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Sixteen takes.
Leo's quiet, afterwards, just gives her a twisted little smile, one half of something private, and saunters off to his trailer. She watches him stop a few steps away and bum a cigarette off one of the PAs. He gets it lit and keeps walking, cupping the lit end against the wind, alone in a crowd, as always.
Her lips feel numbed with the ferocity of his kisses and she touches them experimentally, but they still don't feel real. Sixteen takes, in total, long takes because that's the way Sam rolls, and she's not sure that the last was even the best. Sam's animated now, studying the field monitors and arguing with the DP. He looks up, like he can feel her gaze, and he gives her a grin. She's getting used to the way he only really sees her through the lens of the camera, through the frame of whichever character he's made her into now. In the beginning, that was part of the attraction, to be a muse, to be shaped and crafted into someone else.
She's older now. They've made films together, they've had the iconic portrait in Vanity Fair. She's tipped to win the Oscar, one way or another, and she feels for the first time that she's earned it. She's not sure when the image became the reality. She's not sure when the reverse became true. She only knows that she doesn't feel the way she did, and she's not sure when she's going to find a way to deal with that, or who she'll be when it's over.
She gives a wave, and follows Leo's path, past craft services, round behind the back of Frank and April's ill-fated dream home, round to the fields behind where the trailers are parked like so many forgotten school buses.
She doesn't knock.
He's sitting with his legs straight in front of him, and when he sees her he stubs out the butt of his cigarette in an old styrofoam coffee cup. He won't meet her eyes though, and she knows him well enough to call him on that bullshit.
"Leo," she says, and he meets her gaze, then, and he's angry. That's the wrong way round. She's the one with the temper usually, the emotional one, from tears to laughter and dancing and song in the blink of an eye, and back again. He's Leonardo fucking DiCaprio, and in all the long years she's known him, she's seen him quiet, reserved, cool, and more-or-less sanguine in the face of everything they've faced together. Not angry, though. Not at her. Never at her.
April's outfits are too demure: she wears her revolutionary soul on the inside, and Kate fidgets with the wrists of her long-sleeved cardigan, and wishes to be Juliet Hulme again, barelegged in the fourth world sunshine, back when everything was a whole lot simpler, and the chief concern of being a co-star in a movie was whether Melanie Lynskey had eaten all the jellybeans out of the jar in the tiny room they shared, the little pig.
"I'm sorry," she tries, and gives him her winningest smile.
"Don't do that," he replies, and without even waiting for her to ask, "don't do that actress thing. Not with me, Katie."
She flushes, because it's not a thing, it's who she is, and he's a bastard, and she says so.
He stands up, suddenly, and she takes a step back towards the door. He's all coiled up inside, and she wishes he'd just let it out. Smash a plate or something: she's always wanted to trash a trailer, they could do it together. She's about to share that thought when he turns on her.
"That's not who you are," he says, and she gets it's maybe not about the actress thing, not really. Leo pushes his hair off his face. He smells of cigarette smoke and old-fashioned cologne. She's pretty sure Frank wears Old Spice, and she loves that Leo thinks that's important.
"He stands there, and he watches me undress you, and he doesn't say take your hands off my wife, he says 'That's great, Leo, next time can you tear her cardigan a little, be a little rougher, then - hold it - surprised that you've done it'." He gets Sam perfectly, down to that faint trace of pomposity she still loves in him, and her fingers touch the telltale rip in the hem of her cardy. She doesn't know where this is going. She doesn't know where she wants it to go.
"He knows he has nothing to worry about," she says, and feels the lie in her words even as she shapes them. She can still feel his kisses in her mouth, stained on her lips.
"He has everything to worry about," Leo says, and there's nowhere to hide from that.
She doesn't know how to deflect it.
"You're not kissing me," she says, and it's another lie, and Leo of all the people in the world knows her tells. "You're kissing April. You're Frank kissing April."
He reaches out to her, and tilts her jaw to look at him.
"You gonna keep explaining it away?" he asks, and she thinks that maybe she is, thank you very much, and then he leans in and kisses her, not roughly, not gently, not Frank, not Jack, even, someone entirely different, someone who looks in her eyes and doesn't see a teenage murderess, or a impoverished upperclass shipwreck survivor, or a Bletchley Park nerd, or an illiterate camp guard. Not an Oscar nominee or a movie star or even an actress. Not Kate-wife-of-Sam, or Kate-mother-of-Mia. Just Kate.
She gets it, then. He murmurs against her lips, and she bites at him to make him stop fucking talking, but he doesn't.
"Like this," he says. "I'd kiss you this way," and his hands are in her hair, mussing it, tangling and using it to pull her in closer. His arms are strong and warm and pull her in close and safe, and his mouth is wide against hers. She presses back against him, caught up in the tide of it, and it's messy, they're clutched together with no thought for camera angle, or visibility. He draws back a little, and licks her face, messy, disgusting, the absolutely opposite of anything photogenic or elegant. She pokes him right in the belly, and he doubles up a little, gasping out a laugh, and she puts her hands at either side of his familiar, beloved face and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.
"Like this," she whispers. "Like this."
He pulls back, and his eyes are softer now, rueful, almost, and he's himself. She takes his hands and shapes them around her breasts, lets him feel the weight of them, lets him take his time, lets her own head fall back as his mouth moves to her throat. For the first time today she can feel him hard against her, and she reaches down, and scrambles, confounded, at the fastening of his old-fashioned pants, giving up in favour of curling her palm against the ridge of him there. He tucks his face against the line of her jaw and she feels the puff of his breath there, hot against her skin. He's shaking, just a little, or she is, neither of them in control of this, neither of them knowing how to end it, or even how to begin. And maybe now isn't the time, and it's definitely not the place, but she knows in her heart that it will be, and soon.
"And then?" she whispers, and he turns his face against hers and kisses her again. Leo. Her Leo. He leans his forehead against hers, face red, unglamorous, blurred at this proximity, but infinitely precious.
"I'm pretty sure neither of us dies," Leo whispers, and snorts out a laugh. "Other than that, we're just going to have to see what happens."