When the Monster Finally Looked Back

*This one came from wanting to write a monster who's been domesticated and a partner who's sick of the leash. If you like your romance with sharp teeth and a side of existential dread, thanks for reading.*

Miranda Gibbons is twenty-eight years old, and she has spent four of those years dating a man who is not a man. Chet Dobbs is thirty-one, a shapeshifter, and for most of their relationship he has worn the same face for her. A pleasant face. Slightly crooked nose, brown hair, a smile he borrowed from a stranger's insurance commercial, or so she suspects. He has never told her where the face came from and she has never pushed.

That is the word for their whole arrangement, she thinks, dabbing spirit gum off a sponge. Nobody pushed. Nobody pulled either. They just sat there, two adults in a well-lit apartment, orbiting each other at a polite fixed distance.

The boredom crept in so slowly it never announced itself. It arrived the way dust does, one unremarkable day at a time, until one evening she looked up from her crossword and realized Chet had been wearing the same expression for three hours and she hadn't noticed. She could not even blame him for it. He would change his face in an instant if she asked. He had told her so, once, gently, and she had said no, of course not, honey, I love your face.

Which was a lie, because it was not his face. The entire problem with loving it was that.

She rinses the sponge and does not solve this tonight.

***

The set is a converted warehouse on the industrial edge of the city, and it is raining outside the way it always rains, politely and endlessly. Inside, the crew has built a sterile lab out of white panels and rented monitors, all of them blinking in colors real labs probably do not bother with. A single gurney sits under the harsh lights. Everything smells like paint and burnt coffee.

"Back to one!" Bruce Moreau calls from behind the monitor. He is thirty-five, calm in the way only directors on a long night shoot are not, and this is his third film with Chet. He knows what Chet is. He has never once said so out loud, which Miranda finds either very decent or very convenient.

She works at the makeup station at the edge of set, touching up the actress who plays the lab victim. Her assistant Jenni Harrington hovers nearby with a powder brush and the specific eagerness of a twenty-six-year-old who interned under Miranda two years ago and still wants a credit on something.

"Almost ready on Chet?" Bruce asks.

"He's ready," Miranda says. "He's always ready."

That comes out with more edge than she planned. Bruce glances at her, decides against asking, and turns back to his monitor. Smart man.

She walks over to Chet anyway, mostly to check the prosthetic seams, partly because standing near him is easier than standing near her own thoughts.

The prosthetic tonight is a monster. It is a good one, if she says so herself, and she does, silently, every take. Heavy foam ridges down the skull, a jaw piece that extends past his real jaw, blackened teeth, milky contact lenses. Three hours in the chair this afternoon, and it looks like something out of a nightmare with a decent budget. Chet sits under the light wearing all of it, hands loose in his lap, breathing slow.

"How's the jaw piece?" she asks, tilting his chin with one finger. "Any pull at the hinge?"

"Little tight on the left," he says. "But it's fine. I can hold for the take."

"You said that four takes ago."

"And it was true four takes ago."

She works a fingertip along the seam at his temple and feels the warm human skin under the foam edge. The same skin she touches at home. The same temperature. She has checked, once, at three in the morning, pressing her palm to his cheek and thinking, is anything in here different, and there was no way to know, because he would simply never let her know.

"Places!" Bruce calls.

She squeezes Chet's shoulder and steps off set.

They run the scene. The victim actress screams on cue. Chet lurches out of the dark in the monster suit, all prosthetic and shadow, and does the slow head tilt Bruce loves. The crew watches the monitor. Miranda watches Chet, the way she has watched him for four years, waiting for one single frame where something real leaks through the latex.

Nothing leaks. It never does. He is a professional.

"Cut!" Bruce says, and then, to nobody and everybody, "I don't know. It's good. It's just not the last take yet. Reset, let's go again, and Chet, can you give me a little more hunger in the approach? Like it's the first meal it's had in a month?"

"Sure, Bruce," Chet says, muffled slightly by the jaw piece.

They reset. They go again. It is not the last take. They reset again. The gurney gets re-dressed, the victim gets re-powdered, Miranda re-checks a seam that does not need checking, and Bruce calls another take with the serene confidence of a man spending other people's sleep.

Something hot spikes up the back of her neck. It is not fair to be annoyed at Bruce. Bruce is just doing his job. It is not really fair to be annoyed at Chet either, who is out there in forty pounds of foam doing exactly what everyone asks of him, patiently, take after take, the way he does everything. Patiently. Forever.

That is the irritation, she realizes. Not the takes. The patience.

"God, he's amazing," Jenni says beside her, in a low whisper meant to be professional. "That's the ninth take and he hasn't complained once. He's honestly the most patient actor I've ever seen. How does he do that? I'd be chewing through the prosthetic by take three."

"He's not acting," Miranda says.

Jenni laughs. "Right? It's like he was born for it."

He's not acting, Miranda thinks again, and this time it does not feel like a joke. He was not born for it. He was born for exactly this, or something like it, and she has never seen the thing he was actually born as, and she married her life to it anyway, or at least leased it long-term.

On set, Bruce calls the tenth take.

***

The break comes at midnight. Craft services puts out pizza that has been under a heat lamp since roughly the previous shoot. The crew scatters to chairs and phones. Chet sits on a folding chair in half the monster suit, jaw piece off, skull cap still glued down, eating a slice carefully at the corner of his mouth.

Miranda carries her coffee over and stands next to him. Rain hammers the roof far above, a soft industrial drumroll.

"Long night," she says.

"Long night," he agrees. "Bruce found his gear, though. I can feel it. Next take's the one."

"Mm."

He looks up at her. The prosthetic ridges make the look oddly sweet, like a friendly gargoyle. "Hey. You okay? You've been quiet since nine."

"I'm always quiet on set. It's professional."

"It's professional," he agrees, and takes another bite, and lets the silence sit there, because he is patient, he is so patient, and she could scream.

She thinks about the crossword. The dust. The borrowed face at her kitchen table, four years of it, agreeing with her about paint colors and takeout and whether to get a second cat. Agreeing, always, pleasantly, because whatever he actually is, deep under the pleasant surface, has never once been asked to show itself in her presence and has apparently decided to keep the streak alive.

Maybe that is on her. She has never asked. Not really asked. She has said no, honey, I love your face, which is a door slammed shut with a bow on it.

But Bruce wants one more take, and the cameras are already rolling on her nerves, and something in Miranda, tired and coffee-warmed and twenty-eight years old, is done being the reliable one.

"Chet," she says.

"Mm?"

"When this next take's done, I want you to show me."

He pauses with the pizza an inch from his mouth. "Show you what?"

"You know what. The real one. Whatever's under all of it, under the commercial face and the monster jaw and everything. I want to see it. Tonight. Here."

He sets the slice down on the plate and looks at her, and for a second, just a second, she would swear the shape of him goes slightly wrong at the edges, like a photograph with the focus pulled.

"Here?" he says quietly. "Miranda, there's a crew."

"There's a crew," she agrees. "And I'm tired of being the only one at home who doesn't know what she comes home to."

"We've talked about this."

"No, we haven't. I've declined to talk about this for four years and you've politely let me. That's not the same thing."

He wipes his fingers on a napkin, slowly, buying time, which is another thing he is good at. "If I show you and it goes badly," he says, "there's no take-back. You can't unsee a face."

"Good," Miranda says, and her heart is going, but her voice comes out steady. "I'd hate for it to be something I could unsee. I want it to stick."

"Places." Bruce calls from across the warehouse, cheerful, oblivious. "Last one, folks, I can feel it."

Chet stands, and pulls the skull cap free in one practiced motion, and looks at her with his borrowed brown eyes.

"After the take," he says.

"After the take," she agrees.

She walks back to her station. Jenni gives her a look. "Everything okay?"

"Peachy," Miranda says, and picks up her powder brush, and waits for the monster to do the one performance of his life that nobody hired him for.

The makeup trailer is a repurposed shipping container with a mirror along one wall and a heater that only believes in one setting, which is inferno. Miranda catches Chet there during the second break, because the first plan, the polite after-the-take plan, has started to feel like one more door with a bow on it. She wants the bow off.

"Close the door," she says, and he does, and the rain gets quieter, and they are alone with the heater and the smell of adhesive remover and eleven hours of a night that refuses to end.

"I meant it," she says. "The take. Afterward. I wasn't just saying it to say it."

"I know you weren't." He sits down in the makeup chair, which is hers, which is a small thing that annoys her tonight for no good reason. "Miranda, I don't think here is the right place."

"There is no right place. There's just places, and we keep not picking one."

"That's not fair."

"Nothing about this is fair," she says, and hears her own voice go sharp, and keeps going anyway. "I have spent four years being gracious. I have told you I love your face. I have meant it, mostly. And every single day you walk around being exactly the right shape and I have never, not once, seen what you look like when nobody is designing you."

"It's not safe."

"That's your answer? It's not safe?"

"It's the true answer." His borrowed brown eyes hold hers, steady, patient, and God, the patience. The patience is the worst part. "When I let it out, it doesn't always go back neatly. There are hours where I'm not a man in a suit, Miranda. There are hours where I'm just the suit, and the suit is hungry, and it doesn't know your name."

"Well," Miranda says, "it's going to have to learn my name eventually, isn't it? Because I'm not doing another four years of crossword puzzles with a stranger."

He stands up out of her chair, slowly, and for a moment the air in the trailer goes thick, like the pressure changed, like a storm front parked itself between the mirror and the coffee machine. Then it passes, and he is just Chet again, crooked nose and all, looking sorry and immovable.

"Not tonight," he says. "I'm sorry. I'll take you somewhere. A weekend, somewhere far from people, and I'll show you everything. But not here, not on a night when I'm already halfway inside the thing."

"Right," Miranda says. "The weekend. The special occasion. The someday."

"Miranda."

"No, it's fine." She picks up her kit bag with hands she is proud of, because they do not shake yet. "You go be patient somewhere. You're great at it."

She lets the trailer door bang behind her, which is not professional, and does not care, which is also not professional, and walks back to her station with her ears hot.

* * *

By one in the morning, the warehouse is down to