“I’m going to court tonight with Jen and Vervain. Dress me,” I said when we pulled apart.
“Really? Like the works? I have the most amazing dress—”
“Just make sure I can…do whatever I have to in whatever you put me in. I’m taking Jake with me, trying to work out what the fuck that means.”
“You’re gonna be a baby Dom?!” His eyebrows shot up.
“Everyone keeps saying that. I have literally no idea what that means.”
“Are you going to manhandle my stylist for much longer, or can we get this show on the road?” Rhiannon said. “Time is ticking by.”
Her voice was arch and insistent, demanding what she wanted and not considering that anyone would say no to her.
“You’ll treat him with respect,” I said, biting the words off. “It says nothing in the brief or contract about having a personal stylist. I’ll have one of the drainers run a brush through your hair and call it done if you don’t behave.”
“Who the hell are you to talk to me like that?” she snapped. She was being a bitch, but I still wanted to photograph her, the fire in her eyes shining like a diamond.
I didn’t answer her, I just stepped up into her personal space until I was close enough she could catch whatever it was about me that smelled like power. I stared into her eyes, watching the moment they widened and she realised what she was messing with.
“Down to your underwear and on the bed,” I said, jerking a finger to the bedroom door.
“I’ll be right back with something more suitable if she’s wearing granny panties,” Marlow said with a smirk and then took off.
I’ll say this for Rhiannon—she rallied well. When we opened the door, my camera now in hand, and faced the array of barely dressed man flesh laid out on the bed, she just smiled, slipping off her shoes and wiggling out of her jeans and pretty top. I lifted my camera, taking a few test shots and checking the way the light was being captured on the LCD display on the back. She crawled towards Liam, elegant as a cat when I looked back.
I admit, I took some satisfaction in the fact that he paid her no mind, his eyes entirely on me. He gave nothing away about how he felt, just staring back. This was the first time I’d shot him since the day before the party. There was a weird symmetry to that—him telling me about how much he’d ached for the woman beside him as I’d taken his photo. I searched the tableau on the bed. Was that what was going to happen today? They’d talked about Rhiannon ‘not being the one’ in overheard conversations last night, but what did that mean? Was this a scene she’d been in before, though with considerably less clothes? Was I just the newest meat in all this sandwich?
I shook my head. I didn’t have time for that. Time was ticking if they were going to get to those interviews on time.
“Lie on your back, Rhiannon,” I said, “looking up at Liam. Yep, that’s perfect.” Click, click. “Now reach out for him. Not quite so strong. Soften your arm and make it lazy. You’re in bed, it’s early in the afternoon, and you’ve got hours to just be together.”
She took direction well, and as I’d suspected, the contrast between his big muscular body and her slender feminine one was a picturesque one. Liam just stared into the camera, completely oblivious to her imprecations, which had a nice spin to it. It spun on its head the media narrative that he had been chasing after her, as well as that audience engagement. That hot gaze… A million men and women would look at that image, see his intensity, and imagine it was them under him, not Rhiannon.
“Alright…” I said, my eyes flicking around the room at the guys sitting back against the walls. What was going to be the best way to do this? Rutherglen wanted something saucy for the media to chomp on. I’d give him hot. “Billy, you make the calls. Direct the others, tell them what to do to her.”
“What?” Rhiannon’s voice had lost its confident tone.
“No one’s going to actually do anything, but the Rutherglen wanted a story, a sexy story. Well, this is it. You’ll be showing the world their most beloved fantasy—a hot girl surrendering to a whole lot of hot guys. “
“But this wasn’t—”
“Show me what it’d be like,” I said to Billy, watching his brown eyes bleed away to black. “Show me what the monster would want.”
He gave a short, harsh laugh at that, but I saw him get to his knees and crawl closer, shaking his head for a moment, then look to Jake.
“Spread her legs,” he said to Johnno and Jake, the redhead scrambling to do his bidding, Johnno looking somewhat troubled by the idea. “Lucas, grab her wrists.”
My camera was up, ready, capturing their moves, clicking as fast as I could to capture the way they settled around her.
“No, no, this is not what was in the brief!” Rhiannon cried.
“You want out, you just say so,” I said, capturing her frown, her fear. There was a whole BDSM element to what was going on here, so reluctance may as well be a part of it. “The minute you say it, I’ll stop everything, but this is it—my vision for this shoot.” She stared back at me, fury simmering there clearly. “The Rutherglen is using you as a pawn. The Changelings don’t need any more PR, you know that. It’s Dave you want, not Liam. But we aren’t taking this shit lying down. Say no, walk out. You’re beautiful enough to seduce a man like him. Go to him, play his games, entice him, and walk away from this. We aren’t going to be played by him.”
She lay there, every line of her body trembling with reined back tension. She was going to stay, I just fucking knew it.
I sighed. “What’re your limits?”
“No kissing, no hands under my underwear, and he doesn’t feed from me,” Rhiannon said, jerking her head at Billy.
“Like I’d want your scant offerings,” he sneered back.
“So we’re doing this?” I said, not taking another photograph until I saw her terse nod. I shook my head and settled in.
This had nothing to do with her, just as it had nothing to do with the girl with the velvet throat back at Jen’s estate. I could see how it was going to be between me and the band. We could crush people, stepping over them to get to each other, especially when they just laid down and let us. I paused for a moment, watching the way Lucas stretched her arms up and above her head and then pinning them decisively to the mattress, Jake spreading her thighs and taking one ankle and holding it down while Johnno did the same with the other. Liam and Billy, they leant over, as if tasting the fear and irritation that came off her in waves. Then they looked at me.
All of them. I caught that moment of synchronised motion, looking for all the world like a pack of predators, ready to rip the guts from their prey. It was kind of brilliant, the whole scene, the moody lighting and dingy room, the prosaic underwear. But all that ordinary couldn’t mask what was there.
There’s a terrible symmetry that you find in the face of the beautiful. It’s like when fashion photographers get that bright idea to take these gorgeous young models and put them in a junkyard or an abandoned building. The place stinks of piss and decay, there’s shit everywhere. But when they frame that girl in the viewfinder of the camera, the one with that same regularity of bone structure these people had, in amongst it all with the fur stole over her shoulder, suddenly, it looks like that’s where she should have been all the time. Beauty does that—it makes anything seem reasonable.