“I don’t know,” Liz said. “Honestly, I mean, I thought I was, but sometimes I just get freaked out. I’m sorry. I don’t know if it’s you, or it’s me, or it’s being around all these creeps all day . . .”
“The creeps probably aren’t helping much,” I considered.
“They’re not,” Liz said. She caressed my face, my thigh. “I look at you, and I see a really good guyl I know there’s a good guy down deep inside there! But sometimes I get the most fucked-up vibes from you.”
I frowned, taking her hand from my face. “What do you mean?”
“You give off... a weird energy.”
“What weird energy?”
“I don’t know, Sam. It’s not something I can put into words. It’s like, there’s this film around you'. . .”
I groaned. “I thought I was done with hippies.”
“I told you, I couldn’t put it into words, okay? It’s just that I feel like, I feel.. . being around all those assholes all day, doing the shitty things you do all day ... I feel like it’s maybe rubbing off on you,” Liz said. She grimaced uncomfortably, then continued. “And, I don’t think I like being around it.”
“It doesn’t turn you on?”
“What? Me feeling like you’re comparing my body to the girls you shoot every day? You acting like a dick to me? Me feeling like you’re haunted? No. It doesn’t really turn me on.”
“But we have good chemistry.”
“Sometimes,” Liz agreed. “But lately I feel like . . . you’re just treating me like ... a corpse, or something.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“I don’t mean like a dead body. I mean, like I’m not me. I feel like you’re just fucking, basically,” Liz said. “You’re just . . . fucking.”
I sighed, sadly. “I’m just not good at this,” I said dully. “Being in a relationship. It’s new to me.”
“I like you, Sam,” Liz said. “I just feel like you’re hiding something from me. Like, your mind is double-tracking, the whole time that you’re looking at me . . .”
“Well, maybe I am,” I said.
“So I don’t understand why you don’t have the courage to just tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me,” urged Liz.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can,” she insisted. .
“You won’t like it,” I said.
“How can you know,” Liz said, “if you don’t try me?”
“I like throat-fucking,” I said.
“What?”
“I ... I like throat-fucking,” I repeated. “And sometimes I wish that when we, um, made love, you would choke on my dick.”
“What the hell are you saying to me?” Liz asked,^her face crumpling in confusion and disdain.
“You said you wanted to know what I was thinking.” She stared at me, and I stammered on “I’m into this thing, Liz. And I haven’t been able to tell you about it, not because I’ve been too scared, but because the time never seemed right. But now I see that it was driving a wedge between us, and I need to be more honest...”
“Sam? Hold on. Are you serious? You think you need to tell me that you want me to suck on your dick?”
“I want you to choke on my dick,” I clarified.
“But why?” Liz cried.
“I’m interested in it,” I said stubbornly. “I feel like I want to explore it.”
Liz stared at me sadly.
“You really want me to do this for you?”
“Please,” I said. “I’ll do something for you, too, if you want.”
Liz shook her head. And she lowered her pillow. “I guess I can try.”
With her small white body, Liz approached my chest. She lowered her head toward my crotch, and I felt her tongue flick on the head of my cock. I squatted lower on the bed, making an indentation on the cheap metal-spring mattress with my body weight, and my chest puffed out, and my body stiffened. My eyes combed the stucco ceiling. I concentrated on a very small cluster, some very specific dots.
“Is that good?” said Liz.
“Yeah, right, but deeper,” I murmured. Gently I caressed the back of her curly red-haired head. Lovingly, I placed my right palm at the base of her skull, pulling her into me, willing her head and her mouth closer. Liz’s lips opened wider to accommodate me and she gagged momentarily, an aaaacking sound, and I grinned. My left hand explored her face, bashfully at first. Her lovely youthful skin, elastic and well scrubbed. I caressed her nose and tweaked it gently. Something rising in me.
I kissed her little forehead and then, with some hesitation, took her little face in my left paw, my thumb digging into her jaw, my four fingers gripping her face.
I fucked her face, hard, hearing her gasping, choking for breath. My cock grew bigger and some luminous feeling rushed up into my brain, and I held her whole head in my hand and fucked it. Faster heartbeat and sickening sounds. I fucked her face and then I took my open hand and smacked her face hard, drawing a blazing red welt on her cheek.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Liz screamed, pushing away from me.
“I... I just...” I stammered.
“Get the fuck away from me!” she snapped. “Jesus!” There were tears in her eyes. The welt on her face glared at me.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t, I didn’t mean to do that to you, if you didn’t like, I mean, I thought you might like all that.. .”
Liz pushed herself off the bed, away from me; trembling, she stood between the bed and the corner wall. Her back was to me. I looked at her spine protruding, the delicate little ridges of her vertebrae. She turned around to face me, mouth tight.
“Get your clothes on,” Liz said softly. “And then get the fuck out of my house.”
TWENTY-ONE
Breakfast came, and we huddled around our roundtable. The heavy Malibu fog enveloped our secret mansion like an impenetrable woolpack.
“Our money’s down,” Pitts said, looking at the subscriber figures. “Hell, I can’t figure it out. I need to get on our resellers, fast.” He sipped from his coffee cup thoughtfully. “No, we need to push the envelope.”
“We’re here to help, man,” Rag Man assured him.
There was silence at the table, until I realized some sort of response was required of me, too. “Oh yeah,” I said sullenly. “Me, too.”
“Something wrong?”
“Personal shit,” I grumbled. “Doesn’t matter. We’re here for you.” I nodded rather unconvincingly toward Timberlake, who, after a moment’s hesitation, aped my gesture.
Pitts continued, frowning. “We’re going to have to expand our platform.”
“Yeah, like with the gloryhole,” Rag Man said. “I’m getting some killer footage.”
“No,” Pitts began. “I mean, within the larger scenes themselves. My sense is that we need to get quite a bit more hardcore. I’m thinking more along the lines of—”
“A cock cruising through a wooden hole?” Timberlake asked.
“Lookahere, Red,” Rag Man cried. “If you’re cruising for a fight. ..”
“Guys,” Pitts said. “Listen up. I want to talk to you about gapes.”
Gapes were a phenomenon we all knew about in porn, but rarely spoke of. On random, terrible occasions, after a monster penis invaded a pretty girl’s tiny, perfect anus, the violated orifice would, upon removal of the cock, pause before retracting. Standing stockstill, it would yawn blackly, like a wound. Thus, the coveted “gape.”
“My goodness'. I’m gettin’ what you’re thinkin’—and I am lovin’ it!” Rag Man announced. “Ass-fuckin’, in the twenty-first century! Haw haw.”
I groaned. “So you want us to start showing the insides of people’s assholes?”
“Hey!” Rag Man said. “Don’t knock it—sounds innaresting'.”
“It sounds gynecological.”
“Well, according to our stats, our subscriber base likes it,” Pitts said. “Gapes are a big upside.”
“But why?” Timberlake said. “They’re a mistake: a bodily dysfunction.”