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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.