by JD Nixon
Barb and Roger, after smiling at the dancing penis a few minutes longer, gave Bick a break while they ate their lunch inside the booth. We leaned on the barriers surrounding the booth, joined by the thick-necks, and watched the entertainer finish his routine, warming to our spatter of applause. He bowed graciously, a difficult task in his tall, rigid suit. Having had some spectacularly crappy jobs myself in my past, I had a real appreciation for anyone doing their very best in such circumstances. After the other spectators wandered off, he came over to us, his young face flushed with effort.
“Hi,” he said, leaning on one of the barrier poles too.
I smiled at him while Bick high-fived him, saying, “Good job, man. Tough gig.”
“It sure is,” he said, taking off his ‘helmet’ and running his fingers through his damp, curly ash-brown hair. He had friendly hazel eyes and a ready smile. “But when you want to be a dancer, you have to take what you can get.” He swiped at his forehead. “It’s really hot in this costume. I wouldn’t have to work so hard if my partner had bothered to turn up for work today. We’re supposed to be a pair.”
“What costume was your partner meant to be in?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Use your imagination.” When we stared at him blankly, he added, “The female equivalent.”
“Oh,” Bick and I said simultaneously. My mind boggled at the thought of what that costume would have looked like.
“Probably better she didn’t turn up,” the young man mused for a short moment. “Her costume’s a bit scary.”
Bick laughed. “They’re all scary, mate. You’ll find that out when you grow up some.”
I thumped his arm for that sexist comment. “How old are you, anyway?” I enquired of the boy. He didn’t look a day over thirteen.
He sighed hugely, obviously hearing that question a lot. “I’m eighteen. I’m legal. I’m allowed to be here, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said with an uncontainable grin. “By the way, my name’s Benjy.”
We introduced ourselves.
“What do you do?” he asked Bick, obviously impressed with his height, bulk and muscles.
“Private security,” said Bick.
“Cool. Do you carry a gun?”
“Sometimes. She doesn’t though,” he said nodding towards me. “She doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other.”
“I do so.”
“Are you in security too?” Benjy asked me.
“Not at the moment.”
“She was fired.”
“I wasn’t fired. I was suspended. Big difference.”
“Who are you looking after?”
“Some porn stars.”
“Adult entertainment stars,” I corrected.
“Who? I might know them.”
“Busty Biggen and Roger Harder.”
“Oh yeah! The door-to-door survey lady movie, right? That’s a classic.”
“That’s a dog of a movie,” I insisted, hoping Barb and Roger couldn’t overhear me. “You’re a bit young to be watching movies like that, aren’t you?”
“No!” he said, indignantly. “I’m eighteen, I told you. I can do whatever I want.”
A cranky, overweight man with an ugly moustache and spectacularly bad hairpiece stormed over to us.
“Hey, Penis! Get back to work! I’m not paying you to stand around and chat.”
Benjy rolled his eyes and donned the head of his costume again. “See you later, guys,” he said, dancing off down the aisle.
Mr Hairpiece stared at us aggressively. “You’re not being paid to stand around either.” We took the hint and ambled back into the tent, ready for the next rush of fans.
Chapter 8
Before the afternoon Q&A session, Roger and Barb took the opportunity to promote their action group, HUMP. It had been advertised as an additional session and the pair waited with patience while extra people trickled in specifically to hear about their fight against illegal adult material. This was exactly what Trent would be interested in, so I had my notepad out, ready to take plenty of notes.
Roger began with a very heated homily about the awful lives of those adults and children forced into sex slavery to unwillingly participate in the production of explicit and frequently violent pornography.
“We can’t show you any examples of this kind of adult material, and you know why? Because it’s illegal. It’s illegal to make, it’s illegal to distribute, it’s illegal to download, it’s illegal to watch, and it’s illegal to own. But still these disreputable companies keep producing it and people keep buying it. And while there’s a market for it, they will keep making it, despite the quantifiable human misery it causes. It’s up to all of you in this room today to stop supporting the companies that profit from this type of despicable activity.”
“Name some names!” yelled out someone from the audience. “What companies?”
“I don’t want to get sued,” Roger said. “But there’s a company here at Seductively Sextravagant today selling legitimate DVDs, but they are a subsidiary company of a much bigger multinational organisation which has been successfully prosecuted in other countries several times for making illegal adult material. And if you ask nicely at their booth, they’ll direct you to a website where you can pay to access any kind of so-called ‘adult entertainment’ you want to, including that involving children, animals, sexual torture and even murder. I don’t need to tell you their name because they were almost prosecuted themselves earlier this year for distributing some very borderline material, but ended up cutting a deal. I’m sure you can work it out for yourselves.”
A large man in a suit jumped to his feet angrily. “That’s fucking bullshit, Harder, and you know it.” It was one of the suits from PRON Productions. “We didn’t cut a deal, we were exonerated. Get your fucking facts straight.”
“Bullshit!” Roger spat back. “You paid a million dollar fine. I’ve read the sealed court papers. In no way were you exonerated. That’s just a blatant lie.”
The man stormed out of the session, pushing a few people out of his way as he went. Bick sprang into full alert, watching cautiously as the man left. He closed the door, taking up a post near it in case the man decided to return. Roger tried to laugh the incident off to lighten the mood. “Didn’t mean to preach to you all, but some things are too important to be left unsaid. Now, I hope you have some good questions to throw at Busty and me about the legitimate adult entertainment industry?”
“Is there a minimum length requirement for men to be stars?” asked one bloke hesitantly, leaving everyone to wonder if he had a personal interest in the response. The crowd laughed, Roger included, as he answered the question as best he could, and the session carried on in a more cheery tone.
After the Q&A finished and the crowd cleared out, we escorted Roger and Barb back to their booth for the day’s final autographing session. A couple of the PRON Production men walked towards us in what could only be taken as a menacing way, their heads lowered and eyes fixed on us. Bick and I exchanged worried glances. I looked around, but there were no alternate routes for us to take. We had no choice but to cross paths with them.
They openly sneered at us as they approached. They continued to pass us by, one of them ‘accidently’ knocking into Roger with his shoulder, causing Roger to stagger sideways. Roger faced up to the man, his teeth bared.
“You want a piece of me?” he demanded to know.
I silently groaned to myself, not wanting to be caught in the middle of a public altercation. But Roger and the PRON man didn’t share my reluctance, and it was soon on between them. Barb screamed in fear as Roger took a sharp hook to his face. Bick inserted himself between the two men, pushing the PRON man backwards, while I grabbed a resistant Roger around his waist with both arms and yanked him away.
“Go to Barb, now! She needs you,” I ordered him.
He hesitated for a long minute, clearly wanting another shot at the thug. But one look at his wife’s frightened face made u
p his mind for him and he strode to her, rubbing his jaw with a last angry look at his assailant. Bick struggled with the man, their hands clamped around each other’s upper arms.
A couple of the centre’s own security men ran to his aid, so I abandoned him, sweeping Barb and Roger back to their booth. We had to walk past the second PRON man to do so, and my heart hammered the whole time. This man, even larger than the other, stood with his arms crossed, enjoying the fracas. His eyes followed us with hostility as we rushed past.
I breathed a sigh of relief when we arrived back safely, being a little rusty on my security techniques. I filled in our thick-necks on what had happened. They straightened up, slightly resentful at missing the action, bored with their tame crowd-control duty. A few minutes later, Bick arrived, mussed but unharmed. He smoothed down his hair in irritation, taking a few minutes to rearrange it to his liking again.
“Did the bad man mess up your hair, princess?” I teased, smiling.
“Thanks for your help,” he snorted. “You managed to piss off pretty quickly!”
“Hey, it’s not my job anymore to become involved in fights with goons. And besides, you should be grateful – I secured your clients for you. They’re safe and sound now, thanks to me. It’s Security 101, you know,” I said loftily.
“Well, Wonder Woman, why don’t you do me another favour and go find an icepack for Roger.”
I wandered off, eventually tracking down Mr Hairpiece, insisting he produce an icepack. After much grumbling he handed over a small bag of ice that I hurried back to the booth.
Ten minutes later, and although Roger’s jaw would bruise a bit, Barb and Roger insisted they were okay, just a little shaken by the events. They wanted to carry on with their autographing, knowing there would be disappointed fans otherwise.
“Why do those guys call themselves PRON Productions? It’s such a strange name,” I asked curiously, as we walked back to the 4WD when their booth closed for the night. We had to pass the PRON Productions booth on our way to the parking lot, but I was relieved to see that it was already closed down for the night and deserted.
“Probably to pick up those people who don’t type properly or those who misspell ‘porn’ in their internet search engines,” Barb guessed.
“I suppose that makes a warped kind of sense.”
We walked them to their hotel door this evening to be on the safe side. Delivering them to their suite without any further trouble, we promised to see them again tomorrow, the second last day of Seductively Sextravagant. Bick asked me to drop him off directly at Dixie’s place, so I went up to her poky little flat with him. I would have loved an opportunity to talk to her about him, but it became glaringly obvious that even the ten minutes I spent with them was ten minutes they would rather spend alone. So feeling a little unloved, I farewelled them, which neither of them even heard or responded to, and trudged back to the 4WD alone.
I locked the door of my flat, took a shower and ate some leftover pasta, accompanied by wine poured into the biggest glass I could find. In my pyjamas, and doing nothing more exciting than watching a rerun of Law & Order: SVU, there came a sharp rapping on my door. I’d been waiting for it.
“Go away!” I yelled out.
More impatient rapping. “Let me in, Matilda. It’s me.”
I sighed with irritation. “I know it’s you! That’s why I’m telling you to go away! I’m not letting you in and I don’t want to talk to you.”
The handle rattled for a moment and he opened the door, stepping into my flat. “You know I don’t like it when you barricade yourself in here.”
“I’m not in the slightest bit interested in what you don’t like,” I snapped. “I don’t like it when all the men are sniggering about me and my body, but you don’t seem to care about that.”
He seemed taken aback, at a loss as to what to say to me that would make things right again. “My sweet, I didn’t realise you were so angry.”
“Of course I’m angry,” I raised my voice. “And I’m upset how you keep treating the most private, intimate things that happen between us as some kind of public entertainment or some kind of warning for the men.”
“Matilda –”
But I was on a roll and didn’t even let him start. “The men know that I’m ‘your woman’, Heller. You’ve made that perfectly plain on a number of occasions, even when we weren’t together. You don’t need to keep jamming the fact down everyone’s throats. As if any of the men would ever even dare to give me a second glance anyway.”
He sat on my coffee table, facing me and taking my hands in his. Childishly, I snatched mine away. We looked at each other, his beautiful face serious, mine mutinous.
“I’m not very good at all this, Matilda. You know that. But I have witnessed the master copy of the footage being destroyed and the men have been ordered to delete any copies they may have. If I find out someone hasn’t done that, I’ve made it very clear I will be harsh in my punishment.” No one did harsh punishments like he did, so that was probably a sterling incentive for the men to obey. He leaned over and took my hands again. This time I let him, slightly mollified by his earnestness. “Is that enough? Is there anything else you want me to do?”
“Erase everyone’s memories?” I half-smiled.
“There are technologies to do that, but I don’t have access to them. As you can imagine, the government keeps those under strict control.”
“I was joking, Heller.” Almost joking, anyway.
“I’m sorry, my sweet. I want to promise I won’t do anything again that will upset you, but you are such an enigma to me. I sometimes feel I have been gifted a precious and mysterious piece of equipment that came with no user manual.”
That made me laugh. “Gee, you’re such a natural romantic.”
He smiled. “Am I forgiven?”
I sighed. “I suppose.”
“Can I stay with you tonight?”
I inclined my head and regarded him. “You can stay. But . . .”
“Hmm, my sweet?”
“I want tonight to be sex-free.”
“Oh.” That clearly took him by surprise, as if it was a concept he’d never before contemplated. “Sex-free? Not even –”
“No.”
“What about a little –”
“No.”
“Surely, just one –”
“No! Sex-free.”
“But why, Matilda? I don’t understand. It’s almost cruel.”
“You can’t go just one night without it?”
“Why would I want to when I have you in my life?”
“Because I want to see if you can. And I just don’t feel like having sex with you tonight.”
His histrionic sigh would have embarrassed a drama-queen. “This is just one of those many things about you I don’t understand. But if this is what you want.”
“This is what I want,” I insisted firmly.
“I suppose I can survive one night. But you better not do anything that will arouse me.”
I laughed. “Like what? A pole dance? I don’t have any current plans to.”
“No,” he smiled. “I mean like possessing breasts.” He thought for a moment. “Or breathing.”
“Heller,” I laughed again. “I can’t help those. You’re just going to have to control yourself.” Somehow he’d managed to convert my mood from murderous back to affectionate again. I’d enjoy snuggling up to him tonight.
And I did. He managed to keep his animal instincts in check. And with my head on his chest, enjoying the steady beat of his heart, him stroking my hair, I told him a bit about the day, including the altercation with the PRON guys.
“Matilda, please be careful. I’ve met men like them before and they’re usually unscrupulous when it comes to protecting their business interests. Ms Biggen and Mr Harder are playing with fire.”
“I’m sure they know that,” I said, not really all that confident that they did.
“Their cause is a worthy one, but they sound r
ather ingenuous to me to think they can take on major criminal conglomerates without any repercussions. And I don’t want any fallout from their actions landing on either you or Barnes.”
I hurriedly moved to lighten the atmosphere. “I met a giant friendly, dancing penis today.”
Total silence from him. “I have absolutely no idea how to respond to that.”
I laughed and snuggled down against him more. I was almost asleep when he spoke up.
“Matilda, one of the men recently informed me –”
“Snitched to you, you mean.”
He continued as if I’d never spoken. “One of the men informed me that you have set your status to ‘complicated relationship’ at some site I’ve never heard of before called Bookface or something.”
I snortled with laughter and thought about correcting him, but decided against it. He wouldn’t care what it was really called anyway.
“I’m not sure why you’re laughing, my sweet. But is that how you regard our relationship? Complicated?”
“Yes,” I answered honestly for once. “I don’t think there’s anything uncomplicated about our relationship.”
“I’m not sure I understand. There’s nothing complicated about two single consenting adults sleeping together. It’s a very simple matter of exchanged pleasure.”
“That’s not the part I’m talking about, Heller. I mean, for example, I don’t think you’d ever come to lunch or dinner at my parents’ house with me like most boyfriends would do.”
He considered that for a beat and then yielded in an agonised, saintly tone of martyrdom that hadn’t been heard since the medieval era. “If it will make you happy, my sweet, I will accompany you to a lunch or dinner there.”