My mouth reacts before my brain entirely catches up. “What?” I ask sharply. “Who is he?”
I feel her shrink in my arms, retreating into herself and curling into a ball. “I booked a het shoot with LaRue Hagen,” she whispers tearfully. “That’s where I was going today...not for a girl-on-girl scene, but for a scene with Bruce Madden.”
“Bruce Madden?” I demand, five different kinds of anger rising in my chest, the chief one an insanely protective instinct, because Bruce Madden is notorious for shitty onset behavior and fuck that guy. My blood immediately boils, conjuring the worst possible scenarios and elaborate fantasies that involve me going on vigilante murder sprees, but I try to breathe myself into a state of patient calm until I know what actually happened. It’s just that I know my girl, and I know that she’s not the type to cry. She’s not the type to let emotions overrule her control, and so whatever happened must have been big.
And bad.
I think about some of the worst stories I’ve heard about porn sets, all the rapes that happened on camera and were never prosecuted. Raven and I advocated hard for those performers—and we still do, albeit separately now—but I never ever thought that it might happen to someone close to me, someone I love…
Oh God. If something like that happened to Devi today, there will be no end to the hell I will rain down on everyone even tangentially connected. Hell and handcuffs and blood and money, and I will personally see to it that Bruce himself is castrated, followed by LaRue.
You don’t know what happened yet—set the mental castrating knife down.
“Yes, Bruce Madden,” she sniffles. “He was...oh God, Logan, he was awful.”
“Did he…?” I can’t even get the question out, because I’m asking two questions—did he assault you? and if not, did you still fuck him? But even in my protective rage, I can’t bear to ask anything that makes her feel for one second like she’s to blame or did anything wrong. Whatever happened was one hundred percent that shit-bag’s fault. “Did it happen during the shoot?”
“I couldn’t even start the shoot. But then he found me while I was trying to leave…” She breaks off abruptly and starts sobbing, the kind of sobs that tell me words can’t happen right now, and so I just hold her and rock her, stroking the back of her head as she cries.
Then, as I’m murmuring my reassuring words, something else hits me and hits me hard.
Devi booked a het scene. When Devi kissed me goodbye this morning, she was driving off to go fuck another man. And even through the veil of my rage at Bruce Madden and my desperate fear that she’s been terribly hurt, another emotion surfaces, ugly and undeniable.
Jealousy.
I remember our first fake date in the park, when I saw that Sinner’s Playpen was calling Devi, and I remember her asking my advice about doing more mainstream porn, and I remember telling Tanner that of course we were both professionals and would keep filming all the scenes we wanted to do. And somehow none of that matters right now, because before now it was all in abstract, just things that could potentially happen, things that didn’t feel real. I told myself and everyone else it was okay.
But it’s not.
It’s not okay.
Because I’m holding this woman in my arms, and I want to be the only one to hold her, fucking ever, and you know what? That goes for the female performers who get to fuck her too, because I want it just to be me me me, and have her all to myself.
I try to remind myself that it’s just sex, it’s just fucking, and it doesn’t mean anything, but if it doesn’t mean anything, then why didn’t she tell me about it? Why would she keep it a secret?
And then the twin sister to jealousy shows up.
Suspicion.
I hate it. I hate every inch of that emotion, I hate feeling it crawl over my heart and rifle through my thoughts, wondering if there’s some reason Devi kept it a secret, wondering if I’m going to wake up one day soon to find Devi posting pictures of herself with some Italian. I hate wondering if I care about her more than she cares about me, if she’s been fucking other guys all this time, if I’m about to have my heart broken again.
And then I shut it down—all of it. The jealousy and the suspicion and the rage. I don’t have a right to care if she’s fucking other guys because I’ve been fucking other girls, and even if I hadn’t, “sort-of boyfriend” isn’t a term that has to mean explicit monogamy. We never talked about being exclusive.
We’re porn stars. We shoot porn. We fuck other people. That’s just how it is.
And right now the woman I love is hurting, and that’s where all my attention needs to be. I can figure out the rest later.
After a few minutes, I feel her begin to relax in my arms, her tears slowing and her breathing returning to normal. She wipes at her face with her hand, and it comes back black with mascara. She pulls back to look at my shoulder and chest, which are smeared with the same.