“And then you’ll come over?”
“Absolutely. I am so there. Look, Sam, don’t worry. I cant be late for you. I have school later this afternoon. I go to massage school.”
“Do you really?” I said, surprised.
“Yeah!” said Kate. “What, you think I wanna be in porn for the rest of my life?”
Half an hour later, she called again.
“Sam! Here’s the deal! I need, like, an hour. I’m so sorry. I’m over here and I’m at Zane and they don’t have my check!”
“I thought you said you were going to Notorious.”
“I did! But then I remembered I did Naughty Little Nymphos for these guys like months ago! It’s time to pay up, you know what I’m saying?”
“But do you have to get it today?”
“No! Not at all, baby! I just wanted to check with them and see if it was there while I was in the neighborhood. And now I’m gonna come see you right now, okay? Are you ready for me?”
“Of course,” I sighed. “Thank you for calling me, Kate.”
“Oh, no, thank you, baby. I’m gonna be over there so quick. I just have to stop by this one last company and see if they have my chromes. But it’s right over here on DeSoto and it will take me like literally fifteen minutes. And then I’ll be right over. Okay?”
An hour passed. Nothing. Waves of daytime foot traffic passed by my storefront window, people chattering in rapid Spanish, carefree and brusque. Through the thin ceiling of my building, an awful tuba-mariachi music began to wail. I tried yoga breaths to calm myself, invoke a world larger than my own. Not useful. I managed to pass a little time by smoking cigarettes joylessly and checking the charge on my already fully charged video camera. I took stock of my life, perched there on a wooden stool in the middle of my kitchen, naked save for a superhero costume, with a dickhole.
Finally, just when I was starting to lose my shit, she called.
“Hey. Guess what I just realized?”
“What?”
“I didn’t bring a toy,” said Kate.
“What?”
“I didn’t bring a toy. You said you wanted me to start off masturbating, but I didn’t bring a toy.”
“No,” I said sharply. “No. I didn’t say that. I don’t care about any of that stuff.”
“Oh,” said Kate. She sounded hurt. “Okay. I was just letting you know.”
“Where are you, Kate? Are you still coming?”
“I just exited off of Alvarado right now. I’m not far from you. It’s just, it was a bitch going through like, um, the 101 and I think it’s the 110 and all them merge together. It’s just a pain in the ass going there.”
I was silent.
“All right, sweetie,” said Kate. “I’ll see you soon. I just wanted to like, tell you about that.”
“Just. . . come, okay?”
“Of course,” Kate said. “You know, you shouldn’t worry so much. It gets you nowhere.”
And then, without warning, she was at my door.
“Kate! You made it!” I said, letting her in.
“Yes.” She put her bag down and gave me a big hug, bumping into the camera. “Finally! I wouldn’t have been so late, but you live by some really shitty traffic areas.”
“Yes,” I breathed. “Totally.” I had already forgiven her. Completely forgotten about it. Staring at her, I was captivated. I was salivating, dazed, high on her perfume. She looked that good.
“Well, where should I change?”
“In here,” I said, motioning her toward my small, makeshift bedroom. I carried my camera after her, not wanting to miss a thing. “And I can watch, okay?”
“Okay!” she said brightly, moving past me, totally at ease, as if perverted things like this happened every day to her. She had this amazing posture. Her body was very rudely alive.
“Did you get your chromes back?” I asked.
“My whats?” She slid off her sweatpants, revealing an ass that was extravagant and glossy and full of light. Reaching into her zippered black gym bag with a dainty finger and thumb, she withdrew a tiny plaid skirt.
“Your chromes?”
“Oh,” she said, laughing ruefully. “No! Those fuckers, I’m gonna kill them.” She stripped off her shirt. Hands behind her back, she unbuckled her bra, unveiling gorgeous breasts. I gulped. Her stomach was exposed and muscular and firm and hypnotic, worthy of coveting.
Maybe I’m making slightly too big a deal of this. But Kate was the embodiment of my fantasies—the Hot Girl whom I had never been able to touch. In high school, I had listened to fables about wild nights in the North Carolina woods told by the strong boys of our school, they on the soccer team, they who were so naturally graceful, who at age sixteen had heavy, muscular chests, who could kick the ball equally forcefully with their opposite foot, thick socks pulled up perfectly over white-blue shin guards, them running swift and true despite a hangover from the night before when they got steaming drunk around a mystical campfire with the prettiest girls in school who drank beers that tasted so good and got swingingly tipsy and punched the boys accidentally in the left eye, laughing hysterically with their short skirts in the North Carolina night, blackening the boys’ eyeballs, their retinas bloody and sweet. I could have been there with you, too—in the woods! Look at me now! I’m not a bad guy to have at a party, huh?
“You are cute,” Kate said, startling me. “Give me that camera for a second.”
“What?”
“Give me the camera,” she repeated. I handed it to her. She turned it around on me, and all of a sudden I was vulnerable. “Tell me about yourself.”
I ended up jabbering about the last time I was on film, when I’d felt the brunt of the strap-on. “It was, um . . . very exciting. And very, very new.” I didn’t want her to think that I did that kind of thing all the time.
“You should tell my friend Jim about that. He’d love to put you in a movie.”
I frowned. “I don’t really want to make a name for myself like that.”
“You wouldn’t,” Kate said petulantly. “It’d just be like, another point on your resume. Now, how are we going to set this up?”
Together, we arranged the camera on a tripod, dickering over proper height and distance. “You want to get your shot centered,” Kate advised. “See all this open space you have here? You want to bring it in ... here, move towards me ... that should be fine.”
Hanging my head, I backed away and let her make the executive decisions. It was mildly embarrassing, but she was probably better at this than I was. I tugged at my Superman costume, nervous. Go time.
Though I’d like to, I can’t go into great detail about what we did that afternoon. It feels too private, too sacred, even though I paid her $200 in cash. I can say, though, that Kate Frost impaled herself onto me like a demented seal in heat for almost a full hour. I can reveal that. And I can also state that I totally embarrassed myself and lost all professional dignity and distance by lapping up at her comely and delicious vagina with the enthusiasm of a deranged Italian pig snuffling for truffles. If she. was faking her ardor (yes, the question has crossed my mind), she did an excellent job at it, snowing me completely. We kissed with a passion that surprised me. I felt high, emboldened, risky, brave. I reveled in the proud swells of her perfect dancer’s body, delighting in her skin’s high, blinding sheen. My penis stretched, doubled in size, and emerged from the hastily cut hole in the crotch of my Superman suit like a long-dormant groundhog seeking the sun.
It was amazing: every configuration, every shot that we designed, seemed guided by a strange kind of destiny, a wild sort of luck. We changed camera angles with alarming regularity and brazen spontaneity, moving together as if by instinct, codirecting as one conjoined mind, and incredibly, every single shot worked. Our compositional integrity was never compromised. Even more remarkably, our passion never receded. I rustled her hair against my face in spasmodic agonies of blond-brown joy, smelling frankincense and rosewater. Her spine was slick, somehow hot to the touch. And she said crazy things to me, things that got my hopes up.