Page 21 of Bad Reputation

After a beat, Maggie dropped her fingers to her neck and looked at the ceiling, considering how to answer.

He tried not to think about how soft the skin under her neck looked.

“Actors are empathetic,” she said. “You absorb emotions. That’s what makes you good at your jobs. But sometimes, I think performance is about shedding civilization—dropping the rules, the stuff that in most cases we might say makes us good people. We have to turn the volume down on that when we’re performing and try to reveal the truth instead, the messy shit underneath. So it’s good to ask these questions, Cole. It speaks highly of you as a person. But at some point, you have to let those worries go, because they’ll get in the way of your performance.”

Cole had next to no formal training in acting, which hadn’t mattered when he’d been playing a guy who looks good in a tight polo. He’d tried to think about “technique” sometimes, but this conversation was on another level.

He might not be a novice, but Cole hadn’t walked through every beat of this before. He hadn’t had someone to help him communicate with the director or someone whose job it was to balance his feelings with what was good for the production. Maggie was taking him seriously, as a person and as an artist, and it made him feel hot and cold at once.

He desperately wanted to be worthy of this conversation, and he worried that he wasn’t.

“I’ll try.” His voice was a bit gruff. He cleared it, taking a sip from his water bottle, while Maggie shuffled through the pile of scripts in front of her.

“Let’s jump for a minute to the scene from episode six—though we’ll come back to episode two. There’s no nudity in this one, but there’s some kissing and more of that humiliation dynamic you don’t dig.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile, and Cole’s heart crinkled.

Gosh, but Maggie was thoughtful. Last night, he’d watched her watching him, watching Tasha. Not even really enjoying her dinner but trying instead to figure them out.

Cole was so familiar with how people watched him—full of expectations they were confident he’d meet—that he’d forgotten what it felt like for someone to be unsure with him, to check if they were getting the right answers, and to gauge his feelings and wants.

He was used to how the world watched him, but he preferred how Maggie did it.

“Let’s do it. More ofThe ‘Geordie Robertson Is the Worst’ Hour.”

“Yay,” Rhiannon cheered.

When they’d finished with the scripts, Maggie pulled out another notebook, which she flopped open in front of them. “I’ve been working with this mentor to learn how to, you know, do this job, and he suggested I try these.”

She’d broken the page into panels, as if it were an erotic cartoon strip peopled by stick figures. At least Cole suspected they were supposed to be stick figures.

And supposed to be erotic.

Rhiannon leaned over the table to inspect them more closely. “Is that an arm, or does he have three legs?”

Maggie squinted. “It’s an arm.”

“And is that a shirt, or is it one of those puffy coats? Wait, did they have puffy coats in 1700s Scotland?”

“Arg.” Maggie tried to close the notebook, but Rhiannon had slapped her hands on the pages and was holding it open.

She was cackling now. “Maggie, I’m sorry, but these are the worst drawings I have ever seen, and I have a three-year-old nephew.”

“I don’t think they’re that bad,” Cole put in. They were, actually, but he was trying to be nice. “Is that a bush behind us?”

“It’s a campfire. I was thinking about the light.” Maggie sounded so glum as she sagged in her chair and began tapping around on the floor for something. “No, you’re right, they’re hideous. Bernard uses picturesas a way to agree on rough blocking before you do it for real, but we’re going to have to try something else.”

Maggie straightened and, without warning, heaved an exercise ball at Cole. He snagged it out of the air, and Maggie managed a crooked smile, one that he felt in his gut.

Having her here helped so much, but that smile was pure trouble.

Maggie rifled through the box of props and costumes she’d brought with her. “I have a period-appropriate shirt if you want it, Cole.” The linen scratched her palm. Hopefully the real one would be softer than the mock-up.

“Sure.” He stood and began to take off his sweater, doing that thing where he stretched his hands over his back and pulled it off over his head. And what that did to his abs—it was indescribable. Just a ripple of muscles and golden skin.

Maggie made herself look away, but they were in a dance studio. There were mirrorseverywhere. The art of Cole’s torso was inescapable.

Don’t lust after the actors.But she wasn’t having trouble not lusting over the actors generally, just Cole specifically.

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