And then I hang up, because I’m driving past the airport and getting close to Devi’s apartment, and also because I don’t think I can keep my temper under control if I talk to Raven a second longer. I turn onto Grand Avenue, trying to process everything that’s happened, but unable to focus on anything other than my quest to find Devi.
My Devi. It makes me ache to think of her feeling lonely or unsure or scared on LaRue’s set, and I wish that I could have been there, by her side. She is so young, so very young, and maybe I haven’t been careful enough of that.
She seemed so certain this morning, so confident, grinning at me in my dungeon as she examined all the toys arrayed around the room. But there was something unsettled in her eyes, a question there that I couldn’t find the right words to answer.
The question haunted me. It had settled under my skin and pricked at me as I finished setting up the scene, as Bambi disrobed and we ran through her no list. I felt Devi’s eyes burning into me as the cameras turned on, as I slid my hands around Bambi’s face and kissed her before pushing her down to her knees. Bambi is beautiful and Latina, with darker coloring like Devi, and so it was easy for me to imagine Devi on her knees in front of me, easy to recall that just a couple hours ago, I’d been buried inside her pussy.
But here’s the fucked up thing, the thing I don’t know how to deal with. I didn’t have to imagine Devi to get hard, to enjoy the feeling of pushing past Bambi’s plush lips into her wet mouth. My mind drifted between Devi and Bambi as Bambi sucked me off, fantasizing about what Devi was thinking and feeling right then. Was she as turned on as I was when I watched her and Kendi? Was she squirming and wet in her chair, wishing I’d pull her over to me and relieve the building ache in her cunt?
It had made me so hard to think about her watching me, to think about dragging her over to the table and making her kiss Bambi while I took turns fucking them both. I’d wondered if Devi was even touching herself watching me, crossing her legs to squeeze against her pussy or rubbing herself over her dress. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it, in the best possible way.
But when I glanced over at her to catch her eye, the chair was empty.
Devi was gone.
I panicked. I worried. I even got a little pissed off. And here’s the even more fucked up thing—I didn’t stop fucking Bambi. In fact, I fucked her harder, faster, forced more orgasms out of her than I normally would have, because I felt that question nipping at my heels, chasing and grabbing at me.
I felt dirty, not in a sexy way, but in the way that I actually felt like there was grime inside my mind, the kind of scum that builds up on shower doors and on the edges of stagnant ponds. I felt ashamed, and yet I also felt angry and unfairly accused of something, even though no accusation had actually been thrown at me. So what if I was fucking Bambi? It was my fucking job!
Except why did I feel weird about it?
Except why did I feeling like I was missing something, something vital, when Devi wasn’t there?
And how, with all this weirdness, this feeling of being bereft, could I still keep fucking Bambi? Not just fucking her, but murmuring all my usual sex words to her—you feel so good, and your pussy is so tight, and don’t you want to make my cock feel good? They were sex words that I’d murmured in so many different permutations so many different times to so many different women, and they should have felt hollow and wrong, but they didn’t. It did feel good to pump into Bambi, it did feel good to have her suck me off. And at the end, when I wrapped my hand around my cock and shot cum onto her uplifted face? Well that felt fucking good too. How can I feel guilty and good all in the same space? How can I love someone as much as I love Devi, and still get hard for someone else?
God, it’s all so fucking complicated. That restless shame, that empty feeling. It makes me horny and agitated all over again just thinking about it. I flex my fingers on the steering wheel before reaching down to adjust the growing bulge in my jeans.
I need to fuck Devi. On camera, off camera, I don’t care, but that’s the only way to discharge this fucking mess of emotions that I’ve conjured in the space of a couple short hours. I need her so badly, and we need to fix this, whatever it is. We both have livings to earn, so obviously we have to find a way to make fucking other people compatible with our relationship.
As I turn onto her street, I see immediately that her car isn’t around, which could mean she’s not home or that she parked in the garage. A pang of frustration almost paralyzes me; I counted on her being here, on being able to start fixing this right away.
I try calling her again as I pull into her driveway—no answer.
I park and I knock on her door—no answer.
I walk around the side of the house and squint up into the window like a fucking creeper—nothing.
She’s not here. I get back in my car and call again, leaving a message this time.
“Hey Cass,” I say after her sweet voice finishes delivering her voicemail response and the phone beeps to tell me it’s recording. “It’s Logan. I, um. You left and you’re not answering your phone and so I guess I’m worried is all. I love you. Bye.”
I deliver it in the short choppy way that a teenage boy calling his crush might, and I don’t even care at this point. I don’t care if she thinks I’m pathetic. I just need to see her and make this feeling stop.
I wait in her driveway for another thirty minutes, picking up my phone to check the screen every few minutes, even though it would have chimed if she called or texted. But there’s no response, and the late afternoon heat seeps into the car, reminding me that I have work to do at home and a phone call with Marieke de Vries at five.