“Didn’t we decide to put your hair up, in some kind of knot?”
Alison froze. The director was staring at her hair with a rapt certitude which made her want to hit him.
At which point an arm crept around her waist, and someone buried his head in her neck. “God you smell good,” Bradley whispered. She felt her knees buckle, but his grip was firm. “Her hair looks amazing,” he informed the director. “I’d do her right now, in front of everybody, if I wouldn’t get arrested for it.”
“Save it up, Bradley,” she said, pretending to take a professional tone. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“This is a nice sweater,” he responded. “I can’t wait to ruin it.” He actually wagged his tongue at her in the sudden brutal gesture of a truck driver in heat.
“Oh, gross, get away from me,” she said, shoving him.
The director got down to business. “So Tara’s already here, at the bar, when you enter,” he explained, flicking his hand toward the proposed action as if it had already played itself out. “And you spot her, across the room, flirting with the bartender.”
“Well, that’ll piss me off.”
“That’s the idea,” the director agreed, pleased that Bradley intuited the brilliance of this. Bradley followed him across the floor, gliding like a cat, nodding intently, and just as intently now ignoring her. Annoying the shit out of her, flirting with her, having hot sex, then ignoring her again—it was just like being in a relationship, only you didn’t have to wake up with the guy or share a bathroom with him. You did everything but go all the way, because they were paying you to do it, on film. And then you broke up. And then you got back together and did it all again.
The similarities to her on-again, off-again relationship with Kyle were not lost on Alison. She had boldly made the associations herself, publicly, laughing at her entire past as if it were a joke, many times. The first time they had fake sex on camera—some eighteen months ago, just six episodes into season one—Bradley had brought a bottle of champagne to her dressing room, and they drank it and gossiped with Alec from wardrobe and a couple of day players. After one glass she was giddy and she spilled the whole story to half a dozen people she barely knew.
“That was my relationship with my boyfriend for six years,” she laughed. “I went out with him for six years in high school and college and we would do absolutely everything except. Aside from the fact that there were no cameras? It was exactly the same.”
“You would do everything except what?” Bradley asked, with a gleeful leer. “You’re so Midwest. Except what, except anal sex?”
“God, no! We couldn’t even say the words ‘anal sex,’ we’re too Catholic.”
“Trust me, your priests know about anal sex,” Alec observed with a wry grimace.
“Well, obviously, but they’re still teaching the rest of us that it’s a mortal sin.”
“Anal sex is a mortal sin, they teach that?”
“All sex is a mortal sin. Anal sex might be okay. I think the position is, all sex with women is a mortal sin. I think actually that’s true; I think that’s how all those priests justified it.”
“I don’t want to talk about the priests, I want to talk about Alison and the boyfriend she wouldn’t fuck for six years,” Bradley interrupted. He was drinking out of the bottle now.
“No no no. I did, I wanted to fuck him,” Alison clarified. “He wouldn’t fuck me.”
“That’s amazing,” Bradley informed her, serious. “Because honestly—seriously, Alison, you’re pretty hot.”
“Thank you, Bradley.”
“Very hot,” agreed one of the day players.
Bradley smacked the kid on the shoulder. “Down, boy, you’re just a day player,” he warned him.
“So?”
But Bradley was intent on keeping the story on track. “So you didn’t have sex with this guy—excuse me, he didn’t have sex with you—because it was a mortal sin?”
“You could have sex, but it was like television sex,” she explained, draining her cup of champagne. “You could strip down and make out for hours, fingers, everything—”
“Blow jobs?”
“Yes, blow jobs.”
“You can’t do that on television.”
“We didn’t do it either, I just knew that theoretically, it was possible. We were more into the whole torture each other for hours—”
“Torture? Like whips and chains?”
“No, more like I love you but I won’t fuck you.”
“How literary,” Bradley observed. He smiled at her with an intimacy that surprised her, while pouring more champagne into her plastic cup.
“It was extremely literary and extremely hot,” Alison admitted. “If it hadn’t made us both completely insane I probably would have married him.”