Angel of the Morning

It was around eleven when I woke up, if the sun coming through the skylight was any indication. Normally I would have been awake for several hours, but today was a rare day off from either of my jobs, so I hadn't set the alarm last night. More precisely, I hadn't had the opportunity to set the alarm last night, having been otherwise occupied. When I opened my eyes for the first time that day, just what had been occupying me was resting on the other pillow, facing me with eyes closed and mouth half open.

It was unusual. She was unusual. Normally, when I'm approached by women after the set is over, they're accompanied by a boyfriend -- or husband, or hookup, or what have you; almost never a girlfriend -- who has either talked them into it or is being dragged along for the ride. She had been alone all that night, watching me dance on the stage from the bar and then again when she paid for a private "talk" afterwards. If I'm being honest, I'll admit that the novelty of the experience had been what had led me to take her home with me. She was smoking, but I had turned down women who produced much more exhaust when I was myself as exhausted as I'd been last night.

I considered waking her up to let her know that she was late for anything she'd had planned for this morning, then decided that I shouldn't assume that it wasn't her day off just like it was mine. Instead, I rolled over and got up out of bed, letting my steps lead me in the direction of the ensuite. However, my path and the fuzziness of my head led me to step on one of the piles of clothes that my guest and I had discarded in our haste to get to the fun part of the previous night, and now something hard dug into my foot with a crunching noise. Controlling the urge to make an exclamation, I lifted my foot and brought it down again to the side, glancing down at the obstacle I had just encountered.

It was the locket of a necklace, and not one that I had ever seen before. Well, so I thought in that first instant, but then I realized that I did recognize the chain as the one worn by my guest last night, though the locket had been hidden below the neckline of her blouse, also on the floor beneath my feet. I flinched. Okay, if I had damaged the silly thing, it would be as much her fault for unceremoniously dumping it on the floor as it would be mine for treading upon it. But I didn't want to assign blame, so instead I squatted down to pick it up and examine it for breakage. There seemed to be no superficial signs of damage, and I got it open easily enough to look at the picture within.

And that was when what was supposed to be, had been, a fun night became something else. He was older in the picture than he had been in my memories, but that only stood to reason. For a moment that lasted a long time, I just stared at the picture. Then, with a noise somewhere been a sigh and a snort, I stood up and went to the toilet to do my business.

With that out of the way, I slowly walked back into the bedroom where my guest still slumbered. Briefly considering the notion of awakening her, I instead walked over to a chair that faced the bed and sat down in it before pulling one leg up over the other and waiting.

I didn't have to wait very long. She let out a yawn before her eyes opened, then lifted her head to look around. Once she spotted me, a smile grew on her face.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," I replied. My hey was not near so warm as hers, I'm afraid. That was when I held up the necklace, chain wrapped around my fingers and locket dangling beneath my hand. "Nice necklace," I added.

The smile froze. I watched her blink a couple times. Then, at last, she spoke again. "You looked." It wasn't a question, nor an accusation. Just a statement of what we both knew had to have happened.

"I did." I turned my gaze off her face and on to the necklace. "I don't think he's your husband, somehow, and boyfriend seems even less likely. Your father, then?"

"Yes," she answered. I wasn't looking at her face, so I can't say what she looked like when she said it. Her tone didn't tell me anything. I wondered what my tone was telling her.

"Okay. Well. This isn't how I thought this was going to happen," I admitted, then added, "Here you go." With that, I wrapped up the locket and the chain in my hand, let the links on my fingers slip forward and off them, and pitched them in her direction. They landed on the side of the bed where I had been sleeping a short while before, just in front of her hip.

"What?" she asked. Now I was watching her face, and it was nice to see that she was expressing an even greater confusion than I had just described.

"Yeah, I thought that something like this was going to happen one of these days, but I was expecting it to be one of the boys who'd come looking for me," I said, nodding.

"One of the -- how many -- what do --" She made a few more false starts at inquiry, but I'd stopped listening and just waited for her to wind down.

When that happened, I continued. "Five. I've given birth to five children, yourself included. Three boys and two girls. Like I said, I was expecting one of the boys to develop mommy issues at some point, figure out who I was, and then come find me. Not one of the girls."

She stared at me, mouth half-open again. It wasn't nearly as cute with her eyes wide open instead of closed, I must say. Finally, her mouth turned into a flat line. "You're not even a little bit ashamed, are you?"

I wanted to laugh; I really did. But that was denied me. "You know who I am," said I. "You know what I do for a living. You've seen my work. You watched me dance last night. Do you really think shame is something I feel?" It was a sincere question, not a rhetorical one.

And she answered it, sort of. "You fucked your daughter!" she said angrily.

True statement, so I answered it in kind. "You fucked your mother," I said calmly. "Are you ashamed?" That one was rhetorical.

"Yes!"

I shrugged. "Sorry to hear it. Incest stopped being a taboo after your grandfather fucked me for the first time."

Her jaw dropped further.

I pushed on before she could say any more. "It was rape, really. I was sleeping, and then I woke up to the feeling of him sliding up inside me. It didn't hurt, though, and I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or not, so I didn't scream or anything. And then it started to feel really fucking good, so I didn't want to. Still rape, though. Not that I have any room to talk. My mom was also asleep when I licked her cunt, a few weeks later, and she didn't wake up until after I was done. So, yeah. I'm an incestuous rapist, like you. And I don't feel shame.

"I felt no shame when I fucked my uncle. I felt no shame when I fucked my aunt. I have never felt any shame in fucking who and what I wanted to fuck, when I wanted to fuck them or it. There's this song lyric that I've always liked -- 'if morning's echo says we've sinned, it was what I wanted now.' That's how I've lived." I shrugged.

"No siblings?" she snarled. Well, if you can call it snarling when there are tears starting to run down your cheeks.

"Only one half-sister. And yes, I fucked her. A lot. But you don't really want to hear about that, I bet."

"No," she snapped. "You haven't even asked about him."

True statement, so I answered without rancor. "How is your father?"

"He's dead. He died six years ago." Delivered staccato.

This one, I couldn't evaluate as true or false. It was plausible, though. I think he'd been at least as old as I was now when I was nineteen, and that was twenty-three years ago, so it was not unlikely that he had died. Under most circumstances, I would have said some sort of comforting lie like, "I'm sorry for your loss." Social lubricant, the expected reply. I didn't say anything.

"You don't care," she said, through clenched teeth.

True statement. "No. I don't care. Why do you think I would?"

She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Her hands, clenched so tightly that it seemed likely that her nails would cut her palms, came up to her head as she started to curl up.

"That half-sister I mentioned?" I said, tone unaltered. "I probably fucked her more than anyone else in my life. We must have shot more than a hundred scenes together. We lived together for almost a decade. And then she went to prison for tax fraud, and a few months into her sentence she got shivved for fucking the wrong person's girlfriend. I think ... I think I did care about her. I know that I mourned her, a little. But I was fucking someone else when I got the phone call from her lawyer, so it can't have meant much. So why would you think I would care about someone I fucked a grand total of three times, twenty-three years ago?"

Nothing continued to come out of her mouth, despite how often it opened and closed.

"Because you do," I answered my own question, since she wasn't about to do so. "That's why. That's what all love is, in the end. A demand to be loved in return. You loved him, and you think he loved you. But that's not enough, so you want to believe that he was loved by others." I spread my hands. "By me. Well, he wasn't, and he isn't. I don't love anyone. I never have, and never will. I can give the illusion of love, but I cannot give anyone the reality. I am a porn star. I give people a fantasy. And no one will ever have the reality of that fantasy from me. Not your father. Not you. Not anyone."

Her eyes had slammed shut sometime in that oration, but when I hadn't said anything for a little while afterward, they opened again and gazed pure venom in my direction. "I hate you," she said.

True statement. I answered with a shrug but lowered the leg resting across my knee so that both my feet were on the floor. If she was to come at me --

But that speculation didn't come true, and she got up, locket and necklace clenched in one hand, picked up her clothes from the floor, and started to get dressed as she walked out of the room. I heard her stomping down the stairs. After a moment, I heard the front door open, and then slam shut, in quick succession.

"'It was what I wanted now,'" I repeated. It was. There was no point in dwelling on what I had wanted then or what I might want in the future. Anymore than there would have been a point in telling her that the man in the locket was only probably her father, that there had been two cocks pounding away at my cunt the night she was conceived -- his only one of them, and the other his younger brother's. Her daddy might still be alive, for all either of us knew.

Oh well. I got up from the chair and ambled over to my bed and dropped down in it alone.

It was what I wanted now.