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“Can I bum a cig?”
Her breath hangs in the air in a cloud, the air unseasonably chilly for March. He’s momentarily frozen, staring at the delicate space between her collarbone and her neck where her hair fell in soft waves. If he were braver, he’d press his thumb there, pull her closer to him, throw professionalism and training and propriety out the window just to touch her as himself.
Instead, he digs into his coat, hand traitorously shaking as he pulled out the pack of Royals and flips open the carton. She doesn’t reach forward, waiting for him instead to offer… or select?
He can’t figure her out, try as he might. They spend hours together, rehearsing, in holds, playing pretend for the cameras, but she’s remarkably guarded for someone who fills rooms with her laughter. So he follows her lead, sharing just as much as her, no more. If her wikipedia page is up on his incognito tab, it’s his own personal failing.
She’s still waiting, he realizes. Stop thinking so loudly.
He pulls a slim stick out of the pack and offers it to her, the attempt at calm and casual still not exactly sitting comfortably on his shoulders. It never really does, but something about the last few days have made him start to pull at the hair at the nape of his neck, a nervous tick his mother once told him would leave him bald before he was thirty. But here he was, some years past that and still tugging at his curls because a girl made him antsy.
She plucks it from his fingers, if she feels his aloofness she doesn’t let on. Just slides it between her fingers to examine.
“Do you need a light?” He stutters out, fumbling to pull the zippo lighter his sister bought him when he booked the show.
Got to look like an adult on a Netflix project, she’d joked as he opened the box. She’d had his initials engraved on the side, more thoughtful than he’d thought she was capable of.
He doesn’t feel like an adult now, he feels like a schoolboy. Like a green, untrained, schoolboy falling for his scene partner. How juvenile.
She smiles then, sly like a fox as she reaches her hand not for the lighter in his hand, but for his cheek, deftly sweeping his hair from the side of his face and depositing the unlit cigarette behind his ear.
“No,” she answers, her hand still hovering centimeters from his skin, the feeling of the proximity of her skin burning more than any actual contact could.
Her fingers ghost from his cheek, to his jaw, to finally his mouth, where his own cigarette sat, ignored in the corner of his lips. The pad of her thumb comes to rest on his chin as he allows her to pluck it from her mouth, his tongue slipping out to wet his lips as he watches her take a slow drag.
He was fucked.