Brice does laugh. With such fervor that he’s soon holding his cracked ribs and smiling through his grimace. “There? Really? The place we ate before everything went to shit? That’s some pretty weird coincidence right there.”
I shrug my shoulders. “I thought so too, but if it’s going to pay the bills, I can’t exactly be choosy.”
Brice’s humor evaporates as quickly as it came on. In no time at all, he’s back to unfocused eyes gazing out the window at the cloudless sky. It hurts to watch him zone out like this, because I know what he’s thinking. Inside that battered skull of his, doped up on a haze of drugs, he’s wrestling with whether he should burden me with the state of his mother’s finances. He’s playing out the different ways he might ask to borrow money, just until he can get back on his feet and pay me back. Ultimately, he shakes his head and plasters a fake smile back on his face.
“As long as you can sneak me leftovers every now and then, I’m 100% behind you on this. Just one thing,” he says and takes my hand in his. “Don’t walk home.” Now the smile he cracks is genuine as he looks down at himself.
“I’m going to try to get a ride with a coworker. If not I’ll call a taxi or something.”
“That’s a good idea,” he says, but he hasn’t let go of his joke yet. “I mean, have a look at what can happen. This is your body,” he says in a deep baritone, impersonating those anti-drug commercials from when we were kids. He gestures at all of me, and then he points at his body. “And this is your body after a car decides to get up in your face.”
At this point a nurse comes in, saying that she needs to change the sheets and get Brice ready for his first physical therapy session. This is my cue.
After a kiss and a promise that I’ll see him after work, I’m nearly jogging down the halls of the hospital, desperate for a taste of fresh air. Lying straight to Brice’s face this whole morning has been suffocating. But he bought it, which means I bought myself enough time for my real plan.
Before my heart can reason with my brain to stop, my phone is next to my ear, and I’m waiting for the other side to pick up.
“I was hoping you would call,” Greg says in way of an answer.
“Can we meet? Because I have a few conditions.”
This is my first time in Greg’s office. Before this we used the conference room to sign contracts, but Sally is setting up in there for a meeting with investors. She’s checking over a PowerPoint when I walk by. When our eyes meet, I detect a hint of pity coming off her.
Greg shakes his head again. He’s twirling a pencil in his left hand. “There’s no way I can agree to that. It would be like handcuffing myself, and not in a sexy BDSM sort of way.”
Besides his desk, which is strewn with DVDs and mock-ups of advertisements featuring women whose breasts are larger than their heads, his office is simple. Almost stylish in its minimalism. There’s a single poster behind me—a movie poster from the classic 80s film, ‘When Harry Met Sally’. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal face each other, each wearing goofy, love-stricken smiles. A bookshelf takes up the whole wall behind Greg. On it are DVD covers displaying any number of sex acts, trophies in the shape of buxom figures, and a dozen thick books on the topic of filmmaking.
“That’s the only one I absolutely can’t budge on.”
“Look, I can pay you on a weekly basis rather than a monthly one. The rate you’re asking for is steep, but I’ve seen your work, so I’m willing to go that high. Promising that Brice will never know anything about our little deal is easy. (Though if he catches a glimpse of you online, that’s on you.) But I can’t have one of my girls used strictly for solo scenes. We thrive on fetishes here. All my actors need to have a variety of specialties. I’m not asking you to start filming gang bangs on the daily, but if you’re not open to filming with partners, I don’t know how this could possibly be profitable.”
I knew this was going to be a sticking point for Greg. And for good reason. I’m basically tearing away 99% of the possible scenarios we can use. But I came prepared.
“You’re acting like I’m new to this. Like I don’t know my audience. Don’t you remember how you found me?”
“Camming sites are different,” Greg argues. “You might think the tips are good, but it’s not enough to sustain a business like mine. Besides, the tricks you used in live shows aren’t going to work on film.”
I shake my head. “You’re missing the point. You’re thinking too black and white. I’m saying that we fuse the two.”
“And how do we go about that?”
Here’s where I lay out my spiel. I’m far from a businesswoman, but I’ve done enough reading online—plus more than my share of experimenting with my own cam site—to know the effects of loss leaders and funnels that lead customers down to more expensive purchases. The way I used to do it was to attract customers to my live shows, which were free to watch up to a point. They could participate by asking me to do things, and if they tipped enough, I usually would. But since these recordings can’t possibly be live, we can’t exactly ask for tips. Except, I’ve thought of a way around that.
“Have you ever heard of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books?”
Up to now, Greg has been growing visibly agitated with this whole talk, tapping a pen with increasing intensity and tempo against the desk. No doubt he’s thought it was a waste of time from the moment that I declared I wouldn’t be doing scenes with anyone besides Brice. But it only takes him about three seconds after I ask this question for his face to light up. The neurons are clearly firing; I’ve gotten my message across with a single question. But now it’s time to set the hook and reel him in.
“But our Choose-Your-Own-Adventure would require a small ‘tip’ for each decision. And the deeper they go—and the deeper I go,” I say, putting on an extra thick sexy voice, “the more they have to pay.”
Greg tilts his head, picks up a pen, and begins writing illegible math equations on a sheet of paper. After only two minutes, his head pops back up. “Even if we’re only looking at five levels, including the first, and three choices per level after that initial one, we’re talking about filming 81 videos. If you want to add another layer, that’s going to be 243 videos.”
“Only if each and every choice creates a unique scenario. But I don’t think that will be the case. If we can map it out smartly, I’m betting we’ll end up with closer to 200 videos.
Greg is shaking his head. “Even then, calculating that each is 10 minutes, we’re looking at 2,000 minutes of finished video. That’s more than 30 hours! And that’s not accounting for all the resets and video editing. Plus this type of thing has never been done before. I’ll have to get my web developer to put something completely new together.”
At this, I know he’s too excited to ever say no. So I lean over and finally ask, “When do we start shooting?”
Chapter 12
As shocking as having your boyfriend in the hospital while you lead a double life on the outside is, life quickly falls into a rhythm. I spend mornings and nights with Brice. We talk about everything we’re going to do once he’s discharged (which Dr. Heyman still won’t give us a fixed date for). We’ve got a whole list of places we want to visit. Having grown up right under the line of poverty, neither of us has done much traveling outside our great state of Ohio.
“New York City,” Brice says. He raises one arm up high, acting like he’s holding a torch. “The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. Imagine being in Time Square for the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.”
We’re talking over ‘leftovers’ I brought from my fake workplace. In reality, I just got take-out from the Brazilian barbecue place and got rid of the receipt. After swallowing a mouthful of incredibly soft lamb, I say, “No way. Have you ever read the horror stories of people there for New Year’s? You have to get there hours early. Then you’re, like, cordoned off in fences. And you can’t leave to go to the bathroom so a lot of people wear diapers. No thank you,” I say and wave a pork rib at him. “
I’m not pissing myself just so I can kind of see the ball drop while I’m surrounded by tens of thousands of other people also pissing themselves.”
“Fine,” Brice says. “But I don’t see how your plan to buy that rundown theater is any better. It’s been empty for years for a reason. And that reason is a Mega-plex just down the road.”
“We’re supposed to be fantasizing here, right? It’s not like I could ever afford the place. I just like to imagine how it might look all fixed up.”
“You could hang some of that mystical artwork I’ve still never seen up in there too.” He smirks, but the expression quickly slides off his face, revealing a far too serious side of him that I’m seeing too much of these days. He’s staring down at his lap where he’s got his plate of meat and rice.
“What’s up?” I ask him. “Not hungry today either?”
Without looking up, he says, “You don't have to come here every day.”
“I know that. But I want to.”
He’s shaking his head. “Still, I don’t think you should. I mean, this is time you could be resting. Your new job must be hard. Being on your feet all day. Dealing with asshole customers. Then you can’t even rest when you’re finished and all we can do is fantasize about a life we’ll probably never have. What kind of life is that?”
“It’s my life,” I answer. I’ve slid my chair over and grabbed his hand. “That’s what kind of life it is. And I want to spend as much of it as possible with you.”
Before he can say anything more self-deprecating about himself—like how he may never be the same after this or how I deserve better—I lean over and kiss him. When I pull back, he smacks his lips.
“Cranberry. Is that a new lip gloss?”
“Yeah.”
“I like it. Give me another taste.” With a hand on the back of my head, he pulls me down on him, our lips crushing against one another. I’m almost tempted to crawl on the bed with him, but two things stop me. The first is his condition. The second is mine.
What Brice doesn’t know—what he can’t know—is that I forgot all about the lip gloss I was wearing. Because it’s not mine. Stellar insisted on painting it on my lips when we met in the dressing room earlier. She said the bright flash of color would pull attention away from the bags under my eyes, which no amount of cosmetics would cover completely.
Even she doesn’t know the details of my deal with Greg. He insisted on keeping our project hush-hush. It was going to have a big reveal: ‘Tessa Bloom’s Choose Your Own Sex-venture’. That was the tentative name. But before we could do anything else—the website, the promotions, the money—we needed the scenes. Which meant I was in the studio all day, ever day.
Greg and I aim for each scene to be ten minutes. The Level 1 and even some of the Level 2 scenes are easy. Little more than stripteases. The hardest part about filming those is moving slowly enough to draw out the time. And since these are the earliest levels, there are fewer videos to film. In fact, we finish all of these in just two days of frenzied filming. With those done, there are no more easy scenes.
Whish means no days where I’m not exhausted by the time I finally meet up with Brice each night.
“I think I’m going to turn in early tonight,” I announce, pushing off of him. Before he can think he’s done something wrong, I lean down for another kiss. “I promise we’ll make up for all this lost time once all of your bones are straight again. So wait until then, okay?”
He shrugs, clearly not happy our sexy times have ended so early. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
I promise to stop by in the morning, and then I’m gone to catch a few hours of sleep.
A week later, it’s an hour to midnight. We were supposed to be finished two hours ago, but due to a problem with the main camera, Greg has been on the phone with support for the past hour. I’m sitting inside a fake bathtub in the studio, and though the scene calls for me to wear nothing but a towel wrapped around my body, I’ve got a blanket while I wait for the studio guys to give me the okay.
This is the seventh scene we’re filming today. If we weren’t on such a deadline, I would have headed over to the hospital after the fifth scene, but Greg has set a firm (if ambitious date) of revealing our new Choose-Your-Own-Sex-venture corner of his website by the end of next month.
Now we’re getting into the nitty-gritty scenes of self-delivered orgasms. All but the first have been fake up to now, but that doesn’t mean that all of the rubbing hasn’t left me crazy sore. All I want to do is curl up beside Brice and watch a movie together, like we used to do on the weekends. Back before Greg changed our lives up with his crazy request. But I’m here, in a fake tub, waiting for the go-ahead so I can pretend to pleasure myself.
“It’s not going to happen tonight,” Greg announces once he appears in the studio once more. “But we’ll be getting a loner camera from tomorrow, so I’ll see you all then.”
The cameramen and sound guys are already halfway packed up and within minutes they’ve cleared out, grumbling about how they don’t paid enough for this kind of bullshit.
“You holding up?” Greg asks as I climb out of the tub.
I’m holding the blanket over myself reflexively, but it’s silly because this man has seen me nude more times than he’s seen me with clothes on. “I didn’t know it was going to be so tough to film seven scenes a day.”
“You only did six. Normally when we’re filming at such a breakneck speed, we’d schedule you a day or two here and there to recover.”
“I’ll be fine. I’m keeping my end of the bargain, so you be sure to keep yours.”
“We both want the same thing.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together, indicating the thing that makes the world turn round.
Half an hour later, I’m back at the hospital. I’m so exhausted that I forgot to spend the taxi ride over here making up stories about what happened at my fake job today. So when Brice asks me how everything was at the restaurant, I simply tell him that I don’t want to talk about work. Instead, I want to hear all about his day. The deflection works perfectly.
“Therapy still sucks,” he says while stretching out his arms. “They’re weaning me from all the pain meds I’m on, so I’m really starting to feel how messed up my body is. It’s not so bad when I’m laid up like this, but get a girl with crazy strong arms working all your joints so they don’t get stiff, and you can’t hide from reality anymore.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize your physical therapist was a girl,” I say as calmly as possible while remembering that time back in Greg’s studios when Brice was on the brink of filming a scene with Stellar. Even though we’re on friendly terms, I’m not about to let her take my place on camera.
Brice needles his finger into my side right below my ribs. I pull away instinctively from the ticklish gesture. “Is the great and mighty Tessa feeling jealous?”
“I don’t know about that ‘great and mighty’ part, but I’m not thrilled with the idea.”
“Well, don’t you worry,” Brice says. “I’m not into older women, and Tiffany is somewhere in her late forties, I’d say.”
“Tiffany, huh?”
He shrugs. “What? I can’t know her name now?” Oh,” he says and snaps his fingers. “Speaking of Tiffany and therapy and everything. We were talking—”
“By ’we’ you mean you and Tiffany.”
“Yeah,” Brice says with a roll of his eyes. “’We’ meaning Tiffany and me. Anyway, we were talking and she was mentioning how her son—her son, Tessa. She’s old enough to have a son—is about to graduate high school. He’s planning to go into this apprenticeship program to be an electrician. She was saying how apprenticeships are really the new things. I mean, they’re not new, but with the cost of university nowadays, it’s a real option that a lot of people are turning towards.”
“Ok,” I say, stretching out the vowel sounds nice and long to indicate that I have no idea where he’s going with this.
“So I was thinking that mayb
e I could look into doing something that when I get out of here. Maybe it’s time I give up on my dream of being a doctor. It’s not like there was ever a real chance I could work my way up from being a janitor anyway.” This is where he reaches out and takes my hand in his. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I don’t think there’s a future working with Greg. Besides, any videos we make for him will be out there forever. Who’s to say that our future employers don’t see them one day and decide to fire us for something we did way in the past? I just think it’s too risky.”
This is the moment I should come clean about what I’m really doing when he thinks I’m taking orders and bussing tables. After an explanation, I could even tack on how I’m doing this because I heard his mother’s sob story about losing her house. That I’m also doing this so Brice and I have a bit of money to fall back on when he’s finally out of the hospital.
But I don’t say any of these things.
“That’s probably a good idea,” I answer, careful not to word my understanding in a way that would directly imply that I’m consenting to his blanket ban. “It would definitely look bad for any future employers.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Brice says, excited that I’m going along with this so easily. After all, I dragged Brice into this line of work. So for me to give it up so easily must pull the weight from Brice. “It’s too late to pull your cam work from the Net, but we can always say that you were just young and stupid, you know?”
This is where my brain snaps back from pretending that everything will be fine as long as we have money at the end of it. I could go along with Brice’s reasoning before, but saying that I was young and stupid is a step too far.
“No, I don’t know what you’re saying.”
Brice, still unaware of the trap he’s stepping into, goes on to say, “I just mean that you weren’t thinking of the consequences when you made those videos. We all do stupid shit when we’re younger. But we’re maturing now. Growing up and—”
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