I almost do it.  I almost let her walk away from me.  Because I’m so stunned.  Because I’m so hurt.  Because I can still taste the fire and heat of her kiss, and how could she kiss me like that and then just walk away?

But my feet move before my mind, and I’m jogging through the gate right as she shuts the door of her old VW Bug.  She starts the engine but she leaves the car in park as I run over to her.  

She rolls down the window, and on her young face is an expression of pain so poignant I can barely look at it.

“You’re hurting,” I say, bracing my hands against the top of the car’s window frame so I can lean down to see her better.  “And I’m hurting.  Devi, it doesn’t have to be this way; we don’t have to be hurting right now.  Come inside, and we’ll talk. We’ll figure this out.”

“There’s nothing left to figure out,” she says quietly.  “I can’t be with you when you can’t be with only me.”

I slam my hands against the window frame, rocking the tiny car and making her jump.  Anger like hot acid fills my words when I speak.  “You know it’s not like that!  My heart would be with only you, so why the fuck does it matter where my cock is?”

“It matters to me,” she answers, her voice trembling slightly.

I’m still furious, my hands clenching the window frame now, and I want to tear this car apart, rivet by rivet, until she agrees to stay.  “You knew what you were getting into,” I accuse.  “You knew exactly what it would mean to date a porn star.  It’s not fair for you to change your mind now!”

Tears catch on her eyelashes as she shakes her head.  “I can’t be in this porn world anymore, Logan.  I can’t be in your world.”

“It’s our world,” I insist, her tears thawing my anger into a messy, guilty regret. “We both live in it, and we both love doing porn.”

“No, you love doing porn.”  She takes a deep breath.  “And that’s why I’d never ask you to stop.  I love you exactly how you are, and part of who you are is porn.  Doing what you love.  Do you think I’m so cruel that I would ask you to give that up?”

“But…”  

I don’t have anything to follow that word, though.  I just know I need to struggle against this, fight for this, salvage something, anything, because Devi is the one thing I can’t afford to lose…

Except she’s right about me.  I can’t afford to lose doing what I love either.  If I’m not Logan O’Toole, World Famous Porn Star, then who am I?

“It just never occurred to me,” I finish lamely.  “That anyone would want to quit porn.  That porn would be an issue.  I thought we both were on the same page.  I thought we both loved each other.”

A tear finally falls down her cheek, a shimmer racing down her perfect face.  “I do love you.  More than you love me, and that is why I have to go—and why I’m going without asking you to come with me.  Goodbye, Logan.”

She puts the car in reverse, and I have to step back so my foot doesn’t get run over. And it’s not until her taillights vanish around the corner at the end of my street that I manage to whisper, “Goodbye.”

---

Gutted.

I’m fucking gutted.

The good angel on my shoulder tells me not to call her, to give her space and time, because she needs it and she asked for it, and if I invade her mental and emotional space, then I’m violating her consent in a way, and I don’t want to do that.

On the other hand, Devi Dare just broke up with me, and I’m practically hysterical with betrayed misery.  I make it until about two in the morning before I call her, but the call goes straight to voicemail.  Like her phone is turned off.

I call her three more times to make sure, and then I leave her a message.  “Devi,” I say, clearing my throat because her name is the first word I’ve spoken in hours and my voice is hoarse from crying.  “Please call me back.  Please.”

After that, I finally roll out of my bed and search out my scotch collection.  But after I pour myself a glass, I can barely force myself to take a drink.  I don’t want to be drunk right now.  I maybe don’t want to be drunk ever again, because it would mean numbing myself to reality, and I can’t cheat myself out of one second of feeling this pain.  I don’t want to; if this suffering is all I have left of Devi, then I’ll hold onto it as tightly as I possibly can.  I won’t disgrace the memory of the perfect thing we had by drinking myself into amnesia.

So I set down the drink and pull out my phone, not to call Devi again, although I want to, but to watch the video I took of her in my pool a few weeks ago.  And I watch her swimming over and over again, her hair and her body and the water, and I fall asleep on my couch that way.

Alone.  With my phone in my hand and my heart in my throat.

---

I wake up, not hung over, not exhausted, but dazed all the same.  There’s that weird, floating moment between my eyes opening and me remembering, a moment where I feel like something bad has happened but I can’t remember what. When I finally recall Devi’s tears and her terrible, untrue (does she even realize how untrue?) words, I do love you, more than you love me, and that’s why I have to go, I’m destroyed all over again.

I call her several more times, I text her pages and pages of texts, because how could she think that she loves me more than I love her?  But also how could she think about leaving porn?  I text her long, stream-of-consciousness threads of thoughts, about how much I love her, how much I already miss her, all the things I would do to prove it to her, but she never answers me back.  

I don’t have any scenes booked for today, thankfully, so I drive all the way down to El Segundo to see her.  I shouldn’t be surprised when she’s not there, but I’m devastated all the same, and I wait on her porch step for her to come home.  The autumn sun rises high and hot, and I get sweaty and uncomfortable but I don’t care.  I want to suffer.  I want to suffer for her.

She never comes home, though.  It’s just me and my wretched thoughts until the sun sets over the ocean, and the sky fades into oranges and pinks.

And that’s when the ancient Volvo rattles into the driveway.  A stocky older man with a black mustache and a full head of thick black hair gets out and then walks around the front to open the door for the woman inside.  I recognize her immediately.

It’s Devi’s mother.

The couple comes up to the door and I stand, wiping my sweaty hands on my jeans and extending a hand to Mrs. Jones-Daryani to shake.  She ignores it and pulls me straight into a hug, a tight one.  For some reason that makes me want to cry again, but I manage to keep it together.

“Hi, Logan,” she says as she pulls away.  “It’s so good to see you again.  This is my husband, Davud Daryani.”

“Hi, Mrs. Jones-Daryani. Nice to meet you Mr. Daryani,” I greet them back.  I look at the car hopefully, even though I already know it’s empty.  “Is Devi coming or…?”

Sue gives me a pitying smile.  “We came to get some clothes for her.  She’s going to be staying with us for a while.”

I want to ask where they live, if I can come back with them, but even in my desperate state, I know that would be crossing a line.  So I don’t.  I just look at the ground and try not to cry in front of Devi’s parents.

“Davud,” Sue says softly, “why don’t you go inside and pack up some things for our boombalee?  I want to talk with Logan for a minute.”

Davud nods, and before he walks in, he places a heavy hand on my shoulder.  It should feel weird, the father of the girl who just dumped me touching me like this, but it doesn’t.  Instead, I feel just a little bit stronger, just a little bit more clear-headed, as if he’s transmitted perspective and wisdom through my skin.  And then he pats my shoulder and unlocks the apartment door, walking inside and leaving Sue and me on the porch.  

And then it hits me, hits me hard.

This is real life.  This is Devi’s parents gathering up her things and this is Devi not answering her phone, and this is me left broken-hearted for the second time this year, except this time it’s so much fucking worse.

Devi and I are really over.

I sit back down on the porch and put my head in my hands, and I feel Sue sit next me, a musical chiming coming from all her anklets and bracelets as she does.

“Logan,” she says, laying a hand on my back. And again, it should feel weird being comforted by my ex-girlfriend’s parents but it’s not for some reason.  “It’s going to be okay.”

“I fucked up,” I say miserably.  “I fucked everything up.”

“Devi made a point to tell us that you didn’t do anything wrong,” Sue soothes me.  “Porn just isn’t right for her.  There’s a difference.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” I say, still staring at the ground.  “The right thing for both of us.  I was trying to be more like her—more logical and careful—and I thought we could make it work.  Have each other and have porn at the same time.”

“Let me ask you something,” Sue says.  “Deep down, is that what you really want?  To have both?”

“Porn is my entire life,” I say defensively.  “It paid for that car and for my house and my 401k.  It’s the only thing I know.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Sue counters gently.  “I asked what you wanted.  Pretend that Devi would have been willing to stay, willing to continue doing porn.  Is that what would have made you truly happy in the end?”

Yes, of course, I want to snap back, but the response is automatic and rehearsed.  Because porn was my entire life, until I met Devi, and now I want my life to be more than just my job, no matter how amazing my job is.  And I also know the reason I’m defensive right now is because I finally have to look all those haunting questions in the face after avoiding them for weeks, look at those questions and then look at the answers I already know deep down.  The answers that I started to comprehend the first time Devi and I made love without the camera.

That I might only want Devi.

That I love her in a way I’ve never loved anyone else before.

That I want to give her all of me.  All of me.  Meaning I don’t give myself to anyone else.

Sue pats my shoulder again.  “Your heart and your head chakra are stronger than before, Logan, which means you’re growing and learning.  But no growth comes without sacrifice.”

And then she kisses my cheek and goes inside the apartment.

---

I know you want to hear that I stop doing porn right that day, that I swear it off and become immediately celibate, but that’s not what happens.  Instead, the words Sue said to me only very gradually unfold into an epiphany. And as they unfold, I mindlessly and numbly continue life as before.

Well, not entirely as before.  

I give up drinking altogether, sending Tanner home with my magnificent scotch collection one afternoon.  I stop posting on social media, because I’m tired of faking a jovial happiness that I’ll never have again, and also all I want to do is stare at Devi’s feeds, hoping for a single post, a single tweet, one selfie.  Anything to connect to.  But there’s nothing, either from her or about her.  When Raven left me, Twitter and Tumblr exploded with people chattering about it, bemoaning it, and yet after Devi leaves me, the fucking love of my life, there’s complete silence about it on the Internet, because no one knew.  It was only two months.  And they were the best two months of my life.

I give up going out, I give up talking to friends.  I spend my spare time reading through my poetry collection and reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astronomy, because reading about space and the stars makes me feel closer to Devi.

I give up texting and calling her, but I don’t give up waiting for the phone to ring.  It never does though.

I film two more scenes after Devi breaks up with me.  The first is with a performer named Candi Hart and the second is with Ginger.  I feel itchy and empty after both, even though Tanner tells me that they are some of the best scenes I’ve ever shot.

“You’re so fucking in the zone lately,” he says as Ginger and I clean up after our scene.  “Damn, you were intense.”

I shrug, because what can I say?  That I have to completely disassociate myself from all emotion and thought in order to do the scenes?  That I’m disgusted with myself as I fuck other women, as I come for them, because Devi is the only woman I want to touch now?

After Tanner leaves, I trudge upstairs to my office.  It’s been a week since Devi left me, and I’ve become a hollow version of myself.  Even editing and writing my monologues is a terrible chore, and the worst task of all is finishing up edits of the last Star-Crossed scene because all it does is remind me of the heartbreak that came after the camera turned off.  Every glance of hers in the footage, every pull of her mouth—I can see her confusion and pain so clearly now.  How fucking self-absorbed and arrogant was I that I didn’t see it before?

I can only watch a few minutes of the footage before the grief and guilt threaten to engulf me, and I have to turn it off.  I’ll edit my scene with Ginger from today instead.

Except I can’t.

I plug in the external hard drive Tanner saved the scene to, and the minute I open it up, I know I can’t do it.  Even just the still image of me cradling Ginger’s face at the beginning makes me cringe, because it’s something I used to do with Devi.

No.  It’s more than that. I did it with Devi because I do it with almost every girl I work with.  That move never belonged to just Devi and me, it always belonged to me and the hundreds of other girls I’ve worked with.

I can’t articulate to myself exactly why this bothers me so much right now, but it does.  I try to force myself to look past it and press play, but the moving footage is even worse, even when I try to fast-forward to the less personal parts.  But seeing my body pressed against Ginger’s, my hands rough on her tits while I fuck her, it makes me sick to my stomach with shame.  Not Puritanical, anti-sex shame—I’m not ashamed of having sex or making porn—but a deeply personal shame, as if I’ve betrayed more than Devi by filming those two scenes after she left.  As if I’ve betrayed myself.

Which should be a ridiculous thought.  How could I be betraying anything or anyone by merely doing my job?  I try to remember all the things I’ve said before.  It’s just a job.  It’s only sex.  But they don’t feel true any longer.

I close out the footage and pace around my office, running my hands through my hair.  It doesn’t make any sense to me, any part of my life right now.  I’m wrecked, emotionally and mentally and spiritually, but I can still get hard for other women, still come for them.  How is that?  Is it because, like I told Tanner all those weeks ago, porn stars have a more evolved concept of love and can separate it from sex?  Or is it because I’m a man, and men are wired to fuck indiscriminately?

No, I don’t think that’s it either, and not only because Tanner would rant for hours about gender essentialism if I told him I’d even considered that last one as a reason.  

No, what I think is that maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question of myself—not how I can still fuck other women, but why.

Maybe men and women aren’t naturally wired to be monogamous, maybe anyone can turn off their brain and their heart, and let their bodies respond to presented stimuli.  But maybe that’s what makes relationships different.  And special.  Maybe that’s why people have given up their sexual freedoms for the last several millennia in order to bind themselves to someone else.  Because it’s the sacrifice, the continued and repeated choosing of one person over all the others in the world, that makes a relationship stand apart, that makes a relationship significant and rare and unique.

So the real question is: why do I choose to share myself with other women when I only want to share myself with Devi?  Why do I do this job when it means struggling against a heart that just wants to devote itself to one woman and one woman alone?

I don’t know if it’s right to change for someone you love, but I do know that it’s right to change for yourself, if that’s what you want.  But is it what I really want?  Devi’s so young, still so full of energy and opportunity, and it’s easy for her to change direction and start a new life.  But how can I walk away from something I’m good at, that makes me a lot of money, without having anything certain in my future?  What if I give up everything for her and she doesn’t want me anymore?

I sit back down in my office chair and stare at the bulletin board by my desk.  It’s mostly covered in tax receipts and Post-It notes, but I’ve pinned something else up in the middle, The Hanged Man tarot card from my reading with Madam Psuka.  I stuck it up there as a memento of my first real date with Devi, but now it seems like more than a reminder.  It’s a call to action.

No growth comes without sacrifice, Sue said, and isn’t that exactly what Devi and the psychic tried to explain to me about the card?  That The Hanged Man represented sacrifice and suffering without the guarantee of a reward, because the wisdom gained through the experience would be its own reward?

What would I sacrifice?  And what would I gain?

I could leave porn, I think.  

It’s the first time I’ve allowed the thought to take form, to establish itself in words, even though it’s been creeping around the fringes of my consciousness for weeks.

I let myself say it aloud, just to try it out.  “I could leave porn.”

Nothing dramatic happens.  It’s not like a halo comes down from heaven and crowns me, it’s not like my office is flooded with golden light and the sound of angels singing.  And I don’t feel like I’m hanging from a tree Hanged Man style, certainly.

But the words are spoken now and the idea is real, and now it’s floating in the office like an invisible fog, making the air thick and cold.  It never felt like a real option before, it never even seemed like a possible path, because I loved doing it, because it was my whole life. But now it’s there, beckoning to me, unfurling like the new leaves of spring.  I could quit doing porn.  I could stop being Logan O’Toole, porn star, and go back to my birth name, go back to the dreams I used to have.  Going to school, making films.

It’s not that easy, I realize with a sinking stomach and a glance around my office.  Camera equipment litters the room, unfinished contracts pile high on my desk, old tax forms are banked against the far wall like a pile of red and white leaves.  In my email inbox are practically thousands of unanswered emails—projects and scenes that are in every imaginable stage, convention panels that I’ve agreed to be on, articles I’ve agreed to be interviewed for.  I live so deeply within my own life, and there are so many threads running through it.  Tying off every loose end would take months, and the thought of all that work makes me preemptively exhausted.  It would be easier to cut and run...or simply stay.  Stay and change nothing.

I get up and walk out of my office, trying to walk away from my thoughts.  I go for a swim, I tidy up my kitchen.  I drive to my parents’ house and help them pack up some things for their move to Portland, and as I do, things slowly start to settle into place.

Their packing isn’t easy, and there are times when I catch Mom staring at the backyard with a look on her face that suggests she’s mentally replaying all those sappy moments from my childhood that parents like to hold on to.  There are times that I catch Dad rubbing his jaw and standing in the middle of a room, just looking.  They’re leaving so much behind, an entire life of memories and moments that fused us together into a family, but they’re still doing it and making these huge changes because they have faith.  Like The Hanged Man, they know the sacrifice will be worth it.

When I get home that night, the first thing I do is call Tanner and tell him everything, from the moment Devi and I jumped in a pool together at Vida’s to her leaving me last week, and I tell him what I’ve been thinking about today.  He mostly listens in silence, only speaking when my ramblings finally come to an end.

“So you think it’s wrong to do porn now?” he asks.  There’s no judgment or expectation in his tone, but I still scramble to answer so that he doesn’t get the wrong idea.

“I don’t think it’s wrong.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never think that—I still love it, and I don’t regret making it for a minute.  But I think maybe while it isn’t wrong, it’s not right for me any longer.  I think I want something else.”

Tanner is quiet for a moment.  “So what happens next?”

“I don’t know.”  I use the heel of my hand to rub at my forehead.  “I guess the first thing is deciding if I really want to do this.  If I really want to leave porn.”

“Because there’s no guarantee that Devi will take you back,” Tanner points out.  “So if you do this, then you need to be okay with that outcome.”

I think back to all those moments in my life where I’ve felt that big feeling, where I’ve felt a sense of vision and purpose and creative will.  As a kid and as an adult, by myself and with Devi.  “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t doing this for her,” I admit, “but I’m doing it for me too.  When I ask myself what I really want for my life, I can’t find a real answer anymore—and I think that, in and of itself is enough reason to change.”

“Just tell me what you need and I’ll do everything I can to help,” Tanner says, and I wish I could give him a giant hug over the phone.  But I can’t, so I clear my throat, find a pencil and some paper, and we start planning the end of Logan O’Toole, porn star.

In the end, it does take a couple months.  Doing it right—ending all of my projects and contracts professionally and amicably—is so much harder than just packing up and leaving town.  But leaving would have been something an older version of myself would have done—the impulsive, emotional Logan who just wanted love and romance and connection.  He would have chased after Devi relentlessly, he would have been showering her with orgasms and gifts and saying fuck it to everything else.  

And at one point, I thought I needed to leave that emotional guy behind to be the best boyfriend I could to Devi, that I needed to be analytical and logical and even a little callous to keep our relationship strong.  But now I know what Devi knew already—that it’s not emotion versus intellect or head versus heart.  It’s both, complementary and balanced and all at the same time.  Devi, my Devi, was the wisest of us all along, despite her inexperience and age.

I can’t change what—or who—I’ve done.  But I can change what I will do.  And so instead of shutting down my feelings or making a string of rash, impetuous decisions, I am determined that the next time I see my Cass, I will have used my love for her to make smart, determined strides towards a different and better life.

I’m going to show her that the man she knew has come back for her, and he’s not going anywhere this time.