Porn Star(90)

Except why did I feel weird about it?

Except why did I feeling like I was missing something, something vital, when Devi wasn’t there?

And how, with all this weirdness, this feeling of being bereft, could I still keep f*cking Bambi? Not just f*cking her, but murmuring all my usual sex words to her—you feel so good, and your * is so tight, and don’t you want to make my cock feel good? They were sex words that I’d murmured in so many different permutations so many different times to so many different women, and they should have felt hollow and wrong, but they didn’t. It did feel good to pump into Bambi, it did feel good to have her suck me off. And at the end, when I wrapped my hand around my cock and shot cum onto her uplifted face? Well that felt f*cking good too. How can I feel guilty and good all in the same space? How can I love someone as much as I love Devi, and still get hard for someone else?

God, it’s all so f*cking complicated. That restless shame, that empty feeling. It makes me horny and agitated all over again just thinking about it. I flex my fingers on the steering wheel before reaching down to adjust the growing bulge in my jeans.

I need to f*ck Devi. On camera, off camera, I don’t care, but that’s the only way to discharge this f*cking mess of emotions that I’ve conjured in the space of a couple short hours. I need her so badly, and we need to fix this, whatever it is. We both have livings to earn, so obviously we have to find a way to make f*cking other people compatible with our relationship.

As I turn onto her street, I see immediately that her car isn’t around, which could mean she’s not home or that she parked in the garage. A pang of frustration almost paralyzes me; I counted on her being here, on being able to start fixing this right away.

I try calling her again as I pull into her driveway—no answer.

I park and I knock on her door—no answer.

I walk around the side of the house and squint up into the window like a f*cking creeper—nothing.

She’s not here. I get back in my car and call again, leaving a message this time.

“Hey Cass,” I say after her sweet voice finishes delivering her voicemail response and the phone beeps to tell me it’s recording. “It’s Logan. I, um. You left and you’re not answering your phone and so I guess I’m worried is all. I love you. Bye.”

I deliver it in the short choppy way that a teenage boy calling his crush might, and I don’t even care at this point. I don’t care if she thinks I’m pathetic. I just need to see her and make this feeling stop.

I wait in her driveway for another thirty minutes, picking up my phone to check the screen every few minutes, even though it would have chimed if she called or texted. But there’s no response, and the late afternoon heat seeps into the car, reminding me that I have work to do at home and a phone call with Marieke de Vries at five.

Suddenly, I’m filled with an anger so intense I can barely see straight, my vision going static at the edges and my hands gripping tight around the wheel. It’s a fury so displaced and projected and tangled that I’m not sure what I’m actually angry about or who I’m angry with. I’m angry with Devi for leaving and with myself for not realizing she’d be upset watching Bambi and me, and I’m pissed that she won’t answer her phone and I’m pissed that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Mostly, I’m angry because I’m scared.

The anger vanishes as quickly as it came and I loosen my grip on the wheel, feeling both empty and pointless. With a deep breath, I reluctantly pull out of her driveway and onto the street, looking in my rearview mirror as I slowly roll away. It’s like I’m leaving my heart in her driveway, and all the tendons and veins that attach it inside of my chest are stretching and snapping as I drive away and leave it there to bleed out and die.

Needless to say, it’s not a happy drive home. I walk in the door, knowing I need to go to my office, knowing I need to work, but instead I drop my keys on the counter and wander over to my window. Outside in the bright heat, the pool glimmers clear and cold, and I think about watching Devi swim there, moving so effortlessly, the contrast between her dark bronze skin and the bluish water beautiful and perfect and striking.

What if I was right last night? What if that first off-camera sex was the best it will ever be for us? What if it’s all downhill from here? What if that perfect moment of shimmering connection can’t last? We’ve defined it now, as love, and maybe love can’t bear this many complications, and maybe our baby relationship is already in its death throes.

I scrub at my face with my hands and step away from the window. I can’t right now—with any of this. I have too many feelings jumbled too close together, and I can’t even begin to sort them out without my Cass beside me.

So instead, I try to throw myself into work for the afternoon, writing and filming my monologue for Bambi’s scene and having a ninety-minute phone call with Marieke about Star-Crossed. She loves the footage so far, and since Devi and I are getting ready to schedule our last episode for the season, Marieke and I talk about what another season of it would look like. There are a lot of great, sexy ideas tossed around and we finally settle on one, and I should feel energized by all this but I don’t.

I feel like my heart is still pulsing in sad, bloody little beats on Devi’s driveway.

I feel like I want to drive back to her house and sit on her steps until she comes home.