Porn Star (13 page)

It’s possible that I’m making it all up, that I’m seeing things that aren’t there. But the camera’s off. That look on his face is genuine, and I know that expression. It’s the same one that met me in the mirror when I got ready tonight.

I settle back into my seat, and with my elbow propped on the door, I chew on my knuckle and try to dissect the strange discontentment that has crept over me. Yes, I like the guy. There’s no dancing around that fact. But what’s going on with
him
? Why is he pushing me away when his body language and his body parts are telling me he wants, wants, wants?

Is it me? Is it my age? Is he still hung up on his ex? Has the industry jaded him against relationships in general?

The truth is, I don’t know him well enough to begin to form any real answer. What I do know is that no matter how real this chemistry is between us, he’s a closed set. No matter what he reveals on camera, he’s not letting me in any further than that.

“Star-crossed,” I say, breaking the silence that’s stretched between us. “I think that’s what you should call the show.”

“Star-crossed?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s good. I like it.”

I don’t have to wonder why he accepts my suggestion so readily. I’m sure it’s because he realizes as well as I do how fitting of a title it is to describe us—two lovers never meant to be together who meet occasionally in the night.

D
evi’s
quiet when we approach her apartment, and I’m not sure what to say.  I’m not sure I
can
say anything, because I’m still hard as a rock, and every time I breathe, I breathe in the smell of her.  It lingers everywhere—my hands, her thighs, my lips—and it’s driving me fucking crazy.  When she reached for me earlier, her hands fumbling eagerly with my zipper, I had almost climaxed right then and there.  I may be a man renowned for his control, and my scenes usually highlight this about me, but with Devi, I have nothing.  
Nothing
.  No shred of patience or restraint, and going down on her on the hood of my Mustang had already driven me into a fucking frenzy.  (Because what man doesn’t fantasize about that at some point—a beautiful woman spread open on the hood of a muscle car, cunt exposed, hair like tousled cascades on the sleek metal?)

And fuck if getting caught hadn’t made me harder, sent my mind spiraling into the filthiest, most depraved fantasies possible—watching Devi try to “convince” the officers to let us go, first with her mouth and then with her pussy, the kind of fantasies I would never admit to anyone else.  And then we got on the highway and she dove for my dick like a madwoman, and I hope God was watching what a fucking gentleman I was, because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life to push her away.

Except now I’m in her driveway saying goodbye and I’m throbbing with misery and I can tell she’s a little hurt, and shit.  Why did I push her away?

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 it is she’s going to say.

“Why wouldn’t you let me blow you in the car?” 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.