Chapter 12

I began cyber-stalking Mel the moment I got back into my home office.

Google is indeed your friend if you want to stalk. Actually, it was genuinely frightening how easy it was, and I was pretty much a first-timer at this game. Jeez, these algorithms REALLY give me the creeps sometimes. I’m not at all a fan of big government, and I’m even less thrilled at private corporations knowing and anticipating my every move, which is why you won’t find me on social media. Heck, some of this targeted advertising on the internet, it’s almost as if they are reading the innermost secrets of your mind. Clever, but oh so dangerous!

First off, I searched under her real name, which allowed me to read her teenage Twitter timeline. There were a few images just of her, her with friends, with family, with pets, with braces on her teeth, out and about in her home town, on the beach at a lake. She’d been quite discreet and self-aware in what she’d posted on Twitter, but it was plain from reading between the lines of her late-night posts that she’d had one genuinely abusive relationship, and several that never were going to go anywhere. Lord, there were some cries for help in all that angst, and I shed some bitter tears for that poor kid. She was wanting to be loved just for herself, and it wasn’t coming, not even from her family.

Out of interest, I clicked on the Twitter links to her high school and college friends, where she’d retweeted or referenced their handles. They were nearly all private, by invitation, accounts, or hadn’t been updated for a decade. Jeez. What to make of that? Had they disowned her, or were they just watching out for their own personal security, not wanting to get trolled or stalked by some online creep who’d found out they had known Mel before she went into porn?

Then I googled Atlanta Starr, double ‘r’. Shit! She wasn’t wrong, there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of internet pages containing her name. And images. Denial was instantly dead; the girl identified as Atlanta Starr was without doubt the woman I knew as Melanie Jorgensen. She’d been a very busy girl.

Mel had told the truth when she’d said that she looked a little different with makeup and hair styled ready for filming. No, I wouldn’t have instantly recognized her without her warning, but when I looked closer, yep, that was a naked Mel in those images, no doubt about it. I clicked on the top hit.

Oh FUCK!

I had a wave of nausea as I opened the first movie clip. There, frozen on the screen until I pressed the ‘play’ icon, was my Mel, sitting up with a big black cock mostly inside of her, a man’s hand mauling her small cone-shaped white breast.

Shit! It was true. No doubt, no doubt at all.

I went and poured myself a glass of something medicinal, four fingers, and foolishly knocked half of it straight back. Then I coughed and choked for a while, and when my eyes had quit streaming quite so badly, I started trying to sort out a logical way of investigating what had been going on.

First I tried to trace her start in porn. It wasn’t that easy, trying to sort by date of filming, but I eventually got there, or near enough, and started making notes on a legal pad to help make a timeline. There were a few early glamor shots, at a guess dating from her start at college round about 2004, then a whole load of seedy cheap movies, a very young and immature girl getting screwed in tawdry motel rooms. Stepfather, stepbrother, young whore, teen slut genre movies. No real plot, very little context, just filmed abuse of a pretty teen. It looked like the ‘barely-legal’ look was real popular, like the studios couldn’t get enough pretend jailbait stuff made to satisfy the demand for underage fantasies. Some of the makeup and costumes only emphasized her youth and inexperience; I saw her in false eyelashes that a twelve-year-old would have rejected as seriously uncool, and in tiny colorful panties of the kind that my sister had probably grown out of wearing by the age of thirteen. (Hey, before you accuse me of sneaking pervy peeks into the laundry basket, the washing was hanging up in the yard each week. Katelyn’s skimpies drying next to my skinnies. It happens. Same way I knew when she started on her first training bra.)

She’d opened a new Twitter account as Atlanta Starr; I connected some of her tweets by date of movie; there was no note of satisfaction or pleasure in the acts of sex, instead she whined about the travel time, or the crew being chaotic and unprofessional, people not being punctual, or not being paid promptly. Only after a couple of years was she re-tweeting plugs from the studio or her agency; I didn’t know how it worked, but my best guess was that only then was she working with more ‘professional’ operations rather than solo vid-makers.

I was up until past midnight and I’d hardly started on the list. On the way, I’d picked up a few facts. She would indeed be 31 this year. I jotted down her birthday, still automatically hoping that I might be helping her celebrate it. 5’10”. 130 pounds. 34A, 24, 36. Not that they mattered; they were just figures explaining why she’d looked so amazing in jeans at our first meeting.

I thought of Mel as I brushed my teeth before bed, and hoped she was okay. I’d intended to call her to check she’d arrived home okay, but unfortunately that had slipped my mind as I researched her online presence.

I almost picked up the phone then, but didn’t want to risk waking her and upsetting her more. I mentally sent her good wishes, and I meant them.

I’d thought I was totally tired out, but I still didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours. I tossed and turned, my mind taking an emotional rollercoaster ride. The issue that kept coming to the top was how was I going to make my judgment? Just on my moral compass, or some mix of criteria?

Yes, I’d been brought up in a church-going family, and still attended when I was ‘home’. Not a strict or fanatical church, just one acknowledging that there is a Higher Being whose teachings can help you to live a better life, and that the best way to do that is with the help and support of friends and the wider church family. Our pastor was more than happy to marry divorcees and baptize children born out of wedlock – unlike some of the more conservative churches in town – and he was all about love and forgiveness, family and friendship. He wasn’t into purity, chastity and abstention until marriage, which was just as well. The main topics of social conversation at our high school were sins such as fornication and drunkenness, and how to commit them. So I personally wasn’t morally outraged by pornography, not at all. The issue was more about Mel not being the person I’d thought she was, and whether I could accept the real Mel. And, first of all, I had to explore the Atlanta Starr persona to fully reveal the very complex being that I knew as Melanie Jorgensen.

Sunday pretty much sucked. I gave up trying to sleep sometime after four, and gave Max an unusually early breakfast before sitting down again in my home office, the coffee mug already refilled.

There were some real low points for me as I surfed the web that day. Missing out on so much sleep didn’t help my mood any.

Actually, there were a whole lot of low points.

The earliest shoots were some of the most shocking, knowing that she was only nineteen or twenty at the time, a college freshman, who should have been having fun, meeting new people, finding new pastimes. Instead, they were shooting scenes of her having joyless sex in cheap dive locations, many depicting the semi-rape of a young girl, treating her as a piece of meat which had two dick-sized holes in it. Watching them made me angry; I wanted to hurt some of those so-called directors and agents; the stuff was often verging on being sick. Some of them, she might just as well have been a blow-up doll the attention they gave to her as a person. One, she was POV filmed by a guy who didn’t even bother to remove his dirty T shirt as she sucked him; jeez, she didn’t look a day over 15 in that one. Another, posing for the camera in slutty lingerie and flaunting her butt like an old whore, giving her an unpleasant cheapness that certainly didn’t fit with the lady I knew.

Then she got picked up by the bigger operators. The timing matched with the change in her Twitter entries. She started acting instead of just being fucked; though I almost gave up on her when I saw some of the lustful looks and passionate kisses the guys were getting as they screwed her, until I saw a clip which interviewed her after the filming was complete. Now showered and dressed, relaxed and confident, with no trace of having fucked and sucked for forty minutes of finished movie, she was a consummate professional. She praised the director and crew, thanked her co-star, and said he’d been a pleasure to work with. No mention of being an amazing stud, no hint that she wanted to fuck him again. Just another job well done.

I did finally call Mel lunchtime to check she was okay and apologize for not having called her last night; she sounded very nervous and I tried to reassure her that I’d be fair. I didn’t dare say any more, though I SO wanted to hold her and comfort her for all the pain she’d gone through a dozen years before. Jeez, this was going to be SO hard. I didn’t want to give her false hope; but I still had no idea what my final decision would be. At that precise time, if I hadn’t seen the after-scene interview, things would not have been looking good. That professionalism drew a certain respect; I now appreciated that it was a business endeavor rather than a lifestyle choice. That certainly made a difference; quite how much I wasn’t sure.

I made myself a sandwich lunch and ate it straight from the plate on the kitchen counter before returning to my computer screen. It was just a refueling stop; I didn’t take the time to appreciate it, just chowed down. Ate it almost as fast as Max devoured his treat.

Oh boy, the plot for the next one was a doozy. The hunky step-brother she hadn’t yet met came home on leave from the Army while her Mom and new step-dad were away on their honeymoon ... Yeah, really. For once, he looked a decent guy, and he treated her right. It was a hardcore romance, even if it wasn’t entirely believable, and it was actually positive rather than sleazy. I was happy for her that she was finally getting a break from the cheaper outfits; hopefully she was getting a bigger fee as well.

Trouble is, that was a good one. The next three weren’t. Either in plot or content. The one where she was walking through a garden when she came across four black garden workers was just so unlikely, I fast-forwarded to the end. The next one, where she met a stranger while she was sitting demurely in a hotel garden and immediately let him fuck her behind a convenient bush, no, that just doesn’t happen in real life. Doesn’t even happen in most guy’s wildest fantasies.

Apart from a couple of essential breaks, I watched porn for twelve straight hours that day, until I couldn’t stand the strain in my eyes from concentrating. Did I get horny? Did I hell. That was my steady date on the screen, and sexual excitement was one thing I most certainly was NOT feeling. Anger, pain, heartbreak, sadness, sympathy with a young girl, hatred for the people who’d taken advantage of her, gratitude for the ones who had treated her better. Oh yeah, I pretty much ran through the whole fucking list of the negative emotions. It was a bit like Pandora’s Box, but without a whole lot of hope.

I’ll admit it; I was struggling to hold myself together. I’d fallen for Mel because she was smart, beautiful, on my wavelength, and a lady in all the best meanings of the word.

Her Atlanta Starr persona most certainly was no lady; after the initial exploitation of a pretty teen, her performances developed a dark side that was new to me. Several of the movie roles showed her as a tramp, a slut, a cheating girlfriend or wife, a whore, and I simply did not recognize that person. Maybe it was what the studios thought sold better, maybe it paid her better.

There were quite a few BDSM scenes, but they were mostly pretty mild and I was reasonably sure that they were totally staged; the ropes weren’t too tight, the clothes were ripped off without any damage to her skin, and she just didn’t look that scared. Well, being tied up didn’t have her seeming anywhere near as fearful as she’d looked when she’d driven away from my house.

Not all the scenes were easy-going. I saw her being choked during sex by some mean and ugly dudes, and that REALLY worried me. That was straying beyond an enjoyable kink into the territory of sexual and physical abuse, and even if she had fully consented at the time, what kind of psychological effect might that experience have on her long-term?

It was almost relaxing to view a couple of ‘blackmailed stepsister’ clips as relative light relief before I closed down the computer and went to take a long hot shower. I felt unclean.

I just couldn’t find the willpower to call Mel that evening. I was hurting, and I didn’t want to prejudice things by subconsciously taking that hurt out on her.

There was one bright spot. My weekly call home to my folks wasn’t due until Thursday. I had a few days before Mom would be asking awkward questions about whether the ‘possibility’ I had mentioned had yet evolved into anything more serious. I hate deceiving my folks – unless it’s to give them a pleasant surprise – and I’m hopeless at telling them lies. It’s kinda hard to not answer the question when your Mom is asking; moms have no social politeness about being brushed off with a non-answer – they’re worse than a Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist. THAT interrogation was four whole days away, by which time I might have come to a conclusion.

Or not.

Not a great night’s sleep, again. That made three in a row, one from eager anticipation ... and two from dark despair.

Monday was another long day at work (Mondays usually are the worst day of the week because of unexpected weekend events), with a lot of urgent but trivial stuff, and I didn’t make much progress thinking about me and Mel in the odd break I did get.

Helga sat down with me when she brought me my mid-morning coffee, and asked if I was okay. I pulled up a smile and admitted that my relationship with Mel was at an important point, but no more. She respected my privacy, but from the worried looks in my direction I caught during the day, I could tell that she was concerned. I took a few minutes out in what passes for ‘fresh’ air in LA at lunchtime and called Mel to check on her again and to reassure her that I was on track for seeing her soon. She didn’t sound too good; I guessed that she was fearing the outcome more the longer it took.

I had a very bad thought mid-afternoon. I was studying a marketing consultant’s report about what our ‘brand values’ were, and how we might differentiate our hospital from others locally, to try to increase our elective procedure business. Yeah, I know. It’s a fricking hospital. Why the heck would it need a brand? Well, I hate to say this, but we needed to make a decent return on the capital invested if we were to be able to continue investing in modern equipment and facilities. It’s a competitive business. If surgeons were filling other hospital’s beds, then it was affecting our occupancy rate and our profitability. (And, I have to disclose, the size of the executive bonus pool.)

And my bad thought? It wasn’t going to be as simple as just ME accepting Mel’s past. Some of the hospital trustees would certainly not take kindly to me marrying a former porn star. Healthcare is so NOT a business where any publicity is good publicity. Crap. That would take some working through.

I put the report aside for a time when I could actually concentrate on the implications of what it had to say, and took a therapeutic stroll around the site. I got to the foyer and the lady at the flower concession smiled at me expectantly, presumably anticipating another sale. I asked her whether one rose was more romantic than a dozen; she laughed and told me that there were a whole load of traditional meanings. One rose is love at first sight, or ‘you are the only one for me’, two is mutual love and affection, three ‘I love you’, six ‘I want to be yours’, and a dozen indicate true love. Wow, what a minefield. I said that I’d let her know ... Would I ever be buying flowers for Mel again?

I forced a smile for Helga as she knocked on the door frame to tell me she was quitting for the day. It took me another hour or so to deal with the remainder of my in-box, and then I too headed for the staff car parking structure.

I did some more surfing (and emotional suffering) at home that evening, talked to Mel briefly, then took another four Advil to help me get to sleep.

I was sure it was both important and urgent I made my mind up as soon as I could. Mel had sounded real down both times I’d spoken with her that day, and I’d noted that she didn’t call me; when I’d asked why not, she told me that she didn’t want to seem too pushy, she wanted it to be totally my decision to stay in touch. I guessed I could see where she was coming from.