Show Me by Carole Hart

come with wild, helpless spasms, her eyes shutting into a delirious blackness in which his cock pounding into her was the only remaining reality. The orgasm peaked and eased. She opened her eyes to see him in the mirror, biting his lip and then convulsively gripping her to him as he tensed into his own orgasm.
    As his cock pulsed inside her, he kissed the back of her neck. She felt his limbs relaxing around her into a grateful tenderness. At last he said, “Thank you.”
    She smiled. “You don’t have to thank me.”
    Then they were separating, pulling their clothes back on. It was an instinctive movement backward from the intimacy they shared; both of them naturally drew a line after sex, wanting a little space to reaffirm that what they had was, after all, friendship.
    When they were sitting back on either end of the couch, exactly as before, though with an added undertone of calm and warmth, he said, “I’ve been thinking about it. I think I should fuck Valerie.”
    “Excuse me?” She laughed. “You were thinking about it while you were fucking me?”
    “No! God, no. Did it seem like my mind was elsewhere? No, when you were telling me about your man.”
    “He’s not my man.”
    He rolled his eyes. “Whatever you want to believe.” Then he said, with a flippancy beneath which she could sense his loving protective-ness for her, “I have a friend in need. I’m going to make the ultimate sacrifice. If Valerie still wants me.”
    “You don’t have to do that,” she said softly. “Ralph wouldn’t . . . sleep with her. I mean, he wouldn’t do it on camera. I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
    “Look, I could have sworn she had something up her sleeve. For some reason, she thought she could make him do it.”
    Emily looked at him, touched. He was meeting her eye with a stubborn set to his jaw, as if daring her to argue with him.
    Instead, she found herself saying, “I am in love, you know.”
    “I know.” His face softened. “Love. I wonder if that’s really what’s happening to me.”
    “Maybe talking to her would help you figure it out,” Emily said lightly.
    “Shh,” he said. “You know I will. I’m just savoring this last moment before I become completely obsessed.”
    “I think that moment is over.”
    Jared smiled slowly. “Oh, well. Takes a lovesick fool to know a lovesick fool.”

SEVEN
     
     
     
     
    “ S ohow did you end up here?”
    It was Thomas, the black guy Zaza had had a mini-crush on ever since she got to the house. He was leaning against the bar, drinking the last of the martinis they’d been given in a surprise gift at seven. His green eyes were fixed on her with the slightly self-conscious libidinousness that seemed to be common to all the residents. Don’t look at the camera, she told herself.
    She cleared her throat, keeping her gaze fixed on Thomas’s face, and said, “Oh, I just drifted into it. I mean, I had a little role on that soap opera Midnight’s Secrets. ”
    “No way!” Janice put in from the floor, where she was looking through a contact sheet of nude photographs of herself, circling the ones she liked. “You were on that thing? I love that show.”
    “Just a few episodes,” Zaza said. “I got killed in a tragic car crash on my third day.”
    “I hate when that happens,” Janice said. “You get to fuck anybody?”
    “Um, Javier. I mean, Lothario on the show.”
    “Cool,” said Thomas awkwardly. He was (as Janice put it) a “civilian”; he’d never had anything to do with the sex industry before, and he was clearly feeling a little out of his depth. Most of the residents on Home of X had some kind of related background; the producers of the show (an X-rated version of Big Brother ) had decided to play it safe by using people who could be counted on to have good on-camera sex, with a few “ordinary” people thrown in for spice.
    “I think those twins only have their jobs because they’re twins,” Justin said now, scowling at Zaza. “They’re