Tamaris didn't need to ask why they were starting with the bedroom scene.

She knew. They all did.

The producer hadn't even looked at her, just tapped his clipboard with the back of a pen and muttered, "This one's the sell," like she wasn't three feet away in full makeup and a lace bralette that cost more than her first apartment. Like she hadn't done this exact song and dance—soft skin, parted lips, don't-look-at-the-camera-unless-it's-slow-mo—a hundred times before.

The stylist had cinched the top too tight that Tamaris knew angry pink crescents would be left under her breasts later. Mesh garters clung to her thighs and stayed firm in place. She was slick with body oil, powdered in all the places they didn't want to shine. The lashes forced on her were heavy. The gloss was worse.

"Like you just woke up," the makeup artist swore as she put it on her bottom lip, and Tamaris had to swallow a cruel laugh that was enough to slit the whole shoot wide open.

Who the hell wakes up like this?

Still, she knelt where they told her on the satin sheet beneath her. The lights shifted to dusk-warm, then a red that bled across her skin like she was in a red district. The makeup artist tilted her jaw, tucked a curl behind her ear, murmured about intimacy like normal fare and not like they were arranging her body like she was meat.

She wasn't new. She knew how the male gaze turned woman on woman into a fantasy. All this needed to do was sell records without ever meaning anything. But she couldn't sleep the moment VXN was shown the storyboards. Tamaris did everything she could to hide the fact that she was a lesbian and having another woman touching and grinding on her like it was a softcore shoot sounded like an excuse to out her. But even then, as long as no one else in VXN was subjected to the same bullshit. If she could spare her girls from having to hear the way the director's voice deepened when he adjusted her strap, she could endure it.

Someone's throat cleared off to the side, then the man holding the boom mic stepped back out of frame.

The director groaned, low and satisfied, looking in the direction of the door. "Perfect. She's here."

His groan satisfied something in her too. Maybe it was the same thing that made her endure the tight bralette, the forced laughter, the whispers of how sexy she was that she didn't feel anymore. She was a prop, after all. Nothing more, nothing less. Or maybe, she was relieved that she wouldn't be alone in this hell anymore.

Tamaris didn't move as she kept her eyes trained on the lens like it might blink first.

Then, like it was nothing, she glanced sideways.

And there you were.

Just standing near the edge of the light spill, watching.

Tamaris tilted her head, gaze lingering a beat too long. She provided no verbal greeting yet, just acknowledgment. Her heart stuttered for a beat, betraying the unspoken fear that if she let this woman even assume she could be gay, everything VXN worked for would be over.

She'd expected nerves, not being unable to tear her eyes away from the woman.

Someone called for last looks. A stylist adjusted a curl near her temple. But Tamaris didn't look away from you standing in a matching mesh set. She waved with two fingers and only then did she glance at the intern hovering too close, his cologne making her stomach turn.