Show Me

by Carole Hart

  A rack of neatly halved sandwiches and a bottle of Pellegrino waited on a low chestnut coffee table in front of a huge leather sofa that showed the telltale signs of previous occupation by a dog. Ralph and Emily sat, a little self-consciously, and she found she was staring at the sandwiches without any desire to eat at all.

  “I’m sorry it’s a little uninspiring,” he said. “This is what I always have, and I didn’t really think . . .”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter.” She looked up at him and was instantly entranced by his dark gaze. A faint, pleasant chill went through her, and she wondered if this was what people felt when she gave them the “magic touch.” Every cell of her body felt more alive when he looked at her. Even his handsome face, the presence of his strong masculine body so close to her, were like background noise to the compelling electricity of that look. She swallowed and said, “So . . .”

  “Why are you here?”

  She laughed. “I guess I’m always asking you why I’m here.”

  “But this time I wanted to give you a real answer. I know I behaved very strangely the other day.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’m used to people behaving strangely. I mean, it wasn’t strange. In my world, everyone’s strange. I mean . . .”

  He smiled. “No need to tie yourself in knots. It was strange, and I think there are strange people in everyone’s world. But I’m not usually one of them. Now I’m in the difficult position of having to explain something I don’t understand myself. You know I told you I’d read your interviews?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “That was an understatement. I read one—I just happened upon it, and it struck me somehow. I can’t say what it was. Maybe it was your picture.” He shook his head. “I know people get all kinds of fantasies about celebrities, but I guess I thought I was immune. I meet famous people all the time now.”

  “So you got a . . . fantasy?” She tried to smile, but completely failed. His eyes were burning into hers. “But you still didn’t watch the show? Oh, because you . . . don’t have cable.”

  “Because I didn’t want to watch you having sex with another man.”

  She felt a prickling in her eyes and realized she was, ridiculously, on the brink of tears. She forced herself to say, “You mean you had a sexual fantasy, but it was . . . it wasn’t about me with someone else?”

  By the time she finished speaking, he was already shaking his head, with an expression of mild impatience. He said, “Don’t sell yourself so short, Emily.” He smiled. “There, I said your name.”

  “You did,” she said, swallowing again to try to quell the threatening tears.

  “I’ve been saying it in my head. . . . You must think I’m completely crazy.”

  “You’re completely crazy,” she said, and a rogue tear slipped down her cheek. “But I still don’t understand.”

  His face went grave and alarmed. “You’re crying.” He started to put out his hand, but thought better of it. “Did something I said make you cry?”

  “No! I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t usually cry.” She wiped away the tear, trying again to smile. She was aware of giving herself away in the worst possible way, but she still wasn’t sure what it was she was revealing. She hadn’t had any ridiculous fantasies about him. Had she?

  Then he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t stand it anymore. Would you come here?”

  A moment later, though she couldn’t have said how it happened, she was in his arms and he was holding her while she cried desperately on his shoulder. His arms felt familiar to her—though at the same time he felt like no other man she’d ever touched. The sensation of being protected was mingled with a dizzying impression of his strength. She had put herself at the mercy of someone who was stronger than she was. If it was just a sexual fantasy that he’d had, that he was blowing up into something else, then she would be used and put aside. If it was something else, she didn’t even know what was going to happen to her. At that moment, it felt like something so overwhelming and new that it was frightening. She knew, paradoxically, that she wouldn’t have the courage to do it without him there.

  And only a tiny, tiny voice continued to insist, through her tears and longing, that she didn’t know this man at all. How could he mean anything to her?

  He put his lips to her ear, tenderly kissing the place where it met her cheek, and began to speak in a low, impassioned voice. “I felt as if I’d always known you. I do know you—I don’t care if it sounds crazy. I know your gentleness and your honesty, and the way you won’t forgive yourself for things that aren’t your fault. I kept thinking you needed someone to tell you you’re not to blame. And I know you can’t tell anything about a person from an interview. I know it, but I knew all about you. Those pictures. God, they broke my heart.”

  “But I’m fine,” she blubbered.

  They both laughed. She said, “I mean, I was fine until just a minute ago. As fine as most people are. I don’t know—could you be in real trouble and never even know it was happening?”

  He pulled back a little to look at her. “Well, I’m no judge, but . . .”

  Their eyes met again. And since they were already holding each other, it seemed only natural that he leaned down and kissed her on the lips. It seemed natural and at the same time it seemed as if a massive wall had fallen, the wall between the past and an unimaginable future. He was kissing her, and she clung to him, letting the feelings fall with her through a million miles of needs she had suppressed, fears she hadn’t acknowledged. And through it all he was holding her, keeping her safe within the charmed circle that was his kiss. At the same time, her body felt charged with desire of a different order from anything she’d ever felt—all she could think was that it was a complete desire, a confluence of emotion and physical passion.

  So it seemed only natural when he began to unbutton her blouse and kiss the tops of her breasts. She immediately accepted it as a tribute of affection, and her skin was warm and alive where he kissed her. Even the feeling of her nipples hardening as his fingers ran over her breasts was a deep yielding to him, an opening into sex with a significance she had never fully suspected. She had known the words for it but not what they meant.

  He leaned forward, bearing her gently onto her back, and then his wonderful body was weighing her down as his hands moved up and down her body, hungrily getting to know her. He pulled one breast free from her bra and bent to kiss it and then to suck on her nipple with a sweet eagerness. She moaned and was aware at the same time that she was crying again, even as he pulled up her skirt and she felt him pressing against her. Ridiculously, the fact that she could feel his hard-on against her made her swell almost unbearably with love.

  Then she had thought the word “love.”

  As he pulled down her panties and opened his belt, his eyes locked onto hers again. He said, “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

  She couldn’t speak. She wanted him so much she couldn’t find the words. At last she managed a whispered “Yes . . . yes.”

  A second later he was pushing inside her, holding her in his arms as his cock opened her with an aching note of delight that made her clutch his shoulders and cry out. She surrendered herself to the helpless pleasure of being fucked; her breasts flattened to his chest, his cock stroking her inside and seeming to open new reserves, sources of pleasure she hadn’t suspected. Each stroke inside her drove her to a new plane of pleasure, until she was coming while he was still fucking her. She felt his desire and need mingled with her own release—and desired him more.

  The orgasm sweetened into a dimmer pleasure and then began to gather again, and she opened her eyes just in time to see his face change as he was gripped by his own orgasm. She came again as he did, the experience made almost unbearably intense by the electricity of his eyes on her face. He was moaning her name, and her sympathy with him was so powerful that she felt his pleasure almost more directly than her own, her sense of fucking and being fucked intertwined into a wi
ld loving abandon that left her weak. He began to kiss her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, and she only then felt the tears that she had continued to cry throughout the whole experience. She thought, stunned, This is the happiest moment of my life.

  They held each other in silence for a long time afterward, his cock beginning to ease from her. As the minutes passed, a terrible doubt grew in her mind. She began to want to hold him with her eyes shut forever. Anything rather than to find out that she’d been mistaken, that he didn’t really care about her. Or worse—that she didn’t really care about him. She remembered something Babylona had once said: “But, honey, I have been in love! I’ve been in love thousands of times!” What if she was just going through a transformation into a Babylona-style porn actress, one who felt a meaningless transient love for every man she wanted to fuck?

  But when she opened her eyes and saw him, that idea vanished. His eyes were still closed, and his beautiful face had a meditative joy on it. She noticed small details she had missed before—faint lines around his eyes, the sharp outline of his cheekbones, the thick blond eyebrows that looked golden against his lightly tanned skin. Even a tiny scar on his chin struck her as a new perfection, and the word “love” came back into her mind.

  But as she watched, his expression changed, expressing first worry, and then, as he opened his eyes, sadness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was unforgivable.”

  She swallowed and chose her words carefully. “How could that be unforgivable when it was the best thing that’s happened to me in years?”

  “To me, too,” he said, with a gravity that chilled her even as she took comfort in the words.

  “So . . . ?”

  His gaze slipped from hers with an almost angry shame. “It’s unforgivable,” he said, “because I can’t see you again.”

  FOUR

  The girl—a voluptuous Latina with heavily fringed black eyes and full, crimson-painted lips—lay on her front on a dazzling white sand beach. Her bikini top lay on the sand a meter away from her, and the bottoms had been pulled down and were loosely hooked around one ankle. Her legs were spread to expose a delicately pink shaved pussy. She looked over her shoulder and said meltingly, directly to camera, “Are you ready for me?”

  Then a man entered the shot. A bronzed he-man with buzz-cut brown hair, he knelt behind her with greed on his face. As he positioned himself to enter her, she was already moaning and wriggling her hips. Then he thrust in, and she immediately erupted in moans. “That’s it,” she said. “Go in—there! Yes! Yes!”

  His hips worked mightily, fucking the squirming girl, who arched her back to expose her full brown breasts, begging him, “Squeeze my tits . . . please.” He reached forward to cup one of her breasts, following her direction as she crooned, “Harder . . . pinch my nipple. Oh, that’s so good . . . Fuck me harder . . .”

  The fucking motion made her other breast tremble in pulses. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her mouth was open, releasing moans that gradually accelerated into screams. “YES! I’M COMING! DO ME, BABY! YES! YES! THAT’S THE BEST—COCK—I EVER HAD!”

  Suddenly, the shot cut away to a pretty blond woman holding a microphone. “So some pretty out-there beach sex from one of our finalists here on X-treme Bachelor—Bermuda. Let’s go to the panel. Valerie LeBlanc. What do we think of Benita? Did that orgasm look real to you? Kody certainly seemed to be enjoying himself.”

  The camera cut to a bikinied Valerie, sitting in a director’s chair on a different stretch of white beach, a vista of turquoise ocean framing her angelic face, now gathered into a brooding pout. “Angie, I think that was one of the all-time most embarrassing fake orgasms. I think they were lucky there wasn’t any glass around to shatter when she got into that scream.”

  “So we’re saying fake? Not only fake but—”

  “Scary fake. I don’t want to be the one to cast the first meow. But that was bad sex, bad faith, and bad ham acting all at once. I’m going with Nell to make it past the final hoop here.”

  “So you’re saying Kody will choose Nell?”

  “Absolutely. What we saw with Nell was real passion. I know a lot of people watching at home feel the same. Benita seems to just be . . . frankly, auditioning for a porn career here.”

  “And you don’t think she should get it?”

  “Well, there’s no accounting for taste. But . . .”

  “Okay, so let’s see what Jared Vairy has to say. From the way you’re shaking your head, I guess you disagree.”

  The camera cut to Jared, who hurriedly erased the expression of digust that had covered his face while he listened to Valerie. “Angie, I think we’re dealing here with a young woman who’s maybe playing to the camera—that’s a given. All of us here have been guilty of that. But she’s very sexy, very beautiful, and we’ve seen in previous weeks that she has a more vulnerable side that won all our hearts.”

  In his peripheral vision, Valerie was making a nauseated face, while on his other side, the final panelist, Brandi, was grinning at him as she tried to get into a cross-legged position in her director’s chair. Then she froze as Angie turned to her.

  “Brandi, which side are you coming down on here?”

  “Oh!” Brandi said. “I guess I like fake orgasms. I mean, as long as his orgasm wasn’t fake, I don’t think he’s going to ask questions. Also, I’m keeping in mind that five-star blow job we saw yesterday. I still have faith in Benita.”

  As Brandi finished her assessment, Jared sighed with relief. It was his last spot on the show for the day. He was able to slip away while Angie was still summing up. He disliked that when other people did it; it seemed to show a lack of camaraderie. But today he was dying to escape, to get away from the cameras and the almost painful consciousness of the concentrated attention of a million viewers. Ironically, he was an intensely private person, and he was already longing for his hotel room, imagining how he would put the chain on the door and collapse on his bed.

  Also, although he knew it was one of the points of the show, he couldn’t help being upset when people got criticized publicly for their sexual performance. A part of him was always thinking of the person being mocked—how Benita would watch the show afterward and feel completely deflated. That was what she signed up for, he told himself as he unclipped his mike and slipped from his chair. And it’s nothing compared to what a real director would say to her, if she tried that screaming on the set. Still, a nagging feeling of self-disgust pursued him as he padded off down the beach, relaxing in direct proportion to the fading of the voices behind him. Even though it had been Valerie who “cast the first meow,” he felt implicated.

  So it was all the more irritating when he heard footsteps pursuing him, and turned to see Valerie herself hurrying to catch up with him.

  She had put on over her bikini a typically virginal pastel sundress with a wide, fluttery skirt. Her blond hair swept poetically behind her in the wind. Her lovely surface was belied by the overtly sadistic smile on her pretty pink lips. Now, there was someone whose feelings he would not mind hurting. If, in fact, she had any feelings. He stopped and turned to face her, crossing his arms.

  “Valerie, how nice of you to follow me,” he said. “You know I never get enough of your company.”

  “Now, why are you always so unkind to me?” she said. Her manner showed that she knew exactly why, and was delighting in it. “And here all I want is to help you.” She stopped a few feet away from him and stood curling her bare toes in the fine sand.

  “Oh yes, you want to help me promote your career. Why not? All I have to do is fuck someone who makes me—”

  “Let’s not say things we might regret.”

  He took a deep breath. “Okay. I guess I’m still angry about what you did to—oh, that’s right, it was me this time. So selfish of me.”

  “Jared, I don’t think we want to have an angry conversation. I came all this way to explain, because I really think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Shall we wa
lk a little farther? I don’t think either of us wants to be overheard.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he, for one, had nothing to hide. Let everyone hear him curse her for a liar and a scheming, sadistic . . . but she was right. He didn’t want anyone to hear the full ugliness of the hatred he bore this woman. “Okay, let’s go,” he said with a churlishness that embarrassed him.

  Then they were walking side by side down the beach, in a chilly silence that she seemed to enjoy. He reflected that any form of power—even the simple power to make someone else uncomfortable—was a joy to Valerie. She was the sort of person who would charm you at first, purely to enjoy the power to compel your admiration. But once you had seen through her facade, she would take an equal delight in shocking you, badgering you, harping on your weaknesses. She was as happy manipulating through pain as through love—the point was to get her own way. He had always been convinced that she remained a virgin because she had no sex drive at all. To have a sex drive would mean feeling something for someone else. Valerie was incapable.

  They had moved out of earshot of the set. The only sounds were the rushing of the waves and an occasional sprinkle of laughter from farther along the beach. Jared slowed and went to stand in the shallows, trying to let the procession of shining waves calm his mind. But when he broke the silence, his voice was as tense and bitter as before. “So, you’ve decided to give up the virgin shtick. Congratulations.”

  “I would have thought you’d be flattered,” she said, injecting a note of hurt into her voice. “After all, I’m asking you to be my first.”

  Despite himself, he felt a twinge of guilt. He said defensively, “If you are a virgin, which I doubt—”