Living the Role

Content Warning:This Chapter contains mature sexual content and explicit intimate scenes between adult characters. Reader discretion is advised.

The moon sat high enough to come down through the broken roof of the barn and lay itself across the straw, and that was the whole reason the production had put the scene at night. No lamp gave you that. It fell where it fell and it made the place look like nowhere else.

Ronan stayed quiet a while longer. Whatever had been sitting on his shoulders had gone out with the smoke, and when he finally answered Rose, it was her worry he answered.

"I’m still getting used to all of it, Rose. I keep telling you and you don’t fully believe me, but I am from the future, and I’m a dangerous man." He turned the tobacco over in his fingers. "My life doesn’t have a direction. I’m not looking for one either. I’m lost, that’s all there is to it."

He looked up at the moon and laughed once, low.

"And right when I thought I couldn’t get any more lost than I already was, something shoved me into the eighteenth century. It’s a damn mess."

Jane listened and said nothing.

Some of it was in the script. A great deal of it was not, and she caught that almost at once, because she knew the pages as well as anyone on the production and those were not the pages. She let it run. The camera was still turning, and beyond that she wanted to hear the rest of it, the rough voice with all that struggle sitting under it, saying things nobody had written down.

"An ordinary man out of the future would come apart in a place like this. No internet. Nothing to entertain him." He drew on the tobacco again. "But it can’t break me. I came here broken."

Then he looked at her.

"I didn’t care about a single thing in this world. Not one. That held right up until I came to know you." His voice came down. "Meeting you was nothing. An ordinary day. But then I learned what you’d walked away from, that house and that name, and what you carry for your brother, and then I heard you sing ’Cease Your Funning’ from «The Beggar’s Opera», and something in my chest went warm for the first time in longer than I can tell you."

There was a gentleness in his eyes now, and something complicated underneath it.

"And for the first time in my life, when I’m with you, I’m calm. I don’t think about the things that frighten me."

Jane’s heart went out from under her.

It was the eyes that did it. She had time to notice her face going hot and no time at all to do anything about it, and then she had to speak, because Rose had a line and Rose was going to say it.

"Is that your manner of confessing love?" Rose could not keep the tremor out of it. "It wants for poetry, sir. Is that how such things are done in the future?"

Ronan laughed at that, and when he answered he was half joking and half not.

"Then let me put it the way your century likes it." He held the tobacco up between them. "You are my tobacco, my Rose. Grant me leave to smoke you, and every burden I carry goes up with the smoke—"

He never got to the end of it.

Jane came up on her toes and put her mouth on his.

Her lips were soft and warm and they landed square, and it went through both of them like current.

He was deep in Elijah, and even from in there the kiss reached him. It felt incredible.

It was also off the script. He had a line to finish, and Rose wasn’t meant to reach for him until he had. Jane had gone off the page and taken the scene with her, and for once in this production he was the one caught out.

He was only thrown for a second. Then the kiss pulled him under.

And she kept surprising him, because her tongue came against his lips and pushed, wet and insistent, asking for the way in. The slick heat of it dragged over the seam of his mouth, tasting him, demanding.

He shut his eyes and opened his mouth and let her have it. She came in and found him, and her tongue moved over his—slow, thorough, sliding against the sensitive underside, licking into him as if she meant to map every inch.

The wet friction of it sent a raw pulse straight down his spine. Neither of them was leading it anymore.

They were only in it together, mouths open and greedy, tongues rubbing and twisting in a filthy, intimate rhythm that left both of them breathing harder through their noses.

The heat took the pair of them.

They pulled each other in. Her hands moved up over his shoulders and down his back, palms pressing firmly through the thin fabric of his shirt so she could feel the hard shift of muscle and the heat of his skin beneath.

His hands found her waist—careful at first, then not. He gripped the narrow curve of it, then slid up her back and drew her hard against him until her breasts flattened to his chest and the full length of her body was pressed tight to his, heat meeting heat with nothing but cloth between them.

Nobody on the floor moved, and Henry least of all.

He had known what this scene was. NBS wanted an adult scene sitting in Episode 3 because that was the kind of thing that pulled numbers, and he had planned it as hot romance and nothing past that. What he was watching had already gone somewhere else.

’Jesus. Jane Kingsley. Everybody in this business knows her for the same two things, that she doesn’t get attached to the men she works with and she doesn’t give you one inch more than the page asks for. And I’m sitting here watching this.’

He caught himself grinning at the monitor.

’This is history. This is history happening on my floor.’

He wasn’t the only one. Off to the side, Jane’s personal assistant stood with her mouth open and nothing coming out of it.

’Is that... is that really Ms. Jane?’ Veronica could not make the two things fit together. ’She hates kissing scenes. She has hated them her entire career. There was a name actor who tried to hold one on her longer than it was written and she didn’t let him have a second of it.’ Something went through her, and it was close to a shiver. ’And now she’s doing this? With him. With an actor nobody had heard of a month ago.’

It was a scene for the century. Jane Kingsley, the rising star of the industry, kissing a man like that in front of a working crew.

It went on longer than a minute, but the two actors didn’t stop. Jane was already kissing and lightly sucking at the side of Ronan’s neck like it was the most natural thing in the world. He did the same to her, open-mouthed and hungry.

They started undressing each other with quick, eager hands. That meant they were going straight into the next intimate scene without any break.

The nude scene where they made love was supposed to be filmed later, after a break from the kissing. But they were too turned on to wait. They skipped the choreography completely, even though they had talked through every beat of this scene for weeks in rehearsals.

It was still only a scene on paper. Nothing about the way their bodies were reacting felt fake.

His eyes dragged over her body as the last of her clothes came off. Her sharp V-line was fully exposed and smooth. Any man would kill to see that up close. A thin modesty thong still covered her private parts for the camera, but inside the Full-Immersion the fabric turned transparent and he could see everything clearly—soft, flushed, already a little wet. His gaze stayed there longer than it should have.

Then his hand slid up the tight line of her abs and closed over one of her perky breasts. The nipple was hard and pointed against his palm.

He squeezed it, feeling the warm weight of her fill his hand.

When he looked up, her cheeks were burning red and her eyes were heavy, hazy, and full of pure seduction. It only made her more dangerous to look at.

She was staring at him the same way. She ran her hands over his toned chest and hard stomach, fingers pressing into the muscle. Then she leaned in and dragged her open mouth across his skin, kissing and breathing hot against him.

He let out a rough, heated breath. He grabbed her by the waist, lifted her, and carried her the few steps to the bed of straw while their mouths stayed locked together.

They dropped into it hard, still kissing, tongues sliding, saliva mixing. He settled fully on top of her, his body pressing her down into the soft straw as the camera caught every wet, filthy sound of their mouths.

[Scene classification: Intimate.]

[Full-Immersion renders physical sensation in full. No category is excluded.]

[Sensory Fidelity for this scene: Unrestricted.]

[Does the Host wish to feel it?]

He read it, and he hesitated.

[Rendering applies to the Host in full.]

[Target: Jane — already under Full-Immersion Effect.]

[Conviction Threshold: 100%]

[The target will register the rendering faintly, within the Safety Threshold.]

[Safety Threshold: Active.]

[The resulting sensation will not exceed the permitted safety limit.]

[The target is deeply attuned to the Host and will answer with an authentic performance.]

It was as if the system itself were encouraging him—urging him to take the real thing, to feel the full heat of actual intercourse, while his co-actor would never feel it the same way.

He looked at her eyes. Nothing in them was telling him no.

Then he heard it, from somewhere under the sound of the two of them, too small for any microphone on the set to have caught.

"Ronan..."

And he wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all.

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