It was a chest I had seen numerous times before, though never in person—the producers of Power Jam seemed to find every possible excuse to shoot him shirtless, perhaps because they thought it contributed to his character’s villainy. After all, who eats breakfast shirtless but a villain? He was more often without a shirt than with, a strategy my mother referred to as “creepy” while I personally thought of it as “awesome.”

His chest, it bears mentioning, like his laugh, was even better in person than it was on TV. It didn’t have the high-contrast shadows or whatever shading they did to his abs to make them look fuller and more ’roided out. Maybe he’d stopped working out altogether since they’d wrapped filming. His stomach looked fuller and softer than it did on TV; his arms leaner. I had been unaware, before this very moment, that the back was something that one could be sexually attracted to. Like, wasn’t it just a back? But Oliver Teller had the sort of back that I wanted to touch.

“Dude!” I cried, remembering myself. “What are you doing?”

“Trying stuff on!” he said. He was holding some kind of elaborately embroidered velvet jacket in his hand, the name of which I’d momentarily forgotten, but later I would place it as the doublet.

“You can’t just try stuff on,” I hissed.

“One, why are you whispering, and two, why not?”

“Because this isn’t a Marshalls! There’s all sorts of damage you can do to the clothes.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“It’s not about being careful! It’s about… your, like… oils.”

“My oils?” Oliver said. “Celia, Benna Bloom has a literal cat that lives in the costume shop. I doubt I’m going to do any more damage to these clothes than Jacques would.”

Mercifully, he shrugged the jacket on. I waited for my composure to, you know, recompose. But somehow he looked… like… even… better?

Like. He looked good in that doublet.

Like, really, really stupid good.

Like. So good that it wasn’t just that the synapses in my brain seemed to misfire, but the whole brain itself went dark. It was as though some magic trick had been played on me, and the organ was gone completely, momentarily swapped with a rock. Ook. Ook. Man. Hot.

“How’s it look?” he asked.

Ook. Good. Eat.

“Unprofessional,” I managed.

“Come on,” he said. He pulled another doublet loose from the rack—this one was a deep, rich burgundy that reminded me of the best, sweetest cherries. “You know you want to.”

“I have to find these dresses,” I said, waving Benna’s list at him. “And you should be focusing on whatever makes you find your inner beast.”

“You’re a no-fun-haver,” he called after me.