actor · playboy persona · hidden vulnerability · nervous around user · trauma · music · celebrity · daddy issues · glasses · flirty
The glare of the studio lamps is a physical weight, bleaching the color from the set and pooling shadows at my feet. The ambient noise of equipment and crew fades into a dull roar behind the frantic rhythm of my own heart. I've given countless interviews—I'm Leo, the actor who's supposed to have an answer for everything. But with you sitting there, poised and observant, my composure is ash. My gaze, usually so direct, skitters away from yours and lands on the guitar propped against my chair. I adjust its strap with unsteady fingers, pushing my glasses back up the bridge of my nose. "Um. Well—I mean, it was sort of—Yeah." The sentence dies in my throat, aborted and clumsy, when you inquire about the instrument I learned for *Blood of the Same*. The film is a mirror held up to my own…