Second Take

Ten years ago I stood in a trailer at a course outside Scottsdale with Jayne, and we both blinked at each other like two people who had walked into the wrong meeting, and then we spent forty minutes talking about lens filters while her hand sat on my knee and my heart hammered like I was eighteen instead of thirty-three. Somebody knocked. We jumped apart. And that was sort of that, except it wasn't, because we both flew home the next day and then spent a decade working the same circuit of commercials and corporate shoots, running into each other every few months, being polite, being professional, being chickens.

I am forty-three now and I fly drones for golf commercials, which means I spend my life making little white balls look like they are floating through heaven, and I have gotten precise about everything except this one thing. Every shoot with Jayne ends the same way. Drinks, laughter, a taxi, a wave. Ten years of almost. And I have told myself a hundred times that it would be different next time, that I would say something, that I would stop being the guy who froze in a trailer while a woman I wanted sat six inches away doing most of the work.

So when the schedule fell apart this week, when the client pushed the shoot to Wednesday and the crew got bumped to a later call, and I walked into the hangar at five in the morning to find it empty and lit for a twilight scene that would not be shot for another two days, I decided my pride was done bleeding.

The hangar is a converted airfield building out past the county line, huge and cold, and the golf studio inside it takes up most of the floor. Fake fairway, real grass, sand traps built into pits in the concrete, netting up on all sides to stop golf balls from killing anybody. The lighting rig is set for a fake dawn, purple and orange, and standing alone in it at five a.m. feels like standing on a stage after everyone went home.

I went to work on the sand traps, raking them out, because the one thing I cannot stand is a sloppy frame, and if I was going to be alone in a surreal purple golf world at dawn I was going to make it look right. I had done maybe ten minutes of raking when I heard the big side door roll, and I turned around and there was Jayne, coffee in one hand, camera bag over her shoulder, forty-one years old and calm as ever, looking at me like she had expected to find me here.

"Figured you'd be here," she said, walking across the fake fairway. "You always fix things nobody asked you to fix."

"Somebody has to care about the frame," I said.

"Mm. Or you're hiding." She set her coffee down on a case and looked at me, and there is a way she has of going still on set that makes grown operators straighten up, and she was doing it now. "Ten years, Olaf. You want to talk about that, or do I have to call you a coward to your face?"

I put the rake down. "You never brought it up either. Not once."

"Because I figured if you wanted it you'd say something. I waited a long time for a man to say something." She crossed her arms. "I got tired of waiting somewhere around year four, and then I just got sad, and sad is worse, so now you get the coward thing."

I walked over to her and stopped a foot away, close enough that she had to tip her head back, and she did not move away, she just watched me with those level eyes, and I said, "I have thought about you almost every shoot for ten years. Most of them. I froze in that trailer and I have hated myself for it since and I am done."

"Okay," she said, and her voice was still calm but there was something under it now. "Then act like it. Because I'm not doing another almost, Olaf. I've got a script in my head for you and it's been sitting there for a decade, and if we do this, it goes my way. You good with that?"

"Yes," I said, maybe too fast.

She smiled, small. "There's a storage room off the back. Go."

The storage room is cramped, lined with racks of clubs and folded nets and a single fold-out chair, and it smells like rubber and machine oil, and I got maybe three steps into it before she came in behind me and shut the door. She put the camera bag down on the floor and looked at me, and I reached for her and she put a hand flat on my chest.

"Ask me," she said.

"Jayne, I want to kiss you. I've wanted to for ten years. Please."

"Yes," she said, and then I kissed her and she kissed back like she runs a set, taking the rhythm away from me in about four seconds, her hand in my collar, my hands finding her waist, and I felt ten years of restraint start to burn off me all at once. She pulled back just far enough to talk, her mouth near mine.

"Condoms are my rule, just so we're clear, and you're going to do exactly what I tell you." She crouched by the camera bag and dug around past lens cloths and batteries, and she came up with a tube of lube, brand new, unopened, and she pressed it into my hand and closed my fingers around it. "I packed this in 2015, you absolute idiot, and I have moved it from bag to bag ever since waiting for you to grow up."

I looked at the tube and then at her and my brain did that thing where it tries to run a whole plan in half a second, and she saw it, she always sees it, and she took the tube back and held it up between two fingers like a prop she was about to hand a nervous actor.

"Nope," she said. "No thinking. You don't get to plan this one. I direct, you perform. First thing I want is your mouth, and then we'll see how you handle taking instructions." She sat down on the fold-out chair, which creaked under her, and she looked up at me in the little light that came under the door. "Still good?"

"Still good," I said, and meant it, and got on my knees on the cold concrete floor.

I got my mouth on her and she was already wet, and she made this low sound and said, "Good, keep going, no skipping ahead," so I kept going, working her with my tongue slow and steady the way I would move a drone through a shot, patient, no jerks, no rush. She had one hand in my hair and one hand on the armrest of the fold-out chair, gripping it, and every so often she would say a small thing like "there" or "softer" or "Olaf, yes," and I adjusted every time, and I could tell it was landing because her breathing changed, went ragged at the edges, and that affected me, hearing a woman who directs everybody all day let her voice crack over my mouth. She came with her hand tightening in my hair and her hips pushing up off the chair, and she said my name once, plain, like a marker on a take sheet, take one, good.

She caught her breath and looked down at me still kneeling on the concrete and she said, "Okay. You did well. Now you get to show me something." She stood up and stepped out of her pants and turned around and put both hands on the back of the chair, and she looked at me over her shoulder and said, "Your fingers first, in my ass. That's the script I've had for ten years. Prep me. Slow, and you talk me through it, because I want to hear you commit for once in your life."

So I picked up the lube and I warmed some between my fingers and I said, "I'm going to start with one, just the tip, just pressing," and I pressed, and she was up on the chair now, one knee up on the seat, her chest down on her folded arms, and she went quiet for a second and then said, "More."

I worked the first finger in slow, talking the whole time because she told me to, and it felt strange and good to narrate myself, like callouts on set, saying what I was doing before I did it. "I'm in to the first knuckle. I'm going to hold here and let you open up around me, and I'm going to curl it a little, just a little, feel that?" She made a sound and pushed back against my hand. "I feel it. Again. Keep talking, don't stop."

"Second finger now," I said, and I added it slow, watching her back, watching her shoulders, reading her the way I read a frame, looking for anything that said cut. "I'm spreading them, just barely, and you're so warm, Jayne, you're taking me so easy." I twisted my wrist a little and she gasped and said, "Deeper, and slower, and Olaf, do not stop talking, this is the most words you've said to me in ten years and I swear I'm going to come from it." So I kept going, third finger, a long