Life Outside The Elysium Ch 17

This is another chapter in Part 2 of a series that began with Life in the Elysium, which you can find

here.

I strongly suggest you read the first series before starting this one. For those who just skip to the sex scenes, there will be no issue if you pick up here, but if you want to understand and enjoy the plot more fully, please take some time to read the series, as it will make more sense.

Be aware, this series includes a variety of adult situations, including male bisexuality, interracial sex, light incest, group sex and other taboo subjects that not everybody may be into. I do my best to accurately tag the story, so check those tags in advance to see what you can expect from each specific chapter. If anything in the tags bothers you, there's an entire site here filled with things you may prefer more. In any event, thanks for reading!

Author's Note

: This part is long enough that I probably could have split it into two different chapters, but the events here all happened on the same day, so it made sense to have them all together. I also hope you appreciate that we got this chapter out a little faster than the last one. Three more chapters to go, and I think we're still on pace to finish Part 2 by the end of the month. Thanks for reading, everybody!

------------------------------------------------

Eva Romano.

The last person on the planet I wanted to see right now.

I didn't expect to see her. There was no earthly reason for me to think she'd be at this awards show, no reason, as far as I knew, for her to actually be here.

But she was.

Avery was going to kill me.

Geno Volkov was standing behind her with a half dozen of Reyn's porn stars. I know that now, of course, but in the moment, I didn't recognize him because we'd barely said two words to each other. As for the Reyn stars around him, I was too busy worrying about Eva to recognize any of them either. All I knew was that Volkov looked familiar, but I couldn't place him, and he was staring daggers at me.

I remember feeling a chill down my spine. Geno Volkov was a dangerous, unstable man, but I had no idea at the time about that, nor did I realize I was going to find out first-hand how true that was, and soon.

Eva looked like the cat that got the cream, a dazzling smile on her face as she walked towards me. "We meet again Jack," she said, as she held out her hand, European style, with the expectation that I would kiss it. I remembered this was exactly what she did to me the first time I met her, one of the things that had started Avery seething.

Unlike that first time, when I was on my best behavior, I decided to pretend I didn't understand what she wanted me to do. I grabbed her hand, gave it a quick pump, bro-style, and then dropped it faster than a warm turd. She laughed prettily in response.

Shit. I was trying to be a dick, not trying to be funny.

"Eva, hello. I didn't expect to see you here tonight," I said, truthfully, with a fake, plastered-on smile that never reached my eyes. I didn't want to be rude, but I also didn't want to send any kind of signal that I was interested.

Avery was going to kill me.

Before she could respond, the guy she was with stepped away from his coterie of adult film stars and came up next to her. For a split second I was blessing him for stepping in, but that changed almost as soon as he opened his mouth.

"Jack Fisher," the man said, looking at me intensely. He didn't hold out his hand for a handshake. My mind was racing, not only because Eva was there, but because I felt like I knew this guy. The all-black routine made him look like an asshole, and the gold chain didn't help things. He had an aquiline face, short brown hair, five o'clock shadow, and he said my name with a Russian accent.

Russian. Suddenly it hit me. This guy had been standing next to Dimitri Borodin at the funeral. I never got his name. Who could this be?

"You seem to have me at a disadvantage," I told him smoothly. "I recall us meeting at the memorial service for the people killed during the New Year's Day shooting, but I don't think I ever got your name."

"I'm Yevgeny Volkov," he said, with an air about him that made me think he expected me to recognize the name. I didn't. "My friends call me Geno," he added.

"It's good to finally place the face to the name,

Yevgeny

," I told him, emphasizing his full name. I didn't give a shit what his friends called him. I could tell right away this was somebody I had no interest in befriending.

Now, let me be honest here. You guys should know me well enough by now to know that I'm a pretty friendly guy, pretty open with my affections, and I tend to give everybody a chance. It's extremely rare for me to decide straight off that I dislike somebody, but it happened here. There was just something smarmy about Volkov, something off that made me want to punch him in the face.

And it didn't help matters that I caught Eva looking at him with revulsion in the split second he stepped up and interjected himself into our conversation. This intrigued me. If she disliked him as much as that look seemed to indicate, why the hell was she here with him and all these girls?

Who

was

this guy?

"Quite," he told me. "I understand you're up for a few awards tonight," he said.

I nodded. "Yes, I'm the new guy around here, but folks seem to like what we're doing."

"Let me give you some free advice," Volkov said, a smile on his face. "Don't expect too much. After all, you are the new guy, and you and your... stepsister I suppose it is?... well," he continued, stepping in closer to me, and lowering his voice. "You all haven't figured out how things are run around here, have you?"

My urge to punch this guy in the face was rising considerably, and it was already high before. I felt my fist start to clench, and my adrenaline began flowing. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Diego, who was my protection for the evening, take a step closer to the pair of us. I waved him off. Volkov had security as well, and I didn't want or need another fight.

"We're not here to play games, Yevgeny, we're just here to make movies," I told him. "Whether we win awards doesn't matter at all to me."

"Well, it sure as hell matters to me," Nyla said, stepping up next to me. "I know who you are, Geno Volkov. And let me tell you something," she said, attitude dripping off her. "We're gonna eat your damn lunch. Reyn better step up its game, because Elysium Productions is running circles around you and we've barely been out a month," she added.

Reyn? Then it hit me. This guy must run Reyn. No wonder he was so hostile. He was the old school, and we were the new competition. And, if the numbers were accurate, we were beating him at his own game. But there must be more to it than just that, otherwise why would he seem to view me with such contempt?

If he was here with Eva Romano, there must be some connection between him, the Russians and Empire Luxe Holdings. My brain went into overdrive as I tried to go through everything I knew about the politics here in Vegas, but I was still behind the curve with that stuff and I knew it. Claire had been doing her best to educate me, but between classes and everything else my brain just couldn't hold it all.

"Oh, don't worry, Ms. Sinclair," Geno told her, turning his attention to Nyla. "We are well aware of your little website. People like something fresh, but we all know you guys aren't playing by the rules. You shouldn't have cut corners," he added cryptically. "I think you'll find that was a mistake."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Nyla scoffed. "Cut corners? We didn't cut anything, other than into your profits," she spat back at him.

"Geno, do we have to speak about business all night?" Eva said, reaching up and taking his arm, trying to pull him away from the confrontation. He was still dangerously close to me, but I was pleased with my self-control. I hadn't taken a step back, but I hadn't hit him either, so I had that going for me, which was nice. He took a step back as he turned, abruptly, to Eva. He seemed upset that she'd tried to change the subject.

"I'm sorry, my dear. You know how competitive I can be. And Jack Fisher and Nyla Sinclair, we're competitors twice over, of course," he said, as he turned back to Nyla and me. "Since I'm on the Zvezda board now and I own Reyn, we go head-to-head with both your Sinclair Group and Elysium Productions, and well... you know I live for business," he said, returning his gaze to Eva. The look he gave her was somewhere between a leer and a sneer. These two may be together, but it was clear to me there was no love lost between them. What a weird dynamic.

He took another step back, and I unclenched my fist. At that point he looked at me curiously, making a show of finally noticing the bandage on my forehead, which he couldn't have missed at the distance he was speaking to me. It was flesh colored and blended in pretty well, but up close it was clear that it was a bandage. "What happened to your forehead? Cut yourself shaving?" The look in his eyes became mocking, and something told me he knew more about what had happened to me than he was letting on. "Gotta be more careful, Jack. Don't want to mess up that face while it's still making you and your stepsister money," he chided me.

"Thanks for the tip," I told him. What a piece of shit.

My initial concern about being seen with Eva had long flown out of my head, dealing with this obnoxious prick, but I realized now that all eyes in the ballroom lobby were looking at us. If there were eyes, there were probably cameras, and the last thing I needed or wanted was for a video from a confrontation at the AFFI Awards to go viral, especially with me and Eva Romano standing so close to each other. Avery would be sure to see it and I'd be in even deeper shit with her than I already appeared to be.

"It's great to see you Jack," Eva said, and she leaned in and kissed my cheek.

Avery was going to kill me.

She stood back, and looked at me with sympathy in her eyes, but Volkov pulled her away, hard, by the arm, and the two of them moved off. The Reyn starlets he'd brought with him followed, looking like a row of baby geese following their mother.

"What the hell was that all about?" Nyla asked me, turning to look at Volkov and Romano as they walked away. "What's his fucking problem, besides the obvious European douchebag factor?"

"Your guess is as good as mine, sis," I told her. "What did he mean about cutting corners?"

"I have no idea," Nyla said. "We've done everything by the book, and I know we got all our submissions and materials into AAFI correctly -- Ainsley and the staff handled all of that and I double checked it, so I know they did it right. Other than that, what else could he possibly be referring to?"

I just shrugged at her. "I have no idea about any of this stuff, Nyla. Hell, I'm completely out of my element here. What are we even supposed to be doing?"

"You're my date for the evening, and even though we're already here and this is our hotel, we gotta go through the motions. That means walking the red carpet together, like you did at the Empire Luxe, and getting your pictures taken for the trade pubs and the gossip rags."

"Wait, there are porn trade publications?"

Nyla rolled her eyes at me. "Jack, there are trade publications for everything. And yes, even porn. C'mon, I'll show you a little secret," she said, taking me by the arm and pulling me away from the ballroom lobby. I had no idea where she was leading me.

Around the corner from the ballroom entrances was a long hallway that led, like in the Empire Luxe, to the VIP bathrooms. I was starting to think Nyla wanted a quickie, pleasurable memories of my first time getting a blowjob from Avery starting to form in my mind, when she pulled me through a door that I could barely see. It was cleverly concealed in the wall, and looked for all intents and purposes like a bookcase.

"Secret exit," she told me. "Daddy had a few of these installed around the hotel for security. This is an emergency exit stairwell that leads directly outside." We went through and she closed the door, and it clicked shut. It was, indeed, an exit stairwell, curving around and around a half dozen or more times until we reached an exit door. There were three sets of escalators that brought guests up to the ballroom level from the back entrance, as the ballrooms were on the fourth floor of the hotel proper. This stairway was ten times faster than the escalators were, with no stops and we were outside in no time.

The door on the outside was set back in the wall a bit, with a handful of bushes in front of it. I must have passed these bushes and this entrance a couple dozen times walking out of the lobby here to put Avery in cars back to her apartment when we had just started dating. I never realized this door was even here.

"Nyla, why is there a hidden door to the outside here?"

"You know Daddy," Nyla said, giving me a hard look. "He's always planning for the worst. The hotel has all kinds of little hidden doors like this one," she said. "You can look them up with your Admin level access on the Elysium app on your phone." She paused and looked at me closely. "You do know how to use the app, don't you?"

"Har har," I responded, as she looked at me like I was an idiot. "Yes, I know how to use the app," I told her. "I guess I got distracted by ordering sex workers to see all the extra bells and whistles."

Nyla grinned at me. "Yeah, that sounds like you," she told me.

Nyla took me by the hand, and we nonchalantly emerged from the bushes, twenty yards or so from the back entrance to the Elysium. It looked completely different than it usually did, as it was completely lit up by spotlights and roped off from the walkways that ran around the outside of the hotel. I could see a red carpet, dozens of cameras and camera crews, and a pair of reporters standing together at the top of the carpet, interviewing guests as they emerged from SUVs, fancy cars and more than one limousine.

"Ready to walk the red carpet with me, lil' bro?" Nyla asked, looking at me.

"No," I told her, laughing. "But I guess we have to do it anyway. You better protect the talent, Ms. CEO," I said squeezing her hand.

"Excuse me? I'm the talent around here, boy," she said, cocking her head at me. "Don't you forget it."

There was security all around the walkways and the roped off areas, but they let us pass without a word -- Nyla was the boss's daughter, and I was a 'Prince' so we could have done whatever we wanted, and the fact that we were both nominated for awards that night didn't hurt.

As we waited for our turn on the carpet, I got to watch a few of the stars arrive. I noticed a few women I remembered from videos I'd watched when I was younger, which was amazing, but for the most part, many of the people who were arriving didn't look like porn actors and actresses. A lot of them just looked like regular people, and there were a lot of guys who looked like nerds or slobs.

"I expected a better-looking crowd," I told Nyla, as we got closer to the front of the queue.

"They do a lot of different kinds of awards tonight, Jack," Nyla told me. "There are something like a hundred categories, after all, and a lot of them are for stuff that isn't on the screen, including cinematography, directing, sound and the like. It's just like the Oscars, except this is for porn."

"Really? Is this that big a deal?"

"I mean, it's not the Oscars, but there are going to be thousands of people here tonight, it's being streamed live and is also being recorded for a late night Showtime spot in a few months," she said. "Amazing, right? People care a lot about this stuff, oddly enough."

"Is this legit? I mean, the porn business isn't exactly known for attracting law abiding, upstanding citizens," I remarked. Something about the way Volkov was talking to me about us not understanding how things worked was floating around in the back of my mind.

"I have no idea, Jack," Nylaresponded. "This is my first time with all this stuff, too. My understanding is that the members of the AAFI, like the members of the Academy, get to vote on the winners, with nominations being made by the editors of the American Adult Film Industry Insider, their magazine. I heard there was some talk that the people who advertise the most in the magazine tend to get the most nominations, but all the big studios, websites and sex toy manufacturers are all part of AAFI. They're a big organization," she told me. "This stuff really matters to the actors, especially -- awards mean more fans and more fans mean more money."

We had almost made our way to the front of the red carpet, and I was chagrined to realize that the two reporters waiting to interview us were the same reporters, Josh and Kate, who had been at the Empire Luxe for the NARC Gala. Kate was fine, but Josh was an asshole, and I'm sure he would remember our last conversation.

We did our short walk on the carpet, Nyla spinning around and letting people get photos of her. I just stood there, feeling awkward, and let her do her thing. It felt so weird being here without Avery. I felt a little pang in my gut as I thought about her. I hoped she was doing okay without me. It was around eight Vegas time, so she was probably still at work back in DC. I fought the urge to call her and tried to focus before I had to deal with Josh and Kate.

I was actually surprised at how many of the cameras and reporters were snapping photos of me. I waved, casually, but I had a hard time hearing any specific questions, so I just followed Nyla on down the carpet and up to Josh and Kate.

"And if it isn't our wonderful hosts tonight! Ladies and gentlemen, Nyla Sinclair and Jack Fisher, both Vice Presidents with the Sinclair Group, owner of the Elysium hotel we're in right now, and -- amazingly enough -- both nominated for a number of awards tonight!" Kate said, gushing into the camera. Nyla smiled and stepped forward, and I stepped up next to her.

"Kate, it's always a pleasure to see you," Nyla said. "Let's hope tonight has a little less drama than last time," she replied.

Kate puzzled for a moment, and then realized Nyla was talking about the shootings at the NARC gala, the last time we'd seen her. Josh, for his part, knew exactly what Nyla meant, and stepped in.

"It couldn't get more crazy than last time, that's for sure," he said, his smarmy voice getting just a little extra smarmy. "Nyla, you and Jack here are part of Elysium Productions, one of the newest and hottest of the adult websites on the market. Do you think you're in a good position to win some awards tonight?" I was shocked. He was playing this straight. I had expected some kind of snark or other attitude from him, but he was basically ignoring me and focusing solely on Nyla. I was perfectly fine with that.

"We're here for the first time, Josh, so whatever happens, it's just an honor to be nominated, right?" Nyla laughed.

Kate turned to me. "Jack Fisher, American hero and one of the most famous adult film stars in the world now, but not because of your films!" I winced. This was true. I guess Kate was going to be the one with her claws out, but I had to admit I didn't mind being famous for something other than sex on camera. "How's the arm?"

"I'm mostly all healed," I told her. "Next time I'll do my best to duck," I said, using one of the stock phrases I'd been using when people have asked me that same question ten thousand times in the last few weeks.

Kate laughed, and Josh leaned in. "You've got a bandage on your forehead there, Jack," he said to me.

"I do, yes, nice of you to notice," I said, trying not to grind my teeth. Thanks for pointing it out, ass, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.