Chapter 11

A very, very long pause.

Seemed like Mel had said all she wanted to say, and I wasn’t yet up to responding. Heck, I wasn’t up to understanding the words that were still ringing in my ears.

While my brain slowly processed what I’d just heard, the universe seemed to stop revolving. It was a whole lot more than a mental ‘Wait! What did she say?’

It was more: Jesus H Christ! Had she really just said those things?

Fuck! Had she actually DONE all those things? TEN YEARS?

I eventually exhaled. I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath for quite so long. I felt dizzy and shaken.

My memory of those first few minutes isn’t very clear. I went straight into denial. Here’s roughly what I recall thinking:

Wow. I NEVER expected this. No way. Mel, a top adult star?

Really? She has the looks and the slim trim body, for sure – hell, Southern California is bursting with beach bunnies who could get auditions to make porn; she isn’t THAT much out of the SoCal stereotype, but I hadn’t detected the sexually relaxed attitude I would have expected from someone working in adult movies. I didn’t know a whole lot about the porn industry, but I was pretty sure that Mel’s figure was all natural. From what I’d seen over the years, many of the top porn stars had modified their bodies far beyond just the odd nip and tuck of nose or lips. Like reality TV stars, porn stars seemed to be striving towards the un-natural. Mel, on the other hand, seemed to me to be the essence of what God had given her at birth.

This didn’t add up, so I was having more trouble processing something that I was totally unprepared for. I mean ... this was a girl who’d gone half-a-dozen dates before we actually kissed! The one who’d complained about being ogled, groped and taken for a sure thing. And NOW she was telling me that she’d had sex on camera hundreds of times? Holy fuck!

Her face had been blurred for a few moments, my vision cleared and she came back into focus. She seemed badly frightened, like she was on the verge of bursting into tears. “Mike? Mike? Talk to me? Honey?”

I shook my head to try to clear it a little, and took her other hand as well. “Mel, I do know I care for you. I care for you very deeply, but ... this is a whole lot of a shock. I ... I just don’t know the answer to your question right now; I’m going to have to do some real serious thinking about everything you just said, but I promise you ... I’m going to give you your due. Can we just sit for a few minutes, while I try to get my head around what you’ve just told me?”

She spoke softly. “Honey, please take all the time you need. I’m in love with you, Mike. I’m just praying as hard as I can that you not throwing me straight out of here is a good sign.”

Sheesh! She was serious!

I guess that I turned things over in my mind for maybe the next twenty minutes, I’m not really sure exactly how long. Okay, could have been five, could have been fifty. Twenty sounds a reasonable estimate.

Man, that one sure came out of left field!

My thoughts kept going around and around in circles; my new girlfriend was a porn actress? How the heck did I square that with what I’d thought I knew about her? One thing I did know; I’d already connected with her like I never had with a girl before. Max loved her, and he was normally a pretty good judge of people. How could I normalize this? My best friend, an adult star? Was that really enough to decide never to see her again? Did I want to throw away what I’d got before we got closer? The questions whizzed across my brain faster than I could answer them; I couldn’t seem to concentrate on one of them long enough to come to a conclusion before the next one barged its way through the line.

When I finally emerged from my thought trance, I looked over at Mel. She seemed to be real uncomfortable, physically as well as emotionally. The strain was really showing on her lovely face. I suddenly realized that she had been stretching over to hold my hands all that time I’d been away in my thoughts; our fingers were gripping so tightly that I’m not sure either of us could have broken free. I let go and helped her up, giving her a close one-armed hug and running my other hand softly through her hair, stroking her forehead with my fingertips.

We must have stood there in silence for another ten minutes; I was slowly getting my thought processes cranking up again. I’d already made my first decision; Mel was too important to me to just tell her to hit the road and keep going out of my life. I needed to know a whole lot more about the situation she’d just sprung on me – like confirming how she felt about me. Her final plea, to love and respect her for the rest of our lives, was so incredibly powerful. I had no idea if she’d rehearsed that speech; even if I’d been reeling from the actual words, I could still sense the ... desperation? – no, the commitment? – maybe – perhaps the need? Oh hell and double hell!

I fell back onto the only similar situation I could recall. “I guess this is like that old British movie with Julia Roberts, you know, Notting Hill, where she’s the famous Hollywood actress wanting to get together with the ordinary English guy, the bookseller? You’re just a girl asking a boy to love her?”

She shivered in my arms, her voice more hesitant, less confident. “I guess you could say that. I was thinking more of one of her earlier films, though.”

Didn’t take a lot of thought, “Pretty Woman?”

“Yup.”

I inhaled deeply, which didn’t help. She smelled so good, so fresh, so clean, so female... “They both had happy endings. I’m going to need to work this out some more, but at first pass, I hope, I think maybe ... just maybe, we can do this. I’ve known you for just five weeks, yet already I know I’d miss you so much if you weren’t in my life any more.”

That earned me a tight hug and a passionate kiss on the lips. “Oh god, I do hope so!”

I backed away a little. Not that I’d hated the kiss, but my mind couldn’t kiss her AND reason at the same time, “Okay, Mel. It’s gonna depend on a whole lot of things, and I’m not yet exactly sure what some of them will be. This isn’t the kind of issue I’m used to dealing with every day. Let’s sit again, and I’ll tell you what I’m thinking at the moment. I’ve got a couple more immediate questions, though. You shot your last movie back in August? When was the last time you had sex without the cameras?”

She bent gracefully to be seated on the couch. As she had a firm grip on my hand, I followed – less gracefully. “With a guy, six years ago, when I was with my boyfriend, Ricky. He was real supportive at first, helped me a whole lot, but then it got to him. I guess it was too much to ask for him to share me, he got a lot of indirect abuse online for being a wimp and a cuckold, and it became too much for him to deal with, but at least we parted as friends. He’s moved on; last I heard he was getting married, and no, I didn’t get an invite.”

A pause, “With a girl, it was last year, when I evacuated from the fire and stayed with one of my girlfriends in the industry. We both felt horny, got out the Hitachi, and then had some great sex to wind down from the stress. On screen, it’s been seven, nearly eight months since I retired. Four or five years ago, I would have been climbing the walls going without dick for so long, but I’ve used toys and kept myself okay. Yeah, I’ve been tempted, even been close to giving in at times, but the prize of finding a guy I can love is one I think is worth holding out for.”

“So when you told me that you’d dated quite a few guys and some girls, you were actually talking about having made porn movies with them, fucked and sucked them on camera?”