All he could think of was the pain. It was a long time since something had hurt this much but he was determined that he would not give them the satisfaction of knowing it. So he curled up in a foetal ball and tried not to let them kick him to death, or damage his face too much. When he had given them the missive for this job he had specified that they did not touch his face, but you could never guarantee that someone doing a thing for money you'd already paid them would stick to the rules. He closed his eyes tightly and focussed on the video shoot earlier this afternoon. That was where the idea had come from of course. Well, in truth, the germ of it was planted in his mind during the spring when they did that Adam photo shoot for the album and he'd first come up with the Animorous concept.
Peter Adam was a famous photographer, notorious even. In Barcelona, promoting the first single, Rayne Wylde, glamorous lead vocalist with the notoriously bisexual Glam Rock band Whipsnade, had met up with Adam's people, who insisted that the snapper desperately wanted to take his picture. SOLD, Wylde's record label was moderately enthusiastic about it. Adam had a reputation for risquΓ© material and this fitted in quite snugly with Whipsnade's existing portfolio.
Consequently, Rayne Wylde found himself posing nude for the first time in over ten years. It was Adam himself who had brought the matter up. He was an ebullient fellow; a big, blond German with a rack of impressive muscles and a seriously warped genius to boot. He invited Rayne to his studio in Barcelona and in his no-nonsense way proceeded to regale the singer with tales of his time making porn movies and running sex clubs in Berlin prior to becoming a photographer. The walls of his office and studios were covered in framed prints of his work, including a spectacular shot of one very famous young male model and It-Boy kneeling in mud to his mid-thighs, in a pig pen, splattered with filth, masturbating vigorously whilst some pigs and an old man and a little boy in peasant clothing looked on impassively.
"You have done porno before, no?" Peter Adam asked as Rayne was beginning to enjoy himself.
"Er... no," the singer assured him, moments before his companion produced a slim portfolio and flicked it open, slapping a number of cuttings and pictures onto the desk between them.
His heart had performed a back flip at the sight of them.
"Is you?" said Adam, pointing to the face of a boy he had not seen for fifteen years.
Rayne just blinked at them in astonishment.
"Where did you get these?" he wanted to know.
Adam shrugged and smiled wickedly; "Ah, you know... I collect, over the years."
Rayne studied each clipping with wide, pale, horrified eyes. His hair had been bottle blond back then, a near-white, floppy cow's-lick tumbling around his sharp-boned, sixteen-year old face. He could recall everything about the shoot from having his makeup applied (the make-up girl had been amazed by his naturally long, thick, black eyelashes) to walking out into a room where two strangers were waiting to have sex with him whilst a third photographed the proceedings. It had been very amateurish, when all was said and done; just a semi-detached house in Willesden. He had been prepared in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the toilet seat and the session took place in a near empty back bedroom, stripped of all furnishings except for a spartan bed and a simple, wooden chair.
He pulled his thoughts back to the present smartly, lifting his head to meet Peter Adam's shrewd gaze.
"Is this why you wanted to take my picture?"
"You photograph well," the older man said with another shrug. "You have a good face. The camera loves you."
He did not argue. It was true he supposed. Some of the promotional pictures for the last album had to be seen to be believed. No one who had known Raymond Wilde as a skinny, rebellious child would ever recognize the man he had become.
"I'm not sure this is what the record company are after," he said mildly, his soft, husky voice recovering some of its gravity as he pushed a black and white photograph back across the desk. It depicted his naked, teenaged self sprawled supine on a mattress with his knees over the shoulders of one tattooed, muscular skinhead and his lips wrapped around the hard cock of another, who was holding him roughly by the hair. He shifted a little in his seat to try to disguise the fact that the overt physicality of the image was making him very aroused.
Adam grinned wickedly at once.
"Is no problem," he reassured his potential sitter. "We make nice pictures for SOLD; sanitized pictures that do not offend the mothers of your little kiddy fans. Then we make other portraits, more..." he paused and sucked on his teeth for a moment, considering the word he wanted; "...more explicit portraits, for my own portfolio, no?"
Rayne raised one eyebrow cynically.