by Amy Lane
Galen pulled back and whispered, “C’mon, Johnny. I don’t care if it’s fast. I want you to come. Give me something to remember.”
And then that amazing pressure, heat, stroking….
John’s feet beat on the floor and he clenched his ass so hard Galen’s fingers were trapped, wriggling, inside. His orgasm rushed his balls, blowing up and out, and Galen let his mouth fill, the slick heat engulfing John’s cockhead before Galen swallowed, putting pressure on the sensitized skin all over again.
John convulsed, making noises into the pillow until he couldn’t breathe, then finally rolling over and pulling away because his dick was so tender, so exquisitely pleasured, that he couldn’t stand the pain. He lay, panting, spots spinning in front of his eyes, while Galen made cleaning-up noises behind him.
He managed to shift his hips when Galen pulled up his shorts and boxers, then did the zipper and belt. The bed shifted when he was still trying to get his bearings, and Galen unlocked the door.
John managed to open his eyes then, saw Galen limping back to the bed, his cock making a sizeable tent in his shorts.
“But,” he managed. “But… but you….”
Galen sat next to him and smoothed John’s hair back from his forehead. “You need a haircut,” he said. “The shaggy look doesn’t look as good on you as it does on me.”
John tried to laugh, still completely undone. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“John, has it occurred to you that you got screwed over in the romance department? That the reason you love giving people the fantasy is that you never had your own—not really? I watch your porn. The fantasy you sell isn’t just the sex, you know that, right?”
“Of course I know that,” John mumbled. “It’s my porn.”
“Yeah, but you’re selling the human connection. The possibility of happy ever after. The tenderness when the jizz cools.” Galen bent over and kissed his forehead. “When’s the last time you got that?”
John’s postcoital shivers turned cold. “Do you have to ask?”
“I don’t know if you ever did,” Galen whispered in his ear. “Not until me. I’m going to do that for you, okay? The man I want to be, he’ll do that for you. And yeah. You can take care of me when it’s your turn. But I’m going to take care of you. So that’s why you’re leaving, okay? I just needed you to know.”
“Okay.” John nodded because he had no way to argue that, not now, stripped of every defense he’d ever forged. “I’ll remember that.”
Galen tilted his chin up and regarded him steadily from those luminous green eyes. “Do you promise? To remember that? To remember what we’re working for?”
“Yeah,” John said, and right before Galen’s mouth came down on his, he felt the beginnings of a smile.
HE SLEPT surprisingly well in his own bed on his first night back.
Dex had managed to keep his fish alive and had even redecorated the tank a little. The house was clean, dusted, and although the refrigerator had been bare when John arrived, it held milk, bread, some lunch meat, and some salad now.
John lay there for a minute, hearing the constant whoosh of traffic on the overpass, which was about half a mile away, and the smaller traffic on the city streets. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that, the urban heartbeat of cars and fluorocarbons. Or the stiller, flatter quality of air unburdened by humidity, and the gold of lawns in drought. It wasn’t Orlando or Daytona—which were both reasonably beautiful—but there was something… something….
The shade was different, the smells were different, the light was different—but it was John’s place. It wasn’t tainted by memories of his parents or of his nana, bless her, or of Tory. Even the memories of Dex were of a friendship that could be salvaged.
It was a good place, this. He’d made a life here. He was two hours from the mountains and two hours from the sea, seated heart-deep in the middle of a state that had been quietly fighting for his rights for fifteen years.
He closed his eyes on that thought. This was a place he could bring a man to and not be embarrassed about. He dreamed about Galen sleeping next to him, and the dream was good.
The next day he walked into the Johnnies office for the first time since Dex and Kane had dragged him out, bound for rehab.
He strolled into his own office with some confidence and some hope. By the time Dex arrived two hours later, wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears with a big stack of them in a bag in his hand, John had cleared the deck of paperwork and back editing. Dex was walking into a clean store, and John had done that.
He could not describe how good it felt.
“Holy shit, where the fuck did you come from?” Dex asked, shocked.
“Well, my stupid boyfriend got upset that I missed your wedding and kicked me out of the state,” John said. He dropped some of his bravado. “I’m sorry about that, man. I really thought he needed me. Turns out he needed me to have a life. My bad.”
He was unprepared for Dex’s hug. “I don’t give a shit,” Dex said in his ear. “I’m sorry you missed the wedding, but….” He stepped back, hands still on John’s shoulders. “Look at you! It’s like the all-new version of the good old John! I love it!”
John could feel his face turn red. “You are embarrassing me,” he mumbled. “By the way, did I tell you Galen gave us a list of suggestions for tightening our contracts? We’d have to have everybody sign again, but he says it would keep us from ever being put in a position like we were with Scott. He just sort of tightened the hiring/firing language, put us in power a little more. What do you think?”
Dex tilted his head back and forth as though considering, then smiled brightly. “If you’re going to help with getting everyone to sign—”
“He’s got them online now. Since we have everyone’s e-mail, we could just have them sign like that. It shouldn’t take us long—here, I’ll show you how the service works, and we can have the lawyer work on the contract language….” John smiled uncertainly. “I mean, if you want to. And, you know, it’s your first day back. You’ve got to, uhm, give away your stupid hats.”
Dex grinned at him encouragingly. “You’re hoping you have one, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” John said, using a disdainful sniff to hide the fact that yes, he really wanted to be in the Dex club.
“You want one… c’mon, John, admit it!” Dex was just dicking with him now.
John narrowed his eyes. “I wouldn’t piss on your stupid hat if it was on fire,” he said with an ass swish.
Dex tackled him over the shoulders with a big goofy hug that John once would have credited Kane with and not his levelheaded young journeyman. “Good,” Dex said and kissed his cheek. “’Cause I didn’t buy you a hat. I bought you a shirt instead!”
John couldn’t stop the grin that creased his face. “Yeah? A shirt? Lemme see!”
He turned around and Dex practically danced in front of him, holding the bag behind his back. “Nope. Come get it, John… you know you want it….”
By the time the temp receptionist walked in, her bosses were chasing each other throughout the corridors of Johnnies, hollering “Give me that shirt, you prick!” and “C’mon, asshole, beg!”
John rounded the corner to the front office and caught a tie-dyed rainbow shirt right in the kisser. His whoop of excitement could probably be heard through the soundproof glass.
He wore that damned shirt all day. It sort of made being there worth it.
And he needed some encouragement too.
Dex ran a tight ship, but he’d obviously needed help in the past two months. Everybody from the cameramen to the gaffers to the receptionist was completely undertrained. The new girl, Dory, kept putting people on terminal hold or, even better, transferring them to the intercom and then linking it to a porn set. John got a rather bemused phone call from a DVD distributor who wanted to double his anticipated order for the scene that he’d just heard filming. That was nice because it turned a profit, but seriously, t
he next time she did that, the outcome might be very different.
He had Dex call a meeting of the cameramen and—with Dex’s approval, and surprise as well—he threatened to let one of them go.
“I will give you full references,” he told the guy privately after he’d dismissed everybody else. “You take a clean picture, but I’ve counted five come shots that were blurry, or from a bizarre angle, or better yet, focused on the guy’s face. I know you’re not gay, but if you don’t think jizz spurting out of a cock is fascinating, you’re in the wrong business.”
“I, uhm, sort of wanted to film nature shows,” the kid said, blushing.
John and Dex grimaced at each other. “What?” Dex said. “You couldn’t pretend it was Wild Kingdom and that you were watching primates boff each other?”
“Primates don’t grab your ass offset,” the cameraman defended.
John heard Dex suck in a breath too.
“Well, you should have told Dex about that,” John said soberly. “Because he would have put a stop to it. And I will too.”
The kid—Jerzy Dougal—shook his head and shrugged. “I’m sorry—you’re… you’re right. I mean… I’m probably not all straight, even, because I, uhm, well, I got… uhm….”
“Hard,” John supplied drily. “Your dick got hard when you were shooting. Yes, it probably means that sex with men isn’t a total turnoff for you—but you were saying…?”
“I can’t shoot it,” the poor guy admitted. “I… I’m always more interested in how the guys feel when they’re coming. I want to see their faces.”
John let out a breath. “So, like, soft-core,” he said, thinking carefully.
“Well… yeah, sort of.”
“I mean, we’re selling the fantasy, but you really want to sell the fantasy?”
“Well… yeah,” Jerzy said, smiling a little. He was a dreamy-looking kid—soft curly hair, sloe brown eyes, a narrow chin and jaw with high cheekbones and a high forehead. Not really porn material, but young. And creative.
John looked at Dex, who shrugged and grimaced. They really couldn’t have this kid wreck any more porn vids, because the lack of sales hurt the guys shooting as well.
But….
“Kid, how would you like to conduct an experiment? We couldn’t pay you or the models—you’d have to pick guys or even girls who would want to do it for just the sake of making a vid and getting their faces out there. We want… something softer. A scenario, names, seduction—hell, music, as long as you’re not all gross and seventies about it—”
“We need to license music,” Dex said.
John grimaced. “Fuck. Okay. Scratch the music. But you hear what I’m saying? Like, not twenty minutes of porn, but twenty minutes of romance. A script even. We want to care about these guys for twenty minutes, and we want to care about how they get off. What do you think?”
Jerzy brightened. He’d probably heard the “I don’t think this is working out” pitch a mile away. “Wow… really? I could do that?”
Dex was sort of smiling in a surprised way, and John nodded. Why not?
“Yeah. We’ll run it as an experiment, make it a free download from the site. You and the models wouldn’t get paid for the first one—it would be all voluntary—but we’ll ask for feedback. If all we get is ‘Screw it, I need to see fucking!’ well then, we’re not going to make any money, so screw it, we just film people fucking. But if we get ‘That was nice, I’d watch more like it,’ we do some calculations and set a price point. What do you think?”
Jerzy smiled, looking pleased. “That would be… that would be great. So, like, there could be… real sex, not Skinemax sex, but sort of… real real sex.”
John shrugged. It would be worth it—if porn was everything he’d told Galen it was, there was room to play with the formula, right?
“Yeah,” John said, picking up on the enthusiasm. Then he sobered. “But I suggest you have a very specific game plan. Let the models play with it if you want, but don’t go in there all new age and dreamy about it. I’m telling you, any guy who’s ever heard ‘We’re just going to experiment with our feelings a little’ has had to work extra hard to keep his boner. We’re simple creatures. We like simple things.”
To his surprise, Jerzy giggled like a little kid. “Okay, so I get it—high concept, simple dick! It’s gonna be great!”
John nodded, trying not to laugh at him, which was hard because John hadn’t ever been that naïve—or that excited. John wouldn’t piss on his parade for the world. They hammered out some details, including how Jerzy would go about approaching models, because “Hey, wanna make an art porn for no money!” wasn’t such a great opener, and then cut the kid loose.
Dex had to run to his next shoot, but he stopped at the door on his way out. “That idea—that was a real good idea. Where’d you get that?”
John grimaced. “I dunno. I had to explain to Galen why I did what I did for a living, and all of a sudden he starts treating me like it’s a great thing and he’s proud of me for it. I guess I figured if I was going to make that big a deal about how it’s not sleazy, I’d better put up or shut up, you know?”
Dex grinned. “Yeah. I know.” He sobered for a moment. “And that thing about guys grabbing his ass—”
John held up his hands. They both remembered Scott, the fucker. “Yeah, I know, I know—a nonharassment clause shall be included in the new contract.” He smiled a little. “It’ll give me an excuse to talk to Galen for real.”
Dex nodded. “You uhm… I mean, it’s okay that he’s in Florida and you’re here?”
John shrugged. “Yes and no,” he said honestly. “I want him here—I mean, you and Kane, you can’t go two minutes without each other. I want him like that. But….” He thought about the thing he’d just done with his business, and the ways he could help Dex, even though Dex did a damned good job of running the business.
“He’s right. I’ve got a life here. There’s a reason they tell you no new relationships for a year after rehab—establishing a life, a place, a rhythm, you know? Small things that make you not want to get high all the time. I mean….” John sighed, because he hadn’t wanted to press Galen for a day, but he knew it was possible that this could be the case. “I want to think we’ll be ready to make it permanent together sooner than a year, but I’ve gotta… be patient, I guess.”
Dex nodded in agreement. “Yeah, well, you got something to look forward to, right? Helps you make better plans.”
John nodded. “Which reminds me, we need to talk about Project After-Porn, okay? I’ve got some ideas.”
The absolute wonder of it was that he did.
“OKAY, SO a nonharassment clause,” Galen said during their phone conversation that night. He spent a moment thinking quietly. “I can do that. Don’t you have another lawyer to help you?”
“Yeah,” John said, hurt. “But, you know. You’re better. Do you want me to pay you? I could pay you, you know.”
“No, you couldn’t. I know your finances, and I’d charge too much. But it’s appreciated. And no, I don’t want you to go to your regular lawyer. Seems like a nice guy, but honestly? I don’t trust him to take care of you like I do. Think of this like my equivalent of cooking you dinner. It’s an unreturnable favor, but it’s part of the domestic partnership, so it works.”
John digested that for a minute. “I don’t like that at all,” he decided, feeling a little naked. “That’s… how do you have an ‘unreturnable favor’—I mean, I’ve got enough karmic debt already—”
“You mention that kid’s name again, I’m going to hang up.”
“He didn’t need to forgive me.”
“I don’t care.”
“He bought me a shirt.”
“I just gave you thousands of dollars of free legal services. That means I get to not hear you sing his praises for our phone call, deal?”
“Is it, you know, an unreturnable favor kind of deal?”
Galen’s low, pissed-off alley cat grow
l came over his phone from three thousand miles away. “This really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“Has it occurred to you that I am a social liability?”
“I’ve seen you buy sun hats from 7-Eleven. This does not shock me.”
“Worse than that. My own parents disowned me nearly twenty years ago. They still feel the same way. You know what I do for a living. And you’re going to what? Move out here and sink into the quicksand of Sacramento politics? I don’t even follow elections and I’m pretty sure they’re bloody as hell. So what do I have to give you? Lack of judgment? Coming from me, that’s sort of, you know, a thin basis to fall in love with someone.”
“Well, you weigh what? One twenty soaking wet?”
“One sixty!” John protested. He still hadn’t put on the muscle he’d lost when he’d been eating drugs for breakfast.
“That is so not much better. So you’re one sixty soaking wet. You are pretty thin. Doesn’t make you not a person.”
“You’re starting to sound obsessed. It’s weird.”
Galen’s sigh said he’d had enough of this game. “Do you really want me not to love you?”
“I’m terrified you’ll stop. I’m trying to see where it’ll come from so when it hits it’s not such a horrible surprise.” John took a deep breath and settled further into his green couch, making sure yesterday’s episode of The Daily Show was on pause. Poor Galen—it was late in Florida, and John was giving him this shit to handle. “Never mind. It’s an unforgivable—I mean unreturnable favor. Returnable. I can live with that. Unreturnable favor. It’s okay. I won’t come undone. Swear.”
“You are fooling me,” Galen snapped, obviously out of patience. “I will not stop loving you. Stop looking for your Achilles’ heel, because I will tell you now: You are made of heels. You have Achilles’ heels all over your scrawny body. It’s really unattractive. And yet I still love you. And because I love you, my job will be to guard those heels so nobody takes you out. And you are set to guard my heels, because I am an abrasive asshole and what I do not kill is way deadlier than I am.”