Bryn’s hand came up to rest just above her own heart, her fingers pressing against her collarbone as if to hold herself together. Her breath hitched, a soft, broken sound.
“I’m scared,” Bryn admitted, voice breathtakingly shattered.
“Me too,” Vivian confessed, heart hammering and eyes watering. She didn’t mark the audio even though her voice was so raw she wasn’t sure her delivery had been clear enough. The magic of the moment would break if Vivian dared to look away. Dared to leave Bryn’s magnetic orbit. “But that’s why I’m so sure this is right. Fake things are never worth fearing,” she whispered before Jo kissed Maggie again.
Vivian watched, mesmerized, as Bryn narrated the culmination of so much waiting. So much wanting. Maggie and Jo moved in a blur of desire into a backroom that barely doubled as an office. They stumbled, a tangle of limbs and frantic fingers pulling at clothes and fumbling with buttons on jeans.
Clenching her hands at her sides, Vivian felt it. Felt a phantom grip on her shirt, the press of a body against hers, the dizzying sensation of being pulled somewhere unknown but desperately wanted. Bryn’s words were a current and Vivian was willingly diving into the riptide.
“The edge of the old desk hit the small of Maggie’s back,” Bryn breathed, a soft gasp escaping her lips. Her head tilted back, exposing the long, elegant line of her throat. “Solid. Real. It should have been an anchor, but all Maggie felt was the storm of Jo’s kiss. The lashing of her lips and the undulating rhythm of her tongue.”
Trying and failing, Vivian couldn’t catch her breath. She hadn’t kissed anyone with bone-melting passion in a long time, but she was in the backroom. She was Jo showing Maggie with actions everything words couldn’t capture.
Vivian was captivated while Bryn wove something devastating. Janet had performed the scene with a competent, technical heat, but Bryn had found some new dimension. She was embodying the feeling of emotional surrender and physical desire with a nuance Vivian hadn’t seen hidden in Montoya’s words. It wasn’t just lust. It was the terrifying, exhilarating relief of being truly seen. It was being disassembled only to be rebuilt.
The heat in the booth was palpable. It was a living thing radiating from Bryn and seeping into Vivian’s skin.
“Jo’s fingers weren’t just unbuttoning Maggie’s jeans while she pressed her to the desk,” Bryn narrated, voice low and deep and sliding down Vivian’s spine. “They were painting an ancient code on Maggie’s abdomen, her hip, her navel. The secret key effortlessly brought down her carefully constructed barriers. Each touch was a promise she was terrified to trust and yet,” Bryn breathed, adding a perfectly timed pause, “there Maggie was, succumbing to her own glorious ruin.”
Vivian couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see Maggie. There was only Bryn. Bryn with flushed skin and a furrowed brow and the ache of desire wrapped around every word.
“When Jo’s mouth left hers to trace a fiery path down her throat, Maggie’s head fell back. Exposed, all Maggie could do was beg for more. For Jo to take until there was nothing left.” Bryn’s voice was breathy, laced with a tremor that sounded too real. “Her hands fisted in Jo’s shirt, holding on as if the world had tilted on its axis and Jo was the only thing keeping her from spinning into the freezing, empty darkness of space. Jo was light and heat and hope and Maggie couldn’t help but burn.”
Liquid heat pooled low in Vivian’s belly. It was an unwelcome sensation. She’d performed countless scenes like this, her voice a tool she wielded with precision and control. But she was a spectator now, and the scene was unfolding not just in her ears, but in the space between her and the woman across from her. Bryn wasn’t reading words from a page. She was bleeding them. Pouring all of Maggie’s desire straight into the microphone at the expense of Vivian’s nervous system.
“And then Jo’s hand was in her jeans,” Bryn muttered. “Slipping beneath the waistband of her underwear. Maggie gasped, not so much at Jo’s light touch, but at her reaction. Forehead on Maggie’s shoulder, Jo was openly overwhelmed when she found Maggie dripping with arousal. To be wanted so desperately was more addictive than being touched.”
Bryn gasped, too. A soft, sharp intake of air. The sound of pure, unveiled want. Vivian couldn’t absorb it. Her pulse raced in her throat like a trapped bird desperately trying to flee its cage. Each slam of its wings created a fault line. Cracks spread over a crumbling edifice.
“You’re so beautiful,” Vivian whispered, sounding too much like herself and not enough like Jo.
When Bryn’s eyes met hers again, they were the dark blue of a storm-tossed sea. They didn’t hide a thing. The vulnerability, the nerves, the raw, unfiltered desire Bryn was pouring into Maggie. But there was something else, too. A flicker of something that wasn’t for Jo.
The eye contact shattered what little remained of Vivian’s control. She was floating outside of her body when she read Jo’s dialogue. “I’ve got you,” she promised. “Let go,” she muttered, mouth dry and chest heaving.
“Maggie couldn’t speak,” Bryn continued, her voice barely a whisper. An impressionist’s version of sound. “She could only feel. The scrape of denim as Jo pushed her jeans down her thighs. The shockingly cool air on her heated skin. And then, the pressure of Jo’s fingers finding her, parting her, learning the rhythm of her body so fast. Or maybe they’d been destined to fit. A missing key when Maggie didn’t know there’d been a lock.”
Vivian gripped the edge of her tablet stand, but she couldn’t steady herself. She was swept up in the symphony, a single, resonant note vibrating with unbearable intensity. By the soft whimpers and held breaths of Bryn’s performance. While Bryn weaved her spell, all Vivian could do was watch. To experience the sound of a woman letting go. Witness a surrender Vivian hadn’t allowed herself in decades, if ever.
“‘Please,’ Maggie begged, the word a shard of her broken pride,” Bryn’s voice cracking onplease.
Vivian’s body lurched toward the plea, held breath burning in her lungs. Hands aching to reach for Bryn. To give her anything she asked for in that desperate tone.
“Maggie wasn’t sure what she was asking for. For Jo to stop. For her never to stop.”
Don’t stop, Vivian shouted in her mind. Thought it so loudly she was terrified she’d spoken it. She wanted to hear more. She needed to hear the culmination. Hear the release in Bryn’s voice that she knew would be as devastating as the build-up. It was a craving, as unstoppable and primal as the intrinsic need to stay alive.
Bryn’s final words were a raw, frantic whisper. She was heaving shoulders and ragged breaths. She was Maggie clinging to Jo and begging her to stay so deep inside her she’d never feel anything else.
And then there was nothing but disorienting silence.
A silence so deep and profound, Vivian worried her microphone might pick up her pounding heartbeat. But it was hard to make herself move when the air was so thick. So charged with the lingering echo of what they had just created. Of what Bryn had just unleashed.
When Bryn looked at her again, face flushed and eyes glassy and unfocused, she was achingly beautiful. While Vivian watched, Bryn’s expression changed. A wave of vulnerability washed over her, so raw it felt like a physical blow. It was the dawning awareness of a performer realizing she was not alone.
Vivian couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. It was too much.
The more she and Bryn looked at each other in charged silence, the more Vivian felt like she was standing on the rubble of a castle. Exposed and defenseless.
