He’d thought he was hard before, but it was nothing compared to now, his cock throbbing and heavy underneath the layers of restraints. He felt his back muscles bunch and tighten against the tub as he stopped himself from reaching for her, from sinking his teeth into the flesh of her hip where the hard edge of the bathtub pressed it out toward him.
“Perfect. That’s perfect.” Dario beamed, lowering his camera. “I think we’re ready to move into the bedroom, don’t you?”
Lilah released his hair so suddenly that he had to catch himself before he smacked his head on the ceramic. She had her robe on before he had even gotten out of the tub.
Shane knew what that meant: the final stage of their wardrobe. They took another break for the crew to break down the lights and set them back up again in the bedroom. Once the hair and makeup people left his room, he considered going into the bathroom and jerking off to relieve his misery somewhat, but that felt like admitting defeat. Admitting that she still had that kind of hold on him. He couldn’t exactly ignore the evidence, though.
Mercedes stopped by to visit him again.
“Just want to confirm one more time, before we get back out there. Is there anywhere you don’t want Lilah to touch you?”
It was all too easy to answer truthfully: “No.”
In the center of the bedroom was an enormous four-poster bed, covered in pristine white sheets and a billowing duvet. They stood in opposite corners of the room and dropped their robes in silence, like boxers waiting for the first-round bell to ring.
As they climbed under the covers from either side, it occurred to him that they hadn’t been naked together since they were, well, together. The last time they’d had sex, it had been rushed and ferocious, without time to remove anything more than was absolutely necessary. He had to stop his eyes from roaming, cataloging the spots where her body had changed in the subsequent years—filled out, become softer and more lush—not extreme enough that he’d noticed when she was clothed, but enough that he fisted the sheet in his hands so he wouldn’t be tempted to map the differences himself.
She wasn’t totally naked, though. She had on nipple pasties and a spandex thong that were so close to her skin tone that his dick was confused for a minute by the uncanny Barbie aesthetic of it all. Then again, with his Ken Doll groin, he supposed they were a matching set.
They started with Dario climbing to the top of a ladder parked next to the bed to shoot them from above. Shane lay sprawled on his back, Lilah on his chest, his arm curled tightly around her, pulling her flush against him. He shouldn’t have been surprised by how natural it felt. They’d found themselves in that position countless times—but not for years, and never in front of a camera.
It was kind of funny, in a ghoulish way: the two of them forced to reanimate the corpse of their former intimacy, without even the barrier of their characters to hide behind. To his body, it was like nothing had changed. But it wasn’t any deeper than muscle memory and pheromones, the sense memory triggered by the scent of her vanilla body lotion.
He rested his hand behind his head and stared down the camera, as she pressed her cheek to his chest, presumably doing the same thing.
“Lovely. Now, look at each other for me. Let’s see that connection.”
Lilah shifted herself further up his body, his arm automatically sliding down around her waist. When their eyes met, her expression was tender and unguarded. Their faces were inches from each other now, his other hand reaching over to push a lock of hair behind her ear. And that was how he knew he had truly lost his mind: with practically every inch of her body bare and pressed up against him, the thing he was aching to do the most was kiss her.
After that, things got a little hazy.
His back was up against the headboard, his legs slightly spread, Lilah sitting sideways between them, sheet clutched to her chest, both her legs draped over one of his. She leaned forward to nuzzle her face into his neck, his hand flying up to stroke her back almost of its own free will.
“Shane, is that okay with you?” he dimly heard Mercedes ask.
“Mmph,” he grunted, in a way he hoped was affirmative without making Lilah too pleased with herself. When he felt the hot drag of her tongue as she pressed an open-mouth kiss to the side of his throat, he was barely able to swallow his groan.
As soon as she did that, he realized her game: she could tell exactly how turned on he was, and she was messing with him. The annoyance that swept over him was nothing compared to the heat that had been pounding through his veins for hours, but it was enough to clear his head somewhat.
“Okay, Lilah, let’s take it down a notch,” Dario said. “I appreciate your commitment, but we don’t want to get sleazy with it.”
Lilah glanced back at him, lowering her lashes modestly. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. Glad to see you’re both feeling it. Better to go too far and pull it back than try to drag it out of you.”
Shane could think of at least one major reason it would be a bad idea for her to go too far, but he kept his mouth shut.
Finally, Dario and Mercedes rearranged them into the position he was dreading: Shane sitting upright as Lilah straddled him.
She stayed hoisted on her knees, hovering above him as Mercedes arranged the sheets. Once she was appropriately covered, he assumed she would leave a gap between them as she loweredherself down. Instead, she inched her knees forward, sinking down flush against his lap.
Shane couldn’t help but hiss like he’d been burned. She shifted and smirked, flicking her eyes down and then back again.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he murmured into her ear, low enough that Dario and Mercedes wouldn’t hear.
She draped her arms around his neck, dipping her head down until her cheek brushed his. “Don’t flatteryourself by thinking I would find it anything other than totally unprofessional.” Her voice was low and husky.
“Just keep talking. It’s going down already,” he lied through gritted teeth.
