Show Me (7 page)

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.”

 

 

 

 

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?”