Fade To Black

I stood like a statue for a moment before the words sank in, and then I knew it was time to get the hell out of there. I silently shot my hand out and grabbed my phone and slipped it into my pocket, never taking my eyes from the movie star and the make-up artist making out with increasing fury before me. There was a scrap of paper scrunched into the bottom of my pocket and I pulled it out with a slightly shaking hand and saw a stub of pencil on the work counter to my right, and forced my eyes away from the kissing girls while I scribbled my cell number and also the name and number of my hotel. I’d had mobile communication problems before, and there was no way I wanted a poor signal or my battery to go dead if a beautiful and obviously horny actress was going to call me. I was about to drop the scrap on the counter when a thought popped into my head, a thought relating to a conversation we’d had earlier, and I can’t explain why but I also quickly scrawled something else beneath the two numbers. You can blame it on my dazed mind.

I left my message and gripped the door handle, allowing myself one final look before I left. Amy now had her mouth on Jennifer’s throat, her hands gripping the soft mounds of her breasts, and in return Jennifer had now pulled Amy’s panties to one side and was brushing the tip of her index finger down the groove of her butt, pushing slowly against the tight entrance of her ass. I gazed at the sight, for one agonizing moment imagining diving across the room and burying my cock deep into Amy’s wet tunnel while Jennifer held her open for me, and then I opened the door and stepped quickly outside. I’d chanced my luck enough for one day.

After I’d stumbled away from the line of trailers and narrowly avoided crashing through a pane of glass that was being carried in an almost comical fashion by two overall-wearing grips, I leant heavily against the wall of the soundstage and took several long deep breaths. I lowered my head to my chest and felt my hair fall into my eyes while I gave myself a moment to compute what I’d just witnessed. I’d heard it said on more that one occasion that a movie set was full of surprises, and after today that was certainly something I was in agreement with. And maybe my luck was changing, because apart from not getting busted for what I’d seen, it appeared as if the brief encounter that I’d had with Jennifer had a chance of continuing. The cynical part of my mind told me that there was no way she’d call, but life is all about taking chances. You just never knew.

I realized I was grinning, and I levered myself away from the wall and headed towards the door of stage 13. Inside was now a hive of activity, with colonies of personel running back and forth with props and lighting, but my mind was now far away from the filming of the comic book spectacular. Jamie Selkirk appeared once more loaded down with armfuls of crap, and I stopped him and thanked him for his time and indulgence. He asked me if I’d got everything that I needed and I assured him that I had. That was very nearly the truth. We shook hands and I made my way off the stage and back past the security, flipping open my phone as I did so and placing a call to Bernie back in London. It would be mid-evening in the capital and when his voice-messaging kicked in I guessed that my editor would either be down on the workfloor checking copy or firmly seated at the table of his favourite bar. I left a couple of sentences informing that everything had gone well and I wasn’t knocking up too much on the magazine’s expense account, and by the time I’d snapped the Nokia closed I was at the main gate. Hailing a cab took no more than thirty seconds and soon I was back out in heavy traffic and being fried on the backseat again. The driver watched me through the rear mirror.

‘You okay pal? Looking a little pale back there.’

I nodded. ‘I’m just beginning to enjoy my jet-lag,’ I replied, ‘and this weather isn’t helping.’

‘You know, this goddamn city will kill you,’ he said with a grin that was more gums than teeth, before throwing the taxi into a microscopic gap in the traffic and leaning heavily on the horn. I rested my head back on the seat and blinked up at the dirty roof of the cab, but all I kept seeing were images of Jennifer. I wondered if she’d call, and just that thought was enough to get me hard again. I also wondered if she’d act on what I’d written below my number? She’d said she wanted to see a website where fantasies were traded and celebrity females were discussed, and as I said before I knew of a place where this happened. Had I been too bold in my thinking, would she be offended, or would seeing my name at the site maybe turn her on even more? The way she’d acted this afternoon, I had to tell myself that it was the latter. I also debated what my buddies would have thought if they knew I’d just directed Jennifer Garner to our cherished little corner of cyberspace called Literotica. I’m pretty sure there might have been a drink in for me...

**********

The journey back to The Marriott was slow and torturous, and it was nearing two-thirty as I was walking through the revolving doors back into the hotel lobby. After the briefest of stops to check for messages I was into the elevator and by the time I’d reached the seventh I was virtually running down the corridor towards my room. Here we can keep the details sparse but all you need to know is that it took mere seconds for me to dump my stuff and drag my jeans down and not much longer for me jerk-off to a climax that had me flopping back down on the bed and panting like a guy who’s just run a marathon. I lay there for a few minutes watching the revolving fan on the ceiling before I had the horrible idea of the maid coming back into the room. It had been embarassing enough that she’d seen me this naked this morning, I didn’t want her to see me with my shorts round my ankles and my come drying in pools on my stomach. I pulled myself up, flung my clothes into the corner of the room and hit the shower.

The shower wasn’t a great relief, truth be told. Sure, it cleaned my body but it filled my mind with images of Jennifer, and I recalled the look in her eyes when she told me how she had to keep peeling off the leather and taking cold showers. I could imagine her doing that now and then stepping into the cubicle behind me, her hands working their way down my back as she held her body against mine, her daik hair dripping with water as we kissed, erect nipples stabbing against my chest before she raised a her leg and wrapped it around me before lowering her slippery pussy down over my dick, giving the same gasps and moans as I’d heard when Amy had been licking furiously away at her.

I stopped, span the temprature dial to cold and cried out with shock as the heat turned to ice and made every pore on my skin scream with mercy. My erection quickly sank away to nothing and my balls crawled up inside my body as I forced myself to endure the freezing water and take my thoughts away from fantasies that would inevitably lead to wanking. If Jennifer was going to call me, and if something was going to happen between us, I wanted something left in reserve, if you know what I’m saying. I spent a full minute chilling myself down until my teeth were chattering faster than a Mexican tapdancer and then threw myself into a towel.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to keep my mind off what had happened back at Fox. After I’d dressed in fresh clothes I left the hotel and took a walk down the infamous Sunset strip until I came to the Whiskey A Go-Go, once the place for bands to be seen in Los Angeles and a sleazepit that still kept it’s reputation for all things debauched. Inside was dark and depressing and stank of old alchohol, just as it had been the last time I was here eighteen months ago, but that was part of the Whiskey’s charm. I sat at the bar and drained the first beer in one shot and the second with less haste while I swopped small talk with the barman and looked at the greasy photographs of the famous names who had played here. There was Jim Morrison, looking down on me with long dead eyes, and it gave me a secret thrill to be sitting in the same bar where the Lizard King had carved out his mighty reputation. I was going to stay for a third until a guy sporting a Kiss T-shirt and a fine growth of acne approached and offered me speed, and I decided that was my cue to leave.

I found a good diner and read the paper while I devoured Chilli and too much coffee, then mooched around the shops and picked up a couple of old punk albums from a cool store called Finyl Vinyl, took a quick look at the ocean and then made my way back to the hotel. It was now late afternoon and the traffic was a solid block of metal and noise, but at least the heat had died down to something approaching bearable. A busker had set up outside The Marriott and I listened to him giving a very decent pass at an old Jeff Buckley tune before tossing a couple of dollars in his cap and leaving the street behind me.

Up in my room I flipped the TV onto the news channel and kept the volume low in the background while I tried to work on the notes for the article. But whenever my fingers hovered over the keyboard of the laptop and I tried to come up with the killer opening line all I could see was Jennifer. I listened back through my verbal notes on the tape and when my interview with her started all I heard was her sensual voice telling me over and over again to touch her. It was useless, and after a wasted half-an-hour I realised work was impossible. I stretched out on the bed and half watched an old episode of Cheers while I thumbed through a magazine, and when my yawns became more frequent I didn’t fight the onset of sleep.

**********

When I awoke the room had been overcome with darkness and my left arm had gone numb from where I’d lay awkwardly. My face was mashed into the pillow and my mouth was stale from the food and beers that I’d had earlier. And the phone was ringing.

Now I was awake. I rolled over and felt my back protest from the too-soft bed and looked at the phone on the sidetable, illuminated in a grey light from the TV set. I reached out my hand and suddenly stopped an inch above the reciever, let my fingers hover. Could it be Jennifer calling me? My friends or family would almost inevitably call me on my cellphone, and if it was night here then it would be very early morning back in England. It couldn’t be any of them. Who else would call the hotel telephone? I hadn’t left any instructions at reception to be contacted, and the only other person who knew I was at The Marriott was-

Barney Hammond. My heart sank. Of course, my editor was always up before the dawn, regularly crowing about how he’d done a days work by the time the staff had dragged themselves into the office. If anyone from London was calling it would be him. Probably heard the message I left and was eager for a progress report. I sighed and snatched up the reciever.

‘Hello.’

‘I was starting to think you weren’t going to pick up.’ The voice was soft and low, the same voice that had been swimming around my head for the last few hours. I opened my mouth to reply and found that nothing came out.

‘Are you there?’ said Jennifer.

I could feel the blood racing in my veins. She’d actually called me, I couldn’t believe it. Sure I’d imagined, fantasied that she would, but the truth was I wouldn’t have bet money on it happening. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I’m here.’

‘You took a long time to answer.’

‘I was sleeping. Sorry.’

There was a pause, an awkward silence filled the line, and I thought that the conversation might be over before it had begun. Then she spoke again.

‘I looked at the website you wrote down for me.’ She stopped, as if to add something more, but nothing came, and I guessed she was waiting for my reaction.

‘Look, maybe I was out of line,’ I said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to-’

‘I liked it.’

I swallowed, felt the click in my throat. ‘You did?’

‘Well, I didn’t see my name there, but apart from that I thought it was very... Interesting.’

I shifted upwards on the bed, found the remote and snapped the tube off. ‘It just a bunch of people writing about various fantasies. Some of those fantasies happen t be female celebrities, that’s all. We all have a good laugh about it.’

‘I wasn’t being negative about it, I thought it looked really good. Obviously I’ve not hit big enough yet,’ she said, and I recalled what she thought about not really making it as a star until you had fantasies and fakes of you plastered over the Internet. I contemplated for a second about what I was going to say next, and then went ahead with it.

‘Maybe I could change that?’

She laughed softly, and even though her voice was disconnected and sterile from the phone line she sounded as gorgeous as during our meeting, and I could feel the first twinges of yet-another erection from my suggestion and from her tone.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you might have some good material as well, after this afternoon.’

I was glad that she’d bought up the afternoon, it was a subject that I didn’t have the first idea how to start talking about. But now she’d broken the ice. ‘I didn’t mean to spy on you,’ I muttered.

‘Yes you did,’ she said, and when I didn’t reply she continued. ‘That was something else that I liked. I knew you were watching all the time.’

‘Christ, are you serious?’

‘Totally. It was exciting to know that you were watching Amy lick me. It gave me the sweetest orgasm, as I’m sure you saw.’

I’d genuinely thought that Jennifer hadn’t known that I was taking in all of the little show that she and the cute makeup girl had put on. It had seemed as if I’d gatecrashed a very private incident and only been discovered at the last moment, and I told her this.

‘I hadn’t planned on you coming back,’ she said, ‘but it was just a bonus when you did. Anyway, I was so turned on that I don’t think I’d have cared if the whole crew had been standing in the doorway.’ I heard that incredible laugh once more. ‘It might have been the end of my career, though.’

‘Why were you so turned on?’ I asked, adjusting my own arousal in my jeans and praying for the answer that I hoped for.

‘You know why. If Amy hadn’t have come back you’d have been fucking me instead of her.’

When Jennifer said that line it wasn’t in some brash, porno-style way but with a voice that said the F-word in a tone that sounded like shyness. After what I witnessed the last thing I knew she wasn’t was shy, but that still didn’t change the fact that it was one of the most sexy sentences I’d ever heard. My dick was like a bar of iron, and Jennifer must have been able to read my mind.

‘Are you hard?’ she whispered.

‘Very. I’ve been hard all afternoon just thinking about you.’

‘Did you jerk-off while thinking about me?’

‘You better believe it.’

‘Do it again,’ she said, and almost before the words were spoken I’d unbuckled my jeans and let my dick spring free. ‘I wish I’d have been able to see you doing it this afternoon.’

I worked my hand up and down steadily. ‘Tell me what happened when I left,’ I said, my voice harsh from my dry throat and excitement. ‘Have you been with Amy before?’

‘A few times, she’s really nice,’ Jennifer replied. ‘After you went she made me come again just by kissing me and sucking on my nipples. She rode herself up and down on my hand as she did it.’

I lay back and let my head sink into the pillow while I listened to Jennifer tell me how she’d had sex with Amy, how it started after Amy had helped her wriggle into her skin-tight costume during the first days of filming and the feel of the girl’s hands smoothing the leather over her had got Jennifer wetter than she had been for a long time.

‘It’s like the other day,’ she breathed into my ear, ‘when she slid the trousers down you saw me in today and just bent me over the arm of the couch and fucked me with her mouth. Do you know how good that felt? For me to just lie there while she spread my legs and slid her tongue into my pussy, for me to feel her soft fingers pushing into me while she licked my butt. Would you like to do that to me?’

I was so turned on I could barely speak, took all my effort to say that I would.

‘If she hadn’t come back this afternoon I’d have let you. I’d have let you push my face down and take me from behind.’ Jennifer’s voice had changed, became more breathless and slightly deeper, and I wondered if she was masterbating the same as I, giving herself pleasure from her own dirty words. ‘Let you do what you wanted to me. Even let you fuck me in my ass.’ She paused, and I could only hear her breathing, then: ‘Are you still wanking?’

The moan from my throat and my almost tortured gasps were the only reply I could manage. I was having to concentrate from not coming there and then, and with Jennifer telling me all the things that I could do and that she wanted me to do to her that took a monumental effort.

‘I bet you’d like to have me right now?’ She said. ‘Would you?’

‘More than anything,’ I replied. ‘I’d love to fuck you.’

‘Then come and do it.’

‘I don’t know where you are.’

‘I’m outside your hotel.’

I froze, my eyes wide and my hand solid on my dick, and waited for her to say something else. She didn’t, and as I listened for the first time I could make out other faint sounds on the line. The odd car, a vague shout, some general street sounds. Now my blood pumped faster than ever. I’d just assumed that Jennifer was at her own apartment or hotel or still in the trailer at the Fox studio complex. That she’d checked out the website and then decided to call me from the comfort of her surroundings, wherever they might be. Not for a moment did I think she was in my vicinity.

‘You’re outside?’

She laughed again. ‘Don’t sound so shocked. If you don’t believe me take a look out of your window.’

I swung my legs around and stood up from the bed and edged over towards the expanse of glass that lined one side of the room. I still had my jeans around my ankles and I lodged the reciever of the telephone between my shoulder and ear while I pulled them up around my waist. The window went from floor to ceiling and although the room was dark and it was unlikely anyone could see in I still didn’t want to risk the chances of someone spotting me with my balls hanging out. I leant against the glass, cool against my forehead, and looked out into the Los Angeles night. Before me were rivers of lights and in the distance a slab of darkness that was the ocean. I looked down, and the streets took on more definition, neon and cars and lit apartment buildings, bars and people. I looked still further down, onto the street below me that The Marriott was built on.

‘I don’t see you,’ I said. ‘Where do I look?’

In my ear I heard a noise, a metallic click, and then the vague street sounds became a lot more defined. And from my vantage point I saw a car parked on the far side of the street, very slightly down from my building, a car which now had an open door. And then I saw a figure step out and look upwards, not in my exact direction but towards the upper floors of the hotel. Even from seven stories I could tell that it was Jennifer.

‘Do you see me now?’

‘Yes, I can see you. You look absoloutely beautiful.’

She giggled. ‘You’re too far away to tell.’

I shook my head. ‘I know you are. You’re incredible.’

‘If you want me, then I’m right here,’ she said, and I saw her lean casually back against the side of the car. ‘Let me give you something for your story.’ With that, the line went dead. I watched her for a couple of seconds more, and then slammed the reciever back into the cradle and dived across the bed and into the bathroom.

It would have been useful if an official from Guinness had been on hand to record the time it took me to scrub my teeth, splash my face and gargle with mouthwash; I may well have made it into the book of records for the world’s fastest clean-up. I danced around the bedroom while I slipped on some clean jeans, boots and a shirt that was less creased than all my others, grabbed my key and my wallet and was soon sprinting down the corridor towards the elevators like Maurice Green on medal day. The elevator door was standing open, and skidded to a halt inside it and jabbed the button for the lobby, checking my watch as I did so. 10.14pm.