Chapter 22

“Will! What can I do for you?” I was at the desk in my office on Friday morning. The morning that my scene with Emma was released on our website.

I’d wanted to check the early figures and it was looking good so far. “Steady” is the word I’d think I’d use. It wasn’t breaking any records, but it was doing okay at this stage—at least as well as any of the others we’d released and certainly well enough that we could consider the scene a success if it carried on at the same rate.

The previous day I’d filmed yet another scene, this time with a gorgeous Spanish actress called Valentina Lopez. She was in her early thirties and a real Latin stereotype—bronzed skin, a mass of dark hair, dark eyes, and amazing curves from top to bottom.

We shot it as another episode of the Mr Dick series, even though Valentina was much older than the girls in the previous episodes. The series was developing a decidedly international flavour and we decided to run with it. Rather than the girls being new to the business, we made out they were new to the country. My next shoot was with a woman in her mid-twenties called Anastasiya Popov, who I think was Russian, which we planned to also shoot as a Mr Dick episode.

Mel once again directed—that girl enjoyed bossing me about a little too much—and was just as enthusiastic after we’d finished shooting as she always was. I, however, felt something was lacking. Some... Spark. I just didn’t hit it off as well with Valentina as I had with some of the other actresses I’d worked with. We just didn’t quite click. Maybe it was a combination of the format and her age that didn’t work. I guess we’d find out after the next shoot.

Emma picked up on my disquiet immediately and told me not to worry. She said it was not unusual to not click with your co-star and that up to then I’d actually been extremely lucky up to now to have connected as well with my co-stars as I had. She also said that I still did a very professional job and the punters probably wouldn’t notice anything in the final cut.

“Morning, Bobby. I wonder if you have time to meet with me today. Over lunch, perhaps?”

“I’m sure I can manage that. Is there a problem?”

“Not really. I wanted to discuss a couple of our mutual clients, particularly the situation with Paul Robertson. But I also wanted to update you on your ex-wife. We met earlier this week.”

“I don’t know if that’s appropriate, Will. She’s not really my client.”

“She seems to think she is. She even asked me to update you since you won’t return her calls.”

I sighed. This woman was determined to worm her way back into my life, wasn’t she?

“Okay. What the client wants, right?”

“Quite.”

“I’ll see you at, say, twelve-thirty at Westell Mill?”

“That sounds fine. See you then.”

“You’re going to have to return her calls at the very least,” Will said to me at the end of the meeting.

“I know. But when I do, she’s going to want to set up a meeting and that just causes more problems than ignoring her does.”

Will laughed. “Tell me about it!”

Over the meal, Will had told me how he’d reviewed the documents I’d sent him and determined that Bea didn’t have any grounds to challenge the Will of her late husband. He’d then called her to tell her this and she’d insisted on meeting him anyway. At the meeting, she was accompanied by her two step-sons, who fully supported her claim for a larger share of the Estate, which, Will said, changed things. But not much.

I was fairly sure that the reason The Boys supported Bea’s claim was the same reason Lord Smyth-Ryland had married her in the first place. Bea’s, shall we call them Oral Talents, were probably enough reason alone, but I suspected their wives weren’t aware that The Boys knew of these talents or of how they came to discover them and that The Boys were keen to keep their wives from ever finding out.

“Look, tell her ... I don’t know, make something up. That’s what lawyers are good at isn’t it?”

Will raised an eyebrow and smiled wryly. “Some lawyers, perhaps. But not this one. I did you a favour looking at the case. I’m not lying to my client as well.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll try and call her.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her.”

“I just don’t know when.”

“I’ll tell that too.”

I huffed. “Some friend you are.”

We both grinned and started to chuckle.

As we exited the pub, my phone rang. I quickly glanced at the screen and then said to Will, “Sorry, I have to take this or I’ll be in trouble.”

Will grinned. “Emma?”

“Mel.”

“She’s the ... er ... young actress that you live with, isn’t she?”

I grinned back. “One of them. The scary one if I try and ignore her.”

“She’s the one who played the housewife who needed her plumbing fixed, right? Bears a passing resemblance to Chloé Goodman?”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Amy was... curious.” He shook his head. “I’ll call you next week and make sure you’ve spoken to Beatrice.”

“Great, thanks,” I said, putting as little enthusiasm into my voice as I could muster while smiling. “I’ll look forward to it.”

Will waved as he walked over to his car and I swiped the screen to answer Mel’s call.

“Mel—”

“Where are you?” Mel said quickly. “You weren’t in the office.”

“I had a lunch meeting.”

“Well get back here now, you need to see this.”

“Home?”

“The office, stupid. Weren’t you listening?”

“Well, you never actually said where you—”

“Just get back here, will you. Hurry. You need to see this.”

“See what?”

“Yours and Emma’s scene. It’s blowing up right now.”

“Blowing up? Is there something wrong with the server?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. I mean—look, just get over here and I’ll show you.” She ended the call and I put my phone back in my pocket as I headed to the car to do as I’d been told.

“Good, you’re here,” Emma said as I entered the office. She was standing to the side of the chair that Mel was sitting in, bending forward slightly with one hand on the desk and the other on the back of the chair. Both she and Mel were looking a the screen as Mel moved the mouse and clicked repeatedly. “Come and look at this.”

“Problem?” I said as I joined them.

“Possibly, but of the good kind.”

“What do you mean?”

“She means that we may be getting a bill from the web-hosts for exceeding our bandwidth quota,” said Mel.

“Huh?”

“Look,” Mel said, pointing at the screen. “Look at these numbers. Your scene together already has more views so far today than your scene with Amber has in total. And that’s even counting the spike in views Amber’s got this morning.”

I looked at the numbers and shook my head. “What the hell’s happening? We haven’t seen numbers like this at all before now.”

“You’re going viral, that’s what happening,” Mel said. “Look...” She clicked on a link and the view changed to display a timeline graph of the number of views my scene with Emma had received. It showed a steady climb most of the morning. Nothing unusual and pretty much what we’d seen on all our other releases. But then...

“Here,” Mel said, pointing at the screen. “About an hour and a half ago. Views suddenly went through the roof.”

There was no mistaking it. The graph resembled the sea suddenly meeting a cliff. A near-vertical line, suddenly, out of nowhere, shortly after I’d switched off the computer to leave for my lunch meeting with Will.

“Any idea why the sudden spike?”

Emma shook her head. “That’s what we’ve been trying to find out for the past hour.”

“And I think I’ve worked it out,” Mel said.

“I’m all ears.”

“Julezella.”

“What?”

“You mean who, not what. Okay...” She spun her chair around to face me—putting her back to Emma slightly. “Ash called me just before lunch and said that all of a sudden your Twitter notifications had gone berserk. You noticed that, right?”

I just smiled and pulled open a drawer in the desk to reveal Dick’s powered down phone.

“Figures,” Mel said. “Anyway. Ash said you’d been getting a steady stream of mentions all morning—no different from any other day, particularly a day when we release a scene and it’s being actively promoted. But then, BOOM. The steady stream became a raging flood. She had to switch the phone off because it just kept beeping constantly.

“So Emma and I logged on to your Twitter account on my laptop—”

“You can do that?” I asked. Mel rolled her eyes and Emma reached over to playfully slap my arm.

“And we found the usual batch of mentions from the usual review and promotion accounts in the morning, but they had many more retweets and replies than I expected.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“You could say it depends on the replies, but, honestly, it doesn’t. Even if the replies are negative, it still means the tweet is being seen and engaged with more and that’s always a good thing. Even if there’s only one person who clicks through and reads the review then pays to watch the scene for every couple of hundred Shocked of Staffordshires, that’s still a sale we might not otherwise have had.

“But the thing is, there were no Shocked of Staffordshires. None. At all. Every single reply was positive. And there were hundreds of them.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Now, I’d already read all the pre-release reviews. I do that every time we release something, even when we add an old scene to the site. And all they all were positive—even the ones we hadn’t paid for. But that wasn’t a surprise really because it’s an excellent scene.

“The surprise was a review I hadn’t read. I hadn’t read it because it’s not on one of the usual review sites. I found it because the original tweet linking to it was the one with the most retweets and replies. And the vast majority of the retweets and replies were from people who’d never watched any porn at all before. At least, that was the impression I got from them.”

“Really? What review site is this then?”

She shook her head. “It’s not a review site. It’s a lifestyle blog. Julezella. She’s huge. It’s the kind of site that usually has articles about cooking, fashion and makeup. That sort of thing. Here, I’ll show you.” She spun her chair back around, grabbed the mouse and clicked on an already open tab in the browser window. Then she got up out of the chair to allow me to sit and read the page. “I’ll go and get a coffee for all of us.”

“I’ll come with you,” Emma said. Then she leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “Won’t be long.”

They left as I settled in to read the article. Emma was right, it was a site I didn’t recognise at all. There were several sites that we gave early access to scenes so they could write reviews for their sites and blogs for publication at the same time we released the scene to the public. And there were still more sites that tended to publish reviews within a day or two of release.

But this wasn’t one of those sites.

It was nothing like it at all, in fact.

Most porn-review sites were filled with adverts for porn sites, funnily enough.

This one had ads for supermarkets and a mother and baby store.

I began reading...

Dearest readers,

Yes, yes, I know, that’s a corny way to start an article and not what I normally do, but what I’m blogging about today is kinda ... well, unusual. And kinda personal too. And I’m writing this to you, not for you, if that makes any sense.