After Julia paves the way for me, I check in with Lucy. She winces at the sound of my destroyed voice and gives me the day off with nothing resembling good humor. There aren't that many scenes that don't require my presence, and the sets haven't been built for all of them.

This is a really expensive day off for me, and I'm not unaware that having my mental breakdown in the form of a coughing fit was actually a great idea because now everyone thinks that is all it was. And until my throat calms down, I won't be filming anything. I wonder if I could solve this whole issue by shoving a wire brush down my throat.

I am too chickenshit to call Sophie to come home and talk me through the career apocalypse I'm setting myself up for. Instead, I text her innocuously to ask what time she'll be home. The answer, of course, is late. She's been filming in twelve-hour shifts for weeks.

I haven't had an unscheduled day off in too long to remember, and I hardly know what to do with myself, much less what to do to start untangling this whole Christian Grey debacle.

In Hollywood, you don't admit that channeling a certain character is too much, too dark for you. You drink or you do drugs or cheap girls. Or you take the drugs and the booze all at once, enough that you don't have to face what you found inside your own head.

Instead I call my mom. She's had the tests done on the lump in her breast. She says she feels fine and there's nothing to do but wait until the lab reports come back. I tell her the movie is going fine.

Jackson and I go to a park and I throw a stick for him. We run around together until we're both exhausted and we flop into a heap together on the grass, panting and looking up at the clear blue sky. Maybe I'll just give up acting altogether and walk people's dogs for a living. Plenty of neglected dogs in the world. But I won't be able to do much fundraising without an acting career, and there are literally thousands of people that depend on that money.

When Sophie comes home, Jackson and I are on the couch. She smiles wanly and comes over to kiss me on the cheek.

"Hey, you. What are you doing?"

"Waiting for you."

She frowns. "Are you getting sick?"

"Why?" Now that she's actually here, I'm kind of freaked out about talking to her. I'll sound either like a pussy, or a headcase. I'm a little of both, currently, but it would be cool if my girlfriend didn't have to know that.

"Because you never sit and do nothing. Ever. And your voice sounds terrible. Are you getting a sore throat or something?"

"Not sick." If I don't do it now, I'm not going to and then I'll be back to square one because I have no idea how to fix this. Sophie always knows what to do, about pretty much anything. If I can just get the words past my reluctant lips. "I had the day off."

That gets an even stranger look. "No way. I thought they needed you to film like 23 hours a day or something."

"They do," I say bitterly. "I just shitcanned 12 hours of filming by walking out on the first scene of the day."

Sophie drops her purse onto the coffee table and sinks down on the couch. "I think you'd better tell me what's going on."

"My mom has a lump in her breast," I say, and my voice strains a little on the word lump, but it doesn't break.

Sophie's eyes widen. "What? Oh God, is she okay? Is it cancer? Is she sick? How are you doing? That's stupid, of course you're not okay, you walked out on filming-," she cuts herself off and crawls into my lap, wrapping her arms tightly around my neck.

The weight of her does what nothing else could- it presses the tension right out of my muscles. I take a deep breath, feeling like it is the first one in days. She's straddling me, holding my head against her chest just like Julia did earlier, but when Sophie does it, I feel like I'm home. Like I actually have a home.

"We don't know," I tell her when she pulls away to look at me. "If it's cancer. She got some tests, and we have to wait for the lab results."

Sophie frowns. "She got some tests? How long has this been going on?"

"A few days." I shrug.

She looks at me like I'm an imbecile. "She's going to think I'm such a bitch that I haven't called or said anything about it."

I smile half-heartedly. "You forget, Soph, she's known me for a while now. She knows I would have put off telling you. I wouldn't have said anything until we knew for sure what it was. You don't need to be worrying about my mom or me while you're trying to film a comedy."

She smacks me in the arm. "What the hell, David? You're my life, and I love your mother. Please don't ever think I'm too busy to know what's going on with you. I mean, it's not like we're ever not busy."

"Yeah, well, I didn't know where to start. This movie-," I sigh. "This movie is eating me alive, and the news about my mom has just been festering in the middle of all the rest of it."

She shifts off my lap onto the couch next to me and I immediately miss the weight of her. "What's wrong with the movie?"

I rub my hands on the thighs of my jeans and she touches my shoulder with gentle fingers. I remember Christian's expression before the belt scene. Hopeful despair. Opening my mouth feels like lifting that belt.

Emotions are fleeing across my face, and for once I don't try to name them or control them.

"David?" There's a hesitation that wasn't there before and I see that her doubts have crept in, too. I start talking because I can't bear for her to be afraid.

I tell her all of it, every dirty, embarrassing, ridiculous detail. I don't even leave out the parts about her, about how I see her tied up, or in the scenes in the Red Room and sometimes it turns me on and sometimes it freaks me out and sometimes it makes me want to beat the hell out of anyone within six blocks of her.

I shouldn't have worried, though. Her brown eyes can hold every terrible thing I say.

Magically, the longer I talk, things start to sound like they make a little bit of sense. I can see a pattern instead of just a mess of emotions that I don't want to be feeling.

"You hate BDSM," she says when I run out of words. She shrugs. "That's okay."

"But what does it mean that I like it, too?" I say, still frustrated.

"If I was hearing you correctly, you like bondage, not punishment." She peeks through her eyelashes at me with the hint of a smile. "We can talk about that another time. I don't think I get why that upsets you."

"You don't?" I ask her skeptically. "Um, it's wasn't with you, and it's at work."

"Yeah, but David, if you like it, then of course it is going to turn you on when you're with Julia."

My eyebrows shoot up. What the hell is she implying?

"They hired a person you had good chemistry with. Newsflash, David. Chemistry is a euphemism for attraction."

I'm trying to read her face. She washed off her makeup before she left work, and she looks beautiful. What she does not look is angry.

"And this doesn't bother you?" I venture.

"You're attracted to lots of people. So am I. Some of them you choose to date and most of them you don't." She settles further into the couch, toying with a loose thread at the knee of my jeans.

"When normal people are in a happy relationship and they find themselves attracted to someone else, they avoid them until the feeling goes away. Actors, on the other hand, go to work with them for months while the writers crank the attraction up for all its worth. It's really messed up, actually."

I don't know how to take this. It's so…practical. Which is what we should be, obviously, but it's not how I've been feeling.

She smiles. "Besides, you've gotten Sexiest Man Alive from two magazines and a television network. If I was the jealous type my head would have exploded by now. So, no. I'm not worried."

"Unless you think I should be," she adds quietly. Her gaze is unwavering, but it's there, in the tightness of her jaw, in her hands clasped too tightly in her lap.

I smile, running my thumb along her cheekbone, and shake my head. If there's anything left that I'm sure about, it's Sophie. My dick is a little less discriminating, apparently, but I'm not sure that can be helped.

She turns her head and kisses the base of my palm. When she continues, her confidence is firmly back in place.

"So the only real problem is that you don't want to hit a woman."

Something about her voice annoys me. "I don't know why you and Josh say that like it is so obvious. I mean, if you all knew it was going to be a problem, would it have been so hard to tell me before I went to the audition?"

"I didn't think you'd take it so personally," Sophie says. "I mean, come on, you're nobody's idea of a sadist. Well, except for Cambodia last year, when you punched that guy," she teases.

"He was trying to sell me a child," I hiss. It's gonna take a good five years before I can joke about that.

"Way to prove my point," she says.

"And I didn't punch him. I beat him bloody. Which, I might add, is not the best argument for my nonviolent nature."

"Sure thing," she says. "Anyway, you don't have to be a sadist for the part. Most of the movie is pretty light BDSM, nothing abusive, and it is supposed to be feigned." She sighs, stroking my knee absently. "But I guess we've both been in the business long enough to know how real it can feel. So the question is, do you still want to do it?"

"That's not the question. I can't quit in the middle of the project, or it will wreck the entire budget. They'll have to recast, and a lot of people that were counting on work will be left out while they re-organize the whole thing. Not to mention that if I bail out of the biggest movie of my career because I can't separate a role from reality…" I give her a look.

I might as well get a neck tat that says I can't act, and she knows it. Before she came home, I was starting to think the real question might involve men in white coats and medication, but she makes it all sound so much simpler than it's been feeling.

"No. Screw it," Sophie says adamantly. "It's not okay. If it makes you feel like this, even if the movie comes out brilliantly, you should walk away."

I give her a pained look.

She folds her arms. "Would you let me do it? If I was filming Fifty Shades and it was making me feel like this?"

My throat twists and I think for a second I'm going to get another one of those weird gagging/coughing fits. I swallow hard against it and glare at Sophie.

"God no. I'd kidnap you to Mexico first. But it's not the same, because you're a woman. Julia's role in this movie is the hard one, not mine. She's the one that's naked and tied spreadeagle in front of the whole crew several times a day. I would never tell you to do a nude scene if it made you uncomfortable. But I'm a guy. It's different."

"That's bullshit," she says angrily. "It's the same. If you don't want to do this, then you should quit. There is no way the producers on Queen of Hearts would ever fire you. You are that show. It isn't like your career would be over, so don't think like that. All we have to do is tell people the truth. You don't like to hit women, and you couldn't stomach it even for the movie. Your fans will love it. I'll call your publicist right now," she offers.

"That would be like begging to be typecast for the rest of my career. You don't just throw away opportunities to expand your range."

"Okay, so blame it on me. I'll even do all the interviews, tell everybody that I couldn't stand you doing scenes so intimate with another woman. That way all your 'no comments' will come off looking like you are trying to protect me."

"You would never ask me to give up a role."

"The fans don't know that. Come on, Dave. You can have a couple months off, and then go back to playing Alex Harper, getting into fistfights and whatever hot guest star the producers can come up with. Getting every fourteen-year-old with a crush on you to give their allowance to rescue child prostitutes. Being happy." Her eyes are pleading.

It's amazing. She obviously can't imagine why I'm having this reaction, but she's still willing to throw herself on the publicity grenade to save me from my own neurosis.

My stomach is still in knots, but I can't help but smile. "You're kind of incredible. You know that, don't you?"

"What I am is a terrible girlfriend. I should have known something was bothering you. You've been acting weird all month, and I've just been too busy to think about it."

I pull her into my lap, which is where I've wanted her this whole time. "Don't try to make this your fault. You're the only thing that's made me feel good since I started filming."

She cuddles into me, her head tucked into the curve of my neck.

I sigh. "I just need to find a way to make this work. It's stupid, Sophie. I know it's not real. I know it's not abuse. But every time I raise my hand to her, it feels like my head is going to explode. That's not logical at all."

"Maybe you're just going about it wrong. Have you talked to her about it?"

"She tried, today."

Sophie winces. I can feel her face scrunch against my neck. "Yeah, I can just guess how that went."

"Yeah, you can."

She sits back. "Look, if I had gotten the part of Ana, how would you want my co-star to handle things with me?"

Anger flashes through me, heating my skin. "Why do you keep turning this around?"

"Because you take better care of me than you do of yourself," she says flatly. "Answer the question."

I close my eyes, because the thought of her playing Ana makes me want to kill people and I don't particularly want her to think about that. Sophie chooses her own roles and I choose mine. That's the way we like it.

"I would want him to be checking in with you about every five seconds to make sure you were comfortable and that everyone was treating you with respect," I say finally. "And no, I haven't been doing as well as I should with that, with Julia. I mean, I ask, but I can't tell if she's being honest with me or not."

"She hasn't been doing it for you. That was my point." Sophie sits up, looking unhappy. "It's up to you, David. But don't just try to push through. Do it in a way that doesn't hurt you or don't do it at all."

I scrub a hand through my hair, a luxury I don't get on set. "I just don't get it. When I read the book, I was really excited about this role. There must have been more to it than all these sex scenes, more than just him subjugating her."

I sigh. "I need to figure this out by tomorrow. I don't have any time to screw around with our shooting schedule. Julia knows something's up, and I know Lucy suspects. I'm going to stay up tonight, I think, and read the book again. Try to figure out why I wanted to do this in the first place."

"Okay," Sophie says easily, getting up. "I'll make coffee."

"No, you should get to bed. I'll make it."

"I'm staying up with you."

"You just filmed all day and I took up the half an hour of relaxing time you get with my drama. You have to film all day tomorrow. There's no way I'm letting you pull an all-nighter just to hold my hand," I protest.

"There's no way I'm letting you sit up alone reading that book when I know how much those scenes have been upsetting you," she argues. "I've let you go through all of this alone because I was busy. I still have my copy of the book. I'll read with you."

When I don't respond, she tips her head, her eyes beseeching me. "Let me do this one thing for you, David, please."

I shake my head, smiling despite myself. There's no talking her out of it. There never is, when she wants something. "What did I do to deserve you?"

"Don't get me started. There's not enough time before I have to go back to work again." She winks and disappears into the kitchen. Jackson gets up and looks after her, then drops his head onto my knee. I scratch his ears.

"Yeah, I've got nothing to complain about, do I?" I ask him.

Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading and reviewing this story! I can't tell you how much it means to me, and I've loved hearing all the different takes on the story and characters.