I drop to my knees in between her legs, not missing her small shiver as I do.
“You’re turned on for me all the time?” I ask her. “Well, I’m worse. I’m fucking miserable with the need to touch you and taste you. I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with you.” I meet her eyes. “You have to tell me if that makes you uncomfortable. Because the way I think about you, the way I crave you, it’s not just like two performers. It’s not just like two friends.” My hands find her ankles and wrap around them, more to keep myself from touching her in more interesting places while she answers. I can see her pulse hammering in her throat as she swallows.
“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” I ask tentatively.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“And are you okay with it?”
A pause. And then a nod.
Well, it’s not the most enthusiastic response I could have hoped for, but what did I expect? Even holding back from going full Romeo on her, it’s still a lot to lay on a girl, that I think about her all the time, and not in a friends-only way. I start to get up from my kneeling position, but she stops me with a hand on my shoulder. It drifts over to my throat, where her thumb caresses lightly across my Adam’s apple.
It’s my turn to shiver.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “you just took me by surprise. What I mean to say is that it’s more than okay with me. I’m...I’m a little obsessed with you, too.”
I feel like my chest is going to explode. “Really?”
She smiles. “Really.”
“But you also understand why I want to bottle up some of...whatever this is...and use it for the show, right?”
She nods, but the smile fades. “I understand. We want it to feel real.”
“Because it is real. The heat between us, it’s special, Cass, and if we play our cards right, everyone who watches us will feel it.”
“I get it.”
But something is off in her voice, and I don’t know how to fix it. Except to do what I planned on doing originally when I made her sit: lean down and bury my face between her legs.
She lets out a low noise—half moan, half sigh—and I go easy on her, knowing she’s probably a little sore from all the times I made her come in the desert. I go soft and steady, long strokes of my tongue and light flicks over her clit, and her build-up is slow but inexorable as she squirms in front of me, her fingers laced in my hair and pulling hard. And when she comes, she cries out my name, and I nearly lose all my resolve and fuck her right there.
“I just needed another taste before I went home,” I explain as I straighten, wiping my mouth.
“I like that,” she mumbles dazedly. “I like when it happens without the cameras...it makes me feel like you want me.”
“Jesus, woman. I can prove that I want you every second of the day, if you want. But for tonight, I’ll be happy with my taste.”
She falls back against the couch with a tired laugh. “You can have all the tastes you want.”
“I might take you up on that, Cass.”
And later that night, when I’m undressing, I discover that I still have her panties—pink, silk, teenage boy’s wet dream panties—in my pocket. And so I finally, finally relieve the ache, stroking my neglected cock with the silk until I erupt in thick ropes of cum. I film the entire thing on my phone and I send it to Devi.
Told you I was obsessed, I text right after it sends.
Can’t type, my fingers are too busy, she responds after a few minutes.I fall asleep to the image of her masturbating to a video of me jacking off with her panties, and maybe my depraved porno heart has never been happier than it is right now.
* * *
I can’t stop humming. It’s becoming a problem, apparently, at least according to Tanner, who has started grumbling about staging a humming intervention. I hum in between takes when filming scenes, I hum while I’m editing, I hum when I crack open a beer for Tanner at the end of our workday.
“You okay, man?” he asks, taking a drink of his beer.
It’s Wednesday, four days since I went down on Devi in the desert and told her that I had more-than-friends feelings about her. We’ve been texting every day, mostly banter and industry gossip, but at night, our conversations devolve into absolute raunch, usually ending in us sending each other naked selfies and videos of us masturbating to said selfies and so on and so forth until we fall asleep. I’ve been importing some of the selfies and texts and videos to incorporate into the Star-Crossed series (Vida and Marieke both loved Devi’s idea for the name.) All with Devi’s permission, of course.
But even as I work our late night messages into the series, I feel like we’re edging into this exhilarating gray area where the rules don’t apply; where what’s happening between us happens off-script, off-camera first, and then makes it into the project later. We’re skidding off the road in slow-motion, and all I want to do is press down hard on the gas, barrel headlong into this thrilling thing together.
And to that end, I’ve been desperate to see her, but I had to stay in Las Vegas for a few nights for an extended shoot, and she has to work tonight. But tomorrow I get to see her again, and I feel like someone has injected me with pure, uncut happiness. Even right now, while I’m on my knees with leather upholstery cleaner wiping down the couch I just had sex on this morning.
“I’m more than okay, dude,” I reply to Tanner’s question. “I’m magnificent. I’m brilliant. I’m—”
“Are you using drugs?” he cuts in. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so...animated.”
“The only thing I’m high on is life,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster while scrubbing semen off my couch cushions.
“It’s that girl, isn’t it?” he asks. “Devi.”
Thinking of Devi sends my thoughts tumbling down a spiral of affectionate depravity. I want to do the filthiest things to her and then I want to take her to meet my parents. Is this normal? Is this how normal relationships work?
Can we even call it a relationship, given that the only thing we’ve actually admitted is how desperate we are to fuck each other?
“So let me ask you a real question,” Tanner says, setting down his beer and walking over to me with a fresh roll of paper towels. “I don’t have sex with women for money, so I’m not sure how this all works—but do you feel weird at all about fucking other women while you like this girl?”
His question burrows into me, sharp and shaming, joining the other thoughts I’ve been suppressing for the last few weeks. I’m a typical man, I’m good at compartmentalizing, but I’m also this sentimental bastard with all these gooey feelings, and I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t bother me when I think about it.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I start, not really sure how to frame what I want to say. I stop wiping at the couch for a minute and sit back on my heels. “Sex isn’t love, Tanner. It’s not even about liking someone. I respect all the girls I fuck, and I enjoy fucking them, but I don’t always want to hang out with them when the shoot is finished or wake up next to them in the morning. No more than eating a good sandwich for lunch makes me crave my actual dinner any less.”
“But sex isn’t food,” Tanner points out. “It’s not the same as scratching an itch or taking a nap—it’s not purely physical, and even you can’t deny that.”
I sigh. He’s right. “I know. But this isn’t my first time falling in love as a porn star. Even she—” we both know I mean She-Voldemort here “—wasn’t my first girlfriend in the industry. I know how to do this now, and it’s to have really clear boundaries and to keep some things special for each other.”
He looks doubtful. “Most couples have ‘no sex with other people’ as a boundary, you know. That’s like...a super-common boundary.”
“But that’s what I’m saying—porn people aren’t like other people. We’re not common. I mean, on some level, don’t you think that maybe we’re more evolved because we can separate sex from love? Don’t you feel like tha
t’s noble? That I can have sex with so many different partners but still set aside my heart for someone else?”
The doubtful look hasn’t left his face.
“Okay, and yes,” I concede, “it does feel strange. All I think about, all I want, is Devi, and so it felt weird to fuck Candi and Ang today and it felt weird to fuck Jen and Nina yesterday in Vegas, but at the same time, my job is to fuck beautiful women. I can’t just abandon my job whenever I meet a girl I like. And I love my job. My feelings for Devi don’t change that, and I would never expect her feelings for me to change her own career path.”
“If you say so,” Tanner says, draining the last of his beer and walking over to the recycling bin to chuck in the can. “I just don’t even think I’d want to even touch another woman if I was in love with someone else.”
“That’s very chivalrous,” I say, and I don’t say it mockingly. I mean it. I admire that, because despite my warm, gooey center, despite my fantasy to love and be loved, I also know that while it’s still my job to fuck women, I’ll do it happily. Maybe with some complicated feelings, but never with any regrets. It’s not as if I’m going to start going limp on set because my heart’s in another place.
It’s just that I don’t think my heart and my dick have to be connected, at least not all of the time.
“And I think you know yourself pretty well, Logan,” he says, grabbing his keys and phone off the kitchen counter. “I don’t doubt that you’ve got it all figured out. But what about this Devi girl? Do you think she feels the same way? You think she’ll really be cool letting you fuck your way up and down and sideways around the Valley?”
“Of course,” I scoff. “She’s a professional! And I guarantee she won’t stop fucking other people either. I know for a fact that she’s ramping up her hardcore career as we speak.”
Tanner shrugs. “Alright, man. Whatever you say. I’ll see you Friday?”
“Yeah. Whenever you want to come over is fine—we don’t have a scene booked and I’ll be editing all day.”
“And don’t forget to ‘gram those pictures you took of Candi and Ang today.”
“When have I ever forgotten to post on social media?”
He laughs. “Okay, okay, you’re right. But you do have to occasionally promote yourself, you know, not just talk about the lunch you’re eating or whatever show you’re bingeing at the moment.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
He tosses me a wave as he leaves out the front door, and I throw myself onto my newly-sanitized couch, digging out my phone to post the pictures on Instagram and Twitter, and tease up the scene a little, even though it probably won’t go up until next week.
When I’m done, I check Devi’s Twitter feed on a whim. We follow each other, but Devi doesn’t leave much to follow...her most recent tweet is from last month, and it’s a selfie taken inside the flagship Good Vibrations store in San Francisco, where she’s giving a giant dildo an exaggerated, adorable wink. No hashtags, no caption. Her Instagram feed is equally sparse, usually shots of the beach or the desert, never with any words attached.
What was she thinking when she posted those pictures, I wonder. How was she feeling? For all that we’ve done together, for as intimate as we’ve been, I have no idea what her inner life is like. I don’t know if she felt lonely when she looked out at that ocean sunset she posted, or if she felt complete. I have no idea whether her lack of online presence is because she’s shy or because she lives so fully in the moment that she doesn’t even think about sharing it publicly.
I stare at that Good Vibrations selfie for a long time, at the way her hair tumbles around her shoulders and her mouth opens playfully. And then my chest squeezes hard and my mind floods with uncertainties and questions, and I jam my phone back into my pocket.
I wish Tanner hadn’t asked me all those questions, even as I also realize that they’re necessary. I’ve been avoiding thinking about it, trying to put Devi in a mental box as I filmed my usual scenes, as I leaned down to whisper all my dirty, intense thoughts in the ears of other women, as I came on them and inside them, as I wrote monologues inspired by them.
But it was messier than that. The boxes I’d put Devi and Star-Crossed in were porous, and they seeped into everything else, creating these confusing scenarios where I fantasized about Devi as I fucked other women but I was still turned on and completely engaged by the other women. Is that a thing? Being able to want one person so utterly and consumingly, but also being able to throw myself into sex with other people without missing a beat? If porn wasn’t my job, I have no doubt I’d be monogamous. But porn is my job, so where does that leave me?
I stand up, suddenly determined not to think about this anymore. I don’t even really know that Devi has capital F Feelings for me; I don’t know that she’ll want me after Star-Crossed is over. Right now, the only thing that we’ve established for certain is how much we want to fool around with each other and that we maybe like each other in a more-than-friends way. Hardly the time to start thinking about the future.
Even if it’s all I want to think about.
God, she’d look good in my house. Sleeping in my bed, swimming in my pool. Sharing my life…
But no. I’m not going to think about this anymore. For all I know, I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak when I discover she doesn’t feel the same way.
My phone rings, and I fish it back out of my pocket, hoping against hope that it’s Devi and then letting out a world-class sigh when I see that it’s my mom.
Dutifully, I answer. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, honey. Am I interrupting...anything?”
I can’t help but smile. My parents have been mostly supportive of my career choices—not as enthusiastic as Devi’s parents seem to be—but supportive enough. Except that neither of them, Mom especially, like to mention anything about my job by name. The words porn, sex, scene, and even adult as an adjective coupled with anything else, are never words you’ll hear around my family’s dinner table.
“No, Mom. I’m not working right now.”
“Good, because I need to talk to you,” she says briskly. “Dad and I are selling our house.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Dad got a job offer near Portland and he’s decided to take it. We never meant for California to be our forever-home, you know. We thought maybe we’d head back to Boston, but then this Portland offer came in, and we’ve always loved Oregon.”
I’m still frowning. “But…”
“But what, honey?”
“But I kind of like you guys being here and stuff. What about when I want to come visit my old XBox? Or my high school computer?”
She laughs. “Well, of course we will give you a chance to go through all your old stuff. Which reminds me, Phil from down the street said his grandson is about the right age for that old game set you had, the one with the plastic guitar and drums and stuff.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Rock Band, Mom. It’s called Rock Band.”
“Anyway, I gave it all to Phil. It’s all got to be almost ten years old now—isn’t that like ten thousand years in technology time?”
“Yes, but still! I don’t like this. The giving stuff away and the moving stuff. What am I supposed to do for Thanksgiving? I can’t make a turkey by myself!”
“You’re supposed to book a plane ticket to Portland, or accept that you are almost thirty and that your dad and I have lives outside of being available for your turkey needs.”
“I guess.”
“Are you really upset about us moving?”
I think for a moment, standing up and drifting over to the huge window that looks out from my living room onto my sparkling blue pool. “No, I’m not. But I’ll miss you guys,” I say honestly.
I know. It’s gross and un-masculine. But I like my parents, and I have dinner with them at least once a month, and I guess I’ve also never really thought about my childhood being so ephemeral—that the biggest fixed geographical point in my life co
uld shift so suddenly.
Plus, this means my mom is really right. I am an adult, and fuck, I hate being reminded of that. It makes me start thinking of questions I can’t really answer, like what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Will I ever really pursue film as a dream? And don’t I someday want to have adult sons of my own whining on the phone about Rock Band?
“We will miss you, too,” Mom assures me. “I’ll call you later next week to set up a time for you to come by and go through your stuff, okay?”
I decide to put my parents moving into a mental box, just like I’ve done with Devi. I’ll figure out how I really feel about it later. “Okay, Mom. Love you.”
“Love you, sweetie. Goodbye.”
She hangs up, and as she does, I hear a strange clicking noise, clicking like little dog claws on the hardwood. It’s a sound that used to be as familiar as the washer running or traffic outside. Out of habit, I squat down and pat my leg, not even thinking about what I’m doing until Prior is actually butting up against my hand and giving me tiny, effeminate yaps to let me know how happy he is to see me.
As I pat his furry gray and blond head, my mind gradually catches up.
Prior.
My old dog.
The dog She-Voldemort took.
Here in my house.
I look up towards the entrance to the living room, already knowing whom I’ll see there. And I hate to admit it, but she looks as gorgeous as ever, pale skin accentuated by a red crop top and a yellow tulle skirt, dark hair in a tight ballet bun on the top of her head. As always, she looks a hundred percent New York, a hundred percent fashionable, and a hundred percent unattainable. There used to be a time when I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
“Hi, Raven,” I say, scooping the Yorkie up in my arms and standing.
“Hi, Logan.”
They’re literally the first words we’ve said to each other since she left.
She steps forward into the light, and I see her face clearly. Delicate, almost European features. Bright red lips. Eyes limned with the blackest kohl.