“Even in that parking lot where part of you felt ashamed, part of you felt like a god. And at that shitty bar… when you took off your clothes, when you made men want you, it was like that shitty bar turned into heaven.”
-Finnegan Hussein
Rob wasn’t entirely sure why he was doing it, but he didn’t stop to think. When you think too much things don’t happen and he was all feelings, so wound up right now, wound up for the last few days.
“Tired of being a virgin,” Rob Affren groaned.
Sometimes he felt like he was going to explode. He lay on his bed, his hands in corduroys, looking at his dick in his hands, stroking it until it was a large and hard as he could make it. He licked his lips as he took up his phone. It was a good angle. He took the shot. He sent it.
He stroked it a little longer like the guys on webcam did and a few minutes later the message came back.
-NICE
-You like my big dick?
Rob stroked it slower, watching it rise higher, and then as he stop, go lower, turn a little lazily in his hands.
-Can I watch you finish?
-You’re a fucking perv.
Rob kept stroking himself, watching his dick jump in his hands.
-You’re the one stroking your dick.
Rob sat up. He flicked the camera to RECORD.
-Watch.
Rob set the camera up. He pulled off his shirt.
-You gotta nice chest.
Rob had something like a six pack, and appreciated it being noticed, but couldn’t type that back.
Now, gripping his balls, slipping a finger down near his asshole, Rob stroked with abandon, watching his cock rise, excited by someone else watching. He stopped, kept it up, started and stopped again, applied saliva until it felt so good he couldn’t stop. This was the closest to fucking he’d ever been, doing this for someone else, doing this for someone else, someone else… watching…. His big… fat…coooccck.
With a shout that surprised him, while his body seized and quaked on the bed, and the room danced about him, he was relieved the door was locked, hoped no one heard him as the white liquid, geyser like, sprayed out of his cock and onto his open hands and his belly.
Finnegan Hussein. Finnegan Hussein, What the fuck kind of name was that? Was one parent Irish and the other a Muslim, or where there Arabs out there who were totally into Saint Patrick’s day? He wasn’t much to look at. Not bad, but pretty ordinary, and Logan was going over to his dressing room to tell him he could stay in the house for the night as opposed to driving to whatever hotel he had planned to be, when he opened his door and saw this dark haired, small man, legs folded under him, meditating in front of an image of Buddha, a thin line of incense smoke rising from the burner.
He had not noticed Logan, who closed the door quietly, and went downstairs to his office to write a note to stick under the door, completely intrigued by the meditating porn star.
“This has been a dream!” Finnegan declared that night.
They ate Indian food, and Logan thought of commenting that it was a good thing they had it after the anal sex scenes and not before, but refrained.
“This?” he said.
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah,” Finnegan replied, spearing a bit of tandoori chicken with his fork. “You guys were so chill, and the atmosphere is so right and you know… porn. It’s magic. Right?”
“Right on!” Ruthven cheered him.
“I’ve seen both of you guyses work,” Finnegan went on. “You’re newer to this, aren’t you?” he asked Ruthven.
“Yeah,” Ruthven said. “It blew the top off my head off. I’ve never felt so free.”
Logan poured more of the deep red butter chicken over his rice, but said nothing.
“Like, sometimes I’m totally not me,” Ruthven said. “the first time I did sex work it was like—”
“Like this thing in you cracked open!” Finnegan said.
“Right!”
They looked to Logan.
“I don’t know,” Logan said. “I think you both might be kinda nuts.”
“You don’t enjoy it?” Finnegan said. “For real? You look like you’re into it.”
“We’re actors,” Logan said. Then, “Sort of. I mean, do you enjoy every sex scene you’re in?”
“That,” Finnegan told him, “is not what I said. But I do enjoy what I do. In a way it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
“Seriously?” Ruthven said at the same time Logan did, but they spoke in entirely different voices.
“Yeah,” Finnegan nodded. “The first time I saw a porn I thought, I wish I could do something with my body like that. I wish I could make that magic. The first time you saw it…?”
“I don’t remember the first time I saw porn,” Logan said. “I started as a stripper and worked my way up. Or down. One night some guy asked me to have sex with him for money. I went from that to this.”
“But it’s all you’ve ever done,” Finnegan said, fixing him with his green eyes.
“I wouldn’t say it’s all I’ve ever done.”
“Logan,” Finnegan said, “It’s all you’ve ever done. For twenty years. Right?”
“That first time I had sex with some old man in a parking lot,” Logan said. “I used to strip at some miserable place called the Butt Hutt.”
“I’ve seen it,” Ruthven chimed in.
“I have been to some shitty places,” Logan continued. “It was a long time getting here. To this comfy house.”
“Yeah,” Finnegan said. “I get you. But what I’m saying is… even in that parking lot with that old man, where part of you felt ashamed, part of you felt like a god. And at that shitty bar… when you took off your clothes, when you made men want you and you felt that… rhythm… it was like that shitty bar turned into heaven. There is a lot of bullshit in what we do, but we do it because there is… something,” Finnegan’s eyes were green slits, and he was on the verge of snapping his fingers. “Something… you can’t touch anywhere else. That thrill you have the first time you see a guy fucking another guy, when you see something you sort of understood, and that you thought you were, but that is just an insult thrown at you on the playground, the first time you see those bodies tremor, those faces change, mouths go slack, come come pouring out, that is a magic, that is a power.”
Finnegan sat back.
“And when its being done to you, or you’re doing it, and the world is going to see it, that’s a power too. That’s why I do it. I’ve got to be near that. And that’s why you do it too. That’s why we’re all here.”
When Logan had begun seeing Ruthven, it put him in contact with all sorts of people he hadn’t known as well before. Ruthven frequently went to visit his uncle, and now that Ruthven was long separated from Dylan, Fenn found him bearable if stupid. For Logan, Fenn was one of the three men who had shown up after Sheridan had killed his rapist, quietly discarding the corpse with no judgment, and for that he was eternally respectful of the older man.
Judging that Fenn and Brendan were close, he’d once confessed, “I don’t think Brendan likes me.”
“He probably doesn’t,” Fenn said. “What’s it to you?”
“It really shouldn’t be anything. Should it?”
Fenn shook his head.
“Brendan is uneasy about you. Milo used to hate him. I couldn’t stand Ruthven for years, and in the end none of it really matters.”
Logan, who had never really talked about porn with Fenn, or anyone, really, related the whole conversation he’d had with Finnegan Hussein.
“I think your friend has a point,” Fenn said. “I remember I told Paul something like that the first time I met him.”
“I forgot that. You were—I mean you still are friends with Paul and Noah.”
“Yes. They were before your time, but…”
“How in the world did you meet them?”
“Guy McClintock hired Todd to do a documentary of his life as a porn producer, and so we went to their house.”
Fenn shrugged.
The fact that Paul had first shown up at his door high as a kite, and Noah had come into his life fucked up on drugs, and the bags of money Fenn had stolen which had involved them in Callan family, Fenn left out.
“I wonder if I could talk to them about this,” Logan sat back and scratched his chin.
“I think,” Fenn poured another cup of tea, “not.”
When Logan did not say anything, Fenn said, “Because I think your friend is only half right. Or if he’s right, he’s right for himself. I feel like Paul would tell a very different story.”
“What stories does he tell?”
‘He doesn’t,” Fenn said. “That’s how I know.”
