Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

Critics Are Hot for Pleasure U

“A highly erotic look at all aspects of human sexuality. Playtime, bath time, parties, orgies. Everything is covered. . . . Pleasure U is scorching hot and erotic. I even blushed at times.”

—Joyfully Reviewed

“Superbly written . . . a fabulous coming-of-age tale.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Tons of wild and crazy sex scenes of all varieties. . . . Go for it.”

—Errant Dreams Reviews

BOOKS BY CAROLE HART

Pleasure U

The Family Jewels

HEAT
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Heat, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, January 2010

Copyright © Carole Hart, 2010

All rights reserved

HEAT is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hart, Carole, 1965-
Show me / Carole Hart.
p.cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-15983-5

I. Title.
PS3614.E66S47 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009030452

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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ONE

“So,” said Emily Lister, looking up kittenishly from under thick black Slashes, “you started to play guitar because you were lonely?”

“Yeah, pretty lonely,” Greil said. “I guess my parents were busy in those years. They didn’t have time to notice what I did.” His face was lit into handsome rakishness by a grin. “Not that I did much then. It was . . . Nebraska.”

Emily laughed, noticing again that Greil, unlike most celebrities, was much better-looking in person—possibly just because in person you knew his good looks were real. Although they were still incredible. It was the kind of thing that made you want to rub your eyes. He was not only impossibly tall (he had admitted to six foot three) but so well proportioned that his height had a hint of the godlike. That impression of divinity was enhanced by his perfect skin, tanned to a golden sheen. Even the neatly trimmed beard he wore seemed too glossy, too ideally, immaculately black, to seem quite right. What was equally striking was his aura of athletic, boyish masculinity. He was the kind of man who couldn’t sit in a chair without rocking it onto its back legs, as if at any moment he was about to spring out of it with restless energy. It had been something of a problem in their earlier meetings, when he was always dashing out of a shot and having to be pursued by weary cameramen.

Now, in bed, however, he looked completely at home.

“So you’re glad to be in New York now?” she said, letting her voice dip into a purr.

“I’m glad to be here with you.”

“Is it how you imagined it?”

His ice blue eyes narrowed with sly warmth as he said, “I never told you I watched your show.”

“Well. Researchers.”

He laughed and said, “Then you know I’ve had a crush on you for years.”

He was lounging beside her on the bed in jeans and a T-shirt. The bed itself was a four-poster, double-king-sized behemoth whose pastel silken spreads were pulled aside in stylish disarray to bare a snowy sheet. On the art nouveau nightstand—a slab of marble supported by a crystal mermaid—two glasses of red wine stood beside a hardcover book whose cover featured Greil’s devastating grin and his name in red embossed capital letters. Emily herself was wearing a flimsy pink teddy just transparent enough to show a hint of the darker pink of her nipples. Her thick black hair was brushed back from her face and spilled down onto the pillow where she lay, propping herself up on one elbow to talk to Greil. He was half-turned toward her, and his hand was gently stroking her hip. His grin softened now as he moved to take her breast in his hand, the caress of his strong hand teasingly gentle. She half shut her eyes and arched her back.

“Mmm,” she said, “that’s nice. So, you’re my biggest fan?”

“Yes,” he said huskily. “I’ve wanted to do this ever since I was eighteen.”

As he spoke, he was pulling a strap of the teddy off her shoulder and tugging the satin down to expose the full curve of her breast, the softly protruding nipple already stiff from his touch. Then he bent over her, putting his lips to it. He began to lick it in circles, his tongue growing more eager as the nipple hardened. Then he sat back to pull off his T-shirt. Her breath caught as she saw his firmly muscled chest, smooth and golden.

She said, “Well, I’ve been a fan of yours ever since your first album, Banshee Tracks. And before I forget what I’m doing—you’re on the cover of Rolling Stone this month, right?”

“Yeah, life’s been good to me.” He looked down at her body and unzipped his jeans. “Can I . . . ?”

“Oh, there are just two things I have to do first,” Emily said sweetly. “One—” Stretching with a practiced sinuousness, she raised her hips off the bed and pulled her panties down to her thighs and over her knees. He groaned, pulling his jeans and underpants down and hurriedly stepping out of them. Letting her knees drift apart, Emily licked her lips and winked at him. He sat on the bed again, wearing a darker, hungrier version of his raffish grin. Pressing up into his toned stomach was a beautiful, thick cock, so hard that it seemed tensed. Then he was reaching between her thighs, his fingers coming to rest lightly on her bared pussy. The fingers stroked there teasingly for a minute, raising chills in her as they passed over her mound of Venus and gently parted her cunt lips. Then, slowly, he slipped two fingers into her. As they entered her, she was aware of her own rich wetness, and instinctively arched her hips to meet him.

“Yes,” she breathed with an almost wistful sweetness. “You can do that while I . . .” She shut her eyes for a second, her body stiffening as his fingers slid deeper into her and his thumb slipped impossibly tenderly over her clitoris. Focus, focus, she told herself, but her body was begging her, and she could barely tear her eyes away from his cock. In a second she could take it in her hand. Forcing herself to look away, she reached back for the book and held it up, turning her face, languid with sexual need, to camera one.

“Greil Gage’s autobiography, Greil Gage—Playing, is out in stores tomorrow. And now Greil is going to show me some of the games he learned during his journey to stardom.” She let the book slip to the floor and turned to find him already over her, his hips poised between her legs.

In the next instant, she felt his cock pressing against the outer lips of her pussy. Only the incredible professionalism she had built up over five years of hosting the show could account for what she did next. She reached down to cradle the shaft of his cock in one hand, rolled her head to one side as if in the throes of passion—and checked the clock. Damn. Only five minutes left. But she guessed (she thought, guiding his cock into her and feeling the faint, familiar chill as its silky head met the wetness there) that was why she got paid.

That and her uncanny ability to convince rock stars, actors, and pro athletes to have sex with her on live television. In fact, Greil’s publicist had phoned that morning in a state of nervous collapse and begged her outright not to have him on her show. “We’ve got enough trouble as it is. That damned book. I could wring his neck. I can give you one of my other clients . . . anyone. . . . We were that close to a deal with Disney—you don’t understand the kind of money involved!”

“But don’t you think you should work with your client’s strengths?” said Emily sweetly. Even if there had been time to get another guest, Greil Gage was perfect for In Depth. And she had the figures to show that guests on her show didn’t suffer from the extraordinary kind of exposure she had to offer. But even if they had, Emily was of the opinion that everyone should lighten up about “the kind of money involved” and live a little. What happened to good old-fashioned rock star decadence (Hollywood decadence, quarterback decadence), anyway?

Or at least, that had been her opinion until just recently. Until Ralph Anderman entered her life.

Her eyes were still on the clock’s digital display, its unforgiving numbers blurring as Greil’s cock slid into her. At this point, her body took over, flooding with a luxurious heat and sensitivity. He entered her slowly, with a slight turning movement of his hips that made her feel his cock’s thickness spreading her, filling her. Then he was all the way in, his balls pressing sweetly up to her ass. She met his eyes and at that moment the tip of his cock found her G-spot, and an electric trembling spread from her cunt down her thighs. “Oh . . . yes,” she said.

He began to thrust into her with a wonderfully knowing expertise, his cock exploring her deeply, finding every spot of sensitivity inside her and waking it. Her hips moved to his rhythm, and the intensity of his blue eyes on her face made her long for him even as he fucked her. Greil Gage is fucking me, went through her mind, and then she was suddenly, unexpectedly, coming, a gentle orgasm that was like a foretaste of the stronger ones to come. He felt it and moaned, driving into her with force now, his skill giving way to a flowing, instinctive need that carried her with it. She was fucking into a sweet, prolonged play between orgasm and release, orgasm and release. All the while, the cameras in the background were like an extra, generalized desire—a sense of people everywhere feeling what she felt. The world was a place where people fucked and everything was loving and sweet; a stranger held you in his arms and—“Oh, God,” she said suddenly as a keener, more forceful orgasm stilled her, making her legs close around him, pulling him deep inside. That set him off, and he lasted only one more thrust before he came, moaning helplessly and fucking the last hot waves of her orgasm to a standstill.

Then he relaxed down into her arms. She hugged him, looking over his shoulder at camera two to say, “Thanks for joining me for another edition of In Depth—real people, real stories, real sex.”

Emily had never intended to be a porn star. Actually, she had always wanted to be a veterinarian—a fact that never failed to entertain people in interviews. One interviewer had narrowed his eyes and said, “Not a sex veterinarian, maybe? Or a veterinary gynecologist?”

“No,” she had said regretfully, “that was long before I’d heard about sex.”

In fact, when she looked back on her life before meeting Babylona, her younger self seemed so naive that she sometimes wondered if she had heard about sex—sex for fun and profit, anyway, sex that wasn’t about getting married and having children until death did you part. Sometimes she still thought she would have been a happier person if she’d been left that way. She would have finished college and gone on to veterinary school. She would have met some nice man and had nice children in a nice suburban home. (To which Babylona always said, “I’m sure nobody actually does anything so miserable. They just say so to frighten us.”)

In the last days before Babylona, Emily had been going to NYU and working as a masseuse. It was a skill she’d picked up after high school, imagining it would pay her way through college—another idea that now seemed tragically naive. Working nights and weekends, she never made more than a living, and her tuition debts mounted alarmingly. This was so even though she turned out to be freakishly talented at giving massages. She had a deliciously soothing touch, with a hint of uncanny electricity in it—or so she was told. When she touched herself, it was disappointingly unelectric and unsoothing. But when she touched someone else for the first time, they tended to tense and then relax into bliss, muttering ecstatically, “That’s amazing. How do you do that?” One man had even refused to believe she wasn’t using some kind of machine. He’d said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in that stuff.” Nothing she could say would convince him that it was safe.

But Emily could never say how she did it. And every attempt to teach other people amounted to her saying, “Well, you just have to feel their—you know. And then you—you know.” In fact, from her point of view, she was just rubbing their backs. Perhaps she did devote more attention than most masseuses. Touching someone’s body made her instantly rapt with that attention; she found the responsiveness of their skin and muscles fascinating. Perhaps she did fall into a dreamy state in which she was halfway feeling what they felt. Whatever it was, she couldn’t put it into words beyond “You know, you just try really hard. You know.”

Her night job in her senior year at NYU was in the spa at a five-star hotel. It had the advantage of set hours, and the further bonus that even when she was propositioned, it was done in a tasteful way. Almost nobody was under the impression (as clients in the outside world often were) that the masseuse at the Regency Park Avenue offered happy endings.

She first knew Babylona as her eight o’clock appointment. Sixty minutes without aromatherapy or hot stones. With any luck, a twenty-dollar tip. With good luck, possibly forty.

Babylona was five minutes late, which Emily would later realize was her idea of politeness—she was always, punctually, exactly five minutes late. “Everyone likes an extra five minutes in the day,” she would say. Although the hotel was overheated for March and the spa was positively steaming, Babylona arrived wearing a snow-white fur that hung to her knees. She was barefoot, and Emily couldn’t help noticing that she wore a toe ring that appeared to be a diamond solitaire—as if she were engaged to be married to a foot fetishist. She was also one of those rare women who could wear a toe ring with grace—her feet were as white as her fur, and had a sculpted elegance.

In fact, with her exquisite features and glittering aqua eyes, she was the most beautiful woman Emily had ever seen, an impression that was only strengthened when Babylona smiled, shrugged her shoulders, and swung off her fur to reveal that she was absolutely naked underneath.

“Oh, good,” Emily said, trying to seem unruffled. “So you’re ready for . . . I mean, there’s a hook there to hang your . . . clothes.”

Babylona’s hair—long, wavy red hair that set off her pure white skin—had been tucked under her coat. That whiteness—alabaster, Emily thought—in turn set off the perfection of her hourglass figure. In a hotel full of fake tans, the pallor was subtly lewd. It was as if Babylona was more naked than those women could ever be. At the same time, she wore her nudity casually. Walking to the massage table easily and gracefully, she said, “I am sorry if I startled you. But, you see, I’m coming from work.”

Then it was only natural for Emily to ask what her work was.

“Well,” Babylona said with a modest pout, “I suppose I am a sex tycoon. Only for lack of a better word, you know.” And, draping herself on the massage table with a lithe provocativeness that immediately gave credence to her words, she explained in detail.

In fact, if Emily had heard of sex—no-strings sex for fun and profit—she would have already known from the name on her appointment sheet. Babylona ran the largest and most diverse sex empire in the world. There were the string of sex shops, the touring burlesque show, the Institute for Sex Studies, and her new multimillion-dollar project, a television channel dedicated to erotic programming. “Not your usual porn channel, though. Our sex is tasteful. It’s not about close-up shots of organs, though of course those have their place. But porn is almost never sexy—don’t you agree?”

Having no idea whether she agreed—did women really watch porn?—Emily said, “Oh, absolutely,” and began to work on Babylona’s shoulders.

Two minutes later, Babylona was telling her she had a magic touch. A silvery touch—no, a golden touch. Ten minutes later, she was sitting up on the massage table and asking whether Emily had ever thought of changing professions.

The rest was history.

Greil helped her up off the bed and handed her a white silk robe embroidered with roses twining around the XTV logo, courtesy of Babylona’s signature negligee line. She was smiling and returning waves to the cameramen, sharing the wash of relief that always came after the adrenaline of being on air. As always also happened, she wanted to get out of the studio as quickly as possible, back to her dressing room to collapse on a couch and let the excitement wash out of her. So she was already leading a grinning and still-naked Greil down the corridor to the dressing rooms when he said, “I don’t suppose you ever see your former guests, I mean, socially.”

She was trying to think of a way to put him off—ever since the disaster with Evan, she had a policy of keeping business and personal life strictly separate—when she heard a familiar voice saying, “Hello, Emily,” and stopped just short of running into Ralph Anderman. Then she was standing there like an idiot, blushing to the roots of her hair. Greil stopped short, too, and was surveying Ralph with an expression of suspicion.

She caught her breath and said, “Greil Gage, this is Ralph Anderman.”

“Hi,” said Ralph, putting out his hand with perfect, unruffled calm. He showed absolutely no reaction to being presented with a stark-naked rock star on his way to . . . whatever he was doing here. Emily couldn’t imagine what that was. Meanwhile, his air of cool was troubling her. If he couldn’t approve of what she did, he could at least have the decency to be shocked by it.

“Yeah, hey, man,” Greil said, looking at the hand dismissively and crossing his arms. “You’re that guy who was seeing Marisa, right? I remember that.”

Ralph Anderman’s most recent girlfriend had been the supermodel Marisa Brice, a fact that had been returning to Emily’s mind disturbingly often recently. And she guessed Greil might actually not know that Ralph was also one of Fortune’s 100 Richest People in America, a businessman who had blazed a trail through several different industries, transforming them all in his wake. Greil might not know that, but she wasn’t placing any bets.

Ralph just said, with every appearance of friendliness, “Yes, I guess that’s what I’m most famous for.”

“And how is Marisa?” Greil said. “I haven’t seen her around.”

“Very well, hopefully.” Ralph looked at his watch. “Because she’s getting married right about now.”

“Whoa! Not invited to the ex’s wedding! That hurts,” Greil laughed, looking at Emily.

Emily blurted, “Could you both excuse me? Because I, um, I want to get dressed. Though, I mean, it’s good to see you, and . . .”

Ralph said, “Before you go, could I invite you to lunch?”

“Um, now?” Emily was aware she was blushing again, and that Greil was looking daggers at her. “I guess . . . Can you wait ten minutes?”

“I can wait exactly ten minutes,” Ralph said.

She smiled—mindlessly, she realized—and set off to her dressing room, with Greil scowlingly pacing at her side.

“Who is that guy?” he muttered. “I mean, who does he think he is? He just shows up here. I mean . . .”

“Oh, I don’t know. I wanted him to come on the show. So I guess . . .”

“The show? You’re going to have that guy—”

Greil stopped in his tracks. Emily almost kept on going, but realized belatedly that they were at her door—a hot pink door stenciled with a gold heart around the gold letters EMILY LISTER. She said, “Well, no, he said no, actually. But—”

“He said no? What is he, fucking crazy?”

“But—”

“So what does he want to see you for if he won’t even be on . . . the show?”

Greil was glowering at her with his arms crossed. Emily took a deep breath.

“Listen,” she said, in her most understanding older-sister tone. “It was great getting to know you, and I do hope to see you again, but I try not to get my personal life intertwined with—”

Greil had turned chalk white. He said, “Oh, shit. You’re dumping me.”

“Not dumping you. I mean, we never . . .”

“I get it.” For a second he stood there looking at the floor. At last he said, in a more subdued tone, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I guess this whole thing . . .” He gestured at his head. “I got the wrong idea. I guess that happens to you a lot.”

“Oh, well. It’s flattering. And yes, it does happen.”

“Well, I’ll . . . yeah, I’ll see you around.” Then he set off down the corridor again, his beautiful nude back looking suddenly thin and vulnerable. Emily was already inside before she realized he had been heading away from the guest dressing room and toward the staff canteen. Oh, well, she thought. Given that it was XTV, they probably wouldn’t even look up from their food.

Then she went to her clothes rack and stood there with her face in her hands for a minute. Ralph Anderman. Here to see her. Lunch. 100 Richest People in America. 10 Most Eligible Bachelors. 8 People Who Are Transforming Our World.

One man still capable of making Emily Lister behave like a besotted thirteen-year-old.

TWO

Zaza dashed down the hallway, damning the high heels she’d decided to wear that morning (if she’d known!), each step sinking into the deep pile carpeting that covered every inch of XTV’s three surprisingly capacious floors. Zaza felt as if she had run a hundred miles this morning, and every step of it had been like running in sand. But of course it was only her first day; tomorrow she would wear flats. If she could still walk by tomorrow.

She came to an awkward halt in front of one of the dressing rooms—the gold heart enclosing the two names VALERIE LEBLANC and LILA PARKER. For a moment she allowed herself self-indulgent chagrin—if only she could have been Lila’s assistant (or, as another assistant had introduced himself that morning, “porn slave”). If there was one person in the world she could have been, it was Lila Parker, the voluptuous (and nice! Until today, Zaza hadn’t even known how important it was to be nice!) young star of The Mountain Lion. Instead she had to be working for Valerie “Most Hated Woman in Porn” LeBlanc.

She knocked, with a leaping in her heart—maybe Lila Parker would be there?—and when no one responded, took a deep breath and used the key she had been given. The door opened and she entered a room that was pointedly divided into two equal parts.

At a glance, she could tell which half was Valerie’s. Lila’s half of the room was a luxurious confusion of silk underwear, furry slippers, bouquets, and champagne bottles. Framed photographs (all of gorgeous men, to Zaza’s covetous eye) coated her wall. On a red velvet love seat, a pile of recently opened boxes were surrounded by their torn silver gift paper. Oh, God, to be Lila Parker! A mini-parade of Lila’s most recent amours marched through Zaza’s pining brain: John Banks, with his cool air of mystery; Ben Hartford, the most beautiful man in the world of erotica (voted as such by the union two years running); and, most painful of all, Zaza’s eternal crush, Jared Vairy. Zaza told herself to snap out of it (Late! She had been late for everything all day!) and turned determinedly to the other half of the room.

Valerie LeBlanc’s side of the room was so austerely neat that Zaza at first despaired of finding the thing she had come for—was there anything there? The surfaces had a perfect antiseptic shine; the white walls were bare; even the sofa cushions were perfect and undented, as if no one was allowed to sit there. Just like her, Zaza thought, and smiled at the thought of Valerie as a sofa on which no one was allowed to sit. She was, after all, renowned as much for being a virgin as for being the naked anchor of the world’s only daily TV sex news. It was actually amazing that anyone could give so many interviews about not doing something, Zaza thought, as she desperately scanned the shelves for the makeup kit she had come to fetch.

There! It was a gleaming metal box, and Zaza’s heart sank as she pulled it off the shelf and felt its weight. Maybe she could just get the rouge out of it? But no—it was locked. Typical. Zaza was whirling her arm protesting the deadweight of the box, her mind turning to the idea of Valerie LeBlanc as a box that couldn’t be opened, when the door flew open and a young man came in, looking as flustered as she.

It was the assistant she’d met briefly that morning—Lila Parker’s porn slave, of course!—looking somewhat more tousled and much more frantic. When he saw her, he froze, only to relax a second later and say, “Thank God. I thought you were Valerie!”

“That would have been awful!” Zaza said with immediate heartfelt sympathy.

He laughed. “She’s going to kill one of us someday. With those fingernails of hers.”

Zaza made a face. “You’re so lucky to work for Lila.”

“Yeah, I’d like to say that Valerie’s bark is worse than her bite, but her bite . . .”

“Oh, it’s like a snakebite,” Zaza said. “I know it makes me want to wet myself.”

“Well, don’t do that.” He smiled, and she noticed again his peculiarly charming lopsided smile. He was a tall, thin man—Built like a swimmer, she thought approvingly—who, like everyone else at XTV, seemed to carry with him an aura of sexual promise. Perhaps it was being surrounded by sex all day that did it. Still, Zaza couldn’t believe she would ever have that appeal. She was an A cup. A weed.

Before she could stop herself, she said wistfully, “But at least she’s sexy.”

He made a face. “You think so?”

“Well, of course. She’s got everything. I don’t want to be tacky, but if you’re beautiful and you have a perfect body and . . .” Zaza shook her head. “I’d give anything to look like her.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “Valerie isn’t half as sexy as you.”

She was about to brush off this empty flattery when she saw the frank lust in his eyes—which dropped to take in her body fleetingly before returning to her face. He smiled and said, “No contest.”

She found herself staring into his pale blue eyes, her mouth slightly open. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Zaza caught her breath. Go! her mind screamed. You’re already going to be late! But she just stood staring at him, one hand at her throat, as her breath came faster and faster.

“Sorry. I can’t stay and talk,” she said at last, in a hoarse, hesitant voice. “I’ve got to carry that box to Valerie. And I’m late.”

“Me, too.”

But they continued to stand, staring at each other. Finally, he said, “Oh, hell,” and they were in each other’s arms.

He was kissing her deeply and his hands immediately began pulling up her shirt while she murmured, “Oh, God. Oh, no . . .”

He said, “I was hot for you the instant I saw you. Wow, your breasts . . .”

She pulled her shirt off over her head while he fondled her braless tits and began to open her jeans. “Hurry,” she said breathlessly, although he didn’t need any urging. In a second, all her clothes were on the floor next to his jeans. She bit her lip as she noted his firmly muscled thighs and the long cock, deliciously hard, curving slightly to the right. Then she surrendered completely and pressed herself to him, flattening his cock between their bellies, making him groan. She gave him one more brisk kiss on the lips, giving herself a second to appreciate the rasp of his razor stubble on her cheek—men were so fantastic!—before they both tumbled onto Valerie’s pristine sofa.

“This is crazy,” she breathed. “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”

“I can be fast,” he promised. “Do you mind if it’s fast? God, I’m sorry but I’m dying to . . .”

She gasped as she felt his naked cock pressing against her inner thigh, the heat of it startling, its hard shape making her dizzy with want. “Yes! Okay!” she said. “Fast, just . . . do it.”

Then there was the unbelievable, searing pleasure of him sliding into her. Just like that, he was fucking her. Her hands were on his back, gripping the tensing muscles there, her head back on the sofa. As he thrust into her, she spread her legs wider, shutting her eyes in concentration. One last anxious time she thought of Valerie angrily waiting, frowning at the studio clock. Then he thrust into her again, harder, making her cunt ring inside with satisfaction, and she forgot everything.

The curve in his cock made it swipe past her clitoris with every stroke. Between that and the urgency, the near frenzy of his fucking, she had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out. It was like being sliced into again and again by bliss. She just had time to think, This is it; this is what I came here for, before her pussy caught fire and swept her with the first twinge of orgasm. Then she did cry out. His movements quickened still more, the fucking so rapid it was outpacing the twinges of coming. The vibrations from it were maddeningly good, and Zaza let herself go limp as her orgasm rose to its peak and then extended—and extended—and merged with the barrage from his dick in a wavering cycle of blind ecstasy. When he finally drove into her with a hoarse cry of his own, and pulled her body against him hard, she was almost surprised to realize that he was coming, too—that he hadn’t already come. It was as if she’d forgotten that they had two separate bodies.

There was a dreamy spell in which she pressed her lips to his throat and put her tongue out to taste the sweat there. She was smiling with her eyes shut, her body awash with gratitude. Then she froze.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Late!”

He laughed and said, a little teasingly, “So late.”

“Oh, but you don’t work for Valerie!” She was squirming, trying to escape from beneath him.

He released her, grinning. “You’re right. I’m late, too. But anytime you want to be late together again . . . I’m Anthony, by the way.”

“Oh, hi! I’m Zaza,” she said with an apologetic tone as she pulled on her underpants. “Um, that was great.”

“So great,” he said, and sighed as he moved to pick up his jeans.

For a scrambling moment they were both dressing hurriedly with half-pleased, half-embarrassed smiles. Then Zaza grabbed Valerie’s makeup box. Anthony pulled open a wardrobe and took out a flimsy robe—a garment made of feathers and gauze that immediately looked ridiculous in a man’s hand. Then he followed Zaza out the door and they said, “See you later!” in nervous unison before parting ways to run again down the corridor.

Zaza arrived at the studio winded, weak-kneed, and painfully conscious of the scent of fresh sex surrounding her. The box had hit her in the leg with every step of her mad dash, and she was feeling bruised and sheepish as she opened the door. Then she froze. The worst had happened. The show had already begun. The team of absorbed producers and tech people in headphones blurred in her eyes. Doom.

The sound technician turned to look at her and made an I wouldn’t like to be you! face. She grimaced back and crept in to watch the show on the monitors, the soft wetness in her crotch all too palpable as she sat. There was Valerie, in all her blond and buxom glory, her rich cellolike voice reading a report on this year’s Exotic Erotic Ball. No one could look that good sitting in a chair, Zaza thought to herself. It wasn’t strictly natural. But plastic surgery was another thing Valerie LeBlanc was on record as not having done. She had not had breast implants, though her breasts were impossibly perfect. She had not had vaginal intercourse, ever, with anyone (“I guess I’m saving myself for the right guy,” she would say sweetly—she was always impossibly sweet with interviewers). And she had not, ever, lost her temper and stabbed her former assistant in the neck with a silver pen. (“That girl was a very sad and confused person,” Valerie had told a reporter sweetly. “I hope very much that she can get the help she needs.”) It was all impossibly awful and impossibly unfair and impossibly typical of Zaza’s impossible life.

Oh, well, she told herself. At least I got that fuck. And—what was his name? Anthony! He wants to see me again. . . . But a stronger voice was bemoaning her irresponsibility. It was reminding her that this was the chance she’d always wanted, and that she was messing it up exactly the way she always did.

Zaza had wanted to be a porn star since before she knew she was going to have A-cup breasts. Before she had ever seen porn, she wanted to be what she had called “an actress in sex movies.” It wasn’t that she was an exhibitionist, though she was sure she could be, given the chance. It was the combination of the glamour of movies with the glamour that sex had had for her when she was young. Of course, it still had that glamour, and she guessed that from most people’s points of view, she was still young. The trouble was, at twenty-one, she was already old enough to know her breasts were never going to be anything but tiny A cups. She was going to be the wrong kind of redhead—a carrot-topped, freckled, spindly redhead—for the rest of her unglamorous life. And her aunt Lucy, who had raised her, had never let her forget it. Every other day, Lucy would look at her with bliss in her eyes and say, “At least you’re not likely to go the way of your mother!” Zaza’s mother had apparently been a famous reprobate in little, Christian, parochial Dulcie, Oklahoma. About Zaza’s father, all Lucy would say was, darkly, “Could have been anyone, dear, but no one’s talking.” Zaza couldn’t help but dream that someday she would meet that glamorous bad-girl mother and live with her in a world of late nights, skimpy clothes, and booze—all things that were strictly forbidden under the rule of Lucy.

Maybe that was the reason she still wanted, wistfully, hopelessly, to be in erotica. But she never would have done anything about that wish, not on her own. She was too shy about her looks. It was all the result of a chance meeting, an incident she still could hardly believe.

She had just moved into a New York apartment with her old school friend Booley. The apartment itself had very little to recommend it. It was a studio, for one thing, and the girls were sharing a lumpy bed that folded into an ugly sofa in the daytime. The windows didn’t shut properly and the heating barely worked. But it was in the middle of the maze of bars and clubs in the Lower East Side, where every young person in New York came to have a good time.

One evening, she went downstairs to her local bar, Hex, just to feel the freedom of being able to go to a bar alone at five p.m. There was no one inside but a couple arguing at the pool table and a man in a suit sitting at the bar, watching people pass on the street. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized it wasn’t just any man. It was a man with unearthly good looks, and the suit was the kind that cost thousands of dollars. The man was black, with very dark skin that gave his sculpted features an added elegance, a beauty that was unnerving. Finally, and most alarmingly, he was looking at Zaza.

She almost stumbled, but recovered and went to sit a few seats down at the bar—close enough that he could talk to her, but not so close that it seemed she expected him to talk to her. Then she ordered a white wine instead of the beer she had intended to get, and began to sip it self-consciously, studiously not staring at the incredibly hot guy who was disarmingly staring at her.

At last, he said, “Could I ask you a question?”

“Oh, of course. Yes.” She made herself look at him, although she was sure her face was going to turn into a mask of longing.

“It’s a personal question,” he warned her.

“Um, okay.” She took a deep breath. “Shoot.”

“Do you have a job?”

Zaza relaxed. That was an easy one. “Oh, no, I just got to New York. So I should have started looking for a job, but I look at the papers, and everybody wants experience at things I’m not experienced in, because I only really worked at a hardware store and a couple other places that aren’t really interesting.”

He smiled. “That’s great. So you might be looking for a job?”

She balked. This was the moment at which she was supposed to become suspicious. Random offers of work from strange men were usually offers of sex, or even of the wrong kind of work. Which meant she was supposed to refuse to speak to him and go home deeply offended. Except what could be better than an offer of sex from this man? And the wrong kind of work (within limits) was exactly what Zaza had always wanted.

She was silent so long that he said, “I guess this might seem intrusive. I’m sorry if—”

“No,” she said. “I really need a job.”

“Great. So can I explain it to you?”

“Yes,” she said, and laughed nervously. “I mean, it’s not in porn, is it?”

He raised his eyebrows. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card, which he offered to her. As she took it, he said, “I’m afraid my business is erotic programming. But I’m not looking for porn stars. I need a production assistant.”

The card read: LEONARD FALWELL, DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMMING, XTV CORPORATION. It had an address, a phone number, and an office extension. It looked just like a real business card.

Zaza stared at the card for a long time, her mind a blank. He was saying something about it not being very glamorous, that the hours were long, it was a lot of fetching and carrying. But you learned the business, and the pay . . .

She looked up and said, “When can I start?”

He smiled then, showing teeth so perfect that her heart melted. Who had ever imagined someone’s teeth could make you hot?

“As you might guess,” he said, “I’m in a tight spot, or I wouldn’t be accosting strangers in bars. Could you start next week?”

Zaza nodded. “Next week. Sure. I mean—Monday?”

He sighed. “Great. Just be at that address,” he pointed at the card, “at seven a.m. Let me take your name and I’ll have the receptionist tell you where to go.”

It was all a little improbable—even, as Booley pointed out repeatedly, a little fishy. And although Zaza had presented herself at seven a.m. and was immediately thrown into a never-ending series of unglamorous fetching-and-carrying tasks, just as the man had said, one thing still remained peculiar. On her ten-minute lunch “hour,” Zaza had tried to call Leonard Falwell to thank him for the job. Of course, part of her was hoping he secretly still wanted to sleep with her, that giving her the job was a means to an end. But the receptionist who answered the phone insisted that there was no such extension as the one Zaza gave, and that there was no Leonard Falwell employed at XTV.

“No, we never had any Leonard Falwell, honey,” the girl said blithely. “I’ve been here since the beginning. I’m sorry to say it, but I think somebody’s pulling your leg.”

The whole thing was so unaccountable that Zaza had given up trying to understand it. Someday, she imagined, she would run into “Leonard Falwell” in the corridor and . . . probably be unable to meet his eye. Because the same part of her that had hoped he wanted to sleep with her was now irrationally convinced that he had special business cards for girls he didn’t want to sleep with. The production assistant type of girl, who nonetheless would, every one of them, dream of sleeping with him. Of course, that was silly and paranoid.

Now she wondered, if he had been looking for porn stars, would she have had the nerve? Her mind sketched Jared Vairy again and she thought, Oh yes. But he probably took one look at Zaza and thought, Production assistant. Still, maybe she could work her way up to be a producer or a director—something that would bring her close enough to Jared Vairy (for instance—he was only an example) that he could get to know her and see . . . well, whatever it was that made people fall in love with unglamorous girls. However, she had an awful sinking feeling that she was about to lose her job.

Finished before I start, she thought. So typical.

Before getting this job, she had already been expelled from two high schools, fired from three jobs, and dumped by every boyfriend she’d had. She had a perfect score of zero. The worst of it was that she could never see that what she had done was so terribly wrong. As the show ground on, the vision of Valerie’s perfect blond voluptuousness searing into her miserable mind, Zaza listed for herself her failures to date.

1. First high school. Surely it couldn’t have been so bad to streak down the hallways naked, when, after all, everyone had cheered her, and it was for a bet and she had won the bet? (And all the other things she’d done were so minor!)

2. Second high school. They couldn’t expect her to go to all the classes and do all the work, when Joe McAllihy was willing to sneak off into the study hall and make out with her for hours at a time. And they couldn’t be so mad when they walked in on Joe and her at the historic moment Joe got to third base, even if they were nuns.

3. First job. Fucking the boss was not always a good idea, not when he co-owned the business with his girlfriend. But how was she supposed to know it was his girlfriend? Was it her fault he hadn’t told her?

4. Second job. Oh, what was the use? She couldn’t go on.

The boyfriends were more understandable. Or, at least, a lot of girls got dumped by their boyfriends. And she wasn’t a very good girlfriend. She always had her mind elsewhere. She was always planning to move to New York, even though none of her boyfriends ever wanted to move to New York. Or she was in love with some other man she couldn’t have. Even if she didn’t say anything, they must have felt that. The long and the short of it was that she hadn’t been in love with any of them, so she couldn’t expect them to be in love with her.

But the trouble was, no one had been in love with her. In like with her, yes. In lust with her, even. But she just wasn’t the type—Valerie LeBlanc tossed her blond mane and smiled sweetly out of the monitor at her, the type in spades—to break anyone’s heart.

She shut her eyes and immediately imagined Valerie’s blue-eyed, button-nosed face in a nun’s habit. She sighed. Valerie had really, really, missed her calling. She would have been a great mean nun at a parochial school. The greatest, meanest, uptight-est . . . now the incongruously naked nun was saying, “In other news, speculation is growing that Jared Vairy, star of erotic classics like Mile-High Club and Amsterdam Nights, could be suffering from—say it isn’t so!—erectile dysfunction. Is this the real story behind his much-publicized retirement from on-screen sex? More after this break.”

Zaza’s eyes flew open. Jared Vairy. Erectile dysfunction. She met the eye of the frowning sound tech, who said, “Oh, man. Jared’s going to be here in a second with smoke coming out of his ears. Oh, man.” All the people in headphones were shaking their heads, and one woman groaned, “Val, no-o-o-o . . .”

Zaza stared at the sound tech in utter confusion. Jared with erectile dysfunction? But it was just like Valerie to make a story like that up. And Jared, here? Zaza looked down with despair at her already comprehensively rumpled clothes, which had been the wrong thing in the first place and . . .

She didn’t notice Valerie until the other woman was standing in front of her in a rage no less frightening for the fact that she was nude and only five foot two.

“Miss Jeresky,” she said in a voice that was pure ice, “I assume you know that you’re fired.”

Zaza gulped and stumbled to her feet, praying that the aroma of sex wasn’t too strong or that virgin Valerie wouldn’t know what it was. “I—I’m sorry. It was just so far to go, and I was—Honestly, I ran so fast.” In her heels, she towered over Valerie by nearly a foot. It felt especially awkward and absurd to be abject downward to this pocket-sized Venus.

Valerie, however, was not the least discomfited. “Go tell Babylona that she’ll have to find a replacement for you. I have to be back on air in five minutes, and I’ll need a replacement by tomorrow at six. Let her know. Tomorrow at six.” She raised her eyebrows and narrowed her eyes. “Do you think you can remember that?”

“But I’m sorry. I mean, it’s just makeup! I mean, you really look great. I mean, you—” It was on the tip of her tongue to say that Valerie was covered in makeup, which was true. Zaza herself had had to rub the foundation into her back.

Valerie said with condescending fury, “You can’t see my nipples on camera without that rouge. I looked like a freak.”

Zaza opened her mouth, but shut it again. It was no good arguing that it was only a matter of Valerie thinking that she’d rubbed some off on her robe when nobody else could see the red spot on the robe, and . . . it was no good arguing. Of course, she had been away too long. If only she was the assistant to a real porn star, who would have understood why it was vitally necessary to fuck a total stranger in the middle of an errand.

“Please . . . give me a second chance. Please?”

“I don’t have time for this.” Valerie put a hand to her own temple, miming the headache that Zaza was giving her. “Babylona’s office is one floor up. If you get lost, please have the presence of mind to ask someone. I’d appreciate it if you could be out of the building before the show finishes. I do not want to see you again, Miss Jeresky.”

Zaza bit her lip, trying to think of something more abject to say. But Valerie had already turned and was walking off with perfect gyrations of her perfect (and perfectly made-up) ass.

Once she was gone, the sound tech said, “God. Sorry. It’s like this every day here. It’s like working with Henry the Eighth.”

“Oh, hell,” Zaza said hopelessly, giving him a bleak smile. “I really was late. But I can’t go tell Babylona. I mean, she won’t even know who I am.”

“Oh, she’s all right. Don’t worry about her.” The sound tech shrugged. “Babylona’s a cream puff. And everyone knows Valerie’s . . .” Then he caught himself and looked around paranoically. He finished weakly, “Valerie can be a little hasty.”

“Thanks,” Zaza said. “You’re so nice! Everyone was so nice . . . everyone else.” Then she realized there were tears in her eyes and took flight, leaving the makeup box on the floor.

The hallway was empty, to her relief. She leaned against the wall and put her hands over her face, indulging in a moment of private tears. How was she going to face Babylona? Babylona was the number-one person Zaza had always wanted to be, and here she’d been cherishing a stupid fantasy about how they would meet and Babylona would take to her. What a stupid idiot! She had to go and fuck that guy. . . . When would she learn? No wonder she failed at absolutely everything, and everyone was angry at her all the time, and she got thrown out of everywhere. Even in porn you had to get things done. Even in porn—

“Are you all right?”

It was a man’s voice, deep and reassuringly familiar. She rubbed her eyes and looked up, astonished, at a slightly tear-blurred Jared Vairy.

“Oh . . . no. That’s why I’m crying,” she said. Then she actually bit her tongue. The thought went through her mind: So people really bite their tongues! She released it and said, “But, you can just go past, ’cause it’s not important. I mean, you don’t know me, and I’ll really be all right.”

He smiled at her, that famed melting smile that transformed his otherwise hawkish good looks into a dazzling amorousness. It was really Jared Vairy, in jeans and a faded Red Sox T-shirt, just like a real person, only better-looking. “Are you working with Valerie?” he said.

She nodded, trying desperately to think.

“Well, try not to let her get to you. She’s the original woman who makes grown men cry. And not from a broken heart.” He put his hand on her shoulder sympathetically.

Jared Vairy was touching her shoulder. She nodded again, telling herself not to turn and nuzzle his hand—not. Then she suddenly realized what he had said. “Men must fall in love with her all the time, though.”

His face altered subtly, the blue eyes beginning to blaze with contained anger. “Well, I guess some deluded, pathetic, miserable, doomed souls might think they were in love with her, until they got to know her.”

“Oh, did you—? I’m sorry. I didn’t know that—”

“No, not me,” he said. Then he wasn’t touching her shoulder anymore. He was standing there with his arms crossed, a look of disgust on his face.

Suddenly Zaza remembered the news item Valerie had just read about him. “Oh,” she said. “I just heard that news item, too. But no one will believe it.”

“Everyone will believe it,” he said. “That’s the point.”

“I don’t believe it.”

He smiled again, a hint of warm amusement in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Just between you and me—and anyone else you can find to tell—she’s doing it for a reason.”

“Because she’s horrible?” Zaza said.

“Yes,” he said, laughing. “That’s what you’d call the ultimate cause. But the immediate reason is that she wants me to be her first, on prime time.”

“Oh,” Zaza said. For a moment she was distracted by the feeling that it was almost forgivable. Who wouldn’t want Jared to be her fi rst lover, even if it had to be on television? But to show she was on his side, she said, “That’s so selfish. You mean, she wants you to prove . . . with her?”

“She wants the most famous man she can find to do it with her,” he said with deepening disgust. “And until George Clooney starts answering her calls, I’m it. Not that I answer her calls.”

“Well, she’s just fired me,” said Zaza shyly. In spite of herself, the tears began to well again. “And it was only my first day.”

The hand was back on her shoulder. “What did you do? Breathe wrong?”

“Something like that. And now she wants me to—to go and tell Babylona myself. And I’m never going to be able to do it.” It struck her for the first time that she could just walk out. She was fired, anyway. But that would be so irresponsible. It would only prove Valerie had been right.

Then, to her amazement, Jared Vairy was hugging her. At first, she froze, only distantly feeling the hard, wonderful planes of his body. She tremblingly put her arms around him and in an instant dissolved into pure, helpless bliss. Jared Vairy was hugging her! No matter what else happened, for the rest of her life she would always be a person Jared Vairy had hugged. In her arms, he felt better than she could have imagined, warm and big and knee-meltingly male. She wondered if he could smell the sex on her. Surely that would be a good thing?

Then he was standing back from her, still holding her by the shoulders. He said, “Listen. I’ll go talk to Babylona. I’ll bet you can get a job on some other show.”

“But—”

“Ssh.” He put his finger to her lips. “You’ve just saved my life. I would have gone in there and shouted at Valerie in front of everyone. I might have even done it on camera,” he said with a grim humor in his voice. “So one good turn deserves another, right?”

Before she could stop herself, she had kissed his fi nger. That deliciously fatal smile spread over his face again. “Thanks,” he said. He put the finger to his lips and kissed it—kissed her kiss. Then he was turning and heading off down the corridor again, leaving Zaza slumped against the wall in a half faint of wondering joy.

THREE

When Emily had first met Ralph Anderman, it was in his office in Lower Manhattan. The building was a beautiful prewar edifice with a mosaic in the lobby of nymphs in a stream. The elevators still had cages, and his office itself was a modest-sized room that looked like a Victorian gentleman’s study. She spent five minutes gushing about how much she loved the place before he cut her off with:

“I’m sorry, but I have to break in. You should know that I’m not going to be on the show.”

A month’s work on the part of her researchers and producers evaporated. It was the first time it had gone so far before a refusal was issued, and Emily was surprised at how hurt she felt. When she got the news thirdhand, she sometimes felt a little twinge of embarrassment, imagining that the celebrity involved might have specifically not wanted to sleep with her. But having someone say it to her face was ten times worse.

Unfortunately, the embarrassment came out as irritation. “So,” she said, “let me guess. You wanted to meet me from curiosity?”

“Not exactly.” He looked uncomfortable. “At least, that’s not how I would put it.”

“You thought you might get a free sample? Because—”

“Not at all.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a fan.”

“I’ve never seen the show.”

She was about to say Oh, you’re too good for my show? but she caught herself in time. Then she was blushing. Why should he watch her show? If Emily hadn’t been the star, she probably never would have seen it, either.

He was looking at her with a contained amusement, and for the first time she was struck by his looks. He was blond, with a face that might have been too pretty if it weren’t for his brawny physique. Blond with deep brown eyes—it was a striking combination that somehow emphasized the cool intelligence in his face. But perhaps he just looked better to her because she wasn’t going to sleep with him. Meeting gorgeous men she was guaranteed to sleep with had become old hat.

He said, “Let’s just say that you’re here because I wanted to apologize. Turning down beautiful women is new to me.”

“This is business,” she said, but her voice was weak. “You can apologize to my producers.”

“I know I could,” he said, with an irritation that echoed hers.

“So?”

“I don’t know. Is it necessary for me to explain my least motivations?” He was glaring at her now, and she remembered his reputation for being merciless with fools and incompetents. But she wasn’t a fool, and she hadn’t done anything incompetent. She hadn’t done anything at all!

“You did waste my afternoon,” she pointed out. “There’s necessary and there’s simple courtesy. It’s also not that flattering to be described as someone’s least motivation.”

They glared at each other for a moment. But as she watched, his eyes softened into an expression she couldn’t read. Maybe it was only confusion; after a minute, he shook his head.

Then, to her astonishment, he said, “Busted.”

“Busted? What do you mean?”

“I am a fan, and I did invite you here from curiosity—if just wanting to meet you counts as curiosity. I wouldn’t have used that word, but it’s close enough. The shoe fi ts, even if it pinches a little.” He was smiling ruefully.

She found herself smiling back, with a sudden lightheartedness that made her realize that both of them were being fools. And, seen from the point of view of a business meeting, definitely incompetent. “So you have watched the show?”

“No, that was really true,” he said. “I don’t even have cable.”

She was surprised to find that she filled with relief. But why would she be relieved? In fact, why would she care one way or the other? Just to say something, she said, “Wow, you really don’t have cable?”

“No,” he said. “I have to save every penny toward a hostile takeover of Microsoft.”

She laughed. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“You underestimate me.”

“Granted.” Smiling at him, she fell into the habit of imagining where she would touch him first, what kind of approach would inflame him most. Then she caught herself and said, with a somewhat forced lightness, “I didn’t know it was so easy to be a business visionary.”

“Don’t interview me,” he said softly.

She blushed again. Then she was foolishly thinking about how she had always blushed easily, and how people had mentioned it on blogs, and how it was one of the things that set her apart from other porn stars; it made her reactions seem so real, because they were. And all that time, they were staring into each other’s eyes. It had been at least a minute.

She said, “I wasn’t interviewing you. I guess I sound like I am sometimes. Bad habit.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m being terrible. I ought to send you flowers to apologize. That’s what a gentleman would do.”

She imagined receiving the flowers in her dressing room and was hit by an inexplicable wave of loneliness. “Well, don’t.”

Again, she was confronted by the enigmatic dark eyes, the somber expression she could not fathom. Then he was standing and saying, “I’ll see you out.”

In the corridor, he told her, seemingly calm again, that he kept a private elevator in the building; even though he deliberately used a small office and disliked superficial signs of hierarchy, it just wasn’t practical for him to appear randomly in public places. “There’s always a person who’s here to replace ceiling tiles, but who has a million-dollar business idea. It’s not so much that I can’t spare the time; I just can’t stand to hear the business ideas.”

Emily, meanwhile, was strangely affected by the idea of being in the private elevator with him. Her mind was sketching a scenario in which the elevator got stuck and . . . but she made herself match his calmness. “Are they all really terrible?”

“It’s not that the people are always stupid,” he said. “It’s just that business ideas are usually only worthwhile in the context of doing business. You know, when you have a problem to solve, the solution to the problem could be a great business idea. But I guess you’re not interested in business.”

They had arrived at the elevator; he pulled a little key out of his pocket and put it into the wall.

She said, “Oh, it’s interesting. Though I don’t know much about any business except . . .”

“Yes, actually, a lot of the elevator-ride business ideas turn out to be porn.”

She laughed. “Oh, well, you know I never wanted to be in porn.”

“You wanted to be a veterinarian.”

She frowned at him.

“I’ve read your interviews,” he said. “I was wondering why you hadn’t asked how I could be a fan without having seen the show.”

Then the elevator had arrived, and he was drawing back the gates; the thundering sound it made relieved her from the necessity of answering. He stepped back to let her get into the elevator first. He entered after, and the thundering sound came again as he closed the cage.

Then they were standing together in the enclosed space, shoulder to shoulder. Emily was keenly aware of every detail: the elevator’s hum, the cool air, his shoulder inches away from her. The moment that he turned toward her, she was keenly aware of turning toward him, her heart pounding as if everything she cared about was hanging in the balance.

He said, “Hold still.”

Then he put his hand on her cheek and bent down and kissed her on the forehead. It was a gentle kiss that contained the same enigmatic freight of tenderness—it had been tenderness—she’d seen in his eyes earlier. It made her feel weak and desperate. When he let her go and stood back, she felt as lonely as she’d ever felt in her life.

Then the elevator doors opened. He pulled back the gate and she stepped out, propelled by the necessity of acting normal. People had to behave as if they were sane, even if they weren’t sane at all. Even if they had just felt the craziest thing they’d ever felt in their lives.

But when she heard the gate begin to thunder closed behind her, she whirled in a panic. He put his hand to the cage and said, “So long.”

Then the elevator doors closed again and she was walking, stumbling, through the lobby.

She took a cab home—she couldn’t face going back to the studio. In the cab, she sat with her eyes closed, trying to find a way back to her daily life. She knew if she let herself think about Ralph, she would only be miserable. Still, she thought about Ralph. “You wanted to be a veterinarian,” he’d said, and even though it was something he’d read in a magazine, it still made her feel impossibly warm and known.

When she wasn’t avoiding thinking about Ralph, she was avoiding thinking of In Depth, which meant, of course, that she thought about it. Not for the first time, she longed to put it all behind her, to go back to being an everyday person who could walk down the street without having people stare and nudge their friends. A person who could meet a man without obsessively wondering whether he judged her, whether he liked her for herself or for the idea of dating a porn star—whether he was The One but was dismissing her because he didn’t want to deal with competition from a hundred hours of X-rated film.

When In Depth had started, the interviewees were still ordinary members of the public. It was nearly impossible to get celebrities to have public sex even now, and Emily’s ability to do so was one of the things that made her XTV’s greatest asset. With an unknown hostess on a brand-new network, it had been completely impossible. So the focus was on men with interesting stories (“I survived a plane crash in the Himalayas,” “I’m a real-life cowboy,” etc.) who were both extraordinarily good-looking and willing to have sex on air.

At first, Emily was painfully shy about the whole endeavor. Her researchers had had to do most of the talking when vetting interviewees. Her participation had been confined to saying diffidently afterward, “Um, I don’t think I want to . . . with that guy. If that’s okay?” Or else, “Yes, he seems—I mean, don’t you think? I’d like to, if it’s okay.” The charm of that first season (released as a set, it was now selling like hotcakes) was partly her shyness. It made every moment of film feel compellingly real.

The format of the show took shape around the drama of two attractive strangers meeting, getting to know each other, and then having sex in front of the cameras. Every week there was a restaurant date (in a restaurant where the other diners were all paid extras), then a “cute” date based on the gentleman’s real-life job (Emily perched in the cockpit of a plane; Emily getting a riding lesson from the real-life cowboy), and finally a long, leisurely, wine-soaked chat in bed, followed by . . .

Well, the first few times, what followed was difficult. The difficulty sometimes turned into multiple takes and humiliating long afternoons. Emily’s “magic touch” had completely failed her. It was impossible for her to concentrate on someone else’s body with a forest of microphones and camera lenses staring her down. The cowboy had taken two hours to get an erection, and then had threatened to beat up one of the cameramen who laughed at the wrong moment. Another man, an oceanographer who had a fascinating story to tell but a childish sense of humor, had been incapable of stopping himself from saying the wrong thing while they were fucking. In the middle of the sex scene, he would say something like “Wait. What’s that birthmark? Why—you’re my sister!” He’d apologized later, confessing, “Well, it felt so good when you laughed.”

By the second season, she’d begun to relax more. The magic touch returned, and she began to enjoy the way men reacted to her. Making them shift from self-conscious posing to uncontrolled sexuality gave her a feeling of power, not to mention the actual fucking, which was often a fantasy come true. At the same time, she became comfortable being sexual in front of an audience; she could either blank out the cameras or perversely enjoy the illicit thrill of being watched.

But of course, by the second season, she hadn’t had sex off camera for a year. She’d been too preoccupied and too busy getting used to her new life to think about dating. So it became perfectly natural to fall into a sex trance in a TV studio, knowing that any minute the director could interrupt with a request. “Turn a little toward camera one.” “Can we have more vocalizing?” All of this became part of sex, until when she was attracted to a man off camera, she immediately imagined him in that double-king-sized bed, surrounded by film equipment.

“I’m worried that I’m becoming strange,” she told Babylona. “What if I can never have a normal relationship after this?”

“Oh, you’ll have normal relationships,” Babylona said, with a sad tinge to her voice. “You’ll fall in love and desert me; I can tell these things. It’s tragic.”

But Emily was not so sure. The show had become a crazy dream world of sensuality. She would wander through the city, noticing all the good-looking men and wondering if they had a story, if she could get them on the show. One day she actually struck up a conversation with an absurdly sexy man in a bar, who turned out to be a successful artist and a fan of In Depth. He was the first near-celebrity she’d had on the show—the first person, anyhow, who had considered it a possible boost to his career. The day after it aired, her producers were besieged by phone calls from slightly less well-known artists. Soon Emily was sleeping with a series of C-list celebrities trying to become B-list celebrities. At that point, the show became something that was written about in Newsweek: a symptom of a decadent age. Emily was suddenly famous as an emblem of the “pornification” of media.

It had never occurred to her to think of herself in that light. Porn had always existed (well, as long as people could draw). And she wasn’t selling sex on a major network; it was a porn channel. A place people went to specifically for porn. And, once she thought about it, she herself didn’t approve of pornography becoming a part of mainstream culture. She found herself in a bar one night with her friend Jared (internationally renowned star of Mile-High Club), both of them tipsily denouncing pornification. “It’s horrible how kids’ first experience of sex is Internet porn nowadays,” she was saying. “I mean, I never had that. I got to come to it from my own . . . you know . . . my private fantasies that were really about falling in love.”

“Yeah,” he said, “up to a point. Like, I watched porn when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t so normalized. You didn’t think that was all sex was about.”

“And it’s different for girls,” she said with a touch of anger. “I just think of thirteen-year-old girls seeing something like In Depth and it makes me feel sick.”

Here she noticed two men at the next booth eavesdropping intently and looked fiercely at the floor. She heard one of them say to the other in an undertone, “You’re right. That can’t be Emily Lister.”

It was also then that the hate mail began, in tandem with a flood of love letters and proposals of marriage. Looking back on it, she didn’t know how she’d maintained any balance at all. Jared was helpful—he was going through his own crisis, giving up on-screen sex just as she was getting used to it. He and Emily would spend long nights together, talking about all the stresses and the moral dilemmas until the sun came up. He was also the first person she had private sex with in the In Depth era. He turned out to be a thoughtful, sensitive lover as well as a wonderful confidant, although their relationship never had a romantic component. It was the only time she’d been able to have sex with someone whom she loved as a friend.

And then she’d met Evan. Their relationship had started on the show. He was a fashion designer with a bad-boy reputation. Being a straight male designer gave him privileged access to models, of which he took full advantage—before and after he began to go out with Emily. When she found out he was still sleeping with other women, he said, “You do remember how we met, right? I mean, I can go get images of you cheating on me from the Internet right now, if you really want to have this argument.”

And when she said she would give up her job, he stammered and said, “Oh . . . you couldn’t do that. It’s your dream.”

It had never been her dream. Maybe, in a weak moment, the five-room apartment she’d just bought overlooking Central Park was her dream. When she was an awkward teenager, being on Hottest Women lists, as she routinely was now, could have been her dream. But . . .

“My dream, for your information, was to be a veterinarian,” she’d told him furiously.

Well, she could hardly blame him for laughing.

Babylona was no help at all. She wanted to be a help, but she just didn’t understand Emily’s psychology. She admitted as much herself.

“I am sorry about Evan,” she’d said with real sympathy. “He was such a beautiful man. But only one man for the rest of your life? I don’t know how you people face the idea. It’s like only eating steak for the rest of you life. However good the steak . . . I suppose Evan is still taboo. Oh, I see. Well, I will tear up his number, cross my heart.”

Now, in her third year of In Depth, Emily was both more comfortable with the unsavory fame, and more certain that she wanted to leave. Some days, the only thing that stopped her from writing a letter of resignation was the image of herself in a class on canine respiratory illnesses, hearing the inevitable giggles and whispers from the people behind her. There would be rude come-ons, cattiness from other women. And although she hated the notoriety, surely life would seem boring without it? Would she really be happy to go back to being an ordinary person?

All this was turning in the back of her mind as she accompanied Ralph Anderman into his Upper East Side pied-à-terre. When he’d asked her to lunch, she’d assumed it would be at a restaurant. But of course he couldn’t be seen with her without risking gossip about their relationship. The idea depressed her even as she was glad to be with him alone. His apartment windows overlooked the park, from almost exactly opposite her apartment building. She knew, with a sinking feeling, that she was going to be looking for his window at night. In spite of herself, she took notice of the floor—twenty-one—and figured out which corner of the building it was, ensuring later sleepless nights.

The living room they were entering was a huge sweep of gleaming wood floor on two levels, and the side overlooking the park was glass from floor to ceiling. The view was breathtaking. The furniture was a motley collection of antiques, with the odd masculine wrong note thrown in here and there—a dartboard over the chesterfield armchair, a punching bag hanging beside an ornately carved bookshelf. The bookshelf itself held a jumble of reference books, classics, airport novels, and—she noticed with an odd tenderness—children’s books that he had obviously saved from his own early years. (Thanks to her researchers, she knew Ralph had no children. He had, in fact, never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months, which had made her feel a certain kinship to him. At four months, Evan was her personal long-distance record.)

A rack of neatly halved sandwiches and a bottle of Pellegrino waited on a low chestnut coffee table in front of a huge leather sofa that showed the telltale signs of previous occupation by a dog. Ralph and Emily sat, a little self-consciously, and she found she was staring at the sandwiches without any desire to eat at all.

“I’m sorry it’s a little uninspiring,” he said. “This is what I always have, and I didn’t really think . . .”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter.” She looked up at him and was instantly entranced by his dark gaze. A faint, pleasant chill went through her, and she wondered if this was what people felt when she gave them the “magic touch.” Every cell of her body felt more alive when he looked at her. Even his handsome face, the presence of his strong masculine body so close to her, were like background noise to the compelling electricity of that look. She swallowed and said, “So . . .”

“Why are you here?”

She laughed. “I guess I’m always asking you why I’m here.”

“But this time I wanted to give you a real answer. I know I behaved very strangely the other day.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’m used to people behaving strangely. I mean, it wasn’t strange. In my world, everyone’s strange. I mean . . .”

He smiled. “No need to tie yourself in knots. It was strange, and I think there are strange people in everyone’s world. But I’m not usually one of them. Now I’m in the difficult position of having to explain something I don’t understand myself. You know I told you I’d read your interviews?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“That was an understatement. I read one—I just happened upon it, and it struck me somehow. I can’t say what it was. Maybe it was your picture.” He shook his head. “I know people get all kinds of fantasies about celebrities, but I guess I thought I was immune. I meet famous people all the time now.”

“So you got a . . . fantasy?” She tried to smile, but completely failed. His eyes were burning into hers. “But you still didn’t watch the show? Oh, because you . . . don’t have cable.”

“Because I didn’t want to watch you having sex with another man.”

She felt a prickling in her eyes and realized she was, ridiculously, on the brink of tears. She forced herself to say, “You mean you had a sexual fantasy, but it was . . . it wasn’t about me with someone else?”

By the time she finished speaking, he was already shaking his head, with an expression of mild impatience. He said, “Don’t sell yourself so short, Emily.” He smiled. “There, I said your name.”

“You did,” she said, swallowing again to try to quell the threatening tears.

“I’ve been saying it in my head. . . . You must think I’m completely crazy.”

“You’re completely crazy,” she said, and a rogue tear slipped down her cheek. “But I still don’t understand.”

His face went grave and alarmed. “You’re crying.” He started to put out his hand, but thought better of it. “Did something I said make you cry?”

“No! I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t usually cry.” She wiped away the tear, trying again to smile. She was aware of giving herself away in the worst possible way, but she still wasn’t sure what it was she was revealing. She hadn’t had any ridiculous fantasies about him. Had she?

Then he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t stand it anymore. Would you come here?”

A moment later, though she couldn’t have said how it happened, she was in his arms and he was holding her while she cried desperately on his shoulder. His arms felt familiar to her—though at the same time he felt like no other man she’d ever touched. The sensation of being protected was mingled with a dizzying impression of his strength. She had put herself at the mercy of someone who was stronger than she was. If it was just a sexual fantasy that he’d had, that he was blowing up into something else, then she would be used and put aside. If it was something else, she didn’t even know what was going to happen to her. At that moment, it felt like something so overwhelming and new that it was frightening. She knew, paradoxically, that she wouldn’t have the courage to do it without him there.

And only a tiny, tiny voice continued to insist, through her tears and longing, that she didn’t know this man at all. How could he mean anything to her?

He put his lips to her ear, tenderly kissing the place where it met her cheek, and began to speak in a low, impassioned voice. “I felt as if I’d always known you. I do know you—I don’t care if it sounds crazy. I know your gentleness and your honesty, and the way you won’t forgive yourself for things that aren’t your fault. I kept thinking you needed someone to tell you you’re not to blame. And I know you can’t tell anything about a person from an interview. I know it, but I knew all about you. Those pictures. God, they broke my heart.”

“But I’m fine,” she blubbered.

They both laughed. She said, “I mean, I was fine until just a minute ago. As fine as most people are. I don’t know—could you be in real trouble and never even know it was happening?”

He pulled back a little to look at her. “Well, I’m no judge, but . . .”

Their eyes met again. And since they were already holding each other, it seemed only natural that he leaned down and kissed her on the lips. It seemed natural and at the same time it seemed as if a massive wall had fallen, the wall between the past and an unimaginable future. He was kissing her, and she clung to him, letting the feelings fall with her through a million miles of needs she had suppressed, fears she hadn’t acknowledged. And through it all he was holding her, keeping her safe within the charmed circle that was his kiss. At the same time, her body felt charged with desire of a different order from anything she’d ever felt—all she could think was that it was a complete desire, a confluence of emotion and physical passion.

So it seemed only natural when he began to unbutton her blouse and kiss the tops of her breasts. She immediately accepted it as a tribute of affection, and her skin was warm and alive where he kissed her. Even the feeling of her nipples hardening as his fingers ran over her breasts was a deep yielding to him, an opening into sex with a significance she had never fully suspected. She had known the words for it but not what they meant.

He leaned forward, bearing her gently onto her back, and then his wonderful body was weighing her down as his hands moved up and down her body, hungrily getting to know her. He pulled one breast free from her bra and bent to kiss it and then to suck on her nipple with a sweet eagerness. She moaned and was aware at the same time that she was crying again, even as he pulled up her skirt and she felt him pressing against her. Ridiculously, the fact that she could feel his hard-on against her made her swell almost unbearably with love.

Then she had thought the word “love.”

As he pulled down her panties and opened his belt, his eyes locked onto hers again. He said, “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

She couldn’t speak. She wanted him so much she couldn’t find the words. At last she managed a whispered “Yes . . . yes.”

A second later he was pushing inside her, holding her in his arms as his cock opened her with an aching note of delight that made her clutch his shoulders and cry out. She surrendered herself to the helpless pleasure of being fucked; her breasts flattened to his chest, his cock stroking her inside and seeming to open new reserves, sources of pleasure she hadn’t suspected. Each stroke inside her drove her to a new plane of pleasure, until she was coming while he was still fucking her. She felt his desire and need mingled with her own release—and desired him more.

The orgasm sweetened into a dimmer pleasure and then began to gather again, and she opened her eyes just in time to see his face change as he was gripped by his own orgasm. She came again as he did, the experience made almost unbearably intense by the electricity of his eyes on her face. He was moaning her name, and her sympathy with him was so powerful that she felt his pleasure almost more directly than her own, her sense of fucking and being fucked intertwined into a wild loving abandon that left her weak. He began to kiss her cheeks, her forehead, her neck, and she only then felt the tears that she had continued to cry throughout the whole experience. She thought, stunned, This is the happiest moment of my life.

They held each other in silence for a long time afterward, his cock beginning to ease from her. As the minutes passed, a terrible doubt grew in her mind. She began to want to hold him with her eyes shut forever. Anything rather than to find out that she’d been mistaken, that he didn’t really care about her. Or worse—that she didn’t really care about him. She remembered something Babylona had once said: “But, honey, I have been in love! I’ve been in love thousands of times!” What if she was just going through a transformation into a Babylona-style porn actress, one who felt a meaningless transient love for every man she wanted to fuck?

But when she opened her eyes and saw him, that idea vanished. His eyes were still closed, and his beautiful face had a meditative joy on it. She noticed small details she had missed before—faint lines around his eyes, the sharp outline of his cheekbones, the thick blond eyebrows that looked golden against his lightly tanned skin. Even a tiny scar on his chin struck her as a new perfection, and the word “love” came back into her mind.

But as she watched, his expression changed, expressing first worry, and then, as he opened his eyes, sadness.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was unforgivable.”

She swallowed and chose her words carefully. “How could that be unforgivable when it was the best thing that’s happened to me in years?”

“To me, too,” he said, with a gravity that chilled her even as she took comfort in the words.

“So . . . ?”

His gaze slipped from hers with an almost angry shame. “It’s unforgivable,” he said, “because I can’t see you again.”

FOUR

The girl—a voluptuous Latina with heavily fringed black eyes and full, crimson-painted lips—lay on her front on a dazzling white sand beach. Her bikini top lay on the sand a meter away from her, and the bottoms had been pulled down and were loosely hooked around one ankle. Her legs were spread to expose a delicately pink shaved pussy. She looked over her shoulder and said meltingly, directly to camera, “Are you ready for me?”

Then a man entered the shot. A bronzed he-man with buzz-cut brown hair, he knelt behind her with greed on his face. As he positioned himself to enter her, she was already moaning and wriggling her hips. Then he thrust in, and she immediately erupted in moans. “That’s it,” she said. “Go in—there! Yes! Yes!”

His hips worked mightily, fucking the squirming girl, who arched her back to expose her full brown breasts, begging him, “Squeeze my tits . . . please.” He reached forward to cup one of her breasts, following her direction as she crooned, “Harder . . . pinch my nipple. Oh, that’s so good . . . Fuck me harder . . .”

The fucking motion made her other breast tremble in pulses. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her mouth was open, releasing moans that gradually accelerated into screams. “YES! I’M COMING! DO ME, BABY! YES! YES! THAT’S THE BEST—COCK—I EVER HAD!”

Suddenly, the shot cut away to a pretty blond woman holding a microphone. “So some pretty out-there beach sex from one of our finalists here on X-treme Bachelor—Bermuda. Let’s go to the panel. Valerie LeBlanc. What do we think of Benita? Did that orgasm look real to you? Kody certainly seemed to be enjoying himself.”

The camera cut to a bikinied Valerie, sitting in a director’s chair on a different stretch of white beach, a vista of turquoise ocean framing her angelic face, now gathered into a brooding pout. “Angie, I think that was one of the all-time most embarrassing fake orgasms. I think they were lucky there wasn’t any glass around to shatter when she got into that scream.”

“So we’re saying fake? Not only fake but—”

“Scary fake. I don’t want to be the one to cast the first meow. But that was bad sex, bad faith, and bad ham acting all at once. I’m going with Nell to make it past the final hoop here.”

“So you’re saying Kody will choose Nell?”

“Absolutely. What we saw with Nell was real passion. I know a lot of people watching at home feel the same. Benita seems to just be . . . frankly, auditioning for a porn career here.”

“And you don’t think she should get it?”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste. But . . .”

“Okay, so let’s see what Jared Vairy has to say. From the way you’re shaking your head, I guess you disagree.”

The camera cut to Jared, who hurriedly erased the expression of digust that had covered his face while he listened to Valerie. “Angie, I think we’re dealing here with a young woman who’s maybe playing to the camera—that’s a given. All of us here have been guilty of that. But she’s very sexy, very beautiful, and we’ve seen in previous weeks that she has a more vulnerable side that won all our hearts.”

In his peripheral vision, Valerie was making a nauseated face, while on his other side, the final panelist, Brandi, was grinning at him as she tried to get into a cross-legged position in her director’s chair. Then she froze as Angie turned to her.

“Brandi, which side are you coming down on here?”

“Oh!” Brandi said. “I guess I like fake orgasms. I mean, as long as his orgasm wasn’t fake, I don’t think he’s going to ask questions. Also, I’m keeping in mind that five-star blow job we saw yesterday. I still have faith in Benita.”

As Brandi finished her assessment, Jared sighed with relief. It was his last spot on the show for the day. He was able to slip away while Angie was still summing up. He disliked that when other people did it; it seemed to show a lack of camaraderie. But today he was dying to escape, to get away from the cameras and the almost painful consciousness of the concentrated attention of a million viewers. Ironically, he was an intensely private person, and he was already longing for his hotel room, imagining how he would put the chain on the door and collapse on his bed.

Also, although he knew it was one of the points of the show, he couldn’t help being upset when people got criticized publicly for their sexual performance. A part of him was always thinking of the person being mocked—how Benita would watch the show afterward and feel completely deflated. That was what she signed up for, he told himself as he unclipped his mike and slipped from his chair. And it’s nothing compared to what a real director would say to her, if she tried that screaming on the set. Still, a nagging feeling of self-disgust pursued him as he padded off down the beach, relaxing in direct proportion to the fading of the voices behind him. Even though it had been Valerie who “cast the first meow,” he felt implicated.

So it was all the more irritating when he heard footsteps pursuing him, and turned to see Valerie herself hurrying to catch up with him.

She had put on over her bikini a typically virginal pastel sundress with a wide, fluttery skirt. Her blond hair swept poetically behind her in the wind. Her lovely surface was belied by the overtly sadistic smile on her pretty pink lips. Now, there was someone whose feelings he would not mind hurting. If, in fact, she had any feelings. He stopped and turned to face her, crossing his arms.

“Valerie, how nice of you to follow me,” he said. “You know I never get enough of your company.”

“Now, why are you always so unkind to me?” she said. Her manner showed that she knew exactly why, and was delighting in it. “And here all I want is to help you.” She stopped a few feet away from him and stood curling her bare toes in the fine sand.

“Oh yes, you want to help me promote your career. Why not? All I have to do is fuck someone who makes me—”

“Let’s not say things we might regret.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay. I guess I’m still angry about what you did to—oh, that’s right, it was me this time. So selfish of me.”

“Jared, I don’t think we want to have an angry conversation. I came all this way to explain, because I really think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Shall we walk a little farther? I don’t think either of us wants to be overheard.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he, for one, had nothing to hide. Let everyone hear him curse her for a liar and a scheming, sadistic . . . but she was right. He didn’t want anyone to hear the full ugliness of the hatred he bore this woman. “Okay, let’s go,” he said with a churlishness that embarrassed him.

Then they were walking side by side down the beach, in a chilly silence that she seemed to enjoy. He reflected that any form of power—even the simple power to make someone else uncomfortable—was a joy to Valerie. She was the sort of person who would charm you at first, purely to enjoy the power to compel your admiration. But once you had seen through her facade, she would take an equal delight in shocking you, badgering you, harping on your weaknesses. She was as happy manipulating through pain as through love—the point was to get her own way. He had always been convinced that she remained a virgin because she had no sex drive at all. To have a sex drive would mean feeling something for someone else. Valerie was incapable.

They had moved out of earshot of the set. The only sounds were the rushing of the waves and an occasional sprinkle of laughter from farther along the beach. Jared slowed and went to stand in the shallows, trying to let the procession of shining waves calm his mind. But when he broke the silence, his voice was as tense and bitter as before. “So, you’ve decided to give up the virgin shtick. Congratulations.”

“I would have thought you’d be flattered,” she said, injecting a note of hurt into her voice. “After all, I’m asking you to be my first.”

Despite himself, he felt a twinge of guilt. He said defensively, “If you are a virgin, which I doubt—”

“One way to find out.”

He turned to face her and caught an expression on her face he’d never seen before: naked anger. It vanished as he saw it, replaced by a look of sweet confusion. She squinted out at the ocean and said, “Listen, Jared, I don’t want to put you on the spot. If you really don’t want to take part in this, you could help me in some other way.”

“Remind me. Why do I want to help you?”

“Because it’s so much cheaper and easier than a libel suit.” She smiled at him.

He turned back to the ocean sharply to hide his own scowl of naked anger. Valerie had explained her scheme to him once already. She intended to use the loss of her virginity as a pilot for a new reality show that would be hers—produced and directed and presented by Valerie LeBlanc, with the lion’s share of profits going to the same Valerie LeBlanc. It would be a show on which virgins were deflowered publicly. Maximum publicity was guaranteed from the many news outlets that would rush to denounce it. Even people who didn’t get turned on by the idea would watch it out of sheer curiosity—like people drawn to stare at a car crash. Never mind the effect on the girls who appeared on the program.

Of course, such things existed already on the Internet—or, at least, footage existed that was claimed to be of sex with virgins. Anyway, it was the kind of thing that sometimes made Jared ashamed to be involved in pornography at all. In bad moments (when thinking about it gave him a hard-on, as it was humiliatingly doing now) it made him ashamed to be a man. The certainty that he himself wouldn’t be the leading man of this disgusting enterprise hardly helped. All he wanted to do was to stop it from happening. And then he began to feel uncertain of exactly where the line was drawn—why being part of a reality show in which Benita had sex publicly was okay. But Benita likes having sex in front of the cameras, he told himself. That’s where the line is drawn. A virgin doesn’t know whether she . . . oh, God.

And any hope of regaining his ethical footing was scuppered by a growing desire to throw Valerie down in the shallows and . . . not rape her. Not exactly. “Oh, fuck it,” he said without turning to look at her. “Explain what you mean. I might as well know what your plans are for us all.”

“Since you realize I’m going to win,” she said. “Smart. Well, it’s like this. I’ve realized I was being too conservative in choosing someone who’s already in the business. I was inspired, you know, by your friend Emily.”

Jared snorted. “If you’re hoping I have an in with George Clooney—”

“I was kidding,” Valerie said icily, “about George Clooney. I would have thought that was obvious.”

“You thought I would fuck you. I don’t know what could be more unlikely than that.” As he said it, he was miserably aware of his hard-on, which at any moment she was going to see. At least it would prove that he wasn’t impotent, for what that was worth. But of course she had never believed that—it was just a casual lie. For him a potentially career-ending lie, but that wouldn’t matter to Valerie.

She said, “I had in mind Ralph Anderman.”

Jared almost turned to her in shock. He caught himself in time and said slowly, “I don’t get you. He’s not even that famous. And he’s just turned down In Depth. What makes you think he’s going to change his mind to be on TV, screwing you?”

“Well, why don’t you leave that to me?”

“Happy to. But I don’t see where I come in.”

“All I want you to do is speak to Babylona.”

“I see. She’s not interested in this idea.” He smiled to himself with a keen feeling of relief. “So, all of this is pipe dreaming, frankly. Or did you think NBC was going to consider your pilot?”

“It’s not so much to ask,” she said. Her voice dipped to a husky, regretful note. “I’m having trouble getting to her. I think she was upset by what I said about you. Of course, if she thinks you’ve forgiven me, it will make a difference. And I have something very important to tell her.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“Just tell her that you think it’s important. Trust me. she’ll think it’s important.”

At this point, his hard-on was only an embarrassing memory. He turned to her and said, “What if I don’t?”

She smiled at him, her perfect white teeth gleaming. For a long time, she said nothing, and he was aware of the soft breeze chilling the sweat on the back of his neck. His hands formed into fists as he looked into her untroubled blue eyes.

She said, “It hurt my feelings that you didn’t want to fuck me.”

She sounded so serious that he was taken aback. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” he said. “You know it wasn’t personal.”

“You’re not sorry,” she said coolly, as she turned her back on him to return down the beach. “But you will be.”

FIVE

“Wait. I thought that was her husband?” Zaza said, squinting Wat the wide-screen TV on which a devastatingly handsome Latino man was wrestling with a struggling (and devastatingly gorgeous) blonde.

Her roommate, Booley, shook her head in exasperation. “No! The husband is his identical twin, Lorenzo! This is Lothario, the evil twin everyone thought was lost on an oil rig during Katrina when the noble oilman caught him trying to rape a girl reporter and clubbed him and threw him into the sea, but he came back from the dead and raped Toro’s bride on the day of the wedding!”

“Oh. Well, I still don’t know which twin I’m going to fuck.”

“I’m sure it’s the evil twin,” Booley said. “Lorenzo is totally faithful to Annabella.”

“And you’re sure they aren’t the same man?”

“No! Honey, everybody knows they’re real-life identical twins! Where have you been?” Booley looked at her with mock consternation. “You’re lucky you can come to the source here. I could talk about Midnight’s Secrets all day.”

“Everyone’s so good-looking.” Zaza sighed as she watched the man tearing open the blond girl’s blouse to expose her braless and heart-breakingly perfect breasts. The actress screamed as he fondled them with an expression of vulpine pleasure in his eyes.

“At last we meet,” the man said.

Zaza and Booley both laughed. Zaza said, “It’s pretty cheesy.”

“Well, that’s the whole point. You have to love the cheese. It’s good cheese. It’s like extra cheese on a pizza. On a four-cheese pizza.” Booley crossed her arms defensively.

“Well, that’s going to be me,” said Zaza, pointing at the girl, who was now looking up imploringly as Lothario slipped his hand into her panties, smirking sadistically. “Oh! Here comes Lorenzo!”

The two identical men began to fight, throwing punches and hurling each other over the furniture as the buxom blonde ran to a corner of the room and shrieked again.

“Yes, you’re going to be a porn star,” said Booley. “I guess it’s a good thing now that you don’t have parents. My dad would freak if . . .” Then she saw Zaza’s face and said, “Oh, sorry. That was tactless, wasn’t it?”

“Why? Oh—I don’t care about the parents thing. I had an aunt; that was plenty, believe me. I was just thinking about . . . Jared Vairy.”

“I cannot believe he hugged you.”

They both went into a reverie while staring at the TV screen, on which the evil Lothario had fled, leaving Lorenzo and Annabella to embrace each other . . . then caress each other . . . then renew their bond with slow, tender, devastatingly-gorgeous-person sex. Booley pointed at the screen and said, in a dreamy tone, “See? No money shots, no close-ups of genitals. Tasteful.”

“Tasteful cheese.”

“Mozzarella.”

Zaza sighed. “Well, thank you, Jared Vairy. But I am so not beautiful enough for this show!”

Zaza had learned about her new job from Jared himself. She had been out drinking with Booley and a couple of Booley’s college friends, trying not to think about Valerie or whether she’d lost her job or—especially—Jared Vairy, who had probably forgotten all about her the instant he turned the corner. She hadn’t even told him her name! What an idiot. Of course, he knew she was Valerie’s new assistant. But would he really remember to put in a good word for her? And if he didn’t even know her name, why would Babylona listen to him? And . . . but . . . and . . . but . . . until Booley waved her hand in front of Zaza’s eyes and said, “Hello? Hello? Are you having a seizure?”

But just as they got home, Zaza’s cell phone rang. It was Jared Vairy, calling her at midnight from (this was the part Booley couldn’t get over) Babylona’s private jet, Air Force X.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” he said. “I was thinking it was Bermuda time. Though I think that’s even later. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

All she could say was, “You’re going to Bermuda?” Then she wanted to kick herself. Her voice sounded so disappointed—as if he was her boyfriend and he was going away for a week without her.

“Oh, I’m back Wednesday,” he said. “I’ve been commuting all season. It’s murder.”

“It doesn’t sound like murder,” Zaza said. “I mean, Air Force X. Is there really a water bed on board?”

There was a brief silence, and she wondered if she had said something wrong. Then she heard him saying to someone else, “Yeah, I’ll be there in a second. Chardonnay.” He came back saying, “Sorry. They’re about to serve dinner.”

“Sounds like murder,” Zaza said, laughing.

“Oh, I lead a dog’s life. And there is a water bed on board. It’s wonderful during turbulence, though I don’t usually like them.”

“Oh, me, neither,” Zaza said, though she’d never been on a water bed.

“But before I forget, I talked to Babylona and I did get you another job, though I don’t know if you’ll want it. I mean, I told her I’d have to check with you, so it’s no problem if you don’t. It’s . . . well, acting.”

“Acting?” The world went black for a moment, and when it was restored, Zaza found herself sitting on the carpet staring at the phone in her hand.

“Hello?” the phone said. “I’m sorry. Are you angry? I know you might not be—it’s not that I think—”

She put the phone back to her ear hastily and said, “Acting in what? Of course I’ll do it. Acting in what?”

And somehow she finished the conversation and hung up the phone without asking the question that was burning in her mind. Did he really think she was pretty enough to be in an erotic soap opera?

For the three days between that conversation and her appearance on Midnight’s Secrets, Zaza was a wreck. A script was FedExed to her with her lines highlighted in yellow—by an assistant like she’d been, Zaza realized with a slightly guilty thrill. She was playing Lara, sister of the blond knockout Annabella, who unluckily arrived for a visit at the moment that the evil Lothario was rifling through Lorenzo’s belongings, having broken into the house to . . . (Here the plot was too tangled for Zaza to follow, though Booley assured her it was brilliantly stupid.) Lara was obviously immediately kidnapped by the evil twin, and seduced against her better judgment in his evil penthouse. All the while, she imagined she was being seduced by the perfidious husband of her own sister . . . et cetera, et cetera, circles within circles, cheese within cheese.

The details of the sex were rendered in initials: O (M on F), V.

Booley immediately translated this. “Oral, male on female, vaginal. Oh, my God, you’re so cool! Are you really going to do this?”

Zaza answered immediately, “Of course,” although she found it impossible to picture.

It somehow didn’t help that Booley was a fan of the show. Watching the show with her was the worst thing—there wasn’t a single ordinary-looking person in sight. Booley kept saying, “Oh, you’re beautiful. Anyway, obviously they’ll give you special makeup.”

Finally, the morning of shooting came. Zaza spent an embarrassed hour having makeup slathered over her entire body. Somehow no one gave any sign that she was too homely, although they did get impatient with her for wearing jeans and an underwire bra to the studio. “God knows if those marks in your skin will come out in time for the shooting. Didn’t they tell you?”

For the same reason, she learned, the sex scene would be shot first. She was given a black satin robe, like the ones boxers wore before fights, and plush slippers from a laundry bag full of similar slippers. A harried-looking young man led her down to the studio where the scene would be shot.

The penthouse set was there—one half of a luxurious room with a white carpet, a huge leather armchair, and a bed whose sheets were prerumpled. On the side without walls, there was a chaos of film equipment and cables. It gave her a strange feeling, because she remembered the penthouse from the TV show, but in her memory it was a real room with four walls. On the carpet by the bed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s stood open beside two tumblers.

“And is that actually iced tea?” Zaza pointed at the bottle, feeling knowing.

“Oh, that?” the man said. “No, it’s whiskey. Your leading man can’t last ten minutes without a drink.”

She frowned at him and the man shrugged, saying, “He is the evil twin.”

Then it struck her: She was going to have sex with a total stranger. She was going to have sex with a stranger on television. At that point, everything began to be a blur. She sleepwalked through the introductions to the crew and the director, Charity Cave, an aging seventies porn actress who kissed Zaza on the cheek and told her—surely out of politeness—that she was “ravishing.” People were smiling at her; someone put a glass of wine in her hand. She had drunk it down in an instant, and immediately began to think about the whiskey bottle. Drinking was clearly the answer. Then she was standing with an empty wineglass in her hand, grinning meaninglessly at a swarm of bustling people, all arguing good-naturedly with one another and waving scripts.

The thing that woke her up at last was her introduction to Javier, the twin who played Lothario. He took the wineglass from her hand and handed it, without missing a beat, to a passing cameraman, who took it with a frown of irritation and handed it on to an assistant. Then Javier took Zaza’s hand with a melting gentleness and said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t have a drink last night. I would have really loved to get to know you first. Doing it like this seems so . . . corporate.”

“Oh, do you usually . . .” Zaza found herself blushing.

“Yes, I was going to e-mail you. But I had to go meet my brother’s fiancée.”

He was still holding her hand, and the warm pressure of his palm made her tremble inside. A faint pang of anticipation sounded in her belly, and she found herself licking her lips. This man was actually going to kiss her, touch her breasts, fuck her. It was about to happen—nothing could stop it. Meanwhile, he was just as devastatingly handsome—a man with pitch-black eyes and thickly muscled arms whose deep brown skin was striking in the half-unbuttoned white shirt he wore. She couldn’t help glancing at the smooth strip of his chest that showed and imagining how it would feel. Even now, she couldn’t believe it was really going to happen.

She forced herself to make a show of attention. “His fiancée? Oh, he’s getting married?” For a moment Zaza imagined he must be marrying the blond actress from the show. She remembered Booley’s ex clamation: Lorenzo is totally faithful to Annabella! But of course Javier would already know that girl—he wouldn’t be meeting her for the first time.

Javier was looking sorrowful, his thick black eyelashes lowered poetically. He said, “It’s his third marriage in four years. Every wife meaner than the last! This one threw her salad at his head in the restaurant right in front of me.”

Zaza said timidly, “Was she jealous or something?”

Javier looked at her darkly. “No, she wanted some of his french fries. He didn’t want to give her his french fries because he had asked her before if she wanted french fries and she’d said . . . Oh, it’s all too depressing to tell.”

“Oh, well, at least you don’t have to marry her.”

“We live in the same house.” He smiled tragically and let go of her hand. As she watched, he moved with a catlike grace to sweep the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the floor. She was still expecting him to bend and get a glass when he raised it and swigged from the bottle itself. Then she was left with an afterimage of his movements, his body’s strength and beauty in the simple motions of stooping and raising the bottle in the air. He lowered it to his hip and caught her eye, smiling with a quiet, carnal satisfaction. Then he pointed to the bottle inquiringly. She nodded, and as she moved to join him, the director called out, “Would everyone get ready, please? It’s the bedroom scene. Take it from ‘There’s no need to be frightened.’ ”

A thrill of fear ran through Zaza and she took the bottle from Javier hurriedly, taking a swift, burning gulp. Now she had to take off her robe. Of course, she could crawl in under the sheets and then take it off in privacy. But that seemed ridiculous; in another second everyone would see her, anyway. So she took a deep breath, handed the bottle back to Javier, and untied the robe’s belt. As it slipped from her shoulders, she felt a strange invigoration pass through her. Every inch of her skin was hypersensitive with the consciousness of exposure. Javier was watching her with an enigmatic expression as she let the robe fall to the floor.

“You’re lovely,” he said in a comradely undertone. “Lovely. Break a leg.”

Then she was creeping into the bed, dimly aware of all the people continuing to work around her, apparently oblivious to her nudity. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and her first line came back to her just as the director called, “Action!”

Then Javier sat on the bed beside her, his face transformed into a diabolical mask of sly lust.

“There’s no need to be frightened,” he said with a sinister purr. “You’re safe now, my dear.”

“Lorenzo? What’s happening? Where am I?”

He leaned toward her and brushed the hair back from her face. “Try to relax.”

“What happened? Is Annabella here?”

“Let’s not talk about Annabella.” He was stroking her cheek gently now, smiling lasciviously. “I’m not interested in Annabella anymore.”

“What do you mean? You’re her husband.”

“I’m not feeling very conjugal right now.” Here he leaned forward and kissed her. She struggled at first, but allowed him to wrestle her back against the pillow. When she’d read the script, it seemed incredible that this character would (as the stage directions now dictated) “yield rapidly to her passion.” But under the influence of his mouth on hers, his tongue passing over her lips, she began to do just that. When she opened her eyes, his black eyes were blazing into hers with a keen anticipation of what was to come. Then he moved to kiss his way down her neck, pulling the sheet down in stages until his tongue was passing over her breast, raising illicit tingles of response from her that made her gasp.

At that moment, she forgot that he was acting. She forgot that she was acting. Her hands went into his silky hair and cradled his head as he sucked on her nipple, sending sharp flashes of desire straight to her crotch. He kissed down her belly, waking the sensitive skin there into heat. Meanwhile, his hands were already stroking her upper thighs, parting them. As the sheet fell farther, she was shocked to feel the chill of the cool air on her exposed pussy, the reminder that she was wet and naked and ready.

“Sister . . .” he purred, and she was too far gone to even respond to the preposterousness of it. She cried out, “Lorenzo,” on cue, and his lips pressed to her clitoris, making her moan and writhe at the impact of this new, intimate kiss. His tongue slipped against her, hot and alive. She could feel her clitoris stiffening, the pleasure gathering there as he let his tongue play over it, describing rapid circles and occasionally dipping to sample the creamy wetness beneath. He parted her pussy lips with one hand and the sensation intensified. She strained her hips up to meet him. She could still vaguely see the little cluster of cameras following this. The faces in the background intent on her added an exotic spice of transgression. She shut her eyes against them but continued to feel the concentrated attention. It made every feeling more potent, multiplied it. She was almost cruelly conscious of the effect the scene was having on the watching men, a voice in her heart telling her that all of them wanted to fuck her. . . . Javier was sucking on her clitoris, then teasing it further with his tongue, strumming it back and forth until the tense delight in it reached an unbearable pitch. She came with a throaty moan of protest that turned into her final line of the scene. “Please . . . we shouldn’t!”

He crept up her body, pausing to take one nipple between his teeth. The delicate nip of his teeth set off a series of aftershocks from her orgasm that echoed between her breast and her pussy. Then he was poised over her, stroking her face with one hand while the other guided his cock into her. The force of his first thrust made her gasp. The continuing spasms in her vagina made his cock feel impossibly huge. It seemed to be making its own path through a desperate wall of pleasure.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “You’re so tight. . . .” Then he was fucking her violently, the pounding shifting her orgasm into a deeper, more elemental need. She opened her thighs farther, hungry for him, and her hands came up to his chest, finding the skin under his shirt. The contrast between its exquisite softness and the brutality of his invading cock dizzied her. Then, without thinking, she was drawing her legs up over his shoulders, letting him raise her and plunge into her even more deeply, exploring the border between pleasure and pain. Somewhere on that border, she found another orgasm, one that started deep within her and carried him with it so that a second later they were clutching each other and she felt his cock jerking inside her as he came, the semen an impossibly hot last flourish to her delight.

From a million miles away, Charity Cave’s voice called, “Cut! Brilliant! Exactly right.”

And there was a small, faraway burst of applause from the crew as Zaza weakly opened her eyes and saw Javier smiling down at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said in an undertone. “I would have liked that to last much longer. But that’s the rule on this show. Two minutes.”

“That was two minutes?” she said, a little groggy. “It felt like a lifetime.”

He smiled. “I hope I can take that as a compliment.”

He kissed her on the forehead, and she began to smile, too, babbling, “Yes, of course. Of course it was a compliment. I mean . . . wow.”

Then she became uncomfortably aware of her position; curled naked under a still-half-clothed man in front of a crowd of strangers. His cock sliding out of her woke her completely and she was suddenly snatching at the robe on the floor, aware of a blush that spread from the roots of her hair to the soles of her feet. She had just swept the robe on, clutching it shut against her chest, when she spotted Jared Vairy.

He was standing by the door, watching her intently, but his expression didn’t give her any clue as to how long he’d been there or what he had witnessed. Was the darkness in his eyes lust or repulsion? She froze, not knowing if sheshould wave. At that moment, the director appeared in front of her, smiling.

“That was superbly done,” the older woman said. “Really first-class. Remind me, what’s your background?”

“Oh . . . I don’t exactly have a background.” Zaza was still trying to peer around Charity to see Jared, in vain.

“Really? You mean, this is your first sex scene?”

Zaza nodded, her heart pounding with an anxiety she couldn’t explain. “Yes, it’s my first time. I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said, and almost felt as if she was pleading her case, trying to prove her innocence of some crime.

“Well,” Charity said. “I never say this, but you’re a natural.”

Zaza swallowed, trying to smile. Then Charity turned away, and where Jared had been standing . . . there was no one.

SIX

“It’s not even that I don’t want her to be in porn, or that it bothers Ime to see her fucking other men.”

“No, of course not. Why would that bother you?”

“Okay, it doesn’t bother me much.” Jared shrugged and gave Emily a watered-down version of his famous smile. “I mean, having my girlfriend fuck other guys in front of me became the new normal years ago.”

“Granted.”

“But the thing is, she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Yet.”

Jared frowned. “At this moment, Javier could be making her his girlfriend, or Liam could, or any of those rotten, charming, good-looking, damned porn stars—”

“So the solution is . . . ” Emily balked and bit her lip.

“The solution is obviously,” Jared said with light self-mockery, “to get Babylona to fire her from the job that I just made Babylona give her, so that I can eliminate the competition from the porn stars. After which I have to figure out a way of secluding her from the rest of the world.”

“And then you have to run into her by mistake, of course.”

Jared sighed. “I was never this ridiculous about a girl before, was I?”

“Not remotely this ridiculous.” Emily frowned down at the tub of Häagen-Dazs they’d been sharing and dug her spoon in again, hooking out a chunk of chocolate chip cookie dough. “Disturbingly unridiculous.”

“You see, that’s it,” he said, with a wistful look in his eyes. “Up till now, I thought love was supposed to be pleasant and fun. Which was great.”

“Um, except that it wasn’t love.”

“Well, porn confuses things. You add liking to fucking, and it feels a lot like love. It’s just so much, everything you like, and you think, What could be better than this?”

“Not to me,” Emily said.

“Didn’t you used to like it? At least, you used to enjoy . . .”

“All this,” Emily said through her mouthful of ice cream, gesturing around her at her own living room, with its sleek modern furniture, imposing paintings, and the orchids in lacquer pots that clustered on every available surface. Jared looked around, his gaze resting on her most recent acquisition, a grand piano that she was determined to learn to play—one of these days, when she wasn’t so impossibly busy.

“Come on,” he said. “It wasn’t all about money.”

“Well, of course.” She narrowed her eyes, trying to remember. “There was a time when I’d look forward to every new guest. It was like a romance without the responsibility. And, of course, they were all so gorgeous.” She sighed. “But I didn’t ever feel at home in it the way you did. I still don’t know why you quit.”

“Just don’t want to be a middle-aged porn star. Call it vanity. I don’t want to have a Fat Elvis phase.”

“You’re thirty-five. I mean—”

“Oh, well. It’s kind of a moot point, since I have to come out of retirement, anyhow.”

“Oh, right. Thanks to Valerie.”

“Can’t be a sex symbol if everyone thinks I’m impotent. God, how I hate that woman.” He looked unhappily at the mirror beside the piano, in which they were reflected, lying facing each other at either end of Emily’s shocking pink sofa. Jared was wearing running pants and an undershirt; Emily was still in the purple silk pajamas she’d been wearing when she answered the door to let him in. But even lounging there in their Sunday worst, they looked to Emily now like characters in a porn scenario—the man who dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar, possibly. The girl who was “so lonely,” bending over to show him her cleavage. High jinks ensuing, ending in some tangle in front of the mirror, which would turn out to be a two-way mirror, et cetera. Often scenes from everyday life struck her this way nowadays. She would have helpless fits of blushing in the midst of asking for a home improvement loan, shaking hands with her personal trainer, seeing her doctor. The boundary between life and sex had become paper-thin for her, which could be cheering or unsettling, depending on her mood.

Now Jared put out his hand, and Emily frowned at the mirrored hand for a moment before getting it. Then she turned to pass the ice cream into his real hand.

“Why don’t you come on my show?” Emily said. “We can talk about how horrible she is and—well, have one for old time’s sake.” The idea appealed to her. For one thing, it would be easier than sleeping with another in the line of random celebs and celebrity wannabes. Her job had become a serial stress bomb since her afternoon with Ralph. She still didn’t know why he couldn’t see her again, but she was certain that it had something to do with the stigma attached to her job.

But sleeping with Jared couldn’t be exactly stressful, not after all these years. When she’d first gotten her job at XTV, he’d been her instant best friend. He’d also been her part-time lover. Nowadays, looking back, she remembered the feeling she’d had then that sexuality could be based on a heady mix of affection and the senses, without the burdening needs and hopes of “true love,” and she wondered if it hadn’t all been based on her relationship with Jared Vairy. He had been her fun and her comfort for years, without ever being a real love interest—she wasn’t sure why. Sometimes they joked that when they were old, they would marry each other, “and become campaigners against porn,” Jared always added. “I want to be a famous hypocrite someday.” But it was just a joke. One of the special things about their friendship was that they could cheer each other through their relationships, be a shoulder to cry on when the relationships failed, and then have porn-quality sex to forget their worries.

“Well, I wish,” Jared said now. “But Babylona has her heart set on using me in her birthday special.”

“Oh, no! That fucking birthday!”

Both of them started laughing. Emily said, “What charity are we aiding now? Has Greenpeace agreed to take our tainted dollars?”

“Oh, no. It’s some charity for the poor in the Third World. I forget which one. The open-minded one, anyway.” Jared mimed holding a microphone and said, in his best TV presenter voice, “Now, we see on the chart that the erection is only at half-mast! We need to raise another five hundred thousand dollars by midnight to get this baby good and hard! And while you phone in your contributions, let’s see Jujubee Connor fucking three men on a roller coaster!”

“Erection?” Emily frowned.

“You know. Instead of a thermometer.”

“She’s not doing that really?”

“No, I just made it up. Don’t mention it to her, though, please. She can’t resist anything that’s in poor taste.”

Emily laughed. “I’ll never get over the elephant.”

Jared began to laugh, too. Years before, Babylona had decided to add an elephant to the live sex show that had been her pet project before she launched XTV. The act called for two couples to have sex on the back of said elephant—a retired circus animal. The elephant was cool as a cucumber in rehearsal, but on the opening night he’d first tried to knock the sex performers from his back and then got down and rolled, scattering naked panicked people across the stage.

“I still can’t get over Candy’s face in the video. When she’s lying back with Mike on top of her, and then she sees the trunk come around . . .”

“And you can tell her first thought is, No way is that thing fucking me.”

That set them off on a train of reminiscences. Once Babylona had become ordained as a minister solely because she wanted to officiate at a wedding where she could say, “You may now fuck the bride,” and the bridegroom would fuck the bride. It wasn’t even for a show—it was just her twisted idea of fun. “What is a wedding about if it’s not sex?” she’d said, and when anyone tried to answer that question, she’d waved the objections away and said, “Well, this wedding will be about sex.” At last she’d found a couple who were willing to take part in what she called “the beautiful sacrifice of freedom to eros.” At the moment of truth, she pronounced the promised words in solemn tones. The bridegroom began shyly to kiss and fondle his betrothed. But as he pulled up her long white skirt and actually entered her, he was stunned to hear Babylona, clearly having lost control, adding, “Yes . . . you may all now fuck the bride.”

There was a minute of embarrassed silence, in which (Jared swore) two men had actually risen from their seats before being shamed back into them by a general shout of “Babylona, please!” and “Babylona, shut up!”

Then there was the time she had scheduled an orgy at a famous New York restaurant, spending untold dollars to reserve it for a private party. The trouble was, she hadn’t told the management what kind of private party it was. Not only were they alarmed when the diners began to throw off their clothes and make hay among the plates of caviar, but they hadn’t taken the precaution of putting curtains up in the windows. So there was a general melee of waiters trying to separate couples, only to be dragged into clinches with nude beauties, which then turned into a half orgy, half brawl that ended by doing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the place. When the cops arrived, they had to push through a crowd on the sidewalk that was so large and uncontrolled that traffic was stopped on Fifth Avenue. At least one man had left his car sitting at an intersection and walked right into the restaurant and joined in.

From telling stories about Babylona, they strayed into reminiscing about their own old times. There was their first time together, when Jared and Emily had crept under the punch bowl table at a party and almost not quite had sex, a business of clothes in disarray and frantic fumblings, deliriously like being fifteen again. They had consummated that friendly lust a few days later in Jared’s dressing room, a misspent afternoon-to-midnight in which Jared had launched on an exploration of her sexual responses, including a two-hour pussy-licking session that forever changed her conception of how good orgasms could be—and how many she could have in a row (they gave up at a hundred, reasoning that it was a nice round number). The next day they traded notes on the phone and discovered they had both lost three pounds.

For a while after that, they would meet every Friday night, enjoying a kind of second adolescence together that was all about being half in love with your best friend. There were blow jobs in taxis and fucks in doorways; everything took on a halo of delightful irresponsibility. Once they had crept off at a party and had sex on the coats heaped on the bed in the master bedroom. Finding that they’d left a stain on someone’s camel-hair coat, Jared had unhesitatingly put the coat on and they had snuck out of the party, giggling like idiots, to spend the rest of the night finding an emergency dry cleaner and waiting while the coat was cleaned. By the time they got back to the party, everyone was gone, and the host was puzzled by Jared’s explanation that he’d gotten the wrong coat; there were no coats left. Jared wore that coat all winter, hoping and fearing to eventually meet its owner.

Now, for the hundredth time, they talked about why they had never been in love with each other, why life couldn’t be that simple. Somehow it had been obvious from the start that they were made for each other—but only in a particular, limited way. Jared said for the hundredth time, “We’re just too alike.” And Emily said for the hundredth time, “We even have the same birthday. It’s uncanny.” And for the hundredth time, they both sighed and stared into space, wistful.

By then the ice-cream tub was standing empty on the coffee table and they were holding hands.

Then Emily said shyly, for the first time, “The thing is, I think I fell for someone, too.”

Jared flinched and looked at her. Then his hand tightened on hers. “You’ve been holding out on me. You have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”

“No. I kind of have an ex-boyfriend without ever having had a boyfriend.”

She told him the story quickly. When she got to the part where she’d started crying, he scooted over and put his arms around her. So she finished the story nestled against his chest, the warmth and familiarity of his body making her feel that somehow everything would be all right.

“But who is this man? Not one of your almost-movie stars?”

“No . . . it’s Ralph Anderman, the business guy.”

He stiffened, and she pulled away slightly, trying to see his face. “What?” she said. “Do you know something about him? Something bad?”

“Oh, God,” he said. “That explains it. It’s definitely bad, but I don’t know how bad. Valerie’s decided he should be her first.”

“Valerie? Valerie LeBlanc?” For a moment, Emily didn’t believe it. “But you were supposed to be her first.”

“Believe me, now I wish I’d just agreed to that. It’s a gross thought, but what’s a miserable twenty minutes compared to being persecuted to the end of your days by the Evil Virgin?”

“But why Ralph?”

He looked at her unhappily. “I was asking myself that. Does she have anything against you?”

Emily shrugged. “How would she even know that I cared about him?”

He shook her gently by the shoulders. “So my little girl is in love?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, but she blushed and a smile forced its way onto her lips. Her heart felt heavy and bright at the same time. “Well, I feel like I’m in love. But it’s probably over, so . . .”

“You can’t give up like that,” Jared said seriously. “It’s probably not what you think, anyway. What if he just has commitment issues and he’s dying for you to break through his commitment issues?”

“Um, that’s not very likely.” Emily laughed. “Guys with commitment issues are usually dying to stay single.”

Jared shook his head. “Speaking as a guy with commitment issues, I can state authoritatively that what guys with commitment issues are dying to do is have sex with you.”

She laughed. “Is that a formal offer?”

“Let me turn it into an informal offer.” He kissed her, letting her laugh into his mouth as he cupped her ass with one hand and pulled her against him. She could distinctly feel the shape of his hard-on through the soft material of their clothes. Ralph will never know, she thought vaguely. Then, with a pang of hurt, she altered that to Ralph wouldn’t care. Then she was kissing Jared back, letting the comfort of his uncomplicated desire and fondness ease her bruised feelings.

He stood up and stripped off his clothes with familiar casualness, flashing her his famous devastating smile. She couldn’t help staring with admiration at his body, which he kept in perfect shape: washboard abs and massive arms on which the muscles softly rippled as he moved. And then there was his cock. Semierect, it was already longer than most men’s cocks when fully hard, and rosy and sleek. She sat up and reached to stroke it gently along its underside. It twitched in response, hardening to the touch. Taking it in her hand, she let her fingers play along its silky surface while it grew, stiffening and showing its slight curvature. Looking at it, she immediately imagined it sliding into her, stretching her vagina with an excruciating smoothness.

“Oh, the magic touch,” he said, and groaned as her fingers tightened and released. He bent a little to pull the drawstring on her pajama bottoms and slipped his hand down to find her wetness. Meanwhile, she leaned forward and took the head of his dick between her lips. It was already so hard that she had to pull it down and hold it against its natural rearing toward his belly. Instinctively, his hips thrust forward an inch, and she tasted a sweet drop of precome on her tongue. She licked it off, letting her tongue play over his cock’s tip.

“Oh, God,” he said, and moved his hand to find her clitoris with his fingers, using her own wetness as lubricant as he played with the sensitive nub. She moaned, feeling as she always did that somehow it was her pussy moaning; the sensation itself was like a sustained, sweet moan. He cut off the noise by sliding his cock more deeply into her mouth, and she sucked it, feeling his pulse as it hardened further in response. Then time stood still as she sucked him, taking his cock a little way into her throat. The feeling of almost choking was a subtle turn-on. He was bent sideways, his fingers fucking into her. With each thrust he let them play over her now lusciously slippery clit.

“No, wait,” he said. “I want to fuck you.”

Immediately, she knew what she wanted. Sliding off the couch, she positioned herself with her arms on the coffee table, inviting him to enter her from behind. She watched him in the mirror as he knelt behind her, his face transformed by need. Then came the familiar wonder of his cock opening her and filling her impossibly perfectly, so that it felt both overwhelming and exactly right. He went into her slowly, slowly, making her gasp as he hit a point where she thought she could take no more—and then went on and showed her that she could. As his balls pressed against her clitoris agonizingly sweetly, he paused and leaned forward to pull her pajama top open, taking one breast in his hand and fondling it gently. He kissed the back of her head, and the tenderness of it made her tremble. “I love you, Emily,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

With his hand holding her breast, he cradled her against him, his slightly dazed smile meeting hers in the mirror. Then his hips began to move, fucking into her with delicate, knowing movements that seemed to feel for her inner sensations, triggering ever new impulses of pleasure. He had shut his eyes, but she continued to watch in the mirror as his body tensed and released, the muscles flowing under his skin. He was beautiful—this was beautiful. The feeling of his cock meeting her again and again was building into an intensity that lingered just below the point of orgasm. Emily arched her back, letting him drive in deeper. And he felt her need and began to fuck her harder, at the very edge of control. He let go of her breasts and moved his hand down to her clitoris, teasing her with feather-light touches there. That did it: She began to come with wild, helpless spasms, her eyes shutting into a delirious blackness in which his cock pounding into her was the only remaining reality. The orgasm peaked and eased. She opened her eyes to see him in the mirror, biting his lip and then convulsively gripping her to him as he tensed into his own orgasm.

As his cock pulsed inside her, he kissed the back of her neck. She felt his limbs relaxing around her into a grateful tenderness. At last he said, “Thank you.”

She smiled. “You don’t have to thank me.”

Then they were separating, pulling their clothes back on. It was an instinctive movement backward from the intimacy they shared; both of them naturally drew a line after sex, wanting a little space to reaffirm that what they had was, after all, friendship.

When they were sitting back on either end of the couch, exactly as before, though with an added undertone of calm and warmth, he said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I think I should fuck Valerie.”

“Excuse me?” She laughed. “You were thinking about it while you were fucking me?”

“No! God, no. Did it seem like my mind was elsewhere? No, when you were telling me about your man.”

“He’s not my man.”

He rolled his eyes. “Whatever you want to believe.” Then he said, with a flippancy beneath which she could sense his loving protective-ness for her, “I have a friend in need. I’m going to make the ultimate sacrifice. If Valerie still wants me.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said softly. “Ralph wouldn’t . . . sleep with her. I mean, he wouldn’t do it on camera. I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

“Look, I could have sworn she had something up her sleeve. For some reason, she thought she could make him do it.”

Emily looked at him, touched. He was meeting her eye with a stubborn set to his jaw, as if daring her to argue with him.

Instead, she found herself saying, “I am in love, you know.”

“I know.” His face softened. “Love. I wonder if that’s really what’s happening to me.”

“Maybe talking to her would help you figure it out,” Emily said lightly.

“Shh,” he said. “You know I will. I’m just savoring this last moment before I become completely obsessed.”

“I think that moment is over.”

Jared smiled slowly. “Oh, well. Takes a lovesick fool to know a lovesick fool.”

SEVEN

“Sohow did you end up here?”

It was Thomas, the black guy Zaza had had a mini-crush on ever since she got to the house. He was leaning against the bar, drinking the last of the martinis they’d been given in a surprise gift at seven. His green eyes were fixed on her with the slightly self-conscious libidinousness that seemed to be common to all the residents. Don’t look at the camera, she told herself.

She cleared her throat, keeping her gaze fixed on Thomas’s face, and said, “Oh, I just drifted into it. I mean, I had a little role on that soap opera Midnight’s Secrets.”

“No way!” Janice put in from the floor, where she was looking through a contact sheet of nude photographs of herself, circling the ones she liked. “You were on that thing? I love that show.”

“Just a few episodes,” Zaza said. “I got killed in a tragic car crash on my third day.”

“I hate when that happens,” Janice said. “You get to fuck anybody?”

“Um, Javier. I mean, Lothario on the show.”

“Cool,” said Thomas awkwardly. He was (as Janice put it) a “civilian”; he’d never had anything to do with the sex industry before, and he was clearly feeling a little out of his depth. Most of the residents on Home of X had some kind of related background; the producers of the show (an X-rated version of Big Brother) had decided to play it safe by using people who could be counted on to have good on-camera sex, with a few “ordinary” people thrown in for spice.

“I think those twins only have their jobs because they’re twins,” Justin said now, scowling at Zaza. “They’re really freaky-looking.”

“Jea-lous,” Janice sang.

Thomas and Zaza laughed. Justin looked around at the three of them angrily. “No shit,” he said. “They got their eyes too close together.”

“I didn’t notice that,” Zaza said diplomatically. “I mean, I thought everyone was so good-looking, I was really scared. I thought I was the freak the whole time.”

“Oh, that’s nuts,” Thomas said. “You’re gorgeous.”

“You’re way better-looking than that Javier guy,” Justin said, and snorted. “He looks like a weird snake.”

“Snakes have their eyes on either side of their heads,” Janice pointed out.

“According to you,” Justin said dismissively. “All I know is, he looks like a snake.”

Thomas, smiling, caught Zaza’s eye. She almost laughed, but swallowed and made herself say, “It was scary, anyway. Everyone was so professional. I had no idea what I was doing.”

Thomas nodded. “But what I meant was, how did you end up . . . you know, here at all? Doing this kind of thing.”

“Is this the ‘Where do you come from’ part?” said Janice, looking up sardonically through her too-long blond bangs. “I hate that part.”

“Well, it’s lucky no one asked you, then, isn’t it?” Justin said. “I want to hear where Zaza comes from.”

“Oh,” said Zaza. “I feel like I don’t come from anywhere. I mean, I don’t have parents.”

“You were hatched from an egg.” Justin sniggered.

“I was raised by my aunt Lucy,” Zaza said, trying not to be annoyed. If she started getting annoyed with Justin, the weeks to come would be a nightmare—unless, of course, he was voted off first, which seemed likely. “My mother left me there when I was a baby, and we just never heard from her again. And my aunt didn’t know who my father was.”

“Really?” Janice put down her contact sheet. “You don’t know who he was? You don’t know where your mom is? That’s awful.”

“Oh, it’s not so awful,” said Zaza, trying to be cool. “My aunt is kind of awful, though. She calls me up and tells me I’m going to end up like my mother.”

“Well, she doesn’t know how your mother ended up, does she?” Janice said. “She could have married a prince, for all she knows. Poor you.”

“Yeah, poor you,” said Thomas.

Zaza was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. She wished desperately that there was more booze left. “She means well. She’s just conservative. I grew up in Oklahoma, and I was always kind of wild.”

“Chip off the old block,” said Justin. “So you ended up in sex work because of your genetics.”

Thomas scowled at him, but Janice laughed and said, “That’s me. Third generation of sex workers in my family. I grew up at prostitutes’ union meetings. But I’m telling you, my mother wouldn’t even let me date until I was seventeen. She used to tell me, ‘Men only want one thing.’ ”

“Oh, exactly!” Zaza said. “That’s word for word what Aunt Lucy said! It made me think about that one thing like it was the Holy Grail!”

“Yeah,” said Janice. “ ’Cause you knew that one thing must be pretty special, if it was all dudes wanted. Wow, give me that thing!”

Running his hand over his shaved head a little nervously, Justin said, “I hate that. Like men are responsible for all the sorrows of the world. I think girls are just as likely to be using guys for sex. I hate that thing where men are assumed to be predators.”

“Then why do you try to look like a predator?” Janice said skeptically.

Justin had arrived at the house in a black leather biker jacket that, he proudly informed them, had weathered two crashes that put him in the hospital with broken bones. It was accordingly scuffed and torn, and seemed of a piece with his scarred and angry face. When he took it off, he was wearing a wife-beater that showed off a wealth of tattoos, mainly variations on the themes of skulls and knives. With his shaved head and massive size, he was frightening at first glance. On further acquaintance, he became both frightening and annoying.

He pulled a disgusted face. “I got to say, that’s a pretty stupid question.”

“Yeah? What’s stupid about it?”

“I’m not trying to look like a predator—that’s what.”

“So why do you dress like that?”

“Stupid question.”

Janice rolled her eyes. “Am I talking to myself?”

He was silent for a moment, looking around at his housemates’ expectant faces. His jaw was set and he was obviously struggling to contain his anger.

Zaza said softly, “It’s okay, Janice was just—”

“No, fuck it,” he said. “It’s stupid ’cause the answer’s totally obvious.”

“Because you’re scared of seeming gay,” Janice guessed.

“No, you idiot,” he said. “Because I am gay.”

Thomas laughed, while Janice sat with her mouth hanging open, looking both amazed and contrite.

Thomas said, “I guess you don’t seem gay—I mean, in stereotypical ways.”

Justin shrugged, still nettled. “Yeah, whatever that means.”

“Oh, honestly,” Janice said. “What I wonder is why they want a gay guy here. I mean, did they know you were gay?”

“Of course they knew,” he said. “It’s part of their whole plan.”

Janice looked at Thomas and said, “I see a new experience in your future. . . .”

“Cut it out,” Thomas said, crossing his arms uncomfortably. “It’s really not funny.”

“Well, we’re all here to have sex with each other.” Janice shrugged. “So, what’s supposed to happen?”

“I don’t know. You figure it out,” Justin said. “I’m going to go take a shower.” He got up from his chair and left the room in a huff, actually stamping his feet as he went up the stairs.

Thomas looked at Zaza with concern. “Hey, are you okay? I’m sorry. We just forgot about your mom. Did something hurt your feelings?”

Zaza shook her head. “No, I’m okay.” She forced herself to smile weakly.

The secret task she had received that morning had just gotten ten times harder. From the outset, she hadn’t seen how she was going to get Justin to fuck her—without letting him know it was a task rather than her natural inclination. After all, most of the sex they would be having would be assigned for the duration of their stay. Surely he would guess. And now . . . she would seem like one of those crazy women who were obsessed with “saving” homosexuals.

To her surprise, Justin sought her out that night. She was in the back garden, watering the flower beds (one of her chores), when the water suddenly stopped coming out of the hose. She turned around and saw him standing by the faucet, smiling with his usual belligerence.

“Got your attention,” he said.

“Oh.” She felt herself blushing. Her mind immediately went blank. She couldn’t even imagine having a conversation with this person, never mind fucking him. At last she said, “Well, hi.”

“I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I know you’re not like Janice. I mean, you were trying to be nice.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s . . . people say things.” She made a face. “I’m sorry. I’m being dumb.”

“No, I just wanted to say . . . I don’t know. I’ve got some beer. Do you want to have a beer in the breakfast room? No one’s in there.”

Five minutes later they were sitting at the table in the breakfast room, and he was earnestly advising her on her life. She should have more self-confidence, because she was a beautiful woman and if she wasn’t so shy, it would shine out. He didn’t think she was cut out for the sex industry, because it was for people who were tough-skinned, and she was obviously sensitive. Primarily, he thought it was essential that she find her parents, because she would always regret it if she didn’t.

“Don’t you have your birth certificate?” he said. “You got to have a birth certificate somewhere.”

“Sure.” Zaza shrugged, wondering how she was going to get from this to seducing him. “It’s somewhere. I never saw it.”

“But then you can find out what your parents’ names are.”

“It just never mattered to me that much. I mean, I don’t know them. And I figure if they wanted to know me, they know where I am.”

“But they might be scared that you don’t want them.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Well, it just doesn’t mean that much to me, though.” She was feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the idea that this conversation was being filmed. What if her real mother or father was watching this? She added hastily, “I mean, I care about them. I hope they’re okay.”

“If you want, I could try to find them for you,” he said. “If you’d feel comfortable with that.”

She must have given him a strange look, because he became sheepish. Avoiding her eye, he said, “My father left my family when I was five. I just tracked him down last year. So, you know, I know what it’s like.”

Zaza was touched. Clearly there was more to Justin than she’d realized. “Wow. Was it scary? I mean, meeting him for the first time?”

Justin shrugged. “I didn’t meet him.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t want to meet me once he found out I was gay. But, you know, it’s like you said about your aunt. You have to accept some people are just narrow-minded, and keep on with your life.”

“That’s terrible,” Zaza said.

“But I don’t think that would happen to you. Anyone would be proud to have you for a daughter.” He smiled at her. “Especially if your mom was a little wild herself.”

Zaza was surprised by her own conflicting emotions. The story of Justin being rejected by his father made her surprisingly angry. How could a parent be like that? But, of course, parents were like that all the time. Her own parents . . . she squashed that thought. At the same time, she was drawn to Justin’s kindness, and felt a sentimental gratitude that he’d shown her this side of himself. She blurted, “You’re really sweet, you know that?”

He laughed and looked sheepish again. “Yeah, that’s not something I hear that often. Thanks.”

“But why are you here? I mean . . .” Zaza tried to find the words. “Well, it seems like it would be miserable for you.”

“Oh, it’s not a big deal. I was kind of fucking with those guys. I mean, I’m mainly gay, but I sleep with girls, too. It’s just not as charged for me.”

“Oh.” Zaza suddenly found she couldn’t meet his eye. She felt ashamed of the idea of fucking him as some task. Maybe she could get away with not doing the task. What was the worst that could happen? They could make her sleep in the bathtub or something. . . . It would be worth it.

Then he said, “Why don’t you let me show you?”

She was surprised to find that her body instantly responded, waking into sensitivity. Her cheeks burning, she made herself meet his eye. “But . . . you wouldn’t really want to.”

“So why am I asking?” His voice had taken on a deeper, huskier timbre. Without thinking, she glanced at the crotch of his jeans, and he instantly said, “Yeah, I am getting hard.”

Then she was furiously embarrassed—and even more aroused. He got up and moved over to her. When she looked up, her eyes lingered on his big tattooed arms. The muscles, the tattoos, all those corny signifiers of masculinity attracted her despite herself, despite everything. Then his eyes locked on hers. She made a split-second decision and reached forward to touch the growing bulge in his jeans.

At her first touch, his body tensed while his face eased into a drowsy appreciation. She traced the shape of his cock with her finger, and her breath came shallow and fast. He began to stroke her hair, gathering her soft red curls in his hand and then letting them spill through. The shape of the bulge was changing as it grew, and he pulled back from her suddenly, saying, “If you keep doing that, I’m going to have to take these off.”

She looked up. “Do you want to?”

“Of course I want to.”

She considered for a second that she was going to complete her task after all—considered the many reasons she shouldn’t want to do this; considered the fact that this was happening on camera (though that seemed so hard to believe that she actually dismissed it from her mind). And then she undid the top button of his jeans and pulled down the zipper. In a moment he was standing there in only his T-shirt, his hands resting lightly on Zaza’s shoulders while she kissed the thick empurpled shaft of his dick.

She began to lick him with small, confined strokes, moving up and down the length of his cock while he whispered, “God, that’s nice. . . . Oh, God.” She took the end of his cock between her lips and paused, letting him feel her breath on the hypersensitive skin there, feeling the tension as he prevented himself from thrusting forward into her mouth. Then, in one motion, she took the whole length of it in her mouth, moving her tongue along the veiny underside while he moaned and gripped her shoulders.

Then he was pulling her to her feet. She let his cock slide out of her mouth. He smiled at her and said, “I’m sorry, but I can come real fast that way. I don’t want to cheat you.”

She was breathing hard, her mind in a fog. “What do you want to do to me?” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Let me show you.”

Kneeling in front of her, he lifted her skirt and began to kiss her thighs, working his way around to the insides and then up to the edge of her lace thong panties. Then his tongue began to test the fabric over her pussy, and she felt the heat of his breath as a melting longing there. He pulled them down and his hand was already playing with her clitoris, the fingers dancing in and out of her as she moaned. Before she could fully register what was happening, he was on his feet and had lifted her onto the breakfast table, saying, “Can I fuck you, Zaza?”

“Of course,” she whispered. “Of course you can.”

He moved between her knees and she felt the hard tip of his cock pressing against her. With his hand he moved it against her, passing the head over her clitoris in teasing circles. She leaned back against the table and opened her legs farther, giving herself up to the experience completely. He thrust into her, just an inch, and paused with his fingers stroking the insides of her upper thighs, sending shivers through her. She felt her pussy falling into spasms around his dick, the tightening muscles closing on a delicious sensation, a foretaste of him fucking her.

His hands moved to her breasts, finding her nipples through the thin material of her blouse and teasing them into response. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured, and then he drove his cock all the way in.

Zaza gasped, bracing herself against the table to take him in deep. She shut her eyes, falling into a dreamlike state in which she felt the whole shape and size of him inside her, an outline of sensual longing. When she opened them, he was smiling down at her. He began to move his hips in a gently rotating motion, moving in and out of her—and around and around inside her—so that she felt he was seeking out every possible reserve of hunger in her cunt and satisfying it. At the same time, he was waking further and keener hungers, and she instinctively reached for his hips. Her hands on the hard muscles there, she guided him into her again and again, and then just relaxed and enjoyed the sense of him fucking her, the familiar movements seeming freshly exotic and impossibly dirty. She was fucking a near stranger, on a table, with hidden cameras registering every move, every gentle sound of ecstasy that she made. She began to pull him into her more insistently. She was in a trance of ecstasy, lost in the repeated moment of fulfillment when his cock filled her, hitting a place inside her that she could feel as a blinding spot of pleasure—and then fleeing again, only to return to that point. And while fucking him, she did feel beautiful; she was the sexual dance, an expression of these magical desires, the dark raptures of the body.

Before she expected it, her pussy suddenly fell over the edge of pleasure and lapsed into a searing, overwhelming orgasm, making her cry out in a long high note of surprise. It peaked and held her, dizzy and helpless, tensed around that star of bliss that exploded and exploded continuously inside her. At last it began to subside into waves that sent a darker version of the same feeling over her whole body, even to a brief, sweet ache in her fingertips.

At the same time, she felt him drive into her one last time, going into that spot of perfect sensation and forcing it deeper, almost painfully. And he came with a half moan, half cry of wild release, his cock kicking inside her.

When she at last opened her eyes, he was smiling down at her, still drowsily stroking one of her breasts with his hand.

She said, “Oh, man. I just remembered the cameras, just now.”

He laughed. “So you want to take it back?”

“Hardly.” Then a faint misgiving swept through her mind and she said, “Oh, no. There’s one thing I was going to tell you. It just happened, and I . . .”

He frowned. “What? Is there some problem?”

“No, not exactly. It’s just that . . . you know, my task was supposed to be to fuck you. But that wasn’t why . . . I mean, you shouldn’t think that’s the only reason. But . . .”

He laughed and leaned forward to hug her. “Oh, Zaza. You’re nuts.”

“I am?” she said, cheered. “Okay, but isn’t it a little manipulative? I mean, I know that’s part of being here, but . . .”

“Well, I hope you don’t lose respect for me,” he said. “But I got to tell you, my task was to fuck you.”

“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. For a moment, she considered that all his advice to her had just been a setup, a ploy to get to the point of fucking. But he was smiling at her with the same easy warmth, and it was impossible to think of him as using her. It was a game they were playing together. And it had turned out that after all they were playing on the same side. She said, “Well, so we both win.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But they certainly wanted to mess with us.”

“Oh, well. If they wanted to mess with us . . .” Zaza sighed. “They win, too.”

EIGHT

Jared had first met Babylona in his own living room. He was twenty-two then, and doing an internship for a publisher that involved long hours of copyediting at home. It was July, and the work was made all the more onerous because he had no air conditioner in his fourth-floor walk-up apartment. That Saturday night, he’d been working from the time he got up to early evening, sitting in boxer shorts at his desk with the coffeemaker on the floor next to him for convenience. The open window sometimes afforded him a gentle breeze that barely cooled his sweat to room temperature. As the sun began to set, he spent increasing stretches of time staring out the window at his fire escape and the windows opposite, in which he could see a happy couple preparing dinner—a fact that only underscored his single, overworked, unloved state.

He had been in New York for only four months, and found it impossible to meet girls—at least girls who might become girlfriends. The few one-night stands he’d had were fun at first (the sex part) but ultimately embarrassing and sad (the waking-up-in-the-morning part). Recently, with his workload growing into even the tiniest nooks and crannies of his waking hours, he had given up completely. There was the occasional office flirtation with an editorial assistant or secretary, but they would always, eventually, drop the words “my boyfriend” into conversation, returning him fi rmly to square one.

That evening he was out of sorts, halfway to abandoning the whole idea of careers, New York City, success. He was copyediting a book about dog training that was so poorly written his boss kept making the joke that it was from the dog’s point of view. The mangled English necessitated endless tiny notes in red pencil. The red pencils needed sharpening seemingly every other minute. His feet kept falling asleep. His mind had been worn down to a trudging semiconsciousness.

He came to the end of a paragraph about paper training and looked up again at the fire escape, resting his chin on his hands. As he stared out disconsolately, a red-haired woman climbed down the iron steps from the floor above. She was moving carefully, almost tiptoeing, as if afraid to make a sound. She was wearing socks. They were white cotton ankle socks, and they made it all the more surreal that she was otherwise completely nude.

She caught his eye and paused just outside his window, looking remarkably composed. He also noticed, as his immediate shock passed into a more diffuse and lasting shock, that she was extraordinarily lovely. Her widely spaced blue eyes, turned-up nose, and full lips gave her face a foxlike charm; her full breasts and wide hips were made graceful by a narrow waist and long legs. He realized he was staring—but it was his home, after all. His fire escape. He had every right to gape.

She put one finger to her lips and gestured with an inquiring look: Could I come in? He nodded, trying to ignore the immediate response from his dick, the stirring that presaged a hard-on that would be clearly visible.

The beautiful stranger climbed in the open window, stepping from the radiator to the floor with impressive poise. Then she said, in a throaty, musical voice, “I’m terribly sorry. Am I interrupting?”

“No, not at all,” he said. The calm of his own voice surprised him. Meanwhile, his dick was showing all the signs of extreme un-calm, rising against the fabric of his shorts. He moved his hands to a strategic position on his thighs, hoping to subtly shield it from view.

Stalking in, she sat on his new prize acquisition—a plush armchair he’d found on the sidewalk the week before. She let herself fall back into it in a posture of limp relief, crossing her slim legs neatly. “It’s so kind of you to take me in,” she said. “The girl who lives above you was very unsympathetic.”

“Are you all right?” he asked, trying to think what people did in this situation. But this situation didn’t arise. “Do you need help?”

She smiled at him with a bewitching mischief in her blue eyes. “I’m afraid this is very banal. I’m fleeing a jealous girlfriend.”

For a disappointed moment, he thought she meant her girlfriend. Then he realized. “Oh, it’s your boyfriend upstairs. Or, I mean, your—whatever he is.”

“My ex-whatever-he-is, I suspect. These things never seem to get back on their feet after an upset like this.” She sighed and smiled at him with an enigmatic languor.

He ran out of things to say then, pondering whether he should offer her something to wear. Would that seem like judging her? She apparently felt no self-consciousness whatsoever about lounging nude in front of a stranger. His hard-on had progressed to the throbbing phase, also. If he got up, she would be sure to see it.

Then she said, to his mingled horror and relief, “Don’t bother hiding your erection. If you didn’t have it, I might be offended, you know.”

His cock twitched as if responding to being mentioned. He forced himself not to imagine her parting her legs . . . to stop imagining it. He cleared his throat. “Um, I don’t know if I . . . I just didn’t expect . . .”

She narrowed her eyes a little anxiously and looked at the doorway. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No. I mean, not right now.”

“Not right now? Are you going to have a girlfriend in the next thirty minutes? Because although I love surprises, the same surprise twice in a row would be too much.”

“No, there’s not going to be any surprise girlfriend.” His heart was pounding. He realized he was staring at her face in a strange, fixed manner to avoid looking down at her breasts.

She met his gaze seriously, her eyes shifting into a particular vulnerability he would later know well. When she spoke, her voice was soft, a little plaintive. “You’re such a handsome man. It must be my bad luck.”

“Bad luck?” His voice came out hoarse, almost angry with lust.

“I had meant to ask you for the loan of a coat and then find my way home. I honestly had. But now that I’m here with you . . .”

“This is not happening to me,” he said, his cock aching. He was aware of a single bead of sweat moving slowly down his forehead.

She said, “Then let’s just say that it’s happening to me.” She parted her legs, hooking one knee over the arm of the chair. He found himself staring at her pussy, a pink slash embellished with a thin strip of bright red hair. From where he sat, he could see the faint glistening of her inner labia. The expression on her face was imploring; she was offering him the weakness of her lust. Her face said You can do whatever you want with me. I can’t help myself.

He got up and went to her, feeling like a sleepwalker—a sleepwalker having a particularly improbable wet dream. Taking him by the hips, she drew him down to kneel in front of her. Then she was pulling down his boxers and taking his cock in her hand.

“Oh, how beautiful,” she said in a near whisper. He was trembling and unable to speak. Her hands moving up and down his cock were possibly the best thing he had ever felt.

He said, “Can I . . . Do you mind if I touch your breasts?”

“As long as you fuck me while you do it, you can do whatever you like.”

Then she was guiding his straining cock toward her. When the tip met her wetness, he gasped and she let him go, lying back in an attitude of utter defenselessness. Already his hands were on her breasts, cupping them in drunken amazement, lost in a wash of lust. And his hips moved forward, seemingly of their own irresistible will, shoving his cock into her. He was instantly gripped by dizzying waves of pleasure, her cunt spasming over him, drawing him deeper. Her breasts were soft and full in his palms. She was murmuring, “Please . . . please fuck me now. Please . . .”

As he began to fuck her, he felt mingled euphoria and fear. It was as if he was falling into a new world, one where the old rules didn’t apply, where everything he had ever fantasized about came for him with irresistible force. With every thrust, his cock was caressed and filled by waves of sensation more profound than any he’d ever felt before. It was what he’d always imagined sex could be like, but never really believed. She was gripping the arms of the chair and twisting under him in a sinuous abandon that made his whole body respond. He had never been so intensely, fully engaged in sex. All too soon, he felt the pleasure mount to an unstoppable craving peak, and he was coming, and feeling her coming, her hips raised to press into his, his cock jerking and all his lust flowing out of him in an overwhelming rush.

There was a moment outside of time in which he was almost fainting, or remembering fainting. He couldn’t have sworn that he was awake, or that any of it had been real. Then his cock spasmed one more time and he opened his eyes. She was looking up at him with a knowing affection. Her face had an expression of unquestioning acceptance; it was a look like an embrace.

“You are a true friend,” she said in a dazed, drowsy tone. “If I can call you my friend?”

“Of course,” he said, and bent to kiss her with an impulse of gratitude. She had given him a memory that would always remain magical, he thought, a moment of outrageous generosity. Already he felt that sex was changed for him. Some lingering shame or doubt that he had always carried with him was completely gone. There’s nothing wrong with this, he thought. This is just good. Simple and good.

As he thought it, his cock began to gently stir again, stiffening inside her. Her eyes opened and looked at him with something like respect. She said, “Oh, how wonderful. How old did you say you were?”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“How perfectly perfect. Darling, would you fuck me again?”

By the time she left the following morning, he’d fucked Babylona four more times, and he had a new job.

For his first months in porn, he continued working at his internship, carrying manuscripts and sheafs of red pencils to the studio and reading them between scenes. He became adept at excuses, fabricating a spine-chilling dental problem that required constant care—in reality, repeated trips to studios and improvised sets that were often the director’s kitchen or garage. He was aware that sometimes the pages he brought back to the office had a telltale aura of sex; his hands seemed to smell of pussy all the time, no matter how often he washed them. At that age, he could still do multiple sex scenes on two hours of sleep. His life became a strange jumble of subway trains that turned into computer screens that turned into assorted sex goddesses moaning, “Harder! Harder!” that then turned into boozy parties in improbably luxurious apartments, where he would fall asleep beside an indoor swimming pool with his head cradled in a naked girl’s lap.

For a while, he was pursuing a misbegotten love affair with Babylona. She was fifteen years his senior, but her body and face still had a dewy timelessness, her ivory skin unblemished and smooth even on her knuckles and feet. The age difference was less crucial than the difference in their characters. Jared was (in her view) reprehensibly normal. Sometimes she admired his “red-bloodedness,” which signified that he still believed in marriage and America, watched the nightly news, and thought about the future in terms of a house upstate and children. She lived in a parallel universe in which gorgeous people chatted amusingly about anything while knowing nothing. When one of her actresses was in a near-fatal car crash, she readily wrote a check to pay for the surgery, but refused to worry or feel sad. On the subject of fidelity, she was cheerfully incorrigible. “I’ve never felt the lack of it,” she told him. “When I begin to miss something from life, perhaps. But, you see, I’m completely happy as I am.” When he suggested that he might not be happy with her sleeping with other men, she said, “Well, you mustn’t be ashamed of it. Many otherwise sensible people suffer from jealousy.” It was impossible even to break up with her. She just said, “Oh, darling. You can come and sleep with me again whenever you like, of course. But you aren’t obliged.”

Meanwhile, he fell further and further behind with his work at the publishing house, until his apologies and excuses became a daily ritual. At last, inevitably, the day came when he woke up in one of those luxurious apartments at three in the afternoon on a Monday. He was lying on a kitchen floor, intertwined with a beautiful Asian girl in a tutu. His head was in a pool of spilled red wine. The girl muttered, “Harder . . . harder,” in her sleep. Jared thought about it for a whole minute before giving up on careers, New York City, success. He cuddled the girl a little closer and fell back into the blessed sleep of the unrepentant sexual delinquent.

In the thirteen years that had passed since then, he had been in so many X-rated films that there was no question of counting them. He had had innumerable “girlfriends” who “adored” him and wanted to marry him “when all this is over.” He had thought he was in love with dozens of them. But then he just fell in love with the next girl and the next girl, until he wasn’t bothering to think about being in love at all, he was just saying carelessly, “You’re wonderful; let’s get married when all this is over,” and not listening to the response.

It had been almost five years now since he’d had a girlfriend. At first, he’d thought it was a reaction against porn, and the world of careless sex that had become a second home to him. But even when he met a girl outside of the porn world, he would imagine her saying, “I adore you,” in that particular, breathless, meaningless way, and all romantic sentiment would evaporate. Girls continued to get crushes on him. Maybe some of them were even “in love,” though he had always been skeptical about the existence of unrequited love. How could you really be in love with someone who didn’t return your feelings? Wasn’t that based on a delusion?

Now that he’d met Zaza, he wasn’t so sure. Even though when he’d met her, he’d felt nothing more than sympathy, his mind returned to her again and again over the days that followed. He couldn’t imagine her saying “I adore you.” He couldn’t imagine her saying anything at all that she didn’t mean. But he could imagine her in his arms, looking into his eyes . . . opening her legs . . . In fact, he couldn’t stop imagining that.

The image of Zaza came back to him now as he sat in Babylona’s office, waiting for her to finish a long-distance phone call to the house-keeper at her castle in the Alps. “Quatsch, Trudi, nur sag mir . . . stimmt, am Wochenende, aber mit Rudi, das macht neun und dreissig . . . ja . . . nein. . . .” Jared was staring at her red hair and picturing Zaza, her stricken, sweet face turned up to his, her childishly serious tears. That was Valerie’s doing, of course. He had to keep focused, he had to remember why he was here. If he let his mind stray, he would end up telling Babylona all his romantic woes, and leave without achieving anything. Babylona had an instinct for ferreting out gossip—and an uncanny way of ducking anything unpleasant. Tangling with Valerie was bound to involve extreme unpleasantness.

At last she hung up the phone and turned to him with an expression of sweet weariness in her eyes. “How I hate anything practical. I did think that having money would free me from practical things, but they just became very expensive practical things. I really will retire to some Caribbean island one of these days, and spend my remaining years reading on the beach.”

Babylona was always threatening this, though in the years Jared had known her, she had never opened a book. He said, “Well, I hate to come to you with business, then—”

“Oh, you can’t. I can’t bear it when my friends come and see me for business. Tell me something wonderful.”

“After. First—”

“Oh, well,” she sighed and lowered her long eyelashes. “If we must deal with business, we can talk about the birthday show, which you know you must be in. We’re all going to the Schloss and making a party of it—all proceeds to charity, of course. And I feel it would be bad luck to have a miserable time for charity. The charity would go wrong somehow—it would have the wrong energy. Don’t you think?”

“What are you expecting me to do?” he said suspiciously.

“Oh, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. “Something easy but compulsory. You know.”

He looked at her darkly. “I’m not agreeing to it until you tell me. I won’t even come. I don’t even like your castle or Germany or parties. As you know.”

“Oh, so negative,” she said. “Well, you know we have to have you fucking again—just to still the rumors, you understand, grace of the damnable LeBlanc. But if you want to state any preferences, of course I’ll take them into consideration.”

He caught his breath and tried to put it all together in his mind. This was his opening to address the Valerie issue, but he had to get it right. He said cautiously, “I did have an idea.”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I do hate to speak ill of anyone, but is there anything good to say about that LeBlanc person? I was so terribly deceived in her. In my own way, I’m horribly innocent.”

“Can’t you just fire her?” Jared asked, with a sudden flush of hope.

“Oh, it’s a matter of advertising dollars. America loves that sort of girl.”

“Valerie asked me to talk to you about her . . . show. Her idea for a new show.” Without intending it, he found himself making a face. “The virgin thing.”

Babylona leaned toward him confidentially. “Isn’t she awful? I told her it was illegal, but apparently it isn’t. I know nothing about such things.”

“But you’re not going to do it.” Jared’s voice rose angrily. “Tell me you’re not going to do it.”

“Oh, no. But I think it might be wise to let her make her pilot episode. The one where she loses her virginity, you know. It might . . . defang her somehow.”

“You think all she needs is a good fuck?” Jared smiled skeptically.

“No, I thought it might affect her ratings.” Babylona winked. “I have someone in mind to replace her, but I do need to make it look like business. I am pretending to run a business.”

Jared let this pass. In fact, Babylona was a shrewd and committed if not an utterly ruthless businesswoman. Her pretense to “know nothing about such things” became laughable on even a brief acquaintance with her. If she was determined to get rid of Valerie, there was doubtless a business reason. And it came to him that it might be about him. Valerie had damaged the value of one of Babylona’s other properties: Jared Vairy. That could potentially cost her money, and it made Valerie an ongoing risk, a loose cannon.

Now he steeled himself and said, “Perhaps we could kill two birds with one stone.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Oh, you’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice?”

“I have my reasons.”

She folded her hands and regarded him with the intense affection he always found hard to resist. It was at least partly the cheap thrill of being the boss’s favorite. But there was also affection on his side, and a powerful undertow of nostalgia for those early days, when her sex-laden world seemed like heaven on earth. When she was the sexiest woman in the world, the dirty angel who stepped into his window and changed his life.

“You aren’t curious to know who I want to replace Valerie?”

He frowned. “Is it Emily? I know she’s a little burned-out with her show now.”

“Oh, no. Emily’s doing brilliantly on In Depth.”

He tried to think. From the expression on her face, it had to be someone he knew, someone he cared about. At last he shrugged. “Okay. I give up.”

“It’s your Zaza.”

Jared almost said, She’s not my Zaza. But the phrase gave him a warm glow, and he found he couldn’t object. Wasn’t the glow he felt at least a little proprietary? The truth was, he fiercely wanted her to be his. But he could have sworn he hadn’t given himself away to Babylona, even to the extent that there was anything to give away. He’d asked her to get Zaza another job, true. But he’d been so casual about it. Hadn’t he? At the same time, he thought of Zaza being rerouted from acting in porn (in effect, having sex with legions of strangers) into being a commentator (naked but untouched), and something deep within him relaxed. Maybe seeing her fucking other men affected him more than he’d realized.

“She has something,” Babylona was saying. “A certain naive charisma. I know you know what I mean.”

He shook off his reverie. “Granted. But what are you up to? I know there’s something more to this.”

“Oh, perhaps I thought it would please you. Couldn’t that be the reason?”

“It could. But I have a feeling it’s not.”

“Feelings, reasons—this is all too deep for me. Suppose we leave the psychology for now and go back to our business. Which I seem to remember was your night of passion with Valerie LeBlanc.”

“I guess.”

“There’s a problem with that, of course.”

“What’s that?”

“She doesn’t want to sleep with you.”

Jared frowned. “She said that?”

“She said she’s America’s sweetheart, which of course makes one think rather ill of America. But in a twisted sense . . . Anyhow, she wants someone straight to do the deed. A boyfriend type.”

Jared’s face twisted. “Ralph Anderman.”

“Yes. Do you think she knows him? She was very mysterious. She seemed certain he wouldn’t refuse.”

“But I was her first choice,” Jared said. “She wanted me to do it before she thought of Anderman.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Why would she lie about that?”

“Oh, she’s been asking every male star we’ve got at XTV. I suspect she wants to find out who her allies are. Or who can be bought.”

Jared found himself blushing. That was one possibility that had never occurred to him. He imagined Valerie sitting with her phone, placing calls to all the men in the business, insinuating how fucking her would boost their careers, and swearing each of them to secrecy. It was all too easy to imagine. “Well. And I thought I was special.”

“Oh, you are special,” Babylona said with a languid smile. “You were the only one who said no.”

NINE

From: Valerie LeBlanc <vleblanc@xtv.com>
To: Ralph Anderman <ralph@anderman.com>
Subject: Your porn career

Dear Ralph,

I have called and left messages three times since we spoke on Wednesday. I’m sure you understand that you owe me a great deal, and I know you won’t let me down. I am not angry, not yet. But I have responsibilities, as you more than anyone else should realize, and I can’t allow my finances to be damaged by your selfishness. Please let me know when you will be available to discuss our television appearance with my producers.

Valerie

She sent the e-mail and sat back from her computer, feeling sick with rage. As usual, Ralph Anderman was behaving as if his interests outweighed those of everyone else in the world. His convenience, his reputation, his precious tender feelings. Her feelings were always ridiculous and hysterical. Well, she was going to show him what it felt like to be used and discarded. Then he could have some ridiculous feelings of his own.

As she closed her laptop, the intercom buzzed. She checked herself in the mirror, admiring the generous curves of her body, displayed to their best advantage in a clingy wraparound dress. At a glance, it was obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra; she would make sure Liam noticed that she also had no panties on. She had considered meeting him in the nude, but decided that her naked body—familiar to him and millions of other viewers of her show—would be more provocative held just out of reach than openly displayed. She needed a boost to her confidence right now. And the more desperate she could make him, the more she would be able to count on him in the battles yet to come.

She buzzed him in, and a minute later his knock came at the door. Valerie counted to twenty, slowly, before going to answer it, using the time to inspect the room. Because her apartment was a loft, the bed was visible from any point, and she had arranged a few pieces of frilly underwear among its disordered sheets. On the floor by the television set was the DVD case for Liam’s only nonporn film, a straight-to-cable cowboy picture. The image she wanted to conjure in his mind was of herself lying in bed naked, watching Liam. At last she went to the door.

The man who came in was a prime example of clean-cut, square-jawed, all-American good looks. He had thick sandy hair and rugged features; not only his legs but his arms were like tree trunks. His nickname among the actors was Pony, for the obvious reason. No one was allowed to use that name publicly, though; Babylona felt vulgarity of that kind would put off female viewers. Liam “Pony” Peterson had more than his share of female fans who tuned in faithfully for the X-rated cowboy drama in which he starred, The Mountain Lion, centered around a saloon/brothel in the Wild West. Liam played the sheriff, who was always being seduced by scheming prostitutes and lovelorn schoolmarms while never losing his dedication to the common good. Since the show was what they called a one-fuck, meaning that there was only one explicit scene per episode (amid long stretches of fondling and gratuitous nudity), it was a relatively prestigious job. In theory, the show was about the writing and the acting, though Valerie herself considered this to be self-deception on the part of both the actors and the viewers. Porn was porn. In her view, XTV was rotten with this sort of empty pretension. When she was running the channel, all that nonsense would be thrown out.

“Liam,” she said with an affectation of glowing pleasure, “Welcome.”

“Hi, Valerie.” He came in, looking around nervously. She saw his eyes registering the disordered bed and then lingering on the DVD cover—bull’s-eye. He said, “I brought you that schedule.” In his Texas accent, the word “schedule” came out as “skejjle,” and at first Valerie didn’t understand. Then her face melted into a broad smile.

“Oh, you darling! Thank you so much! I know you’re sticking your neck out for me.”

“Oh, well. That’s nothing compared to what you’re offering to do for me, Val. I’m pleased to help.”

He handed her a folder and then followed her to a low boxy sofa with blue chrome legs. The upholstery was a kind of beige burlap, and he ran his fingers over the rough weave and raised his eyebrows, as he sat. “Real interesting place you got here. I like this. It’s kind of . . . tactile.”

“Uh-huh,” she said absentmindedly, sitting with the folder open on her knees. “Thanks.”

“You see you’re in the schedule, Val, so I guess you don’t have to worry about that. I told you you didn’t have to worry.”

It was the schedule for the televised portions of Babylona’s birthday party, a six-hour special that would run concurrently with the celebrations and be used to raise money for . . . whatever it was. Valerie scanned the printout, her jaw setting as she skimmed through the prime-time slots and saw Emily’s and Jared’s names. Her ratings were consistently higher than theirs, but they were always treated as the stars. Babylona insisted on believing that people watched her show for the news—as if anyone needed to keep up-to-date on sex industry gossip. If the appeal was in the human interest slots, wasn’t it because of the work she put in, pushing the writing team to produce excellence? Yet . . . but there was her slot, V. LEBLANC + TK+at ten p.m. She sighed with a dizzy sense of relief.

“You see?” Liam grinned. “You got the plum slot there, Val, ’cause you’ll be coming in after Emily and before the big orgy thing, so you got that, uh, sandwich position.”

“I don’t know if Emily will really get the numbers anymore,” she said automatically. But she couldn’t deny that she was pleased. She reached over and gave Liam a shoulder hug, saying, “And you’ve got the plum slot, too, let’s not forget.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, they’ll tune in for you. This is a big deal, what you’re doing. I think you’re real brave.”

With her arm still around his shoulders, she looked up into his eyes with naive trustfulness. “I’m glad my first time will be with you, Liam. I always had a . . . No, I can’t say it.” She turned her face away as if hiding a blush.

“Oh, you can say anything to me, Val. You know I would have cut off my right leg to be there for you, and I’m so proud you picked me. I mean, anything you’ve got to say, I want to hear.”

Valerie couldn’t help smiling. Her mind flitted back to Ralph and she felt a hot glow of triumph in her chest. It had to mean something that all the men she’d asked were crazy to sleep with her (All but Jared, a part of her mind objected, but she hushed that rebellious voice hastily). Some of them had been calling three times a day. Of course, when she had to disappoint them later, there would be some temporary upset. But in her experience, a woman never did herself any harm by turning men down, however arbitrarily. It never did any harm to be exposed in a lie—it only made men more desperate. It was gratifying to reflect that just by pursuing her own goals, completely naturally, she could create this atmosphere of (why avoid the word?) love.

She took a deep breath and said, a little bashfully, “I guess I had a crush on you.”

Liam reached to take her hand. “Had? You got over it?” His voice was choked with emotion.

“If I’d gotten over it,” she said, turning to meet his eyes with a look of timid longing, “why would I have asked you to be my first?”

His eyes were burning into hers in a way that made her feel—what was it she felt? It was something close to fear, a vulnerability that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. She said, “Would you kiss me?” playing it according to the script she’d prewritten for herself, though part of her longed to escape from him, from the feeling of being exposed and weak.

He bent to kiss her, his lips tender on hers. As he took her in his arms, she realized she was trembling. Good—that would make the right impression. But she was trembling in earnest, her body longing for something from him that she knew he couldn’t give. Wouldn’t give. He would pretend to give it to her, but she knew it was fake. All he wanted was . . .

“Valerie,” he said, his cheek pressed lightly against hers, his breath hot and soft on her ear. “I got such a crush on you I don’t know what to call it.”

She was silent. Her hand moved nervously over his back; the muscles there seemed so hard, so forbidding.

He said, “I could fall in love with you so easy.” He pulled back from her a little bit, searching in her eyes. “Hey, are you okay? I say something wrong?”

“No,” she said, and laughed nervously. “No, I’m just . . . It’s what I wanted. And I just . . .”

“Valerie, you don’t have to say anything.”

Her mind was shouting at her, You have to say something. Tell him . . . But she didn’t know what to tell him. She felt unmoored, fragile, lost. It was unfair to expect so much from her. It was unfair to stare at her that way, seeing things she had to hide, inspecting her. Suddenly, she moaned and began to kiss him violently, her tongue slipping into his mouth. Anything to end that scrutiny.

He responded, pressing her to him. She felt her breasts flattened to his chest and moaned again, her body burning with mingled terror and yearning. He was kissing her wildly, his hands stroking her back and down to her buttocks, which tingled in response. She squirmed, trying to rid herself of the feeling. Then he was moving one hand up her side, letting the backs of his fingernails graze her skin through the thin fabric of her dress. He released her slightly to make room for his hand to move in between them, to grasp her breast—and she pushed him away in a panic, a strangled cry escaping her lips.

His eyes widened, and he was looking at her in confusion and hurt. Or was it anger? She crossed her arms tightly around herself, trying to still her fear. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I just . . .” A tear was forming in her eye and she blinked furiously, for some reason desperate that he shouldn’t see her cry.

“God, I didn’t mean to frighten you, Val. I don’t want you to do anything you aren’t ready for.” A faint frown formed between his brows. He raised his hand as if to stroke her cheek reassuringly; but when she flinched, he pulled it back hastily and even shoved it behind his back, as if to shield her from his own desire. He said, “Listen, Val, if you’re not ready to . . . do this thing for the birthday show—”

“Don’t,” she said faintly. “I think you’d better go. I’m sorry.”

He got up slowly, looking at her with worry clouding his face. “It’s okay. Look, call me if you need anything. God, I didn’t want to hurt you, Val.” He moved toward the door slowly, clearly hoping she would call him back. Even opening the door, his movements were careful, as if he was frightened to make a loud noise. She watched him with her heart pounding. At last he closed the door behind him and she collapsed on the sofa, her face in her hands, sobbing. What was wrong with her? What the fuck was wrong with her?

Her mind circled the blackness within her, straying from fear to anger to despair. All she knew was that whatever was wrong with her, it was Ralph Anderman’s fault.

She had met him at an amusement park a few miles away from her hometown in Massachusetts. She had gone there intending to meet a friend from high school, Sondra, but Sondra never showed up. It was a time in Valerie’s life when this sort of thing regularly happened. Friends and dates stood her up. Plans were canceled at the last minute. Some mysterious social reconfiguration would happen, and her confi-dante of the week before would suddenly be part of a group of girls who whispered and laughed as she walked past. That night, as she wandered alone among the rides, she could easily imagine what Sondra would say about her, the hysterical giggling. “I guess I’m mean, but imagine meeting a guy and you’re with Valerie Berghof ? God, I’d be so-o-o embarrassed.”

She was too embarrassed to actually get on a ride alone, so she just wandered around, trying to appear as if she was looking for someone. Since it was getting late, the groups of people were mainly teenagers a few years older than she—loud, laughing groups who seemed drunk even when they weren’t drunk. She tried to keep out of their way, afraid that their mocking attention would fasten on her. The only consolation was that she didn’t see anyone she knew, anyone who could report back, “Berghof looked so pathetic all alone. I think she’s in love with you, Sondra. She’s crying her eyes out over you.”

Valerie decided she would buy an ice-cream cone and then call her mother for a ride home. The ice-cream cone seemed like a thing to do, a task to complete that would make it feel less like an experience of pure humiliation. She could tell Sondra, Oh, it was okay. I just got an ice cream and talked to these older guys. It was cool. She would say that a guy tried to kiss her but . . . but he had zits. That would work. He had these gross zits. He was pretty hot except for that, but I didn’t want to touch the—

Then she saw him, in the line for ice cream. A tall, spare boy in jeans and a brown leather jacket, smoking a cigarette with an expression of boundless ease on his face. He was standing just far enough apart from the group of girls in front of him that it was clear that he wasn’t with them. Without really thinking why, Valerie looked around for the friends he must be with. But she couldn’t see anyone, just the cotton candy peddler and a few people waiting in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl. The boy—the man, she corrected herself—was alone. That fact gave her a flutter of anticipation, which quickly turned to self-loathing. Don’t kid yourself, Valerie. He’s way, way too cool for you. She joined the line behind him, inspecting him surreptitiously, feeling ugly and small, as if she’d already approached him and he’d rejected her.

Because she was still half in her fantasy of what she could tell Sondra, she was surprised to see that he didn’t have zits. He didn’t have anything wrong with him at all. In fact, he was gorgeous in the oblivious way boys had. Standing there with his perfect features raised to the last light of the setting sun, with a faint frown of thought on his face, he represented everything Valerie dreamed about. His careless posture hinted at strength and confidence; even though his jeans were a little loose, she could see the strength of his thighs in them, a full, powerful shape casually presented.

He glanced at her and said, “They’re taking hours.”

“Oh . . .” Her first thought was that he didn’t want her standing behind him. He was trying to tell her not to get ice cream, so that he didn’t have to stand with her. But no, his face was friendly, his air of ease was unchanged. She said, “Yeah, I’m not in any hurry.”

“You’re here alone?” he said.

“Um, yeah. My friend went home early. I don’t know, I just wanted to hang around. It’s such a nice night.” Then she felt stupid. It’s such a nice night was something her mother would say.

But he just nodded. “Yeah, I like going on the rides alone. It kind of lets me think.”

She smiled with an instant, helpless adoration. “Yeah, that’s cool. I like that, too.”

“Only they make you sit with someone.”

“Yeah,” she said, inventing quickly, “I got stuck with someone’s kid on the Ferris wheel, and the kid kept screaming. I mean, he wasn’t even scared; he just wanted to scream to his sister.”

“That kind of thing.” He laughed, and looked at her with more interest. “I’d go on the Ferris wheel with you. We could just sit together and not say anything.”

“That would be great,” she said, trying to make her voice casual. “Yeah, we could just be quiet and pretend to be alone.”

The line moved forward in slow increments, and they talked about all the things they thought about while alone: fantasies about being interviewed on Letterman, about living in the woods alone with only a tent, about being rich and famous, about being a person who comes to the amusement park alone to escape from fans. He said, “And people are whispering to each other, ‘Is that Ralph Anderman?’ ‘No, it couldn’t be. What would he be doing alone in a place like this?’ ”

“But you’re in disguise.” She found herself laughing, getting a little breathless.

“Yeah. They don’t recognize me without my expensive suit. I’m just wearing this crap to blend in.”

Again, she fell into nervous laughter, thinking that there wasn’t anything wrong with what he was wearing—or was there? Maybe she just didn’t know the difference. She said, apologetically, “It’s not that funny.”

They got their ice creams and went to sit on a bench in front of the roller coaster. He told her that he was a freshman at Boston University, home for the summer. Next year he was going to get an apartment with some friends. While he described the friends, Valerie dreamed up an alternate history for herself, the history of a girl who was old enough, good enough, to be the girlfriend of a BU student, who could visit him on the weekends and look hot in front of his friends. She told him, “That’s cool. I’m going to UMass next year. I’m just going to stay in dorms, though.” She tried to look grown-up as she shrugged. “I guess that’s okay.” The lie felt harmless, though she had some qualms as she imagined actually visiting him in Boston and having to tell stories about her college life when she was actually still in high school. Of course, that would never happen, though. She would never see him after this night.

But by the time they got to the Ferris wheel, there seemed to be some kind of understanding between them. It was something unspoken, something in the way he walked closer to her than a friend would, something about the way he finished her sentences and she laughed too hard at his jokes. She started believing that he might actually like her. Might actually want her—if only she could keep him from finding out what a freak she was. As long as he never met Sondra and all those people, and saw the disgusted, jeering way they treated her. As long as he never saw her house, heaped with the junk from four years without cleaning, or met her drunken mother, or any of the series of “stepfathers” who ran the gamut from maudlin drunk to violent drunk.

If only he never found out who she was.

He got into the Ferris wheel car first and put out his hand to help her in. Taking it, she was flying on an impression of its warmth, its comforting strength. When she sat down beside him, he left his hand in hers for a second before retracting it with a smile. The ride’s attendant put down the safety bar on top of them and the car jolted forward, swinging them free of the ground, free of reality. They coasted up a long delicious step, and stopped.

“Now we’re not supposed to talk,” said Ralph.

They both laughed; she realized with a giddy thrill that he wanted to talk to her now. She said, “Yeah, we have to remain completely silent.”

“So what are we going to do?” he said lightly.

She looked at him, confused. Then he bent down and kissed her on the lips.

Immediately she felt as if the world was spinning around her. He had taken her in his arms; the leather jacket felt cold and masculine on her bare skin. There was an immediate, plummeting feeling of desire that was like being drunk without the sickness, an ecstasy so intense that Valerie knew she would do anything for him, do anything to be kissed by him. He passed his tongue over her lips and her lips burned and sang. She had shut her eyes and when the Ferris wheel moved again, she felt as if she was falling through herself, only being held clear by his arms and the magnetic pull of that kiss. As he slipped his tongue into her mouth, she thought, This is it. This is what I always wanted.

Their ride on the Ferris wheel was a long flight of shut eyes, their tongues meeting and playing over each other, his hands caressing her back in gentle circles. Every sensation coursed through her whole body. Magically, the tiniest pressure of his finger on her shoulder blade made her blood sing all through her thighs and sent waves of elation through her heart. She never opened her eyes to see the lights, and when the ride stopped and he pulled away from her, she was painfully shocked. She wanted to make him promise that he would kiss her again. But the attendant was there, grinning knowingly at them. She stumbled out of the car and walked off through the crowds, forcing herself not to look back.

“Hey,” his laughing voice pursued her. “Are you running away?”

She stopped and took a deep breath. Just as she’d needed him to, he came up and hugged her from behind. He said into her ear, his breath hot on her cheek, “Will you go for a walk with me?”

She nodded, feeling her hair moving deliciously against his face.

The amusement park was fenced off from the surrounding woods. But there was one section where the woods were contained within the high chain-link fence. Valerie had heard stories about girls who went in there with boys, about condoms found there, and blow jobs interrupted by guards. Those girls were sluts, of course. They were easy, the kind of girls boys laughed at behind their backs. But this had to be different. It felt different, and, anyway, Ralph was in college. She had said she was about to start college—and college girls weren’t necessarily sluts if they had sex. It was different when you were older.

Still, she was silent, afraid of herself as she crept through the bushes with him, her legs weak from the desire that was now frankly pulsing between her legs. She could even feel the wetness in her panties, a mushy feeling as if her cunt was deliciously molten. I’ll let him, she told herself. I’m going to let him touch me there. As she thought it, a bright shock of anticipation shot through her pussy, making her stagger a little. He put out his hand to steady her, and then they were walking hand in hand, the pressure of his fingers over hers a delirious luxury.

Under the trees, it was darker than she’d expected. It was hard to see where she was putting her feet. When she put her foot down on a blanket, she flinched back from it at first, as if she’d stepped on flesh. He laughed and said, “That’s it. We can sit down here. It’s a little dirty, but . . .”

She tried to see his face in the dark, but he was a shadow. His dark form was silhouetted against a weaker dark. The boughs above were making a shushing sound, as if they were telling her to relax, relax. When he sat, her first impression was that he’d vanished; the dark shape was simply gone. But then she heard him breathing at knee level, and stopped to feel the blanket with her hands, settling on it with her sandaled feet out among the twigs and pine needles.

He said, “Did you mind me kissing you?”

She felt a sharp relief that was followed by an even sharper disappointment. He wasn’t going to make her kiss him again. They would talk and walk back together. “I liked it a lot,” she said. Then she remembered the role she was playing and said in a false, bold voice, “I like that stuff. I mean, sex.”

She could hear his sharp intake of breath. Before she could think about what it meant, he was kissing her again and bearing her onto her back with his body on top of hers. She could feel the sharp twigs underneath the blanket, digging into her back, and the pleasure of kissing was now made keener by impulses of panic. Her heart was racing, and she was going to tell him to stop. She was going to.

He was feeling her breast through her blouse and bra. Fleetingly, she was grateful for the thick material of the bra; that made it less dirty, less of an invasion. But then he had pulled her blouse down over her shoulder and was reaching inside the bra cup to take her nipple between his fingers.

The sensation hit like a bullet. She was holding her breath, holding still as if the waves of sensation might wash her away. The way he was pulling down her bra was uncomfortable, but above it her breast was prickling with the cold of the autumn air and receiving the attentions of his hand with an intoxicated alertness that made her fear seem small and stupid. When he bent his head to her breast and began to kiss it, she gasped. His lips fastened on her nipple, and he was licking its tip in tiny circles, making her breath come fast and weak.

Then he was pulling up her skirt with an urgency that made her feel powerless. How could she tell him to stop? What if he was angry?

He was pulling down her panties, his hand instantly, eagerly exploring the lush wetness there. His fingers were hard and confident, but the tingling and searing feeling was an invasion. She had to stop him. She had to get under control. Instead, she found herself arching her back, and she had only herself to blame when he slipped a finger inside her. I let him put his finger in me, she thought as it happened. The finger felt cold and unnatural. She was gritting her teeth against the desire, wanting him to move his finger against her more even as she needed him to stop.

When he moved back on top of her, that shadow silhouette over her, she knew. He had taken her here to fuck her. That was what was happening. She was going to lose her virginity here, unless she said something. But she couldn’t say anything. He would know she was a kid, a stupid kid who told lies to seem cooler than she really was. If she said anything, she would start to cry, and he would be disgusted with her.

When his penis touched her there, she caught her breath. This was real. He was really doing it. The tip poked once at her clitoris, a desperate, fearful pleasure. Then it found her slit and slid slowly, unstoppably, in. He was entering her; he was fucking her. She kept her eyes shut tight, thinking of broken hymens and blood. It was too big. It could never fit inside her. As he went deeper, it felt as if her flesh was being cranked open, farther and farther, until she wanted to scream that it was too much. She would die. But at last he was all the way in, held impossibly tightly in her cunt, a hard bar in her soft flesh. That’s his penis, she thought to herself, and at that moment, a sneaking pleasure insinuated itself into her pain and terror. It was a faint, cajoling pleasure; it vanished as he pulled out of her, only to come back louder when he thrust again. It warred with the voice of her torn flesh at first, but then joined it so that the pain became a different kind of pleasure, or the pleasure a different kind of pain. Oh, my God, he’s fucking me, she told herself. And her cunt suddenly gathered into a spasm of joy so strange and wild that she cried out, wanting to tell him to stop, but making only an unintelligible sound that could have been shock or gratitude. He moaned in her ear, his strokes booming harder now inside her. He must be doing some damage to her. He was killing her, but she half wanted to be killed. It was better to be killed by him than go back to her life. If this was the end . . . but as she thought this, he stiffened and moaned again. He fell hard into her, his cock straining up so deep that she bit her lip to keep from screaming.

He relaxed, his body growing heavier on top of her. She could hardly breathe as his weight settled. She measured the time that passed in the gasps she managed, thinking, After twenty breaths, I’ll tell him to move. I’ll have to. All the pleasure was gone, turned to a draining hopelessness and shame. There was a trickling sensation between her legs, and she thought of the fluids there with repulsion. She was disgusting. Everyone was right about her. All she wanted in the world was to be in a shower, alone. She wanted to be alone for the rest of her life.

At last he moved off of her; the cold of the night air was shocking, and she immediately scrambled to find her panties. She was sitting up, pulling her clothes back into place with clumsy panic. He said, “Hey, are you okay? Valerie?”

“Yeah, I’m great,” she said. As she buttoned her blouse back up, the world was beginning to return to normal. She was covered, hidden, safe. If she’d had a coat . . .

He said, “Did I go too far?”

“No, I’m used to it,” she said flatly. “It’s nothing.”

He laughed. “Exactly what a guy wants to hear.”

She stood, arousing a stinging reminder from her cunt. She felt warped out of shape down there, and miserably dirtied and wet. If only the blood didn’t show. She had to get home before she bled through. She said, “I got to go. I got to get home.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice a little colder. “Okay, I can go.”

This time it was only a few steps to get out of the woods. The amusement park seemed luridly bright, full of people who stared at her, who knew what she’d been doing. Music blared from loudspeakers on the rides they passed, the various tunes mixing into a grotesque din. He was walking a little distance from her, apparently put out. Well, it didn’t matter. She was never going to see him again. She couldn’t bear to see him again.

Without bothering to slow down, she said, “I got to go off alone. I mean, my mom will freak out if she sees you. She really will.”

“Your mom? Oh, you didn’t drive here.”

“No,” she said, annoyed. “I don’t have my license. I got to go home with my mom.” Suddenly, the idea of her mother was intensely comforting. Her mother would cry and threaten to kill the no-good motherfucker who hurt her. Her mother would pour her a glass of whiskey (she often tried to comfort Valerie with whiskey—well, this once it would work). Valerie would insist that it wasn’t Ralph’s fault; she would be generous. At last her mother would say, “Oh, never mind, sweetie, you’ll feel better in the morning.” They would watch a movie together. For once, Valerie would be the center of attention.

Ralph had moved closer to her, scowling and trying to catch her eye. “You don’t have your license? Really?”

She stopped to glare at him. The glare of the amusement park lights, his face was a mask of shadows and white, sweat-glistened planes. She wanted to turn and run away from him as fast as she could.

“Wait,” he said. “How old are you?”

She answered honestly without thinking. “I just turned fifteen.”

TEN

As his cock softened inside her, Emily couldn’t help heaving a mental sigh of relief. It was over for another week. Never mind if she still had five minutes of air time to fill; it wasn’t ideal, but at least it was Cal B., who could hardly be boring. He was a former model and the author of several scurrilous and hilarious novels about the world of fashion. At first she’d balked at having him on the show, because he was a little too frank about his reasons for doing it: “Publicity, publicity, publicity, and PR,” he’d said on the phone. “The way the book business is nowadays, I would fuck a cat in the middle of Times Square if it sold books.”

It made her feel defensive when her show (and, implicitly, her body) was seen in such cynical terms. But Cal turned out to be charming company, much friendlier and less caustic in person than he was in his writing. Since In Depth progressed through three stages—the dinner date, the “fun” date, and the sex itself, she spent much of each week with that week’s guest. In the course of that week, she often heard the guest’s whole life story. Cal’s life story seemed to consist of a series of amazing anecdotes, often about celebrities who could not be named but whose identities could be easily guessed. There were tales of models being smuggled onto nuclear submarines; of a fashion designer who would only have sex with people—male or female—wearing a bodysuit stitched all over with feathers, and a cardboard beak; of his own parents, who were both performance artists and had spent a year communicating solely through drawings. He had also had more than his share of lovers, each of whom apparently mistreated him in absurd ways—but who were all, according to Cal, “now good friends.”

Eight years after his retirement from the fashion world, he still looked like a stereotypical male model, with chiseled features, blazing blue eyes, and thick jet-black hair. He was gorgeous, he was sexy, he was funny, he was smart. Emily should have wanted to fuck him. Anyone would want to fuck him. On their “fun” date, they went behind the scenes at a fashion show, and Cal was besieged by frail, exquisite girls. They made big eyes at him and referred to dates with him in terms that made it plain he had slept with them all.

Only, she didn’t want to fuck him. She didn’t want to sleep with anyone but Ralph Anderman. The idea of sleeping with Cal filled her with ennui.

When the time had come, she had distracted herself by trying to give him the sexual experience of a lifetime. By treating it as an exercise of skill, she managed to enjoy herself without triggering her own guilt. It was gratifying to see his reaction to her electric touch and to the carefully planned blow job she gave him, with violent peaks and long, lazy spells of teasing. When they fucked, she was barely conscious of the physical pleasure it gave her. She didn’t want to think about physical pleasure. She almost resented her own body for responding to him.

Now they lay in a careless tangle, Cal smiling blissfully at the experience, Emily smiling blissfully at the fact that it was over. And he said, in the drowsy, deep tones of thorough gratification, “I should tell you . . . I had a secret purpose in coming on the show today.”

This wasn’t in the plans. Emily’s heart sank. If he did anything really outrageous, they might have to run the sex scene again. She said, with some trepidation, “And I guess you’re going to tell us that secret now?”

With an enigmatic smile, he reached for his jeans on the floor. Reaching into the pocket, he pulled out a small velvet box and opened it to reveal a chunky diamond solitaire. He slipped off the bed and got down on one knee, striking a dramatic pose that was made faintly sculptural by his nudity. “Emily . . .”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Will you be my wife?”

Emily actually looked directly at the camera, as if she could see through it to all the people who would eventually watch this at home, catch their eye, and receive some confirmation that she shouldn’t be expected to deal with this.

Cal was saying, “You understand, I’m not a love person. I don’t do love.”

Emily looked back at him, frowning. “So you want me to marry you why? Or is there going to be a punch line?”

“We’ll be the first couple to openly marry purely for the publicity. It should put Hollywood to shame, with its seventy-year history of marrying for the publicity but pretending it’s for love. Everyone will act shocked, of course.”

“You can’t do that, Cal.”

“Any justice of the peace will marry us. It’s not against the law to marry without being in love, you know. I can marry anyone I like, as long as it’s a woman. I don’t have to love her or think she’s swell or believe in fairies or anything.”

She smiled dazzlingly at camera one, trying to quell the shiver she felt going through her. “Well, we’re just about out of time on In Depth for this week. And from me, your hostess, Emily Lister, I’d like to say”—she turned to Cal—“no, I will not marry you—”

“Damn!” he said. “Break my heart, why don’t you?”

“—and good night.” Emily batted her eyelashes at the camera and waited for the call of “Cut!” Then she turned back to Cal and said quietly, “Why did you do that to me? Do you have any idea how unfair that was?”

He cocked his head at her. “You’re acting as if I wasn’t serious.”

“You were really hoping I’d do that? For publicity?”

“Well, what’s wrong with it?”

The cameramen were discreetly slipping away, pretending not to hear. Emily made a face at Cal, wondering if he was sincere. “Look, Cal, are you actually as cold-hearted as you pretend to be?”

“It wasn’t meant to be cold-hearted. Seriously, I’m kind of unconventional, but not—”

“I’m sorry. Forget it.” She reached for her robe, the familiar sight of which gave her a chill of depression. Of course she was the kind of person who attracted this sort of offer. This sort of proposal. Who would expect a porn star to be sentimental about marriage?

“Honestly, Emily, it was meant as a compliment. If you think I would marry just anyone for the publicity, you’re wrong.”

He was watching her with a friendly concern that was so out of synch with her feelings that she stopped to frown at him, the robe held up over her still-naked breasts. Of course, her reaction was more about Ralph than about Cal.

“Now I’m feeling bad about this,” he said. “Note that I wouldn’t bother to feel bad about just anyone.” He smiled at her.

“Oh . . . I think I’m just having a bad week with men, in general.”

“Oh, so you’re saying you’re upset about some other guy?”

She smiled weakly. “Well . . .”

He shrugged. “That hurts. Well, in my own way, I am terribly disappointed that you’re not going to marry me. And it’s not just the publicity.”

“But I’m a love person. I do love.”

“Well, good luck with your love,” he said, and reached for his complimentary In Depth robe. “But if it doesn’t work out . . . I’ll be single for at least another month.”

Emily tried to go back to her dressing room, but the hallway leading up to it was haunted by the ghost of Ralph Anderman. Before you go, could I invite you to lunch? he had said. I can wait exactly ten minutes. If she went into that hallway, it would be only to check whether he was there. He wasn’t there; she knew he wasn’t there. Still, going to her dressing room after he wasn’t there would be so depressing that the thought of it frightened her.

Instead, she decided to go see Jared, who was doing voice-overs for an episode of Meet the Wife on the tenth floor. He would be finished in an hour. Maybe he could take her to lunch, or take her home to his place to sit around eating ice cream all night. The thought of fucking him passed through her mind and made her frown. No, not this time. Jared wouldn’t mind.

She took the stairs. The elevator was used by staff from the insurance offices on the top floor; ordinary office workers in suits, carrying briefcases and laptops. Some days she didn’t care; she would even sign autographs and answer predictable questions about the most recent star she’d fucked. On a good day, it wouldn’t have mattered that she was barefoot, in a flimsy silk robe. Today she not only didn’t want to appear in public in her debauched, tousled, half-exposed work guise; she didn’t want to appear in public with Emily Lister’s face.

When she arrived at the studio, Jared was sitting at a microphone, watching the footage of Meet the Wife on a big monitor while following along on a paper script. A bored technician and producer sat to one side, yawning at readouts on consoles. The lights were dimmed, and at first Emily didn’t see the fourth person in the room—a lanky redheaded girl sitting cross-legged on the floor in one corner. The girl was staring not at the monitor but at Jared himself, as if her life depended on the words coming out of his mouth.

Jared said, “Anna has been married for ten years. She loves her husband, David, very deeply, but sometimes she wants more.”

On the monitor, Anna, a slim blonde in her early thirties, was shown unpacking groceries from the trunk of her car, then exercising on an elliptical machine in front of the TV, then throwing a stick for a Boston terrier in her backyard. Her voice was now heard on the voice-over: “I really want to have a child with David and settle into being middle-aged and, you know, boring. But before I do that, I want to have some experiences—things I missed out on because I found the right guy a little early.”

Jared read, “Anna and David met when they were twenty-two.” (The monitor now showed David, a good-looking, thickset man with impressively developed forearms, coming home from work and hugging his wife.) “They both knew immediately that they’d found the one.”

Now David’s voice was heard on the voice-over. “Anna and I are very alike. Very alike. We like all the same movies, the same bands. We have no friction. But part of that is that we both feel a little . . . like we missed out on some of the wilder parts of being young. Some of the more freewheeling sex that our friends had.”

Jared read, “David and Anna didn’t want to have an open marriage. They were afraid the jealousy would destroy their relationship. So they decided to try an even more unconventional arrangement.”

Anna was now shown in an office, talking to a young man at his desk. Her voice could be heard saying, “So, I’ve always been attracted to you. I mean, the day you were hired and you came into the office . . .” The volume of her voice faded, and Jared began to read again.

“Every three months, Anna and David invite two very special guests to their Montclair, New Jersey, home. Anna invites a man; David invites a woman. All the visits have one thing in common.”

Now David was shown talking to Jared himself, in the same living room that was shown before, the elliptical machine in the background. David said, “So we decided that if we were always in the same room, that would make the situation feel more controllable. Because Anna knows that if she doesn’t feel comfortable, if she is getting really jealous watching me with another girl, she can call it off. That’s our agreement.”

“And has that ever happened?” Jared asked.

“Not so far.” David smiled a little bashfully.

“But from the look on your face, it’s been close?”

“I had a bad night once. But the amazing thing was, the jealousy was really hot. It was one of the peak sexual experiences of my life.”

Jared began to read again, as the film went to Anna slowly stripping in front of a mirror. The camera zoomed out to show that both David and her young coworker were watching her from the bed.

“Every six months, David and Anna have a threesome. In the summertime, they sleep with a woman; in the winter, with a man.”

On the monitor, Anna was standing in bra and panties. She raised her long slim arms above her head and did a pirouette. David leapt up from the bed and lifted her into his arms, carrying her over to the bed. He and the coworker stripped off her underwear while she laughed and pretended to struggle.

Anna’s voice was heard in voice-over: “The feeling of being with another man is really . . . incredible. But it’s more incredible having David there to share it with me. Having him watch me is honestly the most erotic thing. And of course he can’t help joining in. . . .”

The camera cut to a scene from later in the same session, the coworker fucking Anna from behind as she braced herself on all fours on the bed. His eyes were closed and he intermittently bent forward to fondle her breasts, his hips curving forward still, keeping up a steady beat into her. Then David appeared on the other side of the bed, naked, his strong ursine frame emphasized by the savage look on his face. His cock was fully erect, fat and darkly red. With one movement, he had poised himself with the tip of his cock hovering at her lips. She licked her lips and then he was pressing his dick against them, making her take him in her mouth.

The camera came in closer, framing Anna being penetrated from both ends, her eyes shut in a straining ecstasy. The two cocks fell into a rhythm, and her slender body tensed to the beat of the men fucking her mouth and cunt. David was saying, “That’s it, baby. That’s it. Suck me.” Then the coworker broke step, fucking her faster and faster, his hips working intently, gaining a frenzied impetus. She moaned, her mouth twisting on her husband’s cock.

Watching, Emily began to feel a nagging sadness. It was partly the idea of having a husband—someone who would be working with her to make a happy life. Although she immediately felt it was silly, she imagined Anna and David going through life together, developing their own ways of solving problems like the problem of desiring other people. They were committed to each other (meanwhile, David had moved around behind his wife, taking the coworker’s place, and was applying oil to his dick, preparing to penetrate her anally; she looked over her shoulder, half-dazed, half-coy); they were committed to accepting each other for what they were.

As she thought this, in the corner of her eye, she saw the redheaded girl in the corner get up suddenly and head for the door. At that moment, something twinged in her memory, and she said to herself, That’s Zaza.

Jared looked back, his face anxious. He met Emily’s eye and mouthed something at her, nodding at the departing girl. Emily couldn’t see what he was saying, but it was obvious he wanted her to follow Zaza, catch her. . . .

She got to her feet, glad to be able to do something, anything, for someone else. Her shame eased ever so slightly as she followed Zaza out the door. After the darkened studio, the corridor’s light was almost painful. It took her a second to adjust. By then the girl was turning a corner, and she found herself running in pursuit. As she rounded the corner, Zaza was opening the door to the stairwell. Emily called out, “Hey! Wait for me!”

Zaza froze and looked back frowning at her, bewildered. Then her face softened into a faintly starstruck expression. “Oh, is it . . . Emily Lister? Hi. I mean . . . hi.”

“I’m a friend of Jared’s,” Emily said, as if that would explain everything. But the bewildered expression returned to the girl’s face, accompanied by a shadow of guilt.

She said, “I wasn’t . . . I just wanted to thank him. And he was busy, so I guess I chickened out. I don’t know what I was doing.”

Emily laughed. “You mean you snuck in there?”

Zaza shrugged. “I’m great at sneaking in places I’m not supposed to be.”

Emily walked up to join her. As she did, she admired the other girl. She had a coltish vulnerability about her that made her pale, angular face extraordinarily appealing. Her slenderness was quintessentially youthful, and the addition of that silky, blazing hair was enough to make the sensitivity of her face wonderfully sensual. She was a girl “made to be kissed,” as they used to say. She could understand why Jared thought about her all the time, even when he was watching more conventionally pretty girls having sex.

“Would you come and talk to me?” Emily asked. “We can go to Jared’s dressing room and wait for him.”

“Oh!” Zaza blushed, looking helplessly thrilled. “But does he want to see me . . . I mean, I could write him a note. I just . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Emily said, smiling. “I think he wants to see you.”

Emily had had the key to Jared’s dressing room for a year, and he had the key to hers. Each of them used the other’s dressing room as a place to hide out sometimes, or just as a place of comfort. Surrounded by Jared’s clothes and books, listening to his CDs, Emily felt as if she was in a safe zone outside of her own life. Entering there now, she felt such a wave of relaxation that she was surprised to notice Zaza creeping in anxiously, obviously overawed.

There wasn’t much to be awed by. Jared’s taste ran to floppy old furniture and Rolling Stones posters—unframed, attached to the wall with tacks. He was surprisingly neat, but that meant extremely tidy rows of thriller novels on the floor against one wall, and a little arrangement of carefully dusted figurines that included a Gumby and Pokey and a warrior brandishing a sword. The latter was Tenedor, Jared’s half-elf Dungeons & Dragons character, from when he was an awkward thirteen-year-old. Sometimes Emily still called him by that name.

“God,” Zaza sighed. “This is so incredibly cool. It’s like, you know it’s full of molecules from his body.”

Emily laughed. “You mean, dead skin?”

Zaza walked over to a worn old armchair nervously. “Is it okay if I sit down?”

“Of course.”

Zaza sat carefully in the chair, stroking its arms with a wondering tenderness.

“You know, that’s the chair Jared met Babylona in. I mean, when he met her, that was where . . .” Emily briefly told the story of Jared’s first meeting with Babylona, feeling a little self-conscious; it probably wasn’t the best story to tell a young girl with a crush on one of the characters.

But Zaza followed it with rapt attention, and then said, “Babylona is amazing. I haven’t met her yet. Is she still like that?”

“Exactly like that,” Emily said darkly.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Is it bad? I mean, how is it bad?”

Emily considered. While she still had a lot of affection, and even grudging admiration, for her boss, there was also a certain imperviousness about her. Babylona didn’t fully accept that other people could be different from her and have different needs. As far as Babylona was concerned, everyone was just pretending that they didn’t want to have sex all the time with any good-looking stranger. Once she reassured them that it was okay, they should give up pretending and have sex all the time—especially with her.

“Well,” said Emily, sitting down on the sofa, “you know when you go to a restaurant, and at the end of the meal, you’re too full for dessert, but the person you’re with keeps insisting you have dessert, and saying that they’ll pay for it, and that they know you want dessert, and that you don’t have to lose weight, and all the time you actually don’t want dessert, but eventually you give in and get dessert? And then you feel really sick?”

“Oh, no, I always want dessert.”

Emily laughed again. “Well, you two should get along great.”

Zaza leaned forward, frowning intently. “Listen, do you ever have crushes on people you hardly know? Like, serious crushes?”

It was on the tip of Emily’s tongue to say no. But then she thought of Ralph and blushed. “Sure . . . once or twice.”

“Because I was just on this show, Home of X, I guess you probably know it, and I was doing okay. I mean, I got through the first vote and everybody seemed to like me. But then I began to just think about this guy all the time. I mean, a guy who wasn’t in the Home of X house. And then, even though I was still having a good time, I just kept thinking about how long I’d be away from him. I mean, everything was perfect, but it was ruined just because he wasn’t there. . . .”

“Then?”

“Oh, then Janice—this other girl in Home of X—set the place on fire trying to make vegetable curry. I mean, it actually burned to the ground, which looked fishy. But it really wasn’t me—I’m not the kind of person who would, like, commit arson just to see some guy I had a crush on. I mean, I am that kind of person, but I didn’t have to, ’cause Janice really burned the house down. Last night. I’m really tired, actually. Maybe that’s why I’m not making much sense.”

Emily made a mental note to watch Home of X when she got home. “Well, would it make you less tired if I told you that Jared has a crush on you?”

In a flash, Zaza was on her feet, staring at Emily dumbstruck. She swallowed and nodded slowly.

Emily said, “ ’ Cause Jared has a crush on you. One of those crushes you get on people you don’t really know.”

“Oh, of course!” Zaza blurted. “Because if he knew me, he wouldn’t . . . oh, God. And he’s coming here?”

With a pang, Emily realized that she wasn’t going to get to see Jared that night. No ice cream, no lazy confidences, no thirtieth viewing of The Godfather: Part II. Perhaps it was just as well. It was time she faced whatever was troubling her and decided what to do about it. If anything could still be done. She said, “Yes, he’s coming here. Or he will be once I text him and tell him you’re waiting.”

Zaza stared as Emily pulled out her cell phone. She said, “Um, but what if he doesn’t, and then I know he didn’t on purpose? If he doesn’t want to see me, I mean.”

Emily was punching in the message.

“ ’ Cause,” Zaza babbled, “then I’d know. And sometimes when you have a crush, it’s better not to know, so you can keep hoping and having a dream that . . .”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Emily, frowning over her phone. She held it up to show Zaza the screen: zaza in d. room xxx e.

“Oh,” said Zaza. “Yes, I guess you’d better. I mean, if he comes . . .”

Emily hit SEND. Then she was smiling up at Zaza, who had already started staring at the door, waiting for Jared to appear.

“Okay,” said Emily. “I think I’d better go before I magically turn into a third wheel.”

Zaza nodded dumbly. Her girlishness had become so intense that Emily could barely restrain herself from hugging Zaza, patting her on the head. . . . She confi ned herself to saying, “You know, it was really great meeting you.”

At this, Zaza turned to her with immediate, touching gratitude. “You mean it? I’m not hopelessly . . . stupid?”

“Not at all hopelessly stupid,” Emily said, getting up and moving to the door. “And you’ll see. He’s going to have more of a crush on you as he gets to know you.”

Zaza smiled, dazed. “You’re so wonderful. God, I hope you’re as happy as you deserve to be. I mean, I always used to hope that when I watched your show. I always knew you’d be so wonderful in person.”

“Thanks,” Emily said awkwardly. Then she was slipping out, feeling an odd lump in her throat. She didn’t know exactly why this girl’s opinion of her should matter so much, but it did. She could imagine her own TV persona through Zaza’s eyes—a sensitive but poised woman, always affectionate toward her guests . . . a woman who deserved to be happy. She was feeling a resurgence of her self-confidence as she made her way down the corridor toward her own dressing room—and ran smack into Ralph Anderman.

ELEVEN

Neither of them said a word. She had run up against him and then stepped back, with her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. He looked down at her but she couldn’t read his expression; she was too lost in the shock of seeing him. It made her realize that she’d been picturing him almost nonstop for days.

He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps it was that she was barefoot and he was wearing shoes. He should have been just another handsome man, like all the handsome men she worked with every day. But there was something else, a brooding energy she always felt just beneath his calm manner. It was a definitive masculinity in his presence that made her feel that his experience must be subtly different from hers. His emotions were male emotions; his thoughts were male thoughts. She could never quite believe he was real, as if a real man was a mythical beast she had never expected to encounter in real life.

Still, without speaking, they walked to her door and she let him in. As soon as the door was shut behind them, he took her in his arms. Her body molded itself gratefully to his strong frame, and he was kissing her, kissing her, the strange fire of his presence filling her body and making her weak and glad. He stroked her hair as his lips moved to her throat. His firm muscles against her chest made her conscious of her softness; she would feel small and delicate to him. All the sadness and shame of the day had vanished. Everything she wanted was here, was being given to her now.

He pulled her robe down over her shoulders, and she let it fall to the floor. Then he stood back from her for a second, looking down at her naked body. She let her hands fall from his chest and stood there allowing herself to be seen, her nipples tightening under his gaze. His face was almost fierce with his desire for her, and she made herself stand still, letting her own longing mount in her. A bright stab of heat went through her loins and dissipated in a tingling down her thighs. Her skin was alive with anticipation of his touch; it felt almost transparent.

He put his hand to one of her breasts, weighing it, and she gasped at the shiver of response between her legs. Again he bent to kiss her, while his hand played with her breast, the thumb flicking lightly over her hard nipple again and again while he squeezed the tender flesh. She let her tongue slip into his mouth and he sucked it, the motion awakening a deeper, aching throb in her. She could feel that she was already wet, and when his free hand passed down to cup her ass and pull her toward him, a delicious chill passed over that wetness as her pussy was ever so slightly parted.

Then he was guiding her over to the sofa. He sat, drawing her down with him, pulling her so that she was sitting on his lap with her legs on either side of him, her groin pressed against the swelling of the hard-on in his pants. With her sitting on his thighs, he began to kiss her breasts, sucking one nipple and then the other, his tongue playing over the sensitive tips, his teeth joining gently over them and teasing spasms of pleasure out of them. At the same time, he was pulling his belt open, and a minute later his naked cock was pressed at the dripping lips of her pussy, the hardness of it as thrilling as the keenness of a razor. His hands passed down her sides and over the silky skin of her buttocks. Then he was gently raising her, repositioning her on top of his cock.

For a moment she was poised there, a faint cry escaping her lips as she felt the tip of his dick opening her. Her own wetness was exciting her, the softness of her cunt so ready for him. Then he lowered her onto him, and his dick slid deep inside her, cutting a wound of pleasure into her that made her gasp. She let her weight sink fully onto him, the feeling of being fucked deeply making her faint with delight. He arched his hips to press even farther into her, and then he was lifting her again, his dick slipping out, out. He held her poised at the tip of his dick again, his eyes locked onto hers

Before she realized she was speaking aloud, she said, “My God. I love you.”

He said, “I love you, Emily,” and he was releasing her again, her body riding down onto his cock, the feeling of being split and filled now dizzyingly like being loved, being met at the point of her greatest need. And she was riding him, rising and falling on his dick and moaning with a mingled gratitude and need. Even the feeling of effort, the muscles in her thighs tensing and releasing, was a sensual pleasure; his big shoulders under her hands were a delirious pleasure. When she began to come, it was at first a snaking heat that drove into her with his cock, and then a broadening wave that came out of her as she rose on him. The orgasm grew, held, and he was pounding into it, beating more intensity into it as he now began to fuck her hard from beneath. The first orgasm had barely slackened when the second one began, still deeper inside her. It mounted into a blaze of helpless rapture that blinded her as he, too, came, driving hard inside her. His hands gripped her hips and drove her onto him as his cock twitched in orgasm. She bent down and kissed him then, still blind, still fainting and lost. And he held her against him, his mouth meeting hers in ferocious love. She felt his heart beating against her, her heart beating against the slowing beat of her coming. I love you, I love you, she was thinking without thinking. Everything had returned to a point of perfect rest; she had let herself go and she had fallen here, to this man and this moment. I love you.

At last she sat back to look at his face. There were tears in her eyes and she was smiling helplessly, probably idiotically. She said, “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He was searching her face for a moment; then he, too, began to smile with a desperate happiness that made her laugh.

She said, “I guess that wasn’t what you intended? Or was it?”

“No!” He laughed. “What a fool I was. I wanted to have a sensible talk.”

“Well, luckily you can have both.”

“I don’t know how sensible I feel now.” He stroked her cheek. “I do . . . I feel as if I do love you. It’s crazy.”

“It’s crazy.” She leaned into his hand, rubbing her cheek against his palm gently. “But maybe this is how it’s supposed to be.”

“You don’t know?” His smile became mischievous. “I would have thought you’d been in love dozens of times.”

Emily shut her eyes and tried to think. There was Evan. When she was in that relationship, it had eclipsed all her early boyfriends; she thought she would die when Evan left her. But even so, every time she’d told him she loved him, she felt a cold qualm. It was like a voice deep within her admonishing stuffily, Now, Emily, you know that isn’t true. Opening her eyes, she saw Ralph looking at her lovingly. She said, “I was in love once, about a tenth as much as I’m in love with you now.”

He smiled. “You know what’s really crazy? That just made me jealous.”

They both laughed, and she leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Now that we’ve gotten crazy out of the way—what’s the sensible?”

A weariness stole over his face. “Let me hold you. I want to lie down with you in my arms before I say this.”

“Because it will be for the last time?” she said, trying to make her voice light.

The weariness turned into grimness. “God, I hope not. You know, until I came here, I thought I would be able to let you go. Now . . .” He shook his head. “Just hold me.”

She shifted off him and they stretched out on the sofa face-to-face, his arms around her. They kissed again for a luxurious minute of kinship. Emily felt as if she could sense his emotions through his skin, as if his emotions were flowing into her without any barrier, and hers were flowing back into him. She longed to tell him that nothing else mattered, to stop him from saying whatever nonsense it could be that would interfere with this, the only necessary thing in the world. But she made herself pull back and say, “All right. What is it?”

“I knew I owed you an explanation. But it’s something that I’ve never told anyone before. Or no one but my mother.”

She laughed. “Your mother?” Her mind tried to sketch dark secrets that you would only tell your mother, of all people. She froze suddenly. “You’re not—sick?”

“No, no! It’s nothing like that.” He kissed her on the cheek. “But bless you for being scared. No, it’s just . . . I wanted you to know that I’m not embarrassed by you because of what you do. I would never give you up if it was my decision. And it will be my decision. I just have to figure out . . . But I’m not telling you, am I?”

“You’re trying,” Emily said loyally.

“It’s this. When I was twenty years old, I got a girl pregnant.”

Emily caught her breath. “You mean, you’re married?”

He burst out laughing. “Should I let you guess everything it’s not? We could do this by elimination.”

“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it really is sweet. But it’s not that I married her. I couldn’t marry her,” he said with a cold misery in his voice. “She was fifteen.”

“Oh.” Despite herself, Emily was shocked. Of course, it had been a long time ago. Twenty wasn’t that much older than fifteen. Still, it conjured up horrible memories from her own early youth of drunken men trying to pick her up in the street—a certain kind of man who went after teenage girls. She said, “But . . . you were going out with a fifteen-year-old girl?”

“No, I didn’t even know her. I didn’t know she was fifteen, if that’s what you’re thinking. If I’d known, I don’t think it would ever have happened. Not that that did her any good.”

“She didn’t have an abortion,” Emily said. “Oh, I’m guessing again.”

“This time your guess is right. My daughter, Ilana, is thirteen years old now.”

“But my researchers told me you didn’t have children.”

“No one knows.”

“Except your mother.”

“Yes, my mother can keep a secret,” he said wryly.

“But why? Why would you keep it a secret?”

“The girl was fifteen. That’s statutory rape, you know.”

“But it’s so long ago. Surely . . .”

He sighed. “In the beginning, I didn’t want her to tell anybody. But thirteen years is a long time. Things change. People change. Sometimes people become bitter.” He smiled. “I sound very portentous, don’t I? Well, let’s just say Ilana’s mother hates me. She still blames me for ruining her life.”

Emily imagined a woman with a ruined life, a sad, lonely single mother living in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere—Newark, maybe. She would have a drinking problem. She would be either overweight or haggard, the kind of woman who started fights in line at the supermarket. “But you must give her money?”

“Of course. That’s not the problem. The problem was that I didn’t love her. It’s not as if Valerie was in love with me, or not at first. To tell you the truth, I can’t even wonder anymore what it was all about. Over the years, I’ve learned to accept that, somehow, I did ruin her life.”

“But you didn’t know! She could have gotten an abortion. Or if she didn’t believe in that, isn’t it enough that you supported her?”

“It’s not that simple.”

Ralph began to tell the story, haltingly at first, then with a growing passionate sadness. How Valerie had gotten his name out of the phone book, five months after their one-night stand, and told him the news in tears. Her mother had thrown her out, and she needed a place to stay. He was living with three friends then, and he decided he couldn’t tell them. He was too afraid of going to prison. So he moved out with no explanation, first to a hotel, and then to a one-bedroom apartment, where he lived with Valerie until the baby was born.

The trouble was, Valerie hated him. She hated him for refusing to buy her an engagement ring, for refusing to promise they would marry when she was sixteen. She hated him for continuing to see his ex-girlfriend. Part of her hostility was probably teenage angst; she would rage at him because he cared what people thought, or because he was scared of prison. “I would go to prison for someone I loved. I would die for someone I loved,” she would say. Part of it was insecurity and fear of what was happening to her. Every few days, she would collapse into a fury of tears and say she was going to kill herself and the baby. Then he would have to talk her down somehow, insisting that he loved her, that she was a wonderful person with a great future, that she would be happy as soon as the baby was born.

They weren’t having sex, although they often shared a bed. She would creep in beside him when he was asleep, and hold him like a teddy bear. Once he got to know her, he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t seen how young she was. She seemed young even for fifteen. Her family had obviously been a nightmare, and she often seemed like an abused child to him—an eight-year-old possessed by rage and pathetic need. Her growing belly seemed like a further abuse visited on her, and he couldn’t look at her without being stricken by guilt. Living with her, he not only didn’t desire her—he lost all desire for sex.

That was another reason she hated him. At the time, he was too young and naive to understand it, but she was being tormented by the formless and overwhelming lust of a fifteen-year-old girl. She always wanted him to hold her, to kiss her. Because she never tried to initiate sex, he assumed that she didn’t want it, that kissing was enough. But she typically went from kissing him to raging at him and threatening to kill herself, without transition.

He was too much of a coward to go with her to the hospital for the birth. Often he wondered if everything would have been different if he’d done that one thing; showed her that crucial piece of compassion. But no, he insisted that he would pick her up afterward, but he wouldn’t get out of the car, just in case someone recognized him. Even the tiny risk that someone he knew would pass the hospital at that moment was too much for him. Of course, by that time, he hated her almost as bitterly as she hated him. He hated her and pitied her and often woke from dreams in which she was dead and he was raising the baby on his own. The baby in these dreams was always terribly ill; he wasn’t going to be able to save it. Somehow the baby’s illness was all his fault.

Ilana was born healthy, though, after an eight-hour labor with no complications. By that time, Valerie’s mother was back in the picture. She was the one who called Ralph to tell him the news. On the phone, she said she would convince her daughter to come home. “It’s my granddaughter, after all. My kid can’t raise a child; she can’t boil an egg.”

So when he drove to the hospital and waited for an hour in vain, he assumed that was what had happened—the girl had gone home with her mother. He drove to a bar and drank all afternoon, with his cell phone on the bar in front of him. Every hour the cell phone didn’t ring, it became more likely that she was out of his life forever.

When he at last got home, he was drunk enough to assume that everything was going to turn out the way he wanted. Valerie would go back to school and forget about him. He would have a beautiful, happy daughter, and no responsibility for her. Over time, they would all become good friends. He could spend Christmas with them. As he went up to his apartment in the elevator, he was vaguely imagining the generous presents he would buy for his child, whom he visualized as a flaxen-haired eight-year-old, dashing to the door to meet him with delighted screams. His arms heaped with beautifully wrapped boxes. At his heels, a puppy with a ribbon around its neck.

He opened his door, stepped inside, and froze. Even though the apartment was dark, he felt convinced that someone was there; it gave him a creeping feeling down his neck. He called out Valerie’s name, but no one answered. When he turned on the light, there was no one in the living room. There was no sign that anyone had been here in his absence.

But when he went into the bedroom, just to be sure, he found his four-day-old daughter lying on the bed. A note beside her informed him that Valerie had gone to California, and that this was for the best. My mother is an abusive freak. Don’t let my mother take Ilana or I’ll tell the police about you. Remember, I’ll find out everything you do.

“In a way, Valerie gave me everything that matters to me now,” Ralph said. “When she left Ilana with me, I had to give up school and get a job. Then I started my first business partly so that I could work from home.

“It was actually one of the happiest times of my life. When you’re twenty-one, it’s not such a big deal if you never sleep at all. And I don’t think I ever knew what it meant to love someone before Ilana. Seriously, one day my mother came over to look after her, and I had this distinct feeling of really loving my mother for the first time. Having Ilana changed me into a real person.”

But Valerie came back a year later. She wanted her daughter. Ralph wasn’t even listed as the father on her birth certificate—a direct result of his cowardice in not standing by Valerie when she gave birth. Legally, he had no right even to joint custody of his daughter. He could have hired lawyers, insisted on DNA tests, turned it into a war. But Valerie could still wield the old threat of pressing charges for statutory rape. They came to an arrangement—an arrangement that pushed Ralph into working all hours to support two households, to pay for Valerie’s move to New York City, then to move to New York himself to be near his daughter. By then, Valerie was passing Ilana off as her cousin; supposedly Valerie was godmother to the child, whose real mother had died in a tragic car crash. In those early years, Ralph supported Valerie in whatever scheme she came up with to improve her life. It seemed too crucial that somehow, someday, Ilana’s mother should be happy, even if that meant that he, too, could never acknowledge his child.

“I really didn’t have any friends. To tell the truth, I still don’t have any friends to speak of. I’d gotten used to working all the time, first to make the money I needed, and then to avoid thinking about my life. And every Sunday, I’d go to see Ilana and everything would stop. We’d go to the beach in all weather, or I’d just have her at home. She’s such a great kid. She could read when she was three. Until she started school, I don’t think I even believed there was anything wrong with my life. My mother thought there was something wrong.” He smiled sardonically. “She was very vocal on the subject.”

“What happened when she started school?”

The smile vanished. “Valerie sent Ilana back to her mother in Massachusetts. Her mother had sobered up by then, so that was supposed to be all right. And Valerie wanted a career; she was being stifled by having a child. Never mind that I couldn’t see my daughter anymore.”

“But you must have . . .”

“Oh, I see her as often as I can. I see her but Valerie doesn’t. As far as Valerie’s concerned, Ilana is just a way to get money out of me now. Money or . . . whatever else she wants. There are rules for everything.”

Emily had been stroking his chest out of an instinctive, probably useless, need to comfort him. Now he caught her hand and pressed it to his lips.

She said, aware that she was speaking out of sheer nerves, “It’s funny about names. But I work with someone called Valerie who’s just like that. Kind of ruthless. I mean, I know it doesn’t mean anything, really. It’s just a coincidence.”

“Not as much of a coincidence as you might think,” Ralph said. “It’s the same person.”

“Oh.” A chill passed over Emily. Valerie LeBlanc. Ralph Anderman was going to be her first—and for some reason Valerie had been convinced he would do anything she said. But he had already been her first, thirteen years ago. He could be counted on to do anything Valerie said. He could be counted on not to tell anyone that she wasn’t really a virgin. Valerie had all her bases covered, as usual.

“Apparently, Valerie doesn’t like you very much,” Ralph said. “In my experience, that’s to your credit.”

“How did she know?” Emily said, her voice weak and hoarse. “Does she have you followed?”

“I told her.” He made a face. “I should have realized that was stupid, but it’s been years since Valerie cared who I went out with. This seems to have opened her wounds somehow.”

“But you can’t let her tell you what to do,” Emily said, with a growing panic in her heart. “I mean, it’s not healthy. It can’t be good for anyone.”

“Listen,” Ralph said, pressing her hand to his chest. “Ilana doesn’t know her mother is Valerie LeBlanc. She doesn’t know her mother was fifteen when she was born. She thinks we were married, that Valerie was nineteen, that Valerie was the love of my life. . . . If this comes out, it’s going to be ugly. A story for the gossip magazines about a millionaire and two porn stars. Secret love child, the whole nine yards.”

“But she’ll have to find out someday,” Emily said, feeling dangerously close to tears. Whatever it meant, she couldn’t lose this man. The thought of it made her desperate and angry.

“I know,” Ralph said. “But she’s thirteen. And her mother has already abandoned her. I don’t know how I could put her through that.”

Emily opened her mouth to protest but caught herself. She realized she had nothing to say. She didn’t know what it was like to have a child. And part of her fury in all this was a pitiful jealousy of him for having that in his life when—this was what she was realizing, with a sinking feeling—without Ralph, she might never have it. She couldn’t imagine moving on from him, having a family with anyone else. I’ve had everyone else, she thought sadly. No one else will do.

“Trust me,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can. There are some things I can’t do—I can’t sell out my daughter to have you. But anything I can do . . .”

Emily shut her eyes for a moment, trying to still her turbulent feelings. Then she looked into his eyes and said, “Whatever you need.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I do love you, Emily.”

Then they were kissing again, and she felt the desire begin to awaken again. This can’t be wrong, she told herself as Ralph began to move against her. But even if it’s wrong, I won’t give it up.

TWELVE

By the time Jared got back to his dressing room, Zaza had drunk two of his beers, tried on his leather jacket (and forgotten to take it off ), and was playing “Sympathy for the Devil,” almost recognizably, on his keyboard. The door had already opened behind her before she realized it. Then she had spun around, her arms crossed over her chest as if she would be able to hide the jacket from view, her eyes wide with horror.

“Oh, no! I thought I would hear you coming from miles off!” she said.

Jared burst out laughing. “And then you would . . . ?”

“Well, I didn’t mean to be wearing your jacket,” she said miserably. “It makes it so obvious.”

“What? That you steal people’s clothes?”

“I wasn’t going to steal it!” she protested. “You know I wasn’t!”

He laughed again and closed the door behind him, coming forward to sit on his old armchair. “I still don’t know what’s obvious.”

“Well, if it’s not obvious, I’m not going to tell you.”

He leaned back in the chair, smiling at her. There was a wonderful, tickly sort of nervousness in his chest. “It’s not like you to hide things,” he said.

She blinked at him. “You mean, you thought about what I’m like?” Then she ducked her head, looking down at her lap in shy confusion.

He took a deep breath, wanting to impulsively go over and hug her, rumple her hair. Wanting to impulsively kiss her and talk outrageous silly love talk. Wanting to be the impulsive kind of man he wasn’t. I’m semi-impulsive, he told himself. Just okay as far as impulsiveness goes. He couldn’t help thinking that a girl like Zaza would eventually find him boring. Her impulsiveness score would be off the charts.

Now he said, semi-impulsively, “I’ve mostly thought you’re wonderful. I mean, you could have all my jackets, and I’d sit around thinking about you wearing them.”

Zaza was still studying her own knees furiously. She said, “That sounds like you like me.”

“Zaza, look at me,” he said, feeling like he was going to see stars in a minute, he was so breathlessly smitten. When she looked up uncertainly, he said, “I like you so much it’s like a whole new category of like.”

Then a smile bloomed on her face and turned into a grin. “It’s not platonic liking or anything awful like that?”

“What do you think?”

She was hugging herself in the bulky leather jacket, beaming at him. “I wished for this when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake once. It was before I met you. Is that creepy? I thought you might think it’s creepy and then I would have to keep it a secret from you. And since I can’t keep secrets, I thought I should tell you up front.”

“I don’t care if it’s creepy,” he said. “Would you come here? You’re making me wait.”

“But that’s supposed to be a good thing,” she said, getting up hastily and crossing the space between them in one second flat. As she jumped onto his lap, she said, “You’re supposed to play hard to get. If you’re a girl. I mean, don’t you play hard to get; that would be awful.”

“Don’t play hard to get,” he said, taking her hand in both of his.

She stared at his hands, her lips slightly parted. Then she bent her head, kissed his knuckles, and rubbed her cheek against them, looking up at him blissfully. She said, “I’ll play hard to get later. I’m no good at deferred gratification.”

“Then kiss me.”

The grin came back. But she quelled it, reasoning that she couldn’t kiss him and grin at the same time. She said faintly, “Okay.”

The kiss went on and on. If he wasn’t seeing stars, Jared was feeling them—tiny, fiery bursts of emotion mingled with sensation. In his mind, they were red and gold, and he could almost imagine them circling around him as if he were a cartoon character that had been clobbered on the head. She was so tiny in his arms, so fragile and alive. Her long hair was so fine and soft it seemed to be made from a different material from normal hair—as if she alone had spun silk on her head while everyone else had cotton. The skin on her arms was likewise preternaturally soft and smooth, and her arms so slender he felt like a massive ox nuzzling a delicate fawn. He found himself mumbling, “You’re so beautiful. . . . You’re so incredibly beautiful.” And he was relieved rather than flattered when she blurted, “No, it’s you who’s the beautiful one. I’m so not!” in shy distress. He thought, Thank God, she doesn’t see through me.

But when his palm grazed her small, firm breasts, feeling the hard nipples—which also felt delicate and tiny, maddeningly perfect and fine—he caught himself. He was pulling back from her, looking at her flushed, jubilant face, feeling as if they’d tumbling down a hill or run an obstacle course. He was breathing hard and felt undone, helpless—wonderful. He said, “That was, like, the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“No,” she said, dazed. “That can’t be true.”

“It’s true.”

“But it’s what I always dreamed you would say. Honestly.” She shook her head, the grin returning at double force.

He said, “But you understand why I’m not trying to take advantage of you now?”

At this, the grin vanished. His heart sank. Of course he would say the wrong thing. “No,” he blurted, “I mean, I don’t mean that it would be taking advantage. I mean, I’m so attracted to you. You can probably—” He had been about to say feel it, but then the crude reference to his hard-on seemed out of place. He realized that he had no idea how to be romantic. He had always fucked girls, several times, in front of a film crew, before he ever made any romantic speeches to them. Those romantic speeches, furthermore, were made out of a spirit of joie de vivre—as he now realized—rather than love. He had loved being with them and drinking ridiculous blender drinks with them in a revolving restaurant while all the men in the room stared and envied him. He had loved them looking into his eyes and acting coy and besotted. He had loved the fact that no one was really in love, and the protestations had none of the dragging weight of reality.

He had no idea how to be with a girl who was genuinely besotted. He had no idea how to be besotted himself.

He said, “Tell me what to say. The last thing I want to do is hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me,” she said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t know if you hurt me yet. Do you still like me?”

“So much. More and more.”

She sighed, and the bliss began to return to her face. “Okay. Then you can explain to me. Though I think I need another beer.”

She hopped off his lap and started toward the refrigerator, but paused halfway and took off his leather jacket carefully. She started to fold it one way, then changed her mind, shook it out and began to fold it another way. Seeing him watching, she said, “I’ve really got no idea how to fold clothes.”

“Just throw it down somewhere.”

“Oh.” She looked at it and hastily pressed a kiss to the collar before putting it down on the sofa. As she went to the refrigerator, she said, “Okay. Everything’s all right. Right? Everything’s all right?”

“Everything’s so all right. This is the most all right I’ve been in years.”

“I’m sorry I stole your beers,” she said, as she came back with another beer and crept back into his lap. “I was just waiting so long and I kept thinking about the beers. And then I thought they might belong to the channel, and I convinced myself that it was—”

“It was completely okay.”

She sighed. “That’s what I convinced myself.”

“Listen, Zaza. Like I said, I’m so attracted to you I don’t even know how to describe it.”

“A whole new category of attracted,” she said. “That’s what I feel.”

“Yes. And I don’t mean to assume that you want to sleep with me right now.”

“Oh, I do!”

“Okay.” He laughed. “So I’ll assume that. It’s just that we hardly know each other, and I kind of want to be normal. Or, not normal . . . special.”

“Special and normal.” She frowned. “You mean, if I was anyone else, you would have sex with me?” From the expression on her face, it was clear that she wanted to be anyone else.

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean that I want to . . . I’d say I want you to be my girlfriend, but that’s probably really sudden.”

“In a good way.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t believe it.”

“But I just want to be sure of . . . what’s going on with us. Because I haven’t tried to have a girlfriend in so long. And the last time I tried, it was kind of a disaster.”

On Jared’s last day of being a boyfriend, he had been filming a sex scene for a movie, after which he was planning to take his girlfriend to a jewelry store as a surprise. He would walk her to the engagement ring section and go down on one knee. The girlfriend in question, Amanda, was a model—not a supermodel by any stretch of the imagination; just a woman with girl-next-door good looks who was paying her way through law school in a glamorous way. Jared wasn’t sure anymore why he had wanted to marry Amanda. He was probably no more in love with her than he’d been in love with a dozen previous girlfriends. It might have been that—unlike those previous girlfriends, who were mostly lighthearted, fickle porn actresses—Amanda had made it plain that she wanted to marry him.

The movie that day was one of those near-plotless, undignified things that got sold under titles with “ass” or “head” in them. He had worked with most of the people before, and when he arrived on the set, they had already shot two sex scenes and drunk a few bottles of champagne. The set was someone’s improbably huge Tribeca loft, but the assembled porn gang had managed to fill it with eye-smarting clouds of cigarette smoke. Adding to the smoke was a blazing fire in the fireplace, which was also heating the place to such tropical temperatures that even the crew were stripped down to their underwear. Amanda was coming to pick Jared up afterward, in order to drive him off to a weekend away in her family’s cottage in the Catskills, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was going to make of the scene. The only time she’d met him at work before, she had been a good sport about it, but afterward had asked, with a nervous smile, “Is it always like that?”

He’d had no idea what she meant, but just said, “Oh, more or less,” and been relieved when she changed the subject.

For some reason, everyone on the set that day was in a deliriously giggly, happy mood. The film was being directed by a young blond woman called Precious Vandermeer, the star herself of dozens of similar films, and she was directing nude—except for a hugely fluffy white feather boa. Over the course of the day, apparently, the boa had become a running gag; she kept asking it for advice and then making it speak to the actors. “Boa, was that the best blow job you ever fuckin’ saw?” Then, in a squeaky falsetto, wagging the end of the feather boa to make it look like it was speaking: “That was the best blow job anyone ever saw. Nicki and Jack, you rock!”

The actors who were finished for the day were busily making a huge pizza from scratch, with a daring array of ingredients, including sardines and pineapple. They had also ordered several boxes of cupcakes. Just before Jared arrived, they had taken a vote and decided it was okay to eat the cupcakes first, so the first question he was asked was, “Hey, gorgeous—chocolate, lemon, or red velvet?”

The actress he was working with, Regina, a busty Asian girl with an outrageously kittenish manner, had fallen asleep nude on a sheepskin rug in front of the fire and woken up with her butt roasted to a garish shade of magenta. The makeup girl and an actor were now crouched on the floor, powdering and repowdering Regina’s ass while the three of them periodically became helpless with laughter. “We can’t shoot around it,” Regina was saying. “I keep telling you, it’s an anal scene.”

“Can’t he—sort of—fuck over it?” the makeup girl said.

“All you need is the rest of the baboon suit,” said the actor, “and we add a bestiality element.”

Jared carried his chocolate cupcake over to the director, who tickled his nose with the feather boa and said, “No script, okay?”

“Oh, man.” Jared never liked unscripted scenes; all he could ever think of to say was corny clichés. Not that the scripts weren’t made of corny clichés, but at least that wasn’t his fault.

“Eh,” said Precious. “Do the usual ‘Take it; Good girl’ stuff. Right, boa?” She made the boa say, in a high-pitched voice, “Do we have a prima donna on our hands?”

“No, it’s okay,” said Jared. “I can—oof!”

Regina, spotting him, had come running over and tackle-hugged him. “Darling!” she shouted. “Can. Not. Wait—to have you penetrate me anally!”

All the pizza makers began to cheer, and the makeup girl called, “Hey, Red Rump! Get back here!”

Before going on, Jared jotted down notes for himself—that “Take it; Good girl” stuff that he would then have to deliver in a gloating tone. The mood of silliness spread to him, though, and he found the basic insanity of the situation weirdly comforting. These were his people, after all; a tribe of cheerful, charming degenerates who were as close to “the lilies of the field” as could be imagined. With very few exceptions, it was impossible to imagine them surviving in any other line of business. It was impossible to imagine them reading the newspaper, cleaning their apartments, balancing a checkbook. And it was impossible to imagine them harming a fly. Sweet, helpless, wonderful people—and he was suddenly looking forward to introducing them to Amanda. Of course Amanda would like them. To dislike them would amount to disliking cupcakes, roaring fires, helpless laughter, and champagne.

The director waved him onto the set and called Regina, who walked over carefully to the bed at the center of the room, trying not to dislodge the layer of powder from her ass. Nonetheless, a faint cloud followed her through the room, much to the merriment of the onlookers.

Regina picked up a flimsy, translucent dress from the bed and pulled it on over her head, causing new clouds of powder to billow from under the skirt.

“Shaddup!” the boa squealed, and the giggles receded slowly.

The scene called for Jared, wearing an executioner’s hood and nothing else, to steal out of a closet (where he was presumed to have been hiding) and sneak up on Regina while she was making the bed. Seeing him, she would recoil in terror; then he would tear her clothes off, et cetera. When it was all over and she was reduced to a shivering heap of pleasured surrender, he would tear off his hood to reveal that he was, after all, her husband, whom she had accused of lacking passion in a previous scene. Indignation followed by reconciliation, laughter, and more sex—to be filmed on the following day.

The sight of Jared naked in the executioner’s hood set everyone off again, and the director had to start the scene three times before his entrance from the closet did not occasion storms of laughter. Between every repetition, he had to patiently work up his hard-on again, in long minutes in the closet, which smelled penetratingly of mothballs. But at last, everyone calmed down, and the scene began in earnest.

Jared crept out of the closet for the fourth time, suppressing the urge to look over at the rapt pizza makers. There was Regina in her flimsy white frock, pulling at the bedding ineffectually. As he crept up on her, the floorboards creaked deafeningly, and there was a quickly suppressed snort of laughter from the audience. Then he grasped her from behind, saying, “Nice—”

She shrieked theatrically and twisted in his grasp, looking back at him in sweet trepidation. Faltering, she said, “What do you want?”

Jared balked for only a second. Then he made himself say, in a leering, triumphant tone, “You know what I want.” He tore her dress open at the front, exposing her breasts. She shrieked again as he forced her back against the bed, drawing his fingers over one of her nipples and then squeezing the breast roughly. “Nice big tits. I like big tits.”

She squirmed uncomfortably at first, but then fell still, her mouth open in a show of mingled fear and sensual response. “Please . . . you can take anything you want,” she said. “But don’t hurt me.”

“Good. What I want is to fuck you,” he snarled. Now he pulled the ripped garment off her completely, letting it fall to the floor. The next moment, he grabbed her by the hair, saying, “This won’t hurt a bit.”

Bending down, he seized one of her nipples between his teeth and nibbled it, then sucked her breast halfway into his mouth. Then the other breast. She was squirming again, trying to escape from his lips. He gripped her arm to hold her still and suckled with a show of greed. Meanwhile, as always happened at about this point, real desire had begun to rise in him, despite the onlookers and the hot, constraining hood. In fact, there was something arousing about the hood, the feeling of anonymity. He pushed her feet apart with his foot and let his hand trickle down her body and rest on her shaved pussy. He traced one finger down her clitoris and let it lightly tug her pussy lips open, first on one side, then the other, teasing her.

Her eyes grew languid, though she still pulled automatically away from him. He said, “You like that, don’t you?” And he slid his finger inside her, taking the wetness there and drawing it back over her clit, his finger darting back and forth as she tensed and bit her lip. Then he was using two fingers, plunging them into her and then pulling them back over her clit, slipping back and forth until her eyes were shutting involuntarily and her breath came fast and light.

Standing straight again, he forced Regina down onto her knees, wrenching at her hair. Regina managed it smoothly; she created the maximum impression of resistance while avoiding anything that might be actually painful. He felt a surge of warm camaraderie as she stumbled down to kneel, looking up at him plaintively. She said, “Please . . .”

“Just suck it,” he said, pushing her head toward his cock.

She opened her mouth obediently and took the tip in her lips. He let her lick it gingerly for a little while before gripping her hair in both hands and suddenly thrusting his dick deep into her mouth. Then he was fucking her throat, while she made helpless (fake) noises of discomfort, her head tipped back, her eyes desperate. Jared already began to feel the surging extra-hardness that meant he could come at any time. He pulled his mind back from the experience, forcing himself to concentrate on the exact tension of her hair in his hands, on the necessity of not hurting her. His dick sliding into her mouth, which was twisting over it, miming distress while exciting maximum sensation, felt too good, too intense. Out of the corner of his eye, he was watching in mounting anxiety for the director’s nod, releasing him to the next stage of the scene.

At last it came. He pulled out of Regina’s mouth roughly and ordered, “Get up.”

She looked up at him weakly, apparently confused.

“Get up,” he said more savagely. “I want to fuck you in the ass.”

At this, her eyes widened. He pulled her to her feet by her hair, although she anticipated the motion—maybe a little too much; it was going to look staged—and rose swiftly. In a second, he was manhandling her to the bed and turning her around. She lost her balance and fell forward onto it. She was whimpering, “I can’t! No one’s ever done that to me before!”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. He grabbed a tube of lubricant that was handily waiting on the nightstand, and began to grease his cock with one hand. As he looked down, he was almost distracted by the sight of her bright pink buttocks, faintly dusted with powder. Don’t laugh, he told himself. He paused only to spank her briskly a few times with a broad motion, bringing his arm down from a height so that it looked shockingly violent, then pulling the force out of the gesture at the last second so that the contact was light and contained. She yelped and twisted on the bed, her hands clutching the sheets. Then he was pressing his cock against her anus, feeling the tight resistance to him there. He said, “Yes, that’s nice. You’re gonna take my cock in your ass, baby.”

She began to moan as he pulled her ass cheeks apart and began to thrust into her slowly, muttering, “Good girl . . . that’s right . . .” Then he was fucking her, thrusting in with deep, forceful movements. She had fallen still, her body tensed against his thrusts. She began to moan and whimper, her hands clawing at the bedsheets, imitating the responses of a girl who felt violated but was struggling with the frenzied pleasures of her rebellious body. Her response—fake or real—turned him on still more, and he was struggling not to come, moving more slowly now, the sensations almost intolerably powerful. Then she made a subtle, sinuous movement with her whole body and let out a cry of what had to be sincere pleasure. It all joined together—the smooth, silky feel of her long hair in his hand, her sleek body twisting below him, and the maddening intensity of the feelings in his dick—and he pulled out just in time, shooting come over her rosy buttocks.

Then he pulled off the executioner’s hood, realizing as the cool air chilled his face that it had been stifling in there, and she turned back to him with a look of languid, postorgasmic surrender. Her eyes widened, and she said, “Fred! It’s you!”

The rest of the scene went off without a hitch, while the aroma of the cooking pizza drifted through the room. As he cradled Regina in his arms, mumbling sweet marital nothings to her, the relaxation of having come and the warm feeling of community that filled the whole group gave him a sense of sunny well-being. The scene ended; applause and hooting broke out in the room. Precious was making the boa nod encouragingly. In her own voice, she called out, “Genius! Champagne for everyone! You’re both heroes!” Jared and Regina were grinning and even laughing at nothing in particular as they wandered off to find their street clothes.

But as he pulled on his jeans, he looked up and saw Amanda watching from the kitchen. She had her arms crossed and was shaking her head at a girl who was offering her a cupcake. Her face was set in what looked, at this distance, like misery. He hurried over to her, zipping his jeans as he went, still grinning with the momentum of good feeling. “Amanda! Baby! How long have you been here?”

The misery cleared from her face, replaced by an expression of uncertainty. She said softly, looking around nervously to make sure nobody else could hear her, “That was so strange.”

He shrugged, immediately feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah, you know . . . it is kind of fake, but . . .”

“Fake. I guess. So you don’t enjoy it?”

He tried to explain to her, while the laughing and pouring of champagne went on all around them, how it was enjoyable on the one hand, but really a job on the other hand. How it was sex, but still wasn’t exactly like other sex. How. . . . But all the while, he was faintly embarrassed about having a relationship talk in the midst of his happy, decadent friends. And, disturbingly, he was looking at Amanda’s lovely, disapproving face and feeling—nothing. He couldn’t remember why he’d thought he loved her. Now all he felt for her was a distinct, weary longing that she would just lighten up. Or better still, leave him alone.

“Oh, wow!” said Zaza. And then . . .”

“I went away for the weekend with her,” Jared said grimly. “But I didn’t ask her to marry me, of course. And we carried on for a while, but it was never the same. And the whole time, I felt so guilty. Even when she left me, I felt guilty.”

Zaza thought about this, her hand still absently stroking his chest. She was fighting an irrational surge of jealousy of all these girls Jared had fucked. He had fucked them and not her—not fair! She pushed the thought away and said, “But wasn’t that, kind of, because she didn’t get the porn world?”

Jared shrugged. “Not really. The problem was that I didn’t know her. I’d fallen in love with her, supposedly. I almost got engaged to her, which would have been a real disaster. But it was like I was in love with her because I didn’t know her.”

“Oh.” Zaza frowned. “So you’re saying when you know a girl, you stop caring about her?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. But that’s what I’m afraid of.”

Zaza considered this, stroking his chest with her hand absently. At last, she said, “But fucking them didn’t make the difference, did it?”

“What are you saying?” Jared narrowed his eyes at her.

“Well, even if you hadn’t had sex with them . . .”

“Zaza,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t worry so much. Look, I promise you I’ll have sex with you someday, if you still want to when the time comes. But I want to know what kind of sex it is when it happens. I think if we do it now, I’ll be swept up in some romantic dream. . . .”

“Oh, but that sounds so wonderful!”

“Trust me,” he said flatly, “it isn’t so wonderful when it turns out to be fake.”

Zaza looked speculatively at his handsome face, still a little drunk just on his proximity. His eyes were hazel, fringed with thick black eyelashes. He had faint purplish dark circles under his eyes that were possibly the sexiest things she had ever seen. “It’s actually really cool that you want to get to know me,” she said. “It means that you want to spend time with me, except I’m worried that you won’t even want to sleep with me for fun then.”

He was smiling at her in a way that made her heart do flips. He said, “Don’t worry about that. Unless I get hit by a truck, there is no way I’m not going to want to sleep with you.”

“And you won’t get hit by a truck?”

“I won’t get hit by a truck until we sleep together. I promise.”

“You’ll look both ways.”

“Promise.”

Zaza leaned forward and kissed him again, her eyes closing by themselves. She had meant it to be brisk and affectionate, but when her lips touched his, a wave of heat swept through her and five minutes passed before she sat up again, flushed and breathless. She said, “Oh, God. Can we just spend every minute together until we’re ready? How long do you think it will take?”

He smiled at her, looking as lovelorn as she felt. “If we spent every minute together, I don’t know how I could keep my resolve.”

“God.” She sighed. “I never waited for anyone before. But I’d be happy doing anything with you. Even waiting, when I’m absolutely dying to sleep with you, and I can’t wait.”

They were smiling at each other again. He said, “So, do you want to start getting to know each other?”

“Oh, of course. You mean, we can go on a date?”

“I think that’s what people do.”

Zaza’s mind was a jumble of half-baked thoughts and overheated feelings. She felt like she wanted to get to know him every day for the rest of her life. She said, “That’s about the best idea I ever heard.”

THIRTEEN

Ralph walked into the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere with a feeling of foreboding. He had been trying all week—in between seemingly a thousand meetings and lunches—to figure out what was going on in his life and what he could do about it. For long stretches, he’d even thought that he was experiencing an outbreak of insanity.

A man spends too many years alone. He has no serious relationships with women, he works sixteen-hour days, and his only friends are business colleagues. Then one day the man reads an interview with a porn star in a glossy magazine. He becomes transfixed by her picture. He reads the interview again. He goes to the computer and reads another five or six interviews with her before picking up the original magazine and spending two hours staring at the woman’s photograph.

It was a photo of Emily sitting cross-legged on a sheepskin rug in front of an empty and scrubbed-clean fireplace. She was wearing a T-shirt and underpants and her black hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder. She was smiling with a charming reticence. The caption of the photo was: I’D STILL RATHER BE A VETERINARIAN. And for some reason, the girl in the picture was obviously the sweetest, most desirable person in the world.

But she really is the sweetest person in the world, he told himself. Even if my reasons for believing it were crazy, I was right.

As he approached the bank of elevators, he steeled himself. Today he was meeting the least sweet person in the world, Valerie LeBlanc. He couldn’t be distracted and dreamy for this meeting, above all meetings. It was alarming enough that, just as he was planning to call her and ask to meet, she called him and asked to meet. More terrifying still was what she had said on the phone: “Ralph, I think it’s time for us to get closer again.”

When he’d asked what she meant, she had repeated the directions to the hotel and said good-bye. As often happened, at the last moment, her imperious, angry voice seemed awkward and shy. He always imagined her sitting at the phone afterward, cursing herself for all the rotten things she’d said. It was what she’d been like as a teenager: furious at him one minute, furious at herself the next.

The elevator was glass, and shot up the side of the building so that he could see the whole East Side spread out beneath him. As he often did to amuse himself, he looked out at the city and thought, Someday, all this will be yours, Ralph Anderman. Every year, more of it was his, and the joke acquired a stronger flavor of irony. It reminded him that he, like most people, had never expected his dreams to really come true. If he had, he would have had better dreams—or so he liked to think.

Now he stepped out into the corridor of the twenty-second floor and followed the signs to room 2215, where Valerie had said to meet her. Up till now they’d always met at her apartment—the apartment he’d bought for her and Ilana years ago, where he’d spent weekends at fi rst with his daughter, playing little-kid video games with her that featured cartoon puppies and raccoons faced with charmingly simple tasks. He would pretend to get everything wrong so Ilana could scream delightedly, “Daddy! You’re not ta-rying!”

A wave of anger came over him, and he paused in front of the hotel room door and took three deep breaths. Still, he kept remembering Valerie’s coded threats to him over the past few weeks. The first came when he got the invitation to be on In Depth. He had been sitting staring at the letter, wondering if there was any way the producers could have known about the three-month-old magazine that he still kept on his coffee table, the late-night fantasies and Internet searches. Of course there wasn’t, and he fleetingly considered doing it, his mind racing through the consequences and the dizzying idea of Emily, when the phone rang. It had been Valerie, saying, “Ralph, I heard something that disturbed me at work today. . . .” She told him that the idea of him coming so close to her work life—which she had sacrificed everything to maintain—made her very uncomfortable. Of course, he had to agree that it would be bad for his career, as well.

Nonetheless, he went through three meetings with the In Depth team, including two at which he met Emily herself. At all of them, he expressed polite skepticism about participating, but not enough to end the process. Emily in person was exactly as he’d imagined her. Her effect on him was strange; it was like meeting a person from a dream he couldn’t clearly remember. When she spoke, he was thinking, Yes, she’s exactly like that; that’s exactly right. And he felt strangely comforted and excited at the same time. At that point he got an e-mail from Valerie.

It read, “I can see no reason for your pursuing a relationship with Emily Lister, unless it is to get at me. There is no point in arguing about this further. I will use every means at my disposal to put a stop to this, including making public our previous relationship. I hope the prospect of being publicly exposed as a man who raped and impregnated a fifteen-year-old girl will help you to see sense.”

On a couple of previous occasions, Valerie had used the word “rape” to describe what had happened between them, but never so baldly. On those occasions, when challenged, she had said that of course she meant statutory rape. This time, it was clear to Ralph that she was threatening to spread a version of the story in which he assaulted her. It was unclear how seriously he should take that threat. He didn’t want to let Valerie dictate his life, but he had to admit to himself that his infatuation was probably a symptom of loneliness rather than a real attachment. He should give it up, find someone who wasn’t connected to Valerie so closely, and carry on with his life.

But he’d found himself at XTV one more time, asking Emily out to lunch—as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He took her home; had incredible, amazing, wonderful, perfect sex with her; fell squarely and hopelessly in love; said good-bye to her . . . and couldn’t say good-bye to her.

Now he had been standing in the hotel corridor for five minutes taking deep breaths—angry, hard, deep breaths. I’ll explain it to Valerie. I’ll tell her it’s too late. Threats are one thing, but she won’t pull the roof down on her own head. She’s too much of a survivor for that.

In a last-ditch bid to calm down, he made himself picture Valerie as a pregnant fifteen-year-old, puffy-faced and perpetually frightened. She had always seemed frantic in those days, as if she was scrabbling for some purchase on life, anything to hold on to. It had just been her bad luck that he was the thing that presented itself. He’d had no idea how to be responsible for another person at that age. . . . She really hadn’t changed. Her facade was more developed—that was all.

By the time he knocked on the door, he had himself back under control again. Whatever happened, he would be kind to Valerie, as he’d always tried to be. On some level, none of this was her fault.

When she opened the door, he was startled by her resemblance to his mental picture of her teenage self. She was wearing running pants and a T-shirt, and her face was flushed and a little drawn, as if she’d been having trouble sleeping. “Ralph,” she said. “You’re late.”

“Hi, Valerie,” he said. He followed her into the hotel room, which was small but grandly furnished, with a four-poster bed, a mammoth teak bureau, and a matching red leather sofa and armchair by the window. The curtains were striped red and white, and gathered in various complicated ways around a large picture window—the sort of curtain that always reminded Ralph of Renaissance clothing. He went to sit in the armchair. Valerie sat opposite on the sofa, looking preoccupied.

She said, in a quiet and grave voice that was utterly unlike her usual steely manner, “I have to ask you for a favor.”

He was oddly touched. It was so long since Valerie had shown any human side to him. Perhaps she was finally coming out of her trance of rage at the world. He said, “Of course. I’d like to do anything for you that I can. You know that.”

Oddly to him, she blushed. “I was thinking about that,” she said. “I guess I never gave you credit for all the help you’ve given me.”

“It was the least I could do.”

She looked at him, seeming to weigh something in her mind. At last she said, “I guess there’s no point apologizing. What happened happened.”

He shrugged. “I constantly apologize. I think it helps.”

“I can’t apologize,” she said shortly. Then the blush returned, and she looked away out the window. He was studying her face, trying to imagine what the favor could be. Was she going to ask him to give up Emily as a favor now?

Then she turned to him and said, in a voice so faint it was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry.” Her face was tense and pale, and her arms were crossed tightly over her chest, as if she was freezing cold.

He said softly, “Apology accepted.”

Then her eyes welled up with tears. It was the last thing he’d expected, coming here. Instinctively, he moved over to the sofa and put his arms around her. She was sobbing on his shoulder, with her arms still crossed, shutting her body away from him. It was eerily like a scene from thirteen years before, when she used to have crying fits and threaten to kill herself. He found himself stroking her head and mumbling, “It’s all right. It’s all right . . .” although he had no idea what “it” was, never mind whether it was all right.

Gradually, she calmed down. The sobs subsided. She uncrossed her arms and put them around him cautiously. Feeling her hold him so shyly, he squeezed her and said, “I’m here for you, Valerie. What’s the favor? Is that what’s wrong?”

She nodded against his chest. “I don’t know if I can ask you.”

“Please just tell me. I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”

For a minute she was silent. In his arms, she was surprisingly tiny. He was surprised to feel a wave of love for her. He had known her for so long, and in some ways she was closer to him than anyone else in the world. There was even a way in which her loneliness was his loneliness; the same event had isolated them both. Ralph at least had Ilana, and he could never entirely regret her birth. But Valerie had started out too alienated, too broken, to ever be a mother to her own daughter. Ilana only reminded her of her inadequacies as a human being.

Valerie suddenly shifted, moving to look him in the eyes. She said, “I wanted to ask you to sleep with me.”

He froze. As she said it, he realized his body had been responding to her. She was an attractive young woman in his arms, and he had been faintly aware of her breasts pressed against him, the softness of her hair. He said uncomfortably, “Why would you want that?”

Her eyes seemed to lose all their courage. She was actually trembling as she said, “What happened with us . . . I thought if we tried again, it might help somehow.”

“You want to go out with me?”

“No! No, I wasn’t thinking of that. . . .” She looked away, obviously embarrassed and frustrated.

He tried desperately to think. Valerie had publicly been a virgin for all these years, but he’d never really taken it that seriously. He’d assumed it was an empty publicity stunt, the way a gay actor marries a starlet for the benefit of the public. Somehow he’d assumed that she had clandestine affairs that were like his—casual things that lasted for two or three weeks. Now he suddenly realized that she couldn’t have done that consistently all these years. It would have leaked out; everyone would know she wasn’t really a virgin by now.

“Valerie, are you trying to tell me you haven’t slept with anyone since then?”

“I can’t! Don’t you understand? I’m scared.”

“You wouldn’t get pregnant again. I mean, you know better than that now.” He shook his head. “Valerie—”

“I don’t know why. You don’t understand.” She was trembling again, her face turned away from him. “I thought . . . you’re really the only person I know.”

The full tragedy of that statement hit him with a force he hadn’t anticipated. Valerie, the bane of his existence, the woman who spoke to him mainly in threats and demands—had no one else. He held her close, trying to think what to do. Would sleeping with her be a betrayal of Emily? But Emily was a porn star; she would be sleeping with another man next Wednesday. Furthermore, her infidelity would be broadcast to millions of homes. Under those circumstances, it was hard to know what the rules were.

He said softly, “If that’s really what you want, Valerie—of course I’ll do it.”

“Oh, wow,” she said into his neck. “Thank you.”

Then, suddenly, she was kissing him. Her lips were soft and warm, which surprised him, although of course it shouldn’t have surprised him. Weren’t all lips soft and warm? As her body moved against him, his body began to awaken, a fugitive electricity passing through his groin. Fucking Valerie—of course the possibility had always been there. Perhaps that repressed desire was even part of their mutual hostility.

Still, he had to tell himself to touch her breast, and as he did it, he was filled with a strange misgiving. He was breaking a personal taboo created thirteen years ago and always observed. It was again surprising to him that her breast was full, soft, in every way a desirable female breast. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could feel the rounded shape of it, the still-soft peak of her nipple. His cock stirred now in his pants, stiffening and straightening. He was getting hard kissing Valerie. Although the idea was strange, there was something about it that felt right. They were coming full circle. Somehow it felt as if this might heal the rift between them after all these years.

He began to undress her gently, and she allowed it, raising her arms and shifting her hips to accommodate him with a brave look on her face. When she was finally nude, she sat up straight and took a deep breath, seeming to regain her confidence. He remembered suddenly that this was what she did for a living. The traumatized near virgin was a nude spokesmodel on TV. He said, “You’re so beautiful, Val,” hoping to add to her comfort; being beautiful was her stock in trade.

But a shadow passed over her face. She looked away from him. “Then why didn’t you ever want to sleep with me again? All that time.”

He almost blurted out, I’m not that important to you. I can’t be. But he mastered himself and said, “We had a lot of bad history. You know that.”

“It didn’t have to be bad.” She looked at him again, her blue eyes touchingly young and vulnerable.

He knew if they kept on talking, the sex would get derailed. So he said, “Stay where you are,” and got down on his knees next to the sofa. “Just don’t move.”

He started by stroking her thighs, moving his palms from the knee up to the tender softness where her legs joined. He was letting his palms graze the skin lightly, waiting for her to begin to feel it instead of bracing herself against what might come next. At last, her muscles relaxed. Her legs parted ever so slightly, and he took that as the cue to move upward, stroking her belly now. Then he let his fingers travel very slowly up the lower curve of her breasts, until one fingertip rested on each nipple. Moving those fingers in delicate, slow circles, he excited her nipples into hardness. He was rewarded by hearing her breath come faster; her lips had parted and she was breathing through her mouth, her eyes fixed with that youthful, pleading expression on his face.

He bent his head to kiss her on the knee, then moved his mouth up her thigh, bringing his hands down to gently part her legs. He kissed and licked her inner thigh then, tasting the soft flesh there that was impossibly smooth despite her deep Hollywood tan. Of course, her pussy was entirely hairless—that was part of her job—but in his mind it was associated with the virgin thing. Valerie the Untouched; her immaculate skin and hairless pubic area made her seem like a pure creature he was about to defile. He guided her legs farther open and could smell the dark aroma of her cunt, see the pink complications of the inner labia. As she realized what he was doing, she tensed again.

So he started by kissing her mound of Venus lovingly, patiently, little chaste kisses intended to reassure her. When she relaxed, he moved down to kiss the lips of her pussy, trying to gauge by the tiny reactions of her muscles how he was affecting her. When at last he ran his tongue over her inner labia, she moaned longingly, and he knew it was going to be all right. He let his tongue play lightly over her clitoris then, and now the tension in her thighs was from mounting pleasure. Caressing her thighs lightly, he licked her clitoris, up and down, the sweet-salty taste of her seeming like a benediction of what he was doing. When he slipped his tongue inside her for a second, she squirmed and gasped. He followed the tongue with a finger and felt the contractions in her vagina beginning. He wondered if Valerie had ever had an orgasm. It was impossible to believe that that hurried, graceless sex they’d had when she was fifteen had made her come. Most girls would have experimented with masturbation, but Valerie was such a strange person, as angry at herself as she was at other people.

With this in his mind, he set to work more passionately, alternating between teasing her clit with the tip of his tongue and then letting his tongue flatten over it and twist back and forth. She was moaning steadily now with each breath, lying back with her legs spread to give him full access to her. He spread her pussy lips with his fingers to intensify the sensation as he tickled her cunt all over with his tongue. Time seemed to stop while he imagined her pleasure, concentrating on each caress, half experiencing her responses in his own nerves. Her wetness was making him slightly crazy, his cock straining in his pants. And then I’ll fuck her, he kept thinking. Everything will be all right.

At last she began to lift her hips off the sofa, straining to find that conclusive sensation, the final release. He licked her harder and worked two fingers into her cunt, moving them gently to deepen the feeling. It worked; she suddenly stiffened, a shrill cry coming from her mouth, and her cunt exploded in a hundred fierce contractions.

Even as she fell back on the sofa, her limbs loose, her face dazzled, he was pulling down his pants and putting his cock against her crotch. She looked at him, baffled at first. She was smiling.

He said, breathing hard, “Is it okay? Are you ready?”

Then she realized and her face went blank. In a frail whisper, she said, “Yes. That’s what I wanted. Please.”

He thought of embracing her, but changed his mind. Instead, he reached out and took her hand in his, pressing it lovingly. At the same time, he guided his cock into her, the wetness of her cunt receiving him easily even as its tightness resisted the invasion. She cried out faintly as he pressed it all the way in, and caught his breath. His cock was throbbing, almost raw with the need for release. He couldn’t stop himself from fucking her then; he was fucking her even as he told himself to stop, to take breath, to ask if she was all right. He was fucking her, the sweet friction of his cock in her molten pussy maddening him. He was fucking into her ongoing contractions—could she still be coming?—his cock aflame and iron hard. On one level, she was a beautiful blonde, lying back with her legs open to let him do whatever he liked. On another level, she was Valerie, whom he pitied and hated and feared. But fucking her felt so natural that he realized he must have been wanting to do it all along, subconsciously. His pity and hate and fear must have all been keener from the strangled urge to tear her clothes off and fuck her into oblivion.

His orgasm came suddenly and so powerfully that his vision went black for a moment while the impulses tore through him. He was freeing years of repressed desire and hate in a single long blow of ecstasy. He cried out and Valerie was crying out with him, her hand convulsing in his.

Then he was lying on her breast, muttering, “Thank you, beautiful Valerie. Thank you.”

She began to stroke his hair shyly, saying, “No, I asked you. . . . I should thank you. . . .”

He said, teasing, “So, are you still going to be a virgin now?”

To his alarm, she stiffened under him. She said, “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Maybe we should both get dressed.”

Then she was pushing him away. A second later, she was standing over him, pulling her clothes on hurriedly.

“Valerie, I was just kidding,” he said, mystified. “I don’t care what you say on TV. I know it’s just a fantasy, not a lie. Come back.”

She said, “Pull up your pants, Ralph.” Her voice was tense but not angry, as he’d feared. He got to his feet and did as she said, wondering what was going on. When they were both dressed, she sat back down on the sofa as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. He sat back on the armchair, his nerves in disarray, the thrill and intimacy of the minute before still present as a sleepy confusion in his limbs.

She began formally, “I had a speech prepared for you. I was so sure you were going to say no—to spite me, if for no other reason.”

He was about to object, but swallowed it. “I guess that’s fair. I might have reacted that way.”

“Thanks,” she said, and her face softened a little. “I don’t know why I never said this when it might have . . . Well, it would never have done any good. This is the speech, in a few sentences.” She took a deep breath and looked out the window, speaking as if to herself. “I only kept Ilana because I was in love with you. I thought you would eventually see . . . I thought I could keep you.”

“I knew—”

“Don’t. You didn’t know. You thought I was crazy.”

There was a pause. At last Ralph said evenly, “Yes. I thought you were crazy.”

She said slowly, sadly, “I didn’t think about having a child at all. When I ran away, I should have stayed away. My mistake was trying to be a mother at all.”

He said softly, “It’s true. You weren’t good with Ilana.”

Valerie made a face. “I’m not ready to feel sorry for her. I don’t understand anything about it. I don’t feel connected to her at all. Maybe if I’d stayed at the beginning . . . but after I gave birth, I couldn’t stop crying. I just wanted to undo it all.”

“You’re right. You should have told me.”

“I’m making the whole speech,” she said, with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “This is awful. Listen, Ralph.” She turned to him again, her blue eyes tense. Her hair was disordered and her brow glistened with sweat. She said, “I want you to do me one more favor, and then I’ll be out of your life. Your life and Ilana’s.”

He took a deep breath. He tried to focus on Ilana, what she would need in years to come. Nothing came to him; every choice seemed impossible. Children needed mothers, but Valerie had never really been a mother. Probably she never would be. At last he said, “You might change your mind.”

Valerie’s eyes filled with a dull despair. “You mean I might feel something for her someday. But then we wouldn’t have these problems, would we?”

“No.”

“I’d be a different person,” she said. “Don’t wait for me to be a different person. Help me now.”

“What do you need me to do?” A chill ran down his spine, and he realized he was still afraid of Valerie.

She said with a calm that seemed superficial, covering he couldn’t tell what dark emotion, “I need you to be my first. Officially. I need you to fuck me on television. Like you did just now.”

Her insistence struck him funny at first, and he struggled not to smile. Laughing at Valerie would be a terrible mistake at this moment. Then a sudden fury gripped him as he thought, She was manipulating me. This was all a setup.

He found himself saying, in a cold and hateful voice he didn’t recognize, “I can’t do that. I’ve told you.”

Her demeanor changed instantly. In the blink of an eye, she was the Valerie he remembered: cold, angry, ugly in some indefinable way that had nothing to do with her physical features. The idea that he’d just made love to her made his skin crawl.

She said, “You have to do it. It’s absolutely necessary.”

He said, “It ends here, Valerie. You can go fuck yourself.”

Then he was on his feet, a blind rage making his movements uncoordinated. He was stumbling toward the door, barely able to contain the urge to turn and hit her in the face. At the same time, he was already sick at himself for losing his temper. He hadn’t said any of the things he needed to say. He hadn’t even brought up Emily. Valerie had run the whole show, gotten him to . . .

As he opened the door, he turned and said, in the calmest voice he could muster, “I came here to tell you something, too. I’m in love with Emily Lister. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I advise you not to try.”

He left and shut the door hard, heading off with the image in his mind of his last view of Valerie—tears running down her face, crumpled and small and needing something from him that made him hate her—again.

FOURTEEN

Zaza blinked at the invitation. The lettering was script, embossed in gold, and it was actually hard to read; she had to angle it away from the light. It said:

Babylona Parris Requests the pleasure of your company from April 22 to April 24 at Schloss Dreimöse, Schwanzwald, Germany, to celebrate her thirty-ninth birthday in the company of some friends. Transportation will be provided to and from the Schloss on Air Force X for partygoers traveling from New York.

On the reverse of the card, a schedule of events was listed, beginning with a breakfast at eight a.m. local time on the twenty-second, continuing through a six-hour televised portion (All revenues to go Zemblan Famine Relief!) and ending with “frolics” from six p.m. to late on the twenty-fourth. Most of the events were subtitled DRESS OPTIONAL.

But, most thrilling and confusing of all was the slip of paper that had been enclosed with the invitation. This was written in pencil. It said simply, PLEASE SEE ME, BABYLONA’S OFFICE, 1 P.M. TODAY—MICHAEL TYLER.

It couldn’t be anything bad, Zaza told herself. If it was bad they wouldn’t have invited her to the party. Unless they had invited everyone to the party, including people who were being fired in disgrace. But another part of her mind was convinced it was about the six-hour televised portion. What if they wanted her to participate? Would Jared mind? Would she mind? What about all the starving Zemblan children? Zaza had always felt a kinship with anyone or -thing whose name started with Z.

Worst of all: It was already twelve fifteen and she was still half-dressed in Jared’s dressing room, trying to recover from the closest scrape they’d had yet with actual sexual intercourse. (In the two weeks of their relationship, sexual intercourse had begun to seem like a fabulous beast, seldom seen in the wild, that she was stalking through the jungles of Jared’s scruples. She no longer dared to even think the word “fucking,” because it sent her into a tailspin of yearning and frustration. Sometimes being loved was a little bit of a liability, she was discovering.) She realized she was getting hot thinking about fucking again—fucking anyone at all, under any circumstances. Well, it wasn’t entirely not Jared’s fault, even if she respected his reasons. And they weren’t sworn to fidelity, though sleeping with someone else before sleeping with Jared seemed a little much. But this was work! And respecting his reasons didn’t mean she agreed with them, or was happy about them, or cared at all, or could live through the next twenty-four hours without . . . Well, they were almost there.

In their first week of dating, Jared had kept the brakes on with such determination that it was almost insulting. They could only meet every other day, and then they had to be in a public place. There was a good-night kiss—period. Granted, the good-night kiss sometimes lasted for an hour. But it was still a kiss, on a sidewalk, with people passing by them, staring curiously.

The second week began to get out of control. First Jared let her come to pick him up at his dressing room, meaning that they were sometimes two hours late for their dinner reservation. They were meeting every day; by the end of the week they were meeting all day and all night. She would stagger home at two a.m. with a button missing from her blouse and her hair in a wonderful disarray, with carpet lint all over the back of her dress. Then she would lie in bed, having utterly forgotten how to sleep, and rerun the day in her mind, embellishing it with all the sexual intercourse that should have happened.

This morning was the first morning they’d woken up together. They had ended the evening at his apartment, which was a surprisingly modest one-bedroom in the East Village, with a bathtub in the living room and a radiator that clicked and hissed all night as if muttering to itself. At one o’clock, Zaza was lying in his arms, naked to the waist, in a trance of helpless love-and-someday-sexual-intercourse. For hours she had been tracking the course of erections against her thigh: on, off, on, off. When she began to feel the slight movements that meant he was disengaging from her, preparation for making her leave (well, not exactly making her, but she could hardly insist on staying), she felt a wave of self-pity mingled with utter physical exhaustion. She pictured her own bed and the ceiling over it, which she would be staring at again for weary hours. A second later, she was fast asleep.

She woke up well-rested and found him beside her, still in his clothes, holding her hand in his sleep. Zaza had possibly never felt quite so pleased with herself as at that moment. Falling asleep—it was so simple! And when she kissed him, he woke slowly and began to kiss her back, slipping from sleep back into almost-lovemaking without any transition. They’d had breakfast together and come to the studio together, holding hands. She was entering a new world where everything was exactly as she wanted it, down to the bathtub in the living room where she could watch Jared taking a shower every morning after the first sexual intercourse of the day.

Now this. Zaza got dressed incredibly slowly, having trouble making her mind focus on the simple tasks of buttoning, putting on shoes, combing her hair. She knew who Michael was—Michael Tyler, Babylona’s assistant and lifelong crony, a former minor-league baseball player who had been swept up into her entourage when Babylona was just starting out. He was famous for never having been her lover, which was such a feat of willpower, given Babylona’s character, that fifteen years after his appearance on the scene, people still had long conversations about his motives. More remarkable, possibly, was his ability to continue in the post of right-hand man for all those years. There had been a few defections and dramatic returns, which all occasioned storms of gossip. When he started an affair with Babylona’s friend Friselle Belesci, everyone was shocked. When he appeared at a film premiere with a beautiful radiologist, rumors of his impending marriage swept through the porn world. By simply having a normal number of relationships in a normal way, he had gained a reputation for being inaccessible and mysterious.

Jared had said about Michael that he was not only smart, but he was one of those rare people who made decisions based on intelligent thought. Since Jared was obviously thinking of his own decision to take it slow with Zaza, she had conceived an immediate dislike of Michael. Making decisions based on intelligent thought was clearly pernicious.

Now she checked herself in the mirror, amazed as always by the uninspiring reflection there. How could Jared have chosen her? She was still the same skinny nothing, even in the fluffy pink Marc Jacobs dress Jared had bought for her this week. Her red hair made her look even paler than she was; her blue eyes seemed almost colorless in this light. She remembered how, when she was a child, she’d always been afraid that she was turning into an albino. When she finally discovered that it was something people were born with, she’d been both relieved and disappointed. At least if she were turning into an albino, someday she would have been blond.

It was twelve forty-five. Somehow it had taken half an hour to put on a dress and comb her hair. She set off down the corridor to Babylona’s office with mingled trepidation and excitement. It had been a whole two weeks since she’d had an actual job at XTV. Was this going to be a new assignment, or, as her paranoid imagination kept insisting, a complaint about the fact that she was on the premises almost every day, when she didn’t have a job right now—and never would again?

Despite what was now weeks of experience with XTV hiring policies, she wasn’t prepared for just how good-looking Michael Tyler was. He was an African-American man in his late thirties who could have just as easily been twenty-five. He had the kind of chiseled features and glowing skin that Zaza had always assumed were a trick of fashion photography—some combination of makeup and lighting that made people look unfathomably gorgeous. Even Jared looked like a human being in person. Jared was human handsome, not this-person-is-from-another-planet handsome. Michael was breathtakingly handsome. Even being in the same room with him, it was hard to believe he was real.

But what was most amazing was that he was Leonard Falwell. He was the man who’d invited her to work at XTV, who’d accosted her in a bar three weeks and a lifetime ago.

Michael was sitting at Babylona’s desk, eating edamame out of a plastic container while talking on the phone. He was wearing an un-tucked white business shirt, rumpled at the bottom where it had recently been tucked. There were papers scattered everywhere, and he had the air of someone who was being driven insane by other people’s incompetence. At first she didn’t understand what he was saying into the phone. Then she realized that she really didn’t understand it; he was speaking in French. Even in a foreign language, she could glean that he was telling someone what they had done wrong and how stupid they were for doing it. At the end, he slammed the phone down with a gesture of perfect physical confidence. She would have sworn that he’d calculated exactly the impact the receiver made as it crashed down. That gesture flowed naturally into his rising from his chair and extending a hand to her. “Zaza,” he said with a smile full of perfect white teeth, “so glad to see you again.”

“Oh. Hi. Nice to see you, too,” she said, and found herself sitting awkwardly in the chair he indicated. He sat again and regarded her, resting his chin on one fist. Even the fist was handsome. Life was astoundingly unfair.

He said, “I’m sorry for the phony name. If I could explain it, rest assured that you wouldn’t be offended by the explanation. But you’re looking great. You look so much . . .” He stopped himself and shook his head.

“I know I look better on film,” Zaza said apologetically. “You don’t have to be polite. I mean, I’m totally aware I’m kind of weedy-looking.”

Michael smiled, and again Zaza was distracted by the perfect teeth. Even in New York’s world of orthodontic perfection, these were unusual. They went beyond fake-looking into CGI-like. He said, “Not at all. You’re very pretty. You may not believe me, but perhaps you’ll feel more confident when I tell you that Ms. Parris wants you to take Valerie LeBlanc’s place as anchor of Pleasure News, starting in October.”

Zaza sat, her mind going in circles. This was the moment when she should be thanking him for another bit part. Or else apologetically promising to keep clear of the studio. This was too much for her to take in.

He went on. “Of course, this isn’t going to be made public yet, and I’d appreciate it if you would keep it to yourself for now. No one knows about this offer apart from Ms. Parris, me, and now you. I’m sure you can understand why discretion on your part is crucial.”

She managed to say, “Oh, no! Valerie doesn’t know?”

“It’s a management decision,” he said smoothly. “When it’s appropriate for her to know, she’ll know.”

Zaza sat in a stew of doubt and excitement. Or course, it wasn’t porn proper, and she’d just begun to believe she had a special talent for sex scenes. (Jared had said she did, though he might be being nice.) Presenting Pleasure News was completely different from actually playing in sex scenes. It was just like being an anchorperson on any news show, really. Of course, she would be naked, and she could hardly see why anyone would want to see her naked. Naked while being ravaged by two guys, maybe, but just naked?

Meanwhile, Michael was explaining to her the duties involved in being the anchorperson on Pleasure News. She would have a production team, and a new person would be hired to take over some of the writing of the items, so that she would only have to do the news reading at first. Later she could branch out into sourcing her own stories and writing them up. She would have to become an expert on the sex industry, and he would advise her to start doing some research now; she would begin receiving a salary for the position in a month’s time. In August, someone from the production team would partner with her. . . .

It all began to blur in her head into a litany of impossibilities. At last, she cleared her throat and said, “Well, it sounds . . . great. But why me? There must be a lot of other people who would know more than me. Like, everyone here.”

He smiled at her enigmatically. “Sometimes Babylona takes a special interest in someone. There’s no point second-guessing her decisions. So far, she’s always been right.”

“Oh, but you think she’s gone crazy this time, I’ll bet,” Zaza said. “Wow. I don’t have any idea about reporting, but that’s barely scratching the surface of the things I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to be negative, but . . .”

“Well, why don’t you take a week to think about it? And we can talk about it at the birthday celebration. You are coming?”

“Oh yes. Yes, I guess I am. I mean, if you say I should.”

He smiled again, this time with an unmistakable affection in his eyes. “You should.”

“Okay.”

He rose from his seat then, and she got up automatically, nervously. He put out his hand and she put her hand out, expecting him to shake it, but he just held it, smiling at her. For a terrible, wonderful moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. If he did, should she push him away? He was gorgeous; she was dying for sexual intercourse. And he was her boss. She had never liked saying no to men, anyway, because it would hurt their feelings, and plus, she wanted to fuck them.

But Michael just stood holding her hand and looking at her. She felt her cheeks burning. Of course he didn’t intend to fuck her. It was a business meeting. She was getting a little too frustrated; Jared absolutely had to give in soon.

Then he said, in an offhand tone, “I don’t suppose your aunt ever mentions me.”

Zaza flinched. “My aunt? Why would she—Do you know my aunt?”

“A little.” He let go of her hand. “I suppose she wouldn’t mention me. Never mind.”

“But how do you know my aunt? I mean, she doesn’t even know I’m working here. Does she? How—”

At that moment, his phone rang, and he turned to it swiftly, waving good-bye to Zaza over his shoulder. As he began to shout at another person, this time in English, Zaza faltered and finally turned to leave.

Nothing made any sense. The entire encounter had been like a stupid dream, the kind that was so jumbled it wasn’t worth remembering. Part of her wanted to treat it that way—just forget it had ever happened and go on with her life. Dealing with Jared was confusing enough already.

But as she headed back to Jared’s dressing room to wait for him to get back from his production meeting, she realized there was a new confidence in her step. Michael had been right. For the first time in her life, she felt completely, absolutely pretty.

FIFTEEN

As Emily walked from the limo-service car into Teterboro Airport, she immediately spotted the XTV crowd in the windows, all in some designer version of half undress, waving wine bottles and champagne glasses and laughing in a way that was intensely visible. Part of her longed to be with them, to have a glass of wine and join in some sensual oblivion in which everyone used fucking like kissing on the cheek, as the basic unit of affection. It was the way she always felt; then she would feel a deep reticence that kept her on the outskirts of that scene. Only a few times, on particularly drunken or miserable nights, had she fully entered into the spirit of Babylona’s menagerie. Those times had been deliriously fun while they went on, but left her feeling lonely and exhausted the next morning. Now she dawdled, waiting for the group to head out through the security check before going up to the doors. She was too preoccupied to feign hilarity right now.

The basic problem was Ralph, or Ralph’s silence. They had had two weeks of perfect communion, in which they had gone so far into their shared insanity or heaven—or whatever the right word was for being more in love than anyone had ever been before—that they had even begun to make serious plans about moving in together. Then he’d gone to visit his daughter two days ago, and dropped off the face of the earth. For the first day, she’d just assumed that he hadn’t had a moment alone. She woke up on the second day with the awful conviction that she would never hear from him again. Ten hours later, she was ready to assume that she’d been right.

Ralph had decided that his daughter’s welfare was more important, that he couldn’t risk turning Valerie against him altogether. Any other explanation she came up with felt contrived and flimsy. The worst part of it was, she couldn’t blame him. All their plans, she realized now, had avoided the twin issues of Valerie and Ilana. Ralph hadn’t wanted to talk about Valerie at all. When the subject came up, he said that they could worry about that later. He had said something like, “I’m working it out.” And Emily had been all too ready to let it go. She hadn’t wanted to think about it because, in the end, she knew what it meant.

Worst of all, Valerie was going to be on the plane. She would have to spend the eight-hour flight in a tiny cabin with Valerie, pretending everything was all right.

She made herself focus on an airplane coming in to land, the lights surreally bright against a dimming sunset, the silhouette of the plane dark and ominous. I’ll get in the plane and I’ll have a drink. I’ll sit with Jared. I’m going on vacation to a castle with all my friends. Still, there was a weight of tears behind her eyes, and she picked up her suitcase again, deciding to go for a five-minute walk.

At that moment, the glass doors to the check-in area opened and Friselle Belesci came out in a black silk gown split up to the hip, carrying a massive tumbler full of white wine. Her beauty was, as always, slightly jarring to Emily; the tragic blue-violet eyes and slender body were so at odds with her salty personality.

“I thought, You look like you have an unhappy secret,” Friselle said in her lilting Italian accent. “So I asked Michael to cheer you up. When you get on the plane, you will see he is trying to cheer you up. It will be very funny.”

The tears pricked at Emily’s eyes. She said, “I’m okay.”

Friselle laughed delightedly. “Oh, lies. I love lies.”

“Okay, I’m terrible. I don’t know.”

“The man is not worth it, whoever he is. You know why?”

Emily shook her head, the motion freeing a tear from one eye.

Friselle said, “Because he is a man, which is the same as a woman, which is not worth your tears. I am a woman and I tell you for a fact.” She put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Come along with Friselle. I will carry your luggage and you can drink my wine. Then you’ll see Michael trying to cheer you up. It will be ridiculous.”

Emily let Friselle take her suitcase and accepted the tumbler of wine, though she didn’t really feel like drinking. “Thanks. I can’t imagine Michael cheering me up.”

“Oh, he will promise you more money in your contract. I bet you. The man has no ideas of life.” Friselle led the way into the airport. The airport lights blinded Emily slightly, and she followed Friselle with a feeling of utter passivity, as if she were a tiny child who had no idea where she was being taken. In the same spirit, from time to time she took a sip of wine, and was surprised at how good it felt to be drinking. Friselle was gossiping in her musical drawl: Lila and James were threatening to marry, so Babylona was in a foul temper with everyone, while Jared was terribly altered by being in love—“It is awful. I cannot stand the stupid eyes in his head. Awful.” Finally she said, in the same careless tone of enjoyment, “And Valerie is not coming on Air Force X with us. It is a big mystery.”

Emily stopped dead. “What? Valerie’s not coming to Germany?” Her heart was pounding; what could it mean?

Friselle looked at her speculatively, swinging the suitcase against her dainty shins.

“Oh yes, she is coming. But she comes by herself,” Friselle said. “She has Michael buy her a first-class ticket. I think something planning in the witch’s unhealthy brains.”

Zaza climbed the steps up to the plane’s open flank with a feeling of dizzy unreality. She still didn’t know whether to feel dread or excitement about the trip. On the good side: it would amount to a vacation in the Alps, in a castle no less, with Jared. It would be their first really public outing; although many people at XTV knew they were a couple, no one had actually seen them together. And although she couldn’t exactly picture it, she felt certain meeting his friends (the same friends whose decadence had driven him into his thrice-damned “taking it slow”) would be incredibly fun.

On the bad side: From his descriptions, she knew that those friends would start fucking one another before the plane left the ground. If she had been alone, she might have been alarmed at the prospect at first—then joined in. With Jared there, she felt somehow that it would be intolerable. She would want to join in with him. What would those people think if they knew that her boyfriend still hadn’t fucked her? Did any of them know?

Her high heels—another gift from Jared—were teetering on the slick metal steps. She had to grip the railing firmly, watching where she put her feet. So she was startled when she heard Michael Tyler’s deep, pleasant voice addressing her from the open door of the plane. “Hello, Zaza. I’ve been deputed to take you to your seat.”

She paused a few steps below him. To the right, through the open door, she could see the main cabin of the airplane, where an impromptu dance party was going on, despite the absence of music. One girl had already stripped to the skin and was preserving an absolutely serious expression while Javier poured a glass of wine carefully down her forehead, aiming the stream into her open mouth. Catching sight of Zaza, Javier waved, and the stream diverted into the girl’s ear, making her scream and jump away.

Zaza waved nervously and looked back at Michael. “My seat? We have assigned seats?”

“You have an assigned seat, doll. Come with me.”

She mounted the last few steps, immediately imagining being put into the hold like a dog—she would shiver through the flight in a wire cage, away from the glamorous fun. Of course that couldn’t happen, not literally. Perhaps it was just a sort of coach class for nonstar people? She followed him past a velvet curtain, which he pulled shut again behind her. Then he stopped at a little door and knocked lightly on it. There was no answer. He opened it and gestured for her to go inside.

She stepped inside; the compartment must have filled one-third of the passenger area. There was a fully stocked bar to one side and a pair of armchairs to either side of it, with seat belts arranged neatly across them. The far wall of the space was the opposite side of the airplane, with a row of windows showing the landing strip, now bathed in the last rays of sunset. In the center of the room was a king-sized bed, and Zaza knew without asking that it was the famed airborne water bed that featured in so many XTV legends.

“Just wait here,” he said before he closed the door on her. “Don’t worry; everything will be all right.”

And he was gone. She went immediately to the bed and tried it with her hands. Sure enough, the surface gave and the water underneath undulated beneath her palms. She sat on the edge of the bed and lay back as hard as she could, making the waves flow back and forth underneath her. Then she crossed her arms over her chest and shut her eyes.

Jared arranged this, she thought. It must be that. We’re going to make love for the fi rst time here. In midair. Immediately, she became certain that the plane would crash before they could actually have sex. Perhaps she could get him to do it before takeoff ? But she was being ridiculous. . . . She made herself stop worrying and focus on the idea of Jared coming in . . . taking off her clothes . . . taking off his clothes . . . sexual i ntercourse!

At that moment, the door flew open. Zaza sat bolt upright, lost her balance, and fell back, floundering, into the wildly rolling bed. In that split second, she realized Jared wasn’t coming. This wasn’t his idea. She wasn’t going to have midair sexual intercourse at all.

The person in the doorway was Babylona, who now shut the door behind her and said quietly, “Lovely to finally meet you, Zaza. You look so shockingly like your mother.”

As she entered the aircraft with Friselle climbing the steps behind her, Emily was met by a smiling Michael Tyler, who immediately said, “Emily! You look more gorgeous than ever. When you have a minute, I have some good news about your performance bonus.”

Emily felt Friselle poking her from behind and heard the other woman’s low, husky laugh.

“Oh,” Emily said sweetly. “That’s great. I really need the money, because I’m thinking of leaving XTV.”

Behind her, Friselle said, “Don’t tease the man. Also, I’m cold out here.”

Emily took the extra few steps up into the aircraft while Michael scowled at her forbiddingly. As Friselle joined her, dropping Emily’s suitcase inside with a sigh of weariness, Michael said, “We’ll have to look at your contract. I think next year’s scheduling is already advertised, and the sponsors have bought some time—”

“Oh, leave this alone,” said Friselle. “The woman doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“I do,” Emily said.

Friselle shrugged and said, “I can’t help this situation. She drinks my wine and she bites the hand. Young people are coming to nothing nowadays.” She stalked off into the main cabin, letting her gown slip off her shoulder and onto the floor to reveal her lovely nudity while the revelers inside cried out, “La Belesci! Friselle! Wine for la maestra!”

Michael said to Emily in a tired voice, “Let’s talk about this in Germany, if you’re serious. I have to do Valerie damage control on this flight.”

“Valerie damage control?” Emily said weakly. “What happened?”

He sighed. “Four different men are expecting to fuck her in Schwanzwald. I don’t mind if she wants four men to fuck her, but I think our viewers will think it’s a little over the top for a girl’s first time.”

Emily almost said something about Ralph, but Michael’s exhausted expression stopped her. She bit her tongue and just smiled sympathetically before grabbing her suitcase and going to find Jared.

She spotted him sitting in a little row of seats at the back of the plane, his head ducked, obviously trying to ignore the melee. He looked grim and haggard. Dodging her way through the crowd, she headed toward him. By the time she got to him, she had acquired a glass of punch, a lei, and a pair of boxer briefs that had been handed to her by an already drunken Javier (or was it Jorge?) with the words, “Keep these somewhere safe, my love. Annabella is threatening to eat them.”

Jared looked up at her and smiled, his face clearing into its usual charm. “Emily, great,” he said. Then he looked a little self-conscious and asked, “Have you seen Zaza?”

“No.” She felt conscience-stricken. It hadn’t even occurred to her to look for Zaza. “She’ll be here. You know there’s no chance she wouldn’t come.”

“But something might have gone wrong. She might have missed the flight, and then she’d have to buy a ticket last-minute, and I don’t think she has the money. I should have given her money.”

“Jared, calm down,” she said, sitting beside him. “Even if that happened, you could wire her some money, couldn’t you?”

“But she’s not answering her phone!” He held up his cell phone, which she now realized was what he’d been hunched over when she entered the plane.

“And?”

“She never doesn’t answer her phone.” His face had reverted to a mask of despondency.

“But she never doesn’t answer her phone because she’s crazy about you, right?”

He looked cheered for an instant, but then his jaw set stubbornly again. “People change their minds.”

Emily laughed. “You’re nuts.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that. I was thinking I should get off the plane and go look for her.”

“So you’re saying you know that’s insane?”

“Well, exactly. But I still keep wanting to do it.” He shook his head. “I should have slept with her. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, I know what I was thinking, but I always assumed I’d see her again.”

“And you will.”

He carried on as if he hadn’t heard. “I just didn’t realize how hard it was on her; I was too fucking focused on how hard it was on me. I’m such an idiot.”

“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said so far.”

He looked at her with a sheepish smile. “I’m not doing very well, am I?”

“Oh, I think you’re doing a great job of being a lovesick fool.”

“Pot, kettle.”

“Granted.” They smiled at each other. She added, “Just incidentally, me, too. Dying.”

“No word?”

She shook her head and felt again that ache behind her eyes of suppressed tears.

“I guess it won’t do any good if I promise to beat him up,” said Jared.

“No good whatsoever.”

“See, I know these things.”

Emily sat back in her chair, just in time to avoid being hit by a paper airplane. She looked up and saw Jorge—or was it Javier?—standing naked with a disappointed look on his face. “You ducked,” he accused her. “I aimed at you especially.”

“I’m not playing!” Emily called out, giving him what she hoped was a pleasant smile. “Not in the mood!”

He cocked his head and said, “Moods are to be overcome, my love.”

Jared said, “Stop bothering the lady.”

At that moment, a paper airplane hit Javier/Jorge in the head. Following after it came a buxom brunette in a skating dress, who threw her arms around him and said, “You’re it!” He immediately inserted his hand under her skirt and purred, “No underwear. Sabine, my love, we’re twins.” They tangled and subsided to the ground, until Sabine was straddling Jorge/Javier on the floor, riding him with her generous breasts bobbing.

“Maybe Zaza shouldn’t be here to see this,” Jared said, watching.

“Oh, he’s not that good-looking,” Emily said, without conviction. Then, to distract him: “Hey, Friselle Belesci was just comforting me.”

He laughed. “Friselle Belesci is an alien from outer space.”

“Oh, come on.”

“She’s forty-two. Have you ever seen a wrinkle on that woman?” Jared was studying the open door to the plane again. Two jaded flight attendants were standing by the door now, one of them surveying the melee while the other peered out at the airport. “I think they’re going to close the door. Should I make a run for it?”

“No.”

At that moment, the flight attendant began to pull the door shut. Jared slumped back in his seat, defeated. “God. I hate myself.”

“Listen, I just told Michael I’m leaving.”

For a moment, Jared didn’t react. He was still staring as the door fell into place and the flight attendant turned the lock. Then he blinked and looked at Emily. “What? You told him you were quitting XTV?”

“I don’t know if he took me seriously.”

“Should he have?”

She nodded slowly. “I can’t do it anymore. I mean, even if Ralph isn’t . . . you know. I want to go back to real life.”

“Wow. You’re really brave. I would just go into hiding.”

“Well, I had to tell them sooner or later.”

“From your hiding place at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, yes. I can see that. But . . . this won’t change our . . .”

“Oh, I think I’ll still have room for a few porn stars in my life.”

He smiled at her. “Good. I’m still getting used to the idea of not fucking you anymore. It was always . . . cozy somehow.”

She laughed. “Gee, thanks.”

An announcement over the intercom warned everyone to take their seats and fasten their seat belts in preparation for takeoff. Emily and Jared fastened their seat belts in unison as all around them, half-naked porn stars began to detach from each other and slink into their seats.

“Where’s Zaza?” Jared said under his voice.

“Where’s Ralph?” said Emily.

The engines engaged and they both sat back, giving each other a wry smile. Jared said, “Well. Last hurrah.”

“Last hurrah,” she echoed, as Javier/Jorge tumbled naked into the seat beside her.

“Hi,” she said to him.

“Hi, love,” he said. “Where’s my underpants?”

“Please don’t get up,” Babylona told Zaza, perching on one of the seats and regarding her with an affectionate smile. “We don’t need to stand on ceremony.”

Zaza pulled herself up to sit cross-legged on the bed, balancing carefully. “I didn’t know it was you,” she said. “I mean . . . I thought . . .”

“I understand,” Babylona said mischievously. “You thought you had a secret admirer?”

“Um.”

“I am sorry. I don’t like to arrive in the character of disappointment. But perhaps I can make it up to you.” Babylona was wearing a complicated, skintight outfit made of leather and ribbons that laced up in several unconventional places—horizontally over her nipples, vertically over her crotch. Her arms were bare, apart from a bewildering number of silver bracelets that jingled whenever she moved.

Zaza made herself look away from Babylona’s generous cleavage, which hinted at breasts so much larger than her own that it was hard to believe they were the same species. She said breathlessly, “Well, but you’re offering me such a good job, so you already made it up to me. More than made it up to me. Oh, God. I’m not sounding very coherent, am I? I’ll be so different when I’m reading the news, I promise, if I do it. Sorry. I’m kind of an imbecile sometimes.”

“I have every confidence in you,” Babylona said with an airy wave of her hand. “In fact, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“Oh, no,” Zaza said. “Is it about Jared?”

Babylona knit her brow. “Jared?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t have said anything, but I thought you were going to be angry at me. I don’t know why. I know he’s not even your boyfriend and . . .”

Babylona cocked her head. “This is all very fascinating, but I’ll have to decide whether to be angry at you later on. I’m happy to say this isn’t work related or Jared related.”

“Oh.” Zaza blinked. A memory was stirring in her mind, but it refused to come into focus. It was more of an uncomfortable feeling, as if she had told someone a secret when she was drunk but couldn’t remember what the secret was. At the same time, she was miserably remembering that Jared had fucked Babylona. Jared had probably fucked everyone on the plane but her.

Babylona was looking at her sympathetically, her blue eyes half-lidded. “Why don’t you scoot over and let me lie beside you? It’s the best place to be for takeoff.”

Zaza wanted to say something about seat belts, but at that moment the announcement came over the intercom warning everyone to fasten their seat belts for takeoff—causing no reaction in Babylona at all. In fact, Babylona was busily climbing into the bed and lying on her side. Zaza shoved over and, after a brief hesitation, lay down beside her.

Babylona settled slightly propped up on one elbow. She said, “You might have wondered how Michael knows Lucy.”

“My aunt,” said Zaza, her eyes widening. “He said that. I totally wondered—it’s so crazy.”

At this point, the plane began to move. The water bed immediately began to undulate gently. Babylona said, “Oh, lovely. Lie back, Zaza. Takeoff is really exquisite on this bed.”

“But . . .”

“Yes, lie down and I’ll tell you the story.”

Zaza lay back a little reluctantly. Surely it was somehow unsafe to fly in a plane without a seat belt? Maybe it was even illegal. But it seemed so pathetic to worry about seat belts while traveling in a private jet on a water bed with a sex tycooness who was about to reveal your maiden aunt’s connection to her porn empire—so she decided, and lay back flat, feeling the fine vibration of the engines through the water. “Oh—it is nice.”

“There, you see? Now the story. It’s a story about my youth. When I was only fifteen, I met the love of my life. He was a wonderful man in those days, not as beautiful, perhaps, as your Jared—we can’t all have that sort of obvious appeal—but absolutely immoral. That was the essence of his charm. He came to our town to visit a girlfriend, I believe, although he would never admit that to me. I met him at the lake. I was wearing a bikini, you know, so it was love at first sight on his side. You may find it hard to believe now, but I was really rather beautiful in those days.”

Zaza began to object, but Babylona cut her off. “No, you don’t have to flatter me. Really, there is no greater pleasure to an older woman than recalling past glories. Present glories are present, you see? They have no spice, like all things that are easily available. Except, perhaps, for a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl in a powder blue bikini, who retains her charm through any amount of availability, I think you’ll find.”

“I guess,” Zaza interjected.

“Don’t guess. Trust me. James was absolutely in love with me. I ran off with him to San Francisco, you know. And my parents never spoke to me again. My sister wouldn’t have spoken to me again, if it hadn’t been for you. Oh—here we are. The plane’s taking off.”

In fact, the plane had begun to gather momentum, and Zaza felt the acceleration softened in the embrace of the water bed. Then there was the vertiginous moment when the plane actually lifted off the ground, and slightly, terrifyingly, dipped and wobbled, sending waves of reaction through the water beneath her. Meanwhile, her mind was frozen, balking at a deliriously too-good possibility. Was Babylona trying to say that she was Zaza’s mother?

“Yes, it would have been a shame to miss this,” Babylona said, turning to lie on her side facing Zaza. “You have to admit.”

Zaza didn’t dare turn to face her. “But . . . so . . . I was the reason your sister talked to you? I mean . . .”

Babylona sighed deeply. “Oh, well. Lucy was always the dull sister, though I don’t want to speak ill of her to you. It took quite a lot for her to come to San Francisco to see me. I think it may have been the only really rebellious thing she did in her life. Although, of course, sleeping with James might be considered rebellious. But no girl could resist sleeping with James. So I hardly count that.”

“So she—wow. She slept with your boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend then. We’d hardly met.”

“Still. It’s really not like her, ’cause she’s such an ethical person. She gets on my nerves, but she is a really ethical person. I mean, if she came to visit you and then she sleeps with the guy you ran away with, that’s sort of . . .”

“Oh, no. She slept with him back in Oklahoma. I’m sorry. I must have gotten the story mixed up.”

“So my aunt—”

Babylona broke in, “Lucy isn’t your aunt. Actually, Lucy is a shocking liar, for such an unimaginative person. But I’m sorry; I really don’t want to speak ill of her to you.”

“She’s not my aunt?” Zaza frowned.

“I’m sorry to be the bearer of distressing news. Lucy isn’t your aunt at all.” Babylona made a slight grimace of contrition. “I’m afraid that I’m your aunt.”

“Then Lucy is . . .”

“Your mother,” Babylona said with a hint of asperity.

Zaza stared at her, overwhelmed by warring emotions. Aunt Lucy—her mother? It went against all reason. Lucy was her aunt. She had always been her aunt. Lucy couldn’t be her mother! Mothers were glamorous ne’er-do-wells who misbehaved so dreadfully they could never come home. Zaza took after her mother—Lucy had always said so.

And another, gloomier voice inside her reported, Jared fucked my aunt.

It was all incredibly unwelcome.

“Yes,” Babylona went on, “Lucy arrived in San Francisco four months pregnant. At first she wanted to leave the baby with us. She was always terribly afraid of what people would think. And you know she spends every godforsaken waking hour when she isn’t working at church.”

“It’s true,” Zaza breathed. “You really know her.”

“Of course, times have changed, but in those days . . . well, our parents would have thrown her out. So she lied.”

“She said I was yours?”

“There. You have the story now. She got to keep her child and continue to be, well, a plaster saint. Though I don’t want to speak ill of her to you. It was a good solution, although I have never been able to understand why she wasn’t more grateful. You know, she would never let me come to see her.”

“I guess she must think what you do is . . . um, wrong.” Now Zaza turned to face Babylona. She was again taken aback by the older woman’s pale voluptuousness. It did seem unfair that Zaza couldn’t have inherited certain family attributes.

Babylona was looking at her dolefully, pursing her scarlet lips. “Well, there you have the last piece of the puzzle, because I was foolish enough to send Michael to reason with her. As you have reason to know, I sometimes ask him to be my emissary when I have something delicate to achieve. He is very clever, you know, but he has dreadful taste in women. He managed to sleep with Lucy before telling her he’d come from me. Of course, she thought it was all some awful plot against her virtue.”

“No.” Zaza gaped. “Lucy and Michael Tyler?”

“As you get older, you’ll come to realize that adults are nearly always having sex with someone,” Babylona said. “Even when they don’t make a show of it.”

Zaza lay back, trying to process this. The strange, soothing feeling of the vibrations of the plane engine transferred through the water bed had become confused with the story of her birth; she felt as if once they landed, she would be able to step onto solid ground and have everything return to normal. But she wasn’t sure she wanted normal back.

At last she said slowly, “But listen—why did you send Michael to talk to me? It wasn’t . . .” Zaza swallowed. “I mean, Lucy’s going to be pretty upset if she ever finds out I work for you. So . . .”

Babylona laughed. “Do you mean, was I trying to get revenge on her? I suppose you could see it that way, though I think of it more as continuing an argument. However, the chief reason was that I wanted to get to know you.” To Zaza’s shock, Babylona’s eyes had filled with tears. “You see, as one gets older, family begins to mean more. And I lost my family, even though I’ve never regretted my decision. I suppose I thought . . . I hope I didn’t drag you into something you’ve hated.”

“Oh, not at all!” Zaza said hastily. “It’s been incredible! I don’t care what Lucy thinks. I mean, I care, but . . .” The fact that Lucy was her mother came back into her mind, and her thoughts got tangled. She swallowed. “Anyway, I’m so glad to meet you. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Babylona smiled at her gratefully, the tears still lingering on her eyelashes. “Thank you, Zaza—niece. I’m very glad to meet you, too.”

SIXTEEN

The bus from the airport had taken five hours, mostly spent on winding mountain roads apparently designed primarily to induce car sickness even in the most iron-stomached traveler. Jared was feeling queasy, exhausted, and depressed by the time he stepped out into the courtyard behind the Schloss Dreimöse. It was to the rear of the main castle building, at the center of the medieval village that had originally been filled with the vassals and peasants of the Margraves von Dreimöse, an undistinguished offshoot of the German nobility that had lost all its money and sold the castle (then falling into ruins) to a Greek toothpick manufacturer in the nineteenth century. The castle had been rebuilt, with the aid of a theatrical set designer, at that time. The present building was a fantasy version of a prince’s castle: white with three lofty towers and ornamentation that was a smorgasbord of architectural styles ranging from Romanesque to Victorian. Jared had never been here before, but he had seen innumerable photos of the place, notably on Babylona’s dinner plates, which all bore an aerial view of the Schloss with the words HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS! across it in gold script.

Because he and Emily had been fast asleep when the plane landed, they had gotten on the third and last bus headed out to the Schloss. By now the festivities had begun in earnest. There was only one couple actually having sex, a tiny dark-haired girl and her improbably huge blond companion. She was half sitting on an ornamental table and wearing only a frilly blouse, her legs parted. The blond man was naked and beefy, with a classic football-player physique, and he was intently moving his hips to trace circles on her inner thighs and over her cunt with the tip of his dick. As Jared watched, the girl reached forward to grasp his hips and pulled him in to enter her, the blond man arching his back and shutting his eyes.

Everywhere else in the room, people were simply mingling, resisting the attempts of flustered interns—all strapping German college boys from the nearby university—who were trying to coax them to go to their rooms. They were in direct competition with teams of wait-staff circulating with trays of cocktails, coffee, and a distinctive blue beverage that Jared recognized as Babylona’s surefire hangover cure. Clearly, she was covering all the bases. As usual at any XTV function, the rule of the day was a blithe immodesty. Although the hall was chilly, several people had stripped to their underwear, and a few were simply naked, the girls among them still wearing high-heeled shoes. One nude black girl was standing with her arms stiffly at her sides while a group of men took turns fondling her breasts. As Jared passed, he heard her saying, “I think Joey wins. That’s heaven, Joey.” He felt subtly reassured by the scene; he was among his people. Even if the worst happened and he never saw Zaza again, he would have this sleepy, sexy fraternity to comfort him.

He circulated for a little while, trying not to catch anyone’s eye while simultaneously looking for Zaza. He didn’t find her, though one slender redhead almost fooled him. She was bending down over a carry-on bag, wearing a long XTV ROX! T-shirt that had hiked up to show the pale curves of her buttocks in a peacock blue thong. Then she looked up, wasn’t Zaza at all, and met his eye with a smoldering half smile. She put her index finger into her mouth and sucked it pointedly, raising her eyebrows. He smiled politely and shook his head, at which she shrugged and went back to rooting in her bag.

At last he decided Zaza wasn’t there, and gave his name to an intern who led him off to his room. The boy was obviously reluctant to leave the spectacle, but nonetheless checked a list and set off politely with Jared in tow. There followed a bewildering series of long corridors and stairways, all adorned with heavy oil paintings of horses, other castles, and members of the toothpick king’s extended family. The floors had rugs woven in dizzyingly complex patterns, over marble in garish shades of green or red. Jared’s brain was beginning to ache; he longed for color blindness. At last the young man opened an oak door that seemed to be a foot thick, and led Jared up a winding stone stairway. After a few minutes, Jared was beginning to wonder if this was all a complex practical joke. The walls here were white and unadorned. The stone steps were rough. He half expected to be led into an attic full of cleaning supplies.

But at the top, there was a similarly heavy oaken door, this one carved with two warring beasts (the nature of the beasts was unclear; both seemed to be a mix of horse/dog/lizard, in varying proportions). The helpful intern opened the door and stood back to let Jared go ahead of him.

“No, you should go ahead,” Jared said, a little befuddled with fatigue. “I don’t know my way at all.”

“This is it,” the boy said. “East Tower master bedroom.”

Jared was too exhausted to question this. He went up past the boy, through the door, and then stood dumbstruck as the door was shut behind him.

It was a huge circular room with big arched windows all around the walls, excepting only the section with the door where he had entered. It had a gleaming wood floor, and a few pieces of intricately carved Victorian furniture upholstered in off-white. Most of the room was empty, however, to leave room for the bed at its center. The bed had a heaping wealth of pillows and covers, all white; its canopy was also covered in white linen, with lace hanging in complicated folds on all sides. And in the center of the fluffy bed, wearing one of his own lumberjack shirts and a pair of semitransparent panties, was Zaza. The shirt was pulled closed but unbuttoned. Zaza in that shirt was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“Baby!” he shouted, running toward her.

“Jared!” she shouted, and threw herself onto her back with her arms in the air.

He leapt onto the bed and right onto her, immediately pulling her into his arms and kissing her hard. Her slim body against him was the most beautiful thing he had ever felt. Then he propped himself up on his elbows over her and looked down into her eyes reprovingly. “Where were you? I had to go through that whole flight not knowing whether you were coming.”

She laughed delightedly. “You missed me! Hooray! I win! I win!”

“Stop it! Are we having a competition? Come on. Where were you?”

“I was in the plane,” she said, coy. “Where were you?”

“I was in the plane. You weren’t there!”

“I was in the other part of the plane.”

Jared scowled at her. “You were in the cockpit?”

“No, dummy. I was on the water bed.”

“With who?”

At this Zaza began to laugh again. “You’re jealous! I win! I so win!”

“Come on, Zaza, there isn’t anything to win.” He shook his head and then kissed her on the cheek. “Oh, well, I’m just glad to see you.”

“Likewise. Wow, I thought you were never coming. I’ve been here for, like, an hour. I kept posing for you, topless, expecting you to come in the door, but finally I was just freezing to death.”

“I don’t know how you could look any better than you do now.” He began to kiss her again, feeling an actual floating sensation that was a mix of euphoria and a sense memory from being in the plane. Nothing had ever made him quite so happy as seeing Zaza in that bed. No one had ever made him so happy. Just her tongue passing over his lips, slipping between them, made him drunk with love.

As he realized it, he was overcome by a wave of unaccustomed shyness. He pulled back from her slightly and looked in her eyes. They met his with their usual joyful openness. One of the things he loved about her was that her face was so expressive; even the light sprinkling of freckles on her nose now looked like an expression of mischievous delight. He said, his voice a little hoarse, “Are you . . . Can I make love to you?”

The freckles now became shocked freckles as her eyes opened wide. Immediately, her breathing turned shallow and fast. She said, with a faint, thrilled smile, “No.”

“No?”

“No, I’m going to make love to you. I’d already decided.”

“But—”

“No, I have a whole plan.”

Suddenly, he found himself flipped over onto his back. Zaza, sitting astride his hips, pulled the lumberjack shirt off and threw it to the floor, exposing her slim body with its small, pointy breasts. As she did so, he realized he was already hard. He could feel the pressure of her pubis against him as a current running through his cock and deep into his loins. He was actually going to fuck her now. It was happening, and he couldn’t believe he’d held out so long.

She said, “Pretend you haven’t given up.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “So we can’t sleep together yet because . . .”

“Because you’re torturing me for no reason.”

He laughed. “Because I’m torturing you for no reason.”

“But this time I’m not taking no for an answer.”

“No,” said Jared, with mock sternness.

She began to move her hips against him, stroking her crotch up and down the length of his hard-on. “I can feel you,” she said softly.

He glanced down and saw the bright tuft of her red pubic hair through the delicate pink of the panties. Then he let his eyes move up her body slowly, taking in the rounded hips and flat belly, her slender body a smooth cream color accented by her soft, rosy nipples. His mind was shutting down; he found himself thrusting against her without knowing when he had started. Every thrust intensified his desire. He was imagining the moment of actually entering her, the moment when he gave up his long self-control and . . . she was opening his belt, her lips slightly parted.

Then she shoved herself down so that she was sitting on his shins. When he realized what she was going to do, his cock jolted with anticipation and he shut his eyes as if to shut out the rawness of his lust. She pulled down his zipper slowly, the casual pressure of her moving fingers against his dick almost intolerable. Then she was pulling his pants and his briefs down in one gentle movement, and her fingertips grazed the sensitive underside of his cock.

He moaned instinctively, and she said, “Don’t try to stop me. Anyway, I only want to look. . . .”

She stroked his cock lightly with her fingertips, up and down. When it jerked in response, she caught it in her hand and wrapped her fingers around it as if to hold it still. Then she moved it up away from his belly, in position for her lips. She kissed the very tip of it and let her lips rest there for a second before licking it once, a distinct stab of pleasure that made his whole body twinge. She licked it again and then began to move her tongue in circles over the tip. His breath was turning into a series of faint moans; he had lost consciousness of everything but the tiny movement of her tongue on him. It was all he could do not to grab her head and try to press his cock into her mouth, her throat. At last she let the tip of his cock slip past her lips; she was holding the first few inches of him in her mouth, sucking gently, luxuriating in her control of him. He couldn’t help thrusting into her mouth, and she made a high-pitched moan in response, letting his cock drive in and pass over her tongue, which cradled it and moved under it, exploring its shape. Her hand moved to his balls, weighing them, moving over the tender skin there, driving his need still deeper into his body until he couldn’t locate it. All of his nerves were concentrated on Zaza’s touch. Now she began to suck him in earnest, her mouth accepting the whole length of his cock until it met the back of her throat with an almost agonizingly delicious jolt, her tongue slipping up and down under it, its tip zigzagging maddeningly back and forth. He began to fuck her mouth, his body moving without volition, the pleasure overwhelming any conscious intention of his. When she suddenly sat back, letting his cock slip out of her mouth and spring back, painfully hard, against his belly, he groaned in protest.

“No,” she said. “You aren’t going to get off that easily.”

She moved again, crawling up his belly so that her breasts grazed his cock in passing, and he felt the whole delicious length of her settling against his chest. When he opened his eyes, her face was there, now suffused with sensual passion; her lips seemed fuller and redder, her eyes alight with desire. She said, “You have to fuck me now.”

“Make me.”

With a movement of her hips, she found the tip of his cock and he gasped; she had taken off the panties without his knowing it, and his cock was now poised, pressing against her wetness, the lips of her pussy parted to receive him. She held the pose, letting him feel it, teasing him. He caught his breath, waiting for her, his cock throbbing, aching to thrust into her. But she still didn’t move, looking down at him with an expression of languid yearning. At last she said, softly, “Fuck me.”

At that, he drove into her, his cock feeling rock hard and huge. Her cunt was so wet and tight, it seemed to sing with the friction, and he seized her hips, holding her in position above him as he fucked her. She was crying out with each thrust, her head tipped back, her body arched to receive him. It felt at once necessary and perfect—and too much to bear. Her hips were turning in a slight, unconscious circle now, so that his thrusts moved into an ever-changing realm of sensation. When he let go of her hips to take her breasts in his hands, she immediately began to ride his cock, moving up and down on top of him with a desperate need that echoed his own. He was squeezing her breasts and pinching the nipples between his fingers, drawing a series of harsh, high cries from her until she suddenly tensed and a longer, sweeter sound came as her pussy began to spasm. That was too much for him. He grabbed her hips again and drove her down onto him hard, his hips rising simultaneously to send his ejaculation deep inside her. For a minute, the whole world disappeared in a white-hot flood of ecstasy. Only slowly did reality begin to seep back; the bed underneath him, the girl in his arms, the faint scent of the roses in the vase beside the bed.

He whispered, “Zaza. Marry me.”

Her body tensed, and for a second he was afraid he’d gone too far. Then she whispered back, “Of course.”

The words sent an even more exquisite pleasure through him. He was lying in the darkness of shut eyes, feeling a little frightened by the intensity of his feelings; it was as if he could melt in them. Then he suddenly laughed.

She pulled back slightly. “What?”

He looked at her, still smiling. He said, “I didn’t really think anything could feel better than fucking you just now. But when you said ‘Of course’—my God.”

“Oh. I know exactly what you mean.”

They smiled at each other, and Jared guessed he must look as dazed and smitten as Zaza did—more smitten, if anything. He reached up to touch her cheek, and she rubbed it against his palm, her eyes half-shutting with bliss while still holding his gaze. He said, “This morning turned out all right after all. That plane trip was miserable.”

At that, a shadow passed over her face. She said, “Oh, the plane trip.”

“Right,” he said, in a jealous tone that was only half joking. “So, who did you share that water bed with?”

She said in a hopeless voice, “Babylona.”

“Babylona?” He frowned, feeling the real world wash back in the most annoying fashion. “What did she want with you?”

“Oh, it’s okay. It’s just that it turns out that . . . I’m her niece.”

Zaza outlined the revelations that Babylona had made on the flight about her parentage, while Jared alternately laughed and shook his head in amazement. At last, he said, “But she’s not going to make you take over the family business or anything cataclysmic like that?”

Zaza bit her lip. “Um.”

“No! You’re messing with me!” Jared burst out laughing in earnest. “I guess my idea of sending you away to school to be educated is out the window, then.”

“Well, you weren’t going to send me away. I mean, I wouldn’t have gone away.”

“Okay, not away. Just, to be educated out of your uncouth ways.”

“Oh, well. If you insisted, I don’t know . . .”

“No,” Jared said. “I’m just kidding. I don’t care whether you ever go to school. All I ask out of life is that you never change and you never leave. I mean, we’re talking about you moving into production, right?” As he said it, an awful anxiety twinged in his chest. It was almost like a physical pain. He imagined Zaza in the arms of a series of naked men, all—

“Oh, right,” Zaza said. “I told her, you know, that thing about being too sensitive. And she was pretty dismissive, ’cause I don’t think she’s sensitive at all that way. I mean, she’s one of those people you talked about who are fine with doing porn.”

“In spades.”

“Yeah, but the point is, she was okay about it. She said that it took all kinds to make a world.”

“That’s very open-minded of her,” Jared said wryly. He was feeling a keen relief that was instantly darkened by the idea of Zaza spending her career watching a series of men having sex. That is was the lesser evil didn’t stop it being an evil. She was younger than he was; wouldn’t she someday want someone else? But then he remembered that he was supposed to fuck someone else the following day, and said, “Oh, well. It could be worse.”

She hit him lightly on the shoulder. “Come on. It’s great. You’re supposed to be happy for me.”

He said, a little vengefully, “Oh, I’m just wondering who Babylona wants me to have sex with tomorrow.”

“Ha!” said Zaza. “Now I’m going to have a jealous rage and make you quit your job!”

“I already quit my job.”

“So why are you even doing it, then? You see? You must want to do it. Jealous rage is definitely coming on.”

“It’s already in the schedule,” he said wearily. “I have a contract.”

“Lame excuse!”

At that moment, his cell phone rang. Since it was in his pants pocket, now shoved halfway down his leg, he had to push past Zaza to get it, while she shouted happily, “Avoiding the issue! No way! You’re going to answer that now?!”

At last he’d fished it out, restraining the struggling Zaza with one arm while he pressed the button and put it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Jared,” came Babylona’s voice. “Are you in your honeymoon suite?”

“Oh, um, yeah,” he said, shaking his head at Zaza, who was giggling and trying to bite him. “Thanks—it’s . . . awesome.”

“Well,” Babylona said with a satisfied tone, “I did want that to be a disinterested gift. But it so happens I need a favor from you.”

Jared’s heart sank. At his look of alarm, Zaza stilled and frowned, trying to catch his eye, “So what’s the favor?” he said.

“I’ve figured out who I need you to fuck.”

SEVENTEEN

Emily took a shower and spent almost an hour putting on makeup and trying on different outfits before venturing out of her room. The room itself was comfortable but unremarkable—white walls, basic bed, handsome modern desk. Only when she looked out the window at the weathered stone of the medieval town below was she reminded that she was thousands of miles away from New York City—and Ralph.

Her feeling of helplessness about the Ralph situation had eased into an almost luxurious misery. It reminded her of being a teenager lost in one of the many unrequited loves of youth—the football captain, the college guy who kissed her at a party, the almost-successful local singer-songwriter who met her eye in the crowd. It was a consoling, peaceful sorrow. She couldn’t tell whether the feeling meant that deep down she trusted Ralph to come back, or that she’d given him up for good. Either one was better than the anger she had begun to feel toward him for deserting her.

And, as had happened to her before in moments of extreme stress, she felt drawn toward the decadent fellowship of her colleagues. Friselle Belesci’s (or Babylona’s) philosophy of life was oddly comforting to Emily at times like these. All she had to do was let go of her habits a little and walk downstairs, and she would be among the happiest people imaginable, having the most fun possible in the nicest way. Usually it just didn’t appeal. She preferred the quiet of her own room. Today, though, she was walking downstairs—in a lacy black minidress that set off her milky skin and emphasized her shapely legs. And as she heard the sound of revelry and laughter coming up the stairs, she relaxed as if she was slipping into a warm bath.

The noise was coming from the ballroom—a colossal room set off by white marble pilasters, with a painted ceiling that showed nude cherubs and clothed angels frolicking in a blue sky. The wooden floor had been strewn with the thick sheepskin rugs that the XTV old hands called fuck rugs. They were just large enough and soft enough to take the place of a bed in case of need. Still, most of the people who had felt that need were arranged in various orientations on a gigantic dining table on one side of the room. Looking at the mass of nude and skimpily clad flesh there—some six or seven people pleasuring one another around a massive punch bowl—Emily could immediately see what had happened. The little orgy had begun as the line for punch. One hand, held clear of the melee, still held a glass of punch, which was sloshing from side to side as its bearer was fucked heartily by a gorgeous man Emily suddenly recognized as the rock star from her interview a few weeks earlier, Greil Gage. The girl he was fucking had her head turned to one side to suck the dick of an equally handsome blond man wearing only a baseball cap, whose head was resting between the legs of the black-haired star of The Mountain Lion, Lila Parker, who was . . . and here Emily’s ability to sort out limbs into personalities gave out. Emily had never joined one of these groupings—what Jared called a spider’s nest for the seething complication of legs that first struck one’s eye. But seeing it gave her a thrill of preemptive nostalgia for the world she was leaving, where intimacy was just that easy and ecstasy was available for the price of saying yes. And she felt a shocking heat in her body, a longing to strip her clothes away and let herself fall into a world of flesh and kisses and nothing but sex.

“Admiring our centerpiece?” said a cool, low voice behind her.

She turned around and laughed up into the face of Liam “Pony” Peterson. She had gotten to know him—and fuck him—when she once appeared on an episode of The Mountain Lion as a girl disguising herself as a cowboy in order to go on a cattle drive. Of course, the sheriff had figured out her disguise and taken her aside in his office to try to talk her out of it. The sex scene occurred toward the end of the episode, after various shoot-outs and near rapes and rescues. Emily couldn’t exactly remember how the script writers managed to get Liam and her into a situation where fucking on horseback made sense. But she clearly remembered fucking on horseback—her leaning forward, holding on to the mane of the remarkably patient horse, while Liam let his dick find its way into her. Then the motion of the horse, walking, did most of the work, an experience that was strange, sensual, and alarming. Who knew a horse could be so tall? Even while Liam was fucking her, she couldn’t stop watching the ground and imagining what would happen if the horse bucked.

“Hey, Liam,” she said now, getting on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek.

He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently, saying, “I heard you were getting out.”

“You make it sound like it’s prison.”

“Oh, well, I was thinking more of the army, you know.”

“Because of all the discipline,” Emily said, looking from the spider’s nest to the tipsy, semiclad couples fondling each other here and there throughout the room. As she said it, a naked girl ran past with a pair of boxer shorts in her hand, pursued by a naked man who was shouting, “It was a loan! Not a gift!”

Liam and Emily laughed. He said, “Well, maybe not the army. I was just working up to saying I was going to miss you, anyway.”

“Oh . . . well, thanks.”

She slung an arm around his waist and he pulled her against him. For a minute they stood there companionably, watching the spider’s nest move through various configurations. One girl climbed out, looking tousled and red in the face, and stood catching her breath while a stray hand from the table continued to caress her buttocks. Emily began to focus on one couple who were quietly, intently fucking in the midst of the fray, without bothering with all of the people around them. It was vanilla sex, missionary position, slow but emphatic. The man was kissing the girl deeply, passionately, while he fucked her. They could have been alone in their bed at home rather than being jostled by a half dozen other strenuously sex-engaged people. Watching it was making Emily both wistful and increasingly aroused. The pressure of Liam’s strong body against her, his broad back under her arm, were triggering a familiar sweet alertness in between her legs.

At that moment, Javier appeared in the doorway, wearing black suit pants, a white shirt that was half-unbuttoned, and a loosened tie that hung askew. Spotting Emily, he smiled and headed toward her with a purposeful stride. Emily only had time to say “Uh-oh,” before he was in front of her.

Immediately, he put his hand to her cheek and stroked it familiarly, saying, “What’s this I hear, gorgeous? You’re leaving us?” His dark eyes were soulfully wounded as his hand trailed down her throat and came to rest at her neckline, fingering the lacy cloth there. “Trail of broken hearts, needless to say.”

Emily and Liam exchanged glances. Emily was about to take Javier’s hand in hers and extract it from her dress; she was about to dismiss him with a pleasantry and go on with her evening, but something stopped her. She found herself meeting his dark gaze, noticing his ridiculous good looks and his leonine poise. When he added, “You know, you owe me a fuck. You really are bad for wanting to sneak off without paying,” she should have pointed out that she owed him nothing. But she said, “Well, what if I pay?”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. His hand became a little more daring, the fingers straying over her collarbone and lightly tracing the cleft of her cleavage. He said, “I expected nothing less of you.”

Liam said, “Hey, you’re stealing my girl.”

Emily realized that he was trying to protect her from Javier, in case she was being pressured into something she didn’t want. At the same time, she realized that she didn’t want to let go of Liam. Well, it was a party, after all, and if things went the way she planned, she wasn’t likely to be in another situation quite like this.

She looked from one to the other: the handsome, solid blond leaning toward her protectively; the dark and sexy man who stood in front of her, his hand moving suggestively over her breasts now. She felt a warmth growing where her body pressed against Liam’s, her nipples grew hard in response to Javier’s touch, and a heat spread from her breasts. The glow spread on into her belly, the warmth from each of them, and it met between her legs, blossomed, and she felt herself grow wet, hot. She looked down and said quietly, “Don’t you want to share?”

“Share?” Liam asked, confused for just a second. He didn’t have long before Emily made her meaning clear. She took their hands, one in each of hers, and knelt down on the rug, pulling them with her. Both the men knelt down, and she saw them glance at each other. A smile came to Javier’s face, infectious, it seemed, because the same hungry smile came to Liam’s face a second later.

“Of course we’ll share, my dear,” Javier said, and reached down to lift her dress up and off, over her head. He dropped it to the floor beside them, and then leaned in to kiss her. His arm around the small of her back, he laid her down gently on the rug. His tongue darted into her mouth, found hers, and Emily kissed him back enthusiastically.

She felt a tugging at her hips and she lifted them up off the ground so that Liam could remove her underpants, as Javier’s lips moved down her neck, then lower, reaching her breasts. He took a nipple between his lips, sucked her softly, then harder, his tongue circling the sensitive spot. A second later, Emily felt a second set of lips on her other breast, as Liam took her other nipple into his mouth, flicked it with his tongue.

Electric jolts shot down from her nipples to her pussy, connecting them, as a first moan escaped her. A hand pressed down against her mons, a steady, gentle pressure, and then there was a fi nger exploring, parting her now slick pussy lips—whose hand, whose finger, she couldn’t say. That idea, that she didn’t even know who was touching her so intimately, was itself exciting, and she parted her legs to let him in.

As if he had read her mind, Javier said, “Let me make this a little more special for you.” He took off his shirt, and with a loud rip he tore a sleeve from it. Emily watched his pectoral muscles grow pronounced with the effort, mystified by why he would do such a thing. With a chuckle he reached down and covered her eyes with the cloth, tying it into a blindfold.

“Oh,” Emily said, surprised, and then she said, “Oh,” again louder, and then “Oh!” Liam had pressed his mouth to her cunt and had found her clit. His tongue moved over it slowly, up and down, and then rapidly as she squirmed and rocked to his attentions.

Standing up now, Javier removed his pants, tossed them aside, and knelt over her head. Even through the blindfold, she could see the bulk of him, a shadow, and she opened her mouth, knowing what he wanted. She wanted it, too, the salty taste of it, the feel of her mouth being filled by thick, hard dick. He pushed himself forward into her mouth, and she began to move her tongue back and forth along the underside, stroking the sensitive spot right below the head. Her hands moved to the firm, muscular cheeks of his ass, bringing him deeper into her mouth, her head bobbing back and forth in a slow, sensual rhythm.

It took her a moment to realize it was the same rhythm she felt between her legs as Liam continued to tongue her, two of his fingers moving in and out of her at the same time.

And suddenly, they were gone. At the same time, Javier pulled himself out of her mouth. Emily let out an involuntary cry of disappointment—she wanted more. “Don’t worry,” said Liam. “We’re not done with you.”

He reached down, lifted her up, and she felt all four of the men’s hands on her, stroking her, caressing her breasts and ass, as they guided her back to her knees and then down on all fours.

“Switch?” Javier asked.

“What?” she said.

“Not you,” he replied, and it dawned on her—they were changing positions, trading ends.

She spread her knees farther apart, pushed her ass up to welcome him in, and lifted her head up for Liam’s dick. Liam knelt in front of her, and as he pressed it against her lips, she remembered why they called him Pony. Javier’s dick was large but still normal; she had thought it filled her mouth, but she realized now that it hadn’t. She opened her mouth wider to take Liam.

Behind her, Javier put his hands on her hips, pressed his dick against her pussy, so wet now that there was no resistance at all. It slipped right in. She pressed back against him to draw him in deeper, then leaned a little forward to move her lips farther down the mass of Liam’s dick. Back and forth, again and again. The men stayed stable where they were, and let her rock back and forth between them. As she felt the first deep tingling that told her an orgasm was beginning to build up within her, she moaned in her throat, the sound blocked by the dick in her mouth, exciting Liam further with the vibrating hum of it.

She rocked faster and faster, filled from both ends but still wanting more, and it felt like she was fucking one man, a perfectly made creature equipped to fill her however she wanted him to, with one dick or two or three. She moaned again, or thought she did, but it hadn’t been her; it was Liam kneeling in front of her, moans and grunts escaping from his lips, and behind her Javier joined in the deep-throated bass chorus of male sounds, animal sounds. Javier took over now, grabbing her and pumping in and out of her, and as he thrust forward into her, it pushed her forward to take in Liam’s dick, and then back again.

She felt the two dicks inside her, and she imagined that she was the link between them, that through her, the two men were fucking each other: She translated Javier’s thrusting dick into her sucking mouth. As she thought about this, pictured their two dicks coming together, felt them in her but saw that they were thrusting against each other, imagined that over her back above her, they were looking deep into each other’s eyes, her orgasm began to gather, to build, the delicious tension becoming unbearable. She moved faster and faster, both the men moved faster and faster, and when she felt them come, the thick come filling her mouth and her pussy, she exploded, the orgasm so strong that behind her blindfold she saw stars.

There was a minute of confused tumbling, the two men collapsing around and over her in a way she couldn’t picture; arms hugging her and lips kissing the nape of her neck. Then she pulled the blindfold off and found herself staring into Liam’s eyes. Then, behind him, she saw Javier sitting up, looking dazed and pleased. He said, “Thank you, my love, but next time I want you to myself.” She let herself relax onto the rug and what she realized now was Liam’s upper arm, cradling her head. She said, with a smile that probably mirrored Javier’s, “Oh, but my retirement begins now. . . .”

Javier shook his head disapprovingly and began to pull his clothes back on with the neat, precise movements of a cat. “Nothing so terrible could happen,” he said. “It would be a loss to international culture.”

Liam had begun to laugh, and Emily smiled cheerfully at him, then blew a kiss at Javier as he rose to his feet and turned to go. He blew her a kiss back and then instantly fell into the orbit of a passing blonde. As he went off, he was saying, “My darling, the very one I came here to fuck . . .”

Emily made a face, and Liam laughed again. He said, “I don’t know about international culture. But that was pretty fantastic.”

“Thanks,” Emily said, feeling a little bit uncomfortable now that the blindfold was off, now that she could see the big, populous room in which their threesome had taken place. “It was . . . pretty fantastic for me, too.”

Liam looked into her eyes with a slight reserve. “I wouldn’t expect it from you, though. I mean, is something going on?”

Emily considered confiding in him, but she already felt too exposed to want to open herself further. She shook her head. “Just a last hurrah, I guess. The party . . . stuff going on.”

“Okay. Stuff,” he said. Then he kissed her on the tip of her nose and said, “Well, I guess stuff was working in my favor today.”

“It’s not your thing, either,” she said, a little defensively. “Is it?”

“Oh, well, I don’t mind telling you I’m having a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Stuff galore.”

“What kind of stuff?” When he looked at her narrowly, she added, “Well, you don’t have to tell me. I know—”

“No, it’s okay,” he said, and his face settled into a dreamy expression. “Love stuff. Falling-in-love-with-someone-who’s-a-little-troubled stuff. Trying to solve all their problems when all you want to do is make them stay with you—that stuff. Wonderful, and enough to drive you crazy.”

At this, Emily couldn’t help sighing. “Don’t I know it.” When she met his eye again, she was surprised to see him smiling at her as if he knew more than she realized.

“Well, I better get going,” he said. “I got to be on set in an hour.” As he helped her up and handed her her dress, though, his face continued to wear its bemused, knowing expression. And when he kissed her good-bye, he said, “Listen. Your stuff—a little bird told me it’s going to be all right.”

“What?” she said. “What do you mean? Nobody knows about—”

He put his finger to his lips and winked.

Then he was walking off briskly, leaving Emily standing naked, with her dress in one hand and her panties on the floor at her feet. Across the room, she caught her image in a full-length mirror and at first mistook herself for just another of the debauchees having a wild time at the party. By the time she realized it was her, she had had time to be moved by the girl’s expression of fragile, hopeful love. It’s going to be all right, she thought. A little bird told me. She shook her head, turned away from her reflection, and headed upstairs to wash off her last hurrah. In an hour, she, too, had to be on set.

EIGHTEEN

The interview was set in the Pope’s Chamber, a spacious corner room with a view of the cherry orchard on two sides, furnished with gigantic pieces of furniture that were all Gothic in appearance though they dated variously from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A huge mirror had a heavy mahogany frame carved with gargoyles. The armchairs were the size of thrones. There was a dark and humorless grandeur about the room that made it seem like the setting of a ghost story, even with the morning sunlight streaming in the windows and with the camera equipment set up in the middle of it, amid a mess of cables. It was called the Pope’s Chamber because, according to the brochure produced by the toothpick mogul’s grandson during the castle’s brief period as a museum, a seventeenth-century pope had stayed there once. The story was a little improbable, however, since the room was on the fifth floor, and in the seventeenth century the castle had only had four stories.

Valerie was sitting in a gold plush chair that dwarfed her; the back of it was eight feet tall. It was counterintuitive to sit on such a gloomy object naked, and it contributed to her rising sense of panic. Although she had spent half her career posing naked, speaking naked, chatting to cameramen naked, she now felt horribly self-conscious and exposed. After this interview, she would be fucking someone on camera. She couldn’t help thinking that everyone was staring and snickering at her, the terrified “virgin.” Probably everyone knew already that she wasn’t really a virgin. Or else the man who was fucking her would notice and expose her lies. He would thrust into her and immediately say, “Hey! There’s no hymen here!” Then stalk out in disgust, leaving her humiliated, facing the cameras alone.

Of course, the idea was ridiculous. No one would do that. But Valerie couldn’t help thinking that it was fated to happen, it was certain to happen. It would happen because she deserved it.

The past two weeks had transformed her so much that she sometimes felt as if she would go crazy from it. It was like being turned inside out. Some nights she’d been up until dawn, with scenes from the past ten years haunting her, all the tantrums she’d thrown, the threats she’d made, the sheer blindness of her behavior. The worst of it was that when she had to go into the studio to film another show, and was confronted by the stresses of dealing with last-minute production problems, empty time, and people’s mistakes, she threw a tantrum again. But this time she knew how awful she was being even as she did it. Still, she wasn’t able to stop. After the show, she made herself go up to Nan, the producer she’d insulted, and apologize. At first, the woman had been cautious. But when Valerie impressed upon her that she was genuinely sorry, Nan smiled and said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Val. We all get stressed. It’s sweet of you to think it matters.” There was something in her manner that was like a mother being moved by a child’s first attempt at adult manners. The experience left Valerie in the torment of shame.

For the first time, also, being naked in public was difficult for her. She kept thinking of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. They had realized they were naked for the first time. Well, she had, too, but it wasn’t physical nakedness—it was the nakedness of being hated and pitied by everyone around her without knowing it was happening. At times, the craving to go back to pretending was so strong that she wondered if anyone could really repent of bad behavior—it seemed to be beyond her strength. But more than anything, she was afraid of going back to her former blindness.

When Ralph had left the hotel room that day, she had been in a spell of rage. Even as she cried, she was blaming him again for everything that had gone wrong in her life. But through it all, the words “I’m in love with Emily Lister . . . I’m in love with Emily Lister . . .” kept echoing. There was something about their tired, impatient finality that had cut through all her defenses. Ralph was in love with Emily Lister. That was real. It was something from the world outside of Valerie, a place where people cared about things that had nothing to do with her. Things that were (this was the idea that was growing in her mind) more important than Valerie’s problems.

By the time she’d run a hot bath and gotten into it, meaning to wash away the sense memory of his body on hers, she was realizing no one had ever been in love with her. They had said they loved her. They had been obsessed with her, stalked her, sent her extravagant gifts and made extravagant promises. But no one had ever known her but Ralph. And Ralph emphatically didn’t love her. He had made love to her just now, trying to create a loving experience for her, trying to wipe out the memory of their first, rough coupling, out of kindness. And she couldn’t deny to herself that he had no reason to be kind to her.

He loves Emily. He loves Ilana. I can’t love anyone; I’m too broken. She sat in the hot water and could not stop weeping, even as she felt that the tears were making her dirty again. The tears were ruining the bath; she didn’t know why. It was as if she’d been trying to wash off her own feelings, but they kept pouring over her, dirtying her again. She had been trying to wash herself off. But she remained there, an unloved, unwanted mess. Alone.

She spent that night making plans to go see Ilana. She would bring Ilana to live with her. People could think whatever they liked. Maybe she should tell everyone Ilana was her daughter, even if it meant losing her job. It would be a penance she could do for all the years she had neglected her daughter. But by the time she fell asleep, she realized that none of that would do Ilana any good. Ilana didn’t even know her. Valerie was indulging in selfish schemes again, still thinking the world revolved around Valerie.

She called in sick the next morning and spent the whole day coming up with further selfish schemes. At times, she thought she could slowly win Ilana over. She could buy her gifts—children liked gifts. The fact that Ilana didn’t know Valerie could be a good thing; Valerie could be kind and sweet to Ilana and the girl would never know it was strange. But finally, Valerie realized that behind that scheme was the thought that if she had Ilana back, Ralph would eventually be won over. He would come to know the sweet, kind Valerie and fall in love with her. He would move in with her and Ilana. They would be a family. It would be a neat, happy ending—except that it would never happen.

Then she began to think of going to school to be a veterinarian, of getting a humble job as a waitress in a small town, of remaining at XTV but winning everyone over with her new sweet, kind persona. But lingering in the background of all these fantasies was the concluding image in which Ralph realized it was Valerie, not Emily, whom he loved. It would never happen. For thirteen years, it hadn’t happened, although she’d always vaguely assumed that he would return to her, that he would see through her cold exterior to the real person underneath, that he of all people would understand.

Back at XTV the next day, it was impossible to suddenly shed her cold exterior. She inhabited it while hating it, saw her own ugly character all too clearly. She was a bitch. No one could love her. There was no point blaming her childhood anymore, blaming Ralph. She was almost thirty years old. The way she was now was simply who she was. When she remembered her scheme to start a rival network, it all seemed like the boastful pipe dream of a child. She shivered when she thought about pitching the reality show about virgins to Babylona. It was so transparently a projection of Valerie’s own neurosis. Surely Babylona had found her creepy and pathetic.

On the fifth day, she cracked and called Ralph’s cell phone. When he didn’t answer, she was distraught. She hung up without leaving a message and fell into another bout of self-pitying tears, hating herself. Before she called back, she wrote down a script for the voice mail she wanted to leave, afraid that without that precaution, she would end up saying something hateful. It took her an hour to write the script, and by the end the page was a mess of cross-outs—a page of all the pleading, shameless, angry things she had ever wanted to say to him. Her final version was: “Hi, Ralph. This is Valerie. I’d appreciate it if you gave me a call. It’s nothing bad.” She read it into the phone in a careful, quiet monotone, and hung up with her heart pounding. Despite herself, she still felt hurt that he hadn’t answered the phone, still imagined him looking at the caller ID with a contemptuous expression on his face.

Then, without even knowing why she did it, she called Liam. She had been meaning to call him for the last few days, feeling that she owed him an explanation for her behavior. But she owed so many explanations to so many people. Now she was calling him out of pure need.

When he answered the phone, her body was flooded with gratitude and relief. She said, “Hi, Liam. It’s Valerie. Could I see you?”

He said, “Of course. Do you . . . do you want to meet at a restaurant?”

“Oh.” She thought for a second, trying to make her mind imagine normal scenes, meetings at which people had simple, friendly conversations.

But then he said, shyly, “Or . . . you could always come to my place.”

“Great,” she said. “Oh, great. Just give me the address.”

His apartment was an ordinary fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. It was furnished in bachelor style. Everything was basic and serviceable; beige carpet, dusty Venetian blinds, a couch that folded out to a bed. There were dishes in the sink, and when she arrived he was picking clothes up from off the floor.

He said, “I’m so sorry. I really wanted to have this cleared up. . . . I wasn’t thinking when I invited you over. I thought—”

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “I don’t care about that.”

“But I want to—”

“No, seriously,” she said, feeling almost panicked at the idea of someone doing anything for her. “Listen. Why don’t you kiss me?”

At that, he smiled and came over to give her a kiss on the mouth—a lingering, warm kiss that sent a tingling feeling all over her. It came to her that Liam actually liked her. Even if it was based on a delusion, the feeling was genuine. She put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him back, letting the warmth of the kiss ease her tension and kindle a shy heat in her loins. When at last he stood back, he looked chastened. He said in a soft, husky voice, “Would you like something to drink? I’ll clear off a space on the couch for us.”

“Oh, good. Yes, I wanted to tell you . . . I owe you an explanation.”

Over the next two hours, in between kissing him and drinking red wine, Valerie told Liam all the secrets she’d been keeping for thirteen years. By the end of it, she was lying in his arms, talking softly into his ear while he stroked her hair. The miracle was, he was still looking at her with the same protective fondness.

He said, “I knew there must be something wrong, some trouble you were keeping inside. You were always such an angry little thing. It hurt my heart to see it.”

“Angry,” she said. “God, even you thought I was angry.”

He chuckled and kissed her on the forehead. “You telling me you weren’t angry?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know. From my point of view, I was just scared.”

“Yeah, well, it looks like the same thing from the outside. You ever see a fight in a bar, you’ll see some scared guys. But they look pretty angry if you’re on the wrong side of their fists.”

Valerie laughed. “That makes me feel loads better.”

“Damn. Well, it was meant to.”

“Liam. Look at me.”

He turned his face to hers, still stroking her long blond hair, his eyes sleepy and tender. She said, “Would you . . . could we have sex?”

His face became guarded. “I’d be kind of worried, after last time.”

She suppressed another wave of panic. He’s not trying to hurt me, she reminded herself. He’s trying to protect me. “Well, I want to promise that it won’t go wrong,” she said, her voice shaking, “but I don’t know. I’ve been noticing I can’t predict what I’m going to do.”

“Welcome to the club,” he said, smiling. “Listen, Valerie, if you want to sleep with me, that’s wonderful. I don’t think there’s anything on earth I’d rather do. But you’ve got to promise you won’t blame me if . . .”

“I promise,” she said. “Cross my heart.”

He traced an X over her breasts with his finger. Then his finger paused on the swell of her left breast. Another finger joined the first and he was caressing her breast through the fabric of her sweater. Every time his fingertips crossed her nipple, a pang shot through her. She made herself relax, listening to the response of her body rather than trying to control it. As his hand moved over her breast, she was maddeningly aware of a man touching her, of the invasion of it that was part of the pleasure. But she let it happen; she let him unbutton her shirt and see her exposed breasts. She let him bend and seize one of her nipples in his lips, suck it in between his teeth, nibble it. She let herself sigh in response.

“God, you’re so beautiful,” he said, his breath warm against her skin. “I used to watch you on your show. I never heard a word you said. I never saw anything so beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Oh, really.”

He pulled her blouse open all the way and she sat up to take it off, watching him watch her. It was like a dream in which you can do things that are normally impossible; she was standing up and taking off her skirt now, letting him see her from just a foot away, letting him stroke her thighs as she pulled down her panties. When she was naked in front of him, she said, “This should be so normal for me.”

“It doesn’t feel normal to me at all,” he said, and kissed her belly.

She caught her breath. His lips moved down, exciting the sensitive skin of her lower abdomen, and she felt an anticipatory electricity in her cunt, the awareness of what she was going to let him do. His hand moved up her thigh and his fingers rested for a second on her pussy lips, barely moving. Somehow the fact that he was watching himself do this was most inflaming of all. She wanted him. She actually wanted him; it was suddenly simple and easy and good.

“How do you want to do it?” he said, his voice betraying his excitement.

When she looked down at him, she was surprised to see him still fully dressed, still the handsome cowboy with the shy, kind demeanor. She said, “I don’t know. Every way?”

He laughed. “I can do that for you.”

Without thinking, she got down on her knees and began to undress him, with hurried, clumsy movements that seemed to make him breathless with lust. He was fondling her breasts and letting her take his shirt off, open his pants, his eyes focused on her face as if drinking in her willingness. At the last moment, he moved her aside and stood up to shed the last clothes completely; she was smiling at him as he pulled off his socks with the same maladroit haste she had experienced a moment before. But when he was naked, the beauty of his body, its strong and well-formed masculinity, made her feel weak and needy. The thick muscular legs, his broad shoulders, the long shaft of his penis rising, curving slightly from its corona of golden hairs—she wanted all of him. She wanted him so much it was impossible to believe she could really have him.

He said, “Every way.”

Without replying, she bent forward and kissed his dick. The smoothness of it surprised her. She was trying to think that she’d seen this done a thousand times before, that it was easy, nothing. Still, the touch of his cock to her mouth felt incredibly sensual; it was something too amazing to be ordinary. Of course doing this with someone would make you fall in love, she thought, with a vague stirring of sympathy toward her younger self. Of course it would. Then she drove the thought away, looking up at him a little bashfully to say, “I’m sorry. I’ve never done this before.”

“But . . . you want to?” His voice was hoarse with lust.

“I want to.”

“Do you want me to talk you through it?”

“Okay.”

“Try licking it, on the underside there. Lick it up the center.”

She began to do so, again marveling at the silkiness of the skin. It tasted salty; it was a wholesome taste. There was nothing dirty about it at all. His cock responded to her tongue, stiffening even more, seeming to strain under the onslaught of pleasure. She tried moving her tongue in circles, and he groaned. It was as if she could feel his pleasure in her own body. She was getting more and more excited with every second. Her breasts felt tight and exquisitely sensitive until even the cool air was like a caress. And she was aware of the wetness of her pussy, its aching for him.

He said, “Okay, take it in your mouth. Just suck the tip of it.”

She followed his instructions. The size of his cock in her mouth was immediately thrilling—of course it was, and the idea that it would be inside her, this frighteningly big and beautiful thing, was impossibly wonderful. She sucked the tip of his cock, feeling the contours of it with her tongue, and without being told, she began to move her head down, greedily taking more of it into her mouth, wanting to know it. Wanting to make him crazy with the movements of her tongue, up and down.

He breathed, “Oh, God. Oh, my God. That’s incredible.”

It was incredible. She was working her mouth up and down him, filling her throat with his cock, the exact shape of it driving her crazy. Then suddenly he pulled back, a subtle movement that she picked up on instantly, and she let his cock slip out of her mouth and looked up at him questioningly.

He said, “I’m sorry. It’s just, you’re going to make me come.”

“Really?” She caught her breath. The idea of making him come—she hadn’t even thought of that, but now she realized it was what she wanted more than anything.

“Really.” He grinned at her. “You’re amazing. But I want to fuck you.”

The word “fuck” startled her; for an instant she remembered all her fear and defensiveness. Then it was gone, and she was moving up to sit on the couch as he kneeled on the floor and took her in his arms. He embraced her, his cock pressing against her belly so that she could feel the length of it against her. She moved against it, remembering its taste, the delicate skin over its hardness. Then he was pulling back his hips. He took hold of his cock and was moving it against her cunt, stroking up and down so that its tip was lubricated in her wetness, and then sweeping it maddeningly over her clitoris, making her gasp. It was the most intense feeling she’d ever had. As he repeated the motion again and again, she kept thinking, That’s actually his dick; this is actually happening. As she thought it, he suddenly groaned and positioned his dick at her opening, pushing into her. She cried out and parted her legs farther, wanting him to penetrate her completely. His cock inside her was so hard, its thickness gratifying in a way she couldn’t resist. He pushed it in farther and farther until his balls pressed against her buttocks and she again felt the shape of him.

“Yes,” she said, without knowing she was saying it aloud. “Yes, fuck me.”

He began to fuck her, at first slowly, the friction so delicious that she was gripping his arms in a trance of pleasure. His dick pumping into her was the best thing she had ever felt; every inch of it thrilled as it swept in and out, every stroke was a new revelation of what she could feel. When she felt her orgasm gathering, she opened her eyes to look at him, and the sight of his hips moving into her, faster and harder now, made her dizzy. He’s fucking me, she thought, and the idea drove her over the top into a violent orgasm that swept from her pussy in waves and then dissipated in tingling on her skin.

But he was still fucking her, the pleasure now merciless and overwhelming. I can’t do this, I can’t do this, she was thinking as another orgasm grew within her. It’s too much. It was too much; she blacked out for a second and came to again in a world of pleasure, not knowing where it began or ended. Gradually, she became aware of the diminishing spasms in her vagina, her hands on his firm chest. She opened her eyes again and said, dazed and happy, “Why did you stop?”

He was smiling at her with a drowsy contentment in his eyes. “Why do you think, sugar? I came.”

“Oh, no. I missed it?”

He laughed, and she felt it inside her and couldn’t help laughing too. He said, “I guess you were pretty far gone.”

“I guess.” She blinked at him, confused. Then she said, “Oh, and we were going to do it every way. I wanted to . . .”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

Over the next few days, she went to see Liam three more times, and worked through every sexual position and variation she had witnessed in her time at XTV. He teased her that she had a shopping list, but she just said, “Making up for lost time.”

And during this time, she noticed that every interaction she had with people was different. She had always depended on her feeling of sexual power, drawing men in just far enough to manipulate them, then pushing them away irritably. What they didn’t realize—what she had never realized until now—was that her irritation was based on a resentment at the fact that she didn’t dare to go any further with them. It was frustrated desire. With women, she had always been defensive, braced against their envy of her looks while secretly envying them the fulfilling relationships she assumed they had.

All that had changed. Flirting with men was now a different kind of power: a give-and-take that was based on a shared fantasy that might—this was the delightful change—come true. It would take so little—a gaze held for an extra minute—to turn a teasing conversation into a kiss, clothes torn away, fucking.

One day, she had ordered pizza, and the delivery boy was a tall and darkly handsome young man who snuck glances at her cleavage while she hunted in her purse for money. On a whim, she told him to come inside while she looked for her wallet. He followed her aimlessly into the living room. When she got down on her knees in front of him, at first he frowned at the floor, obviously wondering if her wallet could be under his foot. Then she put her fingers to his crotch, feeling the thick curl of his already half-hard dick. She said, “Do you mind?”

He was dumbstruck for a moment, then shook his head mutely. By the time she got his fly open, his dick was rock-hard, and she took it in her mouth with a flutter of euphoria in her chest at her own daring.

It was playing out a scene from an old-style porn flick, one that had always appealed to her because it implied the power of a woman to seduce any man who crossed her path. It was grasping life as it passed, treating it as a buffet of pleasures free for the taking. And it was also the immediate experience of touching him, hearing him murmur, “Oh, God, God,” as she took his dick in her mouth, of getting hot and bothered herself to the point that when he came, she got chills all over. When it was finished, the delivery guy thanked her so many times she began to laugh helplessly. He said, “Honestly, miss, I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”

Two hours later, Ralph called.

“Valerie,” he said. “I’m returning your call.”

The coldness in his voice was directed at a Valerie who no longer existed. Or at least that was what she told herself while she felt the familiar angry tug toward retaliation aching in her.

She was silent so long that he finally said, “Are you there?”

Then she found herself saying, “Ralph, I need to see you. I just want to talk about things.”

“What is there to talk about?”

“Ilana. I want to be back in her life.”

It was his turn to be silent. At last he said, “Of course I’ll see you. I just hope this isn’t—”

“It’s not,” she said. “I promise you, it’s not.”

Meeting Ralph was even more difficult than she’d expected. She kept having feelings that were almost impossible to control. If they hadn’t met in public (a hotel bar with strangers constantly passing by) she might have lost her temper a dozen times, dissolved into tears, found herself caught in all the old games. But time and again, she bit her tongue, waited, and said the thing she knew she should say, even if she didn’t mean it. And by the end, he was warming to her, looking at her with a more relaxed form of that kindness that had always drawn her to him.

They drove to Massachusetts together, and Valerie waited in a cheap highway-side motel while Ralph went and explained to their daughter the secrets that had been kept from her over all those years. He came back looking a little weather-beaten; Ilana had responded in typical teenager fashion, becoming sarcastic and dismissive while looking distraught, as if he was tearing her world apart. And Valerie’s first meeting with her daughter in years was an awkward affair. They went to a waffle house that Ilana was particularly partial to and sat in the fluorescent lighting, struggling to make conversation.

Ilana was a chubby teenager, blond and apple-cheeked in a way that made her sullen attitude incongruous. From the outside, the meeting would have seemed like a complete failure. But Valerie was surprised by the fi erce emotions she felt for the girl, and by the rush of memories she had of Ilana as a child. It had been a time in her life she tried to forget, that she had always thought of as absolutely bleak. Now she was beset by a hundred little memories of moments of grace—times when the world had vanished and there was no one who mattered but her daughter. And Valerie also remembered the keen sense of inadequacy that had always followed on that, her sense that she was going to fuck it all up. At last she had run away, and even if Ralph was inclined to forgive her, Ilana’s nervousness with her was evidence of just how terribly wrong that decision had been.

On the drive back, they were both silent. Valerie was sure Ralph was regretting his decision to encourage her; Valerie wasn’t cut out to be a mother; it was absolutely obvious. But finally, unable to endure the silence anymore, she said, “I have to go to Switzerland this week for that awful birthday party. I’m supposed to go through with the charade of losing my virginity, and now I don’t even know how I’m going to face those people.”

Then Ralph said, “Why don’t we fly out there together?”

She had been staring out the window at the passing sweep of woods, trying to block out his brooding presence. His warm voice was so at odds with what she’d imagined he was feeling that she at first had the impression there was a third person in the car. Then she looked at him in surprised gratitude.

He explained, “I’m having the strangest thing. I know you probably don’t want to hear about this, but Emily . . .”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “Really.”

He made a face. “Well, the best thing in the world happens to you, and all you can think about is the obstacles. I want to call Emily and tell her I love her and I’m going to be with her, but all I can see is the things that might go wrong, and I keep putting it off. . . .”

With a rush of emotion, Valerie realized that he wanted her to travel with him for the same reason that her mind always went to him when she was in distress. For years, she had been the closest person in the world to him, even as his enemy. Now that the animosity was gone, the closeness was all that was left. Ralph was actually her friend; she had a friend.

She said, “I’d love to go out to Switzerland with you. It would really be a help to me to have you there.”

He smiled. “Well, then, that’s settled.”

And she’d spent her last day in New York making phone calls to Babylona, pulling strings to get a room at the Schloss for Ralph, calling in favors—working on someone else’s behalf. By the time they got to the airport, everything was arranged, and Valerie felt like she might be able to have a life like other people’s, with friends, love, a daughter who might someday come to forgive her. Everything could still be all right. There was only one thing left to do.

According to the new schedule, Valerie would interview Jared for fifteen minutes, asking him about his feelings about his return to porn, his new romance . . . the usual. It would be somewhat complicated by the fact that Jared had every reason to hate her. The last person she needed to see right now was Jared.

She would then segue into the preliminaries for her own performance, announcing who she would be fucking, making a few candid remarks about her trepidation (which she would read off a teleprompter). Then . . . the sex scene itself, which was to be the preliminary for her more general coverage of the birthday celebrations. If she didn’t have a complete nervous breakdown and run screaming to the airport.

Now, sitting in the bizarre enormous chair, in her naked body (which she had often thought of as a costume she wore for her TV appearances), she briefly considered quitting then and there. As on most days of her working life, she was a small nude woman surrounded by microphones and staring lenses, with people in street clothes wandering past, chatting to one another, drinking coffee without paying any attention to her at all. It was all so familiar, but today it seemed completely dreamlike. There was also an unusual number of people present, partly because of the colossal scale of the room, and partly because the party atmosphere made it seem natural for anyone with the hint of an excuse to show up for Valerie’s ceremonial deflowering (as she thought of it disgustedly to herself).

Already Friselle Belesci was there; she had gotten two of the strapping interns to carry a couch in from another room and then join her on it. The young men were sitting straight up with a look of awkward bliss on their faces while Friselle draped herself first this way, then that way over their beefy thighs. Jared was standing at one end of the couch with a slight redhead who must be his new girlfriend. The gossip was that he had refused to sleep with anyone but the girlfriend for his birthday performance. Depending on whom you heard the story from, Babylona was either furious or secretly pleased, because that was what she had intended all along. Babylona was often credited with the mysterious ability to trick people into doing exactly what she wanted, while they imagined they were defying her—which she probably achieved by claiming to have cunningly arranged for everything that happened by itself.

At a little card table, sitting on folding chairs, were the four men who were still hoping to be Valerie’s “first.” They were playing poker for her. When the interview with Jared was over, the man with the biggest pile of chips would signal to her and she would announce his name. There was Liam, who had been philosophical about the prospect of watching his girlfriend having sex with someone else. “On-screen sex is different; it’s like having a burger with someone,” he’d said. And although she wasn’t at all convinced, she supposed it helped to think that way.

Then there was Jack Boulanger, a slim, lithe man with elfin good looks and blond hair down to his waist. He was a former piano prodigy who had given up his music career to become a movie star. His film roles had, however, tended to be in straight-to-video dramas about piano prodigies or elves. He now played the boy genius on XTV’s high school drama, South Beach Prep. He was a glum and laconic man who became delightful company when drunk; at parties he would play the piano and invent scurrilous versions of everything from Christmas carols to Justin Timberlake songs. He was also famous for his expensive suits, the beauty of which was legendary. He had once said that he wouldn’t wear a suit that cost less than a new car.

The third candidate was Jackson Nye, who had been voted the best-looking man in porn at last year’s XTV barbecue. With his blazing green eyes, perfectly molded features, and sculpted body, he looked like the descendant of several generations of supermodels. In real life, he was famous for his monumental laziness; he literally brought a sleeping bag with him to work and would nap between takes. When Valerie had interviewed him for Pleasure News, he claimed that he only left his bed for filming and to go to the gym. When he had a girlfriend, she had to accept that all their dates would take place in his bed. He was saving his pennies so that some day he would no longer have to be in movies or go to the gym.

The fourth man was J. T. Allen, a former Navy SEAL and ex-boyfriend of Babylona who was six foot four and all muscle. He still wore his hair crew cut and was one of those men who are devastatingly attractive despite the fact that they lack conventional good looks; his nose was crooked from having been broken, his face was weather-beaten and thin-lipped. Nonetheless, he always had a little fan club of girls following him around. For J.T., the most battle-scarred porn veteran would suddenly begin baking cookies and giggling like a schoolgirl. He had appeared in a few of the XTV shows, but was really just a member of Babylona’s entourage, one of those favorites who trailed her around the world, doing very little with great style.

All four of the men were sneaking speculative glances at Valerie as they played. It made her feel self-conscious, but she also felt a telltale wetness between her legs. Soon she was sneaking speculative glances at them, thinking of fucking each of them in turn.

The director arrived—it was Nan, the woman Valerie had apologized to the week before—and everyone hushed and looked expectant. Jared came toward her. For the interview, he was wearing a suit, which made him look more serious than usual, his chestnut hair groomed, his handsome face composed. At the last minute, as he sat in the similarly gruesome and massive chair beside her, he stuck out his tongue at Valerie.

She laughed and said, “I’m sorry, Jared. About—”

“You’re going to be sorry,” he said with a sly smile.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”

Then Nan called for everyone to take their places.

Valerie didn’t even have the energy to think of what Jared might mean; she was too conscious of the eyes of all four of the men at the card table trained on her. She felt her nipples pricking, hardening under the attention. Then Nan was pointing at her and she roused herself to start the show, automatically finding the teleprompter with her eyes, scanning the words and smiling professionally at the camera.

“Hello and welcome. I’m sitting here with Jared Vairy, star of Mile-High Club and more recently the host of Meet the Wife on our own XTV. Jared, welcome.”

“Hi, Valerie.” He gave her a smile. “Glad to be here.”

“So, Jared, today you’re going to come out of retirement from on-screen sex to celebrate our own Babylona Parris’s thirty-ninth birthday. What made you decide to go back?”

Although she was reading the words from a teleprompter, Valerie couldn’t help feeling an inward cringing at the question. She had made him decide, with her typical bullying to no purpose.

He said, with a slow, insinuating emphasis, “Well, someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, let’s put it that way.”

“And who would that person be?”

“Oh, Valerie, you know who that person is as well as I do,” he said, and a mischievous gleam returned to his eyes.

For the first time since she could remember, Valerie was keenly aware that she was naked while her interviewee was fully clothed. She had always known intellectually that there was something perverse about it, something subtly dirty that viewers responded to. But this was the first time she responded to it. She noticed Jared’s eyes dipping to take in her body and remembered him saying You’re going to be sorry.

Nan gestured for her to go back to the teleprompter, and Valerie read aloud, without understanding a word she was saying, her mind still fixed on the meaning of Jared’s hints, “At this point I’d like to remind our viewers that all proceeds from this broadcast are going to Zemblan Famine Relief, and we’re accepting contributions to our relief fund at our XTV famine hotline.” When she finished reading the toll-free number twice, she turned back to Jared, but he spoke first.

“But, Valerie,” he said, “what I’m doing isn’t half as daring as what you’re doing after this segment.”

“Um, right,” she said. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“It’s obvious to everyone,” he said with a certain languid tone that put her on her guard. “You’ll be having sex for the first time—in front of a camera. Most of us are terrified having sex for the first time, or doing it in front of a camera for the first time. Both at once—that’s huge.”

For a second, she thought he was trying to frighten her, but then he winked at her and she just said, “Well, I’m trying not to think about it.”

“And I’m not letting you.”

“Let’s get back to you,” she said hastily. Friselle Belesci laughed, and then J.T. added his deep laugh to hers. Valerie shot Friselle a dark look and said to the camera, “That laughter you hear in the background is from some of our friends from XTV, who are here to cheer us on—”

“And laugh at us,” Jared put in.

“That’s right, and laugh at our mistakes,” said Valerie smoothly, smiling at Jared.

He said, “So, who’s the lucky man?”

“No, getting back to you,” she said pointedly, “who’s the lucky girl?”

“Oh, that would be telling.”

“Yes, telling is often a component of an interview,” she said. “But let’s try this: I’ll make a guess, and you can tell me whether I’m right.”

“Good,” he said, with that infuriating smile. “I love games.”

“There’s been some talk of a new love in your life,” she said. “A girl some of our viewers may know from Home of X, Zaza Jeresky. I don’t suppose there’s any chance that she’s your choice.”

“No chance at all,” he said.

There was a faint stir of reaction from the people watching. A few people glanced at Zaza, who stood smiling imperviously.

Valerie cocked her head. “Very interesting. So give me a hint. If she’s not your new lady love, and by the way, she is very beautiful and charming . . .”

“Always means more from someone who’s never met her,” Jared said, “but as a matter of fact, that’s an understatement.”

“If it’s not her, could you tell us whether this is someone you’ve chosen or is it someone who’s been visited upon you by our birthday girl? I think many of our viewers will know that Babylona can be very controlling about these things.”

“Oh, that’s an easy question,” Jared said. “Neither one nor the other.”

“Very cryptic. What do you mean?”

“I mean you asked me yourself.”

Valerie balked. “Sorry?”

Jared stood up. Valerie already half suspected, and felt her heart pounding. He said, “You asked me to fuck you, Valerie. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

He was standing very close to her, looking down at her. She found she couldn’t meet his eye. “I remember,” she said.

He bent down and took her chin in his hand, lifting her face to look at him. “So we have the answer to both of our questions.”

A voice in the audience said, “No way!” and was quickly hushed by the other onlookers.

Valerie made herself look Jared full in the face—just as he kissed her on the lips. The touch of his mouth was a shock, his lips so soft. Immediately, her body responded, even as she was thinking that this couldn’t happen. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

But he was touching her cheek, his fingers slipping down her throat lightly. As he began to kiss her in earnest, his tongue invaded her mouth. His hand caressed her neck, the strong fingers molding to the shape of her throat. Then the hand was gone, and she was barely conscious of him pulling off his jacket and letting it drop to the floor, him unbuttoning his shirt. She should be stopping him, reminding him that this was business. . . . But she was already weak with desire; her body was lit up with the anticipation of this particular man. She could feel the darker insinuation in his teasing now, his awareness that he was going to fuck her. That she wasn’t going to be able to stop him.

There—his hand on her breast, playing with it, appreciating its shape. The palm grazing her nipple and making her tense for the next touch. She reached up and found his chest, the smooth muscles flexing as his other hand moved down her bare belly. He turned his hand and drew the backs of his fingernails over her lower abdomen, making her squirm and kiss him more deeply. Then he stood back from her to take off his pants. She opened her eyes and saw the people watching, some of them actually with open mouths. In the first instant, she almost wanted to laugh: shocked porn actors! In her peripheral vision, she noticed that Friselle Belesci had already managed to remove the pants from one of her tamed interns and was nuzzling his erect cock with her cheek while she met Valerie’s eye. Then she saw the poker players looking wry and disappointed. She couldn’t help noticing that Liam had the biggest pile of chips after all; he would have won.

The concentrated attention made her feel every sensation Jared had given her again, amplified by the arousal she saw on the faces behind the cameras. And behind the cameras, the people who would see this later at home. She looked up at Jared but ended up looking at his cock. It was already fully erect, longer than Liam’s and a deeper mauve, its straightness making it look harder. It was magically beautiful to her at that moment, and she was reaching for it without meaning to—and then allowing herself to reach for it, to grasp it in her hand as if claiming ownership. She licked her lips and looked up again to meet Jared’s eyes, to find his face distracted and tense.

He put his hand over hers and moved it up and down his cock, his eyes growing distant. She let her hand be guided by his, her breath coming faster as she felt the hardness of him, the sweet skin there hot and dry. At last she couldn’t wait any longer; she stood up and pressed herself against him, trapping both their hands over his dick. He didn’t kiss her but leaned forward to nip her ear. He whispered, for her only, “I always wanted to fuck you, Valerie.”

She whispered back to him, “So why don’t you?”

At that, he turned her around and he was embracing her from behind, his hands moving on her breasts, his dick pressing into the cleft between her buttocks. He whispered to her, “Put your foot on the chair. It will hurt less from behind.”

With a twinge of conscience, she realized he was still thinking she was a virgin. But she did as he said, letting him guide her so that she had one foot up on the seat of the huge chair and held its back with both hands. She was keenly aware of her pussy spread and exposed to the cameras. And then he began to stroke it, teasing the edges of her pussy lips with his fingers, pressing down on them gently to spread her farther. His thumb passed lightly over her clitoris, making her gasp. Then it dipped into her cunt and circled back, slipping wetly over her tender nub, making her grip the chair and moan.

For a minute she was poised that way, Jared playing with her cunt and brushing his dick lightly against the inside of thigh, arousing her beyond all consciousness of the watching people, who had fallen into a stunned silence. At last she felt the tip of his dick pressing against her, into her. She cried out, and there was a suppressed gasp of response from the audience. He was pushing into her carefully, slowly, spreading her open with his dick. It was all she could do not to drive herself back onto him. Her cunt was in an agony of sensation, and his dick seemed to be carving through the pleasure he had aroused in her, moving far too slowly. She needed him, needed him to just fuck her. To fuck her hard and long. Every way.

At last his cock eased into her all the way and he bent over her, embracing her from behind. Again his hands were on her breasts, holding her against him. He began to move his cock in and out of her. Valerie let herself moan, feeling the people watching, wanting her to fail somehow, wanting her to succeed. Wanting her. He built up to a harder, more aggressive rhythm, his body taking over from his intentions. Her body answered his, pushing back onto his, her back arching to bring him in deeper. With every stroke now he was hitting a point inside her that resounded with lust, that sent shimmering aftershocks of pleasure through her that shattered as he hit the spot again. As he fucked her harder, the length of his dick became almost too much; every stroke seemed to push her to the point of pain and stop just short, making her cry out with panic and lust and pleasure. She was crying out in a high, helpless voice, “Oh, God. God, fuck me . . . please.”

As if out of contrariness, he pulled out of her. She immediately, instinctively turned to him to reclaim him, and he pulled her around, sitting in the chair and making her spread her legs to straddle him, her back to the audience again. She saw what he wanted and guided his cock into her again, sliding slowly down it, feeling it come back at a different angle, awakening a new chord inside her. Then he was fucking her from below, fondling her breasts, and saying, “Valerie, yes. Yes,” his voice hoarse.

She rode him, meeting his thrusts with the weight of her body, feeling the length of him pounding into her, every jolt of pleasure jarring her to the roots of her hair. She was crying out with every thrust now, holding on to his shoulders as if the feeling could sweep her away. And then she felt her cunt begin to focus into an intolerable heat. She wanted to make him stop. It was too much, too much—she was already coming, but she held her breath and let go into it, her body freezing as he continued to fuck into her hard, her pussy becoming the exploding center of the world. The blow of it made her melt, and she was still crying out without knowing it. He pulled her down onto him one more time, gripping her as his orgasm came to meet hers, his cock jerking as it emptied into her. She was still coming as he held her, pulled her into his arms. The spasms subsided only slowly, and she was dimly aware that her skin was covered in a light sweat, and she felt the lights on her as a chill.

When she finally opened her eyes, Jared was grinning at her. He shook his head very slightly and whispered, “It wasn’t, was it? Your first time.”

She winked at him and grinned back. She whispered, “And Babylona made you do this?”

He winked back and kissed her roughly on the cheek. Then behind her, she heard a sprinkling of applause that grew and grew, the audience cheering her, them.

Jared said, “Congratulations.”

She said, “Thank you. I’m glad it was you.”

“I never thought I’d say this,” he said. “But I am, too.”

Then Friselle Belesci was standing beside her, holding a bottle of champagne and a tray of glasses. She was nude, her dark hair tumbling over her breasts, a halo of musky perfume rising from her pale skin. She looked like a hostess of the demimonde, welcoming some new recruits. “Brava,” she said to Valerie. “We didn’t know you had it in you.”

Valerie said, “Neither did I.”

Then Liam appeared at Friselle’s side, looking at once lustful and wistful. Meeting his eye, Valerie felt an immediate response, a complex sense memory from all the times they’d been together in recent days. She caught her breath. As Friselle turned away to wave at one of her interns, Valerie mouthed, “Sorry.”

Liam shook his head and smiled. “I was just coming to ask permission to be . . . your second.”

“My second? Oh, my second . . .”

“The second man you sleep with?” He grinned at her conspiratorially. “And maybe the third and fourth.”

She smiled back, feeling a rush of happiness she couldn’t explain. She said, “It would be my pleasure.”

NINETEEN

“And today, a special session of In Depth,” Emily said, her voice Asounding rote even to her. Although it was a point of pride to her to have her lines by heart, today she was shamelessly following the teleprompter. She had let the makeup artist and the hairdresser work on her without bothering to check the mirror afterward. Babylona had had the trademark In Depth bed flown here from New York, and, pulling on the XTV robe and walking to that bed, Emily felt as if she were being put through her paces in some quiet but very public hell. It was a place where nothing would ever change, where you would forever be surrounded by all the things you were stupid enough to want when you were young. At the same time, she kept chiding herself not to be self-indulgent, not to be hysterical. This was a day job. It was just a day job. The question of whether or not she would ever see the man she loved again had nothing to do with this at all.

Settling on the bed with a habitual feline stretch, she read from the teleprompter, “Usually on the show, I spend time getting to know the man of the week. We dine together, go on an outing together, and spend hours talking before coming to bed at last. This week, we’re cutting to the chase.” She smiled for all the world as if this fact were delightfully arousing to her. Reaching back to grasp the bottle of wine on the nightstand, she began to pour two glasses, saying, “And, of course, we have a very special guest.”

This was the crux of the matter, and the one thing that was helping Emily get through this. They hadn’t been able to get a very special guest. Without Emily’s uncanny ability to coax celebrities into bed when they really should have known better, with Emily despondent and distant, barely bothering to answer phone calls, the show had promised to be a dud, with some luminary of the C-list. But at the last moment, discussions had begun about killing two birds with one stone by putting Jared in as the bridegroom of the week, an idea Emily had fostered as best she could. It would be a great comfort to do this show with him. Then the season would be over and she would have three months to decide what her next step was.

With this thought in her mind, it was easier to go through the next few stages of the routine. Emily sprayed her wrists with perfume and then went to a full-length mirror, pulling the robe off to look briefly at herself, front and back. She gave a significant glance to the camera as she exhibited her body, and then slipped the robe back on and went back to the bed—and the teleprompter.

“Our bridegroom for this special broadcast is a man whom many of our viewers already know from the pages of magazines. And we’re sure anyone who doesn’t know him will be glad to make his acquaintance.” A doubt niggled in her mind: magazines? Certainly Jared had been in magazines, but why lead with that instead of his film career?

The next screen came up, and she was reading, with a growing disquiet, “He began his career in business with a start-up company dealing in medical equipment, and since that time has . . .” As she continued to read the words, a lump grew in her throat. There had been some awful mistake. This was the material they’d sketched out to introduce Ralph. Stalling, she paused to sip some wine and looked for the director, who was looking back with complete composure, smiling as if she hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Was anyone even listening to the words?

“By the time our guest was thirty, he was one of the richest men in America. Of course, he’s been one of the sexiest men in America for a much longer time. Please welcome . . . Ralph Anderman.” Emily put a special emphasis on the words, looking pointedly at the director, who did not flinch. Then the door behind her opened, and she looked back to find . . . Ralph.

Angled away from the camera as she was, she was able to give full rein to her look of shock. He smiled at her comfortingly and covered for her, saying, “Hello, Emily. It’s wonderful to see you again.”

Emily took a deep breath, but her voice was still weak and shaken. “Yes, Ralph. It is . . . really wonderful.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to take her hand. The cool touch of his big palm calmed her somewhat, and she squeezed his hand before saying, sticking to the script, “I have to thank you for making the trip to Germany for us, Ralph.”

“Well, Emily, I’m sure you know why I’m here.”

That wasn’t in the script. She stammered, “Oh yes. Well, why don’t you tell our viewers, nonetheless?”

“I’ll do my best.” He turned to the camera with the air of someone biting the bullet.

Emily said, with restrained panic, “I mean, I know you’re a private person and you haven’t wanted to talk about your personal life in the past. So don’t feel pressured to—”

“This is the right time for it,” he said firmly. “The fact is, for many years I’ve been constrained by circumstances to the point where I haven’t had much of a personal life to talk about.”

In a last-ditch effort to play the talk-show hostess, Emily put in, “But you certainly have had an impressive string of girlfriends. I believe your last was the supermodel Marisa Brice, who—”

“Who went to clubs with me for a few weeks, yes,” Ralph said a little impatiently. “But I haven’t had a real love affair since I was twenty. The truth is, at that age I had a child.” Here he paused and looked at Emily to prompt her.

She made herself say, “I guess this is news to most of our viewers.”

“This will be news to all of your viewers, I think,” Ralph said, “since my daughter isn’t old enough to be watching XTV.”

“And . . . you were saying?”

“I don’t have a smooth segue,” Ralph said, turning to her. He put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently, then said, “You know the rest of the story, Emily. I fell in love.”

Emily cast a glance around the studio, but all of the cameramen and the handful of production staff were smiling at her with soppy expressions on their faces. She said, with a leap of boldness, “Of course. And I fell in love with you.”

He pulled her forward, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her softly, lingeringly. When their lips parted, he looked back at the camera once more and said, “I’m sorry to steal your hostess from you, but I want to ask Emily to marry me. And I think—as the wife of one of the richest men in America”—he smiled a little wryly—“she should at least be able to do what she’s always wanted to do. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

He turned back to her, but before he could speak she said, “Oh, of course I’ll marry you. Of course.”

“Then I firmly plan to make an honest veterinarian of you.”

“Of course,” she said softly. They were staring into each other’s eyes, an energy building between them that could only end one way. She felt a prickling up her thighs and over her breasts at the thought of his touch, his kiss.

She said to him, “I love you so much, Ralph.”

“I love you more, Emily.”

Emily turned to the director and said, in a newly strong and joyful voice, “Cut.”