by Carole Hart
“I don’t care if it’s creepy,” he said. “Would you come here? You’re making me wait.”
“But that’s supposed to be a good thing,” she said, getting up hastily and crossing the space between them in one second flat. As she jumped onto his lap, she said, “You’re supposed to play hard to get. If you’re a girl. I mean, don’t you play hard to get; that would be awful.”
“Don’t play hard to get,” he said, taking her hand in both of his.
She stared at his hands, her lips slightly parted. Then she bent her head, kissed his knuckles, and rubbed her cheek against them, looking up at him blissfully. She said, “I’ll play hard to get later. I’m no good at deferred gratification.”
“Then kiss me.”
The grin came back. But she quelled it, reasoning that she couldn’t kiss him and grin at the same time. She said faintly, “Okay.”
The kiss went on and on. If he wasn’t seeing stars, Jared was feeling them—tiny, fiery bursts of emotion mingled with sensation. In his mind, they were red and gold, and he could almost imagine them circling around him as if he were a cartoon character that had been clobbered on the head. She was so tiny in his arms, so fragile and alive. Her long hair was so fine and soft it seemed to be made from a different material from normal hair—as if she alone had spun silk on her head while everyone else had cotton. The skin on her arms was likewise preternaturally soft and smooth, and her arms so slender he felt like a massive ox nuzzling a delicate fawn. He found himself mumbling, “You’re so beautiful. . . . You’re so incredibly beautiful.” And he was relieved rather than flattered when she blurted, “No, it’s you who’s the beautiful one. I’m so not!” in shy distress. He thought, Thank God, she doesn’t see through me.
But when his palm grazed her small, firm breasts, feeling the hard nipples—which also felt delicate and tiny, maddeningly perfect and fine—he caught himself. He was pulling back from her, looking at her flushed, jubilant face, feeling as if they’d tumbling down a hill or run an obstacle course. He was breathing hard and felt undone, helpless—wonderful. He said, “That was, like, the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“No,” she said, dazed. “That can’t be true.”
“It’s true.”
“But it’s what I always dreamed you would say. Honestly.” She shook her head, the grin returning at double force.
He said, “But you understand why I’m not trying to take advantage of you now?”
At this, the grin vanished. His heart sank. Of course he would say the wrong thing. “No,” he blurted, “I mean, I don’t mean that it would be taking advantage. I mean, I’m so attracted to you. You can probably—” He had been about to say feel it, but then the crude reference to his hard-on seemed out of place. He realized that he had no idea how to be romantic. He had always fucked girls, several times, in front of a film crew, before he ever made any romantic speeches to them. Those romantic speeches, furthermore, were made out of a spirit of joie de vivre—as he now realized—rather than love. He had loved being with them and drinking ridiculous blender drinks with them in a revolving restaurant while all the men in the room stared and envied him. He had loved them looking into his eyes and acting coy and besotted. He had loved the fact that no one was really in love, and the protestations had none of the dragging weight of reality.
He had no idea how to be with a girl who was genuinely besotted. He had no idea how to be besotted himself.
He said, “Tell me what to say. The last thing I want to do is hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” she said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t know if you hurt me yet. Do you still like me?”
“So much. More and more.”
She sighed, and the bliss began to return to her face. “Okay. Then you can explain to me. Though I think I need another beer.”
She hopped off his lap and started toward the refrigerator, but paused halfway and took off his leather jacket carefully. She started to fold it one way, then changed her mind, shook it out and began to fold it another way. Seeing him watching, she said, “I’ve really got no idea how to fold clothes.”
“Just throw it down somewhere.”
“Oh.” She looked at it and hastily pressed a kiss to the collar before putting it down on the sofa. As she went to the refrigerator, she said, “Okay. Everything’s all right. Right? Everything’s all right?”
“Everything’s so all right. This is the most all right I’ve been in years.”
“I’m sorry I stole your beers,” she said, as she came back with another beer and crept back into his lap. “I was just waiting so long and I kept thinking about the beers. And then I thought they might belong to the channel, and I convinced myself that it was—”
“It was completely okay.”
She sighed. “That’s what I convinced myself.”
“Listen, Zaza. Like I said, I’m so attracted to you I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“A whole new category of attracted,” she said. “That’s what I feel.”
“Yes. And I don’t mean to assume that you want to sleep with me right now.”
“Oh, I do!”
“Okay.” He laughed. “So I’ll assume that. It’s just that we hardly know each other, and I kind of want to be normal. Or, not normal . . . special.”
“Special and normal.” She frowned. “You mean, if I was anyone else, you would have sex with me?” From the expression on her face, it was clear that she wanted to be anyone else.
“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean that I want to . . . I’d say I want you to be my girlfriend, but that’s probably really sudden.”
“In a good way.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t believe it.”
“But I just want to be sure of . . . what’s going on with us. Because I haven’t tried to have a girlfriend in so long. And the last time I tried, it was kind of a disaster.”
On Jared’s last day of being a boyfriend, he had been filming a sex scene for a movie, after which he was planning to take his girlfriend to a jewelry store as a surprise. He would walk her to the engagement ring section and go down on one knee. The girlfriend in question, Amanda, was a model—not a supermodel by any stretch of the imagination; just a woman with girl-next-door good looks who was paying her way through law school in a glamorous way. Jared wasn’t sure anymore why he had wanted to marry Amanda. He was probably no more in love with her than he’d been in love with a dozen previous girlfriends. It might have been that—unlike those previous girlfriends, who were mostly lighthearted, fickle porn actresses—Amanda had made it plain that she wanted to marry him.
The movie that day was one of those near-plotless, undignified things that got sold under titles with “ass” or “head” in them. He had worked with most of the people before, and when he arrived on the set, they had already shot two sex scenes and drunk a few bottles of champagne. The set was someone’s improbably huge Tribeca loft, but the assembled porn gang had managed to fill it with eye-smarting clouds of cigarette smoke. Adding to the smoke was a blazing fire in the fireplace, which was also heating the place to such tropical temperatures that even the crew were stripped down to their underwear. Amanda was coming to pick Jared up afterward, in order to drive him off to a weekend away in her family’s cottage in the Catskills, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was going to make of the scene. The only time she’d met him at work before, she had been a good sport about it, but afterward had asked, with a nervous smile, “Is it always like that?”
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.