by Frost, E J
As we step out of the elevator, we bump into Glory, who’s just locking Rick’s front door behind her.
“Mail’s in the kitchen,” Glory tells Rick, stepping into the elevator. She puts a heavily be-ringed hand on the elevator door to hold it while she conducts a rapid-fire conversation with Rick. She’s a gorgeous woman with generous curves, piles of golden-brown curls, and huge, brown eyes accented with thick, black liner, but she dresses like a Jersey housewife, and not the sexy ones on telly. I swear she’s wearing a muumuu, although it’s hard to tell under all the heavy, gold jewelry she’s draped in.
She gives Rick a kiss that seems to involve more tongue than I’d expect from his manager and blows a kiss at me before she takes her hand off the door and lets the elevator whisk her downstairs. In the muumuu-ed whirlwind’s wake, Rick shakes his head. “I have no fucking clue what I’d do without her, and even less of a clue what she just said.”
I chuckle. “Can’t help you there.”
Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention, since their conversation seemed to concern Rick’s business and not the troll attack. It’s not that I have a one-track mind. Emily says I multi-task very well, for a man, which I’m pretty sure is a feminist dig but she says it with such a straight face I can’t paddle her for it. It’s that I don’t really care about the ins and outs of the porn business.
I follow Rick into his apartment. He immediately turns the fake air up to aggressive levels, which brings out goose bumps on my arms. Fortunately, I haven’t worked up enough of a sweat to get chilled, but I wish I’d brought a hoodie.
Rick leads me into his living room, where his laptop is open on the coffee table. I plop down on the couch across from him and pull a Moleskine notebook and a pen out of my gym bag.
“High tech,” Rick scoffs.
“Paper and pen work just fine and they don’t leave a data trail that some bastard can hack,” I tell him. “At this point, you might prefer a little privacy.”
“Yeah,” Rick says. “About that. I don’t want this going any further. You’ll understand when I show you, but you can’t tell Emily about this. I don’t want her knowing.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, man. Not a word to her. I know I gave you a waiver for her, but not for this.”
“I got it, Rick. If you don’t want Emily to know, I won’t tell her.” I’m not going to argue with him.
“Sorry, man, but you’ll understand . . . yeah, lemme just show you.”
He opens his laptop and pulls up a webpage he’s bookmarked. It’s titled, “The Truth About Rick Errol,” with a candid shot of Rick’s face. As I scroll down, I find some of the stills and clips Rick was talking about it, and no, they’re not nice, but if someone took pictures of me playing with Emily, they’d probably look similar. Except that watersports are a hard limit for Emily; they’re clearly not for Rick. But I don’t see anything worse than kinky porn, until I get to a long blog post.
“The Night Rick Errol Raped Me,” by EvonneBringsTheTruth.
I read through the post slowly, forcing myself to take in the details. When I finish, I put my hand over my mouth to keep from puking, and draw deep breaths in through my nose until I’ve got my gut under control.
“Any of this true?” I ask.
It had better not be, or Rick and I are done. I don’t care how long I’ve known him, how much he’s paid me, or how much I need money right now. If he had non-consensual sex with this woman, we’re finished.
Rick slumps into a chair across from the couch where I’m sitting and pushes his hands through his hair. “Don’t you watch Law and Order or any of those shows, man? You’re not supposed to ask if the accused did it.”
“Fuck that, Rick. I’m not a fucking lawyer. I’m your friend, and I’m a Dom. You’ve known me long enough to know there’s nothing more important to me than consent. Did you rape her?”
He shakes his head, but he doesn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How can you not know?”
“It didn’t happen like that. Like she says. Some of the stuff, it didn’t happen that way. I mean, not that I remember.”
“Not that you remember?”
“It was a party, man. On Fire Island. Last Fourth of July. I had a few.” He pushes his hands through his hair again. “Okay, more than a few. I shouldn’t have been playing. Mea culpa, okay?”
He’s going to be mea culpa-ing to the tune of six zeros and a felony rape conviction if this actually happened.
“Okay. You were drunk—”
“No, not drunk. I mean, I wasn’t sober, but I wasn’t anywhere near drunk. I’d gone off with another girl and gotten a blowie and that took the edge off. I still shouldn’t have been playing but I wasn’t anywhere close to drunk.”
“Right. How much of it did you remember the next day?”
“All of it. It left a bad taste in my mouth.”
If it went down anywhere close to the way EvonneBringsTheTruth says it did, I can see why. It’s leaving a bad fucking taste in my mouth, just reading about it.
“What do you remember?”
“There were these two girls hanging out near the bar at the house. I started flirting with them, and I know that makes me a hound after I’d just been with another girl. Sue me. It was a party. Neither of them was called Evonne or anything like that. I think one was called Laura. I don’t remember the other one’s name. She just wanted to watch, not get fucked, so I wasn’t paying much attention to her. There was a guy, too. He said he was a friend of theirs and his name was Damon. I remember because the girl who didn’t want to be fucked kept calling him ‘Big D,’ which I thought was funny ’cause he had kind of a small dick.”
“Uh-huh.” I make a note of the name. “Small D. Then what?”
“We were talking and flirting, and they started asking about my movies. What was real and what wasn’t. Was I really that mean and did I really fuck that hard, and I said only for money. So, they offered me a hundred dollars to make a porno with Damon and Laura.”
“You didn’t run in the other direction? What if one of them had been an undercover cop, Rick?”
“I know. It was stupid, but I wasn’t thinking about any of that. We were joking around and laughing and shit.”
Okay, terminally bad judgment, but nothing I’ve heard so far makes him a rapist. And EvonneBringsTheTruth didn’t mention any of this. She made it sound like Rick picked her up at a party, forced her into a room, offered her money to fuck, and when she refused, beat her with his belt and raped her.
“What happened? Did you negotiate at all? Agree on a safe word?”
“No, not really. Laura’s friend asked if the girls in my films have safe words, and I said sometimes if we’re doing extreme shit, but most of the time, no, because the films are scripted. They were asking about the most extreme shit I’d ever done, and I told them about the piercing scenes.”
I press my fingertips to my forehead, rubbing the scar that runs up from my eyebrow into my hair. “Please tell me you did not agree to blood play with a girl you didn’t know and no fucking safe word.”
“No, of course not, you shithead. I said I’d belt Laura and spit-roast her. You know what that is?”
“Yeah, a guy at each end.”
It’s not a term I’d ever use, though.
“Right. Laura’s friend said she wanted to be really pounded in the ass while she choked on a cock. Fucked so hard she split.”
“You agreed to that? With a girl you didn’t know? With no tests? She could have been drunk or drugged or coerced or any fucking thing, Rick. And who knows what she could have given you? Please tell me you at least used condoms.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “You don’t have to tell me how stupid I was, okay? I got worked up, and Laura had a hot fucking body and I’d had too many. Yeah, I was fucking stupid.”
Monumentally fucking stupid.
“Did you use a condom?”
“No.” He
throws his arms up. “I said I was stupid.”
Stupid enough that I should tattoo “DNA evidence” across his forehead.
“Okay, right, what happened next?” I ask. “She says you dragged her into a bedroom with your belt around her throat.”
“It didn’t happen like that. Yeah, my belt was around her throat for some of it, but not until later and I didn’t put it there. The four of us walked into a bedroom. I belted her maybe a dozen times, but she fucking asked for that. She was fine. Her reactions were fine, breathing, color, everything. She wasn’t in any kind of distress. Yeah, I gave her some marks and I shouldn’t have, but she never said ‘no’ or told me to stop. She looked like she was in fucking heaven, writhing and moaning. I figured she was a pain-slut.”
As I’m trying to get my head around the idiocy of doing any kind of scene with a pain-slut he didn’t know, without any negotiations, without a safe word, and without a bloody condom, he says, “Small D put my belt around her throat while we were spit-roasting her. I told him to ease off a couple of times because I could feel her going limp. But she was coming every five minutes, man. She was screaming and cursing when she came, but she never, ever told us to stop.”
If she had a cock down her throat, I’m not clear on how she could have, but it does sound like Rick was alert to signs of distress. “After that?”
Rick rubs his hands over his face. “Okay, it got a little crazy after that, I admit. I was getting close and yeah, I was smacking her ass and pulling her hair and I’m sure I left her pretty fucking battered. She was screaming plenty but I’m telling you, she was loving every minute.”
Not according to her, but she didn’t detail any of this. “Then what?”
“Her bitch friend kept yelling at me to fuck her ass and she was going to film it on her phone.”
“Did you?”
“No. It looked like she’d never had a finger up there much less a cock, and you can think I’m a selfish motherfucker all you want, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to open her up and I’ve never split anybody and I wasn’t starting with this girl. Next thing I know, her friend is throwing twenties all over the place, yelling that she’ll pay me if I fucked Laura’s ass, but like I said, I was close, so I pulled out and jacked off all over the damn money instead.”
“That’s the picture where she says you tried to pay her and when she wouldn’t take your money, you did it anyway.”
“Yeah. It wasn’t my money, man. I do not need to pay for sex.”
That, I believe.
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. Everyone was yelling and I’d gotten my fucking rocks off and the gin was giving me a headache and I stopped giving a shit. I sat down on the bed with my back to them and the next thing I know, Laura’s jumping on my back and hitting me and screaming about what a lousy fucking lay I was.”
“What did you do?”
“I pushed her off me.” He leans forward and puts his head in his hands. “Okay, that’s not the truth. Look, I’m not proud of it, man. I slapped her. Her face, I mean. I felt bad about it as soon as I did it, but she’d gotten off a million times and then she’s all up in my shit about how I’m a fucking porn star and I didn’t make it good for her. It pissed me off, and no, I wouldn’t have hit her if I hadn’t been drinking, but I was, and, shit. Yeah, I shouldn’t have done it.”
“What happened?”
“She landed on the floor and lay there looking up at me, crying and holding her cheek. I got up and left. Went home. Felt like shit.”
“She never told you ‘no.’ Never said ‘stop’ or ‘red’ or anything like that?”
“I swear to you, not once. I’m a fucking idiot, but I’m not a monster. If she’d told me to stop, I’d have stopped. If she’d said ‘no’ to something, I’d have done something else. I know how to get a woman off, man. I didn’t need to do any of the things we did. I did them because she was just as fucking into everything as I was.”
That has the ring of truth, too.
“She went willingly into the bedroom with you? You didn’t carry her? Drag her? Push her?”
“Absolutely not. Yeah, we’d all been drinking, and we were kissing and shit, but I didn’t even know where we were going. Her fucking friend led us in.”
“Where did you get the blow job?”
“Down by the pool. I know, not classy, but we weren’t the only ones.”
“Girl who gave you the blow job, did you know her? Did she stick around? Did you see her again afterwards?”
“No, no, and no. She was just some girl I was flirting with. We were hanging out by the pool and the next thing I know she’s got her tits out and she’s sliding down the pool chair I’m sitting on with this big fucking grin on her face. She went for a swim afterwards. I went back up into the house to get another gin and tonic. I didn’t see her again. I didn’t get her name or number.”
I keep my head down and make notes so Rick doesn’t see my thoughts on my face. I’ve had sex with over five hundred partners, mostly women but a few men, too. The vast majority of those experiences were casual; many were just one night. But I always knew their names. I always got their numbers. If we did a scene together, I called them the next day to make sure they were okay, even if I didn’t intend to see them again. Other than a couple of games involving glory holes, I’ve never had my dick in anyone whose name I didn’t know and it really bothers me that Rick seems to make a fucking habit of it.
I tap my pen on my notepad until I can come up with a question that doesn’t sound judgmental. “The party, was it a play party or vanilla?”
“I don’t know. Kind of neither. There were some players there that I know from the clubs, but there weren’t any toys or equipment. It wasn’t advertised as a play party. There was plenty of public sex going on, though. People humping behind every bush and on every couch. There was even a couple going at it on the pool slide.”
Sounds like Rick’s kind of party.
“Do you know who threw the party? The hosts?”
“Yeah. I’ve met them a few times. Terri, she did some films, probably ten years ago. She still knows a lot of the producers and crew. I’m not sure what her partner does, but I think he’s in finance. They joke a lot about the guy’s finance friends not knowing they’ve had a porn star over for dinner.”
I push my notebook and pen across the coffee table at him. “I need a list of everyone you can remember at the party. Full names. Addresses if you know them. Everyone you can remember, Rick.”
“Fuck, that’ll take hours, man. I don’t know off the top of my head where half of them live. I’m going to have to call Glory.”
“Then call her. This isn’t going away, Rick. That’s a public allegation of solicitation, assault with a weapon, and rape. Even if I can get my IT guy to take that website down, it will be cached somewhere. An enterprising NYPD detective comes across that while Googling your name and you’ve got a felony investigation to add to your internet woes. Statute on rape is a long fucking time. You do not want this to come back to haunt you ten years from now.”
Rick leans back in his chair and rubs his temples with his palms. “Fuck, man.”
“No kidding. You can’t remember anything about this girl other than the name Laura?”
Rick shrugs. “I honestly don’t remember what she looked like except that I remember when she was sitting on the floor looking at me, her hair had fallen to one side and I could see that the sides were shaved. Like the hot chick in Hunger Games.”
I don’t remember a hot chick in Hunger Games other than Jennifer Lawrence, who was a little too butch for me. I’ll have to ask Emily, whose knowledge of movies is truly encyclopedic.
Then I remember I can’t mention any of this to Emily. Damn.
“What color?”
“Dark red.”
“Long or short?”
Another shrug. “Long, I guess. I could grab a good handful. I wasn’t taking fucking fashion notes, man. She had
a great body and a pretty face and she wanted to fuck. I didn’t rape her, no matter what she says.”
“Then why’d you tell me at the beginning you didn’t know if you did or not?”
“I don’t know. I guess talking it through clarified it in my head. You kept asking me if she said ‘no’ or ‘stop’ or anything and she never did. I’m telling you, man, she was totally psyched with everything until the end. I shouldn’t have slapped her, but I already told you that.”
Clarified it, or hardened a hazy recollection? I’m not sure. Yes, a couple of things he said sounded right, and nothing hit as a lie, but I have to wonder if the truth isn’t somewhere between EvonneBringsTheTruth’s version and Rick’s. There’s enough of a question in my mind that I’m not walking away from him, yet, but I’m still not far off.
“Okay. Email me that list.” I take my pad and pen back. “I’ll get my IT guy on the case. Whatever Glory says, Rick, I can’t believe this is good publicity. Has there been any other blow-back from the community other than Daisy canceling on you?”
Rick shrugs, but he’s frowning. “A couple of emails. Guy from Slinky Sirens wants me to lay low for the release we got next week. No interviews or clips on my site the way I usually would. Whatever, he’s a tool.”
A tool who sensibly wants to avoid getting drawn into Rick’s shitstorm.
“Okay. If you get anything else, forward it to me and I’ll work on damage control. Priority is to track down this EvonneBringsTheTruth. I’m not trying to be an asshole, Rick, but you’re probably looking at a six-figure pay off.”
“Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say.” He pushes his hands through his hair again. “Six-figures for a slap across the face.” He shakes his head. “Whatever.”
If I believed it was just a slap across the face, I wouldn’t even be advocating tracking the girl down. But I don’t, and whatever Rick is telling himself to make himself feel better, I don’t believe he does either.
“She hasn’t contacted you directly and asked for money?”
Rick shakes his head. “Hasn’t contacted me at all. Just splashed this shit all over the web.”
