He’d had no idea what she meant, but just said, “Oh, more or less,” and been relieved when she changed the subject.
For some reason, everyone on the set that day was in a deliriously giggly, happy mood. The film was being directed by a young blond woman called Precious Vandermeer, the star herself of dozens of similar films, and she was directing nude—except for a hugely fluffy white feather boa. Over the course of the day, apparently, the boa had become a running gag; she kept asking it for advice and then making it speak to the actors. “Boa, was that the best blow job you ever fuckin’ saw?” Then, in a squeaky falsetto, wagging the end of the feather boa to make it look like it was speaking: “That was the best blow job
anyone
ever saw. Nicki and Jack, you rock!”
The actors who were finished for the day were busily making a huge pizza from scratch, with a daring array of ingredients, including sardines and pineapple. They had also ordered several boxes of cupcakes. Just before Jared arrived, they had taken a vote and decided it was okay to eat the cupcakes first, so the first question he was asked was, “Hey, gorgeous—chocolate, lemon, or red velvet?”
The actress he was working with, Regina, a busty Asian girl with an outrageously kittenish manner, had fallen asleep nude on a sheepskin rug in front of the fire and woken up with her butt roasted to a garish shade of magenta. The makeup girl and an actor were now crouched on the floor, powdering and repowdering Regina’s ass while the three of them periodically became helpless with laughter. “We can’t shoot around it,” Regina was saying. “I keep telling you, it’s an anal scene.”
“Can’t he—sort of—fuck
over
it?” the makeup girl said.
“All you need is the rest of the baboon suit,” said the actor, “and we add a bestiality element.”
Jared carried his chocolate cupcake over to the director, who tickled his nose with the feather boa and said, “No script, okay?”
“Oh, man.” Jared never liked unscripted scenes; all he could ever think of to say was corny clichés. Not that the scripts weren’t made of corny clichés, but at least that wasn’t his fault.
“Eh,” said Precious. “Do the usual ‘Take it; Good girl’ stuff. Right, boa?” She made the boa say, in a high-pitched voice,
“Do we have a prima donna on our hands?”
“No, it’s okay,” said Jared. “I can—oof!”
Regina, spotting him, had come running over and tackle-hugged him. “Darling!” she shouted. “Can. Not.
Wait—
to have you penetrate me anally!”
All the pizza makers began to cheer, and the makeup girl called, “Hey, Red Rump! Get back here!”
Before going on, Jared jotted down notes for himself—that “Take it; Good girl” stuff that he would then have to deliver in a gloating tone. The mood of silliness spread to him, though, and he found the basic insanity of the situation weirdly comforting. These were his people, after all; a tribe of cheerful, charming degenerates who were as close to “the lilies of the field” as could be imagined. With very few exceptions, it was impossible to imagine them surviving in any other line of business. It was impossible to imagine them reading the newspaper, cleaning their apartments, balancing a checkbook. And it was impossible to imagine them harming a fly. Sweet, helpless, wonderful people—and he was suddenly looking forward to introducing them to Amanda. Of course Amanda would like them. To dislike them would amount to disliking cupcakes, roaring fires, helpless laughter, and champagne.
The director waved him onto the set and called Regina, who walked over carefully to the bed at the center of the room, trying not to dislodge the layer of powder from her ass. Nonetheless, a faint cloud followed her through the room, much to the merriment of the onlookers.
Regina picked up a flimsy, translucent dress from the bed and pulled it on over her head, causing new clouds of powder to billow from under the skirt.
“Shaddup!” the boa squealed, and the giggles receded slowly.
The scene called for Jared, wearing an executioner’s hood and nothing else, to steal out of a closet (where he was presumed to have been hiding) and sneak up on Regina while she was making the bed. Seeing him, she would recoil in terror; then he would tear her clothes off, et cetera. When it was all over and she was reduced to a shivering heap of pleasured surrender, he would tear off his hood to reveal that he was, after all, her husband, whom she had accused of lacking passion in a previous scene. Indignation followed by reconciliation, laughter, and more sex—to be filmed on the following day.
The sight of Jared naked in the executioner’s hood set everyone off again, and the director had to start the scene three times before his entrance from the closet did not occasion storms of laughter. Between every repetition, he had to patiently work up his hard-on again, in long minutes in the closet, which smelled penetratingly of mothballs. But at last, everyone calmed down, and the scene began in earnest.
Jared crept out of the closet for the fourth time, suppressing the urge to look over at the rapt pizza makers. There was Regina in her flimsy white frock, pulling at the bedding ineffectually. As he crept up on her, the floorboards creaked deafeningly, and there was a quickly suppressed snort of laughter from the audience. Then he grasped her from behind, saying, “Nice—”
She shrieked theatrically and twisted in his grasp, looking back at him in sweet trepidation. Faltering, she said, “What do you want?”
Jared balked for only a second. Then he made himself say, in a leering, triumphant tone, “You know what I want.” He tore her dress open at the front, exposing her breasts. She shrieked again as he forced her back against the bed, drawing his fingers over one of her nipples and then squeezing the breast roughly. “Nice big tits. I like big tits.”
She squirmed uncomfortably at first, but then fell still, her mouth open in a show of mingled fear and sensual response. “Please . . . you can take anything you want,” she said. “But don’t hurt me.”
“Good. What I want is to fuck you,” he snarled. Now he pulled the ripped garment off her completely, letting it fall to the floor. The next moment, he grabbed her by the hair, saying, “This won’t hurt a bit.”
Bending down, he seized one of her nipples between his teeth and nibbled it, then sucked her breast halfway into his mouth. Then the other breast. She was squirming again, trying to escape from his lips. He gripped her arm to hold her still and suckled with a show of greed. Meanwhile, as always happened at about this point, real desire had begun to rise in him, despite the onlookers and the hot, constraining hood. In fact, there was something arousing about the hood, the feeling of anonymity. He pushed her feet apart with his foot and let his hand trickle down her body and rest on her shaved pussy. He traced one finger down her clitoris and let it lightly tug her pussy lips open, first on one side, then the other, teasing her.
Her eyes grew languid, though she still pulled automatically away from him. He said, “You like that, don’t you?” And he slid his finger inside her, taking the wetness there and drawing it back over her clit, his finger darting back and forth as she tensed and bit her lip. Then he was using two fingers, plunging them into her and then pulling them back over her clit, slipping back and forth until her eyes were shutting involuntarily and her breath came fast and light.
Standing straight again, he forced Regina down onto her knees, wrenching at her hair. Regina managed it smoothly; she created the maximum impression of resistance while avoiding anything that might be actually painful. He felt a surge of warm camaraderie as she stumbled down to kneel, looking up at him plaintively. She said, “Please . . .”
“Just suck it,” he said, pushing her head toward his cock.
She opened her mouth obediently and took the tip in her lips. He let her lick it gingerly for a little while before gripping her hair in both hands and suddenly thrusting his dick deep into her mouth. Then he was fucking her throat, while she made helpless (fake) noises of discomfort, her head tipped back, her eyes desperate. Jared already began to feel the surging extra-hardness that meant he could come at any time. He pulled his mind back from the experience, forcing himself to concentrate on the exact tension of her hair in his hands, on the necessity of not hurting her. His dick sliding into her mouth, which was twisting over it, miming distress while exciting maximum sensation, felt too good, too intense. Out of the corner of his eye, he was watching in mounting anxiety for the director’s nod, releasing him to the next stage of the scene.
At last it came. He pulled out of Regina’s mouth roughly and ordered, “Get up.”
She looked up at him weakly, apparently confused.
“Get up,” he said more savagely. “I want to fuck you in the ass.”
At this, her eyes widened. He pulled her to her feet by her hair, although she anticipated the motion—maybe a little too much; it was going to look staged—and rose swiftly. In a second, he was manhandling her to the bed and turning her around. She lost her balance and fell forward onto it. She was whimpering, “I can’t! No one’s ever done that to me before!”
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. He grabbed a tube of lubricant that was handily waiting on the nightstand, and began to grease his cock with one hand. As he looked down, he was almost distracted by the sight of her bright pink buttocks, faintly dusted with powder.
Don’t laugh,
he told himself. He paused only to spank her briskly a few times with a broad motion, bringing his arm down from a height so that it looked shockingly violent, then pulling the force out of the gesture at the last second so that the contact was light and contained. She yelped and twisted on the bed, her hands clutching the sheets. Then he was pressing his cock against her anus, feeling the tight resistance to him there. He said, “Yes, that’s nice. You’re gonna take my cock in your ass, baby.”
She began to moan as he pulled her ass cheeks apart and began to thrust into her slowly, muttering, “Good girl . . . that’s right . . .” Then he was fucking her, thrusting in with deep, forceful movements. She had fallen still, her body tensed against his thrusts. She began to moan and whimper, her hands clawing at the bedsheets, imitating the responses of a girl who felt violated but was struggling with the frenzied pleasures of her rebellious body. Her response—fake or real—turned him on still more, and he was struggling not to come, moving more slowly now, the sensations almost intolerably powerful. Then she made a subtle, sinuous movement with her whole body and let out a cry of what had to be sincere pleasure. It all joined together—the smooth, silky feel of her long hair in his hand, her sleek body twisting below him, and the maddening intensity of the feelings in his dick—and he pulled out just in time, shooting come over her rosy buttocks.
Then he pulled off the executioner’s hood, realizing as the cool air chilled his face that it had been stifling in there, and she turned back to him with a look of languid, postorgasmic surrender. Her eyes widened, and she said, “Fred! It’s you!”
The rest of the scene went off without a hitch, while the aroma of the cooking pizza drifted through the room. As he cradled Regina in his arms, mumbling sweet marital nothings to her, the relaxation of having come and the warm feeling of community that filled the whole group gave him a sense of sunny well-being. The scene ended; applause and hooting broke out in the room. Precious was making the boa nod encouragingly. In her own voice, she called out, “Genius! Champagne for everyone! You’re both heroes!” Jared and Regina were grinning and even laughing at nothing in particular as they wandered off to find their street clothes.
But as he pulled on his jeans, he looked up and saw Amanda watching from the kitchen. She had her arms crossed and was shaking her head at a girl who was offering her a cupcake. Her face was set in what looked, at this distance, like misery. He hurried over to her, zipping his jeans as he went, still grinning with the momentum of good feeling. “Amanda! Baby! How long have you been here?”
The misery cleared from her face, replaced by an expression of uncertainty. She said softly, looking around nervously to make sure nobody else could hear her, “That was so strange.”
He shrugged, immediately feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah, you know . . . it is kind of fake, but . . .”
“Fake. I guess. So you don’t enjoy it?”
He tried to explain to her, while the laughing and pouring of champagne went on all around them, how it was enjoyable on the one hand, but really a job on the other hand. How it was sex, but still wasn’t exactly like other sex. How. . . . But all the while, he was faintly embarrassed about having a relationship talk in the midst of his happy, decadent friends. And, disturbingly, he was looking at Amanda’s lovely, disapproving face and feeling—nothing. He couldn’t remember why he’d thought he loved her. Now all he felt for her was a distinct, weary longing that she would just lighten up. Or better still, leave him alone.
“Oh, wow!” said Zaza. And then . . .”
“I went away for the weekend with her,” Jared said grimly. “But I didn’t ask her to marry me, of course. And we carried on for a while, but it was never the same. And the whole time, I felt so guilty. Even when she left me, I felt guilty.”
Zaza thought about this, her hand still absently stroking his chest. She was fighting an irrational surge of jealousy of all these girls Jared had fucked. He had fucked them and not her—not fair! She pushed the thought away and said, “But wasn’t that, kind of, because she didn’t get the porn world?”
Jared shrugged. “Not really. The problem was that I didn’t know her. I’d fallen in love with her, supposedly. I almost got engaged to her, which would have been a real disaster. But it was like I was in love with her
because
I didn’t know her.”
“Oh.” Zaza frowned. “So you’re saying when you know a girl, you stop caring about her?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. But that’s what I’m afraid of.”