Live Session

A Read Me Filthy Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

Jax

I arrive at SoundStage on a Wednesday morning in February at eight-forty with two coffees and a rehearsed face.

The rehearsed face is for the elevator. The two coffees are for my husband, who has been, for two mornings in a row, doing warmups in studio three at eight-fifteen because he is, quote, trying to be early for his own life, and I have been, quote, his assistant, apparently, since last Monday, unquote, per Reyna, who I love.

The coffees are plain black for him and a flat white for me. He has not yet been corrupted by the milk. He will be, eventually. I have time.

The elevator on twelve is empty. Dana is at the front desk with her headset on, not Celeste — Celeste is on vacation this week, which I know because Silas mentioned it on Sunday night at the island with the specific flat face he uses when a change in a professional routine has ruffled him enough to be acknowledged out loud. Dana is thirty-four, she/her, wears a backwards baseball cap, and has three mugs of coffee on her desk at all times because she is, as I have learned from Theo, a woman who does not stop drinking coffee once she has started.

“Jax.”

“Dana.”

“He’s in three doing — I don’t know what he’s doing. He was humming twenty minutes ago. Now he’s just sitting in the booth looking at the page.”

“Okay.”

“Coffee?”

“The black is his.”

“Bless you.”

I hand her the tray so she can hand him his coffee before I walk in. It is a thing. She is his engineer this week. Marlon, the regular, is out — his daughter had surgery on Monday, routine, outpatient, she is fine, and Marlon has taken the week to be with her. Dana is the sub. She is also a friend of Theo’s, which is why Bex approved her a month ago over her usual no-subs policy. Dana has engineered Theo’s horror audio for three years. Dana has, I have been told by Theo twice, heard everything.

I appreciate her.

I knock once on studio three. The seal is partial — the outer room is open, the booth inside sealed — and I can see Silas through the glass. He is in dark jeans, a charcoal crewneck, his hair pushed back, his script open on his knee. He is sitting perfectly still. He is not reading. He is looking at the page the way you look at a wild animal you are about to have to lift.

I push through. I set my coffee on the board. I walk over to the booth and I knock on the glass.

He looks up. He smiles at me the way he does at eight-forty in the morning when we are at work together in public and he wants me to know he sees me without saying anything out loud.

I push the talkback.

Morning, sweetheart.

He presses his own talkback on the table in the booth. “Morning.”

You okay.

“Mm.”

Is that a yes Mm or a no Mm.

“It’s a — ” he laughs, small, wet. “It’s a trying-to-be-a-yes Mm.”

Take your coffee.

Dana has come in behind me. She slides his coffee through the booth door, pulls it shut again, and retreats to the board. She settles into the engineer’s chair. She opens the session file. She does not ask anything.

Silas picks up his coffee. He takes a sip. He looks at me through the glass. He pushes talkback.

“Jax.”

Silas.

“I want to warm up on chapter fourteen.”

I go still.

Through the glass, his eyes are already tired at eight-forty-three in the morning. He is watching me watch him. Dana, at the board, pretends to adjust a level.

Okay, I push. Warm up.

“Yes.”

Not full take. Warmup.

“Warmup.”

Yes.

“Jax.”

Yes, Silas.

“Do you want to — do you want to do something else instead.”

No.

“Jax.”

No, Silas. We do it today. You’ve been dreading it for two weeks. If we push it to Friday you will dread it for two more days. Let’s just do the warmup. Dana, can you roll tape?

Dana, without looking up: “Rolling.”

Silas picks up his script. He adjusts the mic. He takes a breath — the good pro breath, the one he does before a real take.

He reads the first paragraph of chapter fourteen.

Chapter fourteen of Marginalia is the sex scene. It is, specifically, the sex scene I wrote sitting at my kitchen table in Queens in the middle of a breakup a year and a half ago, with Back to Center Ice — narrated by Silas Reed — on loop in my AirPods, because I was twenty-six and miserable and the only thing in the world that soothed me was the sound of a man I did not know reading other people’s books.

Now he is reading mine.

And it is, I hear in real time, flat.

He narrates it clean. Professionally. His diaphragm is open and his pitch is consistent and his reading is, on every technical metric, good. It’s the take I would accept from the narrator of anyone else’s book. It’s correct.

It’s also arm’s length.

I watch his face while he reads. He is not in it. He is three feet behind it. He is reading the scene the way he has read, conservatively, four hundred other men’s sex scenes in the last decade — with precision and discipline and a small mental door closed behind his eyes.

He finishes page one. He looks up. He is not smiling.

“Flat,” he says, before I can.

I push talkback. Yes.

“I know.”

I know you know.

“Jax.”

Silas.

“The alternative is —”

Is you narrate it like you mean it.

“That’s a line.”

I know.

“On tape. In a commercial audiobook that’s going to release on Audible in six weeks.”

I know, Silas.

He is quiet. Dana, at the board, is doing a very slow thing with a fader.

Silas, through his talkback, soft: “Dana.”

“Yes, Mr. Reed.”

“How flexible is your day today.”

“Why, Mr. Reed.”

“Would you be able to — take lunch early. Give us the booth for an hour. Back at eleven.”

Dana does not look up from the board. She adjusts another fader. She takes a sip of coffee number two.

“Sure, Mr. Reed.”

“Tape running or off.”

A long pause.

Dana, mild as water: “Which do you want, Mr. Reed.”

Silas looks at me through the glass. His eyes find mine. He does not blink.

“Running.”

Dana nods. She taps something on her screen. She makes a note. She stands up from the board. She picks up her jacket from the back of the chair. She picks up coffees one and three — she leaves number two on the board for later — and she walks past me to the door.

At the door she stops.

“Mr. Reed.”

“Yes, Dana.”

“The session file you’re rolling right now is on your personal drive, not the Helios cloud. I set the project up that way Monday per your manager’s request. Nothing goes up to the cloud without you signing off.”

Silas, through talkback: “Thank you, Dana.”

“Mr. Harlan.”

“Dana.”

“Don’t break my mic.”

“We won’t break your mic, Dana.”

“I love that mic, Mr. Harlan.”

“I know, Dana. It is a beautiful mic.”

She smiles. Small. The kind of smile a woman who has engineered horror audio for Theo Mak for three years gives you when she has decided not to ask a question.

She closes the door behind her.

Silas

The door shuts. The seal settles. I hear the outer pneumatic on the hallway door a moment later. Dana’s in the lounge. There are three floors and two sets of security between us and anyone else on this level of the building. Bex pays extra for the private floor.

I am alone in studio three with my husband and a microphone.

I push the talkback. My fingers, I notice, are steady.

“Jax.”

“Yes.”

“I want to propose something.”

“Okay.”

“Stop the tape first. Just — for a minute. I want to say this off the record.”

Jax reaches to the board. I watch him find the stop. He pauses before he hits it.

“Jax.”

“Yes.”

“Actually — leave it. I want to say this on tape. Onto our tape. If you’re going to hear me propose this, I want it on record that I proposed it. Do you mind.”

He considers. Then, slow, professional: “Okay.”

He sits back down in the engineer’s chair.

The red light is on above the glass.

I pick up the script. I set it face-down on the table. I look at him through the glass. I push talkback. My voice, through my own mic, goes into his cans at proximity.

“I want to record chapter fourteen of your book the way you wrote it. From the top. I want to narrate it in the voice it was written for, which is not the clean professional voice I was using ten minutes ago. It is the other voice. Which you and I both know exists. Which I have, in a decade of narrating MM romance, not put on a single commercial tape, because I have been careful, because I have been closeted, because I have been — because I have been a narrator who did not want to be a man while he was narrating.”

I take a breath. I keep going.

“The thing I am proposing is that I read the chapter. Start to finish. The written sex scene. From here, in this booth. With you in the control room. While you, through the talkback — not on the script, not in the manuscript — while you narrate to me, in parallel, commentary. Direction. Instructions for my body. And I, in response, keep reading the book out loud while I do what you tell me to do. The tape runs. The master captures both channels. The final file is ours. Not Helios’s. I re-record the chapter clean before lunch, with Dana back on the board, and that is the commercial take that Helios gets. Today’s take — this take — stays on the card in my inside jacket pocket and comes home.”

I stop.

I wait.

Jax is looking at me through the glass. His face, I note with the specific professional attention I have brought to him for a year and four months, is the face he makes when he is doing a very fast internal structural assessment of a proposal that has arrived in his head faster than he was ready for, and is deciding, in real time, whether he is scared or turned on or, as is most often the case, both.

He pushes talkback. His voice, through the cans, goes into my ear at intimate range.

“Silas.”

“Yes.”

“You want me to narrate filth at you while you read my book.”

“Yes.”

“On tape.”

“On our tape.”

“And you’d be — hard in the booth. While you narrate my book. On a tape Helios technically owns session rights to.”

“Nothing goes up to the cloud. The project file is local to my drive. You heard Dana. The card comes home with us. It is ours.”

“And you want to do this.”

“I want to do this.”

“Silas.”

“Yes.”

“Silas Reed.”

“Yes, Jax.”

“Why.”

I am quiet for a beat. I have my answer. I am making sure I give it to him in the right order.

“Because the voice the book needs — the voice your book needs, for a commercial audiobook that is going to be the debut release of my husband as an author — is a voice I can only find by having just done what I am about to ask you to do to me. I have been trying, for two weeks, to get there by discipline. It is not working. I have been, for two weeks, sitting in a booth alone trying to summon a voice I have not had permission to use on tape in my entire career. I cannot do it by myself. I cannot do it cold. I can do it if you direct me through it once — if we make a private record of it once — and then I can re-record it clean an hour later and the clean take will be the cleanest of my life. Because I will know, in my body, exactly where the voice comes from. I will have just put it there.”

Jax, quiet, through talkback: “Silas.”

“Yes.”

“That is the most craft-brained argument for kink I have ever heard in my life.”

“I know.”

“Silas Reed.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, Silas. Yes. I want to do this. I have — I have wanted to do this since you called me about chapter fourteen two weeks ago and I heard in your voice that you were afraid of it. I have been waiting for you to ask me. I did not want to ask you. I wanted it to come from you.”

“It’s coming from me.”

“I know, Silas.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s set it up.”

[CONTENT CONTINUES — page will be extended in next step]