MANIC: Rook and Ronin, #2 by JA Huss

out he and Antoine have very different visions about what these shots should look like.
    Antoine is not happy about this and I can see his point. People usually hire him for his artistic interpretation. But Spencer is an artist too, so there's a whole lot of polite disagreement going on.
    "Hey," I interrupt Spencer telling Antoine how he wants my body to hug the line of the seat and the tank. "Spencer, I think you should take five. Let Antoine do his job. Because I'm really tired here, and you guys just wasted like forty-five minutes with this bullshit vision stuff."
    Ford snuffs out a laugh in the corner.
    I might have stepped over the line. "I mean," I say, walking up to Spencer and putting on a pouty face, "he's famous, Spencer. His talent is the whole reason you guys chose Chaput Studios, right?"
    Spencer shrugs.
    "Just let him do it his way today, it's just one bike. We've got plenty more for you guys to make adjustments."
    "Yeah, OK, but make sure you get the details of her body, Antoine, don't hide the sexy parts, man. We want guys zooming in on her, ya know? We want them to zoom in for tits and see the details on the gas tank, or the chrome on the tailpipe when they look at her legs."
    Antoine responds angrily in French but Billy is the only one who appears to understands what he's saying, and he throws his hands up and says, "Leave me out of it."
    But whatever Antoine said, Spencer walks out and Antoine refuses to speak English after that. He uses Billy and this time Billy does get involved, because even I know the French word for dollars.
    "OK, Rook," Billy says after Antoine whispers something and then starts messing with his camera crap. "Sit on the seat backwards, then lie back on the tank." I do what he says and this makes my back arch and my tits stick way up. "Now turn your upper body slightly, so we get the"—Antoine says something here—"tank shot."
    Right, I sneer to myself. The tank shot . It's got nothing to do with my nipples.
    I just stop thinking and do what I'm told—that is the secret to being a good model. Billy moves me around like a mannequin, Antoine stays in French, and Spencer never comes back. Team Rook keeps far back from Antoine, maybe guessing he's about to morph into super-asshole at any moment over this shoot, and Ford, to his credit, says absolutely nothing. He just sits in a director's chair far off to the side, almost in another set, in fact.
    Antoine finishes up pretty quick and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but either way, Spencer returns, like he was standing outside the studio door just waiting for it to be over, and walks up to me. "Come with me, Rook, I'll wash the paint off you and then we're all going out to dinner."
    I do not want to go out to dinner, but I'm too tired to argue at the moment. He puts his hand on the small of my back and leads me back down to the third floor, but this time we don't go back to the art room, we go through a set of double doors at the end of the hallway.
    It's a shower room and there's already a bucket and a large sponge waiting next to one of the shower stations.
    He turns the water on and waves over to the stream coming down from the shower head. "Rinse off and then I'll scrub you down with this paint remover. Sorry it's so personal, but it was either me or Billy and Antoine said me. So…"
    He looks guilty.
    "Doesn't anyone ever ask me about these things? I mean, maybe I can, you know, shower all by myself?"
    He sighs. "You can't reach the back, Rook." He points to the bucket. "That's the paint thinner we use for this special body paint. It needs to be scrubbed."
    I go stand under the shower and wet myself down and Spencer enters the room with me, staying out of the water blast as best as he can, and begins to scrub the paint off. It runs down my body in long ribbons of inky black streams.
    "All that work, gone. It's sorta sad, huh, Spence?" I look over my shoulder at him and he's smiling.
    "Yeah, this part sucks, but