Porn Star (16 page)

They both turn to look at me beamingly, and it’s so apparent now that I feel retroactively stupid for not having seen it before.  The woman looks exactly like Devi, but without the Persian coloring.  The same high cheekbones and pointed chin, the same heart-shaped faces with identical, beautiful smiles.

It’s Devi’s mom.

I stick out my hand.  “Logan O’Toole.  Nice to meet you.”

“Sue Jones-Daryani.  What brings you to Madam Psuka’s today?  And how come I haven’t seen you in over a week, Boombalee?  I miss you.”

“
Mom
,” Devi says, a little embarrassed.  “I’ve been busy.  And don’t call me that in public!”

“Boombalee?  Devi, I labored for twenty-seven hours with no medication to bring you into this world, and when you came out, you tore my—”

“Mom!” Devi looks seriously alarmed now.  “Can you
not
in front of my colleague?”

“My point is, I’ll call you whatever I want.”  Her gray eyes fall back to me and she softens.  “It’s nice to meet you, Logan.  Are you making pornography with my daughter?”

I can’t help but laugh.  “Yes, ma’am.  I am.”

“I’m glad to hear it.  You have very virile energy, you know.  I can feel the pulsing of your sacral chakra from here.”

“Uh...is that something I should get checked out by a doctor?”

Sue tuts at me in just the same way that Devi tutted at me earlier and reaches behind me, pressing her palm against the very top part of my ass.  Beside me, Devi makes the kind of groan someone would make if they were willing themselves to die, and when I look over, she’s got her face buried in her hands in mortification.  

I, however, am having a
great
time.

“Ms. Jones-Dayrani, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?” I tease as she gives my chakra a few extra pats for good measure.

“Young man, I’ve never had to seduce a single sexual partner in my life, and I’m certain that you’ve never needed to either.”

I give a modest half-shrug.

“Mom, can you please get your hand off Logan’s ass now?”

Sue sighs, as if her daughter is the biggest prude in the world.  “Devi, your sacral chakra, on the other hand, is completely blocked.  And
something’s
going on with your heart chakra.”  She frowns.  “We need to do some Reiki, or maybe you should see Dr. Tammaro for acupuncture.  But in the meantime, I recommend some meditation and maybe some vigorous sex to unblock that chakra.”

“I’d be happy to help your daughter with that, ma’am,” I chime in with a wide grin.

Devi’s hands are still on her face.  “Isn’t there like a midwifery conference or something that you need to be at?”

“Actually, your father and I have hot yoga class, so I should be off.  But you need to come over this week for dinner sometime.  We just got a whole box of manioc roots from our co-op and we’ll need help eating them all.”

“Okay,” Devi says with the exact level of excitement you’d expect from someone agreeing to eat manioc root.  “I’ll call you.”

Sue gives her a big hug, and then leans in to kiss my cheek.  “Honor her,” is the firm intonation she delivers in my ear, but the sternness is softened by the affectionate caress she gives my sacral chakra.  And then she opens the door and leaves the shop.

“I am
so sorry
,” Devi groans as she throws herself into a nearby chair.  “I knew about this place because my mother comes here, but I had no idea she would be in today, and I am so, so embarrassed right now.”

“Why?”  I don’t sit.  I stand in front of her and nudge her knees with my own.  “I thought she was great.  More than great; she’s awesome.  Just like you.”

Devi lifts her eyes to mine.  “Really?  You don’t hate me now that you’ve met my wack-a-doo mom?”

“The exact opposite.  The more I learn about you, the more I want to know.”   
The more I fall in love with you.

I don’t say that, obviously.

She bites her lip to keep from smiling too wide, and my pulse speeds up.  I’m suddenly and painfully aware of how her bare knees rub against my jeans, of the way the thin cotton bodice of her mini dress pulls away from her skin, revealing to an explicit degree how very much she is not wearing anything underneath.

I lean down.  The camera’s still dangling in her hand, the standby light blinking, but I ignore it and use my thumb and forefinger to guide her face up to mine.

She blinks those long, dark eyelashes once, twice, and then I bring my lips to hers.  She is all soft warmth, sunshine and cinnamon, and I breathe her in even as I kiss her, even as I dizzily wonder if this is how it happens for other people.  Do they eat wings and see psychics and have awkward run-ins with parents?  Do they spend days on random adventures, treasuring every single second spent in each other’s company?

This isn’t a fake date at all…
I realize.
This is a real date now.

“This is not a kissing parlor,” a brusque voice informs us.

We straighten up, and I turn around to see a woman with scratchy-looking blond hair and more beaded necklaces than I would have thought possible.  

“Madam Psuka?” Devi asks, standing up from the chair and straightening her clothes.  “Hi.  I’m Sue’s daughter.”

“Yes, I know who you are,” the medium says impatiently.  Her accent is of indiscriminate origin—definitely former Soviet Bloc—and when she waves her hand, I smell Aqua-Net and the kind of perfume that you buy from a grocery store.  

“We’re actually here for my friend Logan,” Devi explains.  “I wanted him to come get a reading.”

“What kind of reading?”

They’re both looking at me.  “I, uh, don’t know?”

Madam narrows her eyes at me.  “No palm reading today, I think.  No horoscope or rune stones.  You need tarot.  One card.”

Devi practically jumps up and down.  “Tarot’s my favorite!”

“This will be quick,” Madam says in a way I find weirdly ominous, and then she vanishes into her inner chamber and returns with a wicker basket filled with velvet bags.  “Pick deck,” she orders in that clipped accent of hers.

I pick a velvet bag at random, right there in the foyer, and then Madam nods, as if that’s the deck she expected me to pick all along.  There’s a glass counter in the corner with an ancient register on top and flyers for psychic fairs and New Age conferences pinned up on the walls all around, and she walks over there now, setting the bag down on top.

She pulls the cards out and indicates that I should come stand by her.

“Knock once, then shuffle with the question in your heart.  After that, hand the deck to me.”  She hands me the cards, and I glance over at Devi, who nods in encouragement, and I think,
why the hell not?
 I’m on this sort of accidentally real date with a girl I’m in love with, why not see where this takes me?

So I rap on the deck with my knuckles and then I pick the cards up to shuffle them.  They are larger than playing cards, but my hands are big enough to make it work.  (That’s what she said.)

As I shuffle, I get glimpses of the art on the cards, which seems to be comprised of lots and lots of naked people.  Fitting, I guess, but maybe a little too fitting, judging from Madam’s smirk as she notices me noticing the cards.

Just a coincidence.
 I don’t believe in this shit, and Devi doesn’t either.  Right?

“Think of it as focused meditation,” she says, as if she knows what I’m thinking.  “It will give you a new frame of reference for your question.”

Oh, shit.  The question.  I cast around for anything I want to ask, but actually my life is really solid right now.  Good money, steady work I enjoy.  Closure over Raven (if not over my dog.)  Really the only thing up in the air is Devi, and she’s not so much a question as a…

A what?  A hope?  A possibility?

I don’t know what to ask, so instead I just think of Devi.  I think of Devi and I think of
Star-Crossed
and I think of all the times I’ve felt that big, magic feeling with her.  And I hope the tarot deck can make sense of all that.

I finish shuffling and hand the deck to Madam Psuka, who briskly cuts the deck into three stacks.  “Point to pile.”

“Um…”

“She means that you need to pick a pile to go on top,” Devi whisper-explains.

I point to the center stack, and again Madam gives that nod, as if that’s what she expected all along.  She gathers up the deck, with the stack I picked on top, and then she slides the card off the top and with great flourish lays it on the counter.  

“
The Hanged Man
,” she announces dramatically, as if I’m supposed to know what that means.  I look over at Devi, but her face reveals nothing.

I don’t know much (or anything) about tarot cards, but a card called
The Hanged Man
doesn’t really imbue me with confidence.  I’d rather get a card called
The Frequently Fellated Man
or maybe
The Incredibly Wealthy and Amazingly Endowed Man.
 But I guess there’s no helping that now.  With a resigned sigh, I lean over to examine it.

It’s a beautiful but disturbing illustration of a naked man hanging upside down from a tree, ropes wrapped shibari-style around his body.  He hangs primarily by one leg, the other leg fastened in a bent position so that his left ankle is behind his right knee.  His arms are lashed behind his back, and rope crisscrosses his body in banded patterns, cutting into the firm muscles of his stomach and legs.

Most striking of all is his face.  If I were to be hanged upside down from a tree, I think I’d be considerably upset, but he seems to be enduring his fate quietly.  Pensively, even.  He stares straight ahead with a clear, almost curious, expression, and the corners of his mouth are tilted in what appears to be a small, knowing smirk, as if he knows something I don’t.

“He is at peace because he hung himself from the tree,” Madam Psuka tells me, her voice startling me upright.  “He chose this path.  Like Odin or Dionysus, he has sacrificed himself for greater cause.”

“I don’t have any great causes in my life,” I point out. “Certainly not any that would require me to hang from a tree.”

Madam Psuka briefly shuts her eyes, as if my ignorance pains her.  “Is metaphor,” she says, a little defensively, her accent thickening.  “Is not literal.”

“So I have to
metaphorically
hang myself from a tree?”

She taps the card.  “This card means that you are coming to time of great choice.  You will be asked to sacrifice something intensely personal and important.”

Hmm.  I don’t like the way that sounds at all.  “Do I at least get something awesome in return?”

Madam Psuka gives me a shrug that is so very, very European.  “Who can say?  Is not job of
The Hanged Man
to know.  He knows only that he must have faith.  But he also knows that he may perish instead, without having gained anything at all.”

All this talk of perishing and sacrifice and death is a bit of a boner-killer.  I turn to glare at Devi.  “You told me this would be fun!”

“I said no such thing!” she exclaims.  “I only said it was my favorite.”

“Getting creepy cards is your favorite?”

“They’re not all creepy,” she says, jutting her lower lip out in a way that makes me want to bite it.  “They just reflect different stages of a journey. That’s all.”

“She is right,” Madam affirms.  “This card is not meant to frighten.  If you are disturbed, it’s only because you sense—deep down—is truth.  Here,” she says abruptly, pushing the card across the counter.  “You must take this with you.  It belongs in your care now.”

The pain and sacrifice card?  No thanks.  “That’s kind, Madam, but I—”

Devi elbows me, and I realize that I should shut up.  “How much do we owe you for the reading?” she asks sweetly.

Madam looks me over.  “Nothing,” she pronounces, her
g
sounding like a
k
.  “Is favor for Sue.”

“Thank you,” Devi says, giving Madam Psuka a hug.  “Come on, Logan.”

Madam Psuka picks up the card and holds it out to me.  There’s no way to refuse it without looking rude, so I grudgingly take it from her fingers.

“Sacrifice is just another word for change,” she tells me, her thick brows drawn together.  “Change that requires letting go.”

I give her a nod and then I let Devi tug me back into the blinding sunlight outside.

“
S
o you never told me
where we’re going for the blowjob,” Devi says a few hours later.  With Madam Psuka’s card jammed in my back pocket, we walked all over the boardwalk, eating shaved ice and hot dogs and cotton candy, and watching the street artists.  Then Devi led me down to the beach and we walked ankle-deep in the surf, gossiping about the porn people we knew and speculating about what would happen in the next couple of years with our industry.  And then we made our way to my car, where we are now, heading back into the city.

I look over at Devi.  As usual, she has the window cracked, the hot wind ruffling her hair.  For a brief, tiny moment, I panic that the tarot card Madam drew for me might mean that Devi and I can’t make it, or won’t make it, for some important but unseeable reason, and my veins are flooded with an anxious adrenaline.

It’s not real,
I tell myself.  
It’s not real.

But what if it is?  What if this is some sort of sign that Devi doesn’t love me back? Or that I’ll have to give her up?

It’s not real.

Despite my mental pep talk, anxiety coats my voice when I say, “It’s a surprise where we’re going.”

She hears the change in my voice and turns her head to stare at me.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.  Fine.”

“Okay,” she says gently, letting me have my space without the slightest hint of resentment, and then I feel bad for shutting her out.

I take a breath, and then confess.  “That tarot card is a little disturbing, don’t you think?”

She laughs.  “Is that really what you’re thinking about right now, Mr. This Stuff Is So Silly?”

“Well, it’s hard to think it’s silly with all the death imagery,” I say, a bit grumpily.

“
The Hanged Man
isn’t dead, he’s suffering.  There’s a difference.”

“Well, that cheers me right up.  Thank you.”

“But in the end, he sees the world completely differently.  Sometimes perspective is painful.”

“You know, maybe you should also be fired from the fortune cookie factory.”

She puts a hand on my thigh, her fingers warm and slender, and I relax under her touch.  “It’s not divination, Logan.  It’s not prophecy.  It’s just something to think about.”

Sigh.  “Sure, Cass.”

“I think I know what would cheer you up.”

“What’s that?” I ask, but then her seat belt is unbuckled and she’s kneeling on her seat and leaning into me, her lips against my neck.  And then she’s sucking, soft and wet, sending shivers down my spine and straight to my balls, which start feeling heavy and constrained in my jeans.  I want to slide my hand up her thighs and see what else is soft and wet, but my stupid car is a manual transmission, and the thick L.A. traffic means I’m constantly shifting between gears as I slow down and speed up.

“This isn’t fair,” I murmur.  “I can’t touch you back.”

“Mmm, good,” she croons into my ear.  “I get to be the one in control.”

“Don’t say that stuff to me, Cass, or we may not make it to our destination.”

She doesn’t respond, just keeps kissing and licking all around my neck and earlobe and jaw, and it’s only by the grace of God that I don’t crash the car.  As it is, I still arrive at our filming spot with a hard-on straining the seams of my jeans.  I can barely focus enough to get the car parked and turned off.

“Where are we?” Devi asks, finally relenting with the necking and peering out the windshield.  We’re outside a small mural-covered warehouse near the river, with the skyline towering in the background, shimmering in the evening heat.

My skin dies a little when she pulls away, but it’s probably necessary unless I want to walk in there with a giant erection tenting my jeans.  “It’s an art gallery, a new one.  They’re doing an exhibit I thought you might like.”  I’m a little shy when I say this, mostly because I’m worried she’ll think it’s lame, and I want to impress her, dammit, and not just with my ability to make her come in under two minutes.  “The gallery owner let me rent it for the night, so after it closes to the public at nine, it’s all ours until morning.”

Her face splits into a huge smile.  “That sounds amazing.  Porn in an art gallery?”

“Yeah, I’d like to say that I have this meta vision for juxtaposing high art and low art, but really it’s because I thought the exhibit was something you’d like, plus it was cheap to rent.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” she says with a wink, and then gets out of the car.  I get out too, grab our bag, and walk to the front door to open it for her, catching a glimpse of the inside through the glass as I do.

It’s still eight o’clock, meaning that the gallery is open, and to my dismay, I see that there’s some sort of reception going on, so the space is crowded with people drinking free wine and milling around.  I was hoping to get some shots of Devi walking around the exhibit, since I got permission from both the owner and the artist to use it as a backdrop, but filming her will be difficult with a bunch of randos walking into my shot and needing releases or whatever.

I quickly decide it’s okay, and that I can always film her later.  I’m too excited for her to see it to wait any longer.  I open the door all the way, unleashing the normal gallery onslaught of music and voices.  I gesture for Devi to walk in and she does.

I follow her in, admiring the way her ass moves under her dress as I do.  Rich orchestral music reverberates throughout the space, deep strings and discordant piano keys, and I see the exact moment that Devi realizes what the exhibit is, understands why I thought she’d like it.

“Logan,” she breathes, reaching for my hand without taking her eyes off the display in front of us.  “This is...you...I can’t believe…”  She finally stops trying to put her feelings into words and simply squeezes my hand, overcome.  My heart soars so far above the ground that I’m certain it’s reached lunar orbit.  

If this is all it takes to make her so happy, then I’m taking her to an art gallery every day.

The exhibit is called
Zodiactive
and is laid out in a large circle.  All throughout the gallery, tiny light bulbs of various brightness are arranged, in a manner that looks completely random and discombobulated to me, but that I know from the gallery’s website is designed to mimic the constellations visible from Los Angeles at this time of year.  The bulbs are strung up high, but also line the walls, creating the dazzling effect of being surrounded by stars.  Gauzy strips of fabric in deep lavenders and pinks hang from the ceiling, wafting with the movement of the guests, the ephemeral panels representing nebulas and gas clouds.  And punctuating the gallery space at regular intervals are huge, magnificent paintings, each one representing a sign of the zodiac, with more light bulbs studding the canvas to show where the actual stars are in each constellation.

The artist in me appreciates the effect of the light and the color and the spacey music, but the Logan in me, who doesn’t know shit about the zodiac or the constellations they come from, is deeply bored.  So instead, I turn all of my attention to Devi, watching her eager eyes drink everything in, watching the way her lips move as she murmurs quiet things to herself that I can’t quite catch.  We make our way around the circle, stopping every three feet for Devi to examine the light bulbs and declare which constellations they are supposed to be, and once for me to grab a couple cups of free wine.

At one point, she stops and slowly spins around, as if lost.  “It’s like being
in
the sky,” she tells me with excitement in her voice.  “It’s easy to forget that the sky isn’t flat, that the stars are actually light years apart.  But it doesn’t feel cold or distant at all when rendered this way.  It feels intimate.”

I lift my hand and gently sweep some hair out of her eyes.  She pauses and looks at me, our eyes meeting, and it’s as if every atom in my body is thrumming with electricity.  There’s something about her, some indefinable
thing
, that supersedes her lovely face and sexy-as-hell body and even her top-notch brain.  It’s strange, because even at the height of my relationship with Raven, I could list logically all the reasons I enjoyed being with her—namely sex and shared interests—and loving her was more of a sustained choice than a feeling.  But with Devi, it’s more than a choice
or
a feeling—it’s fact, just as much a universal fact as gravity, or the speed of light.

Because with Devi, it’s different.  It’s like there’s something beyond the quantifiable, easy-to-name reasons she affects me.  My pull to her is something above the sexual, above the intellectual, and maybe even above the emotional, and all of a sudden, I feel myself at the edge of a vast abyss.  My stomach drops as I continue looking into those dark gold eyes, because what I feel for Devi is a thousand times stronger than anything I’ve ever felt, even after three years with Raven, and I’m scared.  I’m scared by the intensity of my own feelings, and I’m scared that she doesn’t feel the same way.  I’m scared that this speed of light feeling is going to blast a hole right through me, and I’ll be left gutted in a way that Raven never could have gutted me.

It’s this fear that makes me swallow and look away.  “Do you want more wine?” I ask Devi, even though I know she’s barely touched the wine she already has.

“No, I’m good.”  She puts a hand on my wrist.  “Logan, this is more than I could have ever expected.  
This
is the best fake date I’ve ever been on.”

Her words prick into me like needles.  

Fake date.

Right.  Because now we’re on location.  But then why can’t it also be real?  Why can’t something be real
and
planned?  Real
and
recorded?  Why can’t it be both?

I can’t help myself, I say the words pressing against the inside of my lips begging to be let out.  “It’s not a fake date, Devi.  Yes, we’re recording what happens later, but it’s real.”  I plead with her with my eyes.  “I want us...I mean—I want there to be an
us
.  I want to take you on actual dates.  I want this to be a real date.”

Her lips are parted ever so slightly, and they tremble now as she searches for a response, and oh my God, I am going to devour her mouth if I watch it any longer.  With a quick glance around us, I grab her hand and pull her in between two of the zodiac canvases, and suddenly the noise dims a little and we are by ourselves, sandwiched between canvas and exposed brick.  I lead her a little farther around the outer edge of the exhibit, until we’re near the back of the gallery space.  Here, the narrow gaps between the canvases are covered with a cluster of gauzy fabric panels and the comparative dearth of lights in this corner gives an extra shroud of shadows.  In other words, though only a few inches of fabric, canvas and paint separate us from the other people in the gallery, it won’t be easy to be seen, unless somebody took the trouble to look at the six-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of the canvas, but I honestly doubt that will happen.

Once we’re sufficiently hidden, I take her cup of wine and set it down a nearby ledge with mine, and drop my bag to the floor.  Devi looks like she’s used this interval to compose herself somewhat.  

“It can’t be a real date if we’re filming it,” she says, her chin rising slightly.  “This is amazing, Logan, don’t get me wrong.  No man has ever done anything like this with me.  But once we turn on the camera, it’s different.  You have to see that.  Even if it’s not solely performative, it can’t be completely genuine.”

I’m already shaking my head.  “I don’t think there has to be barrier between art and life.  I don’t think capturing a moment makes it any less authentic.”

She gives me a sad smile.  “But when that moment’s being captured to make money?  When that moment is being made for sale?  How can that not retroactively affect the moment itself?”

A tiny voice inside of me wonders if she has a point, but I push it aside.  I want to prove to her that we can have it all—the realness and the camera—and that all it takes is a shift in perspective.  After all, wasn’t that what she was trying to explain to me about
The Hanged Man
?  Perspective?

I step closer to her.  “Will you let me try to convince you?”

“Convince me of what?”

I lean forward and brace myself against the wall with my forearms, caging her between the wall and me.  “Let me turn on the camera,” I say, using the tip of my nose to trace the line of her jaw.  She shudders and goose bumps erupt everywhere on her skin.  “Let me film us doing our thing tonight and show you how real it can be.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want to film,” she says.  I take her earlobe between my teeth and she lets out a soft groan.  “I just…”

“I know what you’re saying,” I breathe into her ear.  “And what I’m saying is I want you to be open to the idea of it feeling real.  I want you to forget about the camera while I’m touching you.”

“I can’t,” she protests faintly.

“I think you can.  At least let me try to help you?”

She sighs, half resignation, half pleasure because my mouth is now on her neck.  “Okay,” she relents.  “I’ll try to forget about the camera tonight.”

I give her neck one last nip and then straighten up, reaching for my bag.

“Wait,
now
?” she asks, sounding horrified.  “While there’re still people here?”

I give her an evil grin.  “Are you being modest, Devi Dare?”

“There’s a difference between modest and law-abiding,” she shoots back.

Undeterred, I dig out the camera and turn it on, setting it on the ledge so it’s aimed at our corner.  While I adjust the settings to compensate for the dim light, Devi lists off all the reasons it’s a bad idea to film right now.  

“We could get caught.  We could get thrown out.  We could get arrested.  They’ll find out you didn’t have the right permits and you could get fined.  Even Vida could get in trouble.”

Satisfied that the camera is set up well, I walk towards her and slowly back her into the wall.  Her voice falters and her words trail off as my stomach touches hers, and then she gasps as my hips move forward and I press my growing erection into her.