Determination (42 page)

“Hi!” The voice shattered my thoughts, and I jerked in the seat as Kate bounced next to the open Jeep window. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” I turned to greet them, but saw that Kate stood next to the car alone.

“Where’s Greg?” I asked and noticed the street had become much busier while Brian and I had sat talking. Cars lined the curb, and people rushed down the sidewalk on the way to the rest of their day. The Jeep door opened and Brian climbed out, so I opened my door slowly, giving Kate time to move, and stepped out. I didn’t expect Kate’s squeal of delight when Brian stepped around the back of the car.

“Oh my God, you’re Scotty,” she cried and slapped her hands over her mouth. It had been so long since I’d heard Brian’s porn name that it didn’t immediately register. Brian’s jaw dropped, and a flush crept from his neck up his cheeks to his hairline, which was hidden under his beautiful curls. He looked at me and I shrugged, waiting for the inevitable. “Jamie, you’re not…? You’re Dylan, aren’t you?” she finished in a whisper, and I closed my eyes as my chest clenched around my skipping heart.

“How do you know that?” Brian demanded and stepped in front of Kate, shielding me from her curious gaze. She didn’t look mad or even disgusted. If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d say she looked intrigued. Brian’s scent enveloped me as I stood just a breath away from him. The clear lines of his back were well defined under his shirt, and I found myself wanting to trace them so I didn’t have to think about how my old life had just crashed through the safety of my new one like a charging elephant.

“Because I subscribe to Raging Hearts. I love that site,” she said quietly after looking around. “You’re one of their most popular models, and I love your scenes.” Her eyes widened in her reddening face as she realized she’d just admitted to seeing Brian naked and having sex on screen.

“It’s okay, but you can see how this might be a little awkward for Jamie if people found out about his career with Hartley Entertainment,”

Brian told her quietly, and the plea in his voice was unmistakable.

Please don’t tell anyone at school that Jamie used to screw guys for
money
. “I don’t want to get into the specifics, but Jamie doesn’t do that Determination

275

anymore, and he’s trying to get on with his life.” I appreciated that he didn’t tell her about how I got into porn or about the drugs. Kate seemed nice, but not all my secrets needed to be told to a teenage girl.

“I won’t tell anyone, and Linda thinks I’m kind of a freak for watching, so no one else would recognize you. I didn’t even recognize Jamie until I saw you two together. Oh my God, that was such an awesome… sorry.”

“Damn, I had to park like three blocks over. How the hell did you guys get this spot?” Greg asked as he bounded up the sidewalk toward us. I gave Kate a look, imploring her not to tell Greg about our conversation. She turned and wrapped her arms around her boyfriend with a small kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you for dropping me off here, then. You’re such a wonderful gentleman,” she cooed in his ear before releasing him, and Greg smiled down at her with genuine affection. He looked up and found Brian.

“Hi, I’m Greg,” he said as he held out his hand in polite greeting.

Brian took his hand and shook it.

“Brian,” he said with a meaningful look at Kate. If she slipped and called him Scott, it would be a very long night indeed.

“I CAN’T believe she recognized you,” I said as I fell back on my bed three hours later. Kate and Greg had ordered appetizers, entrees, desserts, drinks, and anything else they could, it seemed, to make the night just crawl along. My hands started to shake before the appetizers reached the table. The stress of being discovered made everything worse. Humiliated tears welled up in the corners of my eyes as I thought of Kate seeing me have sex on screen. I’d finally started to function like a human being and made friends at school, and now they’d lose all respect for me when they found out I did guys for money. If they dug into the industry blogs, they’d find out about the drugs and the abuse too. That prick Benjamin Feign over at the
Cock
and Bull
, an industry blog that loved to dig up dirt on models and ruin their lives, would certainly have posted something. I hadn’t been checking because I didn’t want to know.

276

Jamie Mayfield

“She’s not going to tell anyone. If she did, she’d have to admit she pays to watch guys screw on the Internet. Goodie-boy Greg would have an aneurism, and she won’t risk that. Besides, she’s like some kind of groupie, babe. You just went way up on her coolness scale, trust me. Please don’t get stressed out about it. If they know, then they know. It’s not something you can really hide forever. You need to deal with it and move on,” Brian said as he sat stroking my back on the bed.

He was right, of course; my naked ass was all over the Internet, and I couldn’t ever take that back. I needed to figure out a way to deal with that before it made me crazy. Though I wasn’t entirely sure why, I felt more ashamed of the porn than I did the drugs.

“Okay,” I responded, just to acknowledge I’d heard what he said.

“Come here,” he whispered and pulled on my arm so I rolled toward him. Wrapping his arms around my shoulders, Brian gathered me into his embrace, and I rested my head on his chest. God, I loved lying with him, our limbs tangled and our bodies wrapped so closely around each other it was hard to tell where I stopped and he began. The silence in the room broke only with the staccato rhythm of his heart as it beat against my cheek. The soft sounds of snoring filled the room moments later as Brian fell asleep, almost in midsentence, it seemed.

Guilt welled in the pit of my stomach. Between chauffeuring me around, spending time with me every night, and trying to keep up with his new, expanded role with Hartley Entertainment, he was exhausted.

I’d told him he should work while I did my homework, but he didn’t want the porn research he did on my dad’s Internet connection. So usually, he checked his e-mail or helped me bounce ideas for the papers I had to write.

“You don’t have to stay with me if you have stuff to do for the site,” I whispered with a silent prayer that he wouldn’t wake up and leave. Each day he went out the door to go home, my heart ached a little more at the separation. I couldn’t stop myself from wishing we were back at our little apartment. I loved my dad, but I wanted to be with Brian.

“Mmm’kay,” he murmured against my hair and wrapped his arms tighter around me. Grinning, I snuggled a little closer and closed my eyes.

Determination

277

Long shadows stretched across the wall from the backyard security lights when I next woke to Brian’s sweet voice speaking quietly in my ear.

“Baby, come on, let’s get up for a minute and get your jeans off.”

I opened my eyes slowly to see him standing next to the bed in nothing but a tight pair of briefs. In the low light they looked black, but they could have been blue or green. My mouth watered at the sight. After a moment of disorientation, I sat up on the side of the bed and pulled off my T-shirt. Not really caring where it landed, I tossed it on the floor and leaned forward to kiss the beautiful, tender skin of Brian’s stomach. His hand came up to cup my cheek as I continued to run my lips along his muscled abdomen. A quiet moan made my cock perk with interest.

I yawned against his navel before standing up and taking off my jeans.

“You’ve been shopping, haven’t you? Those are hot,” Brian commented when my briefs came into view. I had, in fact, ordered them online before I’d been arrested and finally got around to washing them. Damn, I was sick of every thought containing that word

“arrested.” It seemed like I’d never get away from it. Brian must have noticed my change in expression because he pushed me back against the bed and kissed me so deeply my hips began to move of their own accord and I ground up into him.

I stroked his thigh as I felt the warm skin rise in goose bumps under my fingers and wondered if in that moment I was as close to heaven as I’d ever be.

278

Jamie Mayfield

Twenty-Four

“I HAVE to shoot this afternoon.” Brian’s voice sounded casual, but there was an underlying nervousness I couldn’t place. Even with the slight static in the phone’s connection, I could still hear the hesitation. I hated it when he had sex with other guys, even for his job. He knew that, but this sounded like something deeper.

“Okay, I’ll hang around until my dad can get me. It’s not a big deal,” I said as I wrote down on the paper in front of me to text Dad about a ride. My memory only worked when it wanted to, and lately, with the stress of the arrest, I’d had more seizures than usual, which made everything worse.

“Actually, I was kind of wondering… if maybe you’d like to come to the house with me? The guys really want to see you.”

“What guys?” I asked and could actually hear the incredulity in my voice. The guys there never wanted to help me when I was in trouble. I couldn’t understand why they’d care about me now.

“Alex and Mike are shooting. So is Brandon. Brandon has been asking about you. He said he didn’t really get a chance to talk to you when you went out for Em’s birthday.”

“Okay. If you want me to, I’ll go,” I conceded and absently scratched out the note to myself to call my dad. Brian never asked anything of me and did so much. If he wanted me to hang out with the guys while he shot a scene, I would. “Who are you shooting with?”

“Some new guy that Nick found. I don’t even remember his name.”

Determination

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“Aren’t you at least supposed to get his name?” I asked with a snort. It didn’t really matter what the guy’s name was, but the fact that he had one should have been pertinent to a conversation about sex.

God, I hated those months I spent having sex with whoever Nick Hartley could afford to pay. That Brian kind of liked it made my skin crawl.

“The only name I need to know is yours, baby,” he cooed. I tried not to laugh, really I did, but the infectious noise bubbled out anyway.

“Why do I put up with you?” I asked, more of a giggle than a question. Flipping through my day planner as I talked, I saw a note that made my heart stutter. “Oh, my lawyer has a meeting with the DA today. He called me last week, and I put a note in my calendar. I just saw it. Yeah, I think I will go over to the studio with you today. At least it will get my mind off the outcome of that meeting.”

“It’s going to be fine, Jamie. You’ve never been in trouble before, and even your lawyer said that the weight wasn’t really enough for them to bother arresting you. Most of the coke was in you or Steven rather than lying around. They only arrested you because it was in such a high-profile building. They had to do something.” Brian sounded indignant on my behalf, and it made me smile. With him by my side, I felt like I could live through anything.

“I guess we’ll find out later,” I whispered and pulled the phone away to check the time. “Babe, I got class in a few. I have to go. I’ll see you this afternoon. Love you.”

“Love you too. I’ll be outside the doors when you get out of class.”

I turned off the sound on my phone but put it on vibrate before I dropped it back into my pocket. If my lawyer called while I was in class, I really wanted to know what the hell happened with the DA.

Nearly three weeks had passed since I was hauled out of my house and arrested. I was scared all the time, my grades had started to dip, and I could feel the strain on my relationship with Brian. I snapped at him more than I should, and he was so patient with me. As much as I loved him, sometimes I felt like I didn’t deserve him at all.

280

Jamie Mayfield

“Hey, Jamie,” Kate said as I walked into the lecture hall. She and Greg sat in the front row, a concession they’d made for being my friend. She had left the seat nearest the aisle open for me and looked up expectantly as I stood next to them. I dropped my bag onto the floor by the stadium chair and sat down. Once I pulled up the little folding desk, I turned to her and smiled.

“Thanks for saving me a seat,” I said as I pulled my notebook out of my bag along with my tape recorder and a pen. At first, I’d tried taking notes on my laptop, but I didn’t type as fast as I wrote, and sometimes when my hands started shaking, I’d keep hitting the wrong keys. It frustrated me, but the tape recorder helped me to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

“No problem. Did you finish your essay? God, I had the worst time trying to decide what to write about. The topic was just so off the wall this time,” she said as she pulled a folder out of her own bag and then straightened up. I had to admit, Dr. Stewart did have some creative prompts for our biweekly writing assignment, and the one from last week was, by far, the most interesting
. Write a story from the point of
view of an apple sitting in a fruit basket on your kitchen counter
observing life around it.
At first, I had just stared at the whiteboard for a while after he assigned it and wondered what the hell an apple would think about as it sat on the counter. It would be really bored at my house. So I decided to write about what the apple would see at the boardinghouse instead. I even asked Brian if we could stay there on Friday night so I could see what the apple would see. He thought I’d lost my mind until I showed him the assignment. The apple, however, had lots of fun.