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Tasha was wearing her full costume: gown, corset, petticoats, and stockings. Since removing her clothing was such a big part of this scene, the actors needed it for the blocking.
Maggie attached her phone to a tripod and pulled up an app that let her approximate the camera’s viewfinder. After David, the DP, had explained that he found the shorthand version of her choreography incomprehensible, he’d shown her how the app could create a more formal, but stick figure–free, version of the storyboards.
“After the dialogue,” Maggie said, checking her notes, “we start with Effie in Geordie’s lap, and they’re kissing. He unbuttons her gown; then we have the sequence with his mouth on her cleavage. He strips her gown off; then he hikes up her petticoats, and he brings her to orgasm with his hand.”
“That’s the place where I have to show unbridled joy?” Tasha deadpanned.
“Yup, as if it’s the first orgasm in the world.”
“Lucky me.”
“I’m assured the light will be dewy and prelapsarian, which should help.” Maggie checked her list. “Then I’d guess he strips her totally and performs oral sex on her. Kneeling or with them both on the hay?”
“Kneeling.” Cole was firm about that. “It’s not submission, but it’s something like that. He’s worshipping this woman.”
“I like that. Is there anything else we can do to show it?”
“Well,” Cole said, “when we get to the penetration, he needs to take care of her. Like ... use his hand on her clit to make sure she comes.”
“Yes!” Maggie exclaimed. “That’s so rare in a sex scene.” She was already adding it to her notes. “I love it.”
The show was clear that the characters’ sex was orgasmic, but other than lovingly filming everyone’s bodies and showing some oral sex, there’d been shockingly little clitoral stimulation inWaverley’s sex scenes—until now. Apparently Cole James was even better at making sure the love scenes were going to be awesome than Maggie was.
She was absolutely not going to think about what that suggested about what kind of lover he would be in real life.
At least she wasn’t going to think about that right now.
“But can you even find the clit?” Tasha asked Cole.
“Hey,” Cole protested. Then he looked directly at Maggie as he said “I haveneverhad a problem locating—”
“Tasha,” Maggie interrupted, in part because she didn’t want to ponder Cole’s ability to locate the pleasure center. “What are you actually saying?”
Tasha sucked on her teeth. “How would that ... work? He wouldn’t actually touch me there, right?”
Aha. Tasha might have gotten on board, but she still had a few hang-ups. “No, definitely not. We can use forced perspective so that if his hand is just above the merkin”—the pubic wig the makeup people would paste over Tasha’s mons—“it’ll look like he’s stimulating your clit.”
Tasha absorbed this. “Sorry, I know it’ll be fine. You wouldn’t ever cross the line—”
“I wouldnever,” he said.
“But it’s still pretty intimate.”
Maggie didn’t know if Tasha had talked to Cole yet about what had happened to her on theCosa Nostraset, so she was running them through the blocking as if he were in the dark. It wasn’t her place to force a confidence Tasha didn’t want to share.
“I get that,” Maggie said. “I know it’s in my title, so I’m supposed to be the expert, but I keep thinking about the wordintimacy. I thought Iknew what it meant—something like closeness and connection—but if it’s a thing we feel inside, how do we show that on screen? How do we make the audience believe in something they can’t, by definition, see?”
“And the answer is some clit rubbing?” Tasha asked skeptically.
Cole huffed out a laugh, and Tasha, followed by Maggie, dissolved into giggles. There were some moments of this work that were, frankly, absurd.
“It’s that he cares about her pleasure,” Maggie said, once she’d regained some composure. “And that she—not you,Effie—would welcome that kind of touch from him on a part of her body she’s never shared with anyone, in a way that’s going to make her feel out of control. And there’s risk here for her. She could get pregnant, she coulddie, because they have sex. But how she feels makes that risk worth it.”
Tasha considered this.
Maggie pushed on. “If we don’t put the sex on screen, if we don’t take her pleasure seriously, I wonder if Effie’s actions even make sense. It would be a hole in her characterization.”
“We’re compelled to show the banging?” Tasha was only half joking now.
