“Did you just say you would not be celebrating Christmas with us?” Mama Pam asked.
“Well... when you put it like that... It’s just that I’m on location and barely even have a full day off. I’d have to fly home and get right back on my return flight,” I tried to explain. Mom responded well to logic. Surely she would see my dilemma here.
Mom leaned forward so that I could barely see Mama Pam, making it very clear that this conversation was between her and me. “What exactly are you doing in Vermont? I can’t imagine an adult film would need to film through the holidays, Bianca.” And nothing about the way she said my birth name and subsequently my porn name was at all sexy. “Dear, is there something you’re not telling us? Are you seeing someone?”
“Are you back with Spencer?” asked Mama Pam in the background. “It’s okay. We won’t be mad.”
Even though that was definitely a lie. They’d be very mad if I got back with Spencer. I’d be mad with me if I got back with Spencer, the struggling screenwriter I was in an on-again, off-again relationship with for a year and a half until eight months ago, when I thought for sure he was cheating. Turns out he wasn’t cheating. He was just attending a string of family weddings over the summer that he was too embarrassed to take me to. If I hadn’t immediately dumped him, Sunny would have done it for me.
A loud knock rapped against my door. Loud enough that they could hear.
“Who’s that?” they asked in unison.
“Does it look like I’m expecting someone?” I asked, motioning to my face mask and ratty T-shirt.
“It would be fine if you were,” Mom said. “You’re an adult woman who is perfectly capable of making safe and informed sexual decisions.”
I stood up and left the laptop on the bed.
“But perhaps you could put on pants first,” Mom said through the screen.
“Del,” Mama Pam scolded.
I looked through the peephole in my door to see Nolan tracing his jawline with his thumb... the same jaw I’d touched just this morning. I could practically feel the stubble against the pads of my fingers even now. Heat coiled in my abdomen. “Shit,” I muttered.
“Who is it?” Mom asked again, more loudly now.
I ran back to the computer and tore the mask off my face. “I gotta run, y’all, but I’ll call back soon, I promise.”
“Don’t forget to squeeze the excess product out of the face mask and massage it into your skin,” Mom urged breathlessly. “Especially your neck! That’s where you age first. That and your hands.”
“We love you, baby,” Mama Pam said.
“Love y’all too.” I slammed the laptop shut before they could get another word out about Christmas or excess skin-care product, and I ran into the bathroom in search of a bathrobe.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I quietly shrieked.
He knocked again, and this time called, “Bee?”
I took one look at Spencer’s undershirt, which was ripped around the collar and one of the few mementos I still had of our relationship. Quickly, I tore it off over my head before pulling the inn robe off the back of my bathroom door. One size fits most? More like one size fits most people who don’t have any tits, ass, or internal organs in general.
I knotted the sash tightly under my bust and made the absolutely ludicrous decision to wrap my hair in a towel.It’s a whole look, I tried convincing myself.
And holy shit. Bad boy Nolan Shaw was knocking at my hotel room door. This was like my favorite INK fan fiction come to life. In fact, I think the opening scene of18 Hours in Tokyostarted just like this. After the band broke up, I circled fanfic sites like a vulture, hoping that the stories I found there might give me the kind of closure INK themselves never had.
I don’t know if they gave me closure, but they certainlyhelped deliver some of my first orgasms. Written in first person,18 Hours in Tokyoopened with Nolan making strong, meaningful eye contact with a stranger (the reader) on an elevator during a tour stop. The stranger slipped him a key card before getting off on their floor, and well... let’s just say that the imaginary things that imaginary Nolan did to the imaginary mystery person had lived in my imagination for years to come.
The way my nipples instantly hardened in the balmy hotel bathroom at the sheer memory of that fic told me one thing for certain: I might have grown out of my INK phase, but I definitely hadn’t grown out of my Nolan Shaw crush.
One last quick knock pounded against the door.
“Coming!” I said as I pulled the gaping robe closed around my hips, unable to help the sliver of thigh peeking out. I held my hands to my cheeks. They were so warm and flushed. I wished I could dunk myself in an ice bath.
I ran across the room and swung the door open before stepping out into the hall. “Hi. Good evening,” I said, sounding like a hostess at an Outback Steakhouse. Party of one?
His brows shot up for a brief moment before settling into an expression of indifference. He yanked his beanie off his head and shoved it into his back pocket before tugging a hand through his hair, like he was actually trying to yank it out of his scalp.
It took everything in me not to reach up and pull his hand away, begging him to just go easier on himself.
