Sanctuary (2 page)

“Hey guys. Sorry I’m late.” Crystal set her purse down next to the camera case. She wore a casual turquoise minidress that hid the slight bulge of her belly well. Ugh. She was starting to look fat in the videos, and pregnant porn was such a specific fetish. Sales would slump soon if Cole didn’t replace her. Brandon should have brought it up a week ago, but given Cole’s baffling affection for the girl—it was Cole’s baby, after all—Brandon dreaded the conversation.

Thankfully, despite appearances, Cole was as much a playboy as Brandon at heart.
He might think he’s in love now, but he’ll never tolerate a kid.
Brandon had never felt threatened by the child because he knew Cole would either get it aborted or break up with Crystal when the time came. Still, Cole always avoided the subject when Brandon broached it, and that made Brandon nervous.

Heather continued her show, but Brandon’s gaze remained on Crystal, behind Heather and just off camera, primping her ugly brown hair.
What does Cole see in her? She’s just another girl. Needy, weak, dumb. But skanky enough for the job.
Brandon had tasted that fruit himself before Cole declared Crystal off-limits to him… and a few times since then (though those were not entirely consensual). She was a sweet enough snack, but he’d tasted her kind before, and would have fired and forgotten her by now if not for Cole’s romantic streak.

The camera’s card was almost full, so Brandon stopped recording to offload the footage. “Cut,” he said, and a disgruntled scowl immediately replaced Heather’s sultry smile. She covered up and walked over to Crystal.

“Black lipstick,” Brandon said. “I told you to wear black lipstick, Crystal.”

She nodded meekly. “Couldn’t find it. Sorry.” She spoke barely above a whisper. Brandon could tell she was intimidated by Heather, who was taller, fuller, and more comfortable in her own skin. Crystal could jabber on and on around Cole, but got all quiet like this when she taped scenes with Heather and Brandon. She lacked a professional attitude. Despite the playful enmity between Brandon and Heather, he had to give it to her: for the most part, Heather was a pro. Which became uncomfortably obvious with Crystal around. Why couldn’t Cole just dump her and move on?

To Crystal, Brandon seemed way older than twenty-eight. He always dressed well—at the moment he wore a white collared shirt and black satin vest—and he often used words and references she didn’t understand. His movements were graceful and refined. Early wrinkles creased his forehead, and a slight red tint from heavy drinking flushed his face, but despite these imperfections he was handsome and muscular, and could be charismatic—if you were a stranger. Most people she’d seen around him took him for a friendly self-made millionaire, unaware that he was actually a giant mooch.

She checked herself one last time before her scene. Through the mirror, she could see Brandon in the far corner of the ornate lounge, clicking away at his laptop.

She first met Cole and Brandon at a nightclub; her last boyfriend had just broken up with her and she and her friend Sofie were out cruising. Thank God she’d wound up with Cole instead of Brandon that night. Brandon had seemed okay at first: pampered Sofie, taken her shopping, whispered dreamy lies about how much he cared for her. And then he’d gotten her naked for his videos. “Amateur,” indeed. Not only had Sofie fallen for it, but after a few weeks Brandon kicked her out, leaving her with addictions to all kinds of hard stuff he’d given her. Heartbroken, she kept asking Crystal to reconnect the two of them, but Crystal insisted on rehab instead. Crystal would be glad to pay for it now that she was making a meager living, but Sofie declined her offer.

Crystal’s mom feared that Cole was playing Crystal the same way, but Crystal knew better. Her mom had never met Cole. Cole was different.

“You okay?” Heather stood next to the studio light behind Crystal. Had she noticed how stressed she was?

Crystal tried to perk up. “I’m good.”

Heather nodded knowingly. Crystal knew she hated these sessions with Brandon too, but hey, it was a paycheck. Heather was much more experienced than Crystal, but they’d bonded nonetheless, and these days Crystal thought of her as a friend—a co-conspirator to face Brandon with. She shuddered at the memories of making videos with him
alone
. He intimidated her like crazy.

“This is some hot shit,” Brandon said as he turned from his seat by the laptop. “Hits on the website are gonna go through the roof. You girls are gonna be celebrities. Better than that cam girl shit you were doing before, Heather, right?” Heather rolled her eyes at him. “Back up on the table, girls.”

Brandon grinned greedily at his camera’s LCD screen as the girls climbed onto the table. Was he making them do lesbian stuff tonight? Three weeks into this new job, Cole had forbidden Brandon from having sex with Crystal himself, which Crystal had been super relieved to hear (although the command hadn’t worked off-screen). So now lesbian and solo videos were Brandon’s only options with Crystal, except for some occasional weird hardcore stuff involving costumes and machines. Crystal could tolerate the lesbian stuff, since at least it meant she wasn’t alone with him.

“Not enough makeup either, Crystal. I wanna see at least twice as much next time.”

Brandon started rolling, so Crystal adopted a fake sexual expression and twisted her body back and forth to accentuate her features. She removed her dress, revealing lingerie underneath. Heather licked her lips for the camera and ran her hands down Crystal’s body.

Brandon observed eagerly from below. “Ah, great angle. Fuck yeah. A couple of MILFs we got here. Crystal, give her a kiss.”

Crystal leaned over and briefly, tepidly pecked Heather on the lips. Heather reciprocated, probably giving a better performance.

“Naw, put some tongue into it, Crystal,” Brandon said.

Crystal’s false smile waned momentarily, but she leaned in for another kiss that lasted several seconds.

“Is this making you girls horny? Crystal, I can tell this is turning you on. Take off your panties, baby, huh?”

Well that didn’t take long.
Crystal struggled to keep up her facade for the camera. Brandon frowned at her.
Stupid. Why can’t I be as good at this as Heather?
She made it look so easy.

“We’re just getting started, baby,” Crystal said. She needed to work herself up to the point where she could take her clothes off without feeling too self-conscious. “Give us a minute to warm up.”

“The boys online wanna see some pussy, though. So why don’t you take it off?”

Crystal pleaded to Heather via eye contact. “I—I, uh—”

“Take it off.”

Heather slowly ran her tongue up Crystal’s cheek. Crystal did little to respond. “I think going slow is so sexy, baby,” Heather said to Brandon. “Wouldn’t you rather be teased? It makes me so wet.”

Brandon ignored her and vehemently yanked Crystal’s underwear down her legs. He raised a hand toward her bra, and Crystal recoiled, afraid he would hit her. But instead he stopped suddenly and let his camera hang at his side.

“The fuck?” he said. Crystal realized Brandon was no longer looking at her, but instead at the wall behind her, where it looked like the wallpaper had been scratched up. Brandon approached the markings and touched them curiously. Heather and Crystal ended their performance, and Crystal took advantage of Brandon’s distraction to secure her lingerie back in place. “Did you girls do this?”

“No.”

The markings were long and thin and barely noticeable: just slight scratches in the wallpaper that couldn’t even be called rips. Their configuration seemed to loosely spell the word “HIDE,” in all caps.

Brandon snatched his cell from his pocket and heatedly dialed. When Crystal looked to Heather for guidance, the taller woman nodded toward their clothes. Crystal followed her as Brandon spoke to Cole.

“Hey buddy, we’re gonna shoot the rest in your place, okay?”

Crystal donned her blue-green dress and removed those awful heels. She watched Brandon through the mirror as he used his pocketknife to cut away a gel that had partially melted onto a studio light.

“Because I think somebody’s snooping around. I don’t want some fucker looking at my girls for free.” He accidentally burned himself on the light, wrenched his hand away, and shook it vigorously. “Goddammit.”

Brandon was sure the markings hadn’t been there when he’d first started taping Heather half an hour ago. But no one else had been in the lounge when Brandon checked it, so either Heather had done it herself to fuck with him, or one of the condo’s other residents had decided to play a game with the local pornographers.

In the lobby, Brandon approached the security guard: a thin, bald man in his forties who sat behind his desk, sipping coffee and speaking happily into his cell phone. “Two bedroom, one bath. Gas stove, twelve hundred eighty square feet. Right on the shore, very secluded, you’ll love it. And the price is great.”

Making a personal call while on the job? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Brandon interrupted: “Hey. Yo.”

The guard realized Brandon was waiting on him, so he spoke softly into the receiver. “Can you hold on just a minute? Thanks.”

“You got someone fucking with your wallpaper in the lounge.”

The guard didn’t bother to hide his impassivity. He glanced down at his phone as if deciding how he could evade Brandon and return to his call.
What a dumbfuck.

“Can you get off your ass and check it out?” Brandon asked. “One of your residents is a pervert. Could you tell him to leave us the fuck alone?”

The guard hesitated. “Call you back?” He reluctantly pocketed his phone, stood, then adjusted his pants.

Seeing that the guard intended to follow through with the request, Brandon almost left for Cole’s floor, but then had a thought and turned back to the guard. “You selling your house?” He read the man’s nametag. “Virgil? A little place on the beach?”

Virgil gave him a once-over, dropping his gaze from Brandon’s eyes to his shoes, looking through Brandon the man and seeing only Brandon the pornographer. “I’m not selling my house.”

Brandon read the subtext:
Not to someone like you.
He was so tired of this bullshit. Most people in the condo knew about Brandon and Cole’s porn business and treated them like second-class citizens because of it.
Well, fuck this guy. Fuck all of them.

Crystal said goodbye to her mom and hung up. So, her mom had gotten the check at least. Crystal could only hope she wouldn’t waste it all on some weird spice or trinket purported to connect her to the spirit world. The Day of the Dead was coming up, and her mom would probably go all out again with her marigolds and other offerings, just as she’d done throughout Crystal’s childhood. At one point she’d even bought a billboard in Little Havana advertising her services as a medium.

Crystal had lived with that silliness all her life: the luckless fools waddling in to ask her mom to channel dearly departed Aunt Maria or poor old Rottweiler Benito; the plaques and statuettes of Catholic saints and/or Vodou Loa adorning every nook of the house. Her mom was a believer, heart and soul, often spending her paltry grocery money on weird-ass household fortifications against evil spirits or other, equally crazy expenditures. Crystal had enjoyed the stories, songs, and ornamentation—even to this day, she relished her memories of the Vodou traditions she’d grown up with—but tradition was one thing, and beliefs that took precedence over even your own children were quite another. It eventually got so bad that the neighbors called child services, but by then Crystal was old enough to know the difference between what Mom
believed
and what the rest of the world
knew
.

And now, it was Crystal who was the provider. And she found that her mom’s superstitions were even harder to endure when it was her
own
hard-earned money supporting them. She’d borne the burden of those beliefs long enough. Even after all these years, Mom’s vacuous proverbs still spoke inside her head.

“Hang this stone over your bed or Baron Samedi will come get you in your sleep.”

“Don’t shake a tablecloth outside after dark or bad luck will follow you for the next year.”

“You will meet a kind man, and he will be the center of your life.”

That last one came from a palm reading (or was it a Tarot reading?) when Crystal was seven, and her mom continued to remind her about the “kind man” to this day. Somehow though, Crystal didn’t think the owner of a porn website was who Mom had in mind, so she’d told her mom instead that she’d gotten a job as a model and that Cole was her manager. Still, maybe the prophecy had come true in its own way.

Cole wasn’t in his condo, so after Crystal got off the phone she grabbed the book and went searching for him. She spotted him with Heather at the far edge of one of the condo’s many piers, his walking stick in hand, and a white apron speckled with dried black paint worn over his clothes.
Huh. What’s that all about?
Crystal descended the stairs to the docks then gingerly moved closer so she could eavesdrop.

Cole took out his wallet. “How much?” he asked.

“Like a hundred?” Heather said, a twinge of worry in her voice.

“Damn. You ever think of going back to school?”

“Nah. Not my thing.”

“So you’re okay with this job?”

“Sure. Showbiz. Good times all around.”

“Ha. Let me clarify. You’re okay working with
Brandon
?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Heather sounded less convinced this time.

Cole handed her two fifty-dollar bills. “Is that right?”

“Yep. Thank you so much.” She put the money in her purse and started to walk away, but Cole stopped her with a hand placed gently on her arm.

“Hey, do you know how much tuition runs these days?” he said.

“It’s been a few years. I have no idea. Why? What do you wanna study?”

Cole shook his head. “It’s not for me.”

Heather lingered for a moment. Cole often left people hanging like that. It felt like the conversation in his head never quite matched the actual conversation being spoken, so he could come across as detached. Crystal liked how smart it made him seem.