The white doesn't reset. It just waits, the way everything on this set waits, and Maya lies on her back on the bare mattress with the grid of coarse fabric printing itself into her shoulder blades, and she listens to the room rearrange itself around her. Someone's sneaker squeaks on the concrete. The boom swings back into place with a small hydraulic sigh. Deja crosses in front of the lights and the heat comes off her body like a door opening onto a furnace, and then she's gone and the heat is just heat again, coming down on Maya's face, her chest, the backs of her hands.

Marco's voice comes out of the white from somewhere near her feet. "Same marks. Hands where they were. You — " and she can't tell if he's talking to her or the man, and then she can, because the man lowers himself back onto the mattress beside her and the whole left side of the bed dips and her body rolls a half-inch toward him and stops.

His knee finds the same hollow in the mattress. His forearm finds the same place above her shoulder. It's the same body in the same position and it is not the same at all, because now she knows what his hand feels like when it moves, and now she knows what his face does when it decides something, and now she is lying here with all of that in her and Marco has not called action yet.

"Whenever," Marco says.

The man's hand comes back to the knot.

She watches it come this time. She tracks it the whole way — across the sheet, past her hip, to the loose fold of fabric at her side — and she understands that she has been given the gift of seeing it, that the take exists so she can see it, and that seeing it is worse than not seeing it, because now there's a stretch of seconds between his hand and the knot and she has to live in every one of them.

The knuckle of his index finger touches the silk. The knot shifts by a millimeter and settles.

Her hand comes off her thigh. It's slower than last time — she's aware of it the whole way, the weight of her own arm, the cool of the set air on the inside of her wrist — and she lays it over his, and presses down, and holds the robe closed.

This is the part Marco wanted.

She looks up at the man's face because that's what she did last time and because Marco said do it again, and the man is already looking at her, and this time there is no second and a half of deciding. This time he just moves.

His hand turns under hers. Palm up. Slow. And his fingers come through her fingers from underneath, one between her ring finger and her middle, one between her middle and her index, and then his thumb folds down over the back of her hand and locks it, and her hand is inside his hand now, and she is holding nothing closed, she is holding him.

She hears her own breath go in. The boom catches it — she knows it does, she can feel the microphone listening from above her like a held ear — and Marco doesn't say cut.

The man's other hand finds the knot.

One pull. That's all it takes. The silk gives all at once, the way silk does, and the robe comes open down the front of her and falls away from her shoulder to her hip in two clean panels, and the lights are on her chest.

The lights are on her chest.

She doesn't close it. Her right hand is still laced into his and her left hand is flat on the mattress and her whole body has gone very still, and the robe is open, and the hot white is on her breasts and her belly and the soft shelf of her hips, and there is nothing between her skin and the room. The air is dry and warm and moving slightly from the fans and she can feel it on her nipples, which are hard, which have been hard since the first take, which are sore the way they are always sore now, the good ache, the ache that means the medicine is working.

Nobody says anything.

She can hear the fans. She can hear the low electrical hum of the lights. She can hear the man breathing beside her, and her own breathing under that, and she can hear — this is the thing — she can hear that her breathing is being recorded, that it's going somewhere, that some version of this sound is going to exist in the world after she leaves this room.

Marco's voice, from the dark: "Keep going."

The man's free hand comes down onto her sternum.

Flat. Four fingers and a palm, warm, dry, heavier than she expected, and he doesn't move it. He just leaves it there, on the bone between her breasts, and she can feel the weight of it all the way through her ribs, and under his palm her heart is doing something she is grateful he cannot hear, though the boom can, though the boom absolutely can.

"Breathe," he says. Quietly. Not for Marco. For her.

She breathes.

The hand moves. Down. His palm slides off her sternum and over the soft inner curve of her left breast, and the heel of his hand drags across her nipple and it hurts, it actually hurts, the hormone-hurt, a bright wire of it, and her whole body flinches toward him and her hand tightens inside his hand and the sound she makes is not a performance sound. It's a surprised sound. It comes out of her before she can shape it.

Marco doesn't say cut.

The man's hand keeps going. Over the underside of her breast, where the skin is thin and pale and doesn't see the sun. Across the top of her ribs, one at a time, like he's counting them. Into the small dip at her solar plexus, where his knuckle fits exactly. Down the flat plane of her belly, past her navel, and her belly is flat, it's flat and smooth and hairless and it has never in her life been touched like this, by a man, on a set, with a microphone listening.

She is holding his hand the whole time. She never let go. Her fingers are still laced through his and her thumb is still folded under his thumb and she can feel his pulse in his palm, or she thinks she can, or she wants to, and either way she's holding on.

"Good," Marco says. "Hold that."

His hand reaches the top of her thigh.

The robe is open all the way down now, both panels fallen to the sides, and the only thing left across her is the thin strip of silk that came loose from the knot — nothing, a ribbon, a thread, lying across her hip bone like a line someone drew. His fingers find it. He doesn't move it. He just rests his fingertips on the silk and the silk is on her skin and she can feel the exact shape of four fingertips through it.

And that's when she feels the sheet.

Under her. Below her hips. A wet patch, spreading, cool at the edges where the fan finds it. She has been wet since the first take and she has been ignoring it the way you ignore a sound in another room, and now it's under her and it has a shape and a size and the man's hand is six inches above it and there is no version of this room where he doesn't know.

Her cock is lying soft against her right thigh. Not hard. It hasn't been hard this whole take, not once, and she doesn't understand it and she has stopped trying to — her hole is doing all of it, her hole is clenching on nothing in a slow rhythm she can't stop, and every clench pushes a little more wet out of her and onto the sheet, and the sheet keeps taking it, and the man's hand is right there.

His thumb moves.

One stroke. Along the crease at the top of her thigh, from the silk strip to the edge of the robe. It's nothing. It's a thumb, moving two inches. And her hips come up off the mattress.

She doesn't decide to. Her body does it, the same way it flinched at her nipple, the same way it pushed back against her mother's hand two nights ago, and she hears the small wet sound of her back unsticking from the sheet, and she hears the boom catch her breath, and she hears — from the dark, from behind the white — Marco's chair creak as he leans forward.

"Don't cut," he says, to someone. "Nobody cut."

The man's hand goes still.

Not away. Still. His palm flat on her upper thigh, his fingers spread, holding her hip down against the mattress with almost no weight at all, and she is pinned by nothing, she is pinned by the idea of his hand, and she lies there with her hips an inch off the sheet and her breath going in and out of her mouth and her hand still laced into his hand like a girl holding a railing.

"Look at me," he says.

She looks at him.

His face is doing nothing. It's the same face from the first take, the mark's face, blank and patient and a little bored. But his eyes are on her eyes and they don't move, and there's a small muscle moving in his jaw, once, twice, and she thinks — she doesn't know, she can't know — that this is the most either of them has given away all night.

His fingers tighten around hers. Once. A squeeze. Like a signal. Like a man counting down.

And her hole clenches so hard she feels it in her teeth.

It rolls through her — not a wave, nothing that soft, more like a door being pulled shut somewhere deep in her pelvis — and her thighs clamp around his hand and her back arches off the sheet and she comes. Her cock stays soft against her thigh. It doesn't twitch, it doesn't spill, it just lies there while the rest of her goes to pieces around it, and the wet comes out of her hole in a slow hot pulse that she can feel soaking into the mattress under her ass, and she makes a sound into the hot dry air of the studio that she has never made in her life.

It's not the sound her mother taught her. It's not the sound that pays.

It's just hers.

The boom catches all of it. Every breath. The whole thing.

And Marco does not say cut.

She comes down slowly, in pieces, the way you come down a staircase in a house you don't know. Her hips settle back onto the sheet and the wet patch is warm now, no longer cool at the edges, and her thighs let go of his hand one at a time, and her fingers are still laced through his fingers, and she has not let go of him once, not through any of it.

The room is very quiet. The fans. The lights. Somewhere behind the white, a chair.

The man's hand is still on her hip. His thumb has come to rest on the silk strip, on the line across her hip bone, and he isn't moving it, and he isn't looking away from her face, and she lies there under the lights with her robe open and her chest bare and her breath loud in the microphone and her come cooling in the sheet under her, and she waits to find out what a take sounds like when it ends.

Marco's voice, from the dark, flat and unhurried:

"That's the one."