23 - Bound for the Stage
MF / Femdom / BDSM / Dom/sub / Bondage / Orgasm Control
“No, no, that’s not right.” Benny stepped forward from his position center stage, his hand raised like a traffic cop.
“The blocking has me entering from stage left, but if I’m coming from my apartment, wouldn’t it make more sense for me to enter from upstage right?
That’s where the door would logically be. ”
The director, Marcus, looked up from his script with the tired expression of someone who had already answered this question twice. “Benny, we’ve been through this. The set design—”
“But it doesn’t make sense for the character.
” Benny caught the look that passed between Marcus and Paloma—the subtle eye-roll, the barely contained sigh.
He’d seen that look before, on every set where his “suggestions” had been politely ignored.
But this was different. On a film set, he could retreat to his trailer between takes, decompress, prepare for the next shot.
Here, there was nowhere to hide, no reset button, no second chances.
The weight of that realization settled in his chest like a stone. All his usual strategies—the detailed notes, the environmental control, the careful preparation—felt suddenly inadequate. He was performing without a net, and for the first time in years
, he couldn’t guarantee the outcome.
“Benny.” Paloma’s voice cut through his explanation. She stood in the wings, arms crossed, watching him with barely concealed irritation. “It’s theater, not a documentary. The audience doesn’t care about architectural accuracy.”
He turned toward her, his jaw tightening. “They care about believability. If nothing makes sense, they’ll be pulled out of the story.”
“What pulls them out of the story is when actors stop the scene every five minutes to debate geography,” she shot back.
Marcus cleared his throat. “Let’s just... let’s run it from David’s entrance again. Benny, stage left, just like we rehearsed yesterday. And the day before that.”
But Benny was already checking his watch, frowning. “We’re running three minutes behind schedule. If we don’t tighten up these transitions—”
“Jesus Christ,” Paloma muttered under her breath, loud enough for everyone to hear.
As Marcus called for yet another reset, Paloma stepped back deeper into the wings, trying to calm herself.
Paloma reminded herself that everyone had to start somewhere. Journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step and all that. But he wasn’t making it easy, rubbing at her already thin composure while casually mentioning this was just a sidestep for him before he returned to film and TV.
“The hours and the pay are better,” he had told her once, only ten minutes after drawing a complete blank on a short, snappy monologue he swore he had memorized. “But my agent told me this would show everyone I was a committed, serious actor.”
Paloma nearly reminded him that everyone read the stupid gossip column blind item about him being a control freak on sets and snapping at co-stars who, by all accounts, were doing their jobs. Just not the way he thought they should.
When she was told he had been cast as her love interest in a new work, one she was excited to be in; somehow both sweet and sardonic, she had almost quit on the spot until the director promised the man would be on his best behavior.
She didn’t need to be corrected by a ham-fisted, pretty boy who seemed resigned to playing law and order types in procedurals.
Maybe he played a different type of character at some point, but Paloma had never seen it.
But now … now he had that look on his face.
Now the gravity of the situation had descended upon him, and it drew tight the air in his lungs, sucked the blood into his torso so his stomach went leaden and dropped through his hips and into the earth.
Paloma watched the confident strut become a dazed shuffle.
He had really agreed to do this. He had really agreed to do this, and there was no way to make a graceful exit.
“What happens if something goes wrong?” he asked in a whisper after he stumbled over his lines for the umpteenth time. “I can’t just yell cut.”
“I thought only directors were supposed to say cut,” Paloma replied without dropping her volume at all.
“You know what I mean. I’ll have to figure something out on the spot. How do I do that?”
She almost laughed in his face but didn’t. How was it possible that this wasn’t something he was at least familiar with? Had he managed to avoid any kind of fumbling high school theater experience and just appeared fully formed into an overwrought TV series?
When she saw the knitted tension, the tell-tale physical signs of nerves winning the battle, it occurred to her that if she didn’t help him, he was going to pull the whole ship down.
Despite the amount of anger it caused her, her success and the success of this show she was so readily rooting for depending on this man, this arrogant control freak of a man, doing well.
“I think you’re getting too inside your own head,” she told him as they went back to one to start the tracks for the scene all over again. “It’s only as hard as you let it be.”
As they moved toward the wings, Paloma realized she was stretching out her hand to touch Benny, to comfort him in a way she didn’t think he deserved. When she made her unconscious, concerned contact, she was stunned to feel how badly he was trembling.
He flinched away from her without the proper amount of force to remove her hand from him, so they stood in the silent abyss of the wings, her hand on his shoulder and his shoulder shaking violently under her fingers.
“If I quit, it’s a breach of contract,” he whispered more to himself than her as he stared off into the distance, his eyes unfocused.
“So don’t quit.”
“Do you know what happens then? Do you know what I have to pay out if I get sued for breach of contract?”
Paloma didn’t know for a variety of reasons. For starters, she never even considered breaching any of her contracts. Every role she auditioned for, every job she accepted, she saw through to the end. In her world, quitting was never an option.
The other reason, and one she would never admit to Benny, was that few people in the realm of live performing had ironclad contracts.
Most of them were just thrilled to be making a living wage every week and not having to resort to teaching drama to ungrateful teens somewhere.
She knew she had to be in control of how she behaved because she existed on the precipice in a way that he hadn’t for a long time.
Even when she was being courted and sweet-talked by a producer, there was always the danger of someone else being more available, cheaper, ready to commit to each little task a persnickety director could think of.
Benny, despite his rumored outbursts and what seemed to be paralyzing anxiety, had found the security that artists of all stripes wished for.
Watching him shake apart in the wings, Paloma realized something that made her stomach drop: she recognized herself in his panic.
Not the confident performer she’d become, but the control-obsessed perfectionist she’d been before she learned to let go.
He wasn’t just some arrogant screen actor—he was someone who’d built his entire identity around being in control, and now that foundation was crumbling.
The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d learned to surrender control through her own sexual awakening years ago, discovering that giving up power in one area had made her more powerful everywhere else.
Maybe what he needed wasn’t traditional acting techniques, but the same lesson that had transformed her own relationship with control.
Though now, the deer-in-headlights look painfully obvious even in the dark of the wings, his toes were curling over the precipice next to hers, but the difference was he wasn’t used to it.
Years ago, Paloma had come to terms with the fact that her life was always going to be a little more tumultuous than her friends and family could handle.
When she talked about auditions or long, dry spells where roles were discussed and promised yet not delivered, she saw the terrified expression mold their features.
None of them could hide what they were thinking, and she read it across each one of their faces: I could fucking never.
“Benny, I have an idea,” Paloma said, still amazed at how much he was shaking. “Why don’t you come over to my place tomorrow, and we can run some lines together? The theater will be dark, anyway.”
“More rehearsal,” Benny answered blankly.
Paloma wondered if he had meant to say it as a question but was so stuck inside his own racing head that he couldn’t be bothered to think about his cadence.
“Not rehearsal entirely. A casual session. We can do some breathing exercises, learn some improv techniques, help you feel really secure about being onstage.”
Benny pivoted toward her; Paloma pulled her hand back. He had gone from deer-in-headlights to a child lost in a crowd. She could see the hollows of his cheeks sucking into themselves.
“Tomorrow,” he repeated in the same flat tone.
“Yeah, I think it’ll be helpful.”
Benny nodded, and in the heavy pause between them, Paloma was sure he had something else to say, Instead, he just stared straight ahead, and when the director called to them from the house, he stepped out of the shadows of the wings and into the work lights by himself, Paloma watching him walk, oddly and utterly transfixed.
***
Paloma wasn’t sure which Benny to expect at her door the next day.
Would it be the cocky, arrogant, control freak Benny or the quaking with fear, humbled little mouse she had seen yesterday?
The out-of-his-depths and unsure of himself screen actor suddenly faced with the juggernaut that was her livelihood of repetition and audiences staring up at them from the blackness?