by Amy Lane
Whether Bobby topped or bottomed was the director’s choice on the set, but in close and personal, when it was just the two of them, Bobby took charge. In a way it was almost scary how much Bobby seemed to know about telling Reg what to do, but in another way it made total sense.
Bobby knew what to do. He knew when Reg got too excited or just needed to be kissed hard and into the mattress. He liked to touch, sliding big work-roughened hands over Reg’s skin like he was covering Reg with his essential person-ness, protecting Reg with a layer of warmth, giving him a thicker skin.
Reg saw Bobby sexed out, looking like he knew he didn’t smell great, and he felt some of that warmth seep away.
Reg wanted his things back.
He was still standing there, reflector in hand, when Dex walked through the corridor and bumped him from behind.
“Uh… Reg?”
“Sorry, Dex. Just thinking.” For a moment he was embarrassed, but if Dex thought there was anything weird about Reg thinking, he didn’t say that.
“What about?”
“About… about what I do for a living.”
Dex grunted. “Hold a reflector and listen to me say ‘Dammit, flash your junk’?”
Reg snickered. Yeah, the last shot had been with a new guy who’d picked the name Harvey, which Reg thought was the dumbest porn name ever. He thought making o-faces and waving his wang around made for good film. Dex had needed to stop shooting to say “I know it’s gross, but people like to see that thing moving in and out of the asshole, so you’re gonna have to lean back. Do some stomach crunches if it’s too hard, but it’s necessary.” And then Skylar, who’d been bottoming for this shot, had cracked up, and Dex had turned on him. “Dude, I know you douched and shit, but whatever protein drink you guys are downing now, it’s rank. Maybe stick to fruit juice the day before the shot?”
“Aw, dammit, Dex!” Skylar had whined, “Now I’ve gotta think pineapple juice to get it up again. Do you know how wrong that is?”
Dex just looked at him. “I watch guys have sex day in, day out. If I can do it without smell-o-vision, there’s a chance I might get laid myself, so no. I don’t feel sorry for you. Seriously—what have you been drinking?”
“Spinach, kale, and this new sort of protein powder that… uh… I haven’t tried… uh….”
Dex was staring at Skylar and touching his nose. “Bingo.”
“Yeah. It’s bad. Sorry.”
Dex shook his head. “No worries. Harvey there apparently can get it up in a meat-packing plant. Everybody, break for hygiene and Gatorade. Back in five.”
So their jobs were not exactly glamorous, but it was finally hitting Reg why any guy who was hung like a god and could come on command might opt out of porn.
“Reg?” Dex shoulder-bumped him. “C’mon, man. Let’s get to the next set—it’s just a basic intro video. New guy.”
Reg brightened for a minute. “Really? Audition tape?”
“Yeah. This guy’s pretty hot. If he does good, we may fly him out from Kansas City and back to film.”
Reg sighed. Another guy who got to go places Reg had never seen. Another new face—and new dick—in porn, to replace the guys who had grown out of porn and were now on to the grown-up parts of their lives.
“Well, if a horny teenager awaits,” he muttered and walked around the complex to the other bedroom set to film.
THE BOY was pretty—super pretty, actually. He had longish blond hair and a wide, smiling mouth—not unlike Bobby’s. Big brown eyes too. Reg had been in the business long enough to know that the way he brought himself off slowly, his face relaxed and happy, arching like a bowstring as he shot, and the almost decadent pleasure he got from licking his own come off his hand—all that would make him a surefire winner at Johnnies.
But Reg felt none of the protectiveness over this one—Kip—as he felt for Bobby.
When Kip was done and collapsed on the bed, laughing softly at his own audacity, Reg shyly handed him a towel and then offered him a robe. The kid took it, but of course all his attention afterward was taken up by Dex and whether or not he’d passed the audition.
Well, duh.
But Reg looked at Dex and got a brief thank-you salute before he went up front and found Bobby chatting over the counter with Kelsey.
“Reg!” she said as he walked around the front. “Hey, buddy—I cut your check today. Do you want it?”
Oh yeah—payday was always good, especially when you’d been working extra days as the light guy.
“Sure. Why’d you cut it early?”
She grinned at him cheekily, pregnancy rounding out her face, but in a pleasant way. She’d been all sharp points and angles before, but Reg liked soft women—round and substantial. Maybe because he’d done enough guys to be worried about breaking the super-skinny girls.
“You’re one of the first ten guys on my list,” she said with a shrug. “So I print out a batch of ten, and hey, hello….”
“I get paid.” He kept a grin on his face because it was a nice thing she was doing, but inside he died a little.
“So mine doesn’t come out until tomorrow,” Bobby said, but not like he was asking for a special favor.
“Sorry, Bobby.”
He winked and waved his hand. “No worries. I got tips to tide me over. But I send most of this check to my mom, so I can tell her when the money’s going to come.”
Kelsey held her hand to her mouth. “You don’t send her money, do you? Like cash?”
Bobby shrugged. “I send her an insured money order. Why?”
She frowned and started writing information on a business card. “Okay—so this is the information I need you to bring me for your mom. Don’t worry, I won’t look at it, you will. But once we have this from her and this from you, you can—” She frowned again. “You’ve got a smartphone, right?”
Bobby grimaced and pulled out a very dated version of the phone Kane had talked Reg into buying that fall. “Not so much.”
Kelsey scowled at him. “Okay—look. I’m going to cut your check right now.” She sorted through some numbers on her computer and hit some keys. A specialized printer by her knees started spitting out a familiar piece of paper. “I’ve seen the numbers—you’re getting residuals with this one, and it’s way big.” She ripped the check off the printer and handed it to Bobby, nodding so he could look at the numbers.
“Damn,” he whispered, and Reg watched his face carefully. Not greed. Not “Whoopie, gonna have fun tonight!” Relief. It was a look of sheer relief. Reg got it then, the responsibility for his mom that had been weighing Bobby down the same way Reg’s deal with his sister seemed to weigh on him. Maybe that was why Bobby was so good with V.
But Kelsey didn’t know any of this. “You need to go out and buy a smartphone—something current. And then I’m gonna show you how to transfer your funds to your mom’s account so you don’t have to mail shit. And then I’m gonna show you how to fuckin’ live, kid, ’cause by this time in their careers, most of these bozos have a new phone, a new car, and a new fuckin’ leather jacket to show off their new porn bodies. I’m sayin’—you’re doing all of the work and getting none of the bennies.”
Bobby laughed, taking the rant with easy humor. “Fair enough—and you’re right. When I was looking for a job, the phone could have saved me a whole lot of running the truck up to my mom’s to fill out applications.”
Kelsey nodded firmly. “Well, now you’ve got a couple of jobs, you can use it for other things. Reg, help him get a phone and a data plan and all that other shit we need here in the twenty-first century, okay?”
“Sure thing, Kelse.”
“And then bring him back here tomorrow so I can show him how to use some of that shit.”
“Sure thing, Kelse.” Bobby echoed.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Are you two a thing?” she asked suspiciously.
Bobby’s cheeks went a flattering pink, and Reg found it suddenly hard to meet her eyes. “Uh—”
> “I help him fix his house,” Bobby mumbled.
Kelsey rolled her eyes again. “Sure. You have a cell phone from the dark ages, and you use your money to help him fix his house. Men. You all suck.”
Reg’s inner twelve-year-old surfaced. “Well, not all of us. Just, you know, gay guys and bi guys and porn guys—we all suck. But straight guys aren’t supposed to do that sort of thing.”
She clapped her hand over her eyes. “Go away,” she groaned. “I love you, Reg, but go away. I’ll see you both tomorrow, after you’ve had sex and you can pretend you’re not a thing some more.”
“I’m not getting laid, Kelse,” Reg said, laughing. “I’ve got two more days before my shoot—you know that.”
She banged her head softly against the counter. “Could you… could you both just not? You’re masculine pheromoning all over my nice little desk here. Go away.”
“Sure,” Bobby said, bumping Reg’s shoulder with his own. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Kelsey. We love you, Kelsey. You’re gonna be a good mom, Kelsey.”
“Shoo!”
They laughed and left, and Bobby walked toward Reg’s car. “Tell you what,” he said, sounding happy. “I’ll follow you to your house, and we can check on your sister, then do what Kelsey said and get an iPhone, ’cause she’s right. I’m not up to getting the laptop yet, but I understand you can get books cheap on your phone too.”
“Wow,” Reg said, suddenly seeing the potential of having books in his back pocket without abusing his beloved paperbacks. “You’ll have to show me how that works.”
Bobby nodded soberly. “Sure thing. See you at your house.” Suddenly he grinned, the tiredness of filming the scene seeming to fall away, along with that weird shame that had seemed to take him over in the hallway. “We can celebrate a little,” he said softly. “No sex until your scene—but we can have some fun.”
Oh wow. Like a date. It had been so long since Reg had gone on a date with someone, he’d almost forgotten that was an option.
V HAD been in a dark mood when they brought her lunch, and Reg had made her take the extra pink pill, just in case. She’d downed it with a scowl and some curse words—but no violence—and Reg called it good.
He and Bobby had opted out of fast food, because Bobby had asked for some recs and found a bistro not far from his apartment in midtown. Reg felt very fancy in a place that served tasters of beer and a special fruit-and-veggie plate. Bobby was starving, so he ordered a hamburger, all the extras, and he carved off a little bite.
“I won’t tell,” he said with a wink. “You’ve got two and a half days—it’ll be gone by then.”
Reg laughed and told Bobby the Skylar’s-special-sauce story (as Dex had called it by the end of the shoot), and Bobby chortled, washing down his hamburger with soda, since he was too young to order beer. When they were done, Bobby left a big tip because he said the service was great, and Reg was impressed too.
“I never tried to wait tables,” he said, embarrassed, as they walked back to his car. “Fast food was hard enough—always loud and people yelling.”
“I just smile a lot,” Bobby said, shrugging. “And when I screw up, I try to fess up.” His face clouded. “Which reminds me—well, of a couple of things. A good thing and a bad thing, really—but you have to know the bad thing before we talk about the good thing.”
Oh crap. “You do know I’m not that bright, right?”
To his surprise, Bobby smacked him on the back of the head. “Stop saying that. Just… just stop. I was being confusing. That was not your fault.”
“Okay, fine.” Reg squinted at him and repositioned his stocking cap. “Could you maybe be less confusing? Just a little?”
Bobby grunted and buttoned up his jacket. Kelsey had been right—warm leather coats were sort of the Johnnies uniform, and Bobby was wearing a denim jacket with a hooded sweatshirt underneath. Reg remembered how, right after Thanksgiving, Kane had come in wearing a really nice warm coat and new hat, because Dex had bought them for him. They had become a couple, and Dex wanted to take care of him.
Reg paused, almost tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. “Do you want a coat?” he asked, baffled by this sudden impulse. But… but Bobby was cold. And he was wearing a denim jacket that was coming apart at the seams.
Bobby rolled his eyes. “I’ve got one. And it’s not hardly cold here—it’s way colder in the mountains. My mom’s up to her ass in snow. I just need a phone.”
Reg stared at him, hood up around his neck, his hands—skilled and work-roughened—red and chapped. “You… you need warm stuff,” he said stubbornly. “We’ll get a phone first. Then Target.”
“Not Walmart?” Bobby asked, amused.
Reg shook his head. “The ceiling freaks me out,” he answered. “Target has gloves. We’ll go there.”
“You’re driving,” Bobby said, bumping their shoulders together. “I can’t stop you.”
Reg wanted to take his hand—his cold, rough hand—and blow on it, make it warm. Who did that in public? Boys and girls, that’s who. Reg shrugged unhappily. “Yeah. Yeah. Then that’s where we’ll go.”
He kept his word too, after he and Bobby spent a long damned time talking about data plans and bandwidth and available apps. Reg got it, because most of the guys at Johnnies had, at one time or another, spent time with him buying a phone. Bobby’s eyes were glazing over by the time the sales guy put in the SIM card and activated the phone.
“There you go,” the smiling salesman said. He was cute—in his twenties, big brown eyes and pale bronze skin—and had shown off his phone with pictures of his wife and kids as he’d shown Bobby the works. “Now all you gotta do is take a picture of your girlfriend for wallpaper.”
One corner of Bobby’s mouth quirked in, and for a moment, Reg was afraid he was going to be mean or militant or even just really, really personal in the face of this stranger.
“Reg,” he said instead. “Here—let me get a few pix.”
Reg saw them, a series of them, when Bobby was done. His mouth open and his eyes wide in surprise, then his teeth biting his lip shyly as he looked away. Finally he was looking directly into the camera and smiling, his nose wrinkled a little, one side of his mouth twisted just a bit higher than the other.
“Those are real good pictures,” Bobby said, his voice low and sort of intimate. “I’ll put this one as my screensaver.”
“That one?”
Reg’s chin was pointed away, but his eyes were looking into the camera, and he was biting one side of his lip.
“That’s the one,” Bobby said, winking before he turned to the salesman. “Here—is there anything else I have to sign?”
“Nope.” The guy smiled at the two of them warmly. “You guys have a real nice day.”
They left the store, and it hit Reg as they neared the car. “Hey, Bobby?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he knew we’re a couple?”
Bobby shrugged. “I think he might have guessed.” He let out a breath. “Target next?”
“Yeah.”
Reg started the car to steer them deeper into midtown before Bobby spoke again.
“Would it have bothered you? If he did?”
Reg grunted. “No. I mean, I go in public with Johnnies guys all the time. Some of ’em are… uh… out out. Doesn’t bother me. Just, you and me, I just… we didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. Didn’t hold hands or… you know.”
“PDA?”
“Yeah. PDA.”
Bobby grunted. He did that a lot when he was thinking, and Reg didn’t mind, because it meant neither one of them was comfortable with words. So many of the guys were going to school or just really smart in general. One of the nice things about Bobby was that words weren’t toys to him. Like everything else around Bobby, they were strictly functional.
“I used to hold hands with Jessica in public, and I spent a lot of time trying to get away from that. I’d go fetch her ice cream or hold groceries—anything
so I didn’t have to touch her personally.”
Reg grimaced. “That’s not friendly.”
“No. But… well, there was this guy, her brother, Keith. And we’d….” He looked out the window. “This is embarrassing,” he said glumly. “This is, like, the worst thing I’ve ever done. But we were both going out with girls—I was going out with his sister, for chrissakes. But we, you know. Blowjobs. And that was all it was. He’d give me mine and I’d give him his. And I’d want to….” He sighed. “I wanted to touch him. So bad. You’re the first man who let me touch you like I wanted to touch him when we did that. That’s why I got so confused, I think. There were the blowjobs, and I wanted to touch him, but if I did touch him, I’d be gay. And… the truth was, I just really, really… liked him.”
“Like you like me?” Reg asked, trying to put this in perspective. Reg wasn’t the first guy Bobby liked. That would take some getting used to.
“Well, not nearly as much,” Bobby told him as they came to a stop. Reg looked at him sideways then, and found that same shy smile at his lips that Bobby had captured on his camera. He’d had no idea that was in him—prettiest picture he’d ever taken.
“But I didn’t know that,” Bobby added, looking away. “Light’s green, Reg.”
“’Kay.” Reg pulled through the light and kept going toward Target.
“Anyway, there was no touching. No softness. And I… I wanted that. But he was getting married in a few months—they put the wedding off, but it should have been October. Anyway, I told him no. No more. Wasn’t right. We were lying, and it didn’t sit right.”
Reg had to smile. “That’s my boy.”
“Yeah?”
He didn’t even have to think about it. “Yeah. You make mistakes—but same mistakes everybody else does. You’re just super good at learning from them, that’s all.”
Bobby grunted again, but it sounded like a happy grunt. “Well, thanks. Unfortunately this mistake didn’t go away.”