Chapter 5
“Oh no” Irene mumbled under her breath. “Cut! CUT!”.
Bette distanced herself quickly from Tina, as if the contact burned her. She turned around to look at their director, annoyance etched on her face.
“That’s just… not it. Look at this.” She pointed to the scene they had just filmed, that was playing on some nearby screen. “This looks soulless.”
They stood in front of the tiny screen, looking at what the director tried to show them. As much as Bette hated to admit, Irene was right. They were supposed to kiss passionately, almost desperately, and yet they looked like two robots going through the motions and wanting to finish quickly.
They never had a problem with this kind of stuff. Quite the contrary, in fact. But lately Bette had been feeling a strange discomfort around Tina, something deep inside of her that made her want to run away from the blonde as soon as she had her close.
She had been praised many times for how good of a kisser she was on-screen. “I commit”, she would say simply when asked about her secret to be so. But ever since the red carpet of that fucking premiere (and most importantly, the kiss that Tina had so nonchalantly given her) Bette had been spiraling. The whole being-a-couple-on-screen-and-pretending-to-be-a-couple-off-screen was already a bit confusing, but the strange signals the blonde was sending her way confused her to no end.
Like in that exact moment, when Tina took her by the wrist and pulled her aside, away from Irene, and the crew, and the set they were supposed to be filming in.
“What’s wrong?” the blonde asked, clearly concerned.
“What do you mean? Everything’s fine” she answered, maybe a little bit too quickly.
“C’mon Bette, I’m not dumb. You look like you’re in another universe. I’d never seen you like this on set.” Tina tried to reach Bette’s cheek with her hand, but she immediately pulled away.
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” She repeated, stubbornly. “I just can’t focus today, that’s all.”
“Oh, Bette” Tina exclaimed, her voice impossibly tender. She squeezed the other woman’s hand for reassurance, like she used to do those days. “It’s just me, ok? We’ve done scenes like this a million times before. Just let go of everything and think of that place to the one you always go when we do these scenes, and it’s just you and me.”
Does she even understand what she’s saying? Bette thought to herself. Does she know what it means?
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll try to do better.” She responded half-heartedly.
“It’s just me.” The blonde repeated. “You know what to do. Don’t overthink it.”
She wants to turn me insane, Bette concluded.
If there was one thing she had been doing in the last couple of days, that was overthinking. Overthinking everything. The night after the premiere she had felt like a crazy woman, watching and re-watching the videos of the kiss Tina had given her. She stared at the screen for a good portion of an hour, the video repeating itself in an endless loop, before she was even able to pick up the phone and call Alice.
“Do you think it was too much?” she had asked, not even bothering with greeting her friend.
“I think you are just confused” her friend had concluded after a long talk. “And for what it’s worth, I think it’s completely normal. I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner” she joked, while Bette was losing her shit but trying to stay composed.
“This isn’t funny, Al.” She complained. “I just don’t know what to do. I can’t call off the whole fake-dating thing, but it feels so wrong.”
“Just let it go, Bette, Go with the flow. If there’s nothing you can do against it, don’t fight it.”
So she was supposed to just let it go, go with the flow, don’t fight it, “it’s just me”, not overthink, and know what to do. Cool. She was more lost than before, that was for sure. But she decided that switching her brain off was probably the best option.
The scene they had to film was a pretty simple one: Laura and Emma were in the middle of an affair, both their characters in serious relationships with other people but still longing for each other. But in a night out at some club, they find themselves alone in a VIP room and end up kissing like… well, like two horny teenagers. The script used fancier words, but that was basically it.
Tina gave her a little smile of reassurance before the director called for action, and she felt her chest warm up. God, it was all so confusing. She tried to push her thoughts aside, but as Tina talked, she couldn’t help thinking about how good she looked in that shiny dress they made her wear, or how cute her way of gesticulating was. How low her voice sounded while delivering the lines of her character, and how pretty her lips were. Or, more particularly, how soft those lips felt against hers, and how little time was left before she got to feel them again.
“You’re lucky. That you have Carla”, Tina said, in full-Laura mode.
“Yeah… I really am.” She answered.
Tina glanced one last look at her, held her head down and got up to leave. A chill ran down Bette’s spine as she thought about what she was supposed to do, but she kept her head still and extended her hand to pick up Tina’s, and put her other hand on the back of the blonde’s neck to pull her in for a kiss that tasted heavenly.
She kissed her as if she could convey all her questions and doubts into a kiss; all her confusion about their status and her unwillingness to believe that Tina didn’t feel the same spark between them. Bette felt the hands of the blonde roaming her arms and her hair, but she couldn’t think of anything else than devouring her mouth, kissing her senseless, losing herself in the other woman in case she never got to do that in her real, boring life.
She could’ve stayed there for hours, but the kiss was meant to end, so they slowed down the rhythm. But Bette couldn’t stop, not then, not when she was just beginning to show what she wanted to say. She kissed Tina a couple more times, gentle and tender kisses meant to say that she didn’t want the moment to end, until the other woman put some space between them, gently caressing her hair, bumping their noses.
Tina was holding her so close that, even with her eyes closed, she could feel her intoxicating all her senses. It was too much for Bette, who had spent the last weeks wondering if she would ever get to feel something as real as this thing that they kept pretending, and acting, and selling to everybody.
She couldn’t take it anymore.
Bette broke down in a sob that cut through her chest and made her shake in her co-star’s arms, who held her even tighter, consoling her with more kisses. She felt drunk and dizzy from the sadness, and the frustration, and the sheer need for more.
“CUT!” Irene screamed from some corner, interrupting their moment. “Fuck YEAH, that’s what I was talking about.”
Tina gave her one last kiss on the forehand before they separated. Bette felt the immediate cold that came from the lack of the blonde’s body attached to hers.
“Bette, I don’t know where that came from, but it was perfect. This will be the perfect end for this chapter, oh my god, I’m so proud of you both. You outdid yourselves!” The director was so excited that she couldn’t stop talking.
“Yeah, ok. Cool. I’ll just… I need a moment.” Bette said, and got out of the set as fast as she could.
-
“You’re coming tonight, right?” Shane asked her from the other side of the lunch table.
It was just them and Dana sitting there, in an almost-empty dining room. They had taken longer than usual in a particular scene, and the rest of the cast had already had lunch by the time they even got there.
“To where?” she asked back, genuinely curious. Her head had been everywhere in the last couple of days, and she didn’t remember an invitation to any place.
“Oh, c’mon, the new club’s opening in Sunshine Boulevard. You know the one, we’ve been talking about this for weeks now”, Dana replied while biting her sandwich.
“Oh, that, yeah” Bette thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know, I’ve been pretty tired lately and tomorrow I have to be here early.”
“Your girl’s gonna be there” Shane added quickly, a smile playing on her lips. Dana winked at her, approving of the persuasion tactics.
“She’s not my girl”, Bette said, defensively.
“You didn’t even doubt who I was talking about. I rest my case.” Shane got up, picking up her tray with her.
“We’ll go to your house to get dressed at 7 p.m.” Dana added, following their other friend on her way out.
Just as promised, five minutes before seven Bette heard a knock on her door.
“You’re early” she pointed, as Dana made her way into the house, followed closely by Shane.
“What can we say, we’re excited.”
“Sure, but where are the others…?”
“Al, Tina and Helena were still filming I don’t know what, so they’ll get there later. Tash’s got the cold, and she wants to take care of herself, blah blah. You know how she is. And the boys will go too, but I wasn’t going to invite them here.” Shane knowing all these details surprised Bette very much. Her younger friend was not one to get into people’s business that much, but apparently she was very invested in tonight.
They chose their outfits while drinking red wine, Bette opting for an oversized blazer on top of her lace bra and some matching dark pants that made her look a little less tall than usual.
“No shirt, eh? Someone’s not playing games tonight” Dana commented between laughs, and Bette suspected that she was already tipsy.
“You look hot”, Shane added, and Bette smiled at them, thankful.
She agreed, the no-shirt thing looked hot on her. Bette would be lying to herself if she said that she didn’t want to look hot for a certain blonde, because she did. She had no idea where they stood (they hadn’t talked about anything and had limited their act to posting some bullshit on social media), but she had noted a change in her co-star’s demeanor, too. Maybe Bette wasn’t the only one having a hard time stopping every time they kissed on set. And maybe she wasn’t alone in that feeling that there could be so much more to all the pretending and lying they had been doing on contract.
The club was like all the other clubs in Los Angeles (or like any other club anywhere, Bette thought, not being a fan of those places). All the lights and high music couldn’t make it up for the fact that the air conditioner was working extra hard, and it was still hot as fuck with so many people in such a reduced space. Shane went for drinks as soon as they crossed the door, and Bette felt a hand pulling her to one of the VIP areas. Dana followed them closely.
“Darling, you look amazing” the British accent was unmistakable, and Bette quickly turned around to hug Helena, who was the one guiding them to the more secluded space.
“Helen! I thought, I mean, Shane told us you’d get here later.” She quickly checked her friend’s outfit before adding, “and you look amazing too. We clean up well.”
“Well, thank you. And yes, we were supposed to take longer, but we came directly from the set. Someone was eager to get here”, she pointed at Alice and Tina with her head, both blondes already dancing with flutes of champagne in their hands.
Bette kept talking with Helena absent-mindedly, but her attention was on Tina, who was wearing a short red dress that highlighted her toned legs, her hair loose and framing her face beautifully. She thought about how that hair felt intertwined with her fingers when they kissed, how she...
“Oh, you’re not even listening to me, right?” Helena snapped her back to reality.
“I’m sorry.” Bette apologized. “What were you saying?”
“Nothing important” her friend waved off, smiling. “Go talk to her, you fool. She wants it too.”
“What’s ‘it’?” Bette asked, but before she could even finish her question, Helena was already somewhere else. At some point Shane had put a beer in her hand, but she was long gone too and nowhere to be seen. So, seeing there wasn’t much of an excuse, she approached Tina and Alice, who were now with Dana too.
“Hi ladies” she greeted them. “Long day in set today?”, the question felt out of place, but she didn’t know how to start a conversation. Was she nervous? That was ridiculous.
“What? Don’t be weird and greet your girlfriend with a proper kiss!” Alice chastised her, her voice sounded way too excited. Maybe it wasn’t their first flute of champagne.
Without previous warning, Tina planted a kiss on her cheek and whispered above her ear:
“Hi, baby”. Her voice was low, smooth, drunk. Their friends cheered in response; Bette blushed.
“Hello”, she replied, almost shyly, not wanting this to happen here in front of everyone.
“I’ll have to go… to the bathroom” Dana commented, although they had just entered the club. “And Alice’s going to come with me.” The two women were out before Bette could even pronounce a word.
She was alone with Tina now.
Tina, who was drunk, and apparently wanted nothing but to dance.
“C’mon” the blonde said, taking one of her hands in both of hers and guiding her to the main floor. “I love this song.”
Bette couldn’t recognize the song, but she could recognize a couple of the faces that were around them. A food influencer, some actors from a miniseries she sometimes watched, a group of extras from their own show. This was L.A. at its best, and all these people were under the idea that Tina and her were completely in love. I could play my part, for God’s sake, she thought, and grabbed the blonde by the wrist to pull her closer. As in instinct, Tina put both of her hands around Bette’s neck, falling into rhythm with the song and with one another.
Bette could feel the blonde everywhere, as if she was taking over her own body. She could feel the way her hips swung under her fingers, and the cold fabric of her dress contrasting with her own hot skin. She stopped her gaze for just a second on her neck, and she couldn’t help but think of the many times she had traced that same neck with her tongue, or how Tina would respond to her biting her pulse point.
“Are you going to kiss me?” the blonde asked, the exact same question Bette had asked before, at the premiere. But this time it felt rawer, like it carried a different weight. It was all too much for Bette.
She entangled her fingers with Tina’s hair and brought her closer, so close, in fact, that it felt like there was no air between them.
“I want to.” She answered, and even though her voice was just a whisper and the music was loud, she knew Tina could hear her. “But what I want is to really kiss you. No PR bullshit.”
“Then do it” Tina said, simply, with a tiny smile.
Bette closed the distance and captured her lips with hers, kissing her eagerly, almost desperately. She had no idea where this need had been, but now she felt it urgently, begging her to take whatever Tina was willing to give her. She felt the blonde responding to her kiss and deepening it, to which Bette felt a chill down her spine. Her hands roamed down Tina’s body until they reached her ass, grabbing it lightly. The touch made Tina kiss her with a renewed fire, and the kissed seemed to stretch forever, both women wanting more.
“You know what I want?” the blonde asked on Bette’s ear, when they pulled apart for a second. Not waiting for her response, she continued. “I want you to take me home. Now.”
That night, with Tina Kennard naked and tangled in her bedsheets, keeping her awake until daylight, Bette Porter came to three conclusions.
The first and most obvious one was that there was no turning back. She could play dumb, and Tina could say she was drunk (which would be a lie because no drunk person could do the things they did that night, for as long as they did them), but there was no way to pretend they hadn’t wanted this. A lot.
The second was that Tina was the most incredibly lover a woman could ask for. She was fiery, determined and knew exactly what to do with Bette’s body. Her skin was the softest she had ever kissed, and her lips seemed to know things about Bette that she didn’t even know herself. They had done everything (from fucking each other senseless as soon as they touched the mattress to sweet, tender lovemaking in the morning when they were already spent), and Bette couldn’t quite believe that she had spent so much time in her life without Tina Kennard under her body. And on top of it. And beside her, sleeping peacefully.
Which lead to the third conclusion: it’d been a long time coming.