The Princess and the Porn Star (6 page)

When I reached the register, I said, “Grande iced latte, please. And a cheese Danish.”

“Grande iced latte.” She wrote my order on the side of the cup and handed it off to the other barista. Then she pulled the Danish out of the case, set it on a plate and slid it toward me. “That’ll be seven twenty-five.”

I opened my wallet and pulled out a ten. As I paid for my order, the other two baristas eyed Olivia.

“I really think it’s her,” one whispered.

“No way.” The other snorted derisively. “She looks way too put-together. Olivia Taylor’s a hot mess.”

The first shrugged. “Maybe she’s gotten herself back on track.”

“Yeah right,” said the barista at the register. She rolled her eyes. As she handed me my change, she said to me, “Kind of hard to un-wreck a train, right?”

I gritted my teeth but didn’t say anything.

“Sad, wasn’t it?” the first barista said. “Poor girl.”

“Pathetic is more like it.” The cashier slammed the cash drawer emphatically. “How do people do that, anyway? Have the world at your feet and then piss it away like that?” She sighed as she dug some quarters and a couple of ones out of the drawer. “Bet she wouldn’t have taken a career like that for granted if she’d ever worked in a place like this.”

Clicking her tongue, the first shook her head. “What a shame.”

“It
is
a shame.” I took my coffee and plate and quietly added, “Can’t think of a much bigger shame than someone trying to recover from a breakdown like that in front of a world full of armchair experts.”

I didn’t wait for a reaction. Coffee in one hand, plate in the other, I got the hell away from the counter and made my way to the table where Rachel sat. I rolled my shoulders to shrug away the annoyance and smiled as I approached.

“Hey,” I said as I pulled up a seat. “How’s your foot?”

“Much better.” She smiled back. “Comfortable shoes and a shot of cortisone make a world of difference.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. Are you going to be okay for tomorrow’s shoot?”

She tapped the rim of her coffee cup with her fingertips. “Guess we’ll see. As long as I don’t fall and break my neck, I should be all right.”

“Yeah, don’t do that.”

Rachel laughed softly. “I won’t. The last thing I need is someone having to break the news to my mother that I fell, broke my neck and bit the dust while I was on-set with a porn star.”

I laughed. “Well, hopefully they’d be more tactful than that…”

She snickered. “Hopefully.” She sipped her coffee. As she set the cup down again, she said, “Mind if I ask you something? Out of curiosity?”

“Why do I work in porn?”

She laughed. “How did you know?”

I grinned. “Everyone asks sooner or later.”

“I could’ve been asking if you liked dogs.”

“Were you?”

She giggled and shook her head. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.”

“So, why
do
you work in porn?”

“Why not?” I shrugged. She opened her mouth to speak but didn’t seem to know what else to say. I laughed again and idly picked at my Danish. “It wasn’t what I planned to do when I moved here, if that’s what you mean.”

She leaned forward, resting one of her forearms on the edge of the table. “What did you plan to do?”

“Act.” I laughed and played with the straw in my drink. “Who doesn’t, right? Everyone comes here to get into the entertainment business.”

“Very true,” she said. “So, what kind of actor?”

“Not the one I ended up being, that’s for sure.” I sliced off a piece of the Danish with my fork. “As for how I got into the industry I did? It was because of an audition I did for a sitcom, believe it or not.”

Under the bill of her cap, her eyebrows jumped. “Really? You were auditioning for a sitcom?”

“Yep. And I thought I did really well, actually. Best audition I’d had yet.” I grimaced. “The casting director thought differently.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. He told me I was so devoid of talent, I’d never even be able to land a role in a two-bit porno.”

Rachel smothered a laugh. “Oh my God. That’s…a little mean, isn’t it?”

“Just a little,” he said. “But you know how it is. Music and entertainment are brutal industries. They’re not there to be nice.”

“But still. A two-bit porno?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it stung at the time. Looking back, he was probably right about my lack of acting ability.”

“But not your ability to get into a porno.”

Laughing, I shook my head. “Nope. And I was so pissed off by that comment, I decided to prove him wrong by doing exactly that. I had this whole vindictive, immature plan to be in a porno and then send the DVD to his office with a little ‘fuck you’ note attached.”

“Which I’m assuming you didn’t do?”

“Nah. Except about the time I’d cooled off, I actually landed a role.”

“And you took it?”

I shrugged again. “Why not? I mean, by that point, rent was coming up due, and I was kind of intrigued by the idea of actually doing a porno. Money wasn’t great, but I thought the bragging rights would be.”

“The money wasn’t great?”

“Oh, guys usually don’t get paid for shit in this business. It’s the one industry where women definitely out-earn men, and by a huge margin.”

She cocked her head, and I followed her gaze to the stainless Rolex on my left wrist as she said, “You seem to have done all right.”

“I have,” I said. “I got lucky, believe me. Scraped by for a while, and then got this big-shot porn actress’s attention. She wanted to do a scene with me, and that put me on an even
bigger
-shot director’s radar. After that, I started getting paid a hell of a lot more.”

“So, even with a stage name, do people know?” she asked. “Your family, friends, that kind of thing?”

I sighed and looked into my drink. “A lot of them do, yeah. Used to be the only way anyone would find you was if they went into one of those adult shops, but now it just takes a rumor and a Google search.”

“What do they think of it?”

“Well, my folks weren’t thrilled when they found out. My brother still won’t talk to me, but my parents and my sister have gotten over it.” I managed a halfhearted grin. “We just don’t discuss it over Christmas dinner.”

She snorted. “I don’t imagine you do.” Then her expression turned shyer, and she lowered her chin a little, like she was burying it in a nonexistent high collar. “And, if you don’t mind my asking, is…”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Trust me, there’s nothing you can ask that I haven’t answered a few hundred times already.”

She looked at me and grinned shyly. “Yeah, but
I’ve
never asked anyone.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

She laughed a little. “Okay. So, is it different? Being, um, being with someone on-camera versus…not?”

“Oh. Yeah.” I popped a piece of the Danish in my mouth. “Night and day.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“In what way?” She paused. “Stop me if that’s too personal, I’m just dying of curiosity.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Okay, you’ve watched porn before, right?”

She jumped, and I thought I might have offended her, but in spite of the red in her cheeks, she said, “Sure. Who hasn’t?”

“You’d be surprised.” I brought up my cup, pausing with the straw almost to my lips. “But, anyway, it’s always the most athletic, enthusiastic sex imaginable, right?”

“In between making ridiculous faces at the camera.”

I choked on my coffee.

She giggled behind her hand. “I’m sorry.”

I coughed and glared at her. “No you’re not.”

“You’re right.” The giggle turned into a snicker, and I couldn’t help laughing in between coughing a couple more times. I took another drink, wondering why my heart was beating so fast. This was a subject that never made me uncomfortable—it couldn’t, after all this time—but with her? I felt like a kid. Talking about this subject with her of all people, I’d need something a bit stronger than a cold coffee before long.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Most athletic, enthusiastic sex imaginable. Go on.”

“You have any idea how long it takes to shoot a porno?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.”

“Let’s just say it’s generally measured in hours,” I said.

“Oh God…”

“Yeah. I mean, there’s breaks, and we do get some recovery time, but make no mistake: it’s
grueling
. More than most people realize. Plus, well, the sets aren’t always…ideal for performing.”

Cradling her coffee cup between her hands, Rachel furrowed her brow. “How so?”

“Well, for example, there was this one girl I worked with, I don’t know, two years ago?” I shook my head and laughed. “
God
, she was a bitch.”

“That bad?”

“That bad. Thought she was God’s gift to everything. Which I can usually deal with. I just think about something else while I’m…” I paused, flicking my eyes up to meet hers, and then my cheeks warmed a little as I said, “I just think about something else. But this one, she had it written into her contract that she called the shots as far as the temperature on the set.”

Rachel’s eyebrow quirked. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I guess she was the type who’d sweat if it was above sixty-five, and she didn’t want to sweat on camera.”

“Heaven forbid someone sweats during sex,” she muttered.

I snickered. “Well, they do keep some of the sets cool specifically for that reason. But this woman? I don’t know what temperature it actually was, but it was fucking cold. Like, a few degrees above being able to see your breath.”

“Oh my God!”

“Yeah. And…” A little more heat rushed into my cheeks. “Okay, I don’t think I have to explain how cold can, um, affect a guy, right?”

She put her hand over her mouth, but not before an amused squeak escaped. “I’m sorry.”

I laughed. “No, it’s okay. It’s funny looking back now, but at the time… Jesus…” I grimaced. “Trying to stay ‘in the game’, as it were, is one thing. When it’s three hours on a freezing cold set?” I shuddered.

“Oh, I can’t even imagine.” She absently played with the handle on her coffee cup. “So, were you able to, erm, work with her?”

“Didn’t have much choice,” I said. “It wasn’t fun, but it was in my contract, so I gritted my teeth and kept myself going by thinking about spending the entire damned evening in my hot tub.”

“I don’t blame you.” She took a drink. “So do you have any unreasonable demands written into your contract?”

“Nah. Though I’ve gotten a little bit of flak for refusing to do bareback scenes and only doing scenes with women who’ve been screened since their last scene.”

“That…seems pretty reasonable, actually.”

“Yeah, but everyone’s going to bitch about something.” I shrugged. “If the actresses don’t want to be screened, or the director doesn’t like how condoms look on-camera, then I turn down the job.”

“You can do that now,” she said. “But what about when you were first starting out?”

“I was still pretty adamant about it back then. Occasionally meant the difference between paying rent on time or not, but usually, everybody’s screened and insisting on condoms anyway. The industry’s been pretty clean since even before I got involved in it.” I sipped my coffee. “I just added the clause to make sure I was covered. So to speak.”

“Seems like a smart move.” She idly tugged at the bill of her cap, lifting it enough to let a little more light reach her stunning eyes. Her eyes, which had lost focus like she had an unspoken thought on the tip of her tongue.

“Something else you wanted to ask?” I’d heard it all. The questions were easier to answer than they were to ask most of the time, so it—

“Are you happy with your career?” she asked suddenly.

I sat back. Okay, that was one people didn’t usually ask. People didn’t ever ask. “I…”

“I mean, even if it’s not what you had in mind when you came out here?”

I rolled the question around in my head for almost a minute before I answered. “I can’t complain. It’s got its drawbacks, and it’ll probably keep me from ever getting any serious acting jobs, but…” I shrugged and played with my straw again. “But it’s been an experience. Good living. Lot of fun. Met a lot of great people.” I lifted my gaze to meet hers. “So, yeah. Yeah, I’m happy.”

‘That’s good,” she said quietly.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see how my career goes this time before I decide if I’m happy with it.”

“You were successful before.”

“For a while.”

“Were you happy then?”

She pursed her lips, glancing out the window at the mostly deserted street. “Honestly?” Her eyes flicked up to meet mine. “I was miserable.” Before I could press any further, she asked, “So how long do you think you’ll stay in this business?”

“Oh, I’d say Buck Harder’s got a few years left. The money’s great, and it’s fun.” I paused. “Of course, I don’t want to be that guy who’s struggling just to get through a scene. I’d rather go out while I’m still at my peak than get to that point, so I’ll retire before I let myself get to that point.”