Thread: Paradise Isle  (Fades & Good Girls)

Making Mr. Jeffrey Tremonti himself sweat even after he had lay claim to the mother of dragons and his everything, well, Maddie wasn't going to say that she wasn't a little proud of herself. It might have been rhetorically easy to say that by the end of tonight, they'd all be on exactly the same level as one another, but the redhead also wasn't too proud to admit that she knew when it came to the pecking order of the guests on stage today, she was the black sheep of the growing family. A mere television actress! For a network! Ranked against a prestige tv actress with more than a few films under her belt, one of the biggest pop stars working today, and .. well, her soon-to-be potential-successor, she was on the bottom rung from the get-go as far as the press was concerned. But you know what? Two things. One, she didn't give a good god damn. And two, neither did he. She couldn't help but give him her most beatific smile, her eyes ever so briefly contemplating the darkness and light above without entirely breaking contact when she considered the idea of him giving up on the charade he'd played so well with the three of them so far all because he wanted to fuck her in the ass that badly. The following shimmy in her shoulders found his proposal wordlessly agreeable. If there was any game of hierarchies and ladders to be played after this press junket to end all press junkets, then it was one that was going to be played on their terms, through their actions, and not through something that depended on so much luck and happenstance as a famous career. Getting reamed in front of that many cameras would just guarantee that she had managed to tempt him in ways that Emilia and Ariana hadn't exactly managed to rev. Or that they'd gotten him kickstarted for her, and she was just the lucky one who got to feel him purr. Either way it was one way to put her on equal footing with the others in a way that the press and the world sure damn well wouldn't forget. Madelaine felt her mouth go deliriously dry when his expression went from kind, agreeable admission to the stern lesson about to come, but that was the only part of her that was at any risk of going dry. She'd watched Ariana tease and goad him from backstage, just about every chance she'd gotten, in an adorably girlish little fashion. And Madelaine was practically ready to chew the drapes waiting to see him spring into action and give her what she was asking for, no matter whether or not she'd really understood what she was asking for. He probably hadn't known then that he was just saving his punishment, forgoing its use on the pretty little brat seeking a few little taps on her rear in favor of the sizzling flame that was about to roar onto the stage. A wildfire would catch anywhere it could jump to unopposed, but keep it properly contained, fed, and watched, and it would find its proper place in a hearth. The feel of his fingers on her arm were thrilling enough to bring the goosebumps out along the back of her neck and raise them against her delicate arms, but she didn't dare look away to miss even the subtlest turn of his eyes in the transformation of his expression from encouraging, even indulging , to promising . She exhaled, the breath hitting turbulence about the same time her knees did. Graceful and poised as she may have been, there was a difference between the Barbie doll in her box and the one who was being played with. And those mincing little arches weren't really meant to stand on their own. If his hand hadn't caught her by the shoulder, the throat, the strong curve of her jaw, she would have ended up in a filly-tangle of limbs with a likely snapped heel among her other little aches and bruises. That it did catch her, it must have seemed that the slightest bit more pressure against her skin would have bruised her or marked her as surely as a flaming hot iron could hope to. She was soft and delicate, for all her vivacious presence, in a way that neither Emilia nor Ariana had been exactly. This particular toy got put into the -Fragile- boxes when it was time to pack her up until they arrived at their new home. Maybe there really was something to be said for the hearty effect a nice big ribeye could have on folks, if his supple little soygirl was any indication. Maybe there was something to be said about the way she didn't act remotely delicately, though. Her expressive face might have pulled a particularly unphotogenic one, her surprise not bordering on so much as sailing right past the point from sultry interest to slapstick comedy for anyone who managed to flashbulb the flailing ginger in the instant between her being pushed and her being caught, but as soon as she was caught her relief settled it away with a little gasp of air. Her eyelashes fluttered and her legs flexed, not least reason why being that one of her legs had skidded particularly far forward and away from its partner in a fashion that left her literally trembling from toes to thighs in trying to keep from falling the rest of the way not to mention, for those who hadn't filled their photos folder with enough pink already, a study in contrasts between a pop star's dulce de leche hue leading into the princessly spread of her dripping vagina and the pop of red and white around the paler pink of Maddie's pretty little pussy even though it felt like he had her by the scruff of the neck. It was all accompanied by a mighty thunk and the screech of feedback that came along with her inadvertently dropping the mic. So much for getting to do it on her terms. With any luck, the noise distracted anyone from catching her least elegant looks, as it faded by the time she found herself arching against his chest and knee and having her tip-toes put on the spot even more by his positioning in shoes that were absolutely not designed for going en pointe . Her back twisted into a perfect bow. Her hips curved outward and downward in equal measure. She felt the tremor go from the tip of her to the tip of her, the weight of her own breasts against her rib cage unable to decide if gravity was taking them toward her torso or the stage at her backward angle. One proud row of teeth emerged, twisting against her plush red lip with nearly enough force to make the red go running down her chin. This. Is. It. She didn't scream. It was almost disappointing to at least one or two people in the crowd who had already gotten their fingers and palms ready to witness the repeat of Emilia's wailing pain or Ariana's siren pitch. They had to sheepishly get back to the business of filming, shooting, and typing while the latest acquisition chose not to serenade them with how much pain the human body could endure when fire was applied to it. Borne of it, bearing it, living it. She wasn't a literal flame. Redheads, some people said, actually had less tolerance for pain, fair complexions even less for heat. Her lip popped out from between her teeth with a ragged, barbed-wire sigh of a sound twisting in her throat, hitching and squirming not unlike a young actress hitched and squirming against the buck bringing her to bit with one hand at her throat. Madelaine saw colors she wasn't sure she'd ever seen before. She felt simultaneously so loose her body was an afterthought to the experience of her soul, and so tight that each and every fiber in her muscles was known to her. She sucked in a breath and let out another one on two . And another one just before three. There were tears shining in her eyes, artfully adorning the length of her lashes before spilling down her cheeks, but they didn't look like anything less than tears of joy. She hadn't slipped and fallen yet, and hadn't twisted out of his sturdy grip. Her slender hands came up viper quick as soon as she'd processed the realization that she was being held and would not be let go, and with both of them, she grabbed hold of the shaft of la touche finale and wrapped them around one another. And pushed. Felt her hands add that much more pressure to the top of her breast. Felt her hands push it that much closer to her heart. Felt his hand, an extension of the tool, making sure it didn't move so much as a hair in any direction he didn't want it to lest she be marred rather than marked. Three and a half. Her thumbs caressed the branding iron like a lover, around the same moment that in the absence of any sound save for her stilted, sucked in and forced out little breaths and pants, the entire gathered press corps could realize that for the first time they could really hear what it sounded like when a young woman had her freedom burned away. Not that far away from that aforementioned ribeye hitting the grill, really. But if there was any irony to be had in the pretty little vegan ending up branded like the grass-fed pet she was, it wasn't in her body language or her expression. There was rapture there, rapture in the moment, rapture in the understanding of what it meant. And rapture in the pain . Five . Her skin, so white, bore a brand more black than any other, for while Madelaine might not have denied him the pleasure nor duty, nor the intersection in between, of claiming her as his very own she did not let him extricate herself from the choice she had made quite so easily as the others did. It wasn't even a vicious streak of masochism bubbling to the surface out of a girl who had never been the sort who turned to certain frown-worthy techniques for feeling something her fair skin would have borne the truth of that had it been the case, no hiding on arms like those that made her branding linger on for a crucial second more. It was that in the seconds between grabbing the iron and Jeffrey pulling it from her, she had nearly forgotten that she was holding it at all. She was in another place entirely, anchored and locked and seared to the stage and yet feeling somewhere beyond the breathy race of oxytocin following a young woman's fancy to make a mess of her sheets in the privacy of her own bedroom. It was a hyperbole to say that some things were better than sex. Sometimes. It might not have been better . But she could only do it once, and that was its own kind of special. She was giggling before he even finished whispering into her ear, the iron having not even finished its haphazard roll of the both of them managing to drop it back down to the stage. It was a sound as pure as a ringing bell, giddy with a lack of things to say, and joyous with things felt. She sucked in air through her teeth in a low, lingering hiss, her eyes a pool of tears, but though her shuddering breath came out louder it was only joined by another soft peal of laughter rather than gratitude or adoration . In its own way, her giggles were both of those things, like she'd won a bet against herself. Not that she could keep herself better composed than her compatriots, because that would have been putting herself against them, like those in the press were bound to continue doing. Again, not a good god damn to give. Her hands didn't have the iron to clutch, but for all her thrill at making him nearly sweat she didn't palm at him in the hungry way his girl did, or cling to him with the comforting submission of his lady . She wrapped her arms around his neck, letting herself give way entirely to gravity and his own support. She was milk poured into a vessel, and was only as sturdy as what held her. In her sweet, teary, shuddering delight, she found release no less potent than Ariana's had been even if she managed to keep her hands to herself. No hate. and confirmation no less powerful than Emilia's. She'd never have this exact series of feelings again. And that was tragic. And that was beautiful. She spilled, and there was no use crying for it. A splay of curve, limb, and hair in duochromatic bliss of red and white beneath his masculine hover, catching her breath as the hard wood caught her. She had stood as tall as she could, but this too felt just as right as maintaining the tightrope balance of being a young woman in Hollywood, maintaining her self-image and her physical image while still maintaining a down to earth approachability to fans online of being gorgeous, but not an object of envy or scorn or shame to young women who looked up to her. Of being a stone cold bitch in her best known persona, and being an energetic, sometimes silly, sometimes manic, sometimes preachy person in her real life. Being a sexual creature without being a maligned harlot. Letting herself be held, presenting herself for his approval, feeling joy and pain alike for him, it was more than she'd imagined it to be. And she had been imagining it quite a bit for the past few weeks. She leaned into his kisses without quite catching them. She just basked in them, searing them as surely as his initials over her heart. And when she seemed ready to let him go, she reached behind herself again, to catch him by the neck and give him a beaming, toothy smile. Her voice might have twisted itself into nothing in lieu of adding another pair of glasses to his itemized receipt for this ongoing charade for the press, but she found it through her giddy tears. I am a good girl, she told him, sincerely, sweetly. But I'm really good at pretending otherwise, she promised with no less sincerity. That ought to have been the button on which she allowed him back his verticality, but just as she hadn't let go of the iron, her fingers curled sharply if barely enough to dimple his skin where her nails met it as he began to lean up and her wrist almost considered getting back down to the rest of her. Her grip pulsed, holding him there just a moment longer. And I'm going to love you so deeply, she promised to the both of them, and only then relinquished him. Spitfire masochistic fucktoy on one hand, sweetly giddy romantic on the other? Well, some people did also like to claim all redheads were mercurial and tempestuous. But Maddie wasn't all redheads. She was, in the parlance so favored by all of them, His redhead. She was cherishing the ongoing pain of her scorched flesh, every bit as much as she was cherishing the slowly fading warmth of his kisses and his touches. She didn't shy away from letting her arm brush up against her breast as she squirmed her legs the littlest bit, finally close enough to unstrap her heels and slip out of them. She left them neatly upright, standing without her, and placed each of her earrings atop one. Pin point up. Just in case anyone got any ideas of walking out in them. She put her ring directly between them, and then turned, lingering in the arch and motion of her elbows and knees like a cat who wasn't quite ready to stretch and wasn't quite ready to nap. But there was still something leonine in the fall of her crimson mane around her cheeks, her dark eyelashes seeming all the more prowling from that vantage even with or because of her mascara outlining where her tears had followed. Madelaine was so at home on her ridiculous heels, it was little wonder that she was just as at home crawling on all fours or maybe she just wanted to make him sweat a little again. But she couldn't quite wipe the smile off of her face when she got up next to Emilia, sandwiching the gorgeous brunette between herself and Ariana plaything and lover, lioness and pussycat. And anything and everything in between. She settled onto her knees, her backside fitted neatly against her calves, and then followed that up with her hands around her ankles. Her slender fitness certainly contrasted with Emilia's more traditionally feminine curves, but with both of them presenting side by side .. well, there was going to be another cottage industry in folks online arguing about cup sizes and who's were bigger without literally a single thought of nuance to the fact that perspective, angle, and which one of them was breathing in or out at any given time had a lot to do with it! And of course, Ariana was just happy to be there. Very happy, judging from the occasional squirms she was still giving like she still wanted dessert after a five star meal. Still, in their attempts to be relatively still and perform their task of showcasing Jeffrey's conquest of .. well, them , it was still a bit easy to get distracted. And they did , just a little, when the audience followed up Maddie's settling in not with the polite, pregnant silence that preceded Mr. Tremonti's next and presumably final introduction, but with a few murmurs and gasps and then a lot of digital camera whirring. After all, he hadn't made any introductions. Maybe he just didn't need to. There was no attention-grabbing clicking of heels, no working of the crowd, no diving into a speech -- after all, Jeffrey had only just bent down to recover the dropped microphone and, if Madelaine's aim was true, admire his personal vantage point of her crawl and brought himself back up again -- when the four on stage were joined by a fifth. And with no announcement from the master of ceremonies, there was some understandable confusion in the crowd as to whether or not she was the last of the known quantities, or if someone had just decided to crash the party. If it was unplanned, then she had nonetheless dressed the part. While most turned their heads naturally to see who had arrived beneath the stage lights, she would have turned them soon enough. Draped in silk, she was nothing so much as an Aphrodite in voluminous skirts, pleats and folds ending and beginning with ripples around her legs that showed not an inch of skin as they pooled and dragged against the wood of the stage, her Grecian straps missing only a curl of olive leaves to complete the illusion of a goddess stepping down from Olympus. But in the play of silk and cloth around her legs, bunching and twisting and smoothing out like a river in motion, there was a marginally sturdier sewing to the bustier of the dress. There simply had to be. And if Greek Goddess was what the dress was going for, the hair and make-up was entirely Hollywood . Another sort of myth entirely, told on high for a century or more, her gold was tamed with pins and jewels that glittered in the stage lights but calmed with nothing more than the ancient techniques, combed and styled until the line between old pictures and old stories was inexorably blurred. It was a statement , entirely about the way Los Angeles treated its brightest with the same reverence and worship as the legends of old, and about how he of all people thought he had the right to simply re-tell and re-write and re-shoot their stories however he liked, until his were the versions that went down in history. There had been three statements stripped to nothing and left burning with his ownership. Her very existence on the stage seemed to be designed to be a challenge, to the tempo of his show, to the idea that each of these women were going to come here to play ball, to the very integrity of even well-tailored silk when it was no doubt intentionally well-tailored to be at least somewhat inadequate .. Her fingertips found his wrist, delicate as they slid beneath and touched the heel of his palm, lingering just long enough to either appreciably mimic his tactile way of approaching the others or just long enough to gently mock him for the clear pleasure and control he got in doing so, to lift the microphone in his hand up to her lips -- painted neither searingly red nor girlishly pink nor glossily nude, but just enough -- and give him a patient smile. I think we're all dying to know how much you paid for a prize like her, she gently prompted, as though she had been here all along to play the dutiful assistant keeping the show going on, her admiration sounding as real for Madelaine's performance as if she had given voice to everyone who might have briefly knitted their brows over a mere TV actress following up after Ariana only to find her every bit as arresting in her final, first submission. Scarlett Johansson took one step back, letting her fingertips fall away from his wrist with warm fondness but none of the lingering need that accompanied his branded beauties after their confirmations. She was her own woman after all, and something in the practiced, perfect politeness of her paparazzi smile suggested that tonight wasn't guaranteed to change that.