14. February 23rd

FEbrUARY 23RD

Waters

The housethe eight of them were living in was a security nightmare.

It had the capability of modern conveniences, but they were not entirely dependable since the nearest town, Coxen Hole, which was also the capital city of the island, was ten miles away. There was the town, and then suddenly there wasn't, so things went from primitive to archaic quickly. This meant there was electricity, but other than the kitchen, it was relegated to fireplaces downstairs, one table lamp per room, and a single naked bulb ceiling light in the bathrooms. There was a possibility for hot water, but usually only in the downstairs sinks and tubs. And the internet was available, but service could be spotty.

On the second floor, the actress had a room to herself, and the five men were bunked as a double and a triple while sharing a single full bathroom between the six of them. There were no curtains on any of the windows and only floor rugs on any of the floors.

Downstairs was only slightly better conditions-wise.

On the first floor was a large farmer's style kitchen, with a huge picture window above the sink and a mud room between it and the so-called backyard. While there were electrical outlets, most of the appliances they attached to were ancient. Waters noticed that the stove was gas and there was no coffee maker, so cooking would be simple, and they'd be making coffee and hot chocolate the old-fashioned way.

The front of the house was split between two main rooms: an old-fashioned parlor room and a library.

He had taken the old-fashioned parlor, which had somewhat recently been turned into a bedroom for someone who had been unable to climb the stairs of the house. A bathroom existed between the parlor and the kitchen, but it was so tiny he barely fit in it along with the toilet, sink, and clawfoot tub.

Across the hall from the parlor was what Kubrick dubbed the War Room, which was basically an old-fashioned library. Double doors opened into a large space with bookcases on three walls that went to the ceiling, two tall windows looking out into the so-called front yard from the fourth wall, a fireplace, a massive handmade antique desk with a high-backed leather chair behind it, a long leather sofa with a matching loveseat and armchair, a long rectangular coffee table, plus her workstation, which was basically a stand-up drafting table.

Weirdly enough, the room did have an older flat-screen television that could get a few local channels, including baseball for Kubrick. Secretly, it also gave Waters a source for Midas to hack into for security cameras. Thank goodness the man was a genius at seeing and hearing in places where most people could barely get cell service. During their first day of training, TB, Nemo, and Demon were going to be rushing to install short-term cameras and microphones for surveillance.

The one saving grace was that Kubrick's bedroom suite was only accessible through the War Room.

After the first four hours in the house alone, he'd tried to reason with her about locking up rooms and safeguarding personal items, as well as personal safety. She'd shot him down.

Then he tried playing the "prevention of curious locals from poking around" card and emphasized the potential invasions of their privacy, let alone their personal safety, especially when they would be out of the building for long periods of time with no security staff to watch over the building. She'd thrown back her head and laughed in his face.

When it was clear she wasn't going to see things his way, Waters had to give Kubrick an unconditional rule seven, which was that, at the very least, the War Room was to remain locked at all times. She'd gotten all ruffled and stomped off, muttering "Christ on a crutch" and something about military men with an obsession for bad guys around every corner, but she hadn't actually argued with him about it, so it was a huge victory in his mind.

As far as the film project itself, despite himself, he was encouraged by the actors' commitment and impressed that they weren't the prima donnas he had feared they would be. It gave him pause, too, because he hadn't expected to like them as much as he did. There was very little ego amongst them when they were together, and they balanced the work with the fun. Not the stereotypical idea of Hollywood stars at all.

But then again, is that a surprise? Would Kubrick willfully work with people who were difficult? Not likely.

Benjamin, nicknamed Lazarus, was playing the part of a former SEAL gone rogue, making him the villain in the film. He appeared to have some Native American ancestry in him that made all the women on the crew lose their ever-loving minds.

Maddox, nicknamed Dawg, was the perfect male lead: tall, blond, ripped, and as Sookie described him, "sex on a stick." Without question, his real-life persona and his nickname fit together all too well. Waters had a feeling it would be a very bad idea to introduce him to Nemo, Tribe's resident bad boy. He could only imagine them keeping scorecards on the scandalous things they'd done and where they'd done them.

Luca, nicknamed Jumper, came from a small rural town in Wisconsin and had been a three-sport athlete who could have signed to play quarterback at several major universities but chose instead to follow his heart to Hollywood. When Jumper arrived, he was dressed all Ken-doll chic with perfect blond hair and blue eyes. The next morning, he'd shown up with a self-shaved head, missing the blue-colored contacts, and ready to run.

Caleb, nicknamed Brick, lived up to the name. Of African ancestry, he was built like a rugby player—short, compact, and all muscle. His mouth was constantly going to the point that Kubrick kept telling him he had diarrhea of the mouth—it just kept running. Waters had a very difficult time keeping a straight face on that one and had to pretend he'd swallowed wrong to cough and suppress the laughter.

Cameron, nicknamed Enigma, was a dark horse. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was muscled and tattooed to the point of being the movie cliché SEAL. All the stereotypical vices had been a part of his life: the uppers to keep him focused, the benzos to get him to come down, blackout drinking, hangers-on supplying every narcotic known to man, a new woman on his arm every time he was photographed, and arrests for the destruction of property and assaulting a paparazzi. But this Enigma that Waters saw seemed to have things under control and was allegedly going on five years sober.

The last piece of the puzzle was Sookie, nicknamed Vixen. Tiny to the point of ridiculousness, long brown hair, and exotic green eyes, she was a walking dynamo and reminded him of a World War II pin-up girl. She was a blindingly beautiful girl, sugar sweet, and sincerely kind. However, she was a terrible flirt with all of the guys, including him, which was something he was finding uncomfortable for the first time in his life.

Overall, he was pleased with the group's efforts. It was easy to see that they would be good for the parts Kubrick had cast them in as they were already playing with personality traits when they trained—another insistence Kubrick made of them in order to try and get the foundation work for their characters to be natural, so they didn't have to also work on that when it came time to film. Things that she liked, they finessed into their process. Things that didn't work, they tossed and didn't return to. She was efficient at layering the job, like the character development on top of the training. At meals, she had them develop and share backstories for the characters, or she would have them improvise scenes the characters might find themselves in during everyday life. One of the things he had noticed about the script was that she often reworked scenes around action—eating meals, cleaning guns, packing parachutes—so that everything felt like it moved. Like people always multitasking in real life, nothing was static.

After the evening meals, they met in the War Room and continued the work, doing read-throughs, discussing scenes, and running lines. But they also used the time to get to know how each other worked or hang out. They genuinely liked each other, and it took almost no time to develop. Just last night, they had found a closet filled with board games, and a near-violent game of Team Battleship erupted with the stakes of laundry, garbage, and dish duty for a week on the line. Dawg and Brick lost spectacularly, which caused Jumper to go outside and roll around in the mud just so the laundry became more interesting.

And heaven forbid they caught anything baseball-related on the local TV, even a rerun from thirty years ago. The actors would heckle Kubrick and whatever team she rooted for as if they were fans of the opposing team, drink warm beer, make popcorn in the fireplace, and then throw said popcorn at Kubrick. All this while she tried to watch the game, answer emails, storyboard scenes, do rewrites, and discuss ideas with him. But she got distracted often. Mostly by food.

Cute. As. Fuck.

Currently, they were going over the week's schedule and trying to come up with contingency plans because there was potential weather coming in the next few days due to a tropical storm. Jumper had been channeling his high school baseball days, imitating batting stances all night long, and once he'd made it through the batting order, then he started to imitate the pitchers. Now the actors were singing a horrifically bad rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." At moments like this, it felt a bit like running an insane daycare.

Waters was sitting on the floor, his back against the couch, trying to concentrate. It wasn't working, but it wasn't because of the actors. Kubrick was sitting cross-legged behind him, and she kept leaning over his shoulder to steal potato chips out of his bag. When she wasn't stealing his food, she was shoving papers under his nose for him to review.

"Did you eat a ton of sugar before coming in here? Christ, woman, slow down. I can't keep up."

"That's because you're an old man," she teased.

"Umm… you're older than me."

"Pfft. Two months. Barely."

She laughed at him, then lunged for the potato chip bag, which he successfully thwarted despite the dizzying cloud of lilac scent he'd come to recognize as all Kubrick.

"Get your own," he groused.

"Mine are gone."

"Well, eat yours more slowly next time. Don't just dump them into your mouth directly from the bag. It's like your own damn version of Pudgy Bunny."

"Are you calling me a pig?"

Waters began to make pig snorting noises.

"You cheeky fucker! I'm going to give you such a pinch!" That, of course, was another epic fail, and he had to save her from falling off the couch two separate times. The second time, he got a handful of her breast, but other than a solid inhale from him, the fake fight just kept going with her trying to go at him from the other side.

"Do you have any fat on your body anywhere? Shit on a shingle, there's nowhere to grab any skin."

"Pretty much zero body fat." He slapped his abs with both hands.

"But you eat junk food," she marveled. "I've seen you shove a whole donut in your mouth. More than once."

"And work out way more than I should have to, especially since I'm herding cats here for you."

She laughed. "They're not that bad."

"No," he agreed, "they're pretty good. Dawg needs some corralling at times, and Brick needs a gag, but they focus well when they need to."

"Hmmm. I wonder if Jumper has a ball gag with him," Kubrick mused.

He turned almost entirely backward. "What?!"

She shrugged with an impish grin. "As for their focus, I put this group together very much by design. I don't hire problem children. No time or patience for it."

"You work with Big Bird." He turned back to face front, more than a bit disturbed by the throwaway comment from her about Jumper.

"Ah, but I didn't hire him. He hired me. And while I had major reservations and still wonder at my sanity for saying yes, as well as wonder why he wanted me since he detests me so much, I wanted this job almost more than I love chocolate. This could really solidify my career."

"You don't need solidifying. Your other work is excellent."

"You've seen it?"

He nodded while reviewing the cover shot storyboards she'd handed him.

"Which ones?"

He frowned, turning some pages so they were the right way round and shuffling them into chronological order. "All of them, I think."

"Wh-when? Why?"

"Before we left L.A. For research."

"Oh."

Will she ask?

He figured she would want to know which movie he liked best. The question she asked was unexpected.

"Did you believe what you were seeing? I mean, did you feel like it was real when you were watching them?"

Looking over his shoulder at her, something clicked. She had kept pushing with him and God that truth was what she worked toward in her work. It wasn't technical accuracy that she meant, although she did strive for that as much as possible. She wanted Truth. The capital T version. She wanted people to live in the world she created and be a part of the experience. "Yes. Even the wolf shifter romance, and I'm not fond of those kinds of movies. I can't buy into all the creatures. But when I watched that one, I just saw people who couldn't get along because they believed in different life philosophies." He turned his head back to the drawings and began adjusting one of her sketches with his pencil. "It reminded me of Afghanistan, actually."

"I'm not sure if I should be sorry about that or flattered."

She reached over his shoulder with her own pencil and made some adjustments to a storyboard frame on the far left. He breathed deeply, as quietly and unobtrusively as he could.

I will never smell lilacs and not think of her.

He cleared his throat to settle himself. "The people in the Middle East, most of them are pawns on a chessboard. It's not their fault what's going on. Most of them don't want it any more than we do. But they're just as powerless to stop it as the average American. The kindness I saw while there for our soldiers, especially with the wounded, was sometimes even greater than what we experienced back home. We tried not to trade on that because villages got punished for helping the Infidel. But we always tried to do what we could. The kids were the best. We'd get our asses handed to us on a regular basis by them. Their soccer skills were insane."

He reached into his thigh cargo pocket and pulled out a thin credit card sleeve, sliding out a folded photo of himself and an Afghani teen. Handing it to her, he watched her reaction. The photo was beat up, as he'd been carrying it around for over a decade.

She was smiling softly before looking up at him. "You're such a baby there."

"It was my first tour. Nineteen. His name was Hesam."

She handed the photo back to him. "Was?"

"At one point, there was a reporter with us for a while, and he sent me this after he came home from doing his story. He was there when Hesam died shortly after our unit moved on. He thought I'd want to know." He slid the photo back into the sleeve and put it back into his cargo pocket. "One of those innocent victims. I carry the picture to remind me that good people exist everywhere. Corny. But sometimes, in my line of work, you need a reminder."

Lilacs wrapped around him comfortingly as she placed a hand on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, "You're a wonderful human being, Waters. Fucking perfect." Her lips barely pressed against the side of his head.

Without thinking about it, he reached a hand up to grasp hers as she lifted it from his shoulder. He tilted his head to brush his cheek against the back of it. "You're pretty damn perfect yourself, Kubrick."

It was late.The actors had all drifted off to bed. Kubrick and Waters barely even noticed that everyone was gone. She was lying on the floor, shoveling more junk food into her mouth, a paper script in pieces in front of her—which were clearly out of order now, given the grumbling and page flipping that was going on—and there were a number of pencils she had worn down to blunt tips scattered around her. Waters sat on the couch, feet propped on the coffee table, tablet in his lap. He was trying to concentrate on the email in front of him, but between her constant whispered swearing and the contents of the email, he couldn't stay focused.

Doesn't help that she's ass up on the floor, either. Knew it would be wicked.

He watched her unwrap another Zinger and start shoving it in her mouth.

Grinning and shaking his head, he went back to his computer screen.

Hey, Boss.

Midas still has no new information on our missing sailor.

Boss is so pissed and ate so many suckers he broke two teeth. Cherry took away his stash. Now everybody in that office is cranky. Glad I'm here with you.

Cyclopes is up and watching all entrances and exits, plus the main rooms and hallways, live 24/7. Bedrooms are also recording but are not live to view. If you need him to turn off the feed for any reason (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), just use "Stanley" as a code, and the system will shut down until you tell him to turn it back on.

Fun story. We sent Nerdboy on a field trip around the property. Dumbass got bit by a snake, so Demon had to play doctor. Apparently, it was the poisonous kind, so Nerdboy is limited for a day or two. By the way, Demon got his contract of employment today, so he'll be officially in place on set tomorrow.

— TB

It was concerning that there were still no leads on Ka-Bar, there'd been no attempts of anything hinky in connection to Kubrick, and that meant they were still at Ground Zero. That, in itself, was proof enough to Waters that something wasn't right, and obviously, God thought so as well if he was breaking perfectly good teeth.

"I give up." The groan from the floor was tortured as well as muffled. Kubrick was softly banging her forehead on the floor since she was face first on the carpet, arms and legs splayed like she was floating dead in the water.

"Never give up," Waters admonished. "There are still Zingers left in the box."

Without looking up from the floor, Kubrick grabbed the box and shook it. No sound came. "Nope. I ate them all."

Waters blinked. "There are twelve in a box."

"Yup." She threw the box across the room and huffed into the carpet.

"You ate twelve Zingers."

"Yup."

"Am I going to have to hold your hair while you puke them all up later?"

"Doubtful."

He shook his head in disbelief. "You're a human garbage can, you know that, don't you?"

"Yes, you've already established that you think I'm a pig."

"I do not think you're a pig. I do, however, worry your stomach is rotting from the inside out." He closed out his screen, shut down his tablet, and then slid to the floor, lying down next to her propped up on his elbows. He sorted through the pages strewn about. "Are you playing paperwork solitaire again?"

"Bite me," she snapped.

He glanced back over his shoulder at her ass. His mouth actually watered.

Oh, sweetheart… don't tease.

"Seriously, what are you trying to do here besides create a mess?" he wondered.

Kubrick rolled over onto her back, staring at the ceiling. "I thought I was making notes for blocking the first set of scenes, but I've got myself so turned around I can't even figure it out anymore."

"You do know you have over four weeks before cameras start rolling, right?"

"I know, but I'm a serial killer when it comes to planning."

He stopped sorting through the pages, glancing over at her with raised eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

She blew air out of her mouth up toward her forehead, and stray hairs blew out of her eyes. "Serial killers plan the work and then work the plan. I do the same with my scripts." She turned her head to face him. "Not a very pleasant analogy, is it?"

"No, it isn't. You need to stop watching all those crime procedurals."

Her gaze went back to the ceiling. "Mmm. Maybe that's why I can't get a date."

Waters swallowed tightly, then turned his attention back to the scattered pages on the floor. "Likening yourself to a serial killer could dampen someone's interest."

Hasn't dampened mine, but I'm pretty sure I'm certifiable when it comes to you.

"I wish it were that simple. I just don't think I inspire that sort of interest from men. Hell, I'd take interest from a woman right now."

Thank God I'm on my stomach on the floor right now. Awkward!

Clearing his throat, Waters reminded her, "You once told me that men are a nuisance."

"Oh, they are. But they have their uses. Particularly when things are frustrating." She looked back over at him. "The problem is, I don't even know why I'm frustrated with this right now. Things are going well. It's not like Big Bird is here throwing crap in my way, or the actors are creating drama. Maybe that's the issue. There are no problems for me to solve, and I'm used to there always being problems to solve."

"Hang in there. I'm sure problems will arise."

I certainly have a problem that has arisen.

A soft caress, barely there, whispered across his right shoulder. He turned his head to see Kubrick's index finger following his ink over his bare shoulder from front to back, where his tank top revealed a piece of his tattoo.

"It's driving me crazy. What is it? It's got to be a huge tattoo because I can see more ink on the back of your neck, and the design on the left side is similar in style."

"It's a Kraken."

"Not an octopus?"

"A Kraken is an octopus," he clarified.

"The Kraken is a Titan," she corrected, "not a simple octopus."

"Actually, technically, it's a giant squid, and extra technically, it's Norse, not Greek."

It was clear from the look on her face that his tone had been sharper than he intended. The tattoo was not something he was comfortable talking about with her. That message was obviously received because she retracted her hand quickly from her tracing.

He apologized. "Sorry. That came out a bit grumpy."

"Just a little. But that's okay. I was prying. I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry for crossing the line."

"No, it's okay. If it were that much of a dead zone for me, I wouldn't let the ink show for people to see. I just"—he ran a hand over his hair—"I guess I'm not ready to talk about it. At least not tonight."

"Understood." She rolled over and gathered the sheets of paper from her side of the floor, making a haphazard pile of them. "Maybe someday you'll share. But it's okay if you don't." She took the orderly pile of papers he'd collected and added them to her stack, then stood up from the floor. "I'm heading to bed. I don't want to be tired and cranky, or my trainer will make me run extra tomorrow." She winked at him, then took the stack of papers over to the desk. "Night, Waters," she called without looking back at him.

The door to her suite closed behind her.

"Night, Kubrick. Good dreams."