by Amy Lane
“Don’t worry, chica,” he said, kissing his sister on a wan cheek. “I don’t need Hector’s charity. I got myself a job.”
Fabiola looked at him dubiously. “Jeez, Carlos. I hope it’s legal.”
He smiled back at her wickedly. “I’m eighteen, aren’t I?” And before he could spill the beans about what he was doing, he poured himself a big glass of milk in the kitchen and then went to the living room to pull Frances out of the playpen. He hated those fucking things, and he wanted his niece to have better.
Someone Else’s Pain
Dex
AFTER eight years in the business, he’d stopped pretending that he wasn’t gay, stopped pretending that the first guy he’d fallen for since his first male lover died actually loved him back, and stopped remembering that his real name was David.
But he’d still always thought of himself as a moral man, a moral person, until right about this moment.
Dex sat on one of the ultra-comfy couches in front of the giant plasma screen at John’s office suite with the keyboard in his lap so he could edit the footage. He was watching the rushes of the threesome with Kane, Ethan, and Chance while he chewed the inside of his cheek. After all this time with John as a model, a camera man/editor, an accountant (because he had most of a business degree under his belt), and an advisor and friend, he hadn’t ever seen anything like this particular film.
“It’s disturbing, isn’t it?” John asked quietly. He was sitting on the couch across from Dex—this room was never used for anything other than editing and business, so the furniture was clean, bright (John really liked the color green for some reason), and comfortably worn. But neither of the men felt comfortable watching the sex on the screen.
Dex nodded in response to John’s question, but his eyes never left the action. Chance was stunningly beautiful—blond, blue eyed, an intense, high-cheekboned, almost narrow face—and he had this look, this lost little boy look, when he didn’t know anyone was watching him. When he knew you were looking, he got this practiced openmouthed expression like every dumb jock you’d ever met—and suddenly, he was that guy too. So he was pretty incendiary on the screen, with the dumb jock and the hidden innocence, and the footage was hot, there was no question about it. But then, touching Chance (everyone knew his name was Chase because Tango was not exactly discreet about throwing his “secret” identity around. But then, Tango had a good reason for wanting Chase to come out of the closet) had always been like touching a magnesium road flare of sex and longing.
Need just oozed from the guy’s skin.
And ever since Chase’s breakup with Tango, there had been a whole other dimension of intensity and crazy added to his look, his touch, the horrible cauldron of something scary that Dex had always sensed under his “I’m just a dumb jock” exterior. Never more so than when he watched this last scene.
“Right there,” he said quietly, looking at the beginning. Kane was there, beautiful, dark hair spiked a little because that’s how he liked it, his soul patch groomed because yeah, there was a little bit of vanity working there, but mostly, just a nice kid. When Kane started a scene, he’d get rough, manhandle a guy, throw him around a little, dominate him—even when Kane was on the bottom, he was telling the guy how to move. He was a bossy fucker, that was for certain, but when he was off the set?
He’d brought Dex a coffee or a Jamba Juice pretty much every time they’d worked together. He texted dumb jokes, bought a new video game every week and invited people out shopping or to the water slides to play, and filled in whenever somebody needed help. That included off camera, when one of the guys was moving, or when the receptionist was overwhelmed and just needed a hand.
He might have liked to put his hand on your back and nail you to the bed when he topped (and he’d done this to Dex on set—it was one of Dex’s favorite memories of Johnnies, actually), but during every other frickin’ moment of the day?
He could be the sweetest mammal since Labrador puppies had been invented. And he would be horrified to realize that the guy he’d been fucking in that threesome hadn’t been completely consenting because apparently he was losing his fucking mind.
Dex and John watched the film from the very beginning to see what had gone wrong at the end. There was the preliminary stuff, kissing, a little bit of joking, and then right there, Kane had kissed him and Ethan—a big burly Italian guy with a smile that would melt a grandmother’s heart—engulfed Chase’s cock in his mouth and….
“Oh Jesus,” John said, a little bit horrified. “I think that’s a real scream.”
Dex swallowed. He’d gotten to know Chase, had watched him and Tango do a painful, delicate dance around each other because Chase refused to admit he was gay, refused to break up with a girlfriend that he adored but didn’t love—not like he loved Tango. Anyone could see that.
Dex and Tommy, known as Tango, had worked together for nearly four years. Tommy was as good a friend as the real Dex, if nothing at all like him, and Dex had never seen Tommy as wrecked as when Chase had broken up with him in the name of doing the right thing.
And Dex couldn’t even blame Chase. Chase was trying to be a stand-up guy, not to keep Tommy on a string when he couldn’t find a way to let his girlfriend go.
Dex watched him on screen now. He was in a sixty-nine with Kane, sucking Kane’s hugely wide seven-inch cock down his throat like he didn’t need to breathe. Ethan came up behind him and entered him with his own nine-inch wonder (God, shooting scenes with Ethan sucked sometimes, even when the guy was being exquisitely gentle), and Dex and John both winced from the sound that came from Chase’s throat. Then he threw back his head and screamed, “Fucking more!” and Kane had bottomed out on Chase’s erection until the sounds coming out of Chase’s mouth weren’t real words.
The thing was, this whole scene would have been incredibly hot—just scalding, get-a-boner-thinking-about-it Grade A porn—if they didn’t know that at the end of it, Chase had just convulsed on the bed, still coming, half out of his mind—
And weeping for Tommy.
Dex had been the one to call Tommy, and only because John had actually said, “Should we get an ambulance?” and Dex thought that Chase would have hated that. Chase didn’t talk about his feelings. He liked to pretend he didn’t have any. But Dex had been there when Chase had gone in to clean up Tommy’s house. Tommy had made himself sick to cover up the misery that had been watching Chase with someone else.
Dex had seen Chase sitting in the middle of a pile of CDs, trying to excise every part of himself from Tommy’s life while crying soundlessly over an old brown cat.
Dex knew that Chase’s feelings, whatever they were, would probably make Dex’s stomach cramp, and he couldn’t stand to think of that much vulnerability all alone. So he’d called Tommy, and Tommy had taken Chase into the showers, and then they’d all left the two of them the hell alone until Chase had snuck out of the set and the office altogether, probably in the name of trying to be a good guy.
Tommy had followed Chase home with Dex in the passenger seat, and then they’d gone to Tommy’s house, where Tommy had proceeded to beat a dinette chair against the kitchen floor until it disintegrated into splinters, and then Dex had held him as he’d cried.
So now, watching Chase come unglued in the guise of having sex, Dex was pretty damned fucking uncomfortable.
“Oh God,” he muttered. “John, have you called him?”
John grunted. “I sent him the rushes this afternoon and told him to text back when he got them. Should I do something else?”
Dex shook his head and took out his cell phone to text Tommy. Have you heard from him?
The reply was immediate. No, why?
Dex took a deep breath. He didn’t want to worry Tommy but…. Watching scene. It’s not good.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck… he’s not answering my texts, the fucking dick.
Dex leaned his head on his hand and watched as Chase started to convulse, coming helplessly, without any control over his body or the sounds
coming out of his mouth or….
Let me know if you hear something. Take care of yourself, okay.
Dex, he’s so fucking lost.
I know. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Dex signed out and watched the screen again—the part they’d cut, where Chase wouldn’t stop convulsing and Ethan was looking at him in confusion, and Kane?
Kane dragged him into his arms and just held him, rocking him back and forth and stroking his sweaty hair back from his face like an infant. Dex could almost swear he was singing.
“God,” Dex said, “we can’t….”
“Can’t what?” John asked, his voice sharp. “Ethan and Kane are counting on that check—and I’m pretty sure Chase is going to be as well.”
“If Ethan and Kane agreed not to post it…?”
John nodded. “Yeah, let me ask Chase.” John pulled his phone out and it buzzed in his hand. He looked at it and closed his eyes. “He okayed it.”
Dex said, “He texted you?” feeling almost excited, and John shook his head.
“It says ‘OK’,” John muttered. “Nothing about this is okay, dammit, but he okayed the paperwork, and….” John sat down and scrubbed his hands over his face.
He’d been dealing with shit, Dex knew. Besides the regular running of the business, there’d been stuff about his location houses, and he’d been planning to send some guys down to Puerto Vallarta on business, and then the stuff he thought he could leave to Dex had just become a major pain in the ass.
Chase was on his side now, and Kane was just stroking his back, leaning down, naked, covered in the aftermath of a threesome and not seeming to care in the least.
Dex had set the camera down long before—he’d called Tango by now and sent Ethan off to the showers, but he’d forgotten to turn the camera off. He appeared in the frame now with a blanket, and together he and Kane managed to wrap Chase up so he wasn’t so naked. Dex looked at Kane and said, “Hit the showers, brother. I’ll watch him,” and Kane shook his head.
“You called Tango?”
“Yeah.”
“We can stay with him until Tango gets here.”
Dex had to smile, watching Kane’s concern. You so wouldn’t think it, but Kane? Wild-haired, wicked-eyed, intense, fuck-’em-into-the-mattress Kane was really good people.
Dex sighed. And Kane needed money. “We’ll edit it again—as much as we can with Ethan and Kane, as little as we can with Chance. How’s that?”
John scrubbed his face. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he muttered, and Dex grunted.
“John, man—”
“Yeah, I know. It’s bad for me and it makes me a shitty person. But if I’ve gotta watch that fucking tape again, I’m gonna need a bump of coke.”
Dex sighed and scrubbed his face too. God. He hated it. John was a friend by now—they worked late nights and watched pretty boys and cracked jokes and shared beers. Never a bed, although Dex suspected that John might have had a crush on him for a while there, but they’d been friends. Dex had sort of taken on a role as second-in-command, because John’s business really had been in the nascent stages when Dex signed on, and it had tripled since then. He’d hired a receptionist and cameramen and other things, but Dex? Dex was his guy Friday. Dex was the one who knew every part of the business from the phone system to the speech to give the new guys to how much they should spend on getting guys to Puerto-fucking-Vallarta. He was John’s twelfth model and the first one to stay in the picture for longer than a year. The stuff he learned in school—he was only a semester way from his business degree—helped, and so did that basic hard work sensibility he’d learned at home.
He just didn’t think his parents would approve of anything he was doing with it.
It was, he had to admit, one of the reasons he hadn’t been too keen to press his degree just yet. Once he had it, he’d have to tell his parents he’d found a job or tell them he did more than do accounting for an entertainment firm. His “real” life would begin in the eyes of his family, and he’d have to grow up, get married.
And, of course, stop being a part of Johnnies. No one here—not even John or Tango—knew the story of Dex and David, two boys coming home from their first time together, but that was okay. Even if they did know, they’d understand.
He was happy here. He’d mostly stopped shooting scenes, and that was a relief, because he was starting to want a relationship and the scenes just muddled that shit up, but still. He got to stay here, and be with the guys, and take care of them or be a part of their lives.
So Johnnies was important to Dex. He hated to watch its founder threaten to flush it down the toilet with his cocaine habit.
It wasn’t every day or even every week, but every time John went to his back bathroom and came out with a tissue, snorting in little delicate, ladylike sniffs, Dex wanted to throw up. He so didn’t believe in drugs. He knew some of the guys used them—in fact, they’d watched as more than one guy had sort of spiraled off the map because of a habit. Even something like poppers, which some of the guys said made sex outstanding, could fuck up a scene because it took away some of the choice or the personableness or the… the… unselfishness that it took to be a good lover on camera.
And let’s face it, no one wanted to watch someone just lie there and take it because the drugs were doing all the work.
So yeah. Dex pulled his granny panties on and frowned whenever John went to the back room and indulged in his nasty little habit, but tonight? Tonight Dex wished he had something to cope with the total fucking helplessness of watching a friend self-destruct in front of his eyes, and feeling like he couldn’t do fuck-all about it.
He started editing on autopilot, wondering if he shouldn’t wait for John because his eyes were starting to burn and his eyelids were starting to droop. It had been a pretty stressful couple of days. He was on the third minute of what looked to be a thirty-minute video when John came back doing that Victorian woman’s sniff again, and his phone buzzed.
Dex looked at the number and the text and groaned.
“Fuck,” he muttered, and John’s dilated eyes were sympathetic. God, how could John be decent even when he was stoned but Scott, the guy on the phone, apparently couldn’t be decent in church, even if he went.
Dex shuddered. How could he have been so wrong? He looked at the text again and squared up his jaw.
She’s working late. Want to come over?
And that right there was the problem with dating someone on a porn set. You both start out necking at a location shot because you figure, “Hey, we both have girlfriends, we’re in Florida. What the hell. It’s not like our girlfriends don’t know what we do for a living, right? What’s one more guy?”
Except for Dex, “one more guy” was that breathless moment when they were done making love and not just having sex, and Scott smiled, and Dex suddenly felt like… like David again, and like Scott might be the lost Dex of his childhood. Except Scott really wasn’t like Dex at all. Scott was a guy who liked getting laid but who was planning to marry his girlfriend anyway, because he figured he was still a straight guy having sex with other straight guys, and wanting one guy over all the others and touching him softly and thinking about him, the sound of his voice, the shape of his eyes, those things didn’t make him gay at all.
Dex fought the temptation to chuck his phone through the plasma television. He texted instead.
We broke up three months ago, asshole. Lose my number.
David, don’t be like that.
And forget that name.
C’mon. It’s not like you didn’t know what you were in
for at the very beginning!
That doesn’t mean I can’t end it. Go away.
You can say what you want. I’ll be at your house in five.
I’m not there.
I’ll wait for you.
I’ll call the cops.
Don’t be stupid. You want it too.
Dex snarled at his phone and tossed it on the couch next
to him, then started to rub his chest through his hooded sweatshirt.
“John,” he said, squinting at his phone like he could change the shape of it as it sat on the couch.
“Yeah?” John had picked up his keyboard and was editing like a madman. Dex almost hated to break his rhythm.
“Does coke really make you more aggressive? Like you’re a god and can do anything?”
John grinned at him, his eyes bright and alive. “Man, you’ll feel like you can walk through the fuckin’ walls.”
Dex sighed. He hated himself on so many levels tonight. What was one more fucking thing going to matter? “So, can I have a bump of coke? I need to break up with an asshole permanent like.”
John nodded. “You drive?”
“No,” Dex said, thinking about his little house about three blocks from John’s office suite. “Walked.”
“Excellent. There’s some on the mirror in my bathroom. Knock yourself out.”
Dex stood and walked resolutely to the bathroom, ignoring the buzzing of his phone on the couch behind him. For nine years he’d been telling the world he was really someone else. Well, tonight he was going to be someone else. He was going to be reckless and assertive, just like the real Dex, and he was going to tell Scott to take his booty-call relationship and his “I’m not gay” bullshit and shove it up his ass.
Fuck it. Proof that feeling shit too deeply was a bad thing could be seen screaming in orgasm on the screens behind him. He was through with that shit for good.
Kane
KANE knew it was a dick-mobile—he knew it was gaudy and arrogant and so big it looked like he was compensating for something—but geez. It was such a sweet ride. The big black Lincoln Navigator was even dated as a dick-mobile, but he couldn’t help it. It was what every guy in his high school had considered the hallmark of success, and now he got to drive it. And he had leather bucket seats and a cherry sound system and gold flashing rims and trim and tinted windows! He loved this fucking car.
But all things considered, he was ready to get out of it.
