Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  “Kelsey?” he asked after sucking down the rest of his soda until it gurgled. “How did you know I was gay?”

  Kelsey looked at him and flushed. “Uhm… how am I supposed to answer that? We work at a gay porn business.”

  “We work at a gay-for-pay business.” Dex’s eyes were narrow and his voice was flat, and he knew it. “Until August I had a girlfriend. I’ve barely said it to my closest friends. How would you know I was gay?”

  Kelsey looked down at her cold french fries like she couldn’t remember how they got there. “Scott,” she whispered, and Dex stood up and took deep, grating, even breaths.

  “Did he tell you how he knew?” Dex asked. He started gathering their trash and throwing it in the little can by her desk. It was full after a long busy day, and Dex bent over and started shoving the trash in, using his formidable strength to tamp it tight into the trash can, not caring if the bag around it popped or if the empty soda cup had burst and was leaking brown ice into the trash.

  “No,” Kelsey said, looking at her hands. “I… he was hitting on me, and I told him that if I was going to sleep with anyone from work, it’d be you, because you’re a nice guy and I knew you best. He said you were gay, so give it up.” She looked up at him, her eyes deep and shadowed and growing shiny again. “It sort of broke my heart, you know?”

  Dex stood up and kicked the trashcan, sending it smacking against the filing cabinet behind Kelsey’s desk and thundering a reverb through the office. It tipped over, but it was so tightly packed that nothing fell out. Kelsey jerked back and clasped her hand over her mouth in shock, and Dex looked at it numbly, not sure what to say.

  “I’m the one.” His voice was a hoarse surprise. “I threw CDs at him. Kane Split his lip. I… I didn’t come in for the shoot because I was in the hospital with Tommy. I….” Dex shook his head and tried to pull himself together. He’d had a breakup. They happened. She was pregnant. That was worse.

  He looked at her dead on. “Don’t worry about me,” he said sincerely. “I’m not going to go party with my uterus in eight months. Our health insurance is fucking awesome, but is there anything else you need?”

  Kelsey turned her head so her cheek could rest on her fists. “Oh God. What a fuckin’ douche bag,” she whispered. “Why? Why would he even do that? It was like, I was invisible, and all of a sudden, he saw me. And….” She looked up and sat up and wiped under her eyes determinedly. “I mean, you’re all so beautiful, and you’re nice to me, and… and suddenly he was paying attention like he meant it. I thought….” She grabbed some Kleenex from the box by her computer. “Isn’t that stupid?” she asked to the pained silence. “We work in porn. Isn’t it stupid to think that he meant it?”

  Dex walked around to the back of her chair and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. He rubbed his cheek against hers for a moment and then turned his head and kissed it. “When the cameras are off, it should be real,” he said, thinking about Chase and Tommy. They’d never shot a scene. Not one. But Tommy had visited Chase in a freakin’ mental institution every damned day. Chase had stopped, mid-suicide attempt, so Tommy wouldn’t have to clean up his mess. Not one scene together—but Dex had shot scenes with both of them, and when they were in the same room, no one else mattered.

  Kelsey nodded her head. “It should have been real,” she echoed. “I thought it was real.”

  “Have you told him?”

  Kelsey shuddered in his arms. “He told me to get an abortion.”

  Dex tightened his hug around her. Of all the things… nine years in gay porn, and that was the word that made his little Catholic heart quiver. He took a deep breath on his childhood repression and remembered this was not his body or his life or his mistake. He’d done blow and the effects had lasted a couple of hours. Kelsey’s error in judgment was going to last forever.

  “How do you feel about that?” he asked, and she whimpered.

  “I always swore I wouldn’t.” She sniffled into her arms. “Dammit, Dex. I’m still in school. This was not my plan.”

  And Dex found he was smiling with all his teeth as a groundswell of bitterness erupted out of his pores like swamp water. “It never is,” he whispered. “Trust me on that one, sweetheart. It never is.”

  There was a sound then as John opened the door from the hallway to the front office, and Dex straightened and squeezed Kelsey’s shoulder.

  “Did you guys hear something fall?” John asked. His eyes were glossy and his ginger hair was stringy from having his hand torn through it too many times.

  Dex stood up with a scowl of irritation. Great. He’d knocked the trashcan over and John was on his nth bump of coke. Suddenly, in spite of his pride in his work, he was hit by the inescapable notion that Kelsey needed to find another job if she was going to be a single mother. It was okay for a bunch of single guys to fuck away their wonder years, but a baby probably deserved better.

  “I kicked a trash can,” Dex said, and his voice seemed to echo around the empty complex.

  “Awesome. When you’re done kicking trash cans, could you come in and help me frickin’ edit this last frickin’ video? You’ve fucked girls, right? You know what a pussy is supposed to look like?”

  Dex winced. “Nice. Yeah. Sort of.”

  “Excellent. I need someone who can tell me if this shit looks hot or just weird.” John whirled around and slammed the door, leaving Kelsey and Dex gaping at him.

  “Oh God,” Kelsey muttered. “I so do not want to be you for the next two to four hours.”

  Dex grunted. “I gotta call my roommate,” he muttered without thinking.

  “Roommate? Is that code?” Kelsey squinted at him. “I mean, you just scratched up Scott’s face six weeks ago!”

  “I threw CDs at him!” Dex snapped. “I did not claw him like some rabid… rabid….”

  “Pussy?” Kelsey said grimly, and Dex grunted, uncharmed.

  “I broke up with Scott a long time before the CDs,” Dex said, so glad that was true. “I threw the CDs because he was showing up at my house asking for booty call. It was pissing me off.”

  Kelsey shuddered. “Yeah, he’s been doing that.” She sighed then, disconsolate. “I even gave in.”

  Dex had a sudden horrible thought. He looked at Kelsey, who was maybe five six and not teeny like a toothpick, but not two hundred pounds of muscle like Scott.

  “Kelse?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do me a favor. If Scott shows up at your place, lock the door and call me. I throw CDs and I make a dent. You throw shit at him and it just pisses him off.”

  Kelsey nodded, her eyes wide and apprehensive. “Okay.”

  “If I don’t show up, someone will. This may be porn, but you’re not alone here, okay? We’ll take care of you.”

  Kelsey nodded again. “Okay, Dex. I hear you.” She sighed. “You know, my mom retired and moved to New Mexico. She keeps telling me she’s got a spare bedroom. I think she’s lonely. Maybe I should take her up on it. I think she’d even forgive me for the kid, you know?”

  Dex nodded. “We’d miss you. You finally learned the phone system.”

  Kelsey smiled. It looked watery and limp, but it was also a good try. “You can put that on my letter of reference.”

  Dex sighed. “Yeah. Make sure you have me write that up for you and John sign it. He’ll probably put ‘porn’ on the letterhead.”

  “Yeah—what’s with him, anyway? He looks way strung out.”

  Dex shrugged. “I got no idea” is what he said. “He don’t usually let that shit get in the way of his work. Maybe it’s the girl parts freaking him out.”

  Kelsey giggled and Dex walked away, aware that, like a total coward, he’d managed to dodge the “roommate” question—which was good, because with or without the talk with John, he didn’t have an answer for that one.

  LATER he would wonder why it hadn’t occurred to him to talk to John. Maybe it was because Dex had learned to keep his personal business just that—personal. Nobody
on the set had met Allison, or Ashley before her, or Corinne, or even Kelly, who had sent him to Johnnies because she’d thought the kink would be awesome. (He had to admit that for a while it had been, but he was really only a fan of threesomes on camera. Off camera, he found them way too exhausting for the emotional payoff.)

  Maybe it was because although John knew about Scott and the cheating and the debacle of the whole thing, John had also spent a long time hitting on Dex when Dex had maintained stoutly that he was straight but just did the gay thing for kinks and kash. (He used to spell it that way in his head too—made it sound more like marketing and less like the complete moral degeneration his family would believe it to be.) John had understood about Scott—they’d both seen affairs start on location that ended badly off of it. But explaining about the breakup and how ugly it had really gotten, and maybe how Kane had comforted him afterward? That felt wrong. It was like those girls who dumped a guy and then called him to talk about their new dating life “because we’re friends!” So Dex refused to do it for himself, and maybe that feeling bled into the thing with Kelsey.

  And maybe it was because John was stoned—something he was doing more and more and that Dex was starting to worry about. In the beginning, it had been once every couple of months, maybe. The workload would spike, John would bump some coke and stay up and finish it, and that would be the end. But lately it was once a month, or every two weeks. Dex did the finances, so he knew John wasn’t taking it out of the company yet, but still. He couldn’t help a vague nagging worry that this entire enterprise that he’d put a lot of his uncredited (but well-paid) time into might eventually be snorted up his friend’s nose. And the cocaine made John untrustworthy for Kelsey’s secret too.

  So Dex didn’t confide in John. They sat in the editing room and polished three scenes together, and Dex said things like “Oh God—has that guy ever been in the same room with a naked girl before? That was your choice for our first het feature?” John would reply with things like “Nobody’s gonna be lookin’ at his tongue, Dex. I’m still obsessing about his wang!” and together they edited a porn film with unfamiliar parts. But not once did Dex tell John that maybe Scott needed to go, or that they were going to need to hire a new receptionist, and although he had the talk later, after Thanksgiving, it would bother him that he didn’t do it now. It would bother him a hell of a lot.

  What he did do was go home to his cozy little two-bedroom, which was now rife with scaly things, and look around in appreciation. There were remnants of pizza left on a plate with plastic wrap over it, and boxes neatly in the trash. Next to the plate (obviously meant for him) there was a list of things like decorations, invitations, eats, victims/volunteers, clear it with the shrink, and obviously some decent thinking toward the whole welcome home party for their troubled friend. The dishes were done, the recycling had been taken out to the outside can, and it looked like Kane had swept and vacuumed as well. Kane himself was on the couch watching an after-midnight episode of Law & Order, his cheek propped on his hand. His eyes were closed, and a very loud snoring rose and fell with his even breaths.

  His hair was a mess, like he’d been running his hand through it, and when his mouth—usually moving in speech or expression—was slack, the faint scarring of his harelip was visible. He never talked about it, but Dex thought he might have been self-conscious about it. When he smiled widely, sometimes he held his hand up to his mouth. Even seeing Kane still enough to make out the small rectangular shape made Dex feel privileged. So much of Kane was on the surface, worn on his sleeve, completely unselfconscious and without reserve. Seeing this one private part made Dex possessive.

  For a moment Dex just looked at him, feeling something warm and unfamiliar flooding his chest, stopping his breathing, making it hard to swallow. For someone who wasn’t gay, Kane sure did seem to take awful good care of Dex when Dex needed it most.

  Dex turned off the television and bent over the couch to kiss him on the cheek. “Kane?” he whispered. “Kane? C’mon. Let’s go sleep in a bed, okay?”

  Kane turned his head into Dex’s mouth, and Dex lost himself in the heat and the wet of Kane’s kiss, and then Kane pulled away and squinted at him.

  “It’s hella late,” he muttered. “I want to jump you, but you’d probably rather go to bed.”

  Dex made a positive sound, affirming that, and then stood and offered Kane his hand. Kane took it and swung a friendly, supportive arm around Dex’s shoulder as they walked down the hall, turning off lights as they went.

  They climbed into bed in their boxers, and Kane wrapped his arm around Dex’s stomach and just hauled him in, and Dex felt like he belonged there.

  “Anything interesting happen?” Kane mumbled.

  Dex, who thought they were just going to sleep, found the whole day pouring out, with Kelsey and Scott, with John and the coke, with crappy heterosexual porn and bitchy actresses and crying women and violent men. Kane woke up and asked questions and rubbed Dex’s chest and listened. Just listened to all of it, and at the end, when Dex was all talked out and it was almost two in the morning, Dex rolled over on his side to face Kane because he had to.

  Kane kissed him in the dark and swung a leg over Dex’s hips and mumbled, “We’ll fix it in the morning, sweetheart. You can’t save the world after 1:00 a.m. Not even you.”

  Dex felt tears starting then and squeezed them back. God. God. The things he felt. The things he wanted. The things he thought he could imagine having, if only this kid eight years his junior was actually gay.

  Kane

  KANE looked at Tommy helplessly, not really sure what to do. Tommy’s little house—which was painted gray and DayGlo orange on the outside, something that tickled Kane a lot, although Dex’s brown and lavender blue was starting to grow on him—was full of people whose one connection was Chase Summers. It wasn’t a bad connection as those things went. Chase knew guys from his baseball team and guys from Johnnies. Chase knew Donnie, and Tommy might want to strangle Donnie with his bare hands, but Kane liked him. Donnie was nice—always frickin’ nice—and Kane could get behind that. And, of course, Kevin, Chase’s other friend from high school, was just good people. Kane and Kevin could play video games for hours, and unlike Tommy, who made him feel stupid with his snarling sarcasm, or Chase, who was unnerving because he was always so quiet, Kevin was just…

  Just like Kane. His entire soul was in his smile.

  Now Kane looked at Tommy, who was picking at some carrots on his little paper plate (Kane had picked the plates out—they had turtles on them, and since Tommy had turtles too, it seemed like a good choice) and wished he could make his way to where Kevin stood next to Donnie and his impossibly beautiful sister. It would be an easier conversation.

  “His girlfriend’s pregnant?”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” Tommy snapped, and Kane winced because they’d worked too hard for the “ex” to happen, oh yes, and he needed to remember the ex.

  “His ex-girlfriend is pregnant?” Kane rephrased, his voice small. He looked around the kitchen for Dex, but Dex was talking to Donnie, and Kane wished, suddenly, fiercely, that they were a couple, and that he really was gay, so that he could say, “Gotta go talk to my better half,” and then walk over there and grab Dex’s hand and kiss his cheek and let Dex, who always seemed to have shit like this together, comfort him and tell him that their friends were going to be all right.

  “Yeah,” Tommy muttered, and then he smiled. “It’ll be awesome. We’re gonna be daddies.”

  Kane gaped at him. “You’re happy about this?” To make sure, right?

  “Yeah. Shit yeah. She doesn’t want the baby, ’cause she’s fuckin’ stupid, but I’m not holding that against her.” Tommy smiled with some satisfaction, and the expression was a little bit evil. On the porn set, it was sexy as hell, and even now it made Kane’s cock sit up and take notice. But Kane had learned a little since high school, and the unlimited sex on set had helped. He knew that his little fucker was hyper-fucking-active. If
he let it sit up and bark, that was fine, and he could always pet it when it wagged, but he was getting too old to let it off its leash when it didn’t need to be.

  Kane shouldn’t ask. He shouldn’t. But he had to. “Why’s she stupid?”

  Tommy’s scowl made Kane step back. “She should have seen it coming.” Tommy’s throat worked, and Kane’s mouth went dry. “She should have seen it coming. He was falling apart, and it was her watch. And instead of saying ‘Hey, baby, you seem fucking miserable!’ she sabotages the fucking condom, ’cause she thinks she’s going to lose her meal ticket.”

  Kane had met Mercy; she hadn’t seemed that bad. It was all, he thought wretchedly, part of being complicated. If you kept things simple—this person’s nice to me, this person’s a bitch—you didn’t have to get all mad about a girl who had maybe seen the same things in your man that you did.

  “Maybe she was just scared,” Kane said after a moment, and when Tommy looked at him this time, Kane remembered why Tommy was Dex’s best friend.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, his voice a little softer. “We can get down with that, right? Fuckin’ asshole scared us all.” Then Tommy brightened, and there was nothing evil or sexy about the smile at all. It was just all Tommy. “And you’re right. She’s giving us the baby if Chase agrees. I can fuckin’ love that woman—bring her flowers, give her face, what the hell ever—if I can hold Chase’s baby. It’ll be good.”

  Tommy was watching Chase from across the room as they spoke. He’d gone to talk to a short, chubby blonde woman who looked a lot like Donnie and was probably Donnie’s mom. They’d had a brief conversation, and now he was sort of wandering away down the hallway.

  “He’s tired,” Tommy murmured. “He’s still in recovery. His shrink”—and there he was, the shortish balding man with the bag of knitting and the homemade sweater-vest—“said that it’ll take him a little while before he gets his stamina back.” Suddenly Tommy’s quicksilver smile landed on Kane, and Kane felt like Tommy knew he was there, really there, for the first time since Tommy and Chase had walked through the door. “So, mostly, he’ll be a lot like you!”