Popping The Bubble

WARNING: This story contains poetry! Not much, but some.

This connects only VERY tangentially to my other stories, so feel free to kick back and enjoy it. I've written it for Lit's annual Nude Day contest, so read all the entries and vote up your favorites!

* * *

I popped a new piece of gum and looked over into the corner of the studio, where Grundle sat with his feet up on the console and his nose buried in his phone. As I sometimes did, I wondered about his life: here he was in a little room with three naked people (two of them svelte, eager fillies, which I knew was the kind of thing he was into), running sound and lighting for a show with every kind of raunchy question imaginable, and yet there he sat, watching the clock, unwilling or unable to raise even the slightest hard-on in his black basketball shorts.

That's what you get when you produce sex shows for four years, I guessed: a case of terminal boredom. We paid Grundle a hundred an hour, and these days he could get these things taped, edited, pixellated, and posted in like three hours, start to finish.

I stirred as Elliot aimed the mic toward his mouth and lobbed another softball at our guest. "And so what's your favorite sex position, would you say?" He said it with that old-radio plumminess he often found buried in his vocal cords; El had always had a fantastic voice.

The guest was a young lady named Kaylen, who must have had a last name. But I'd forgotten it. She was on the show ostensibly because she'd just come back from a summer internship on some island off the coast of god knew where, where she'd counted puffins or something, but in reality the show was taking its usual course: guest comes in, everyone gets nude, we open with some innocuous questions (about puffins, in this case, and islands), we play a song, and then we all start talking about sex.

A lot.

"Well," the puffin lady mused, scratching at her pubes, "I mean, doesn't everyone say doggy?"

"Yeah, but I was just wondering whether being on a bird-covered rock in the Atlantic might have made you think of anything more creative. Or something." They chuckled at each other, already fucking in their minds, and I found my eye wandering to Grundle's clock. Fuck. Eight more minutes of runtime before this recording of Nude Mood with Bubble and the Whang would be safely finished, and the real show could start. I zoned out as they prattled, a fake smile on my face for the benefit of the cameras.

I had an itchy butt, but I'd long since learned not to scratch there on camera. If I did, the eventual webcast would get a flurry of online comments about me picking dingleberries, or whatever. The camera caught just about everything. And what it missed, the commenters surely found.

She was in the middle of some sort of answer, with me giving appropriate coos and smiles, when Grundle lit up his little yellow light. I waited for a pause in her story, some bullshit she was spinning about masturbating in a tent during a nor'easter, whatever that was, and then I lifted my lips to my mic and cut smoothly in. I did check my notecard first, to remember her last name. "So, for those of you listening live? You've just heard from Kaylen Rapp, a grad student in the College of Arts and Sciences, right here on Nude Mood With Bubbles And The Whang. We record new content every other Wednesday, then upload on Fridays, so be sure to check us out."

"We want to thank you, Ms Rapp," Elliot added, clean, with no dead air, "for your enlightening comments. We're now going to move into the... well, call it the 'afterparty' segment of the show."

"We call it Sloppy Seconds," I added, putting the usual sass in my voice. I was chewing my bubblegum loudly, as usual.

"That's where we see if anything develops from sitting here nude." He laughed. "See if we can, you know, have a little fun. If you're up for it."

"Oh, I'm definitely up for it." You could hear the truth of that in Kaylen's voice: this chick was the German Army in 1939: she had a very flexible definition of the term boundaries. "Definitely."

"Sweet. Well, then this is the point in the show where we sign off on the Comm Department platform and move the party over to our Pixboox Passion Pit..."

"...which you can join live with your Pixboox Plus account," I finished. "Sign up today for special offers and bonus content, including the Whang and I getting up to a few shenanigans on our old show Kinkytime, which is fully archived over there. Among other gems, you can watch the time the Whang spread peanut butter on his dick to see how well it would work as anal lube."

"Hell yeah," Elliot gloated. He'd told me once that the best two years of his entire life had been when he was banging me on the webcam, and it gave him a little thrill every time I plugged the archives. "If I recall correctly, creamy beat chunky. Right, Bubbles?"

"Well, we definitely wound up creamy, Whang," I cooed. The guest was glancing back and forth between the two of us, transparently uncomfortable thinking about me and him fucking.

"Yes, indeed we did," he leered, then turned back to Kaylen with his cock visibly harder. "So, before we sign off here and drift out of the Nude Mood, there's only one question to ask: would you rather pop the Bubbles?" He raised an eyebrow. "Or bang the Whang?" I blew a big pink bubble, the gum already losing its flavor.

I was fully expecting her to pick him, which would mean an hour or so of the two of them webcamming, Elliot and I getting paid for every depraved act the Passion Pit audience wanted to suggest. It was a great business model, and it sure beat just me and El doing it every few days like we used to. Female guests usually wanted to bang the Whang and male guests chose to pop the Bubbles, as a rule, but there were exceptions. Elliot sometimes ended up with a dick in his ass, while I occasionally wound up with my tongue in someone's cooter. Kaylen Rapp did not strike me as the kind of girl who'd like me.

She surprised me, then, when she crowed, "Oh, I'll take both of you!"

I glued on a huge, fake grin as I nodded at the camera. "Well, great! Let's get it the fuck on!" I was not enthusiastic... but I was a good actress. Webcam girls learn that skill really quick. So, while the play-out music started thumping and Elliot beamed at our guest, I let my mind wander toward the logistics: this woman was a hottie, with a nicely rounded ass and tits almost as sweet as mine. Where would the cameras go? Who'd suck what? Where would Elliot's penis end up? Who'd take the cumshot?

Threesomes were always a little difficult.

"Okay, guys." Grundle slapped a button, then messed with some of his dials. "That's a wrap on the webcast. I'll get set up for the livestream, then you guys can fuck. Or whatever." Elliot stretched, needing no time; he was already halfway hard. Our guest, fingering her nipples, looked speculatively at his genitals.

"Now I know why they call you the Whang," she mused, her voice rich with the kind of playfulness a lot of women used on Elliot. "Before I came in, I figured you'd be Chinese."

"Yeah, a lot of people do." He shrugged. "When we picked the name, we didn't really think of that."

"Did you pick it?" She was ignoring me utterly, which didn't surprise me. That was fine; I was checking my texts.

"No. She did." Presumably, he'd nodded at me. It was true: I'd given him that name when we'd first started out doing the webcam thing, because he was massive down there. "I'm the one who picked hers."

The woman paused, then sniffed. "Bubbles." I was still in my phone, but I could feel her eyes on me, judging. "I can figure out at least two reasons why you chose that name," she laughed, and it wasn't a kind laugh. "What's your real name?" Kaylen asked. I was having a hard time not thinking of her as Puffinslut, though Gingerbitch would have been just as appropriate. I laid my phone aside and sighed my way over to their side of the little studio. Time was a'wasting.

"She's Christa," he replied once I didn't answer. His eyes rested unabashed on her tits. "I'm Elliot."

She laughed. "Like in ET?"

"Yeah, but with a bigger dick," he leered, starting to jack himself. Elliot's ability to produce a reliable hard-on was legendary, but I'd seen it hundreds of times over the years. I didn't even bother watching anymore. "Phone home, baby."

I interrupted Puffinslut's giggle. "So usually, when guests do us both, we don't bother opening it up to suggestions or audience requests." It was the dozenth time I'd given this spiel. "Usually, when it's one-on-one, the livestream viewers in the Pit get to pay to tell us what they want to see, but we've found that there are just too many moving parts and pieces with threesomes."

She stopped her examination of Elliot's penis and looked slowly over my body, plainly offended that I was not ugly. "Whatever," she shrugged, smiling sweetly, "as long as I don't have to eat out your cunt."

I arched an immediate eyebrow. I had been doing this far too long for customer service to be all that important to me. "Look, you're the one who said she wanted both of us. I'm just as happy to sit off to the side and do my homework while you let El nail you. This is on you."

"Honey," she said after a moment, her voice dripping with contempt, "I think I'd like you to lick my asshole. Deal?"

I shrugged, ignoring the ill-will behind her smile. "Why not." Rimjobs made for excellent content; we'd clear four figures, easy, if Grundle could get a close-up of my tongue in her shitter. "Just do me a favor and clean yourself out first? You can use one of the wipes on the table," I nodded.

She fumed, but I didn't care. I had work to do.

* * *

So important to know!

Certainty, so necessary

To the face we want to show:

So, so hard to accept ambiguity.

* * *

I was sore after the gym the next day, but that was par for the course. When you spend your working life naked on a camera, your trainer and your waxer become your best friends. I returned to my dorm to face yet another nastygram from the Dean's Office. Fuckers kept trying to get me to graduate. I had long, long since met the university's requirements, but you had to actually apply and pay a fee to graduate. And my grant would run out as soon as I did that.

Besides, I'd changed majors more often than I'd changed nail colors. So even the Dean admitted he wasn't quite sure which degrees I'd earned.

I reckoned until he figured that out, he could get fucked. I'd started avoiding all his plaintive phone messages asking for a meeting, especially once Grundle had compared the IPs and figured out that the Dean watched our webcasts. Meaning, he enjoyed the pixellated version of me nude, probably whacked off to it. "Or maybe it's me he's doing it to," Elliot had mused, mostly because Elliot always assumes everything is about him.

I wondered, sometimes, whether the Dean was also one of our 633,249 Pixboox subscribers. Hell. Of course he was. I'd long since found it was best for my mental health just to assume every person I met had found our Passion Pit site. Pixboox had really hit it out of the park with that app; they'd been slow to realize they had to compete with OnlyFans, but once they'd gotten their act together, they'd given all us content providers a license to print as much money as we wanted.

Well. At least until we got bored.

We'd gotten thoroughly sick of each other already, Elliot and I: two years of camming had, it turned out, been too long. We'd only gotten back together because we'd changed it up and gone semi-legit, and because it was no longer just us fucking.

Usually, anyway. Now that I thought about it, the recording with that Puffinslut whore had been the first time in months I'd actually had physical contact with Elliot's penis. Once upon a time, that thing had been everywhere on (and in) my body, several times a week, for the edification of the hordes of subscribers who'd filled our wallets. Now, I could barely even remember how his nutsack tasted.

Not that I'd done much last night, either, once I'd rimmed the bitch. All I'd done had been to give his cock a good-natured lick, then I'd smeared some lube on it and lined it up at her backdoor for the camera's unblinking gaze. After that, my night had been over: I'd curled up on Grundle's couch and pulled out my tattered volume of Tennyson, gnawing on a breath mint while Elliot had given her the business.

Definitely had an anal fixation, that girl.

My calendar was packed for the first part of the month, then pretty empty. We had another recording just next week, then a third just a few days later, but then nothing for a couple weeks. The forecast looked pretty clear to me: both recordings were return customers, and they'd always chosen to bang the Whang rather than pop the Bubbles. Next was Lynne Tirado, and then that hockey player Tyler Schiff. I'd been interested in him the first time we'd had him on the show, but then he'd picked Elliot and I'd written him off as gay.

I might need to line up an actual date, I reflected. Someone needed to tend my vagina, and if I wasn't getting it at work?

I sighed and propped my feet on the little coffee table I'd slid into the dorm. I needed a shower, and I was already naked: I tended to strip the moment I got into my room. But for the moment I was just relaxing, stewing in the soreness of my overworked muscles, contemplating my life. Gotta grow up sometime, Christa, I reminded myself. There'd be a time, probably soon now, when the internet sex work would dry up, I'd be forced to graduate, and I'd need to actually get a job that required something other than loose morals and vaginal elasticity.

Or? There was always grad school.

* * *

My mind is a caravan

Wandering lost in the wastes,

Seeking for something unknown and

With only the very vaguest, most fleeting sense

Of confidence.

* * *

"So that's it for another edition of Nude Mood With Bubbles And The Whang," I crooned into the mic. Beside me sat Lynne Tirado, PhD, an associate professor of some sort of "Studies" department: gender studies, diversity studies, womens' studies. Something like that. "As always, we want to thank Dr T for coming along and sharing her insights."

"Absolutely." Elliot sat there with a visible hard-on, knowing what was coming. Lynne was a wild thing. She had a tall, toned body and a secret crush on Elliot, along with a surprisingly well-developed exhibitionist streak for a thirty-four-year-old on the tenure track. She sat there with her back straight, lean and pale and extremely horny. He liked her because she let him do anything he wanted; in some ways, she reminded me of myself in my freshman year. "So. Doc. You know what comes next..."

"...Sloppy Seconds, over on our Pixboox Passion Pit livestream; log in using your Pixboox Plus account, or just send the Whang or me a buddy request. Join tonight for special offers and bonus content, including every single one of the Whang and I's archived videos from our old Kinkytime webcast." I smiled for the camera, wondering how he'd take her this time. "Including the memorable time we used shark repellent during sex."

"And before we lose the Nude Mood this evening, we just want to let our live listeners hear your answer to one very important question: are you going to pop the Bubbles? Or are you going to bang the Whang?" He stared at her expectantly, then broke into a wide grin as she reached confidently out and took his penis in her long-fingered hand.

"With the greatest love to Bubbles?" she smiled, turning to wink at me, "I think I'd like to bang the Whang." I just blew my bubble and let it pop against my lower face, smirking behind it.

It was just five minutes later that the two of them were engrossed in each other's bodies while Grundle messed with the handheld and I sat naked on the couch, just barely within the view of the fixed camera, and monitored our feed. Usually, the host that wasn't getting popped or banged was in charge of fielding comments, handling requests, and making witty attempts to upsell our audience: sex, after all, was hardly the name of the game. Money was.

"Whang," I called out as he crouched over Doctor Tirado with his heavy balls swinging gently against her tongue, "there's someone who'll pay a hundred bucks to see her stick her finger in your butt!"

"That's hardly a challenge," Elliot scoffed, and that was certainly true: he'd had all sorts of things in there. "Go for it, professor," he urged.

I tapped whimsically at the keyboard: I can make him lick his own ass off her fingers afterward for fifty. The reply came back a moment later, enthusiastically, and I cackled. "Gotta lick her finger clean, though." He blinked a few times at that, but Elliot Wiley was nothing if not game, and he knew I'd have squeezed some bucks out of it.

I immersed myself in the work after that, guiding the Sloppy Seconds webcast through a dizzying array of moves in line with the relative and slowly escalating monetary contributions of our subscribers. And it was somewhere between a $100 ass-to-mouth tease and a $30 flat-chest titfuck that my wandering mind started to drift off into where it always went, if I gave it long enough.

Caesura.

Assonance.

Iambic pentameter.

Topos.

Metonymy.

And then, as sometimes happened, my mind went further, skipping dangerously away from the here and now and into a valley of words, a thicket of them, tangling me and tripping me up until only I could figure out how to tame them and impose any kind of order. And so I tried to, my brain sorting words, concepts, putting them together, trying to fit them like the perfect puzzle I knew they could become.

Enjambment.

Consonance.

Couplet.

I saw flushed flesh and slapping bodies. I saw sweat fly in the air from fevered foreheads. I smelled the richness of a woman in heat and a man ready to breed her. I experienced all of this not as visuals, the way Grundle and the world needed to see them, but as themes. As patterns. Of words. And they unfolded suddenly, sprouting into something... an elegy...

"Uh, Bubbles?"

I blinked, shaking out my reverie, noting offhand that my nipples had gone hard, my pussy weeping onto the couch. Before me crouched Lynne and the Whang, improbably twisted, pretzeled around each other beneath an air of expectancy that, I sensed, seemed to have something to do with me. I shook my head slowly. "What?"

Elliot arched an eyebrow, his mouth in Lynne's armpit. "What does the audience want us to do next, Buns?"

Buns. Bunny. My first nickname from him, from way before. Those first heady days, days of sunlight on permanently naked bodies, days of my first freedom away from home and of the heady liberty, unapologetic, pure, as I finally got to use my body the way I'd felt I should: in the service of this man and his dick.

It had been so, so easy for him to get me onto the camera.

I dragged my awareness back to the laptop resting on my pubes. "Um. The people want you to titfuck her again, Whang."

"Whoah." His eyes lit up, but it was all an act; this had to be a hard-core fetishist calling in, because Lynne had no tits to speak of and already had a long red mark in her cleavage from the last time he'd laid his dick there. I wondered, tangentially, how many of her students were watching her here. "You sure that's not a request for you, Bubbles?" He snickered, then bent the panting Dr Tirado down over the rumpled couch and without much ado, slid his cock straight into her. She blew out a grunt, part-helpless, part-excited.