Page 119 of The Casting Couch

It felt like home.

Looking around the office, I felt something I rarely admitted to myself: gratitude.For Nico, for Bradley, for the idiots and beauties and chaotic queers that made up this bizarre empire we’d built.We were family now.Loud, dysfunctional, occasionally sticky—but family all the same.

I tilted back in my chair, smiling at the ceiling.

“You know,” I said, glancing at Moira, “sometimes I forget how lucky we are.”

“To have each other?”She asked, blinking sweetly.

“No, bitch.To work in porn.Where the outfits are better and nobody gives a shit if you scream in public.”

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If you’re craving a love story that burns hot against a backdrop of snow and silence,The Fire Beneath the Frostis calling your name.Set in crumbling, twilight-era Leningrad as the Soviet Union takes its final breath, Petyr and Dimitri’s romance is equal parts forbidden and fated.Their connection ignites in the shadows of a collapsing regime—where survival is hard, but falling in love might be even harder.This is a story of stolen glances, quiet bravery, and the kind of heat that can melt through even the coldest walls.It’s not just about love—it’s about choosing hope in a world built on silence.The following is an excerpt form their story,

I couldn’t breathe.

Or maybe I just forgot how.My lips were still tingling, my heart galloping like it was trying to outrun a war horse.My whole body buzzed, like I’d stepped too close to a live wire, and now the charge had nowhere to go but inward.

Petyr had kissed me.Twice.

No, not just kissed.Devoured.Undone me.Pulled me into some invisible orbit I didn’t know I’d been circling my whole life.

I could still feel the pressure of his mouth on mine, could still taste him—bittersweet vodka, salt, and something warm I didn’t have words for.My hands were still clenched in his coat, not because I meant to hold him, but because I hadn’t realized I’d let go of control entirely.

All I could think—over and over like a broken reel—was: So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

I’d spent my whole life assuming there was something wrong with me.That I was defective in some quiet, shameful way.The boys I grew up with, they used to whisper about girls’ legs, breasts, the way they giggled.They’d sneak glances at magazine covers, draw crude things in their notebooks.Laugh like they were all in on some great secret.

I waited for that feeling to come.I waited for it to awaken inside me like a sleeping beast.

It never did.

I told myself maybe I was a late bloomer.Maybe I was too serious.Maybe I just hadn’t met the right girl.

But the truth was—none of them made my legs shake.None of them made me want to melt into another person’s skin.

Petyr did.

God help me, all I wanted in that moment was to feel his body pressed against mine again.To kiss him until I couldn’t remember my name.And if there was more, if there were things to learn, things I had only imagined in the dark, I wanted him to be the one to teach me.

Petyr must’ve seen it in my eyes.The need, and the terror.The aching question mark of who I even was now.

He leaned in and pulled me close again.Not for another kiss, but to whisper against the side of my face, his breath warm against my temple.

“I want to make you feel things you never imagined possible.”

I shivered.Not from cold.Not even from fear.

From desire.

He stroked my cheek with the backs of his fingers, slow and deliberate.My breath hitched like I’d been sucker-punched in the gut.He looked around the room at the men who weren’t watching us, the shadows that welcomed our secrets, and then reached for my hand again.

I gave it to him without thinking.

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