"Oh! Oh no, shoot, I'm sorry baby!"
I pulled a look of disappointment, entirely fabricated of course. This was just part of what we did. I think.
"Another denial?" I asked her in reply.
"Gosh, yeah. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong!" she said, staring at her phone, slumped in the bed behind me while I pecked away on some work stuff at the desk.
"You know," I said over my shoulder, "you could just let me take a look at it. There has to be something in the email that says why your submissions are being rejected." I looked back to see if she was listening. She was.
"What, you don't think I can figure this out? I'm smart you know!" She scrunched up her nose and squinted at me. It was unreasonably cute.
"I know you are, smarty pants." I turned back to my work, only to be interrupted once again, this time by the oaf I shared the apartment with yelling from down the hall.
"Hey! Are you coming out tonight? Dave says there'll be girls this time!" he shouted, ignorant to the fact that I'd had a non-imaginary one in here for the better part of the weekend, and most nights in the week before. I swear, he wouldn't notice if the world ended sometimes. I leaned back in my chair to crack the door and reply.
"Nah," I hollered back, "I gotta finish up some work, and the girls are definitely just going to be his cousins again."
"Fuck you dude, I know you'd plug Marissa if she'd let you!"
I imagined that I could feel her eyes burrowing into the back of my head. He might be right about Marissa, but I'd never let her know that.
I offered a crude reply about my unwavering preference for his mother as he scooped up his keys and left the apartment laughing. I looked back cautiously, sure I'd get an earful. She lay in the pile of pillows and blankets, scrolling through her phone with a stern look on her face. The silence was heavy, and uncomfortable.
"I uhh..." I offered.
"Oh shut up, stupid," she laughed, losing control of the faΓ§ade of righteous indignation and throwing a pillow at me, "you should see your face right now! Like I give a fuck."
The truth was that *I* gave a fuck. Not specifically about the Marissa thing, but the other thing; the thing that happens when a beautiful woman randomly strolls into your life, sucks the life out of you daily for a week, starts calling you 'baby', falling asleep in your arms every night, and yet doesn't want your roommate to find out about her, or acts like you're just there to act as a stunt cock for her fan site page. I wouldn't admit to caring, but I cared. I was starting to care a lot.
"Besides, I know there's no way she'd let you do the stuff you do to me anyway." Her little wink didn't come close to suggesting the full scope of what she was talking about.
A week had passed since Ashley had knocked on my door, expecting to partake in an overheard foursome that had been nothing more than a technical failure on my part. Since then, we'd spent any time that we could get alone in trying to complete more of the prerequisites that would contribute to her getting certified as a JustAdmirers.com fuckdoll. The fan site, enormously popular, had established the program to offer an appealing draw for creators to put more effort into their pages. In return, the models got access to a modest benefits package, some higher financial remuneration, and even the ability to 'specialize' in some areas. Of the 100 prerequisites, Ash needed two thirds of them to earn her Fuckdoll International Standards Certification. So far, she'd only managed a handful.
It wasn't for lack of trying or anything. She'd submitted no less than 5 clips of herself this week for verification, but continued to be met with rejection after rejection for technical shortcomings or bad angles or whatever else the emails said; I wouldn't know, given that she wouldn't let me see them. I couldn't even find her profile on the site, which she continued to insist was because she had set it to private until her certification was completed. True or not, she had her reasons, and I'd respect that for as long as she needed me to. I wouldn't risk pushing her away, not now, now that I...cared for her.
"No," I laughed, "I really don't think she would. I saw her gag on a hotdog at a barbeque once."
"Oh my god," she chuckled, sitting upright. The blanket fell away from her shoulders; she wore only my t-shirt. "Could you imagine how depressing her blowjobs must be? God, she'd probably choke to death on the tip alone!" She fell to a short fit of laughter, imagining the comedy of the situation, and pulling a ludicrous face in imitation of someone choking. Her laugh was so sweet; her little nose bunched up and snorting contentedly every time she got herself really worked up. We both eased back out of the mirth of her crude joke after a minute.
"Oh but I really shouldn't tease," she said with slap of the blanket fortress around her, sounding genuinely sympathetic, "I know some girls don't like that kind of thing. I forget that not everyone is like you and me sometimes."
She'd made similar comments a few times. 'You and me' this, 'me and you' that. I wasn't entirely sure what all fit into that box, aside from a general sexual depravity that had served as the basis for our continued...association? Friendship? I failed to see how my being a rabid masturbator and porn addict was in any way comparable to whatever you'd call her. There was a divide, in my mind, between me and the alter to pornographic spectacle that my bedroom represented, and the outright feral degeneracy of a woman so dedicated to the art that she routinely choked herself out on my cock. There were worlds between us. I was like the naked guy in that DaVinci painting, arm outstretched to make the barest connection between his fingertip and that of his god. How could there ever be a 'you and me'?
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Their loss, I suppose. Some people just don't know what's good for them. You want something to eat? I can order in. Jeff'll probably stay at Dave's tonight, so we'll have the place to ourselves."
"Hmm," she mused, "can it be something light? No wait, that's no fun. Pizza?" she asked, perking at the thought. God, but she was cute.
"We can do pizza, sure. Want me to call?"
"Yes please" she said with a mildly predatory smile blooming across her pretty face. I knew that was.
"Stop it, you. No more blowing me while I'm on the phone. No, I mean it! Don't make that face. My boss nearly figured it out last time. No, you stay over there you little..."
She crossed the few feet from the bed to my desk chair swiftly, crawling up into my lap to plant an aggressive barrage of kisses on my face and lips.
"Fiiiiine," she conceded, rolling her eyes as I wrestled her back, "but you owe me then!"
"For what?!" I teased, "buying you dinner AGAIN this week?" She laughed, pretending to think hard about the jibe.
"Mmm, yeah," she draped her arms around my neck. She was so close to me. She dropped her voice, speaking softly, "You owe me for letting you buy me dinner. Again. And you owe me for letting you watch a movie with me in here while we eat. And, let me think. You also owe me for letting you lend me your shirt." Her voice was so quiet by the end. I had no choice but to kiss her.
"Is there anything else I owe you for?" I asked.
"There *is* just one more little, tiny thing" she said, taking my hand and guiding it up her smooth thigh to settle on her naked hip, surely hoping I'd register her nakedness under the tee.
"Tell me," I whispered, moving to graze her butt softly.
Another soft kiss.
"You owe me,"
Another, impossibly gentle peck.
"For taking so long to order."
She squealed with reckless abandon as I tickled her right back onto the bed, screeching her petitions for an escape from her sentence. I ceased only once I was sure she'd paid the price of for her crime, and called in the order.
*******
Movie nights looked a little different for us than you might be used to. The array of wall mounted monitors and large TV connected to my computer were often used for video games or work, but whenever the apartment was empty it turned into something else entirely.
"Can we watch something different tonight," she said, plucking a greasy pepperoni off the top of the pizza I'd just slapped down onto the bed between us, "I feel like switching it up."
"Well," I said, "what are you in the mood for? Bondage?"
"Ew, not with pizza, you fucking weirdo," she said, inexplicably repulsed at the thought, as if we hadn't watched a 2 hour blowbang over some Chinese food on Thursday, "Do you have anything new? I want something you haven't seen yet so we can watch it together for the first time."
Most girls who said things like that meant canonically classic RomComs, or Disney movies. Not hardcore pornography.
"Not really, but let me look." I navigated through a few tabs while she plated a slice for me, and plunked it in my lap.
"There!" she exclaimed, pointing insistently, "Do that one!"
"Really? How is that.. You know what, sure. Let's do it."
We sat in contented silence for the most part, happily munching down dinner together and beaming giddy smiles back and forth while watching two leather-clad women work a series of phallic toys in and out of a third woman, who was drenched in some description of oil.
"Can you imagine how hard that would be to get out of the sheets?" Ashley asked me, setting her empty plate aside. "Hurry up so I can cuddle on you."
I didn't tell her that I knew exactly how hard it was. I scarfed down my last few bites and ditched the plate, holding up an arm so she could crawl up next to me, still in just my tee.
"Which one do you like?" she asked. Again, where the question would have been a trap from other girlfriends, this was no such thing from her. And she wasn't my girlfriend anyway.
"The brunette" I said, watching her grope the naked woman's ass with a gloved hand as she worked a large dildo in and out of her punishingly stretched asshole on screen.
"Mmm, me too," she said matter of factly, "though I wish she'd take her tits out." I conceded that the latex bodysuit would look better on the floor.
"See if there's anything with her in it where she's naked. I want to know what she looks like," she said with a cheek pressed to my chest, snuggly tucked up under my arm. I paused the video to do as I was told.