by Hazel Keys
“Wanna fuck me, baby?” she teased. The camera pulled back more and, just before her face came into view, she flipped herself over and got up onto her knees, bending forward to rest on her hands and wiggling her tight little ass toward us. “Come on, baby, fuck me quick…” she said as a pit opened up in my stomach, big enough to swallow me whole. Three things happened in lightning quick succession. The girl looked over her shoulder at me and I saw her face, I also spotted the delicate angel wing tattoo just above her ass, and I recognized her voice as she finished her sentence, “… before Paige gets home.”
Why would Adam have film of Stacy having sex? my naïve brain asked. Stacy let a leering smile linger on her lips as she watched the camera man put down the device, the lens now facing her side-on,before he rushed around behind her. I saw his rock-hard cock pointing straight at her, seconds before he grabbed it to line himself up. “Uh-huh,” she moaned, her eyes now closed, as I figured he found her waiting hole, “that’s it, baby.”
He thrust himself into her with amazing force, hard enough to force out a loud, ecstatic ‘yes!’ from both of them, and I saw Adam’s face as he threw himself forward over her. His eyes were shut tight in pleasure, his full lips twisted like some snarling porn-stud.
I felt the tears building in my eyes and my hands starting to shake. I don’t know why I didn’t turn the video off right then. I wasn’t watching it. My vision was too blurry and I felt like I could actually feel my heart breaking. Somewhere, at the edge of my consciousness, I could hear the noises; the wet slapping of his skin hitting hers; the low groans he made as he fucked her, coupled with the soft cries that fell from her lips as she received him; then the sound of a key turning in the door.
*****
It took me a second to realize that the door opening was part of my reality and not happening on the recording. I looked up to see Adam smile at me as he walked into our home. It seemed to take him an eternity to gather the scene and put two and two together but, I guessed, it probably took no more than a microsecond for him to see me holding his laptop with tears running down my cheeks. Especially when the Stacy in the video yelled out ‘Fuck me harder, Adam!’
“Babe, I…” he began, taking a step closer. I responded by slamming his computer shut and hurling it at the wall beside our couch. It hit it with a corner and gouged a huge hole in the ancient plaster, then dropped to the floor. “Are you fucking crazy?” he yelled, dropping his things and running to pick it up.
I watched him bend and collect it. It had fallen open again and I couldn’t see the film anymore, but I could hear their pace increase and Stacy suddenly shouting and swearing as she came. When he held it up, I could see a huge crack across the screen, running almost right through the two copulating bodies, now frozen on the broken display. Adam shut it again and, as he strode over to the kitchenette to throw it in the trash, Stacy’s orgasmic screaming finally silenced.
“How long?” I asked him, very quietly.
“Babe, I’m so sorry. I love you so much…” he continued as though he didn’t hear me. He carefully walked back over to me, getting closer and closer with each step.
“How long?” I asked again, louder this time as he crouched down right beside me. I tried to scoot away into the corner, pulling away as far as I could from him.
“It just happened one day,” he offered, “I bumped into her on the way out of the shower…”
“How long, Adam?” I yelled it this time. “How long have you been fucking her?”
“I don’t know!” he yelled back. He looked angry, not sorry.
How can he be yelling at me, I asked myself, is this my fault?
“A few months, I guess,” he kept shouting. “What does it matter?”
“Because it feels like I now know why you haven’t been fucking me!”
Chapter 8:Caleb
As far as my professional life was going, I couldn’t have been happier. I didn’t think I would, but I was actually enjoying hosting these classes. The students really wanted to learn and, despite all the warnings from Helena, I wasn’t being distracted by the constant parade of young, fit girls staring googly-eyed at me. Sure, the attention was flattering, especially when it came from some of the real, hardcore fans of my earlier work, but I wasn’t remotely tempted. Somehow, I’d developed a shockingly professional attitude to being a professor.
I liked to think it came from my desire to mold the next generation of photographic artists, or from my devotion to my beautiful wife. But I knew, deep down, it was her.
We hadn’t spoken since I came on pretty strong in the classroom. She kept attending my lectures, three times a week, but she stayed quiet and it seemed tough for her to even look at me. Still, I couldn’t get her out of my head. Every time I thought I’d succeeded, I’d see that achingly beautiful photo again. Every time I went to make love with Helena, I’d be back in the club, standing naked before Paige. Only, this time, I’d just take her. Like I felt she wanted me to at the time. I didn’t often regret not taking that step but, this time it had me kicking myself over and over.
Fortunately, Helena didn’t seem to have noticed. Our casual attitude to sex meant she never took it personally if I stopped in the middle of things. It usually just meant I was tired, stressed, or suddenly inspired. I had a feeling, though, pretty soon she’d figure out I was thinking about someone else, and that violated our agreement.
One afternoon, however, Paige didn’t come to class. It was no big deal really. Every student missed the odd lecture. But I noticed and I couldn’t help but worry. No, not worry; wonder. Where was she? Was she okay? Had she decided she couldn’t stand taking my class anymore and I was never going to see her again, even from a distance?
I managed to get through the session without seeming too distracted and, as I made my way through the quad toward the faculty parking lot, something made me venture over behind the columns that held up the roof of the enclave.
“Hey,” I whispered, “I’m sure I’m probably the last person you want to see right now, but can I ask you if you’re okay?”
Paige’s eyes flicked to me then went back to staring at the pavement. They were red-rimmed and tear-stained. “Believe it or not,” she sniffed, “you not the last person I want to see. You’re only top three.”
I laughed out loud. “Wow, then someone must have really pissed you off.”
That didn’t get the response I was hoping for. She didn’t laugh or even crack a smile at me. She just kept staring down at the ground. I felt myself shaking and my mouth running dry. Whatever was upsetting her, I could feel the heartache. I also felt myself wanting to heal whatever was making her look so sad, but I had no idea how. I decided to sit close beside her and put my arm around her, hugging her to me.
She was suddenly wracked with huge sobs. “Oh, my God, Caleb!” she cried. “How could this have happened to me? How could I not see this coming?”
I could feel myself wanting to question her, dying to find out who or what hurt her, but I figured the last thing she neededright now was an interrogation. So, I held her tighter. “Hey, it’s gonna be okay,” I whispered, “you can get through this. I know you can.”
“How?” she asked. “How do you know I can get through this?” Where, a second before, she’d been melting into my arms, crying, she was suddenly pushing me away. She stared right into my face, her expression furious. “You don’t even know me. You don’t know about my life. I’m not the ‘beautiful, sexual’ girl from your photograph and I don’t need some masked pervert fucking me against a wall.”
The attack took me by surprise but I quickly realized that A: What she said was true enough, and B: It was a rant, a vent. She just needed to lash out for a second, to make herself feel just a little less helpless.
“Your absolutely right, Paige,” I told her, keeping a concerned, sincere smile on my face. I guess she wasn’t expecting that response. She opened her mouth to say something, closed it, and her face just dissolved into tears again. I edge
d forward and put my arms around her once more, and felt her weight transfer onto me. We sat like that, her slim body occasionally shuddering as she cried softly, for a few moments. Or a few hours, it was hard to tell. I breathed her in and she smelled amazing, but all my sexual thoughts of her had disappeared. Right then, I just wanted to give her comfort, make her feel safe, ease her pain, and help her to stop crying. If I could have just absorbed all the sorrow from her, just leeched it out of her body, I would have. “But I’ll tell you one thing I do know,” I said finally, “I know that at least one of us needs a drink.”
The sobbing had pretty much ceased a few minutes ago but, when I said that, I was sure I felt her smile.
*****
I didn’t press her anymore as we drove, but Paige did begin volunteering information. “Why are men such assholes?” it started.
“You got me,” I told her, “I’ve been one for nearly thirty-eight years and I still don’t know.”
“A man or an asshole,” I heard her grin as she said it.
“You choose,” I smiled back. “Besides, women aren’t much better.”
“You’re right there.” So, I now knew she was having boyfriend trouble. I also knew now it was because of another woman, possibly one she was acquainted with. “Where are we going?” she asked, a sudden tone that sounded close to panic in her voice.
“Just this bar downtown I heard about,” I told her. “I figure it's more your scene than mine, but you’re the one that needs cheering up.” She said the name of a place that I’d heard a bunch of my students mention. “That’s the one.”
“Oh, God, Caleb,” she was suddenly pleading with me, “we can’t go there. My apartment is right above it.”
“Oh shit! Really?”
“Anywhere but there, please.”
“I haven’t had time to get downtown that much since I moved here,” I told her, “I don’t know anywhere else.”
“Well, can we just go to your place?” she implored me.
If I brought Paige back to the homestead I knew it wouldn’t sit well with Helena. Bring girls back for sex was okay, but to help them with their feelings? That would be much too personal. “My place is all the way out in Boerne,” I told her. Then I had a thought. “I rented a studio around here, just in case I felt the urge to create. I haven’t used it yet but it’s furnished and all my gear is there.”
“Whatever,” replied Paige. I could see she just didn’t want to be there.
“I’m sorry,” I said after we’d driven a little further.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied absently. “How could you have known where I lived. I just escaped from there before you found me. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go but the campus.” She turned her head to look at me. “I’m sorry I missed your class, though. I just didn’t feel up to it.”
“I guess I can let it go,” I said, feigning a stern attitude, “just this one time.”
I pulled in behind the unit. It was a converted studio apartment, appropriately, on top of a slightly grubby-looking taco place, set up with plenty of sinks, power outlets, a bright white room great for staging indoor shoots, a light-tight room perfect for developing film, and even a shower and a cot, in case I found myself working into the night. Like there was any chance of that. Still, at least having it ready meant I couldn’t let ‘not having anywhere to work’ be an excuse.
I showed Paige up and turned on the fluorescent overhead lights, just to really emphasize the peeling paint and squalor, but she smiled as she looked around going over to some of my more famous prints and studying them. “Yeah, you got me,” I said as I reached into the desk drawer for the bottle of scotch I kept in it, “I do keep those hanging there to remind me that I was once an artist.”
“From what I hear,” she accepted the dirty coffee cup I’d filled with whisky for her, “a lot of people, not least impressionable college girls, still think you are.”
I laughed and sat on the small cot bed that faced the studio. “Do you count yourselves among them?”
She laughed in return. “To tell the truth I had no idea who you were until I Googled you the other day,” she told me. I mimed the pain that caused me. “My friend Julie is a huge fan, though,” she added.
“Tell Julie my career, such as it is, thanks her.”
A moment passed. Paige stopped looking at my pictures, turned, and walked back over to where I was sitting on the little bed. She sat next to me and clinked our cups together.
“And, I guess, thank you,” she smiled.
“For what?”
“For coming to my rescue,” she told me. “I needed someone. And I’m sorry, you weren’t in the top three people I didn’t want to see. Just the last person I expected.”
I nodded gratefully and we sat in companionable silence for another moment. “I feel like I should apologize to you, as well. I shouldn’t have shown that picture of you when I realized you were in the class,” I said.
“Maybe,” she mused. “On the one hand, you had no right. On the other, you did make me feel special. What you said, about someone I care about making me doubt myself, boy, was that true.”
Then she told me. It took whatever three refills of our whisky cups is in hours, but she told me everything. Her insecurity about her fiancée Adam, the way he was making her feel about herself, the reason they went to the Wrecker’s Ball, what happened there, what she was thinking when I spoke to her, and what happened that very afternoon, when she discovered her boyfriend and her best friend were having an affair. A couple of time she cried, sometimes I held her hand, but we got there.
“I don’t know about you,” I said when she was done, “but I think I need a taco, now.”
“Wow, I hadn’t realized I was so hungry.”
“So it’s agreed,” I got up and headed for the door. “And Paige,” she turned to look at me, “don’t worry about going home for a while. You can stay here for as long as you need.”
“Thanks, Caleb” she smiled.
*****
I was only gone a few minutes. I didn’t know what she’d like, so I ordered two enchiladas, two crispy tacos, two chalupas, each of them one with chicken and one with beef, a quesadilla, with some beans and rice. I asked for a couple of cervezas too, but the sweet Mexican mama at the register said she couldn’t. An extra twenty-dollar tip and a vow on my mother’s life that I wasn’t a cop later, she capitulated.
When I arrived back up from the joint downstairs, my arms full of food, the mood in the studio had changed dramatically. The second thing I noticed was the fluorescent tubes that lined the ceiling were switched off, replaced with the standard lamps, my studio lights with filters covering them, even some candles around the cot, which I didn’t know I had.
The third thing I noticed, as I put the food down on a small table by one of the sinks, was that Paige seemed to be reordering my prints. She’d found a few more in another folder and was hanging them, taking them down, then rehanging them in a different sequence.
Oh, and she’d found and changed into one of my old shirts, too. It was white once, now more of a beige, and had a developing fluid stain on the left cuff, and hung kinda baggy off her slender body. She’d also ditched her pants, as well, and that firm, toned ass, wearing only a thong and peeking out from under the shirt as she reached up to hang a print, that was the first thing I noticed when I walked in.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she called without turning around, “those industrial lights were making me feel blotchy. And I needed to get out of those clothes.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I replied, the unencumber view of her buttocks sending signals through me that only my cock could respond to. It all came flooding back, the desire I had for her, and I suddenly felt like a drooling manimal. “What are you doing, by the way?”
She turned around, the shirt covering her again, except for a tasteful glimpse of the swell of her breast and her long, shapely legs. “I was trying,” she began with a girlish smile, “
to organize your previous works into the order I think you took the pictures.”
“I see you have the one showing you on the far end.”
“I needed a reference point,” she said, then pointing at the print on the end nearest her. “This one looks like the earliest.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked laying out all the food so it was easily accessible, then twisting open the two beer bottles.
The picture showed a nearly naked actress, smiling, laying on a dark floor, kicking her feet playfully in the air. She was supposed to be the next big thing not long not long after the photoshoot but she disappeared into obscurity,thanks to a dreadful Michael Bay movie. I couldn’t even remember her name. “You can almost feel the fun, the irreverence, the sexual energy,” Paige told me, “I’ve no doubt you guys fooled around after the picture.”
“Actually, it was taken during,” I mumbled. That I did remember. I expected Paige to judge me but she just smiled.
“Then this one,” she pointed at the one set next to the shot of her, “Looks like the latest one.”This was a shot of Helena. Black and white, she looked gorgeous, made up and dressed up to attend some power meeting, looking at us from her own reflection in a mirror. Only she was naked from the waist down and acting like she had no idea her bare ass was on show. “It looks so…”
“It’s okay, I’m a big boy,” I reassured her.
“It looks so staged, so unnatural. The model is beautiful, sure, but its missing something. If anything, I’d put your picture of me more like here.”
She moved the image of herself another two-thirds of the way along toward the first. “That’s amazing,” I told her. She came and sat back down next to me, a plate of food on her lap. “You’re right, Paige, absolutely. You’ve got some eye.”
“But why?” she spluttered, her mouth full of food as she demolished the pile on her paper plate. “Why does the picture of me fit so far down the line, but not at the end?”
