Character Bleed Book 1: Seaworthy

Prologue: Auditions-2

Obviously Colby had heard him. That comment, that phrasing, couldn’t’ve been coincidental. But it hadn’t even been sarcastic. And he’d not kicked Jason out of the building or shouted back or even suggested politely that he was sorry but this role clearly wouldn’t work out.

Jason stared at that slim shape, that knit blue sweater, as it outdistanced him.

Resignation, he thought, a thought that arrived all at once, as if fully formed. Acceptance. That look. Taking the hurt and boxing it all up meticulously and sliding it onto a shelf alongside other hurts, because Colby Kent evidently had practice at that. Being professional, after insult or injury.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. What would he say? Another useless apology? A vow that he’d not meant it, he’d mostly been frustrated and aching with self-doubt, and he wished he could fish that coffee out of the trash bin?

Maybe he should. Maybe he should drink trash bin coffee. He was clearly a trash bin person.

Colby stopped, glancing back at him. The hallway lights framed all that fluffy brown hair in sympathy. Even the lights liked him. Who wouldn’t?

That answer to that was Jason himself, apparently.

“I’m sorry,” Jason tried, and then remembered that he was supposed to be walking, and tried to do that. He tripped over nothing at all. Stumbled. Caught balance. “I’m…I didn’t mean…”

Colby said, amused, “At least it’s not a ballroom dancing scene.” He might’ve not heard the apology; he might’ve been laughing, casual, playful, as if they were friends. “Come on, you’re the last for today and I’ll admit I’m absolutely starving, we’ve worked through lunch and I only had a banana this morning, and after this I am completely ordering pizza. With pineapple, I think. How do you feel about pineapple?”

“Um,” Jason said. “It’s a fruit.” Were they friends? Should he be worried that Colby Kent, box-office darling, apparently lived on air and various fruit-related foods and the ability to dismiss awful overheard insults without batting an eye? “But. Um. It’s your pizza. You should get whatever you want on it.”

“Of course it’s my pizza. But I was only wondering which side of the debate you landed on.” Colby dramatically widened those eyes at him, opening the door. “Some people have opinions about pineapple.”

“I sort of don’t.” Jason trailed him in. Gazed at the bare set-up: a wall, a chair or two, the cameras, the table, the people. Three people. Five, counting Colby and the cameraperson. Important people. Watching him. “I can take it or leave it. I mean, if you’re actually ordering the pizza. What you want is my mom’s homemade dough for the crust. And her recipe for the sauce.” Why were they talking about pizza? Why was he explaining his mother’s cooking?

What the hell, he thought, very clearly. What the hell am I even doing. This’ll never work. I won’t work. I’ve already hurt his feelings and I don’t know how to fix that and I don’t know how to be a serious actor and I don’t know how I’m feeling and I think I’m drowning. Help.

He said, “Colby—”

“Oh, sorry, I distracted you with pizza! Of course you should introduce yourself to everyone. Sorry, Jill. Sorry, everyone.” Colby offered up an abashed shrug and wave at the room. The room instantly forgave him. “I’ll just back off and wait until you need me, shall I?”

“There’s pizza?” said the cheerful stocky man next to Jillian Poe. In a woolly cardigan and glasses, he might’ve been an English professor or a literary teddy bear given human existence. Jason was pretty sure he had to be Benjamin Rogers, the writer, but wasn’t a hundred percent confident. “Colby, when was there pizza?”

Jillian Poe, critically acclaimed director, wagged a clipboard at him. Her hair, purple-striped today, crackled with energy even at the end of the session. “You don’t get to order any. You like anchovies.”

“Could we order historically accurate food?” suggested the person on Jill’s left, who was in fact a person Jason knew; Amanda Young had handled casting for several big-budget Hollywood productions, and she’d been in the room the first time he’d come in to read. She was grinning, the usual eruption of black curls leaping out joyfully, comfortable in this room with this group. “Think there’s a Napoleonic Wars version of pizza?”

Colby, promptly forgetting to avoid distractions, jumped in with, “Bread and cheese and mutton? Some sort of savory pie? Pineapples definitely existed, I know wealthy people used to rent them for display during dinner-parties and—”

“If you want pineapples,” said the cameraman, “I could totally get you some, my cousin knows someone who grows—”

Jillian put one hand over her face. “No pizza for any of you, pineapple or not. Jason, I apologize on behalf of the lunatics. It’s been a long day.” Mandy leaned around her to poke Ben with a pencil.

“No,” Jason said hastily. Ben grabbed and hid the pencil. Colby seemed to be smothering a laugh, in the background. “I mean, no problem. Right. Sorry.”

“You haven’t met Ben, have you? Ben Rogers, our writer. Ben, meet Jason Mirelli, you saw the audition tapes, he’s the one that Colby said the Star Wars thing about, you know.” She made a vague flitting gesture; Jason had no idea how to interpret that, but everyone else did, from the nods. Star Wars thing? What thing? A bad feeling about this? A disturbance in the Force? Something else?

“And that’s Brian Park behind the camera—”

Brian saluted.

“—and now you’ve met everyone. So,” Jill concluded, abruptly crisp and professional, “you know which scene we’re doing, Jason? That first balcony scene. Outside the ballroom. We’re looking for chemistry. That crackle in the air. Will and Stephen instantly tempted by each other. Whenever you’re ready.”

Jason wobbled a little in the face of this imminent intensity, hopefully not visibly. Here and now. Himself and a camera and this chance. A real role, a powerful heart-wrenching role, and emotion that’d made him ache to read, spilling from the page.

He could do this. He had to do this.

He took a breath. Tried to wrap Captain Stephen Lanyon’s world around himself. At war with Napoleon. Responsible for hundreds of lives. Only recently promoted and new to command. Awaiting the launch of his new ship, in fact, which would be why he’d come ashore, to wade into political waters and call in favors from the Admiralty and request better supplies, ship’s carpenters, his own second lieutenant from his old command as support. Here amid this kaleidoscopic reckless whirl of revelry, at the heart of London society, and both playing the game and despising it.

Here, at the Stonewood ball, where the aging lion who carried the title of Earl kept trying with all his might to find a wife for his only heir. His beautiful, brilliant, frighteningly frail, secretly entirely uninterested in women, heir.

In the present, in a meeting room, under twenty-first century lights, Jason glanced at Colby Kent. Couldn’t help it.

Colby gave him that bright welcoming grin again, the one he’d worn when Jason first arrived. That expression shook the whole world out of complacency. Invited it to jump up and join in and pretend along.

Jason forgot to inhale, shaken.

Colby ran a hand through his own hair, rumpling forest-dark waves, and offered Jason an encouraging head-tip, and then did—

Something. No good word for it. Suddenly he was William Crawford, Viscount Easterly: brittle and breakable and lonely and longing, good with maps and ciphers, never having been allowed further than the family estate on his own. Even his shoulders carried that weight, thin and distressed. One hand on a chair’s back for support, he did not look back at anyone in the conjured-up ballroom, beyond imagined balcony doors.

Jason, like Stephen on the page, caught sight of him and couldn’t look away.

He took a step forward. Colby turned. The camera might have existed, or might not; and Jason thought, very fleetingly, of pain and an earlier wound and friendliness solidly in place to defy it.

He said, “My apologies, I wasn’t aware anyone was here.” A lie, and they both knew it.

Colby gave him Will’s smile this time, polished and patrician. “Don’t tell me a Captain of the Royal Navy can possibly be so inattentive to his surroundings. I’d be frightened on behalf of the war effort.”

“Very well, I saw you. Would you like me to leave?” He shifted weight closer, saying it. Colby’s eyes got a bit wider; Jason knew about the effect of his own muscles, that height and strength and breadth, and he knew it’d work on Will, who liked the thrill of danger and power and tantalizing adventure. That much was in the script. He did not know whether the visible lip-lick, that catch in Colby’s breath, was deliberate or unplanned.

“You may as well stay.” Colby waved a hand, purposefully elegant and slightly arrogant, reclaiming ground and not backing away. “You can’t precisely uninterrupt my solitude.”

“They’re your festivities.”

“They’re my father’s festivities.” Cool and collected, armor up. “Hardly my preference.”

Jason took one more step. Directly into Colby’s space. Catching luscious blue eyes with his; letting the moment extend, letting the words linger and then emerge. “What is your preference, in that case, Viscount Easterly?”

He’d meant it to be a challenge. It was. But it came out unexpectedly gentle, as something changed in Colby’s face: parted lips, a shiver, an unanticipated vulnerability. Those eyes were very large.

Jason said it again, softly, and put a hand out. Traced fingers through a loose wave of Colby’s hair. Tucked it back into place. “What would be your preference, if you could choose? What would you like, from me?”

That last bit wasn’t in the script. It’d just tumbled out. Unplanned.

In the background, far off, someone said, “Holy s**t—”

Someone else demanded, “Don’t you dare stop recording, I want every second of this—”

They didn’t matter. Unimportant. Jason watched Colby’s face, the way the next inhale lingered over lips, the way his hair brushed his collar when he tipped his head up to meet Jason’s gaze more directly. “I prefer—”

He stopped. Jason had left the hand in place, stroking whisper-soft hair, and now half-inadvertently slid it down to touch his cheek: a caress and a question and a request for forgiveness. Colby seemed to be wordless.

Forgiveness, Jason thought. For Stephen’s interrupting of Will’s retreat; for his own idiotic tantrum earlier; for whatever had put that resigned small pain behind Colby Kent’s complicated pretty eyes. They all fell together and blurred into one. He couldn’t pull them apart. He no longer quite knew how.

He wanted to kiss Colby Kent on a balcony the way Stephen wanted to kiss Will. He wanted to grab Colby’s wrist and sweep him off into the library and crush him into books the way Stephen very shortly would. He wanted to explain that he hadn’t meant any of his own earlier words, he just couldn’t believe in all that niceness, not without some reason behind it.

He wanted, against all logic and rationality, to help.

This realization silenced him.

Colby, looking faintly shocked, managed to find safe harbor in a line. “I’d like to be able to choose. For once. For one night.” That was more or less the script, but Jason hadn’t imagined it quite so raw, so poignant. “Could you offer that, Captain Lanyon?”

“Perhaps I could.” They could’ve had hands on a balcony’s old stone railing, under moonlight; he held his out instead, a suggestion. The scene, this scene, should end with the breath before a kiss, followed by that tumble into the library, a Regency-draped one-night-stand, loosened cravats and undone breeches and gasping breaths. He could have closed fingers around that slim wrist and yanked Colby forcefully to him; he only made the hand an invitation, and waited. “Would you accept it if I did?”