Hot Cop Boxed Set

by Paige, Laurelin

  Is it weird how often I think about Logan? We did a scene together—once—a threesome where I played the “extra.” It was more than three years ago now, and I still fantasize about it on a regular basis. That’s probably a sign that I’m not cut out to do full-blown porn. One on-camera scene with a man—sans intercourse, even—and I’m attached. Since then I’ve turned down any job that’s strayed from my usual girl-on-girl.

  It would be nice if I had more of that work coming in. That could make a dent in the student loans.

  “Moving home might be the answer,” my mother insists gently. “What makes you so quick to dismiss that option?”

  “Is it pride, Devi?” There’s an edge of lecture in my father’s voice. Which is as close as he actually gets to actually lecturing. “You know what Buddha says about pride. ‘Let go of anger. Let go of—’”

  “—‘pride. When you are bound by nothing, you go beyond sorrow,’” I finish with him. “Yeah, yeah, I know and it’s very sweet of you to offer. It’s not about pride.” It’s somewhat about pride. “I just need to figure this out.”

  Mâmân is visibly disappointed with my response. I’m her only child and she misses me at home. “You know what? Let’s tarot,” she says. “The universe can tell you what to do.” Eagerly, she prompts my father to get the Tarot cards from the breadbox—because who doesn’t keep a deck of Rider-Waite in their kitchen pantry?—and takes a seat at the chair next to me.

  I blow out a hot stream of air, refusing to let my irritation show. Though I’ve been raised with the cards as a staple in my life, I’m less convinced of their divination properties and more convinced that my parents use them to convey whatever hard words they believe I need to hear. As my mother lays out the first card, I prepare myself for her interpretation to be, “Move home, go back to school, be happy.”

  And she’ll make it sound so simple. If only that was how life really worked.

  “We’ll just do a three-card spread,” she says, probably sensing my reluctance to give the reading any credence. “This is your pathway—The Wheel of Fortune.”

  My father grimaces slightly over her shoulder. “Not my favorite card in the deck.”

  “Don’t listen to your Bâbâ. That’s a fantastic card. It’s telling you to remember that things happen in cycles. You might be down right now, but the wheel always turns. You aren’t doomed to stay at the bottom.”

  “And then when she’s back at the top, all she has to look forward to is the ride back down.” It’s an uncharacteristically pessimistic viewpoint coming from my father, but it’s one I’ve heard before. Every time that card has shown up in a reading for the last twenty-one years, in fact.

  I put a hand up before they launch into further argument about the negative or positive aspects of The Wheel of Fortune and instead ask, “But how does that help as my path? I should just brace myself and know that eventually life will get better?”

  My mother shakes her head. “No, of course not. It’s a card that suggests you do exactly the opposite. Don’t stand still and let the wheel push you down. You can actively work to get on the upside again.”

  I nod, pretending to take it in. “So think of a way to make some more money.” Like I’d said before the cards came out. “Got it.”

  “Yes. Like you could move home. Temporarily.” And there it is—the words she wants me to hear.

  I grumble inwardly. “Next card, please.”

  “The greatest obstacle,” she says, flipping another card from the deck. “Aw, it’s The Lovers.”

  “Jesus,” I mutter. “A relationship would definitely be an obstacle.” Seriously, it’s the last thing I need right now.

  “The Lovers doesn’t just represent a romantic relationship,” my father says. “It can represent something more base—an indicator that it’s time to develop your own philosophy and belief system. It’s time to decide who you are. What you believe in.”

  “What you want to do for the rest of your life…”

  “Mother!” I groan.

  “Don’t get mad at me. I’m just a messenger for The Universe.” She seems to correctly interpret my skepticism. “Going on. The outcome.” She starts to flip another card, but halts when my father’s phone sounds with Peter Griffin from Family Guy shouting, “Who’s texting me?”

  I smile as I always do at the notification tone I set up for him, then chuckle to myself when I think about how he most certainly has no idea how to change it. My anti-technology parents only have a cell phone to be notified when one of their clients has gone into labor, so both of them perk up anxiously while he reads the message.

  “It’s Astrid,” he says, his eyes beaming. “Contractions are only a couple of minutes apart. Got to hustle.”

  My mother shrieks with excitement. “I’m not even dressed!” She hops up, abandoning the deck on the table and rushes to don her doula attire.

  I watch after her, wondering what it feels like to love a job as much as she loves hers.

  My father stands behind me, putting his hands firmly on my upper arms, and I know he’s directing his energy toward me. “Hang in there, kid. You’ll figure it out. And you’re right—the answer is not moving back home.”

  I’m a bit surprised that he isn’t on my mother’s side. And grateful. It’s nice to not have that pressure from at least one of them.

  He kisses the top of my head, and I soak up his affection, sending mine back to him. It might be hokey, but it makes him feel good, and he makes me feel good. “Thank you, Bâbâ. Asheghtam,” I say, using the Persian words to say I love you.

  He squeezes my arms and says it back to me. Then my mother has returned, dressed in her swimsuit. Must be a water birth.

  “Good luck!” I wave at them, promising to lock up when I’m done.

  As I scoop up the mail, an invitation-sized card addressed to me attracts my attention. I slice through the envelope and find an invitation to an industry party hosted by Vida Gines. The date says it’s happening tonight. I consider for a moment. It’s not the type of thing I usually attend—her parties are geared toward her crowd, the serious pornmakers—but if I want more jobs, even just the femme porn variety, this might be the place to make some new connections.

  Wasn’t that what The Wheel of Fortune was telling me to do? Look for new opportunities and the like. Not that I believe in that divination stuff. Not entirely, anyway.

  It’s merely out of curiosity that I flip over the next Tarot card, the one that would have been the answer to my situation. It’s The Star, my favorite card in the entire deck. As a child, I loved it because I loved the stars. I didn’t care what the seers said it meant—for me it always represented the shining jewels that lit up the night sky. For hours and hours I’d stare at the bright dots through the telescope given to me on my tenth birthday, listening while my parents recited stories of the Greek Gods who resided in constellation form above us. Even then I wondered beyond their prose, wondered what elements made the balls of fire, what made them burn and glow and fall.

  Of course that isn’t the message the reading is giving me now. In my parents’ absence, I try to conjure up the intended meaning instead. Hope, I think. Yeah, that’s it.

  It’s a universal message that could apply to anyone at anytime. But as I gather my student loan invoice and Vida’s invitation and head home to get ready for her party, hope buzzes inside me, and I can’t help but think that the card was pretty apropos.

  Three

  I suppose it doesn’t take much to break a man.

  Take me for example. My life checks a lot of boxes. Well-adjusted childhood, check. Successful business, check.

  Healthy? Decently good-looking? Amazing dick?

  Check, check, and check.

  I had a great life. And I thought I had a great girlfriend to match it. For three years, I had this pale-skinned, dark-haired beauty at my side, and she was creative and smart and driven, and so goddamned sexy I couldn’t keep my hands off her, even after a long day spent on set
fucking other women. We had a purebred Yorkshire terrier that we named Prior. (After the character in Angels in America. Raven’s idea.) We picked out towels and plates together. And she was so integral to the founding of O’Toole Films, helping me write business plans and apply for loans and shooting scenes with me that we knew we wouldn’t get paid for until the company got off the ground…

  And then I came home one night to an empty house.

  No warning.

  No goodbye.

  I left her to her quinoa and fair trade coffee one morning and came back and she was gone. Clothes, makeup, dildos—anything that was hers, she took. Along with Prior, the furry little guy with his sweet little face and the habit of licking my toes when I tried to edit scenes in my office.

  It didn’t make sense. We were happy, right? We were having fun. I won’t pretend that jealousy didn’t stab me in the ribs when I saw scenes that she filmed with other people, but that was part of our business. I didn’t stop fucking other girls and she didn’t stop fucking other guys; we agreed at the beginning that our relationship wouldn’t affect our jobs in any way, but for my own sanity, I set one simple ground rule: no off-screen fucking with anyone else.

  There. Easy.

  Except when she left, it became very clear that it was not that easy. Not only did she abruptly bow out of all of our upcoming projects—professionally embarrassing, since most of them were with outside studios that then had to scramble to find another performer to be with me. But the tall Italian guy that appeared in all of her Instagrams the following week indicated that I had probably missed a few key signs that Raven had checked out of our relationship long before she threw her dildos and our Yorkie into her purse and drove off.

  I wish I could say that I dealt with this gracefully. That I didn’t Google-stalk Italian Guy (some big shot producer over in Europe,) that I didn’t listen to Damien Rice songs on repeat, that I didn’t miss that dog so fucking much that I went to the pound every morning to pet the dogs there.

  That I didn’t drink my weight in scotch every week.

  That I didn’t withdraw from my family and my friends.

  That I didn’t fall asleep folded into a ball on my kitchen floor, because I couldn’t bear looking at the empty bed, much less sleeping in it.

  Those are not the kinds of things Logan O’Toole does. Logan is funny and friendly and worldly, too emotionally wise to feel heartbreak. Logan should have endured the departure (and probable infidelity) of his long-term girlfriend with a Zen-like equanimity, and wished her peace on her new journey or some bullshit.

  And so that’s who I am tonight. Worldly and Zen, flirty and aloof. My wounds have started to scar over, and I want to prove that I’ve moved on. And that is why I walk into Vida’s like I own the place, shoulders back, grin at the ready, with a steady, focused gaze that makes it clear I’m not scanning the room for any hint of Raven’s presence.

  Tanner is in the main room—a large open space studded with low couches and ottomans that I’d be hesitant to shine a black light on—and he comes toward me with a drink in his hand.

  “I got you some scotch,” he says.

  I sniff the glass. It’s something smoky, probably an Islay Scotch, and although I prefer Speyside, I’m still impressed that it’s single malt. Vida must have pulled out all the stops for this party.

  While I sip, I finally take the chance to assess the room. Like I thought, it’s mostly the feminists—tattooed, pierced, bespectacled. I do a lot of scenes with those types for O’Toole Films because we have a very similar ethos when it comes to consent and female pleasure.

  Also I think girls with tattoos are fucking hot.

  But there are other types here too—mainstream stars who frequently work with Vida’s company, the indie crowd, the underground BDSM people in their vinyl corsets and thigh-high boots. And Vida herself at the center of it all—mid-forties, deeply tanned, platinum blond hair coiffed short and stylish. She looks exactly how you’d imagine an aging porn star to look—sagging plastic surgery, careworn face, too much makeup—but if you discount her business acumen or intelligence because of the way she looks, you’re a fucking idiot. There’s a reason even the most insulated, conservative Americans have heard of Vida: because she gets marketing and she gets content and she gets platform saturation.

  I want to be her when I grow up.

  “I like these parties,” Tanner says, taking a sip of his gin, “because I’m not the only black guy here.”

  He’s right about this crowd being more progressive than most, although this party is still mostly white people. “We’re going to make it so all the parties are like this, but better,” I tell him. When I hired Tanner two years ago, he was frank about all of the problems he saw within the industry—including the inherent racism embedded in the very foundations of mainstream porn. So I told him that if he came and worked for me, we’d fix it; we’d cultivate diversity without all the weird taboos and fetishes normally present in interracial sex work. And so I managed to snag an incredibly talented filmmaker right out of art school, and he managed to make a believer out of me.

  He shrugs, giving me the don’t-make-your-white-guilt-my-problem look I see on his face at least once a week. “It’s L.A.” His tone is off-handed. “I knew what I was getting into when I came here.”

  I am going to say something else—probably something stupid and not at all adequate or helpful—when I see her.

  She’s here.

  My fingers tighten around my glass, and my stomach starts flipping over like a gymnast on the uneven bars, swoop, swoop, toss, spin—

  “Breathe,” Tanner coaches. “Everyone has to run into their ex-girlfriend for the first time since a breakup. You’re just getting it out of the way now.”

  But it isn’t Raven that I see laughing out by the pool. It’s not Raven with the glass of scotch and the long caramel hair and the smile that could power the whole goddamn Valley if she wanted it to.

  It’s Devi Dare.

  The balcony is lit up against the night, and the pool sends blue-white glimmers dancing across her face. She wears some sort of shimmery gold halter top that drapes low, exposing the smooth bronze skin of her sternum and teasing me with the hidden curvature of her tits, and leaving almost her entire back bare.

  With her short black shorts and ankle-high gladiator heels, she doesn’t just look fuckable, she looks beautiful, and I wish I had a camera right now. I want to film her here, laughing and golden with the sparkling grid of the city behind her, and then I want to take her to a beach and see what she looks like against a backdrop of inky sea. Maybe we could drive up north, find an empty stretch of highway, and I could film her walking on the dark asphalt. With that shining gold top and those fuck-me heels, the contrast of her with a desert highway would be so stark and so gorgeous and thought-provoking. The kind of shit you see gif-ed on Tumblr.

  And then she turns and sees me through the floor-to-ceiling window. There’s a moment where her eyes narrow, as if trying to make out my face in the dim interior of Vida’s living room, and then her face blossoms into the kind of smile that makes me want to give her everything in my wallet. If my stomach was swooping before, it’s a tornado now, whipping up emotional debris and lust and all the fantasies I’ve ever had about this woman, and I only barely remember that I’m supposed to be Worldly and Zen Logan in time to give her a flirty grin in return.

  As she turns back to her friends, I realize my highway film would be all wrong. Devi is the living antithesis of asphalt. Devi is energy and health and vibrancy. She’s sunshine and butter-yellow flower petals and the sweetly earthy smell of cinnamon and cloves. I was right before, with the ocean idea, or maybe the desert in the dark, when the night flowers are in bloom—

  “Thinking about who you’re going to fuck?”

  A sharp voice jolts me out of my directorial reverie, and I blink to find Tanner gone and Vida Gines standing next to me, a bright pink drink in her hand. She arches an eyebrow at me as she cants
her head toward the massive windows, indicating the balcony outside. “I saw you making eyes at Devi.”

  Worldly and Zen, I remind myself. Vida doesn’t need to know that I’m mentally comparing Devi to the flowering night desert. Be casual.

  “Devi’s fucking hot,” I say, taking care to keep my voice casual. “Lots of hot girls here.” And then for good measure, I take a drink and look casually around the room. Casual Logan, that’s me.

  Vida takes a drink of her own, but that eyebrow stays arched and I know I’m not fooling her one bit.

  “Great party,” I volunteer, trying to deflect attention away from me and my overt ogling of Devi. The last thing I need after my insanely public breakup with Raven is rumors of a new fling. “Congratulations on acquiring Lelie, by the way.”

  Vida nods. “Lelie is an amazing studio. Great vision, great philosophy. Tons of potential for profit. Which is why we should talk.”

  I hear her, but for a moment, I zero in on the way her nails are painted the exact shade of her drink. Pink nails, pink drink, pink lips--the kind of thing a director would deliberately orchestrate. I make a mental note to toy around with this kind of visual sometime in my scenes. Surely, the girls wouldn’t mind me choosing their lipstick color? If it was for art?

  “Logan?”

  I snap back to her. “Sorry, what?”

  That eyebrow is practically touching her hairline now. “I said we should talk.”

  “I’m always happy to hear what such a smart lady has to say.” And then I find the small of her back with my palm, leaning in to whisper, “Do you want to find someplace a little less noisy?”

  Despite our age difference, and despite the fact that I know she only wants to talk business, my proximity affects her. She shivers and then laughs, pushing me playfully away. “You know how to make a woman feel young, Logan. This way.”