“Sacrifice is just another word for change,” she tells me, her thick brows drawn together. “Change that requires letting go.”
I give her a nod and then I let Devi tug me back into the blinding sunlight outside.
12
“So you never told me where we’re going for the blowjob,” Devi says a few hours later. With Madam Psuka’s card jammed in my back pocket, we walked all over the boardwalk, eating shaved ice and hot dogs and cotton candy, and watching the street artists. Then Devi led me down to the beach and we walked ankle-deep in the surf, gossiping about the porn people we knew and speculating about what would happen in the next couple of years with our industry. And then we made our way back to my car, where we are now, heading back into the city.
I look over at Devi. As usual, she has the window cracked, the hot wind ruffling her hair. For a brief, tiny moment, I panic that the tarot card Madam drew for me might mean that Devi and I can’t make it, or won’t make it, for some important but unseeable reason, and my veins are flooded with an anxious adrenaline.
It’s not real, I tell myself. It’s not real.
But what if it is? What if this is some sort of sign that Devi doesn’t love me back? Or that I’ll have to give her up?
It’s not real.
Despite my mental pep talk, anxiety coats my voice when I say, “It’s a surprise where we’re going.”
She hears the change in my voice and turns her head to stare at me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Okay,” she says gently, letting me have my space without the slightest hint of resentment, and then I feel bad for shutting her out.
I take a breath, and then confess. “That tarot card is a little disturbing, don’t you think?”
She laughs. “Is that really what you’re thinking about right now, Mr. This Stuff Is So Silly?”
“Well, it’s hard to think it’s silly with all the death imagery,” I say, a bit grumpily.
“The Hanged Man isn’t dead, he’s suffering. There’s a difference.”
“Well, that cheers me right up. Thank you.”
“But in the end, he sees the world completely differently. Sometimes perspective is painful.”
“You know, maybe you should also be fired from the fortune cookie factory.”
She puts a hand on my thigh, her fingers warm and slender, and I relax under her touch. “It’s not divination, Logan. It’s not prophecy. It’s just something to think about.”
Sigh. “Sure, Cass.”
“I think I know what would cheer you up.”
“What’s that?” I ask, but then her seat belt is unbuckled and she’s kneeling on her seat and leaning into me, her lips against my neck. And then she’s sucking, soft and wet, sending shivers down my spine and straight to my balls, which start feeling heavy and constrained in my jeans. I want to slide my hand up her thighs and see what else is soft and wet, but my stupid car is a manual transmission, and the thick L.A. traffic means I’m constantly shifting between gears as I slow down and speed up.
“This isn’t fair,” I murmur. “I can’t touch you back.”
“Mmm, good,” she croons into my ear. “I get to be the one in control.”
“Don’t say that stuff to me, Cass, or we may not make it to our destination.”
She doesn’t respond, just keeps kissing and licking all around my neck and earlobe and jaw, and it’s only by the grace of God that I don’t crash the car. As it is, I still arrive at our filming spot with a hard-on straining the seams of my jeans. I can barely focus enough to get the car parked and turned off.
“Where are we?” Devi asks, finally relenting with the necking and peering out the windshield. We’re outside a small mural-covered warehouse near the river, with the skyline towering in the background, shimmering in the evening heat.
My skin dies a little when she pulls away, but it’s probably necessary unless I want to walk in there with a giant erection tenting my jeans. “It’s an art gallery, a new one. They’re doing an exhibit I thought you might like.” I’m a little shy when I say this, mostly because I’m worried she’ll think it’s lame, and I want to impress her, dammit, and not just with my ability to make her come in under two minutes. “The gallery owner let me rent it for the night, so after it closes to the public at nine, it’s all ours until morning.”
Her face splits into a huge smile. “That sounds amazing. Porn in an art gallery?”
“Yeah, I’d like to say that I have this meta vision for juxtaposing high art and low art, but really it’s because I thought the exhibit was something you’d like, plus it was cheap to rent.”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” she says with a wink, and then gets out of the car. I get out too, grab our bag, and walk to the front door to open it for her, catching a glimpse of the inside through the glass as I do.
It’s still eight o’clock, meaning that the gallery is open, and to my dismay, I see that there’s some sort of reception going on, so the space is crowded with people drinking free wine and milling around. I was hoping to get some shots of Devi walking around the exhibit, since I got permission from both the owner and the artist to use it as a backdrop, but filming her will be difficult with a bunch of randos walking into my shot and needing releases or whatever.
I quickly decide it’s okay, and that I can always film her later. I’m too excited for her to see it to wait any longer. I open the door all the way, unleashing the normal gallery onslaught of music and voices. I gesture for Devi to walk in and she does.
I follow her in, admiring the way her ass moves under her dress as I do. Rich orchestral music reverberates throughout the space, deep strings and discordant piano keys, and I see the exact moment that Devi realizes what the exhibit is, understands why I thought she’d like it.
“Logan,” she breathes, reaching for my hand without taking her eyes off the display in front of us. “This is...you...I can’t believe…” She finally stops trying to put her feelings into words and simply squeezes my hand, overcome. My heart soars so far above the ground that I’m certain it’s reached lunar orbit.
If this is all it takes to make her so happy, then I’m taking her to an art gallery every day.
The exhibit is called Zodiactive and is laid out in a large circle. All throughout the gallery, tiny light bulbs of various brightness are arranged, in a manner that looks completely random and discombobulated to me, but that I know from the gallery’s website is designed to mimic the constellations visible from Los Angeles at this time of year. The bulbs are strung up high, but also line the walls, creating the dazzling effect of being surrounded by stars. Gauzy strips of fabric in deep lavenders and pinks hang from the ceiling, wafting with the movement of the guests, the ephemeral panels representing nebulas and gas clouds. And punctuating the gallery space at regular intervals are huge, magnificent paintings, each one representing a sign of the zodiac, with more light bulbs studding the canvas to show where the actual stars are in each constellation.
The artist in me appreciates the effect of the light and the color and spacey music, but the Logan in me, who doesn’t know shit about the zodiac or the constellations they come from, is deeply bored. So instead, I turn all of my attention to Devi, watching her eager eyes drink everything in, watching the way her lips move as she murmurs quiet things to herself that I can’t quite catch. We make our way around the circle, stopping every three feet for Devi to examine the light bulbs and declare which constellations they are supposed to be, and once for me to grab a couple cups of free wine.
At one point, she stops and slowly spins around, as if lost. “It’s like being in the sky,” she tells me with excitement in her voice. “It’s easy to forget that the sky isn’t flat, that the stars are actually light years apart. But it doesn’t feel cold or distant at all when rendered this way. It feels intimate.”
I lift my hand and gently sweep some hair out of her eyes. She pauses and looks at me, our eyes meeting, and it’s as if every a
tom in my body is thrumming with electricity. There’s something about her, some indefinable thing, that supersedes her lovely face and sexy-as-hell body and even her top-notch brain. It’s strange, because even at the height of my relationship with Raven, I could list logically all the reasons I enjoyed being with her—namely sex and shared interests—and loving her was more of a sustained choice than a feeling. More choice than fact. But this is like a fact, what I feel right now, like my falling for Devi is just as much a universal fact as gravity, or the speed of light.
Because with Devi, it’s different. It’s like there’s something beyond the quantifiable, easy-to-name reasons she affects me. My pull to her is something above the sexual, above the intellectual, and maybe even above the emotional, and all of a sudden, I feel myself at the edge of a vast abyss. My stomach drops as I continue looking into the those dark gold eyes, because what I feel for Devi is a thousand times stronger than anything I’ve ever felt, even after three years with Raven, and I’m scared. I’m scared by the intensity of my own feelings, and I’m scared that she doesn’t feel the same way. I’m scared that this speed of light feeling is going to blast a hole right through me, and I’ll be left gutted in a way that Raven never could have gutted me.
It’s this fear that makes me swallow and look away. “Do you want more wine?” I ask Devi, even though I know she’s barely touched the wine she already has.
“No, I’m good.” She puts a hand on my wrist. “Logan, this is more than I could have ever expected. This is the best fake date I’ve ever been on.”
Her words prick into me like needles.
Fake date.
Right. Because it’s for the show. But then why can’t it also be real? Why can’t something be real and planned? Real and recorded? Why can’t it be both?
I can’t help myself, I say the words pressing against the inside of my lips, begging to be let out. “It’s not a fake date, Devi. Yes, we’re recording what happens later, but it’s real.” I plead with her with my eyes. “I want us...I mean—I want there to be an us. I want to take you on actual dates. I want this to be a real date.”
Her lips are parted ever so slightly, and they tremble now as she searches for a response, and oh my God, I am going to devour her mouth if I watch it any longer. With a quick glance around us, I grab her hand and pull her in between two of the zodiac canvases, and suddenly the noise dims a little and we are by ourselves, sandwiched between canvas and exposed brick. I lead her a little farther around the outer edge of the exhibit, until we’re near the back of the gallery space. Here, the narrow gaps between the canvases are covered with a cluster of gauzy fabric panels and the comparative dearth of lights in this corner gives an extra shroud of shadows. In other words, though only a few inches of fabric, canvas and paint separate us from the other people in the gallery, it won’t be easy to be seen, unless somebody took the trouble to look at the six-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of the canvas, but I honestly doubt that will happen.
Once we’re sufficiently hidden, I take her cup of wine and set it down a nearby ledge with mine, and drop my bag to the floor. Devi looks like she’s used this interval to compose herself somewhat.
“It can’t be a real date if we’re filming it,” she says, her chin rising slightly. “This is amazing, Logan, don’t get me wrong. No man has ever done anything like this with me. But once we turn on the camera, it’s different. You have to see that. Even if it’s not solely performative, it can’t be completely genuine.”
I’m already shaking my head. “I don’t think there has to be barrier between art and life. I don’t think capturing a moment makes it any less authentic.”
She gives me a sad smile. “But when that moment’s being captured to make money? When that moment is being made for sale? How can that not retroactively affect the moment itself?”
A tiny voice inside of me wonders if she has a point, but I push it aside. I want to prove to her that we can have it all—the realness and the camera—and that all it takes is a shift in perspective. After all, wasn’t that what she was trying to explain to me about The Hanged Man? Perspective?
I step closer to her. “Will you let me try to convince you?”
“Convince me of what?”
I lean forward and brace myself against the wall with my forearms, caging her between the wall and me. “Let me turn on the camera,” I say, using the tip of my nose to trace the line of her jaw. She shudders and goose bumps erupt everywhere on her skin. “Let me film us doing our thing tonight and show you how real it can be.”
“I’m not saying I don’t want to film,” she says. I take her earlobe between my teeth and she lets out a soft groan. “I just…”
“I know what you’re saying,” I breathe into her ear. “And what I’m saying is I want you to be open to the idea of it feeling real. I want you to forget about the camera while I’m touching you.”
“I can’t,” she protests faintly.
“I think you can. At least let me try to help you?”
She sighs, half resignation, half pleasure because my mouth is now on her neck. “Okay,” she relents. “I’ll try to forget about the camera tonight.”
I give her neck one last nip and then straighten up, reaching for my bag.
“Wait, now?” she asks, sounding horrified. “While there’re still people here?”
I give her an evil grin. “Are you being modest, Devi Dare?”
“There’s a difference between modest and law-abiding,” she shoots back.
Undeterred, I dig out the camera and turn it on, setting it on the ledge so it’s aimed at our corner. While I adjust the settings to compensate for the dim light, Devi lists off all the reasons it’s a bad idea to film right now.
“We could get caught. We could get thrown out. We could get arrested. They’ll find you didn’t have the right permits and you could get fined. Even Vida could get in trouble.”
Satisfied that the camera is set up well, I walk towards her and slowly back her into the wall. Her voice falters and her words trail off as my stomach touches hers, and then she gasps as my hips move forward and I press my growing erection into her.
“I’m not ignoring your concerns,” I tell her, sliding one hand around her waist and the other up her neck to hold the side of her face. “But I want you to trust me. Let me take on your concerns, and I promise to take care of you. I’ll be responsible for you—for us—and I’ll make sure we don’t get caught.”
I feel her hesitate, and even though I want nothing more than to seal my lips over hers and kiss the resistance right out of her, I have to know whether or not this is an actual limit for her.
I use my hand to guide her face so that she’s looking at me. “Devi, it’s okay if this is a boundary. Being in public. All you have to do is tell me.”
She worries at her bottom lip with her teeth, and then she finally shakes her head. “As long as you listen for anyone…”
“I give you my solemn vow.”
“...then I guess it’s okay.”
“You guess? I need more than that, Cass.”
She takes a breath. “I’m sure it’s okay.”
“I don’t know how much better that is.” I’m full hard now, and all I want is to start, but I have to know that she feels safe and comfortable. Otherwise, no dice. “It seems like you’re uncertain...do you want to try it and then if you need to stop, we can stop?”
Her forehead wrinkles. “Like with using a safe word?”
“Right, but you can just snap your fingers if you’d like.” I’ve found that many girls struggle to vocalize their limits, even with permission, and sometimes things like snapping fingers are easier.
“Okay. I’ll snap my fingers if I want to stop. But I don’t think I’ll need to.” She gives me a small smile. “I trust you.”
“Thank God,” I exhale. “I didn’t know how much longer I could keep from kissing you.”
“Then don’t wait any longer,” she says, and I don’t. I do h
ave something to prove, after all.
I lower my face, brushing across her mouth once, twice, three times before I firmly settle my lips against hers. For a minute, everything seems singularly slow and distinct, her small inhalations and exhalations tickling the skin above my upper lip, the way her hand finds the back of my neck to pull me even closer to her, the way my heart pounds in my chest as I cradle her face against mine. And then time catches up with us all in a rush, Devi’s fingers finding my hair and pulling, my hand dropping down to her ass. I ruck up her skirt until my hand finds the bare skin of her ass and then I’m grabbing and squeezing the delicious curve of firm flesh, my cock leaping every time my fingers dig into her skin.
She’s just as busy, her other hand finding the bottom of my shirt and then sliding up my stomach to trail lines of light scratches down my abs. I hiss as she finds a flat nipple and pinches it, the sensation traveling straight to my dick.
I deepen the kiss, parting her lips with mine and licking inside her mouth. It’s sweet, like the cotton candy she ate earlier, and warm—and like a lightning strike, I remember that she’s going to suck me off with that sweet, warm mouth, and I have to pull back for a second to clear my head.
“What?” she murmurs, using the break in the kiss to move her mouth to my neck, sucking and biting hard enough to bruise, and I have to wrap my hands around the brick ledge to keep from shoving her to her knees right then and there.
Keep control, you asshat.
After all, I am supposed to be proving something to her, right? Not simply proving how much I want her to go down on me. I’m going to prove to her how real, how organic, we can be, even with the camera.
Resolve renewed, I take a step back. “Turn around,” I say, keeping my voice quiet to account for the people enjoying the art mere feet away.
Biting her lower lip, she pivots so that she’s facing the wall. I lean forward enough that my mouth comes close to her ear. “Brace your hands against the wall,” I whisper.
She shivers and more of those delightful goose bumps appear, and she obeys, her slender hands spread wide and flat against the brick. The thin dress she’s wearing has ridden up slightly in back, and I place a hand in the middle of her shoulder blades and push her forward even more, so that the hem of the dress barely clears her ass.
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