Matt

I wake with a hand on my shoulder and jerk upright. As I do, the silk sheets slide away from me, and I yawn. For a moment, the hand seems like a dream, no different from waking with a loud noise in my ears that isn't there, or a feeling that I'm not alone in the room.

Naturally, I'm naked. Sleeping with clothes on never came naturally to me. The older I get the more they feel like they just get in the way. So I throw my sheets back and sit up and stifle another yawn.

Buck-assed naked, I open my eyes.

Oh. There is someone in my room after all.

Well, not room…trailer…but that isn't on my mind now. Standing in front of me is six feet and five inches of sex, a stunningly handsome mass of muscle and man, and sitting on the bed puts his bulge at right about face height.

I've always been…curious, I think is the word. Maybe questioning, but it's never been a question I tried to answer. Preserve the mystery, maybe. Right now, in the naked moments between waking and putting the scrambled parts of my brain back into the right order to form thoughts and personality, I go from questioning to full thirst and rake my eyes up the form of the man standing in front of me.

He’s tall, and the low ceiling makes him seem taller. He's broad, but with a narrow waist, huge in the way that's also trim, rippling with compact power even when standing still. He has the kind of physique that makes a man give up on wearing off-the-rack polos and just surrender to skin-tight water-wicking fabrics, a wall of sculpted muscle that invites the eye and, to be blunt, the tongue. It's hard to drag my eyes from the bulge in his khaki pants—he's clearly packing serious heat.

Maybe I'm dreaming, but I swear he's getting hard, too. I can almost…maybe I really can see it growing, thickening, defined under the fabric. Too dull to do much else, I stare.

Then, finally, I look up. He's gorgeous, movie star gorgeous, which is a little amusing considering the circumstances. The only thing marring his perfect features—sharp cheekbones and chin, strong nose, and deep, soulful gray eyes—is a thin, barely noticeable scar, little more than a white line sketched down his right cheek, so faint you have to stare at it to see it, and stare, I do.

Me being me, and this being morning, and it being too early for my blood, I decide to make this interesting. I lean back. I throw my legs wide. I show off the goods.

His eyes never leave mine, even as my own decide to roam again. I was so intent on his physique—his entire body seems built for thrusting—that I didn't notice the gun on his hip or the security badge around his neck that reads “Lucas Baxter. Security.”

His eyes do not move, and I wilt just slightly. I was hoping he'd skim them down at least, check me out. I put a lot of work into this bod. No matter how much I pump iron and run and down protein shakes, I never seem to get more than a lithe swimmer's form, but the abs drive the ladies wild.

“Are you going to get up?” he says.

Considering how I sit, leaning back on my palms with my knees wide and all my goods on display, the double entendre is too perfect, but he delivers it in a heavy deadpan. His voice is sonorous, deep and rich like a hot sip of flavorful coffee. I can tell it can crack like a whip; this guy is used to giving orders. It could be silken, too, though.

So yeah, I get up. Just not the way he intended. Still his eyes don't waver.

Except…there, just a flash.

Suddenly the rest of my brain comes online, and I drag my sheet over myself, remembering how to be embarrassed. I was already flying the flag from sleep, but now it's damn near painful, and I begin to avoid looking at him rather than staring.

“Do you mind?” I say.

“Nothing I haven't seen before,” he says, leaving me wondering if I imagined the faint, ironic crackle to his voice.

Nothing he hasn't seen before, or nothing he hasn't seen before.

“What time is it?” I demand, yawning for the third time.

“It's two in the afternoon. Get up.”

There's a hint of motion—a twitch of his arm—betraying the idea of pulling me to my feet. This guy's bearing says military.

“Thirsty,” I mutter.

Grunting, he turns to the fridge and fishes out a bottle of diet soda, grimacing at it like it offends him on a personal level. He knocks around several half empty liquor bottles in the process, throwing me a dirty look when he spots the banana schnapps.

I'm too busy enjoying the show. His body is herculean. He would, of course, be wearing a skin-tight shirt over those bulging muscles, but this guy isn't finding a pair of loose pants, at least not in the seat. His ass looks like it could crack walnuts and throw out a lot of push, if you know what I mean.

I shake that out of my head. Funny how in the life of hedonism I've lead so far, that's always been the one frontier I've never pushed. There's a little fear to it, and it's the fear that makes it so alluring, so common to my fantasies…

Fantasies this man may as well have stepped out of. If I had to imagine a guy to, ah, explore my boundaries, he'd be just like this, and trust me, I've imagined that many a time.

I should thank whoever sent him.

He hands me the soda.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I'm your bodyguard.”

“Babysitter,” I mutter.

“Let me guess,” I say.

“Your mother hired me.”

“That's a bingo,” he says.

“On your feet. You're late for work.”

“Alright, alright.”

“Now,” he growls.

Something in me, nice and hardwired for it, responds, and I'm instantly on my feet, saved from the foolishness of reflexively saluting only because, as I stand, my sheet skims down my body and just barely catches on my raging hard on, giving me time to grab it and cover my crotch, as if there were any point to modesty after all that.

“Shower up and get outside in five,” he says. “I'll wait.”

“What if I don't?” I say, hinting oh-so-subtly.

“Then I come and get you,” he growls.

I walk past him—cutting him off from the door—discarding my sheet as I walk past to the small bathroom on the far end of my trailer. The prickle I feel is electric, intoxicating. I know if I turned back he'd be out the door, not looking, but with my head facing the other way…

I was right. In the mirror, I catch him looking. His eyes skim up my legs, his gaze gliding over the flesh of my hamstrings to my ass like caressing fingers, giving me that little tingle betwixt the cheeks I get when I fantasize about playing around with a man. He could be the one…

Oh, wake up, Matt. Like it would be that perfect.

I turn on the shower and look back. The door is swinging just as I do.

After a quick shower, I dress from the basket of laundry the housekeeping people brought me and step outside into the burning desert sun.

That, you see, is where I am. About sixty miles north of Las Vegas in the high desert, with mountains one way and endless scrubby flat the other. The perfect place to sit out and watch for shooting stars or the odd UFO buzzing its way up to the secret government base by Groom Lake that the screenwriter told me all about.

We're out here to make a movie. My movie, financed by my mother, a rich man's wife with nothing better to do than to propel me into stardom, or so she thinks, in some kind of attempt to make a man out of me.

If she wanted to make a man out of me she should have just told Lucas Baxter, my new bodyguard, to take care of that. Only a man could handle him.

Is he looking?

In the bright sun he wears wraparound shades, military style, and everything about him screams secret service. He moves like a panther when he walks, and he seems to know everything around him, perfectly alert.

Sweat beads on the back of his neck and his top lip, and a single bead of it glides down the skintight surface of his athletic shirt.

“Well look at you,” my costar says.

Her trailer is next to mine. Sandy Pines is old enough to be my mother—which isn't saying much, since I was born when mom was seventeen. They are, in fact, almost exactly the same age, and attended the same Bay Area high school. Both had similar career trajectories. Well, sort of.

They were dancers. Mom married out of the career, having won the lottery in more ways than one. My dad's father was moderately wealthy. My dad, though, dropped out of his junior year at Caltech to join a startup and, well…

Let's say conjuring a moderately budgeted movie out of thin air amounts to a rounding error on a day's interest.

Sandy, in her casual dress, doesn't look much like herself, or rather like her public self, from her, ah, acting persona. She favors flannel shirts and cutoff shorts, flip flops and straw hats, and you could picture her on her knees and elbows deep in potting soil planting tulips in some suburban front yard. Except all the neighbors would wreck their cars; she's a ten by any measure, even if it took a little surgical help to get her all the way to the top of the scale.

I really don't see her that way; to me, she's just my “Aunt” Sandy, and she acts like it. Most of the time.

My new babysitter has her speechless, though, which is rare for her.

“Wow,” she finally manages, after raking Lucas with her eyes.

Something odd flares in my belly: Jealousy. It burns hotter when she seductively drags her big sunglasses down her nose and flashes her green eyes, one of her best-known features, at him.

I am somewhat relieved when her come-hither stare breaks on Lucas like water on rocks. He looks at her as if she were a lamppost. He's not impolite, though.

He offers her hand, and she shakes it.

“Lucas Baxter, with Maximus Security.”

“Sandy Pines. That's quite a piece you're packing there, Lucas. Planning to hunt Tyrannosaurs?”

I stare at her for a second before I realize she means the gun on his hip, not the one in his shorts.

“If any show up,” he says, shrugging.

“Pleasure to meet you,” she says, brushing her glasses back into place. She struts past him. Lucas barely spares her a glance.

“She's nice,” I tell him.

“You know her?”

“She half raised me,” I say. “Until I was six or seven, my mom still worked. They worked together but not always on the same shift, so she babysat for me a lot.”

He glances back at her, then at me again.

“Well,” he says. “That's something.”

I snort.

“You're supposed to be in the tent for the table read.”

I roll my eyes and clack my tongue.

Lucas doesn't scowl, but somehow his blank look is more recriminating. His sheer presence makes me ashamed to complain. Which I really should be, given the life I've led, which to this point has been doing whatever and, frankly, whoever, I wanted.

We walk over to the tent and step inside.

“Matt? Matt!”

The director, Nick, looks at me angrily, holding his folded-over script like he'll hit me with it. Taking it, I head for the table where I sit back in my seat, staring right back at him.

“Could you please take this seriously?”

I glance down at the script.

The Adventures of Space-Prince

As I flip through the script, Nick preps the actors seated 'round the table.

“Alright everyone,” he says, “This is a table read. Since Matt and Sandy are new at this, let me run you through—”

“I've done a table read before,” Sandy says calmly.

One of the other cast members, a bit player seated across the table, says, “For what movie? Sandy Does DesMoines or Double Down in Sandy's Dunes?”

She looks at him coolly. “Honey, I got a paycheck. You were the one paying to watch.”

Nick lets out an exasperated sigh. Sandy continues staring the guy down, a combination of confidence and her oddly unsettling schoolmarm look, turned up to eleven by her peering sharply over reading glasses, shuts up the miscreant.

Meanwhile, I take a quick flip through the phone book-sized script.

How am I supposed to take the role of Prince Grabthar seriously? Everyone here is acting like we're making the next Blade Runner, but my costar is a porno actress and the director's only credits are a commercial for headache ointment and second unit work on Changeformers, a direct-to-video knockoff movie with special effects out of the '70s. I'm talking actual puppets and Claymation here.

I'm supposed to launch my career with this?

The constant feeling that I'm the only one who is in on the joke is starting to make me wonder if I'm the only one who is not in on the joke, like this is all some kind of elaborate twenty-first birthday surprise party scheme.

The only thing I can think about right now is getting out of here…and my new babysitter. Oh, Mom has had people on me before, but she went whole hog on this guy. I think he's actual ex-military, like some kind of covert CIA secret agent for hire type, and frankly, he makes me a little nervous. Like, I'm not giving this dude the slip.

Besides that…he made me feel weird.

I've always been, well, a playboy. The lifestyle, not the magazine. When you're me—falling ass backwards into money and attention from every girl you see—it just sort of happens.

Half the elite private high school I barely graduated from saw my cock during my tenure there, and the other half wanted to. If Mom found out what happened in my senior year with Miss Marshall, the brand spanking new, fresh out of college twenty-two-year-old English teacher, she'd have shipped me off to military school and probably taken out a hit on poor Miss Marshall with the Mob. As it is, it's just sheer luck that she didn't take maternity leave the next year.

I mean, what was I supposed to do?

After my antics—fooling around with two separate teachers, running with the craziest crowd in school, house parties, a few bookings and mug shots—I care about showing my dick during some swagger about as much as Sandy, sitting next to me, cares about hers.

Today, for the first time I can really remember, I felt naked. What's weirder is that I had a raging hard on, and it wasn't morning wood; I woke up only at half mast. I had to throw on my jeans to keep from strutting around at full mast. Not that I mind; it's a good way to establish dominance, you know, letting it hang out.

With no girls in the trailer (I'm pretty sure that's half the reason that Mom set this thing up to film in the burning desert, right beside the cosmic asshole of the universe) and just me and him, it's almost like his voice alone made me hard. I could half believe it; when he started shouting orders, I got this weird, turny sensation in my stomach, like I wanted to obey, and yet it would be more fun not to.

Weird, isn't that? Obeying doesn't really come second nature to me. Or even third.

“Matt!”

I look up at Nick.

“Oh, right, where was I?”

He lifts his script and raises his glasses and, in very exaggerated fashion, reads the first few words of my line.

I have to flip around until I find it. I guess they went through the prologue scene without me.

“You'll never get away with this, Monstrothis,” he deadpans.

Sandy guffaws.

I roll my eyes and look at the script, finding my spot.

“You'll never get away with this, Monstrothis. You may have me, but the Pirate Princess has escaped, and my allies—”

The villain, who has third billing in this mess, is a veteran stuntman who's used to working behind heavy prosthetic makeup and clearly relishes the role of a mustache (tentacle?) twirling villain, even if it means he's going to be baking in this ungodly heat under fifty pounds of silicone and body paint.

He spits his line like it wronged him.

“You're the one who's done for, Grabthar! The princess will yet be mine, and when my Imperator Virus spreads across the stars, only those I deem worthy will survive! The weak and the unfit will be destroyed, starting with you!”

Nick reads the script in a deadpan monotone.

“Prince Grabthar struggles mightily against his bonds. He looks down in concentration. He flexes his mighty thews, and his restraints begin to loosen. As Monstrothis turns his back—”

“Excuse me,” Sandy says.

Nick glares at her. “What?”

“If he could rip his way out of the restraints, why didn't he do it earlier?”

Nick gives her a withering look and appears desperate to explain that he didn't write this. The screenwriter Mom hired is seated in the corner, wearing a black turtleneck and beret in the fucking desert, until he launches to his feet.

“Because he could not summon his resolve until his lady love, the Pirate Princess, is threatened,” he says dramatically. He says everything dramatically, like he's in an audition every moment of his life.

“Sit down, Maury,” Nick mutters.

“Why are you letting these actors savage my script?”

“I said sit down.”

Another actor leans forward. “Honey, you got hired on to this for two reasons.”

Sandy glares at him.

“Maybe you want to get something off your chest?” he says, gritting his teeth at her.

“You—” she snarls, leaping out of her chair.

My new bodyguard moves so fast I can barely believe it. He very calmly pushes Sandy back down into her chair, to keep her from crawling over me, and puts a hand on Maury's shoulder, pushing him back down into the seat.

“Are you professionals?” he says, “or fucking children?” Looming over all of us, he looks at Maury. “Apologize to her.”

He mutters his apologies and Sandy gives Lucas an appreciative nod.

Nick looks at him appreciatively. He steps back and looms behind me, tree-trunk arms folded over a massively muscled chest.

“Shall we continue?”

Jim, the stuntman playing Monstrothis, leans forward. Nick continues his narration.

“Prince Grabthar's left arm breaks free, exclamation point.” He actually says exclamation point out loud, glancing over at Maury, the screenwriter. “Monstrothis turns, and—” Nick cues him with a pointed finger.

“You think you can escape?” Monstrothis roars, startling all of us. “You will never defeat me, boy! I already have your precious princess on my pleasure starship?”

“His what?” Sandy snaps.

A round of snickers and suppressed laughs busts out around the table.

“The pleasure starship represents Monstrothis' deep-seated—”

“It represents the reason why your contract has a nudity clause,” Nick says, annoyed. “Shall we go on?”

Nick, annoyed, rubs at his temples.

Sandy holds up the script. “Uh, mister director?” she says, playing up her Joisey Girl accent a little too much for her to be serious.

“Yes,” he sighs.

“One minute of script is supposed to equal a minute of screen time, right?”

“That's the rule,” Nick sighs, clearly knowing where this is going.

“We're on page thirty-seven…six-hundred and forty-three.”

“Yes,” Nick says.

“This movie is ten hours long?”

“It is a true epic,” Maury says.

“Shut up,” Nick says. “We're breaking for dinner. Come back in the morning. The morning would be before noon, Mister Laurel. You actually need to do this.”

Hurriedly, I leap out of my seat.

My security detail of one hulking hunk is on me like glue, following me out into the night air. It gets cold out here almost instantly when the sun goes down, despite the brutal, punishing summer heat, and I can see my breath.

“This whole thing going to be like that?” he says.

“I have no idea. I've never done this before. Trust me, not my idea.”

He snorts. “I believe that.”

“So, who the hell are you again?”

I stop and turn and study him. For such a big man, he's devastatingly handsome in a rugged kind of way, with a long scar running down one side of his face, dark hair, and violently gray eyes. I'd guess he's only a few years older than I am in age, but he seems older, surer.

“Security.”

“Like, Paul Blart security? Or putting-black-bags-over-people's-heads-for-the-CIA security?”

“Half a dozen of one, six of the other,” he says, smiling dangerously.

It takes a rare man to look muscular in tailored clothes, but he does. The job must pay well; he's all designer, from his Italian leather shoes to his tie tack. The leather holster under his arm is probably bespoke, too. You don't buy off the shelf for a hand cannon like that.

I start to ask him if he's packing as much heat in his pants as he is under his arm, but catch myself before the words escape.

“So this is your first movie,” he says as I start to walk.

“First implies there will be more than one. You don't need to be part of the whole Hollywood scene to see what a shitshow this is, do you?”

He shrugs his huge shoulders.

“Do I really need to explain why a ten-hour movie about Prince Grabthar, written by an accountant named Maury, is a bad idea?”

“Accountant?” he says.

“Yeah. Maury isn't a screenwriter, he's high up in an accounting firm my dad uses for his company. He's friends with my mom. He's been shopping this dumbass script around since I was in diapers.”

Lucas laughs.

“I don't care. Whatever, as long as the checks keep rolling in and don't bounce. I'm on you until this is over.”

“On me, huh?”

“Your mom says you're quite a problem child.”

I roll my eyes.

“My mom married a rich man and thinks she's rich. This isn't me.” I wave my hand around.

“Then what are you doing here?”

I shrug. “Nothing better to do. Trust me, I'm only ironically detached. I'd prefer this to where I'd be if my mom hadn't met my father.”

“Where's that?”

“Oakland,” I shrug.

“You grew up on the poor side?”

I eye him. “Mom was…well, she was a stripper. She's friends with Sandy, if you can believe that. So we had more than most. Less than some. You?”

He rolls his big shoulders.

“I grew up one of six in a farmhouse in Buck's County with two air conditioners for seven rooms, leaky roofs, pest problems, and four brothers and a sister constantly at each other's throats. I got out when I could and didn't look back.”

He looks into the distance, darkly.

“Where the hell is Buck's County?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Where the hell is Pennsylvania?”

He shoots me an annoyed look, suppressing a smirk.

“So, what now? You escort me? Are we sleeping in the same trailer?”

I almost stumble over the double entendre. The flirtatious edge to my question seems to catch him off guard. This doesn't strike me as a guy who startles easy, but he takes just a little longer to answer than I expected.

“Your mom didn't deign to tell me about my sleeping arrangements. I'll have to ask her about that.”

“If you're smart, you'll make sure you ask for your checks. She has a tendency to forget to pay people.”

“Don't worry about that,” he says. “Boss takes care of it. What now?”

“Chow,” I say. “Follow me.”

I drop by my trailer to grab a sweater first and head over to the caterers. They've set up under a canopy, serving from a food truck.

“Mom wouldn't skimp out on this,” I tell Lucas as we get in line.

Everyone is huddled around the tables. Those big gas heaters that look like giant floor lamps raise the temperature a few degrees, while citronella candles burn away the bugs under the tent.

I go and sit with Sandy.

Lucas sits down next to me, creaking the metal bench at the folding picnic table with his weight.

She glances at me and says nothing. Now wrapped in a cardigan, she looks even more librarianish. She pokes listlessly at her beef wellington with a fork.

Yes, my mom had the caterers prepare beef wellington out here.

“You look a little glum,” I say.

She looks up at me, then back down at her food.

“You try being the butt of every joke for a while.”

“You handled yourself well,” Lucas says. “You'd do better in a squad of Marines than they would, trust me.”

We both look at him. Sandy smiles gratefully.

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” she mutters.

“Join the club,” I say.

Lucas says nothing. He didn't take a slice of the beef, but grabbed a saran-wrapped turkey club.

“How'd you end up doing this?” he says, after a few bites.

She looks at him and laughs.

“My career isn't going anywhere.”

“It's not?” I say.

“I've met a lot of your fans. Marines love you,” Lucas says.

“Yeah, but so what? They gonna pay me to do a USO show?”

Lucas laughs. “You'd be more popular than some washed up stand-up comedian.”

“I'm forty-six years old,” she says.

“I'd have said thirty,” Lucas grunts.

She looks at him, trying to assess whether she's being played or not.

“I can't even eat this shit,” she mutters, shoving the plate away. “You know how hard it is to maintain twelve percent body fat and have a big ass?”

“I can't say I do,” Lucas says.

Sandy cranes back in her seat and looks at Lucas's ass.

“You sure?” she snorts. “Anyway, I've burned too many bridges in the biz. Didn't save enough, spent too much on…doesn't matter. Most girls by the time they hit my age are producers now. Plus, the industry isn't what it was. Everyone watches on those stupid tube sites. They don't pay us.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I'm not expecting to be Meryl Streep, you know? I know I'm never going to be taken seriously. I just need to get into something before I'm totally washed up, even if it's something as dumb as this. If you don't mind my saying.”

“Don't tell my mom,” I say.

She smirks at me. “You're adorable.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “I think you're worried too much. You're perfect for MILF stuff.”

She laughs. “Honey, I've been a MILF since you were in diapers. MILF one day, teen the next.”

Grabbing her plate, she rises. “I'll be in my trailer. Might as well enjoy being able to say that while it lasts.”

As she leaves, I shift into her seat to face Lucas, who watches after her.

“She live up to all your fantasies?”

He shakes his head. “Never had any interest.”

“Too blonde, or too…” I make a motion in front of my chest.

He smiles at some secret and chows down on his tuna.

“So, are you seriously going to follow me everywhere?”

“Till your mom says otherwise, or whoever signs the checks. How long is this supposed to take, anyway?”

“Mom will get frustrated and give up as soon as there's any real push back. I give it a couple of months.”

“Why's she doing this?”

I shrug. “She says it's for me, but she always says it's for me. She wants to be a movie producer. She has this fantasy that she can buy her way into fame for me and her with my dad's money.”

“Where's he in all of this?”

I cut off a bite of beef wellington. It's perfectly done, at least. I chew it for a while, savoring the taste before I answer him.

“He's at work. Nobody's going to say it, but it's pretty clear that they're in an open relationship and have been since I was in sixth grade. She spends money like water, but if this production costs something nuts like fifty million, he'll have made six times that on interest on one account before it's over. If she's out screwing around in the desert playing movie mogul, he doesn't have to schedule his booty calls around her. I think his latest is some French conceptual artist.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The kind that strips down, paints herself orange, and stands around with leaves on her nipples to represent the clearing of rainforests or something. She's actually kind of fun, but I don't want to be Eskimo Brothers with my dad.”

“What?”

“You don't know Eskimo Brothers? It's when two guys have both—”

He grunts. “Huh.”

“Yeah,” I say. “You should go see my mom, find out where you're supposed to sleep.”

“Not until you're buttoned up in your trailer, kid.”

I narrow my eyes and grit my teeth. “Don't call me kid. Besides, how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” he says.

“Hah, not even old enough,” I say. “What are you so worried about? We're in the middle of nowhere.”

“See,” he says, gesturing at me with his sandwich. “That play won't work.”

“What play?”

He smirks. “Telling me your plan and trying to make it sound ridiculous so I won't be suspicious.”

“I don't even have a car.”

“Like the drivers won't run you anywhere you want to go. Are they going to say no to Prince Grabthar?”

I glare at him. “Fuck you.”

He stands up, taking his sandwich with him. “These heaters are burning me up.”

I'm with Sandy, not hungry enough to choke down any more of this overly rich food. I stomp past him towards my trailer, neither giving a heads up nor announcing where I'm going, but I can't shake my new babysitter.

I wonder if Mom told him he's not the first. I suppose maybe this was justified when I was sixteen, like I needed guarding at prep school. Maybe it was a dad thing. Set the boy right or he's off to military school. I really doubt that. I don't think he cares. This is all Mom, trying to keep me from being just embarrassing enough that the old man takes notice and bounces her.

This entire debacle. All her. The worst part is I think she genuinely believes this steaming pile of garbage she's talked these people into creating is actually going to launch me a career.

Lucas shadows me all the way back to my trailer. I stop at the door.

“Did you want to follow me inside and tuck me in?”

For a few heart pounding seconds, he seems to consider it. God, he's hot. Looking at him, it feels like I've never seen a man before. This alluring creature before me is a new, undiscovered territory I want to explore. Never in my life have I felt this kind of reaction. I'm hard as a rock and I can barely breathe.

“Try not to lose yourself overnight,” he says.

“I won't,” I say sarcastically.

Inside the trailer, I slam my door and lock it. It shakes the whole damn thing. It's freezing in here. The air is still running full blast. There's no thermostat, so I can really see my breath now. I rush over to it and shut it off, and stare at my shaking hands.

I haven't felt like this since the first time I got laid, except it's fifty times more intense. My dick is as hard as a steel rod and my balls are boiling.

I can't sleep in jeans. Well…I can. I choose not to. It's so freaking cold in here, I turn the shower on full blast with the hot water all the way up before I clamber inside.

The water stings my skin from the heat. I duck my head under it, and a faint layer of dust turns slick and trickles down my back. The dirt in this place gets everywhere, you can't stop it.

So I soap up, get the sweat and omnipresent grime off of me.

My hand goes between my legs and I take a harsh pull on my cock, dragging the skin through my fingers. My eyes half open, I start thinking about Lucas Baxter, my bodyguard.

I've…I've had fantasies before. Who doesn't? I'm just curious, I've always told myself, even when I slide a finger up my ass…like I'm doing now, gliding it inside me and thrusting into my fist. What would he taste like? Hot breath on my face, in my mouth. Strong where a woman is yielding, rough rather than soft, hard and urgent rather than enveloping and inviting. I pump my ass hard. One of my old girls got freak on me back there once and I got a taste for it.

So much of a taste that I keep a nice thick plug in the drawer by the shower. I lube that boy up and shove him in there, yelping from the brief pain as the widest part spreads my hole open. Cumming is one thing, but cumming with the heavy weight of the plug pressing on me from the inside almost makes me fall down.

I slide to the cramped floor of the shower and play with myself, wondering what his skin would taste like, how it would feel to take his cock in my mouth. I always fantasized about a kind of generic guy, just wondering how things would feel. I wrote it off as being jaded about sex, and if anyone is jaded about sex, I would be.

Okay, maybe it wasn't always a generic guy. A few of my classmates, a teacher or two… Mister Babbage, the gym teacher, was ripped as fuck and he'd teach classes in basketball shorts, swinging around like a sock full stuffed with a cucumber.

Lucas is hung, I could tell just with a glance. Only a guy with a big dick swaggers like that.

Fuck. I explode into my hand, shuddering all over as I lose control and moan softly, choking down the sounds. I never learned to be all that quiet—I could be banging cheerleaders two at a time and my mom and father wouldn't notice as long as we didn't leave my suite in the house—but for some reason when I fantasize like this I need to restrain myself. Like I'm ashamed.

The high from orgasm makes my head swim as the aftershocks twist through my body. I have to catch a breather before I pull the plug out and crawl out of the shower. The water went cold while I was sitting there and now I'm not just freezing, I'm wet and stiff and I just finished beating off.

Shivering like mad, I towel off as fast as I can and throw on loose warm-up pants and a hoodie.

Then I head for the door.

Outside, the crisp night air sucks the moisture right off my skin and scalp. Hood up, I wander through the camp. There's still lots of activity. The crew mom hired are all hanging out together. I hang around the edges, watching the rough and tumble guys argue, brag, and joke with each other.

They all know what a complete shitshow this is. You should have seen the look on the guy's face when she bought half a million dollars’ worth of cameras and lenses over loud objections that most productions just rent because of how fast they go obsolete.

I don't know what I'm looking for until I find it: Lucas.

They gave him a trailer. It's about half the size of mine, just barely enough room to stand up and walk around in. I creep up to it when I spot him through the window, freezing when he stops, a deep expression of concentration on his face.

He's listening.

Sneaking up on this guy seems like a really stupid idea all of a sudden. I should back off and get back to my trailer before he drags me there by the scruff of my neck…or go jack one of the production's Navigators, head down to Vegas, and have a good time.

Instead I wait, frozen, deer in the headlights, until he turns back to what he was doing.

Undressing.

Carefully, I creep up to the curved aluminum wall of the trailer and lurk near the window, watching.

He detaches his shoulder rig from his belt first, removes the gun and checks it, and sets it on the side table.

I suck in a breath when he whips off his shirt. His body is more massive muscled even than I realized. He's huge, a godlike figure of raw power. I lick my lips, staring. He sheds the shirt and moves and flexes, sitting to take off his shoes and socks before he rises again to undo his belt.

My mind catches the action in slow motion. Buckle first, then it slides loose of the loops with a tug of his hand. My eyes flit everywhere at once, trying to soak in every movement of his massive body.

His pants fall just slightly, tugging his shorts down to the hip, exposing a delicious V cut down the front and the top curve of an absolutely massive ass, huge boulder muscles that could fuck his cock through a concrete wall. He stands there rolling up his belt and his pants sink incrementally lower with every movement.

Then he bends, all at once, and reveals strong legs, that massive ass, and the biggest penis I have ever seen. I go instantly rigid, my knees buckling and my head swimming as my dick goes from half-chub to full on, uncontrollable, just-breath-on-it-and-I'll-come super hard-on.

Watching that thing swing around all I can think about is getting on my knees, feeling his big hands on my head as he rams his cock down my throat.

I start touching myself without realizing it. I need to get out of here. I pull my hand off my shaft and try not to let it wander again as I watch him move around until he finally disappears and the trailer wall thrums with the running water of the shower.

My body aching for release, I rush back to my trailer, knowing that whatever I do to myself wouldn't be as good as feeling him.