Page 6 of The Viper
The moans from the next room crescendoed into a scream, then cut off abruptly. My team had broken him, no doubt. Answers would flow now, tying up this loose end. But a new thread had unraveled, pulling me toward an unknown horizon.
3
LEXI
The next morning, the sun was already blinding by the time we pulled up to set.
Charleston light had a way of showing everything—the shimmer on the water, the haze above the marsh, even the tiny motes of dust dancing in the air. Los Angeles light was harsher, filtered through smog. This was something else. Too honest, maybe.
Our production trailers were lined up along the dock like little pastel houses, their metal sides painted to blend with the backdrop. Crew members darted between them carrying clipboards, coffee, and the kind of quiet urgency that meant we were behind schedule before the day had even started.
“Ready?” Hannah asked from beside me, already scrolling through her phone, her headset in place like she’d been born with it.
“As I’ll ever be.”
My reflection in the trailer window stared back—makeup flawless, hair curled into effortless waves that had taken an hour to achieve. The irony never got old. The whole point of today’sshoot was raw realism, according to the director. “Stripped-down intimacy,” he’d called it in the production meeting. No glamour, no filters. Just truth.
And yet here I was, airbrushed within an inch of my life.
“Ms. Montgomery,” one of the production assistants called, jogging up with a clipboard. “We’ll get you through wardrobe and touch-ups, then straight to blocking. Boat scene first.”
Boat scene. Right. Of course, they’d start with that.
I followed him down the dock toward a gleaming white trawler bobbing gently in the water. A handful of crew worked around it—adjusting reflectors, running cables, setting up a massive wind machine on the pier. From a distance, it looked like chaos. Up close, it was choreography. Everyone knew their part. Everyone except me, apparently, since my stomach twisted tighter with each step.
It wasn’t nerves, exactly. I’d done this a hundred times. But no matter how many sets you’ve been on, there’s something about the first day—the shouted cues, the tension humming under every movement—that makes you feel like a beginner all over again.
Inside the makeup trailer, my team swarmed like bees.
“Morning, superstar,” said Carrie Drake, my makeup artist and therapist rolled into one. “Sleep okay?”
“Not really,” I admitted, sliding into the chair.
She studied me in the mirror. “Jet lag?”
“Existential dread.”
She laughed softly, brushing powder across my nose. “So, the usual.”
I smiled at that. If anyone understood, it was Carrie. She’d been with me since the indie days, long before the blockbusters and the award shows. She’d seen me cry in bathroom stalls and throw up before auditions. She knew how to hold space for the good and the bad.
“You look beautiful,” she said finally, stepping back.
“I look like someone who slept three hours.”
“Same thing,” she deadpanned, then turned me toward wardrobe.
The costume designer fussed with the hem of my sundress, pinning it in place. “The director wants this to feel … accidental,” she said. “Like you just threw it on after swimming. Can you make it look like that?”
I almost laughed. Can I make something look like something else? That was the whole damn job.
When I stepped out of the trailer, the director was already waiting. Franklin P. Smith was young, brilliant, and just pretentious enough to make people call him a visionary.
“Lexi,” he said, kissing the air beside my cheek. “You look luminous.”
“Thanks,” I said, because what else do you say to that?
He launched into a monologue about the emotional weight of the scene—something about isolation, vulnerability, how love and danger live in the same breath. I’d read the script enough times to know all of that already. What I hadn’t quite prepared for was starting with a sex scene.
