Milked

Loren | promoted.

It was a Friday afternoon. I didn't have a shoot or anything, but I went to the studio, AKA Vaughn's house, for a meeting he had scheduled with me. Part of me was worried, because I had no idea what the meeting was about, but I thought it might have something to do with personal branding. That part of me was also angry, because I'd made it crystal clear to Vaughn that I would not be promoting my videos using the social media accounts he wanted me to create for my other identity. There was no way. Why was he continuing to push me? I wouldn't give in.

I sat down in one of the chairs in his office, which wasn't really an office at all, just a desk in a corner of the studio—a desk that had sometimes been used in different shoots, for the sake of saving the money in our prop budget for other costs. You couldn't look at that desk without thinking about how many bare asses had sat on top of it, how many people had gotten head on it.

Next to me in the adjacent chair sat Stephen, our gay-for-pay actor who looked like he belonged in a boy band. He was young, just a freshman, a guy who'd been "discovered" his senior year of high school, but whoever discovered him (probably some shady motherfucker) had somehow led him first to the world of nude modeling and then to the world of gay porn. Like me, he thought it was easyish money for just a few hours of work, very conducive to the college lifestyle where you had a lot of homework and not enough time to do it with a regular job. With a hairless lifeguard body and shiny hair reminiscent of spun platinum that curled slightly at the ends, he was probably the second most adored actor at our studio. I never used the word adorable, not out loud, but that word could definitely be used to describe his smile. He didn't smile at me right then, though; just looked at me inquisitively, probably wondering, like me, why the fuck the two of us were there. Maybe he hadn't been on board with the whole personal branding thing, either; after all, he lived more of a double life than most of us and had a girlfriend who thought he did manual labor on the days he had shoots. How she thought Stephen could be capable of manual labor was beyond me.

Vaughn told us, "Loren, you're not doing the shoot we have scheduled next week, the scene at the party where no girls show up. Stephen, you're taking his place."

Stephen said, "What?" at the same time I said, "Why the fuck not?"

"I don't want to be in an orgy," Stephen continued, and I felt sorry for the guy, because my time spent doing shoots with him had convinced me he really wasn't gay, that he wasn't just making it up. I had once wanted to believe everyone was at least a little bi, but Stephen had convinced me otherwise; no sexual chemistry ever emerged between him and any other guy, and you could only fake that shit so much. "It's not like it doesn't feel good," he once told me. "It's just...missing something." What was missing was attraction, but all porn stars were used to filming sex scenes with stars they weren't attracted to, so it wasn't like I couldn't relate. Poor Stephen usually only had to film one-on-one scenes, though; he had successfully avoided doing shoots with more than one guy up until now. Filming an orgy where none of the participants attracted you sounded pretty sucky (no pun intended).

"Well too fucking bad," Vaughn told him. "If you want to get paid this month, you'll make it to the shoot. Bring some extra male enhancement pills or something."

"But my girlfriend and I have plans that day!"

"I don't know what to tell you, kid. You want the paycheck, you show up. That's that."

Stephen got up angrily and left, and Vaughn smiled and said, "He'll be here. You'll see."

"What about me?" I asked Vaughn. "Why are you replacing me with Aaron Twink?" I worried he might actually be firing me this time.

"I have a different shoot I want you to do, the week after."

"Really?"

"I'm still working on the script, but I'm calling it 'Lieutenant Lopez Gives It to Logan.' You're a cadet."