I wasn’t lying when I told her that I thought it would be better for the show for her not to reciprocate tonight. I do think that, and also I’d like to plan another visually dynamic venue for the blowjob, not just the interior of my goddamn car (even though it’s the best car in the world.)
But that’s not the real reason, and the real reason is so fragile even in my own mind that I know I have no hope of explaining it to her. Because those thirty minutes with her on my hood, when I tongued her to orgasm over and over again while she told me Persian and Greek fables in that breathy, faltering voice, the big feeling had come, and I was drunk on it. It came with my mouth on Devi’s silken skin, with her words drifting into the desert, and it was more powerful than I’d ever felt with anyone, ever. More than my first scene, my favorite films, or my most elaborate and creative ideas.
No, this was something beyond anything I’ve ever felt, so powerful and elemental that I could feel it coursing through my body and into the rocky ground underneath me and into the speckled, glittering sky above me, and the world dissolved into pure, celestial magic.
Sparkling.
Atomic.
Holy.
And then the world came together again, normal once more but still charged with the ionized memory of our magic, and we sped into the dark, laughing at our near-miss.
So why did I push her away?
Because I couldn’t bear the thought of something so unbearably sexy, so indelibly perfect, being brought down to earth with something as mercenary and trite as forcing her to suck me off in my car. I mean, I knew at the time that I wasn’t forcing anything, that she would have been happy to do it, but it would have ultimately been me leading the transition from the stars to the slurping, and it felt wrong.
It still feels wrong. I chose the right thing, I know it, even as I sit here listening to Devi gather up her things and unbuckle herself.
“I’ll walk you inside,” I say suddenly, unbuckling too.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice betrays nothing, and this is one of the strangest things I’ve learned about Devi in the past few weeks. She can be so friendly, so straightforward, so adorably young, that it would be tempting to think that she’s an open book. But she’s not always, only when she chooses to be, and there are times when she’s just as unreadable as the stars. More Queen Cassiopeia than Layla.
We get out and I follow her up the walk, up to her front door. The moment is pregnant as she unlocks it, as we both recall our searing first kiss here, and I wonder how she remembers it. She wanted it, I know, just like she genuinely wanted to blow me tonight in my car. Devi is a modern, sex-positive girl; she enjoys having sex and she likes me as a friend. And there have been a few moments where I’ve thought I’ve glimpsed something more, kernels of yearning in her voice, a bite of the lip or a quick blink as she looks away from me.
But I still think it might have just been a hot kiss for her and nothing more. Not the revelation it was for me.
The moment passes and then we’re walking up the old wooden stairs to the upper floor and unlocking another door there.
She flicks a light on, and a yellow CFL bulb illuminates a cozy living room lined with bookshelves and dominated by the ugliest couch I’ve ever seen in my life, a hulking thing of orange velvet. It’s either the kind of couch you find in your great-aunt’s basement or the kind of couch you pay too much money for at a place like Anthropologie.
I walk over to investigate it further, and then I hear Devi clear her throat like she’s going to speak, like it’s easier for her to speak when we’re not looking at each other. I brace myself for whatever she is going to say.
“Why wouldn’t you let me blow you?” she asks softly.
Dammit. The one question I would pay real, American money for her not to ask.
I turn to face her, my filmmaker brain having tiny seizures when I see how sweet and vulnerable she looks framed against her sagging, overwhelmed bookshelves. “Devi, it’s just about the show, it’s not because I don’t--”
“Bullshit.” There’s no menace or heat in her voice right now, just the matter-of-fact voice she would use to tell me about star formation.
I hesitate. She tilts her head at me.
I speak after a long moment, trying to fumble my way towards the truth without exposing how deeply, crazily, ridiculously I am caught up in her. “I didn’t want to use you, Devi. I didn’t want to cheapen what we shared in the desert.”
She raises an eyebrow, and I realize suddenly I’ve said something wrong.
“For one thing,” she says, using her fingers to tick off her words, suddenly not looking like a girl at all, but a confident—and irritated—woman, “there’s nothing cheap about my choosing to do any sexual act with you. I make the choice—I choose to use my body, either for work or for pleasure, and tonight I was choosing to go down on you, even though I knew the cameras were off. When you call that choice cheap, it makes me feel cheap.”
Shit shit shit.
“That’s not at all what I meant,” I hurry to explain. “I just meant—”
“And for another thing,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken, “I feel like you’re holding yourself back from me, and I don’t get it at all. Logan, your body isn’t a machine, and I don’t expect it to be—I don’t expect you to turn yourself off like a switch when the camera turns off. You’re human, you’re going to keep needing and craving even after a scene ends. Of course, you don’t want to use women, and of course you aren’t the kind of guy who tries to fuck around with girls onset when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s one of the things I like best about you.”
I don’t know what to say to this, because I’m so floored and grateful that she has noticed those things about me, but I also know that she’s not finished talking yet and that I’m still in trouble.
“But Logan—” she steps forward “—I offered. I was offering because I wanted to. I wanted to and I chose it, and you wouldn’t have been manipulating or even coaxing me into it. Please...as we move forward...please open up to me more. I’m your friend and I think I’m—” she breaks off, swallowing and glancing away. “I’m so turned on for you all the time,” she finishes, and it makes my dick ache and my heart beat hard, even as my mind recognizes that she changed course at the last moment.
She changed course...why? My heart beats harder and faster. What was she going to say? Because what if she was going to say that she is falling for me? That she has feelings for me?
What would I say back?
The answer rises to my lips immediately: Me too me too me too.
She drags my mind away from those thoughts with a soft sigh, the kind of sigh that makes me remember the noises she made on the hood of my car. Something snaps inside of me, something big.
“Sit on the couch,” I command. My voice is firm, loud and a little harsh in the small, warm space. Some distant part of me wonders if I’ve crossed a line.
But she sits.
I walk over to her. “On the edge,” I say, and she obeys, and then I kick her legs apart, so that she’s not only sitting on the edge but has her legs splayed wide. Her skirt rides up, baring her pussy.
She peers up at me with those golden eyes at the same time that I smell her scent again. My pulse thuds in my neck and wrists and groin, and it hits me.
I’m not just caught up in Devi, I’m truly, honestly falling for her. I have feelings.
Capital F Feelings.
Somehow my crush has gone from “casually obsessed with” to “move in with me,” and I have no idea what the fuck to do with that, much less what Devi would do with it if she knew. She’s obviously attracted to me, but that in no way equates romance, especially in our line of work. It’s too soon for me to feel this way, and it’s not right to drag that into the middle of a project. And if I’m being honest, I’m scared. Not a little scared, but a lot scared, because the last time I had capital F feelings, I lost my dog, my heart, and my sobriety in one fell swoop.
But I can’t just ignore this, and clearly, I can’t hide it from Devi, nor do I want to.
There has to be a middle ground, right? Between pretending it away and proposing marriage?
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 sayi
ng—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 that’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?”
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