turn and the engine still whirs and the entire airfield reeks of gasoline.
His character is dead. Hers is alive.
She wraps a gray shawl around her bare shoulders, the white hem of her sundress stained a tawny brown, and runs to the plane.
“Here’s looking at you kid,” Scott had muttered from behind the camera that final shot.
Anne looked back over her shoulder.
-
Her room is quiet. The curtains dance in front of open windows and outside the sea crashes against a waiting shore and Scott thinks if he tries, he might be able to hear it. He doesn’t try.
He presses his mouth to her forehead. “Are we really going to do this?” she asks. The sound is muffled against the downward slope of his neck and he swallows. Anne’s hands are light on either side of his chest, fingers skimming his shirt, just below his shoulders. There is a lilt to her voice that makes him smirk against her hairline.
He thinks that he’ll regret this. He thinks he has never really liked girls like her, but he goes with it - he leads with it - all the same.
He knows he will regret this.
He knows other things as well:
She likes it when he bends her in half, legs open and ass perched on a countertop, a desk, a table, the vanity, dresser, anything but a bed, apparently. Her knees bent and braced tight on either side of his chest, bare back arched in a neat curve he can feel with the palm of his hand but can’t see;
She is quiet when she comes but her hands are strong and fight against the firm weight of his shoulders and close and clench around the muscles of his upper arm;
Her bed smells like her and her skin is bright, too bright, even in the darkened room;
They will not talk about this come morning. He will leave early, before she awakens, maybe, before the sun rises fixed and firm, perhaps. But he will leave and she will wake and they both will shower in their separate bathrooms and they both might still be able to smell the other on their skin but neither will dwell on this. They will not talk about this.
Autumn has come and their plane will leave and maybe she knows all of this too, maybe that’s why she asked him, “are we really going to do this?” in that timid and small voice that got lost against his throat.
It was a question she already knew the answer to, but she asked it anyway.
Maybe it was her way of saying to him, “I thought so too.”
When he leaves the sun is orange and trying for height in the open sky.
-
“You talk like you’re drugged,” she said one afternoon. She chewed on a strand of her hair as she said it and Scott had tried to avoid her eye over the rim of his aviator sunglasses.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
Her smile, he had thought, would be cruel on anyone else and he wasn’t sure what he did to deserve that. On her it was merely mocking, teasing but not completely malicious.
“You talk like you’re tired. Like a tired cowboy.”
“That might be the greatest compliment I have ever received,” he deadpanned.
She laughed.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “I thought so too.”
-
There was never an agenda here.
Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes people meet and sometimes they fall in love. Sometimes they don't. It never works in that simple addition and subtraction route easy things like romantic comedies and thin paperback best-sellers are apt to lead one to believe. But it does happen.
Maybe that’s the miraculous part of all of this.
It does happen.
-
Late in the fall their plane will taxi at LAX and Africa will have set behind them.
At the airport terminal her luggage will arrive first, circling the carousel in slow motion, and she will be the first to leave.
They will not meet again until the winter.
Winter in Los Angeles is a misnomer, is misleading, but she will wear velvet and he will dress as though the possibility of snow is on the air.
“Anne,” he will say with a nod.
“Scott,” and perhaps her own movements will mirror his own. Perhaps not.
That’s the problem with people, isn’t it?
You think you’ve got them right there, you think you’ve got them pinned down and each and every action and exertion their body will expend can be predicted and foretold.
People are like the weather in that sense. There is always enough wiggle room for that surprise storm.
Winter in Los Angeles does not exist. Pressure systems can be miscalculated and rain may arrive instead of shine. We can never correctly predict these things, we can merely hope and guess.
To their premiere they will arrive in different cars; they will exchange greetings and pose for photographs and maybe their skin will touch.
What will happen next we cannot say.
-
fin.
rpf. these stories happen all the time; just because you have not heard them does not mean it didn’t happen. anne hathaway/scott speedman. rated r. 3501 words.
notes: i just realized i had not posted fic in close to two months. that is sad, sad times. and i think i have been working on this one for the better part of a month? haha, whoops. anyway, this is much in the vein of every other rpf fic i have written where no, none of this actually happened, but these people are rather hot and i feel like they probably should get it on, idk. also, a long time ago viennawaits wrote her own take on this pairing, a little bit elementary, and i love it to pieces and credit it for why i even bothered writing these two, haha. OKAY. BYE NOW.
you're not going to fall in love are you?
not with someone who’s always leaving.
(OUT OF AFRICA)
You’ve got your guys and you’ve got your girls and you’ve got the connections and the little beginnings, middles and ends they create for themselves.
You’ve got the things that happen.
This happens. This happened.
So there’s that.
-
First, a movie happens.
A screenwriter sits down one day, maybe in a coffeeshop, maybe in a diner, maybe in a cluttered den only he himself is privy to. But he sits and he writes and he churns out page after page of HE SAID - , SHE SAID - , of the exposition, the rising action, a climax, and the fall.
Maybe he was the sort of writer that saved the resolution for last. Or perhaps not. He might have been the sort who started with a vision of the end in mind and built up and up and off of that.
A script is written. That happens.
Faxes are sent and calls are made and something like movie magic occurs and suddenly there is a whole list of names attached to these sheets of bound paper - a producer, the money, a director, a sound mixer, titles endemic only to Hollywood.
A cast is assembled. Auditions happen.
They meet.
Yes. That happens.
-
Before he even read the script, words were thrown around, two words in particular: sexual frankness.
He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. He didn’t think he liked the imagery it inspired. Sexual frankness. He thought of the French, he thought pretentious, he thought full-frontal nudity. He thought Chloe Sevigny swallowing around some guy’s dick or whatever.
He was pretty damn sure he didn’t want to be that guy.
He auditioned anyway.
“What the fuck else you got on your plate?” his agent had barked.
His acquiesce was his answer.
-
“Anne,” she said. Her shoulders were set back and she had a long neck, a swan’s neck.
“Scott,” he said and when he took her hand her grip was firm. He had not shaved in close to a month and her eyes had roamed over the stretch and curve of his jaw and chin.
“Marvelous,” she chirped.
-
Before, what he knew of her was this: her mouth was too big, almost grotesquely so, and one time she was a teenage princess and another time her Euro boyfriend ripped her off or, like, pretended to know the pope, or something, and went to prison and then she was nominated for an Oscar - but not because of the shady, incarcerated boyfriend, rather because she played some faux-ugly drug addict or whatever.
Not bad for the under thirty crowd.
Like he would understand that.
(“You get close to the top, right? But, buddy, it’s like, it’s like fucking treading water, okay? You gotta work at it, you gotta keep moving, you gotta - ”
He needs a new agent).
-
The film is to be shot in Cape Town, South Africa.
He had imagined that Anne would arrive for their flight dressed as though heading off on a safari deep into the Serengeti. He thought there would be khaki shorts with too high a rise and long, pale legs that led down to feet clad in fashionable heels with no function. She would wear a white Oxford shirt tucked in and there would be a hat. He would want to hate her for all of this, the ostentation, the declaration of Hollywood and high fashion and the promise, the threat, that he would be stuck with this for the next handful of months.
Instead Scott does not recognize her from across the airport terminal until she stands beneath the sign for their gate and she bites her bottom lip in a gesture of confusion and concentration.
Her jeans are tight and dark; they hug her thighs in a way he likes more than he would ever care to admit. Her t-shirt is striped, black and white and black and white and faded. The worn cotton clings to her chest, the neckline cut down in a deep V; a knotted red scarf hides any flash of skin and flesh from him. Her hair is messy, a ponytail loose at the nape of neck and her face is clean and bare.
Anne’s mouth slices open wide in a smile when she spots him. She waves. He lifts a hand back and twin clusters of lines crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
It isn’t that he does not like her. He doesn’t even know her. It’s just that there are some things Scott is sure of, and chief among which is the simple fact Anne is not what he wants.
-
Rehearsals were in Los Angeles.
Rehearsals are never enough to get a feel for a person.
It’s called practice for a reason, he reminds himself later.
(Then, then, Los Angeles and the glare - the sun, a windshield, lens flare - he had thought her overblown, he had thought her theatrical, and she, Anne, she had opened her mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed).
-
On the plane, Anne reads from a pamphlet.
“Do you like whiskey?” she asks him. Scott shifts in his seat, his seatbelt still buckled and tight low on his hips.
“Beg pardon?” he says. The shades are drawn on the window next to their seats. Anne sits by the window; Scott has the aisle. First class, and there is leather, oversized seats but still not enough leg room. There’s an ache in his knee that started in Los Angeles and has persisted since their connecting flight in London. He rests his left cheek on his shoulder as he turns to look at her.
“Apparently, the charming resort we are booked at is renowned for its, uh, Whiskey Bar? And Wine Bar? But that’s not what I’m talking about.” She thumbs back a couple of pages and bites her bottom lip, knits her brow. “360 whiskies. Like, I am hardly a booze connoisseur or what-have-you, but that sort of strikes me as a whole lot of whiskey.”
He snorts and smiles into the sharp curve of his shoulder. Anne flips back to whatever page she had been reading and Scott can see photographs of open-air cafes and a beach and he’s pretty sure she didn’t see his grin.
“The pool looks nice,” he says softly. Anne stills and the corners of her mouth crinkle in a smile without teeth.
“I thought so too,” she finally says.
-
Scott packed a couple Hemingway paperbacks, still brand new - their spines rigid and clean, the pages stiff and unturned. He throws a Grisham in, a measurable guarantee that it will be read before any of the other novels are cracked open.
“They’re called best-sellers for a reason,” he once sneered to an ex. She had mocked him, teased him for his reading selections while she sat there with her thousand page tomes of Dostoevsky or what-the-fuck-ever.
“So pedestrian,” she had said.
He remembers: he had not liked that. He had not liked that at all.
-
“Are you in love with him?” Scott asks, his voice canted lower and rougher than usual. An unexpected wind kicks up and he wonders if it will ruin the shot.
Anne has an arm wrapped tight around her waist and a hand raised to her eyes, against the glare of the afternoon sun. She shakes her head slightly, her mouth firm and serious.
He knows that the unspoken question here is supposed to be, “Do you love me?” - that this is the big dramatic scene or whatever, amid all the dust and the brown and the unending stretch of flat sky and dry, aching heat.
Their eyes meet and he knows they got their shot.
-
The dust continues to kick. Filming is canceled for the rest of the day. The screened-in porch off of the hotel restaurant proves a refuge to cast and crew alike. Anne curls neatly in a wicker armchair with faded striped cushions. He settles into the chair next to hers, its mate, and their feet share the matching wicker ottoman. He opens his book.
“You like Hemingway?” Anne asks. She wears those sunglasses, the huge ones, round and oversize, the sort of sunglasses you might find in a senior center, a shuffleboard court, on his grandmother, on women older than his grandmother, the women of Palm Beach, of apartments on the Upper East Side he has never seen.
“Sure,” he says, noncommittal.
“What’s your favorite?” She poses the question like maybe she’s an expert. He can’t see her eyes or much of her eyebrows behind the plastic tortoiseshell of her glasses.
He pauses, plays like maybe he’s mulling the question over in his head.
“I guess the one with the bullfights - I really liked that one,” he says, the timbre of his voice slow and lazy, thick as the same heat that engulfs the open porch, the same heat that creeps in unbidden, paired with the bursts of green in the stalks of thirsty plants and drying grasses.
“The Sun Also Rises,” she says. It’s not a question. He does not acknowledge it.
He still can't see her eyes.
-
Anne hides from the sun.
Out here, her skin stays pale and untouched. Scott does the opposite. He relishes in it, likes how at the end of the day his skin feels taut, rough and baked and pulled tight across his warmed muscle and bone.
He will wake in the morning, throw back the curtains and stretch.
He wonders if she does the same.
-
The film wraps that day. They celebrate.
Their hotel has a bar and lounge on the first floor. The lounge opens up in a wall of glass and ajar French doors. There are low-hanging lamps lit by low-watt bulbs and the couches are a red plush that strikes Scott as out of place.
Anne dances. He drinks. Anne drinks and she dances, but Scott only drinks. He drinks and he watches and if there is a degree of self-consciousness to her she does not show it; either she buries it well, or maybe, and perhaps more likely, she simply does not possess it. He settles into the out of place red plush couches and he watches.
There is something wild about her.
Untamed might be the better word for it.
Later, she insists on shots that she calls Lemon Drops at the bar and the taste is too sweet, too tart as it goes down and he insists on a shot of Jack to balance it out.
Anne agrees.
She drinks and she dances and he settles into the out of place red plush couches. There is a formula at work here, a formula those who frequent scenes such as this are well-acquainted with - there is a closing of perimeter, a lessening of distance between two people.
He nurses a beer and his spine is slick with sweat. Her arms raise and her hips have found a rhythm all their own.
Her teeth gnash into a smile, her knee bumps against his and she dances over him.
Two separate points on a grid, and the line has been drawn; they have been connected.
Her knees settle on either side of his thighs and her hips still move, a counterbeat to the music and he watches, he watches still.
-
They shot the sex scenes early on.
The director referred to them as “love scenes,” but after that week of shooting, Scott found little sexual and even less romantic or love-fueled to be found in the proceedings.
It had all the spontaneity and passion of a routine physical, a game of anesthetized pre-pubescent Twister.
Your right hand on her left hip.
Her mouth on your mouth.
Raise her leg but lower your own.
There had been little thought the first time he kissed her. It was quick, dry and passionless. He had given it little thought, and they were forced to reshoot it a dozen times.
Finally, it was Anne who said: “For God’s sake.”
She took his face in both her hands and her mouth had opened wet and wanting over his and his lips and tongue moved back in kind.
He had not thought then either.
-
She smells like alcohol and girl and sweat.
“I thought you girls were supposed to be better behaved than this,” he drawls, his mouth thick, up the column of her throat, along the whorl of her right ear. A strand of dark hair catches against his upper lip.
There is an undignified start of a giggle from her. She braces her weight on her knees and the curve of her ass brushes against the top of his thighs. His hand fits easy in the crook of damp skin behind the bend of her knee.
“Us girls, huh?” she says on a grin. Anne presses a hand flat against his chest and leans back a little, her eyes bright but still a little guarded. His fingers rub idly up the back of her thigh; his other hand grips the smooth fabric of the couch. The hand on his chest presses firmer against him and then slides down. Her hand slides back up as he inhales tight. She toys with the line of buttons before smiling, all straight white teeth and stained lips.
“So ladylike,” she hums and undoes his top button, the one just below the valley of his throat. The pads of her fingers are warm against the now-exposed skin of his chest. Anne rakes through the light patch of hair and her smiles grows.
She settles her hips down against his and he grunts. He’s half-hard against the seam of his jeans - against her, and that scrap of a skirt rides up even more, he’s half-hard against her, between her legs - and there’s a drop of sweat slicking down his spine. He thinks she has to feel this - he lifts his hips and shifts just a little beneath her and his hand slides higher up her thigh; his fingers catch the hem of her skirt.
Anne leans in. Scott looks up at her.
“Was I supposed to say please first?” she asks.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he breathes and her mouth is too close to his own.
A remix of an old, familiar pop song starts up and out of the corner of his eye he can see a handful of people swaying on a small square of dance floor. No one’s watching here. No one watches in Los Angeles either, not him at least, but they’d watch her. They would watch Anne, all pale skin and vintage couture or whatever the fuck that means anyway - dark hair and big eyes and maybe she is a big deal and maybe he’s not.
It doesn’t matter.
She rocks her hips against his, a simple back and forth motion, and Scott nibbles at her bottom lip.
Scott knows how these things work. He thinks he knows how these things work. They are on the edge here, they are walking a fine line. If he opens his mouth to her, if she opens hers, if they allow the spit-slick tangle of their two tongues - it’s all over. Tomorrow is going to ache enough as it is, a painful hangover as a reminder paired with the heat of embarrassment.
Anne sighs quietly and he can feel the scratch of fingernails against the nape of his neck.
She kisses him and he kisses back.
-
The final shot of the film takes place on a landing strip.
A plane idles in the distance and the propellers beat. The plane is inoperable, a prop, but the propellers still turn and the engine still whirs and the entire airfield reeks of gasoline.
His character is dead. Hers is alive.
She wraps a gray shawl around her bare shoulders, the white hem of her sundress stained a tawny brown, and runs to the plane.
“Here’s looking at you kid,” Scott had muttered from behind the camera that final shot.
Anne looked back over her shoulder.
-
Her room is quiet. The curtains dance in front of open windows and outside the sea crashes against a waiting shore and Scott thinks if he tries, he might be able to hear it. He doesn’t try.
He presses his mouth to her forehead. “Are we really going to do this?” she asks. The sound is muffled against the downward slope of his neck and he swallows. Anne’s hands are light on either side of his chest, fingers skimming his shirt, just below his shoulders. There is a lilt to her voice that makes him smirk against her hairline.
He thinks that he’ll regret this. He thinks he has never really liked girls like her, but he goes with it - he leads with it - all the same.
He knows he will regret this.
He knows other things as well:
She likes it when he bends her in half, legs open and ass perched on a countertop, a desk, a table, the vanity, dresser, anything but a bed, apparently. Her knees bent and braced tight on either side of his chest, bare back arched in a neat curve he can feel with the palm of his hand but can’t see;
She is quiet when she comes but her hands are strong and fight against the firm weight of his shoulders and close and clench around the muscles of his upper arm;
Her bed smells like her and her skin is bright, too bright, even in the darkened room;
They will not talk about this come morning. He will leave early, before she awakens, maybe, before the sun rises fixed and firm, perhaps. But he will leave and she will wake and they both will shower in their separate bathrooms and they both might still be able to smell the other on their skin but neither will dwell on this. They will not talk about this.
Autumn has come and their plane will leave and maybe she knows all of this too, maybe that’s why she asked him, “are we really going to do this?” in that timid and small voice that got lost against his throat.
It was a question she already knew the answer to, but she asked it anyway.
Maybe it was her way of saying to him, “I thought so too.”
When he leaves the sun is orange and trying for height in the open sky.
-
“You talk like you’re drugged,” she said one afternoon. She chewed on a strand of her hair as she said it and Scott had tried to avoid her eye over the rim of his aviator sunglasses.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
Her smile, he had thought, would be cruel on anyone else and he wasn’t sure what he did to deserve that. On her it was merely mocking, teasing but not completely malicious.
“You talk like you’re tired. Like a tired cowboy.”
“That might be the greatest compliment I have ever received,” he deadpanned.
She laughed.
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “I thought so too.”
-
There was never an agenda here.
Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes people meet and sometimes they fall in love. Sometimes they don't. It never works in that simple addition and subtraction route easy things like romantic comedies and thin paperback best-sellers are apt to lead one to believe. But it does happen.
Maybe that’s the miraculous part of all of this.
It does happen.
-
Late in the fall their plane will taxi at LAX and Africa will have set behind them.
At the airport terminal her luggage will arrive first, circling the carousel in slow motion, and she will be the first to leave.
They will not meet again until the winter.
Winter in Los Angeles is a misnomer, is misleading, but she will wear velvet and he will dress as though the possibility of snow is on the air.
“Anne,” he will say with a nod.
“Scott,” and perhaps her own movements will mirror his own. Perhaps not.
That’s the problem with people, isn’t it?
You think you’ve got them right there, you think you’ve got them pinned down and each and every action and exertion their body will expend can be predicted and foretold.
People are like the weather in that sense. There is always enough wiggle room for that surprise storm.
Winter in Los Angeles does not exist. Pressure systems can be miscalculated and rain may arrive instead of shine. We can never correctly predict these things, we can merely hope and guess.
To their premiere they will arrive in different cars; they will exchange greetings and pose for photographs and maybe their skin will touch.
What will happen next we cannot say.
-
fin.