It was warm here. The warmth came only partially from the fireplace: the rest was the lights. Their warmth was exceeded only by their glare. Glare that was, naturally enough, centered upon the actors on the phony fur rug. The lights, of which there were half a dozen of various sizes, stood on metal folding stands like weird sunflowers, their petals black: round bright circles of light surrounded by flaps of black metal. A microphone hovered above the couple, eavesdropping, as they made their sexual sounds, the guy saying little contented things, making little contented noises, a few of which sounded convincing, but not as convincing as the authentic sucking and slurping sounds the girl provided.
“Cut,” Castile said.
The girl wiped off her mouth with the back of a hand, looked up and said, “What about the come shot?”
Castile, either not hearing her or ignoring her, went over to the thin pale blond kid and said, “I’m going to move ’em closer to the fire, over toward the right, and I’m afraid we’re going to get some shadow from that boom mike. And I don’t want to mess with the lights, so swing the boom out of there and use the shotgun mike on ’em, okay?”
The kid said okay and armed himself with a long-narrow metal spear that was, apparently, a shotgun mike.
The girl was standing, now, and had her hands on her hips and didn’t seem to remember she was naked. She was, by the way, pretty, now that she didn’t have her mouth full.
“Jerry,” she said. “I said, what about the come shot?”
“Since when are you looking forward to that?”
“Looking forward to it my butt. I know you, is all. You’re going to want a come shot. Right?”
“Right,” he admitted. “We’ll shoot an insert later on.”
“Later on when?”
“Tonight. It’s more important we get to the straight fucking, get some good meat shots and save the come shot for the end of the fucking.”
“What’s the deal?” she said, her mouth on sideways. “Can’t this queen get it up again and do ’em both?”
The guy, who’d been leaning back on the rug, to the rear of this discussion, looking bored and a little tired, now sat up and said, “Yeah, and what do you know about it, bitch? All you got to do is spread ’em. I do the hard work.”
“Well you don’t do it hard enough.”
“Yeah? Well look what I got to work with.”
“You said it, not me.”
“You little bitch…”
And the guy was rising. To his feet, that is.
Castile got between them, got caught under the glare of the lights for a moment and pushed his hands out at the air in a conciliatory fashion. “Settle down, kids. Just settle down. Frank, I know you could probably handle doing two come shots in a row, God knows I’ve seen you do it, but it’s just safer, or easier rather, to save the other one for later, as an insert, nice for variety anyway, a nice close-up insert. Now. Can we go on to the fuck scene?”
“Fine,” the girl said. “But he can just get himself ready for that insert and bring me in for the finish. We got plenty of blowjob footage as it is already. I’m not doing this for fun, you know. Not with this cheese-brain, I’m not.”
“Keep it up, bitch,” the guy said, trying to sound threatening and not quite making it.
“Isn’t that what you’re getting paid for?” she said, arching a brow.
“Kids,” Castile said. “Please. We’ve gotten along so well, so far. This is the last day, after all… just this one last tiny fuck scene and one last tiny come shot insert and we’re home free. What do you say?”
Silence.
And then, after a good full minute, the girl said, “Okay.”
And she smiled at the guy.
He didn’t believe her at first, which he shouldn’t have, because she was about as sincere as a used car salesman, only not as good at acting. But then he seemed to buy it. The boy just wasn’t particularly bright. He smiled back and said, “All right, baby. Let’s show ’em how it’s done.”
And the girl smiled again, though there was more than a trace of smirk in it, and Castile said, “Roll,” to the fat man who stood behind the massive black machine that was bigger than any man in the room, including the guy preparing to ball a very naked and pretty girl, and they were both saying, “One, two, one two,” like an after dinner speaker testing his microphone, while the thin blond kid lurked off to the side with his shotgun mike, and Castile looked over at the darkhaired girl at the tape recorder, who nodded at him, and he stepped momentarily in front of the camera and slapped together a pair of hinged boards, a skinny one on top of the wide one that had data written in chalk on it, and Castile said, “Action,” and the couple started fucking.
They started out missionary position and were apparently really getting into it. Both of them were moving together in what seemed to be passion, accompanied by all the appropriate moaning and groaning, and it was amazing how much they really seemed to mean it, especially, surprisingly enough, the girl, who had a very believable orgasm after about five minutes, a screaming, body-shaking orgasm that prompted Castile to come in for some close-up work.
He’d been on the sidelines, waiting to use a small handheld camera with a large magazine that said ARRIFLEX on it, staying out of range of the other, much larger camera, watching the couple on the rug hump each other as if they meant it. He had been, you should excuse the expression, waiting for an opening.
And now he’d found it. He went in for his close-up work, roving around the couple, at one point slapping the guy’s naked ass, which had prompted the guy to put his hands under the girl and lift himself and her off the ground, and Castile got down in for some very close-up, shots of grinding genitals. When he finished that, he slapped the guy’s ass again, and the guy withdrew and turned the girl over, roughly, and entered from the rear. Castile got back out of camera range, while the fire flickered on the sweating naked bodies, and it was real and unreal all at once.
Finally the guy withdrew and laid that slab of nine inch meat across the upper portion of her ass and he came. A long shooting stream of it, and it caught in the girl’s hair, and glistened there, surrealistically.
I looked over at Castile and he was grinning. His eyes were glistening in much the same way as the trail of white fluid that had landed and now hung in her hair, like an obscene Christmas ornament.
“Cut,” Castile said, softly, with not a little satisfaction.
And, with the camera no longer rolling, the girl began to scream.
“You son of a bitch!” she was saying, in the shrill voice of somebody whose finger got slammed in, the door. “You son of a bitch!”
And she threw a nice hard right into the side of the guy’s head-he was still on his knees, in dog position-and he went down for the count.
She stood over him, raving and ranting, her hands balled into fists, her naked breasts jiggling, all of her trembling with rage.
“You shit! You putz! You did it on purpose!” She kicked him in the side of one thigh.
“No, no,” he said, feebly, afraid the next blow would be more appropriately placed.
“You didn’t have to get it in my hair. Do you have any idea how long it takes me to do this hair? And if we’re shooting an insert tonight, I’ll have to get it ready again, before then, wash it, dry it, set it… ooooh! Get out of my sight, you miserable wimp, before I kick your paycheck up around your ears!”
And the guy got to his feet and, doubled over, did as she told him, pausing only to grab a robe from a chair.
The fat cameraman was laughing. The pale blond kid wasn’t. The dark-haired girl was in the shadows.
Castle put an arm around the girl’s shoulder. Smiling, he said, “You were a little rough on that poor kid.”