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“Can you sing?” Jody asks as Colt is bent over the pool table. He’s got two balls left before he wins the game, again, his third of the night. Jody would be tired of losing, if she weren’t being placated with the view of his ass snug in his jeans. His shirt rides up every time he leans across the table, tanned skin meeting the black waistband of his boxers peeking over dark wash denim. It is a mollifying sight.
Colt pauses from setting up his shot, casting a look back over his shoulder toward her. His eyebrows are arched questioningly, eyes narrowed, sensing her setting the trap.
“Why?”
“Because I want to hear you sing,” Jody states, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. She perches herself beside him on the table, and directs her attention to the stage where the first AD is performing a butchered rendition of California Girls. They’d left the good karaoke performances behind about three drinks ago. Anyone with a decent set of pipes has either found a permanent seat at the bar, or gone back to their hotel - alone or otherwise.
Colt, four beers down, a tequila sunrise dripping condensation in Jody’s hands where she holds it for him, would most likely not fall in the class of a good performer. She wants to see him try anyway.
“No,” he states emphatically, shaking his head, and turning back to line up his shot like he hadn’t heard a word she said.
“Oh, come on,” she pleads, nudging him in the thigh and throwing him off balance. “Just one song?”
He catches himself with a hand on her knee, pulls it back just as quickly, “Trust me, Jo, you do not want to hear me sing. No one does, I'd get us kicked out of here.”
‘Jo’, he only ever calls her that when he’s drunk. Jody had noticed it a few months ago, when the name had slipped out as he was walking her back to her hotel room after their first post work hangout. Always the gentleman, he’d stood in her doorway, hands held politely behind his back, biceps straining against his too tight flannel. Jody had found it distracting, but not so distracting that she’d missed the quiet, ‘goodnight, Jo,’ that slipped from his liquor loosened lips. On set, she was ‘Jody’, always professional, always with a divide between their working relationship and their fastly developing personal one.
Sometimes she wonders if he actually likes her, or if he’s just flirting for the sake of it. But then that nickname slips out, said softer than any tone he usually takes, and Jody doubts their flirtation a little less.
She’d doubt it a whole lot more if he put on a show for her.
“Let’s make a bet then,” she proposes, “you win this round, I will let you buy me a drink. You lose, I get to watch you sing.”
“Kinda feels like you win either way with that one.”
“Well, yes. But in one scenario you get to avoid embarrassing yourself.”
“Is there a scenario where we can just, like, keep playing pool? I like that scenario, we should consider that one,” Colt argues, leaning further forward on the table so he can rest his elbows on the green felt and look up at her with the familiar smirk she knows means they’re playing off one another.
“That scenario doesn’t exist,” she replies, taking a sip of his drink. It’s more tequila than anything else.
“I’m pretty sure it could though.”
“No. Not an option, unfortunately. Drink or stage. Your choice, stuntman.”
Colt smiles, the sort that spreads slowly across his face like a sunrise. She has yet to see it directed at anyone who is not her. Though, she also hasn’t seen Colt speak to another woman who wasn’t Gail Meyer.
“Well, when you put it that way…” he re-aims, pulls the pool stick back, and...sends the eight ball directly into the far left pocket.
“Wait, he’s actually singing?” Dan exclaims from where he’s sat beside Jody at the bar.
She’s nursing a margarita in her hands, courtesy of Colt, despite their agreement. Jody had been going to order something for herself when he swooped in and demanded it be added to his tab, before spinning back around and going to put in his song request.
“I made a bet with him, he has to,” she states, like their agreement was contractually binding and not something bantered back and forth over a watery tequila sunrise.
From across the room, Colt flashes her a thumbs up.
Jody returns it with a smile hidden behind the rim of her margarita glass.
“I don’t think I've ever seen him go up at one of these things.”
“First time for everything, Dan.”
Though it does stroke her ego a little to know Colt is doing this solely for her benefit.
“He say what song he was picking?” Dan asks, giving his own thumbs up when Colt throws one his way as well. Jody wonders if it’s become a nervous tick of sorts, a habitual trait that’s ingrained in him.
Jody shakes her head, “No, I don’t think he even knows, to be honest.”
Her margarita isn’t near as good as the tequila sunrise was, Jody should have asked them to put something spicy on the rim, something to give it a kick. But she’s nearly as drunk as Colt, so taste isn’t ranking that highly on her list of priorities right now. She’s content to settle back against the sticky bartop, prop an elbow up, and wait for the show to begin.
They don’t have to wait long. Colt follows up the next act, someone from the sound team who is putting way too much energy into a rendition of an Adele song. They finish off with a smattering of applause from the dwindling audience and then Colt is taking their place. His white shirt is darkening at the armpits with sweat, she can see it where the dim light of the bar is suddenly spotlighting him. He swallows, mic gripped in his hands, and Jody swears she can see a tremor there.
They lit him on fire yesterday, blew him up today, sent him careening through the air and landing face first in a muddy puddle. He hadn’t shown a twinge of anxiety through any of that, but somehow the opening notes of Journey have him looking two seconds away from feinting. Jody’s pretty sure he’d looked less pale when he sliced open his arm in their first week of filming, blood gushing down his forearm while they rushed to wrap it.
It’s endearing, Jody finds herself watching him with deepened interest.
“Wow,” Dan snickers softly beside her, “he is not.”
“Just a small town girl,” Colt starts, voice shaky in a way she’s never heard it.
“What?” she asks Dan, nudging his arm with her elbow, sloshing some of his drink over his hand. She glances at him long enough to point her question, then quickly looks back at Colt.
“Livin’ in a lonely world,” shockingly, he’s not terrible. Or maybe Jody is just drunk. The mic squeals once and he pulls it away with a wince before going into the next verse. “She took the midnight train going anywhere.”
Dan keeps laughing beside her, quiet chortles that shake his whole body.
“What, Dan?”
“Nothing, nothing.” though he keeps laughing as he drinks his bourbon.
Onstage, Colt is so tense she can see his muscles flexing, rigidity written into every bone of his body. As the song keeps going, it starts to melt out of him. His foot starts tapping, and then his whole side goes along with the movement. Eventually, he ends up with the mic in one hand, granting him freedom with the other to curl it up into a fist and pump it along to the beat. Jody hides a laugh behind her hand.
Dan doesn’t even bother to hide his.
“He’s Chris Evans-ing you!” he proclaims, just as Colt reaches the first chorus and scans his finger across the room, eventually landing with it pointing at her.
Someone in the audience cheers when Colt does a whole little dance to, ‘Up and down the boulevard,’ the motion includes waving his hand above his head in one big arc. Jody was expecting decent singing, monotone, if not a little quiet. She was not expecting a whole stage production.
Though, maybe she should have. This is Colt after all, he’s not a wholly quiet person.
“What does that mean?” She demands, nudging Dan again. This time, he moves his drink to the other hand. “Is that a movie thing?”
Dan and Colt, she’d realized early into observing their friendship, speak in a language that is solely theirs. Or, at least, is borrowed from the many films that Dan can quote on a dime, and Colt guesses the source of almost just as quickly. Colt had told her once they watch a lot of movies between set times, lounging in the stunts trailer, icing sore muscles and adding to their vocabulary of cinema.
Jody knows movies, they’re her career, but she doesn’t have the memory Dan has.
“Oh, it’s definitely a movie thing,” Dan affirms.
Jody wracks her brain, tries to place the moves that Colt is pulling on stage, but her mind comes up empty. She’s pretty sure he’s going off script of whatever scene is playing in his head anyway, if the way he eyes the free chair in front of the stage for all of a second before impulsive stepping up onto it is any indication. He doesn’t stay there very long, quickly follows it up by going to the top of a table.
“Streetlights, people, livin’ just to find emotion.”
It could just be that everyone is drunk, a group psychosis induced by too many drinks, but Colt’s actually getting reactions. People are cheering him on, loudly. Jody adds her voice to the mix, cups her hands around her mouth and lets out a ‘Woo!’.
Colt winks at her. Jody laughs.
There’s an infectious energy to the way he moves. It’s reminiscent of watching him on set, his body becoming the spectacle. Where his actor counterpart has lines and dialogue, Colt speaks through action. He dances across the table, jumping for emphasis, or throwing a fist in the air. At one point he gets the crowd around him to start waving their arms along. During the brief guitar solo, he plays an air guitar and slides down to his knees atop the table before popping back up to go back into the singing.
“Don’t stop believin’!” He exclaims, jumping to another table, “Hold onto that feelin’!”
He makes it to the last few lines of song before the alcohol hinders him. Jody can see the moment he miscalculates, trying to step down from the table and instead hooking his foot between the rungs of the back of the chair. He falls, crashes hard back to the stage while a collective gasp of concern spreads through the room.
Journey finishes playing out.
Jody jumps out of her seat and is halfway to him before he throws a thumbs up into the air.
“Look at you,” she frets, angling his head back and forth in her hands, trying to get a better look at him in the dim bathroom lighting. “You’re a mess.”
His white shirt is spattered with crimson, blood still dripping freely from his nose. It’s smeared across his cheek from where he’d tried to wipe it, the back of his hand that’s resting on her hip is sticky with it.
Jody has him bracketed against the sink, his back pressed to the porcelain so she can take stock of his injuries. Really it’s just the bloody nose and the steadily forming black eye, he’d clipped it just right on the edge of the chair as he fell. His sluggishness when he waves her away can probably be attributed to the alcohol, but she’s not sure if they can rule out concussion.
“I’m fine,” he promises, “I just tripped.”
“You’re bleeding!”
Colt shrugs, “I do that a lot.”
His lack of concern is proof enough of that. Dan hadn’t seemed all that worried either. He hadn’t followed them into the bathroom to check on Colt. Though that could maybe be because, with the way she had him pressed against her, he didn’t want to intervene. It is hard to ignore the way Colt seems perfectly content to be this close to her, despite the injury that prompted it.
Jody pulls handfuls of thin brown paper towels from the dispenser and leans around Colt to run them under the trickly flow of water from the sink. It’s not the most sterile of locations, but it at least gets him away from the crowd of people who’d kept drunkenly asking if he was alright. She could see the way he was feeling cornered by them, pulled him to the bathroom and locked the door behind them so she could assess him on her own.
“Here,” she thrusts the napkins into his non-blood coated hand. “Hold this to your nose.”
He obeys. It’s clear he’s no stranger to bloody noses. He doesn’t even try to tilt his head back, just pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger and angles forward slightly.
“This happens a lot, huh?” Jody inquires, swiping her knuckle against his fingers pressed to staunch the blood.
“Oh, all the time,” Colt answers. His voice comes out nasally. “Occupational hazard.”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“What?” At the angle he’s holding his head at, he has to look at her through the strands of hair that have fallen into his eyes. Jody resists the urge to brush them back, she’s already touching him far more than usual.
“This. Getting injured all the time.”
“Well i’m not normally busting my ass singing Journey.”
She laughs and is startled when he does too, when she feels the breath of the exhalation against her cheek. They’re closer than she realized.
The next time she speaks, it comes out quieter, “Dan said you don’t normally sing anything.”
Something flashes across his eyes, something that makes them change in the light somehow. She can see his pupils dilating, black swallowing the usual blue. His breathing changes, she can hear the shift of it, the hitch in his throat when he swallows. Distantly, the muffled sound of karaoke starting up again makes its way into the cramped space of the black tiled room. Jody isn’t hearing it well enough to decipher the song.
“I don’t normally have a reason to,” he confesses.
There’s so little space between them now that Jody can see the curl of his eyelashes, the blonde wisps of hair that are just barely brushing against them. He blinks, and she stumbles back slightly.
Space. Space is good.
She’s not under the illusion that they haven’t been toeing the line of this. It’s hard to see their banter as anything but the thinly veiled flirting that it is. He wants her, and she wants him, and they both seem to be operating under the shared understanding that whatever happens can’t interfere with the work they both love. She’s seen relationships on set, seen them begin and end and all the fallout that happens because of it. Colt Seavers can’t be the thing that roadblocks her path to the directors chair.
But god does she want him.
It takes a monumental amount of effort to redirect, “What, um- what movie were you referencing?” she asks, leaning away from him to grab more paper towels. They’re the crappy brand that hardly soaks up anything, he’s already bled through the handful she gave him.
Colt’s eyebrows furrow, like he’s lost the train of the conversation.
“What?”
Blindly, he accepts the new stack of paper towels she offers him and tosses the old blood soaked ones into the trash. It’s not a worrying amount of blood, at least he doesn’t seem concerned about it.
“Dan said something about Chris Evans?”
“Oh, um- it’s stupid. It’s, uh, The Losers. The elevator scene.”
Jody still can’t place it, “The one with Liam Neeson?”
Colt laughs, ducking his head again, “No, that’s The A-Team.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Not much, really. No.”
Absent-mindedly, he drops a hand back down to his side. Jody feels when his fingers brush against her hip again. It’s natural the way he settles there, unthinkingly, he’s too busy explaining the movies to even really notice he’s doing it. Jody lets him, leans into the touch and accepts the warmth of his palm that bleeds through her clothes.
By the time he’s finished, his nose has stopped bleeding, the napkins are soaked again, and Jody grabs another handful to clear away the streaks of crimson drying tacky on his skin. They’re not very good for cleaning up much of anything, already shredding into bits by the time she soaks them through with water.
Colt goes to accept the new wad at the same time she reaches forward to wipe away the blood herself. There’s no reason to really, he’s perfectly capable, but Jody is maybe searching for an excuse to touch him. She finds justification in the way his hand freezes, half raised and halting, his eyes widening slightly.
“What are you-” he breathes.
At the same time she asks, “Is this okay?”
Colt nods, jerkily. His hand on her hip tightens, spasms, like he’s not sure if he wants to pull her closer or push her away. Jody makes the decision for him and moves further into his space. It’s hard to ignore the press of him against her thigh, how his breath hitches when she notches a finger below his chin and taps to get him to angle his head how she wants.
It doesn’t take long to clean up the blood, to wipe it away until he’s back to normal, only the black eye left to indicate he’d had any fall at all. It’s not swelling yet, he should get ice on it before it starts. But even once he’s blood free, Jody doesn’t step back. She doesn’t want to.
Jody wants him.
His lips are parted slightly, quiet exhalations filling the space between them, and she can’t seem to look away from the shape of them. His hand on her hip is searingly hot, the warmth of his palm spreading through her with an intensity that’s new to her. Maybe months worth of flirting and pent-up attraction wasn’t a good plan, if anything it’s made the urge to have him all the worse.
“Jo-,” is all he manages to get out, before Jody is closing the last bit of space between them.
He tastes like tequila sunrise, like the faint metallic hint of blood, like bad decisions come the morning and the promise of something more. God, Jody wants more of him.
Colt moans against her, both hands finding purchase on her hips while hers tangle in the sun-bleached mess of his hair. His neck is sensitive, she can feel him jerk against her when her fingers brush the nape. She does it again just to pull another sound out of him.
“Jody,” he pants out between breaths, foreheads pressed together.
Her name on his tongue tastes so sweet when she pulls him back for more. She swipes along his lower lip and he lets her in without question, mouth parting so easily that it’s like he’s been waiting for her this whole time.
At some point, his hand slips beneath her shirt, just enough that he finds bare skin to rest his fever hot palms against. He doesn’t inch any higher than her waist, stays right where he’s wanted.
The knock on the door is the only thing that pulls them apart. It comes sharp and annoyed, a rapid pounding by whoever's demanding to be let in. They jump apart so fast that when Colt rears back he rams his head against the mirror behind him. His cheeks are flushed, neck red up to his ears, his hair is skewed every which way. Jody isn’t faring much better. They’re matching shades of warm-rush lust. There’s no disguising anything, least of all when Colt’s lips are shining with Jody’s spit.
“Wh-” Colt tries, the words not seeming to find any purchase in his mouth. She can’t blame him, she’s pretty sure the shape of her tongue is taking up most of the space there right now.
“You want to walk me back to the hotel?” Jody asks, panting slightly, feeling the fading warmth of Colt’s hands on her. He’s managed to keep somewhat of a grip, loose finger looped through one of her belt loops like he’s tying himself to a lifeline.
The nod he gives her is an emphatic yes, slowed slightly by the world he’s still trying to pick up speed with. His pupils are blown so wide Jody really isn’t sure if he’s concussed or turned on. Judging by how he’d felt against her, she figures it’s the latter.
Thankfully, it’s the drunken sound guy who’s waiting outside the door. He probably won’t remember his rendition of Set Fire to the Rain, let alone the sight of Colt stumbling out behind Jody on legs akin to a baby colt, both of them with clothes and hair in various states of disarray. The only person who does seem to notice them is Dan, still perched at his spot at the bar, arching an eyebrow as they pass.
“We’re gonna head out,” Colt manages to get out, “feeling a little tired. A lot tired actually, very tired.”
Dan’s eyebrows arc higher, “uh-huh. Sure. See you tomorrow, man.”
Colt mock salutes him, seemingly managing to get his legs back under him as he swipes Jody’s hand into his and marches them out the door. His palms are still warm, heat arcing through him and into her with an intensity that she has never felt before. Jody doesn’t pull away, she doesn’t think she ever will.