“Right. The show.” That sinking feeling from the day before returns, but then I glance at Logan’s profile, and it hits me—he’s as mixed up about all this as I am. It’s written all over his face. He’s longing. He’s conflicted. He’s nobler than he realizes.
It’s possible that I’m making it all up, that I’m seeing things that aren’t there. But the camera’s off. That look on his face is genuine, and I know that expression. It’s the same one that met me in the mirror when I got ready tonight.
I settle back into my seat, and with my elbow propped on the door, I chew on my knuckle and try to dissect the strange discontentment that has crept over me. Yes, I like the guy. There’s no dancing around that fact. But what’s going on with him? Why is he pushing me away when his body language and his body parts are telling me he wants, wants, wants?
Is it me? Is it my age? Is he still hung up on his ex? Has the industry jaded him against relationships in general?
The truth is, I don’t know him well enough to begin to form any real answer. What I do know is that no matter how real this chemistry is between us, he’s a closed set. No matter what he reveals on camera, he’s not letting me in any further than that.
“Star-crossed,” I say, breaking the silence that’s stretched between us. “I think that’s what you should call the show.”
“Star-crossed?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good. I like it.”
I don’t have to wonder why he accepts my suggestion so readily. I’m sure it’s because he realizes as well as I do how fitting of a title it is to describe us—two lovers never meant to be together who meet occasionally in the night.
10
Devi’s quiet when we approach her apartment, and I’m not sure what to say. I’m not sure I can say anything, because I’m still hard as a rock, and every time I breathe, I breathe in the smell of her. It lingers everywhere—my hands, her thighs, my lips—and it’s driving me fucking crazy. When she reached for me earlier, her hands fumbling eagerly with my zipper, I had almost climaxed right then and there. I may be a man renowned for his control, and my scenes usually highlight this about me, but with Devi, I have nothing. Nothing. No shred of patience or restraint, and going down on her on the hood of my Mustang had already driven me into a fucking frenzy. (Because what man doesn’t fantasize about that at some point—a beautiful woman spread open on the hood of a muscle car, cunt exposed, hair like tousled cascades on the sleek metal?)
And fuck if getting caught hadn’t made me harder, sent my mind spiraling into the filthiest, most depraved fantasies possible—watching Devi try to “convince” the officers to let us go, first with her mouth and then with her pussy, the kind of fantasies I would never admit to anyone else. And then we got on the highway and she dove for my dick like a madwoman, and I hope God was watching what a fucking gentleman I was, because it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life to push her away.
Except now I’m in her driveway saying goodbye and I’m throbbing with misery and I can tell she’s a little hurt, and shit. Why did I push her away?
I wasn’t lying when I told her that I thought it would be better for the show for her not to reciprocate tonight. I do think that, and also I’d like to plan another visually dynamic venue for the blowjob, not just the interior of my goddamn car (even though it’s the best car in the world.)
But that’s not the real reason, and the real reason is so fragile even in my own mind that I know I have no hope of explaining it to her. Because those thirty minutes with her on my hood, when I tongued her to orgasm over and over again while she told me Persian and Greek fables in that breathy, faltering voice, the big feeling had come, and I was drunk on it. It came with my mouth on Devi’s silken skin, with her words drifting into the desert, and it was more powerful than I’d ever felt with anyone, ever. More than my first scene, my favorite films, or my most elaborate and creative ideas.
No, this was something beyond anything I’ve ever felt, so powerful and elemental that I could feel it coursing through my body and into the rocky ground underneath me and into the speckled, glittering sky above me, and the world dissolved into pure, celestial magic.
Sparkling.
Atomic.
Holy.
And then the world came together again, normal once more but still charged with the ionized memory of our magic, and we sped into the dark, laughing at our near-miss.
So why did I push her away?
Because I couldn’t bear the thought of something so unbearably sexy, so indelibly perfect, being brought down to earth with something as mercenary and trite as forcing her to suck me off in my car. I mean, I knew at the time that I wasn’t forcing anything, that she would have been happy to do it, but it would have ultimately been me leading the transition from the stars to the slurping, and it felt wrong.
It still feels wrong. I chose the right thing, I know it, even as I sit here listening to Devi gather up her things and unbuckle herself.
“I’ll walk you inside,” I say suddenly, unbuckling too.
“Okay,” she says. Her voice betrays nothing, and this is one of the strangest things I’ve learned about Devi in the past few weeks. She can be so friendly, so straightforward, so adorably young, that it would be tempting to think that she’s an open book. But she’s not always, only when she chooses to be, and there are times when she’s just as unreadable as the stars. More Queen Cassiopeia than Layla.
We get out and I follow her up the walk, up to her front door. The moment is pregnant as she unlocks it, as we both recall our searing first kiss here, and I wonder how she remembers it. She wanted it, I know, just like she genuinely wanted to blow me tonight in my car. Devi is a modern, sex-positive girl; she enjoys having sex and she likes me as a friend. And there have been a few moments where I’ve thought I’ve glimpsed something more, kernels of yearning in her voice, a bite of the lip or a quick blink as she looks away from me.