There was no laughing after that. Just her excited little gasps and her fingers tight in my hair and the eventual taste of her coming against my mouth while thirty terribly dressed versions of myself looked on.
“Will your moms mind that we spent the night fucking in your old bedroom?” I asked a few hours—and a few condoms—later. We were lying on top of the duvet because we were too sweaty to be under a blanket, and Bee had her head on my chest, drawing idle circles on my stomach as she answered.
“Nah, they’ve always been pretty open about that kind of thing. They only care if it disrupts their sleep and therefore their pre-Texas-sunshine morning walk. Also, I mean, they know what I do for a living, so I think some bedroom sex probably ranks pretty low on what would shock them.”
“Good. I don’t want them to think I corrupted you.”
“I think we’re probably at equal levels of corruption capability,” she murmured. “After all, I’ve never had an orgy on a circus train before.”
“Thatis overrated. Half the people were trainsick and had to take Dramamine partway through, so the beds got filled up with people taking naps. And fucking on train carpet is a recipe for some vicious rug burn.” My knees had been raw for weeks.
“Nolan,” Bee said after a long pause, her finger getting slower and more deliberate as it drew its circles, “after this... do you mind if I continue with ClosedDoors? I don’t know what’s next, but it might include continuing to do porn with other people.”
I thought about it for a moment. Not because I hadn’t thought about it before, but because she deserved for me to be utterly certain of the answer. “I don’t mind,” I told her firmly. “In fact, I wouldn’t want you to quit solely because of me. I want you to do what makes you happy, and I know it’s complicated, but I’m not bothered by the idea of you having sex with other people.”
“Really?”
“For a moment, I thought I might mind,” I admitted, “because I had some ambivalent feelings knowing you werewith someone else in Christmas Notch. But I grew up and got over it.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at me, a line etched between her eyebrows. “With someone else in Christmas Notch?”
I flopped my head back, feeling like a jackass. “You know, in one of your ClosedDoors posts. I could see his shadow, and—”
“Ohhhh,” she said, and then playfully twisted my nipple.
“Ow!”
“It was Angel, you cement-head. He took the picture for me because he drunkenly came into my room after a night out with Luca, and I’ve been in this game too long not to shamelessly solicit a friend’s help for pictures when I have the chance.”
I really did feel like a cement-head. “Ah, shit.”
She twisted my nipple again. Gentler this time. “Now what were you saying?”
I met her eyes, giving her a rueful smile. “I was saying that I realized I wasn’t jealous because you might be having sex with someone else, but because you might beclosewith someone else. I don’t feel possessive of your body, Bee, or at least, not in a way that precludes you from doing your job. But I do feel possessive of your heart, I guess. I want to have it. I want to keep it. I want you to carry it around just for me while I carry mine around just for you.” I took a breath and then decided to go for it. “And if you ever decide you want to wear a wedding dress again, I want it to be for us. For real. You know. If you want that too.”
She sucked in a breath, her eyes glassy. “Okay,” she breathed after a minute.
“Yeah?”
A nod with a quivering chin. “Yeah. I want all that. For our hearts to be each other’s. And maybe the wedding dress thing too. Eventually.”
My chest felt like it was ready to crack wide open and spill sunshine everywhere. “Good,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“And I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do about performing yet,” she said. “For a while, I felt like I would never do something as Bee Hobbes again after this, because it was so hard and scary trying something new and then being exposed like that. But I think that maybe I was trying to protect myself. Which is what I did the first time around with acting, you know. I pretended I didn’t want it so that it wouldn’t hurt when it didn’t want me back. And I don’t want to do that again.”
“So there might be more Hope Channel movies on the horizon?”
There was a laugh that she stifled by pressing her face against my chest. “Oh yes, I can really imagine the Hope Channel wanting me back. Wholesome holiday fun for the whole horny family!”
“You know what I mean,” I said as she wedged her chin on my chest and looked back up at me. “Will you try again? Try for more of whatever you wanted when you decided to doDuke the Halls?”
She shrugged as best she could while half draped on my chest. “I don’t know. But I’m going to give myself the chance to figure it out. And as much as I loved performing in porn, I think I’m ready to take a break while I decide what to do.” She seemed to think about it for a moment. “Maybe even a permanent break, because there’s so much else I feel ready totry right now. I don’t want my exit from this industry to turn into some kind of commentary on rehabilitating porn stars or something. But I also know that it’s the kind of career that isn’t forever—at least for me. There’s no perfect answer to how and when to move on.” She sighed, her breath tickling my neck. “What about you?”
“Me? Well, my pornography career is still in its early days, but it’s quite promising, I think—”
She slapped my chest. “You asshole. You know what I mean. What if Steph drops you as a client after your interview tonight? What if you’re not able to get any more gigs as the wholesome version of Nolan Shaw and you can’t support your family?”
I tugged Bee closer and drew up the duvet around us since we were finally starting to cool down. “I guess I also don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve decided that it’s okay not to know right now. There’d be no guarantee that everything would work out even if I did all the things exactly as Steph wants me to. So why not at least try to do the right thing? And if everything does crash and burn, then I know how to survive it, and so does Mom and so does Maddie. We’ve been through a lot, and so we know we’ll be okay.”
