Page 13 of In Frame
He’d loved the story, of course. Stephen and Will were brilliant central characters, and their love mattered, and the script had been among the best he’d ever read. He’d wanted to be a part of it and he’d wanted to work with Jillian Poe and Colby Kent.
But he hadn’t loved it the way Colby had, the kind of love that’d read the source novel multiple times and wept over it and rewritten it. He hadn’t been so caught up in character that he’d broken on set and begun crying for his near-death fictional other half, the way Jason had.
Maybe Leo Whyte just wasn’t good at love. Not epic. Too shallow. Once again: a silly puddle, not a towering ocean.
Leo Whyte fell out of boats while filming and laughed about it. Leo Whyte spent off hours orchestrating a delivery of a nineteen-eighties vintage mermaid-comedy movie poster just to tease his director about an early crush. Leo Whyte did not have deep conversations with silver-screen legends like Sir Laurence Taylor; what would they talk about? The time Leo’d convinced set decorators and carpenters to construct an entire second traileraroundTom Bradshaw’s trailer, so that when he’d stepped out he’d still been inside?
Tom had been a good sport and laughed. Sir Laurence would likely not laugh.
Leo’s chest hurt slightly, a bizarre hollow ache. He did not like that feeling, so he watched his movie instead.
On screen, he and Jason emerged into London streets: a captain and a loyal lieutenant, facing the wilds of polite Society. A mission. A goal. No less vital than those at sea: the desperate need for more men, more provisions, support from the Admiralty. Hence this ball: political connections, maneuvering,patronage.
Leo spared a thought for how dashing he appeared in period naval attire—his arms really did look splendid in that coat—and then watched Jason acting.
Jason was genuinely good. Leo saw that in a heartbeat, the way he’d seen it on set previously: a man of action, certainly, but the action-hero label would never be all that Jason was, not after tonight. Not with that complicated and contradictory emotion so skillfully portrayed: Stephen’s loathing of aristocratic games and awareness that he himself needed to play them, and the secret he hid about the directions of his desires.
Leo had had suchfunplaying off that broad-shouldered serious nuance. He could trust Jason to get the layers of a scene, a line, a simple glance of comprehension.
He took in the moment of Colby’s appearance on screen: bright and scholarly and sickly, enthusiastic about frogs and mathematics, afraid of nothing other than running out of time. The audience made appreciative noises about Colby’s beauty: bathed in sunshine, in a meadow, shirt fluttering open.
The film shimmered, and soared, and sizzled where it should, and swept them all away like sails full of wind, breathless.
Leo watched Jason and Colby flee a ballroom and run through a door and tumble into a historic library, hands and mouths busy, finding each other; he guessed that scene would’ve been so much harder than anyone knew, back when Colby did not like being touched, when even these days roughness might still hurt in ways both physical and not. He saw Stephen and Will coming together; he saw Colby trusting Jason, on camera.
That odd tiny spear poked him in the chest again. Not big, not hard. A small knitting-needle. A pointed tip. Not worth paying any mind.
He hoped Sam had come. He hoped Sam liked this film. It was good, and he was proud of it, and he’d given his all to the character of Edward Harper, supporting Jason’s Captain Stephen Lanyon in battle and in love. He hoped that’d been enough.
On screen, at that aristocratic party, Ned drank some port, chatted with a lord, glanced around for his missing captain. The moment was mildly funny, mildly sweet, a bit wry: Stephen’s falling in love was not, after all, their mission. And Ned would stay in the ballroom and attempt to navigate those tricky political waters, and draw no attention to his captain’s vanishing with the Stonebrook heir.
The moment worked, multifaceted if quick. Leo thought that he’d managed it well. He wanted to believe that he had.
* * * *
Samuel Hernandez-Blake, having charmed his way into the press tangle by the metaphorical skin of his teeth, forgot to feel utterly naked and out of place in his rented inexpensive suit and lack of tie, and got swept up inSteadfastinstead. Watching the luscious color-drenched epic love story between two men, across history and a war and a viscount’s title. Watching Leo Whyte most of all, up there on the screen and larger than life.
Larger than life, he thought; and glanced down many rows to find the back of Leo’s head, the fashionable upswept hair, the sort of sandy blond that verged on brown like concealed veins of deep earth. Leo Whyte did not feel the glance and turn his way, because life was not a fairytale and Sam was nobody’s destined true love.
Leo Whytewaslarger than life. That description sounded apt. Fitting. Just right for a man who had a flourishing film career, who had millions of social media followers and fans, whoplayed lighthearted jokes on co-stars and made everybody laugh, and who had the sort of heart that’d step in front of a camera-bullet to protect friends.
Sam had wanted to kiss him on the spot. And then to shake him a little, because how could someone so amazing not see his own worth? How’d someone so full of affection ended up so blatantly lonely? How had no one else ever seen that hurt?
Maybe he wanted to shake the world, not Leo Whyte. Everybody who’d ever made those movie-star hazel eyes ache with self-doubt.
Leo on screen, in a role, played support like he’d been born to do it: funny and faithful and determined, letting Colby Kent and Jason Mirelli shine. But Sam ended up watching him, even if he stood in the background: Leo was always doing something, an expression, a reaction, a small character note. He did not steal the show, but he was working, building a scene, adding to the world.
Leo also looked damn good in Regency-era naval uniform. Those firm thighs. The shift of nicely muscled shoulders under a coat, and the long plane of his back as he turned to speak to a midshipman, and the curve of that delectable ass under costume fabric. Not overly bulky, but definitively masculine, and comfortable in his body, strong and relaxed.
Sam shifted in his seat. Crossed his legs.
He’d kissed Leo Whyte, in a late-night enchantment woven of whiskey and want and courage. His hands recalled the feeling of Leo’s back, shoulders, body. Of a strand of Leo’s hair, being stroked back into place by his fingers.
He didn’t know why he’d come here, now, to this theatre. He didn’t know what he’d hoped for, what he could’ve hoped for, what he thought he was doing.
He’d begged and pleaded and argued for this assignment.He mostly worked freelance—contract jobs, tabloids, whoever’d pay for the picture of the day—but he had a few steady employers, magazines and editors with whom he’d established a mutually reliable relationship over the years. They could trust him to get good useable snapshots and write some quick copy to go underneath; he liked being paid and working with editors he at least knew and understood.
Liking the editor in question was a whole different issue. Sam did not particularly enjoy meeting with Jameson Jay, who ran theDaily World Newswith a steely-eyed fixation on the profitable copy-selling line and who’d famously once thrown a coffee-cup at a photographer who’d brought in pictures too blurry to print. Sam had personally never been a fan of the attitude that regarded celebrities with predatory avidity, as if a glimpse of Colby Kent clearly on the verge of panic in a fan-and-paparazzi-swarmed shop had been set up as a gift from the moneymaking gods, sent via direct express to tabloid magazines.
