Chapter 2: Julia Meets Nigel

The dream shifted. The room dissolved and re-formed — different walls, different light, the same woman at the center of it, her phone in her hand and a decision taking shape in the pit of her stomach.

By four-thirty that afternoon, Julia had managed to convince herself at least six different times that she was fine.

The seventh attempt failed somewhere between her apartment and her kitchen table, where she sat with her phone and the increasingly unavoidable arithmetic of what she had agreed to.

She opened Steven’s contact and typed before she could talk herself out of it.

Who judges whether something counts?

The answer came remarkably quickly.

I do.

Julia laughed.

You’re joking.

No. I’ll be behind the observation glass. You won’t even see me.

Another message followed.

Unless you spend the whole hour thinking about me.

Julia stared at that one a fraction longer than she intended. She typed harder than necessary.

You designed the game. You’re putting money into it. And eventually you’re one of the men in the room. You think I’m letting YOU be final arbiter? Come on.

Steven took longer this time.

What do you suggest?

Then:

You want even more eyes on you during this? Thought you wanted it private.

Julia’s mouth tightened. He had a point, and she hated that he had a point.

She typed:

So your solution is just “trust me”?

Steven:

My solution is that I have no incentive to cheat you. I want you to finish the three sessions just as badly as you do. Maybe more. If I start screwing you on calls, you walk and I never get mine.

Julia read it twice. There was something about I never get mine that made the words feel less administrative than they had any right to.

She tried another angle.

Okay. What about your session?

What about it?

Your incentive disappears. It’s the last one. Suppose you make a bad-faith call then. I can’t threaten to walk away from your session because I’m already in it.

For nearly a minute there was nothing. Then:

Look. At some point we have to trust each other.

I don’t trust you AT ALL.

I know.

That answer quieted her. Another message appeared.

We can argue over every close call until we’re both dead. But there’s no version of this where you engineer every ounce of danger out of it.

And:

Anything sexual has danger in it, Julia. You know that. You either accept that and agree or you don’t.

Julia sat at the kitchen table and stared at her phone.

She thought about the money. Three hundred thousand dollars. Her parents’ faces when they talked about the business, the careful way they avoided numbers, the tightness around her mother’s mouth that had become permanent sometime around Julia’s twenty-second birthday. She thought about three massage sessions — three hours total, against a debt that had been quietly suffocating her family for five years.

She thought about Steven’s hands on her that morning. About the way her body was still replaying things she hadn’t given it permission to replay.

She thought about what he’d said: there’s no version of this where you engineer every ounce of danger out of it.

The infuriating thing was that he was right. Not because the argument was morally sound — it wasn’t, and she could hear the self-serving machinery grinding beneath every sentence — but because it was factually accurate. She could add rules, add observers, add cameras, add lawyers, and at some point she would still be alone in a room with a man whose self-control was the only thing between her and whatever he wanted to do. Rules got you most of the way. They didn’t get you all the way.

The question was whether she could live in the gap.

She’d asked him point-blank during the meeting whether the role was contingent on any of this. He’d said no, and she’d believed him — not because Steven was a good man, but because Steven was a man who kept his leverage organized. He wouldn’t muddy a clean debt with a messy threat. The role was hers. The debt was separate. What he was offering was a way to settle the debt that happened to involve her body, his voyeurism, and three men on a massage table. She could walk away from the proposition and still shoot the show. She just couldn’t walk away from the debt.

Steven had a reputation in the industry. Not a good one, exactly — nobody with that much power and that little interest in disguising his appetites earned a good reputation. But the people who had worked with him, even the ones who disliked him, tended to say the same thing: Steven was a bastard, but he was a bastard who kept his word. He didn’t cheat on deals. He didn’t renege on agreements. He screwed people in the ways he’d told them he would screw them, which was, Julia supposed, a form of integrity available only to men with enough money to afford the luxury of honesty.

She picked up her phone.

Fine.

Steven:

Yeah?

Don’t make me regret it.

His reply came after a pause just long enough to suggest he’d considered several responses and discarded the worst ones.

Wouldn’t dream of it.

Julia set the phone on the table and stared at the ceiling.

She was going to do this. She was going to walk into a room with a stranger, let him lie on a table, and spend an hour trying to make him want her badly enough to act on it — while Steven watched from behind a pane of glass, holding the scorecard and the debt and whatever else he held that she hadn’t fully catalogued yet.

She was going to do this because three hundred thousand dollars was three hundred thousand dollars, and because the alternative was another five years of watching her family drown in slow motion, and because — if she was being honest with herself, which she was trying very hard not to be — some part of her that she did not intend to examine tonight wanted to know what would happen.

She got up from the table and went to bed. She did not sleep well.

The first day of shooting began in a confusion of cables, coffee cups, half-built walls and people shouting questions toward other people who were pretending not to hear them. The soundstage was already hot beneath the lamps. Electricians crossed behind the false bedroom set with coils of black cable slung over their shoulders; someone was arguing about gels; a production assistant hurried past carrying three Styrofoam cups and an expression of advanced despair.

Nigel stood beside the camera discussing a lens change.

Then Julia stepped out of wardrobe.

Nothing stopped. That was the strange part. The soundstage continued functioning: a grip rolled a stand past the doorway, somebody called for a replacement flag, and a carpenter drove two quick screws into the back of a flat.

And yet the room changed.

Not dramatically. Just enough.

A conversation near the lighting cart stumbled. One of the camera assistants looked up, forgot what he was doing for approximately one second, and then looked down with tremendous professional concentration at something that did not require professional concentration.

Julia noticed. Naturally.

The costume department had put her character in a brown satin chemise, ostensibly because the scene took place late at night.

On another woman, it might have looked delicate.

On Julia, delicate was not the word.

The satin clung to her exaggerated hourglass figure with a liquid softness, smooth over her hips, drawing sharply inward at her tiny waist before sweeping outward again over a bust the garment had absolutely no hope of making discreet. Two whisper-thin spaghetti straps rose over her shoulders, doing almost nothing visually to support the spectacular fullness beneath them, while the neckline plunged into a deep V edged with fine lace. The slip was a masterpiece of calculated vulnerability. It was thin enough to cling to every curve, sheer enough to hint at the dark lace of her bra, and loose enough in the front to make the tied knot look like it was holding on by a thread.

It did not conceal Julia’s breasts so much as frame them.

The satin stretched sleekly over their forward curves before disappearing into the deep valley of her cleavage. There was no molded cup imposing an artificial shape, no heavy padding creating stiff symmetry. The thin material followed what was already there.

That made the effect worse.

Or better, depending upon who was looking.

Julia took three steps onto the soundstage, and the soft weight beneath the satin answered each one. Her breasts did not swing loosely or hang; they sat far too high for that. Instead they shifted together with a dense, supple heaviness, rose fractionally with her stride, and settled again in a small, unmistakably natural jiggle that traveled through the glossy fabric.

The movement was subtle.

It was also almost impossible not to notice once noticed.

Light from the stage lamps slid across the satin, outlining the generous upper curves and the plunging cleavage between them. Even the faint points of her nipples remained visible through the thin material, lending an intimate edge to what technically remained a perfectly legitimate piece of wardrobe.

Julia glanced down at herself. Wardrobe had done this on purpose.

She was certain of it.

She adjusted one strap with two fingers. The tiny motion subtly lifted one side of the neckline before the satin slipped back into place across the heavy curve beneath it.

Across the stage, somebody dropped something metallic. There was a brief clang.

Julia looked up. A young lighting technician immediately became very interested in the floor.

Her mouth twitched. She continued walking.

The effect followed her across the soundstage like a pressure change. Men looked and then remembered not to look. Some were better at the remembering part than others.

It was not merely that Julia was beautiful. Sets were full of beautiful women. Actors were supposed to be beautiful.

The problem was proportion.

The chemise exposed enough of Julia’s upper body to make the contrast almost absurd: all that soft, impossible weight carried above a waist that had no business supporting it. Every time she moved, the satin registered the slight physical consequences. A turn of her shoulders changed the shape of her cleavage. A step produced a soft settling motion. A deeper breath gently lifted the neckline.

There was no way for the eye to look at the garment without becoming aware of what filled it.

Julia passed two crew members standing beside a rack of equipment. They were speaking quietly enough that they clearly believed themselves inaudible.

They were mistaken.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” one murmured.

His companion made a tiny disbelieving sound. “I know.”

“Where the fuck did they find her?”

“Casting, presumably.”

“No, seriously. Look at her.”

“I am trying very hard not to.”

Julia kept walking at precisely the same pace.

There was a pause behind her. She took another few deliberately unhurried steps. The chemise whispered over her thighs. The soft fullness beneath the neckline shifted and settled.

“Those cannot be real,” the first man whispered.

“Yeah but look at how they move. I really think they’re real.”

“How the hell do natural tits that big sit that high?”

“Genetics?”

“Witchcraft.”

His companion suppressed a laugh. “Those straps deserve hazard pay.”

Julia bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself laughing. She should probably have been offended. Instead, some shameless little part of her enjoyed knowing exactly what had derailed them.

She had spent years learning that being looked at and being diminished were not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes she could make the looking work for her.

Today, the attention felt like power. A shallow kind, perhaps.

Still power.

She walked toward the set with her shoulders comfortably back rather than curling inward to make herself smaller. The posture deepened the neckline another fractional degree, displaying the extravagant swell above it. Several more heads turned.

Nothing theatrical. Nothing that would have survived confrontation. Just tiny betrayals.

A boom operator paused while adjusting his headphones. An assistant director glanced over twice. One of the grips gave another man a look that contained an entire silent conversation.

Near the craft services table, a heavyset man in a black T-shirt with smudged glasses and a sheen of perspiration at his temples had stopped chewing mid-Dorito to stare at her. Unlike the others, who at least performed the courtesy of pretending they hadn’t been looking, this one simply stood there with his mouth slightly open, the orange dust on his fingertips catching the stage light, gazing at her chest with the unblinking absorption of a man who had encountered something he’d previously believed to be theoretical.

Julia kept walking. By the time she reached the far side of the stage, the accumulated weight of every turned head, dropped sentence, and pair of eyes that had forgotten to come back up had settled over her like a change in air pressure, and she felt warmth rise into her face despite herself. The attention was embarrassing.

The attention was gratifying.

Those two things, she was beginning to realize, could occupy exactly the same inch of skin.

The chemise whispered against her thighs as she walked. Beneath the thin satin, her body moved with her rather than remaining decorously still, and she could feel the tiny answering weight of her breasts shifting with each step.

She reached her mark beside the bed.

Nigel finally looked away from the camera.

He looked at her. Steven had shown him the DVD — the brief guest spot where Julia had played a lingerie-clad stripper, the performance that had apparently persuaded Steven to restructure a woman’s family debt into a parlor game. On screen she had been striking — the kind of body that made you rewind a scene you hadn’t been paying attention to and watch it again with considerably more focus. He had understood, watching the DVD, why Steven had designed an elaborate wager around this woman. What he had not understood, until this precise moment, was that a television screen had been doing her an injustice so profound it bordered on defamation.