The over-laden table outside Craft Services is staring back at me.

Protein. Lean meat and vegetables. My personal trainers's voice is a monotone in the back of my head, and I'm trying to re-connect my tongue and my stomach but all I can see is the abused toddler version of Christian Grey, starved. The dogs in Cambodia, all ribs and matted fur.

We've been doing scenes about Christian Grey's messed up childhood all morning. I'm not in most of them because they are flashback scenes with the child version of me, but it is still pretty depressing. I shove a dry chicken breast into my mouth and try to cheer myself with memories of Hugh Jackman's pre-Wolverine interview, full of good-natured bitching about bulk-up diets.

I'd like to pretend it's the first time my conscience has ruined a perfectly fucking great lunch, but it isn't. Too much time in southeast Asia has given me food issues to rival Christian's.

My anorexic pity party is interrupted by an eye-poppingly painful slap to the ass. I turn, not sure if my fist or the sharp side of my tongue should be answering for the assault. My aggression evaporates in the face of Julia's toothy grin.

Her eyes flash and the chemistry between us crackles as if Lucy just waved it into the ring. "Owed you one, cowboy," she says with the lilt of her natural accent.

I want her to pull me over her lap, squeezing my disobedient cock between her legs as she spanks me. I want to shove her against the wall hard enough to bruise her translucent skin. I want to wrap my hand around her throat and kiss the fuck out of her.

I swallow a bite of repulsive poultry and turn away because I am not fit to be in public right now but I'm always, always in fucking public.

"Careful, Dave," calls a voice from behind me. "We finished off the Red Room of Pain set earlier. You don't want that tigress dragging you in there before you sign something."

I flash a careless grin, my rote memorization supplying a name. Kent, from art department.

"All's fair in love and war. If I don't miss my guess, I'm about to owe her somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-six hours of embarrassingly feigned pain and arousal."

Julia bumps my hip with hers. "All you owe me is one of your good Northwestern microbrews and a sappy line in your Oscar acceptance speech."

She chooses a pear and takes a bite, the juices glistening on her full lips. She winks at me. "He's right. We're going hard-core this afternoon, cowboy. The only thing that stands between us and a revolution in wide-release films is a crew that can translate brilliance into camera angles."

Kent sets down the box of supplies that he's carrying. Cardboard, styrofoam, spray paint. Three kinds of glue. The usual raw ingredients that art department's magicians use to create a world.

Kent smiles at Julia, and I remember that the reason I know his name is that he has the confidence not to go the deference or the disrespect road in his interactions with the actors.

"Hope you powdered your ass this morning," he teases her slyly.

She swats his arm, and then steps aside so he can get to the food table. "You just better have padded those benches with something other than Styrofoam. I've got bony knees. You hungry? The butternut squash soup is kind of amazing." It's pure Julia, playful sarcasm unable to conceal the sweetness beneath.

"How's the Red Room set?" I ask, keeping my voice relaxed.

"It's a hard-on in red leather," Kent says, ladling himself a bowl of soup. "Excuse the language, Julia."

She grins wickedly. "Don't forget who's going to put the hard-on in all that red leather. I don't think you should be excusing your language to the likes of me."

He chuckles and I should be laughing too, except my cold chicken is threatening to make a reappearance.

"How long do we have before we have to be sexy?" I ask Julia, pulling the trash can out for her so she can dispose of the core of her pear.

"Forty minutes, I think." She smiles. "Think I'll write an opera. Maybe paint a little."

"America's Top Model in your dressing room, again?"

She giggles and shoves me lightly. "Don't give away all my secrets, David."

"Red Room of Pain this afternoon, darlin'," I drawl. "You aren't going to have any secrets left." I toss off the last sentence while walking backwards toward my dressing room because I am pretty sure I'm about to need a trash can of my own and I'd rather it not be the one holding the remnants of Julia's snack.

She has to pretend to be attracted to me for another eight hours or so, and yakking in front of her isn't going to help her get into the right mental space for that.

I slam the door of my dressing room, yank the wastebasket out from under my dressing table and lean over it, panting in a very non-sexy way. Goddamn dry chicken. I was right. Craft services on this job is total shit.

I'm salivating queasily but not vomiting because my problem has nothing to do with bad food.

My traitorous brain is playing a high-speed, high-definition montage of images of whips laid across Julia's perfect ass. Sophie's sweetest Emily Wellington smile, her hair in a perky ponytail. The first dog I had to shoot, when it was too old and sick to keep suffering and I was too old for my dad to do it for me and too young to not go sobbing to my mother when it was all over.

I shake my head and shove the wastebasket away. "What the fuck, Dave?"

Am I having some kind of Catholic-guilt-flavored psychotic break? My dad asked me about that once, in his taciturn, third-Coors-Lite kind of way.

"Doesn't it get old?"

"What, Dad?"

"Everything being imaginary."

I shake my head. "Screw that."

I check my prop watch. It's a flawlessly faux Rolex and keeps great time. I've still got thirty-five minutes to be myself instead of Christian Grey, and nothing in my dressing room feels like home, so I flop into my chair and call my mother.

"Hi sweetie," she says brightly. "I didn't think I'd hear from you until next month at least. Aren't you shooting?"

"Sure, but I'm a big star now. They give me half an hour here and there if I'm really good," I tease.

"They'd give you whatever you wanted if you would ever ask for it," she reminds me.

This is an old argument and I sidestep it.

"How are things at home?"

"Humid. I used to hate working in the greenhouse in the summer, and now I'd give anything to do it, if my darn hands were up to it. Not that I'm complaining. They still work, and I'm far from starving in the streets."

"Are you still teaching that yoga class?"

"And loving it. I've got four or five students that come every week. That might not sound like much, but people these days aren't that great at showing up on a regular basis, you know what I mean? I guess they're busy. There are a lot of things to occupy your mind nowdays, and it probably is difficult to wrestle an hour for yourself with everything else going on."

I smile despite myself, lulled by her familiar rhythm of complaint and justification. She never wants to see the negative in anything or anyone, but she is too clear-sighted to ignore it, either.

"How are you? Is filming going okay? I've been worried about you and that crazy new movie," she says.

"I'm just proud as can be, told everybody in my class that you landed the role. This one woman went on and on about how happy she was for you and made me promise to tell you that she hopes Alex and Emily get together in Season Four and that she'll be happy to pick off some writers from a water tower if they don't." She takes a belated breath.

"I know that's your show, not your movie, honey, but the Cassie was really excited about both and I just know you'll do an amazing job but that movie is really out there, isn't it? Challenging, I guess you actors would say. Good to get a new role. I'm rambling, aren't I? How is it, really?"

"Great, mom. My co-star is really talented and a lot of fun. Sophie's movie is filming nearby, you remember, so that's good too."

"Did you talk her into moving in with you this time?"

"Sort of. We're sharing an apartment, for the five minutes we're both awake and together every day. Fifty Shades recruited a lot of top-shelf talent, and you know how what that does to the shooting schedule."

"I know it does, honey. But you tell them you can't look so handsome if you don't ever get to sleep."

"I've got your genes, mom," I tease. "I don't need sleep to look handsome."

She starts off on another tangent about Cassie and her yoga class and I just let her voice wash over me until I realize that she hasn't asked me anything in a few minutes. Her rambling is nice, but she never makes more than one statement before she brings the conversation back to you. It bounces back to her life, then yours, then hers, the rhythm as predictable as tennis. She's out of pattern today.

Shit.

I cut her off in the middle of a description of her just-in-time adjustment of a woman who was doing a headstand in a very dangerous fashion.

"Mom, what's wrong?"

Silence. "Nothing's wrong, dear. Why, are you okay? They are working you too hard, aren't they? I am going to call Bill, he's such a sweetheart, but I worry he's not aggressive enough to do a good job as an agent. I just know-,"

"Mom." I cut her off again, all the crap with Julia and the Red Room gone in an instant, my fingers squeezing the phone dangerously tightly. Since the divorce, she has a million friends, but I'm really her only family. There's no one there to look after her when I work too many shifts and forget to call.

The silence is fretful and I refuse to disturb it.

I hear something on the other end of the line. Clinking, like she might be doing dishes.

"You're just on break, aren't you, honey?"

I don't answer.

"Why don't you call me on your day off?"

She knows I'm not going to get a day off for a while. The filming schedule for this is patched together with a hope and a dream to get everybody they wanted away from different commitments for sixty full days. We need ninety and we won't get it.

I clench my jaw and start mentally reviewing the language in my contract about days for family emergencies. It isn't Julia or me that has the worst schedule limitations, or Lucy. Maybe we can shift the non-essential scenes if it is just a cameraman or producer that can't stay for the whole haul.

I flip my laptop open and start searching my emails, trying to find the spreadsheet of time commitments that production sent me. I never opened it. Schedules aren't my job and I was free when I needed to be. But if I'm going to convince crazy Lucy to give me time off to see my mother, I need to know what my argument is.

My mom sighs heavily and I look up from the laptop. She's going to actually tell me. My stomach squeezes. I'm pretty sure I don't want to hear whatever she has to say.

"They found a lump."

My brain struggles to piece this sentence together. My head is crammed full of scripts, witty banter laden with sensual subtext. The words my mother has just spoken don't make sense in the context I've been living in.

"What?"

"In my breast, honey. I got my physical, like I have every year since we had that talk, and they found a lump this time."

Her voice gets tight. I don't know why she thinks this hides her tears but she's done as long as I can remember. Her voice will get higher as her throat gets tighter until the tension pushes one of us into tears. For the last fifteen years since I have been firmly ensconced in puberty, she always breaks before I do. This time, I'm not so sure who will blink first.

"What?" I say again, because it is all I can manage. Words are pounding through my mind. Every script and press release I have memorized since I started acting when I was twelve. None of them will help me now.

"It might be nothing. They don't know if it can actually hurt me, if it is benign or malignant. They have to do tests."

"When?"

"I told them whenever they had time."

"Now, mom. You don't have to wait for insurance. You know that. You do whatever needs to be done and I will pay for it."

"Well, I mean, I made an appointment."

It takes a long time to figure when her appointment is and when it should be, between my throat that is trying to close up shop and her unwillingness to be a bother to anyone, even people whose entire job consists of deciding which lumps are okay and which lumps will Hurricane Katrina your fucking life.

There is a careful, production assistant knock on the door and in the silence, my mom hears it before I do.

"You have to go, sweetie. Don't worry about me. I feel fine. It is probably nothing. You know how doctors are."

I don't say anything. Her voice goes from high to gentle. "David. I'm fine. Do your job. If I was sick, I would tell you."

She takes a deep breath. "Even if it is malignant, I feel fine. I have plenty of time. And I'm your mother. I have to die sometime. So do your damn job and get me a golden statue to show off to my friends."

She never swears.

"I love you. I'm hanging up now. You're late," she says firmly.

The line goes dead.

The production assistant knock comes again and I realize I never answered.

"How long, Sara?"

Pause. "Two minutes?"

Fuck. "I'm sorry, Nicole. You can open the door, you know."

"It's your private time. I don't want to interrupt."

I grimace at the carpet. "It's a little weird having a relationship with you that involves my door as a mediator."

She actually laughs. "Yeah. I guess. Minute and a half. Can I get you anything?"

"Another five minutes?" I stand up. "Just kidding. I'm ready."

I don't even see the Red Room when I enter it. I let myself slip gratefully away and instead the controlled, patrician posture of Christian Grey organizes my body. I don't fight his anticipation of the games to come.

My brain provides all my lines, all my cues, and a totally wrecked David apparently equals a normal Christian Grey. I spend the next few hours devoted to inflicting his delicate balance of torment and tenderness on my co-star. Lucy wraps all the scenes in only a few takes and sends us all home three hours early.

Julia jokes cheerfully with me all the way to my car and when I get inside the smile drops off my face like a too-fragile prop.