by Sam Hall
“You do,” Marlow and Mark said at the same time.
“OK, Paulie, you’re with me. But, Marlow, we’ve got to do a quick confab about what you want from these shots. I get I went rogue yesterday and you liked it, but you won’t be around this time to approve my images. We’ve got one go at this,” I said.
Marlow grinned at that, placing a hand on my shoulder. His eyes darted up momentarily to catch Mark shifting behind me, which only made his grin widen.
“Excellent attitude. I appreciate the due diligence, but you needn’t worry. You seem to have an eye for this. You see the potential for a story, and you pursue that. I could’ve paid a million other photographers who can compose a beautiful image, sometimes stunning images, but that’s not what’s wanted. Chase the story tonight. Every single artist and band here is coming at this experience differently. I can’t be there to capture that and wouldn’t be able to, even if you put that beast of yours in my hands. But you can. Show me and show the world the story of The Changelings, let loose in the garden.”
He was saying something that meant nothing, just the usual vague bullshit artists used to describe some ineffable quality in their mind. I’d watched fourteen seasons of America’s Next Top Model and still doubted my ability to identify what ‘fierce’ meant. But that was fine. I was in a win-win situation, I realised. If I nailed this job to the wall and gave them everything they wanted, I was well on the way to establishing my career as a photographer. If I didn’t, then they’d let me off the hook, let me go home to my safe little cottage, and life would go back to normal. I didn’t quite know which one I wanted, but in a way, that made it easier.
“So, anything else before you go?” Marlow asked.
“Yeah. Got any tights?” I said.
“Tights? Why would you—”
He fell silent as I parted the flounces of fabric, his eyes trailing up the inside of my lily-white thigh until they came to rest on the pretty green lace knickers he’d supplied me with.
“I’m here to shoot other people’s genitals, not show mine.”
It took a rumble from Mark to move Marlow into gear. He walked over to a rack and flicked through it, then tossed a green garment at me. “In there.” He indicated to a closed door when I searched for somewhere to get dressed. When I came out again, he nodded. “No jeans and t-shirt, just this. You don’t mix couture with jeans, no matter what Courtney Love might think.” He looked me over and then said, “Chase the story until there’s nothing more than sloppiness, then come and find me.”
13
Which is how I ended up standing outside The Changeling’s playroom, Paulie’s hand on the door.
“I can take you back,” he said as I heard the muffled sounds of chants coming from inside. Were they sculling beer or summoning the Devil? I wasn’t sure, but I was prepared to capture it on camera. I fished it out, checked the memory card, took a quick look at the light around, and made some adjustments, though it might be quite different beyond the door. I felt a faint flush, my hands slightly damp, but I squared my shoulders as Anna appeared, a camera on her shoulder.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Let’s do this.”
The room was considerably darker than the hallway, due to the sheets that were thrown over curtains, which created a close, airless quality. The chanting was a lot louder here, and I could hear the guys counting something. A pale-skinned woman stumbled into the entryway in just a little pair of bikini undies, a bottle in her hand. She looked…like some kind of escapee, her eyes a mask of dark running mascara, her lipstick smeared all over her face. She smiled when she took in Paulie, her arms opening as she walked towards him with an exaggerated swivel of her slim hips.
I nodded to Anna and lifted my camera, trying to capture the… What the hell was it? Enthusiasm? Nah, that wasn’t it. Need? Nope, I wasn’t sure her actions were prompted by her desire or a need to service that of someone else’s. Abandon. That was it. She looked like she’d been abandoned, the smears on her skin telling the story of what she’d been up to, and now she’d been released to go and find some other purpose.
“Ah, no thank you, miss,” he said, and placed his hands on her shoulders as she dropped to her knees, pushing her back and stepping free when her hands persisted in sliding up his kilt. “Little help?” he yelped when she shuffled forward, cornering him against the wall.
“Oi, love! You wanna be in The Standard tomorrow?” I said.
Her head whipped around to me, and her lips distended in an extended pout. I took a few shots, as much to appease her as to capture the kind of trashed beauty she exuded. She was slim, sylphlike, and moved like naked was her most natural state. She raked her hands through her shaggy mop of black hair and started to pose. Ah, a model.
I took several photos and then said, “Can you take us to the band?”
She smiled at that, wide and sweet as a child’s behind that ragged mask of makeup, and then gestured, staggering off to walk into the next room.
My eyes were on my camera, fiddling with the shutter speed as we followed along after her, so I missed it initially. It was the light on Anna’s camera that alerted me first, then the progressively louder sound of the chanting. My eyes flicked up to take in the new room we’d walked into.
For a second, I just stared. There was a very nice sectional couch in a warm grey that formed a U shape against the walls of the room. A large low coffee table was covered in bottles and glasses, bongs and mounds of white powder arranged artfully on a silver tray. Seated around it was The Changelings, not wearing the beautifully distressed leather costumes Marlow had worked so hard on. Instead, it was ragged and ripped jeans and bare chests, except for Billy in his ubiquitous black leather with the lacings loose and the front open.
Because a girl was kneeling between his legs, working his dick down her throat.
“Forty-one, forty-two,” Lucas counted, his eyes trained on the woman’s head, counting each time she bobbed it up and down again. However, the other members of the band’s voices trailed off when they noticed us, and I smiled as they looked up like racoons caught pilfering a trash can. Marlow had asked me to get the story, so I needed to introduce the characters, and here they were, in their natural habitat.
Click.
Liam rallied quickly, leaning back against the couch, his six-pack revealed in its glory as he did so. He lay his arm against the headrest and stared down the camera with heavily hooded eyes, pupils the size of watermelon pips.
Click.
Lucas, refusing to look up or react to our presence, big muscular arms resting on his knees as he watched every stroke. His smile widened as he counted, as he caught the shake in Billy’s arms while he started to claw at the couch, obviously getting close to where he wanted to be.
Click, click, click.
Billy shoving the girl off with his hand wrapped cruelly in her hair, his dick throbbing as he struggled to stay in control while tears streamed down her face. The lightning quick smile, bright and brilliant as the sun for a moment, before he dissolved into laughter and loosened his hold, pushing her towards Jake as she fought to catch her breath.
Click.
Billy staring into the camera as he flopped back against the couch, his cock long and hard and pulled up tight against his stomach.
Click, click, click.
Jake laughing riotously, free and unfettered as his hand went to his jeans button, his green eyes flashing like emeralds for a moment as he stared directly into the camera and undid them, pulling his own rigid dick out. I caught it in the seconds before the girl’s mouth swallowed it hungrily. His eyes rolled back for a second as she sank down on it, then Lucas started the count again.
Then I shifted to Johnno, who just looked at us, stunned. There was something so relaxed and still about his body, like it hadn’t registered the tension in his expression. He wore no shirt, and his skin glowed with a golden light against the warm shade of the upholstery. His jeans were unbuttoned, his softening length the only
other evidence of his reaction. He was still the racoon transfixed by the spotlight turned on him and unable to put the trash down.
I moved the camera away from my eye for a moment and regarded him without the lens as a buffer, something that seemed to shift him out of his shock, his hands going to his jeans, his eyes wide and on me as he put himself to rights. Mine narrowed. The rest of them looked well-prepared for this, like this was another, less physical performance. So why did he look at me so seriously with his eyes burning into mine? He had to know this was going to happen. What else had he asked me to come and film? What else had his band spent all this money on?
I shook my head and then lifted the lens, catching the moment he got up, striding closer, and I backed up as he held out his hand to try and stop me from shooting.
“What the fuck?” I said, trying to catch something, then stopping altogether as he came too close. “If you want me to take these shots, you need to get back in there.”
“What?” His brow creased as his eyes searched mine, but I was looking past him to where Jake fought gleefully to resist the groupie’s efforts. I raised the camera and fiddled with the depth of field, so the very nice line of his shoulder formed a frame for a blurry vision of Jake’s antics. “Kira?”
His hand landed on my arm, something that jerked my focus back. Paulie stepped forward, but I just frowned, pulling free.
“My job’s to shoot your bullshit, not ruin my makeup joining in, so keep your bloody hands to yourself,” I said. “What’s the problem? Worried about your reputation?”
Those golden eyes searched mine, as if he couldn’t believe my reaction. I got where he was coming from. If you’d told me I was going to one, come to one of Jen’s parties, two, do so as a photographer, and three, shoot photos of famous people competing with their mates to see who can last the longest while getting a blow job, I’d have thought you were on crack, but here I was.
And I was here. I’d taken this job, put the mask on, and accepted the weird analytical calm that seemed to come with shooting photos, and he was getting in the way of this.
“In or out?” I said. “Because I think your boy’s about to blow, and I need to catch that.”
He moved out of my way, and I was drawn closer, like a puppet on a string.
Jake was a natural at this, and he had a damn fine career ahead of him in porn if he wanted it. While for my preferences, I would have liked to have seen one of the guys between his legs, gagging noisily, not the woman, but it didn’t matter. Jake’s hips flexed, and I caught every lean muscle there shifting as his chuckles went to gasps and then back again. He was almost reverential about the way he held the girl’s head, and his teeth dug into his lip as something intense washed over him.
“Jakey’s gonna blow,” Billy said, watching the other man’s thighs begin to spread wider, as if that would allow her to get closer, go deeper.
“You little fuck!” Liam snapped. “Hold it off! That’s not what this is for.”
Jake just laughed, and it took Anna shifting forward to remind me to shift to continuous shooting. I kept my finger on the shutter release, capturing shot after shot, as his head was thrown back, as his laughter turned to full-throated and wanton moans. “Oh fuck!” he yelped, over and over again, while Lucas oddly counted throughout the process and Billy watched the whole damn thing with a hungry gleam in his eye.
I saw the point of this exercise when Jake came. I’d seen guys make the Goofy face enough times from my own sexual experiences, seen the simultaneously beautiful and ridiculous grimace we all made as we went rocketing towards orgasm. But here, now, there was something beyond that. Jake gleamed like a motherfucking star as his whole body went rigid, as if it took every one of his considerable muscles to shoot his cum down the girl’s throat. I caught every damn bit of it—when his eyes went wide, shining with some kind of insane light that transcended the laws of physics in this gloomy room, and the moment when all of the smirking, laughing crazy was thrust aside, and for one second, he was completely and utterly vulnerable.
I jerked the camera down after catching him pushing the girl to one side, bringing up the playback on the LCD screen, and scrolled through the images rapidly, shaking my head. I looked around me, trying to find the light source that had momentarily cast him so bright, but came up with nothing.
“You get that?” I asked Anna, and she swivelled around, her camera pointing towards me. I fought the urge to step away or to the side as I felt the weight of that artificial eye’s gaze on me.
“Sure did,” she said with a grin.
“Alright, Billy’s got the highest score so far,” Lucas said.
“Always have, always will,” he replied, then took a deep drink from a bottle of spirits.
“So who’s up next?”
“I am.”
Everyone’s eyes turned towards Johnno, who still stood to one side of us. Those golden eyes had gone hard for some reason, perhaps his ego had been pricked because he was relegated to the audience for Jake’s performance. Well, he looked determined to draw the focus back on him, and I was happy to catch the moments. He reopened his jeans, and those long, sensitive hands looked amazing as they did very dirty things, pulling his half-hard dick out and giving it a stroke.
The thing men never understand is some women are very interested in looking at their dicks, if there’s something to it. Like, a disembodied penis in an unsolicited dick pic from some rando is a bit like a cat plonking a half-eaten dead rat on your pillow. It’s incredibly pleased with its efforts, and there is something to be said for what it’s done, but having it thrust into your face with no preamble just makes it unpleasant at best, and a form of abuse at worst. Somehow, the fact that it was attached to the honey brown loveliness that was Johnno made it so much better. I could see the tiny twitches of pleasure in his face as he worked his dick to hardness, using a kind of brutal efficiency that was hot, like he needed it, to get to where he wanted to be as quickly as possible. I was so caught up in watching, I forgot to shoot at least half of it, something that seemed to please him for some reason. He smiled at me, letting his cock go, and then turned back to the others.
“Johnno!” Lucas crowed, gesturing for the original girl to come forward. She put the bottle she was drinking from down and sank back down onto her knees. But Johnno’s eyes weren’t on her, they were on me, burning into the lens as her head lowered down.
“Come forward,” he said, tangling his hand in the woman’s hair to hold her still. He stared at me until I realised it was me he meant, not the girl straining to get at his dick. His head rolled back on the headrest as I got the clue, then I put down the camera and looked at the others.
“You don’t have to,” Paulie said, his feet shifting.
“Yes, she does,” Liam said. “You’re ours, little watcher. You want to record us? You can’t do that from afar. You’re a fan, and that helps you understand what’s going on with us, but this performance isn’t you, anonymous, in a huge crowd. You can’t use your telephoto lens for this. This is intimate, so you need to get intimate.”
I turned to Anna. “I’m going to get in shot.”
She shrugged. “Marlow reckons half the story is you, and the voyeurism. If you’re cool with it, get in there.”
No one moved. Every single member of the band went stock still, like beautiful golden statues, lurking in the depths of some subterranean ruin, gleaming despite the decay around them. It was only the first girl, who was snorting lines of coke, and the other one, who pulled against Johnno’s grip to get to his cock, that moved.
I was normally a pretty quiet person. When you grow up in a town where you’re defined by your illness, as that being the main thing people know about you, what else could you be? I always felt guilty if I was too loud or drew too much attention, because I got so much all the time. People checking in, observing me for symptoms, fingers at the ready to call Mum if I did. But in this weird little dark cocoon, trussed up like a chicken in this dress, I had what
Jen always wanted for me—the freedom to be whatever I wanted to be. I could be the girl that strode forward into that oddly insular little group, who told them to clear a space on their coffee table for me to sit down on. Who perched on the edge, feeling the cool liquid that had spilled on its surface seeping into what was probably a horribly expensive gown. Who lifted her camera and looked down the lens at Johnno as he stared at me.
His eyes darted down, and he told the girl, “Slow. Take it long and slow. Lick like you would your favourite treat. Make me ache for it.”
She did as she was told, and I shifted my angle and the lens into macro mode. Her lips glistened cherry red as they parted, her tongue already out, aching for a taste of him. I caught the way the saliva glistened before being deposited messily all over the crown of his dick. I heard him hiss, felt someone shift beside me, but I paid them little mind. I watched her smear her bruised lips all over his unyielding hardness, and his hips bucked up, contradicting his words, wanting her to take him deeper. But the original order held. Her fingers, complete with a perfect black lacquered manicure, wrapped around the thick base but wasn’t quite able to close around it, and she licked him from root to tip.
“He thinks it’s you doing it,” a voice buzzed right next to my ear. I looked away from the camera to see Liam had leaned in, his mane of hair hanging over his shoulders, his smile carnivorous. “Our Johnno likes our little watcher. He kept thinking you were coming by at any minute and held off from getting involved in the pre-game show, because he didn’t want you to see him with his dick down some groupie’s throat, but I knew. I knew you’d come, you’d watch, and you’d want to see him come undone. Look at him.”
He directed my gaze back at his brother, and a thought niggled at my brain for a moment, but as soon as I saw the muscle tension in Johnno’s body, I could do nothing other than stare.
