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Valerie LeBlanc’s side of the room was so austerely neat that Zaza at first despaired of finding the thing she had come for—was there
anything
there? The surfaces had a perfect antiseptic shine; the white walls were bare; even the sofa cushions were perfect and undented, as if no one was allowed to sit there.
Just like her,
Zaza thought, and smiled at the thought of Valerie as a sofa on which no one was allowed to sit. She was, after all, renowned as much for being a virgin as for being the naked anchor of the world’s only daily TV sex news. It was actually amazing that anyone could give so many interviews about
not
doing something, Zaza thought, as she desperately scanned the shelves for the makeup kit she had come to fetch.

There!
It was a gleaming metal box, and Zaza’s heart sank as she pulled it off the shelf and felt its weight. Maybe she could just get the rouge out of it? But no—it was locked. Typical. Zaza was whirling her arm protesting the deadweight of the box, her mind turning to the idea of Valerie LeBlanc as a box that couldn’t be opened, when the door flew open and a young man came in, looking as flustered as she.

It was the assistant she’d met briefly that morning—Lila Parker’s porn slave, of course!—looking somewhat more tousled and much more frantic. When he saw her, he froze, only to relax a second later and say, “Thank God. I thought you were Valerie!”

“That would have been
awful
!” Zaza said with immediate heartfelt sympathy.

He laughed. “She’s going to kill one of us someday. With those fingernails of hers.”

Zaza made a face. “You’re so lucky to work for Lila.”

“Yeah, I’d like to say that Valerie’s bark is worse than her bite, but her bite . . .”

“Oh, it’s like a snakebite,” Zaza said. “I know it makes me want to wet myself.”

“Well, don’t do that.” He smiled, and she noticed again his peculiarly charming lopsided smile. He was a tall, thin man—
Built like a swimmer
, she thought approvingly—who, like everyone else at XTV, seemed to carry with him an aura of sexual promise. Perhaps it was being surrounded by sex all day that did it. Still, Zaza couldn’t believe she would ever have that appeal. She was an A cup. A weed.

Before she could stop herself, she said wistfully, “But at least she’s sexy.”

He made a face. “You think so?”

“Well, of course. She’s got everything. I don’t want to be tacky, but if you’re beautiful and you have a perfect body and . . .” Zaza shook her head. “I’d give anything to look like her.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “Valerie isn’t half as sexy as you.”

She was about to brush off this empty flattery when she saw the frank lust in his eyes—which dropped to take in her body fleetingly before returning to her face. He smiled and said, “No contest.”

She found herself staring into his pale blue eyes, her mouth slightly open. He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Zaza caught her breath.
Go!
her mind screamed.
You’re already going to be late!
But she just stood staring at him, one hand at her throat, as her breath came faster and faster.

“Sorry. I can’t stay and talk,” she said at last, in a hoarse, hesitant voice. “I’ve got to carry that box to Valerie. And I’m late.”

“Me, too.”

But they continued to stand, staring at each other. Finally, he said, “Oh, hell,” and they were in each other’s arms.

He was kissing her deeply and his hands immediately began pulling up her shirt while she murmured, “Oh, God. Oh, no . . .”

He said, “I was hot for you the instant I saw you. Wow, your breasts . . .”

She pulled her shirt off over her head while he fondled her braless tits and began to open her jeans. “Hurry,” she said breathlessly, although he didn’t need any urging. In a second, all her clothes were on the floor next to his jeans. She bit her lip as she noted his firmly muscled thighs and the long cock, deliciously hard, curving slightly to the right. Then she surrendered completely and pressed herself to him, flattening his cock between their bellies, making him groan. She gave him one more brisk kiss on the lips, giving herself a second to appreciate the rasp of his razor stubble on her cheek—men were so fantastic!—before they both tumbled onto Valerie’s pristine sofa.

“This is crazy,” she breathed. “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”

“I can be fast,” he promised. “Do you mind if it’s fast? God, I’m sorry but I’m dying to . . .”

She gasped as she felt his naked cock pressing against her inner thigh, the heat of it startling, its hard shape making her dizzy with want. “Yes! Okay!” she said. “Fast, just . . . do it.”

Then there was the unbelievable, searing pleasure of him sliding into her. Just like that, he was fucking her. Her hands were on his back, gripping the tensing muscles there, her head back on the sofa. As he thrust into her, she spread her legs wider, shutting her eyes in concentration. One last anxious time she thought of Valerie angrily waiting, frowning at the studio clock. Then he thrust into her again, harder, making her cunt ring inside with satisfaction, and she forgot everything.

The curve in his cock made it swipe past her clitoris with every stroke. Between that and the urgency, the near frenzy of his fucking, she had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out. It was like being sliced into again and again by bliss. She just had time to think,
This is it; this is what I came here for,
before her pussy caught fire and swept her with the first twinge of orgasm. Then she did cry out. His movements quickened still more, the fucking so rapid it was outpacing the twinges of coming. The vibrations from it were maddeningly good, and Zaza let herself go limp as her orgasm rose to its peak and then extended—and extended—and merged with the barrage from his dick in a wavering cycle of blind ecstasy. When he finally drove into her with a hoarse cry of his own, and pulled her body against him hard, she was almost surprised to realize that he was coming, too—that he hadn’t already come. It was as if she’d forgotten that they had two separate bodies.

There was a dreamy spell in which she pressed her lips to his throat and put her tongue out to taste the sweat there. She was smiling with her eyes shut, her body awash with gratitude. Then she froze.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Late!”

He laughed and said, a little teasingly, “So late.”

“Oh, but you don’t work for Valerie!” She was squirming, trying to escape from beneath him.

He released her, grinning. “You’re right. I’m late, too. But anytime you want to be late together again . . . I’m Anthony, by the way.”

“Oh, hi! I’m Zaza,” she said with an apologetic tone as she pulled on her underpants. “Um, that was great.”

“
So
great,” he said, and sighed as he moved to pick up his jeans.

For a scrambling moment they were both dressing hurriedly with half-pleased, half-embarrassed smiles. Then Zaza grabbed Valerie’s makeup box. Anthony pulled open a wardrobe and took out a flimsy robe—a garment made of feathers and gauze that immediately looked ridiculous in a man’s hand. Then he followed Zaza out the door and they said, “See you later!” in nervous unison before parting ways to run again down the corridor.

Zaza arrived at the studio winded, weak-kneed, and painfully conscious of the scent of fresh sex surrounding her. The box had hit her in the leg with every step of her mad dash, and she was feeling bruised and sheepish as she opened the door. Then she froze. The worst had happened. The show had already begun. The team of absorbed producers and tech people in headphones blurred in her eyes. Doom.

The sound technician turned to look at her and made an
I wouldn’t like to be you!
face. She grimaced back and crept in to watch the show on the monitors, the soft wetness in her crotch all too palpable as she sat. There was Valerie, in all her blond and buxom glory, her rich cellolike voice reading a report on this year’s Exotic Erotic Ball.
No one could look that good sitting in a chair
, Zaza thought to herself. It wasn’t strictly natural. But plastic surgery was another thing Valerie LeBlanc was on record as
not
having done. She had
not
had breast implants, though her breasts were impossibly perfect. She had
not
had vaginal intercourse, ever, with anyone (“I guess I’m saving myself for the right guy,” she would say sweetly—she was always impossibly sweet with interviewers). And she had
not, ever,
lost her temper and stabbed her former assistant in the neck with a silver pen. (“That girl was a very sad and confused person,” Valerie had told a reporter sweetly. “I hope very much that she can get the help she needs.”) It was all impossibly awful and impossibly unfair and impossibly typical of Zaza’s impossible life.

Oh, well,
she told herself.
At least I got that fuck. And—what was his name? Anthony! He wants to see me again. . . .
But a stronger voice was bemoaning her irresponsibility. It was reminding her that this was the chance she’d always wanted, and that she was messing it up exactly the way she always did.

 

 

 

Zaza had wanted to be a porn star since before she knew she was going to have A-cup breasts. Before she had ever
seen
porn, she wanted to be what she had called “an actress in sex movies.” It wasn’t that she was an exhibitionist, though she was sure she could be, given the chance. It was the combination of the glamour of movies with the glamour that sex had had for her when she was young. Of course, it still had that glamour, and she guessed that from most people’s points of view, she was still young. The trouble was, at twenty-one, she was already old enough to know her breasts were never going to be anything but tiny A cups. She was going to be the wrong kind of redhead—a carrot-topped, freckled, spindly redhead—for the rest of her unglamorous life. And her aunt Lucy, who had raised her, had never let her forget it. Every other day, Lucy would look at her with bliss in her eyes and say, “At least you’re not likely to go the way of your mother!” Zaza’s mother had apparently been a famous reprobate in little, Christian, parochial Dulcie, Oklahoma. About Zaza’s father, all Lucy would say was, darkly, “Could have been anyone, dear, but no one’s talking.” Zaza couldn’t help but dream that someday she would meet that glamorous bad-girl mother and live with her in a world of late nights, skimpy clothes, and booze—all things that were strictly forbidden under the rule of Lucy.

Maybe that was the reason she still wanted, wistfully, hopelessly, to be in erotica. But she never would have done anything about that wish, not on her own. She was too shy about her looks. It was all the result of a chance meeting, an incident she still could hardly believe.

She had just moved into a New York apartment with her old school friend Booley. The apartment itself had very little to recommend it. It was a studio, for one thing, and the girls were sharing a lumpy bed that folded into an ugly sofa in the daytime. The windows didn’t shut properly and the heating barely worked. But it was in the middle of the maze of bars and clubs in the Lower East Side, where every young person in New York came to have a good time.

One evening, she went downstairs to her local bar, Hex, just to feel the freedom of being able to go to a bar alone at five p.m. There was no one inside but a couple arguing at the pool table and a man in a suit sitting at the bar, watching people pass on the street. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she realized it wasn’t just any man. It was a man with unearthly good looks, and the suit was the kind that cost thousands of dollars. The man was black, with very dark skin that gave his sculpted features an added elegance, a beauty that was unnerving. Finally, and most alarmingly, he was looking at Zaza.

She almost stumbled, but recovered and went to sit a few seats down at the bar—close enough that he could talk to her, but not so close that it seemed she expected him to talk to her. Then she ordered a white wine instead of the beer she had intended to get, and began to sip it self-consciously, studiously not staring at the incredibly hot guy who was disarmingly staring at her.

At last, he said, “Could I ask you a question?”

“Oh, of course. Yes.” She made herself look at him, although she was sure her face was going to turn into a mask of longing.

“It’s a personal question,” he warned her.

“Um, okay.” She took a deep breath. “Shoot.”

“Do you have a job?”

Zaza relaxed. That was an easy one. “Oh, no, I just got to New York. So I should have started looking for a job, but I look at the papers, and everybody wants experience at things I’m not experienced in, because I only really worked at a hardware store and a couple other places that aren’t really interesting.”

He smiled. “That’s great. So you might be looking for a job?”

She balked. This was the moment at which she was supposed to become suspicious. Random offers of work from strange men were usually offers of sex, or even of the
wrong kind of work
. Which meant she was supposed to refuse to speak to him and go home deeply offended. Except what could be better than an offer of sex from this man? And the wrong kind of work (within limits) was exactly what Zaza had always wanted.

She was silent so long that he said, “I guess this might seem intrusive. I’m sorry if—”

“No,” she said. “I really need a job.”

“Great. So can I explain it to you?”

“Yes,” she said, and laughed nervously. “I mean, it’s not in porn, is it?”

He raised his eyebrows. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card, which he offered to her. As she took it, he said, “I’m afraid my business is erotic programming. But I’m not looking for porn stars. I need a production assistant.”

The card read: LEONARD FALWELL, DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMMING, XTV CORPORATION. It had an address, a phone number, and an office extension. It looked just like a real business card.