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Off Camera

Laine Hissett-Bonard

    I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew I was falling for him even before he came on my face in front of a camera.
    We, the famed duo of Derrek Lee and Jacob Storm – his porn name and mine, respectively – had been filmed together twice before the session that spawned the facial in question. My real name was Jeremy Burke, but none of my network of slavering online fans would ever know that, if I had anything to say about it.
    As for the great Derrek Lee, I only knew his real first name was Michael because he told me so the first time we met onset at TwinkLove Studios an hour before we were scheduled to tape our first duo scene. That, his age, and the fact that he, like me, lived with his family in Fort Lauderdale was all I knew about the real him, at least identity-wise. Through a series of on-the-job conversations, including those awkward ones that took place after the production crew left the set to allow us to pull together our scattered clothing and mislaid dignity, I had learned a few other things about him. Derrek – it just felt wrong to think of him as Michael – was soft-spoken but inherently disposed to an ingrained brand of personal fierceness, and more intelligent than most seemed to assume at first blush. He was a lot shyer in real life than his current career might indicate, although he seemed to warm up a little every time I saw him.
    At that rate, I figured, by our tenth scene together, I might find out if he took cream in his coffee or not.
    Regardless of how little I knew about him, I found myself thinking about him randomly throughout the day, and even more so at night, tucked into my bed in my parents’ house, anticipating sleep. The kinds of things I thought about him, however, were not exactly what I expected, especially considering I already got naked with the guy twice. I found myself wondering what kind of toothpaste he used, and whether he did his own laundry, and what kind of books, if any, he liked to read. The point was, it was stuff I wouldn’t wonder about someone if I was only interested in fucking him on camera, and that was where, as far as I saw it, things got dangerous.
    I’d heard of it happening more than once: two guys met during a shoot, had explosive sex on camera, developed a crush on each other, and started dating, only to see their relationship self-destruct with all the heat and resultant fallout of a fireball. In most cases, one or both members of the ill-fated former couple basically disappeared off the roster after the studio found out about their off-screen relationship. I had to sign a contract when I first started modeling for TwinkLove stating I wouldn’t have relations with any other model outside of filming. Maybe the studio figured if models dated and broke up, they’d grow disillusioned with the porn business altogether, or maybe that they’d be unwilling to pair up with their exes, but whatever the reason, I didn’t want to lose my main source of income. That meant hooking up with Derrek outside of work all but screamed bad idea, although that knowledge did nothing to halt my admittedly pleasant daydreams and fantasies.
    Making matters worse, I personally knew of two couples – I’d filmed with three out of the four guys myself – who managed to make it work without the disastrous consequences, utilizing nothing more than a healthy dose of discretion. That was probably the main reason I hadn’t banished my Derrek-related thoughts outright.
    “Okay, guys, come on in and get comfortable on the bed.” Aidan, the twenty-two-year-old producer-slash-director who also manned the camera on most of the studio’s shoots, poked his head out the door and motioned for me and Derrek to abandon our positions on opposite ends of the couch in the lounge. “Don’t be shy. We’ll roll in a minute, but before the scene, we’re going to shoot a quick interview first, okay?”
    Suppressing a grimace and following Aidan onto the set, I nodded as affably as I could. Interviews were my least favorite part of the job, as I placed a high value on my personal privacy. Still, they were unavoidable; our viewers unfailingly wanted to know more about the boy behind the dick, and if throwing out a few soundbytes was what it took to keep the studio happy and ensure my continued employment, I was more than willing to comply. I had to make money somewhere, especially if I hoped ever to finish college, and doing porn was a relatively easy way to do it. Besides, considering everything else I eagerly did on camera, interviews should seem harmless in comparison.
    “Here we go again,” I said with a grin, settling onto the bed beside Derrek, who reclined against the headboard and favored me with one of his sweet, tentative smiles. His large blue eyes were rimmed, as every time I saw him, with black liner. “You ready for this?”
    He laughed, and as it always did, the deep timbre of his voice, though softened by its natural sibilance, surprised me when it issued from his scrawny chest. “More like, are you ready for this?”
    It was a fair question; technically, the upcoming session would be a departure from our previous work, at least in terms of the roles we would take. Although Derrek was a devout top, our first session together was also a first in that ever-persuasive Aidan convinced Derrek to bottom. It was hard to forget the level of flattery I felt when I heard that out of the three guys Aidan offered as potential scene partners, Derrek chose me because, as Aidan told me, he thought I was the cutest. Knowing Aidan had chosen Derrek’s three potential scene-mates because we were of average endowment, which was the only way Derrek would agree to bottom, didn’t taint the flattery in the least. As far as I, the studio, and my fans were concerned, my talents far surpassed the size of the bulge I carried around in my cute little jockeys.
    The second scene we shot together was a threesome in which we mutually – and at one point simultaneously – penetrated a perky, mocha-skinned beauty stage-named Sky Lopez, so the session we prepared to shoot marked the first time I would bottom for Derrek. In all honesty, I couldn’t wait. Sure, I was a little intimidated; to put it mildly, Derrek was on the large side. I knew more than one model that walked funny for couple days after filming with him. Still, even though I too preferred topping to bottoming, I considered myself versatile enough, and I found it impossible to turn down the opportunity to shoot another scene with Derrek no matter what the circumstances.
    “I’m always ready.” I couldn’t bring myself to leer at him; he was just too sweet. The best I could do was smile again and wiggle closer, pressing my back against the headboard beside him so our arms touched. Just before the camera rolled, Derrek reached over and placed one bony, long-fingered hand comfortably on my thigh, and my resultant grin was still in place when the camera began rolling.
    “Action!” Aidan called, then nodded at me. “Go ahead and introduce yourselves.”
    “Hi,” I said, smiling but self-conscious, “I’m Jacob Storm, and I’m nineteen, from Fort Lauderdale.”
    “And I’m Derrek Lee, and I’m twenty, from Fort Lauderdale.” His hand twitched on my leg, and I impulsively entwined my fingers with his. His nails were painted sky blue; on his middle finger he wore a lime green and pink plastic ring, which coordinated perfectly with the multi-colored jelly bracelets hugging my wrist.
    “Jacob, maybe you could start by telling me something about Derrek you like – why you’re attracted to him.”
    “How about “everything”? I thought, swallowing and glancing sideways at Derrek to give myself a moment to think. “Well, um, I love his hair.” At least that was a no-brainer; great hair was one of Derrek’s trademarks, easily attained because he attended school for cosmetology, a fact that might seem clichéd on anyone other than him. His long, jaggedly cut locks were poker straight and dyed a glossy black with streaks of magenta shot through, rendering him a fellow scene kid, at least in the eyes of the producers, who gleefully touted him as such. Our limited number, at least within TwinkLove’s employ, was probably a good part of the reason he and I were paired as frequently as we were. Birds of a feather shot porn together or something like that. “And he’s really sweet, and, uh...” I laughed. The next one would be expected of me. “He has an awesome dick.”
    “Aw, thanks,” Derrek said modestly, touching his hair, obviously taking the first compliment more to heart than the last. After enough people raved about your genitalia, I’d discovered, those particular compliments tended to go right over your head.
    “What about you, Derrek? What turns you on about Jacob?”
    My face froze, and I had a mercifully brief moment of panic in which I was sure he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything. For some reason, the probability that I was much more attracted to Derrek than he was to me was crippling. “Well,” Derrek said, looking me up and down, during which time it took all of my restraint to avoid squirming, “I like his piercings—”
    I barely resisted the compulsion to lick my symmetrically pierced lower lip in response.
    “—And of course he has a cute ass,” he continued, hesitantly sliding his hand out from under mine to rest on the curve of my far hip. Oh, the promise that gesture contained! I couldn’t suppress a delighted shiver. “I don’t know,” Derrek said finally. “I guess I like everything about him.”
    My heart pounded as I turned my head to look at him, knowing my smile was stupidly wide but not caring in the least. While he may have pulled out his final answer as a last resort because he couldn’t come up with anything better, I could hardly deny the effect it had on me. I like everything about him. Oh, God. I couldn’t be so lucky. The feeling was more than mutual.
    Though I pondered it frequently, I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly about Derrek I found irresistible. He wasn’t classically good-looking, at least not in the sturdy, blond-haired, corn-fed farm boy sense like many of the guys with whom I filmed. He had a single tattoo, the simple black outline of a star on the inside of one wrist, and a Monroe piercing decorated the right side of his upper lip. Those lips were decidedly full, pink, and as strong and precisely shaped as the rest of his features, giving him an unusual but statuesque appearance. At about six feet tall and maybe a hundred and twenty-five pounds by my best estimate, he was ridiculously skinny, arguably emaciated; the edge of almost every bone was easily discernible through the faintly golden skin covering his body. I often wondered how I could smuggle a cheeseburger or two into his mouth without him noticing, because that kind of frailty couldn’t be healthy. I was only about five foot eight and probably weighed the same as he did, and most people considered me too skinny.
    “Okay,” Aidan said, interrupting the split-second wandering of my mind, “that’s good. Go ahead and show us what you got.”
    We both knew what that meant. Without a word, Derrek and I turned to each other and pressed our lips together, his hand moving to my shoulder, mine slipping beneath the long hair at the nape of his neck. Our touch was equally hesitant at first, but it didn’t take long for the nervousness to abate. As Aidan specified, we started with the standard kissing, soon sliding downward to lie on the bed with our arms twined around each other. Derrek’s kisses were unusual compared to most of the guys I worked with; he didn’t use his tongue much, but I found the press of his lips doubly intense as a result.
    To be fair, that might have something to do with the way I felt about him.
    The heat of his body through his thin t-shirt and torn skinny jeans was almost unbearable, and when he peeled the shirt over his head and wordlessly guided me to do the same, the resultant skin to skin contact threatened to turn my blood to steam. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop my hands from roaming; fortunately, nobody in the room was complaining.
    Derrek was normally very self-possessed during filming, his composure rarely slipping to let more than heavy breaths or the occasional grunt or moan break through, but during the first scene we filmed together, I found the chink in his armor and used that knowledge now in an attempt to ratchet up the intensity. Luckily, his weakness was my specialty, and after only a minute or so of grinding him enthusiastically into the mattress with my still-clothed hips, I was gratified to note he was actually panting. So what if dry humping was so junior high? The viewers ate it up, and as I had previously discovered, so did Derrek. Perched half on top of him, I smiled when his pretty blue eyes rolled and fluttered wildly before focusing on me, and he gave me a breathless grin before gripping the back of my neck and pulling me down to kiss him again.
    For the next hour or so, we did everything Aidan had requested of us during our earlier discussion of the activities he expected, but I think we surprised him with just how passionately and believably we accomplished it. Not once did Aidan interrupt to offer direction or ask us to do something differently, and a glimpse of his face mid-scene gave me a pretty good insight of how content he was to let us continue as we wished. Whatever he didn’t like or anything that didn’t look great on film could be edited out later, but he knew better than anyone that when things got legitimately hot and heavy, the director needed to stay the fuck out of it.
    I always got into my work; I liked to think of myself as a professional, and even when I wasn’t altogether attracted to my scene partner, I managed to put on a pretty convincing show. With Derrek, however, not a single moment of my enjoyment was feigned, and neither was my gasping plea – “Fuck me!” – when I could take no more of the grinding and rubbing and sucking and kissing and rolling around like rutting animals. I thought I heard a mutter of affirmation from Aidan’s general direction, but I paid him no attention; I was too busy watching over my shoulder as Derrek, kneeling between my feet in all his smooth-skinned, bony glory, hastily slicked on the mandatory condom. I was too far gone to feel intimidated by the ridiculous magnitude of his dick, thank God, and when he gripped my hips with his lube-slicked fingers and pushed it home, the cry that pealed from my throat resulted primarily from enjoyment and only the barest hint of pain.
    As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about, except maybe the top of my head blowing off. A couple of times, I nearly forgot about the camera altogether, although it was never far from my mind – or my ass, for that matter; the phrase extreme close-up took on an entirely new meaning for me after I started doing porn. It wasn’t until sometime later, after I came explosively all over my own chest with a quavering wail and Derrek watching in awe from above, that I remembered exactly where I was and what was expected of us next, and I fought to maintain my stupid, blissful grin as my head dropped to the mattress, my hair sweat dampened and stuck to my temples, my body still twitching. Derrek didn’t stop right away, giving a few more slow, deep thrusts and coaxing a series of heated whimpers from me before Aidan cleared his throat pointedly.
    Fuck you, Aidan, I thought, both helplessly and pointlessly, forcing my eyes open and meeting Derrek’s. I wanted nothing more than to lock my heels behind Derrek’s back and refuse to release him until he finished, but the ending had already been spelled out for us, and I chewed on my lower lip to avoid pouting while he pulled out with an unmistakable lack of enthusiasm. I couldn’t tell if I was fooling myself or if he really did appear reluctant as he straddled my chest with his impossibly long legs, but I had to expend a lot of effort forcing myself to watch him jerking off just inches in front of me when all I wanted to do was stare at his face and imagine he wanted a different ending as much as I did. I may have been able to ignore the camera before, but I was never more aware of it than I was now.
    After he finished, mercifully missing my eyes but liberally splattering the lower half of my face, Derrek carefully wiped my lips with the pad of his thumb before bending down to give me a regrettably brief kiss. I didn’t have to guess at the reason for that; he never was a big fan of ingesting bodily fluids, either his or someone else’s. “Cut!” Aidan called, and just when I thought Derrek would pull away, a flush of surprised delight washed over me as he pressed his forehead against mine and gave me a sleepy-eyed smile.
    “Holy shit,” Aidan said breathlessly. “That was fucking epic!”
    Derrek turned his head to the side, leaving his temple mashed against my forehead. “Thanks.” Once again, I was positive he would disengage from me at that point, but he didn’t, rolling off me but remaining attached to my side. I thought I might swoon if I wasn’t already flat on my back.
    Even when Aidan vacated the studio to pack up some of the equipment and give us time to clean up and dress, Derrek didn’t move. I knew it was a bad idea, but I wanted to kiss him again, refraining only because I didn’t want to gross him out with my sticky lips. I tried to tell myself the real reason I suppressed the urge was because I knew it was a bad idea, but I was a very bad liar and saw right through myself. Bad idea or not, possible career suicide notwithstanding, I couldn’t deny how much I wanted to kiss him now that the camera was off and our audience no longer present.
    I didn’t do it, but it took all the willpower I possessed to restrain myself.
    “That was fun,” Derrek said, reaching up with one hand to brush a lock of sweaty, multi-hued hair off my forehead. It was well past time for a dye job, but I liked it the way it was – dirty blonde at the roots and fading to a soft purple at the tips.
    “Hell yeah.” Without thinking, I reached up to grasp his delicate wrist, my fingertips tracing the pronounced blue veins on the back of his hand. Instead of withdrawing from my grip, which I was certain he would, Derrek repositioned his hand so his palm lay along the side of my face, which flushed immediately. “We should do it again.”
    “I’m sure Aidan’s already planned the sequel,” Derrek said wryly, giving me a light peck on the forehead before sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. When he stood and stepped into his pants, his hipbones looked sharp enough to cut through his skin.
    “Well,” I said hesitantly, sitting up and reaching self-consciously for one of the towels Aidan left nearby, “I was kind of thinking, like, without a camera in the room. Sometime. Maybe.”
    Slithering into his t-shirt, Derrek didn’t say anything at first, and I took that time to wipe my face and tear myself to shreds internally for putting to voice the one thing I should most keep to myself. As I reached for my clothes on the floor, my face burning miserably, Derrek said, “Where’s your cell?”
    Despite the fact that what he asked made absolutely no sense whatsoever, I stammered and fumbled in the pocket of my plaid Bermuda shorts until my fingers closed around my phone. Without a word, I placed it in his outstretched hand and watched uncomprehendingly, scrambling into my shorts, as he deftly tapped the screen before handing back the phone. “There,” he said, smiling faintly as I looked at the screen, where my Contacts list displayed an entry I didn’t recognize: Michael Riley.
    I swallowed hard, disbelief and adrenaline coursing through me, and met his eyes.
    “Call me,” he said, brushing aside my hand, which still held the phone, and slipped an arm around my waist, pulling me to him, stomach to stomach. “Just don’t say anything to Aidan. And, uh... maybe we can actually do something besides sex.”
    “Yeah,” I nearly gasped, grinning like an indisputable moron, which didn’t deter him from dropping one more surprisingly chaste kiss on my mouth.
    “Or before sex, at least.” With a low chuckle, he – Michael – released me, his fingers trailing down my arm as he went, and slipped out the door, leaving me standing there with my phone in my hand, my shirt and shoes on the floor, and an utterly ridiculous smile on my face.
    Maybe I was naîve, hopelessly romantic, stupid, or all of the above, but there was one single, obstinate thought I just couldn’t shake as I dressed and walked off the set to collect my paycheck: This could work.



Special thanks to Ryan James and Austin Anomic

for their invaluable guidance, which made this story possible./font>

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