Sexile

by Lisa Lawrence

  Fifteen minutes after we were done, I was back in the car fighting London traffic and thinking it didn’t seem real. But I had the documents. The tangible goods. And I was on my way to my bank to move the money, because I still couldn’t shake my suspicion of Hodd. Paranoid. I kept fearing he’d drop the other shoe and say, surprise, we’ve taken the money back, consider your labors a service for Queen and country. But in less than an hour, the bulk of the funds—including a good portion of what I already had—was shifted into an offshore account, and no, not one in Guernsey. They couldn’t touch it. They might still be able to follow the trail to where I had sent it, but too bad, it was safe. I left enough for the usual grocery runs or when I needed to hit a cash machine for an outfit I just had to buy or drinks with Helena and the boys. My rent check had already cleared and the bills had just been paid, thank God.

  I can still remember signing the documents in that conference room. And every time I do, I repeat in my head: Teresa, you bloody idiot.

  ♦

  I felt like celebrating. No—not exactly celebrating, but indulging myself.

  I didn’t want to bug Fitz again, not so soon. He sounded stressed and busy with the new center, and I actually was in the mood for novelty. And detachment, if that makes any sense. You know how after a breakup with one person, your mind snaps back and longs for the previous lover? Stupid, I know, but I felt that—well aware it was impossible, that it could never happen. I wanted release. If it couldn’t be with the person I still dreamed about after all these months (she’s gone, Teresa, gone forever), I didn’t want involvement with anyone else. Not yet, at least, not unless he or she intrigued me. It seemed unimaginable at the moment that that could ever happen again.

  With Fitz there was always affection, but no future. How about another escort from Helena’s agency? No, that would require me to offer a minimum of attentiveness, polite curiosity, be “on’ for someone else, even though the guy was supposed to be there for my sake and my needs.

  I knew what would do. For the interim.

  It’s hard to keep track of the lingo, but the current Internet term these days was “soft swinging.’

  Desmond Hodd was right in that I did have experience with “hypersexualized scenarios’ (what a way to put it). I’d become something of an amateur sex anthropologist—kept track of a few fads in the papers and magazines. The whole “dogging’ craze in London had become so popular and gotten so much attention from the media, it was bound to decline. For one thing, there were the creepy guys who apparently wouldn’t settle for just watching and broke etiquette, trying to join in or talk, and then there were the “Roys,’ as they were dubbed, the killjoys with the fake sirens to drive the doggers off (though you couldn’t blame ‘em—it’s not like I wanted to see that either if I lived near a nice common or something).

  So exhibitionist couples had taken the show inside. Just putting themselves on webcam wasn’t enough—for them or voyeurs. They needed the thrill of having an audience right there, a few feet from their bed or sofa. Like everything else, you used the Net to trade pics and got vetted by the hot couple, and either you showed up at their home or you were invited to a certain outside spot where you got a great view of them through their parted curtains.

  Tonight I was cleared for entering a home.

  The couple showing off were young. Guy nearly thirty, blond, and looked like he had northern European ancestry, not especially my taste but cute in a generic sort of way, overly muscular build, like he worked at it because he liked being on display. It was the girl who had caught my fancy. Twenty years old and tiny. Big brown eyes and lush eyelashes, Asian, an endearing gap in her two front teeth, lovely curves on her, midnight hair that went down all the way to the small of her back.

  A second-floor flat in Chelsea, and I laughed softly to myself, wondering why I should feel embarrassed; I’m only here to watch. They even had wine out and a few snacks in their living room, the lights dim, and the television enigmatically left on with the mute pressed. A cheerful white girl had opened the door for me, greeting me like a friend, but no one here knew the hosts or anyone else. We all just had the amiability and goodwill of strangers who answer an advert to help get petitions signed. Ridiculous. But no one wanted to leave.

  Because the blond guy leaned out of the bedroom door and said, “Hey.’ And that was it, confirmation he and his girl were ready to start.

  No self-consciousness to them at all, no attempt to “show us how it’s done’—we were there for them, not the other way around. And when the girl’s eyes took us in, those of us cross-legged on the bedroom floor, she looked at us as if we were all behind glass. We were the ones in the zoo, not the other way around.

  She stayed dressed in a half-T and sweatpants, no bra, while he stripped down to nothing in front of us. There was a small gasp in the room, because he was hung like a horse and thick, and he went from dangling to a low angle of arousal, her tiny fingers tugging. on him and taking him between her lips. I was unimpressed at first, but the erotic charge came from her still being clothed, her small breasts dangling, and as she sucked him, he tugged her T-shirt up a little so that the bottom curves of her golden breasts were exposed, at the same time the hem of her sweatpants riding off her tight little ass. With a small hand urging him to move with her, she lay on her side on the bed, still sucking him, and he fondled her, hand playing a peep show for us with a quick flash of dark brown nipple, burrowing into the sweatpants to feel her mound. She let him go briefly to slip them off, revealing a neatly trimmed wedge of black fur. Then he lay down on the bed, and she straddled him.

  You could hear those watching stir and make hard swallows as the girl took his huge cock and brushed its head against her pussy lips, and then, at last wet enough, guided him in, her eyes shutting, mouth open. Someone on the floor whispered, “Fuck,’ in the near-darkness. We watched her start a rhythm, but the blond guy forced his own, lifting his ass off the sheets to impale her as she hovered with her face close to his, and then she got in sync, and we heard the slaps of flesh, a long drawn-out whimper from the girl.

  The etiquette for this game was you don’t speak to the couple, you don’t interrupt, you don’t dare approach, let alone touch. If they ask you to join in, that’s different, but an invitation was necessary. You could masturbate, but you were expected not to make a mess on the host’s furnishings or bed linen. And you don’t stare at another audience member when he or she masturbates. Sometimes “helping’ the process for a neighbor was tolerated, but it was going too far to initiate a full-scale second show of your own. If the spark was there, the two of you were expected to leave and get it on elsewhere.

  The Asian girl was riding him hard, the curtain of black hair splayed over one shoulder, her little tits quaking. It was amazing she could take all of him in.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a guy on my left moan and quickly unbuckle his trousers. He slipped them off and rocked in place, gripping his flushed red cock. It was clear he had no lubricant and didn’t want to rub himself raw, but his dick twitched and a dribble of semen ran down the shaft. A couple, who looked like they were virgins to the whole scene, were more furtive, the guy slipping one hand underneath his partner’s top and fondling one of her breasts. The girl’s breathing began to get ragged.

  I couldn’t help myself. I lost all self-control and slipped down my own trousers and panties, started to play with myself in the dim light despite those around me. I tried to cover my moan, and I’m not sure whether it was me or something else distracting them, but the Asian girl looked up and right at me. Then the guy did, craning his head back. She bit her bottom lip, and I felt myself come, small but satisfying. I needed more. I’ll be never sure, but I think it’s why they decided to switch positions, him taking her from behind. A cloud of pitch black hair, so long and wild, cascading tresses of it, as he rammed her, and she fingered her clit, doing her best to prop herself up on one hand. “Aaaaa…’ Looking right at me again, triggering a fresh rush
of lubrication in me as she cried out enigmatically to be either saved or joined. “Aaaa…aaaa …’

  The couple to my right had lost all composure, the girl’s breasts exposed with her bra cups and her top pulled up, her guy squeezing a nipple between two fingers. She gripped his stubby pale cock pushing through his fly and didn’t need to jerk him. He was doing his best to keep himself from letting go. He let out a grunt and took her hand away, and it was clear he was trying to calm down. But the blond guy on the bed surprised us all by calling, “Jimmy.’

  They knew each other. He waved to the guy to approach the bed. “Jimmy’ looked back at his girlfriend. She looked reluctant, even now tugging her bra cups back down along with her top, feeling intensely self-conscious. The couple switched positions again, her lying on her back, her calves now on his shoulders, and he began to drill her almost savagely, the girl’s whimpers rising in octaves, and it became clear why Jimmy was granted a small mercy to approach the bed, inches away from seeing his friends doing it. She wanted to see him lose it and shoot. It drove her wild, and I realized the rest of us were part of a stage set. This was about these four, and others, including myself, had been invited to make it safe, less personal. If Jimmy and his girlfriend were the only two watching, masks would be stripped away, no courage found. They could watch if others were watching. But now the couple wanted tribute, demanded Jimmy make his own sacrifice. And he did, his climax a sputtering geyser on the floor as the Asian girl wailed high and long. Her blond lover let out a ferocious grunt as he came inside her, pulling himself out to come some more on her stomach. I felt myself come again, watching that beautiful face with its splayed black sunburst of hair, mouth wide open in ecstasy as threads of semen splattered across her golden body. I imagined me on that bed with that cock inside me.

  Next to me: “Eeeahh…Eeaah …’ Jimmy’s girlfriend masturbating, coming over the same tableau, but deeply troubled, and a tear glistened down her cheek. She was confused; both she and Jimmy getting more than they bargained for here. Seeing her man turned on by these friends, being turned on herself by the sight of him climaxing on someone else. And now Jimmy looked back and understood what had just been shattered, his face pale over a fragile trust of intimacy cracking, close to breaking. I wondered absently if they had a future together. You go to one of these things or some other scene, like group sex or bondage games, and it can be hard sometimes to find your way back to the pleasures of one-on-one (take my word for it). And if your second instinct after the need to get off was confusion and hurt, this game was not for you.

  I fixed myself up, suddenly reminded of Kim’s betrayal, and all the amusing pleasure of the scene dissipated for me. People were ready to drift out now, like those who shift gears after slowing down for a traffic accident, and I went home, feeling empty.

  ♦

  Weeks later I was at Silky Pictures. Sitting at my computer, working through something called Adobe Production Studio, with my screen divided into multiple boxes, one called “Source,’ another called “Program,’ whilst below these was a long rectangle with lines like on a thermometer, and they marked so many frames per second of the film. Here’s the fascinating thing: There were really no frames at all.

  A camera guy had shot the movie in what’s called hi-def, which was video but had the quality of 35-millimeter film, and then he passed the footage on to me to download onto my hard drive. Now as my mouse clicked on the “razor blade’ icon, I moved a black vertical line over a red one to make a cut. I didn’t need a shot of the nipple that long because I had to insert male fingers straying down to the girl’s pubic hair and then put in a new cut or maybe a dissolve. The film script would put it this way: DISSOLVE TO: CLOSE ON PENNY’S FACE. Or Mary’s. Or Charlene’s. Or Jasmine’s. Or a dozen other girls.

  This “slow dissolve’ shit had been a cliché for how many decades now, and the worse part was, as the boys who were veterans would say, it “wouldn’t cut.’ I was editing the footage to rescue it rather than making an artistic decision. I’ll save you all the technical details, but at the end of the day if the director doesn’t shoot things in a certain manner, the raw footage can be jarring, no matter how seamless the edits. That’s because you’re still stuck with the basic ingredients they’ve handed you.

  More about the director in a minute. Oh, boy.

  For the assignment, I was given a cover identity—no longer Teresa Knight, now “Teresa Lane’ (I lobbied for a surname that was more interesting, maybe Sudanese, and Hodd quietly said no, we do not choose cover names for fun—and stop sulking). I was introduced to Luis Antunes briefly my first day there. He peered shyly at me through his spectacles like a grown-up Daniel Radcliffe and shook my hand, quite pleasant and professional, and then I was off to be shown the rest of the office and to get my own desk. In the first couple of weeks, I saw Luis in the hallway, and we did no more than exchange a “hi’ as we passed each other. I was busy anyway getting the lay of the land.

  Everyone admitted that Silky Pictures had been modeled on Vivid Entertainment, porn’s reigning giant out of America’s San Fernando Valley. Sex on the screen, not on show in the building. When you walked in the foyer, a receptionist greeted you, and you saw cubicles for Accounting and Marketing and could mistake the place for a bond trader’s office. I had seen for myself that Luis drove home to a mansion and upper-class family bliss. Even from inside, it would be an uphill climb to find the connection MI6 wanted.

  Not that the place didn’t have its circus elements. You had young guys of nineteen, inarticulate, showing up in their metal band T-shirts and torn Levi’s, applying to be in a Silky feature. Here for free sex and a vague yearning for infamy. It was creepy and pathetic. Every one of them was politely turned away.

  And each week, a regular stream of girls, aged from about nineteen into their late twenties, visited the office with head shots and résumés and rattled off with sparkling, vacuous cheer their versatility in sex acts. Blondes from Essex, brunettes from Wapping. Maybe one black girl or mixed-race girl in weeks of arrivals. A female casting director named Roberta had a chat with each and every one, then made a girl take off her clothes and pose for a few digital shots up against a wall. Antunes was shown the head shots, digital snaps, and résumés and, like checking stocks for an investment portfolio, hand-picked girls to come back to see him.

  If a girl was selected to star in a feature, she had to bring back test results giving a clean bill of health regarding venereal disease, and if that was a go, she was offered a waiver that made condom use her choice and signed a liability form that got Silky Pictures off the hook in case she or her sex partners were less than responsible—unwanted pregnancy, disease, injury. In the office, there was a veneer of professionalism, maybe even a sincere attempt at it. It was surreal, considering someone called “Action!’ and a girl was to be penetrated in front of a lighting technician, a sound guy, and six other technical workers. And she had to look like she was having the shag of her life, and no one was standing around watching.

  As for the scripts… Hodd had told me Silky Pictures had “pretensions to plot.’ But I never expected that the regular screenplay writer for Luis Antunes’s movies would turn out to be a grandmother from Hounslow who used to write corporate biographies. Luis, if you can believe it, supposedly found her because his girlfriend read a novel she’d dashed off for a romance publisher, a competitor of Mills & Boon. He had no clue how to recruit scriptwriters in Britain, and since he hoped the movies would appeal to both men and women, he guessed that a woman would write more interesting scenarios to justify the sex content.

  I was in the foyer when Judith, the writer, turned up one day to collect a check. As I shook her hand, she smiled brightly at me. “You can go ahead and look surprised. I get that a lot, dear.’

  She told me how oh, yes, she had written a short book for young people on the Stock Exchange and a chapter for a textbook on the EU, and Orpheocon had paid her to write a corporate biography to be sent as a gift to share
holders.

  “It’s all money, isn’t it? It’s the same thing with these movies. I just wish Luis would allow me to stretch my wings a little. It’s always a girl needing help escaping her jewel thief husband or she needs to clear her name, and somehow romping in bed will help this detective and/or his partner find clues—so of course, they have to have a ménage. Why can’t the girl be the adventurous plucky one, hmm?’

  “I don’t know why she can’t,’ I offered.

  The little woman scratched her white curls and adjusted her glasses. “I know Luis doesn’t dream up these plots, but that director…’

  “What about him?’ I asked, sipping a Coke.

  She leaned in and whispered to me, “He’s a pig. Each and every picture he rings me up and says, ‘Judith, if you write it, Luis will accept it.’”

  “Accept what?’ I asked, mystified.

  “He wants me to write a scene in which the girl is fucked up the ass,’ said the sweet grandmotherly figure. And I nearly spat a stream of Coca-Cola onto the rug.

  “Oh. Uh, well—’

  “I told you the man’s a pig,’ she went on. “Luis knows it would offend our target audience, and he doesn’t let him shoot it. Some of the girls have done this, of course, for other productions, and let’s just say they’re not very bright. So if the man says this is what we’re filming today, they may well go along, the silly things. But I know Luis would have it cut out even if it’s shot. Now our esteemed director’s tactic is to try to persuade me to give it a story rationale! Nothing doing, I told him. They can shoot what they like, but I’m not writing that. Vulgar man! I think he’s an Aussie or something. Well, they’re always loud.’

  I didn’t comment on that point. I hadn’t met the director yet, and I had nothing against Aussies. I didn’t know many either. But I had picked up on how the director was loathed in the office. His name was Duncan McCullough.