Porn Star(39)

No, this was something beyond anything I’ve ever felt, so powerful and elemental that I could feel it coursing through my body and into the rocky ground underneath me and into the speckled, glittering sky above me, and the world dissolved into pure, celestial magic.

Sparkling.

Atomic.

Holy.

And then the world came together again, normal once more but still charged with the ionized memory of our magic, and we sped into the dark, laughing at our near-miss.

So why did I push her away?

Because I couldn’t bear the thought of something so unbearably sexy, so indelibly perfect, being brought down to earth with something as mercenary and trite as forcing her to suck me off in my car. I mean, I knew at the time that I wasn’t forcing anything, that she would have been happy to do it, but it would have ultimately been me leading the transition from the stars to the slurping, and it felt wrong.

It still feels wrong. I chose the right thing, I know it, even as I sit here listening to Devi gather up her things and unbuckle herself.

“I’ll walk you inside,” I say suddenly, unbuckling too.

“Okay,” she says. Her voice betrays nothing, and this is one of the strangest things I’ve learned about Devi in the past few weeks. She can be so friendly, so straightforward, so adorably young, that it would be tempting to think that she’s an open book. But she’s not always, only when she chooses to be, and there are times when she’s just as unreadable as the stars. More Queen Cassiopeia than Layla.

We get out and I follow her up the walk, up to her front door. The moment is pregnant as she unlocks it, as we both recall our searing first kiss here, and I wonder how she remembers it. She wanted it, I know, just like she genuinely wanted to blow me tonight in my car. Devi is a modern, sex-positive girl; she enjoys having sex and she likes me as a friend. And there have been a few moments where I’ve thought I’ve glimpsed something more, kernels of yearning in her voice, a bite of the lip or a quick blink as she looks away from me.

But I still think it might have just been a hot kiss for her and nothing more. Not the revelation it was for me.

The moment passes and then we’re walking up the old wooden stairs to the upper floor and unlocking another door there.

She flicks a light on, and a yellow CFL bulb illuminates a cozy living room lined with bookshelves and dominated by the ugliest couch I’ve ever seen in my life, a hulking thing of orange velvet. It’s either the kind of couch you find in your great-aunt’s basement or the kind of couch you pay too much money for at a place like Anthropologie.

I walk over to investigate it further, and then I hear Devi clear her throat like she’s going to speak, like it’s easier for her to speak when we’re not looking at each other. I brace myself for whatever it is she’s going to say.

“Why wouldn’t you let me blow you in the car?” she asks softly.

Dammit. The one question I would pay real, American money for her not to ask.

I turn to face her, my filmmaker brain having tiny seizures when I see how sweet and vulnerable she looks framed against her sagging, overwhelmed bookshelves. “Devi, it’s just about the show, it’s not because I don’t—”

“Bullshit.” There’s no menace or heat in her voice right now, just the matter-of-fact voice she would use to tell me about star formation.

I hesitate. She tilts her head at me.

I speak after a long moment, trying to fumble my way towards the truth without exposing how deeply, crazily, ridiculously I am caught up in her. “I didn’t want to use you, Devi. I didn’t want to cheapen what we shared in the desert.”

She raises an eyebrow, and I realize suddenly I’ve said something wrong.

“For one thing,” she says, using her fingers to tick off her words, suddenly not looking like a girl at all, but a confident—and irritated—woman, “there’s nothing cheap about my choosing to do any sexual act with you. I make the choice—I choose to use my body, either for work or for pleasure, and tonight I was choosing to go down on you, even though I knew the cameras were off. When you call that choice cheap, it makes me feel cheap.”

Shit shit shit.

“That’s not at all what I meant,” I hurry to explain. “I just meant—”

“And for another thing,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken, “I feel like you’re holding yourself back from me, and I don’t get it at all. Logan, your body isn’t a machine, and I don’t expect it to be—I don’t expect you to turn yourself off like a switch when the camera turns off. You’re human, you’re going to keep needing and craving even after a scene ends. Of course, you don’t want to use women, and of course you aren’t the kind of guy who tries to f*ck around with girls onset when the cameras aren’t rolling. It’s one of the things I like best about you.”

I don’t know what to say to this, because I’m so floored and grateful that she has noticed those things about me, but I also know that she’s not finished talking yet and that I’m still in trouble.

“But Logan—” she steps forward “—I offered. I was offering because I wanted to. I wanted to and I chose it, and you wouldn’t have been manipulating or even coaxing me into it. Please...as we move forward...please open up to me more. I’m your friend and I think I’m—” she breaks off, swallowing and glancing away. “I’m so turned on for you all the time,” she finishes, and it makes my dick ache and my heart beat hard, even as my mind recognizes that she changed course at the last moment.