The package sat on Erika's desk for about a week before she finally did anything with it. She didn't put it off intentionally, but she'd gotten rid of her VCR about three apartments ago and it took a while for her to find the time and energy to buy one from the local thrift store. Plus, if she'd learned anything during her two years on the pop culture beat for Vixen Online, it was that padded envelopes with no return address containing nothing but a couple of unlabeled video cassettes and a hand-scrawled note saying, "WATCH THE TAPES" generally did not lead to a Deep Throat-style scoop. Most of the time she was lucky if they didn't contain actual dubbed copies of 'Deep Throat'.
Still, you never knew. And a second-hand VCR only cost about five bucks. Erika picked one up the next time she was shopping for cheap clothes and only left it in the bag for a couple of days before she finally hauled it out and hooked it up to her TV. She slid the tapes out of the mailer and spent a few minutes trying to figure out which one to watch first before finally picking one at random and popping it in.
The quality wasn't very good-it looked like a third-hand dub of an old hand-held video camera, complete with shimmery little video artifacts that slowly rolled down the screen as the tape played. The footage couldn't have been that old, though; Erika recognized the girl in the footage as Piper Laramie, a manufactured pop singer who had her first chart hit last year (barely) with some godawful song, what was it? She checked her phone quickly. Right, "A Rebel Just Like Me". Because nothing said rebellion like product placement in all your music videos and licensing your first single out to Old Navy.
She'd written an article on Piper a couple of months ago, although it was really about how old Erika felt seeing yet another nineteen-going-on-twelve baby-faced pop star doing mall tours and playing for screaming tweens while her record label tried to push her as the next Miley Cyrus. Beyond that, Erika hadn't cared too much. She already had too many pop stars to keep track of without adding another.
This didn't look like it came from her publicist, though. It was video of her in an office, sprawled in an overstuffed chair with one leg up on the armrest and the other on the floor, and listening to something on headphones. She looked like the Platonic ideal of the vapid, self-absorbed teenage celebrity-her mouth hung slightly open in a completely affectless expression, she was showing her panties straight to the camera, and her eyes stared vacantly at nothing with all the intelligence of a slightly concussed cocker spaniel. It was pretty much how Erika pictured Paris Hilton looking when she was alone.
After a minute or so, another person walked in. Erika recognized him as well; he was Saul Compton, manager of Piper and about two dozen other interchangeable teen acts stretching back over the last thirty-five years. Rolling Stone had called him "the Antichrist of music", but it hadn't stopped him from making more money than God off the backs of mediocre musicians' fifteen minutes of fame.
"How's it goin' there, champ?" he asked Piper in a honeyed voice that sounded like he'd long ago perfected the art of humoring petulant teenagers that still sold concert tickets. He patted her on the shoulder in a way that he probably thought wasn't creepy.
"Fine," Piper said, her voice a flat monotone of utter disinterest. Erika half-wondered if she wasn't strung out on quaaludes or something. Maybe that was what the person who had sent her these tapes wanted her to see? Maybe they figured that Erika wouldn't mind getting an exclusive of a big name record producer handing out chill pills to his barely legal protégée. If that was the case, they figured pretty damn right.
But Saul didn't give Piper any pills. He just pulled the headphones off of her head and leaned down to whisper something in her ear. She nodded, her blank expression slowly melting into a dreamy smile as she sat up in her chair. "I understand, sir," she said, still in that same drowsy monotone. "How would you like me to obey?"
Erika's eyebrows shot up. Obey? Okay, so half the time she assumed that most of the teenagers in Hollywood had some kind of weird Svengali thing going on with their managers, but she never really expected to have it confirmed with video evidence. It wasn't illegal or anything-Piper always dressed like she was thirteen, but Erika was pretty sure she was nineteen or twenty. But even if it wasn't actually taking advantage of a minor, the power imbalance was obvious. This tape could do some real damage.
And it got worse. On the screen, Saul cupped Piper's chin in his hand and said, still in that same infinitely patient voice, "Why don't you give me a blowjob now, tiger?" Erika shuddered-the unironic use of the word 'tiger' in the bedroom had to be, at the very least, a war crime. But Piper whimpered like he'd just finger-banged her to orgasm and undid his fly with obvious enthusiasm.
She half-expected the tape to cut out at that point, but it kept running as Piper slid her hand into Saul's pants and pulled his cock out. Erika paused the tape, feeling a little embarrassed, but somehow it looked worse in freeze-frame so she hit 'Play' again. She had to admit, Saul looked pretty stiff for a guy who had to be in his late fifties-he probably had a little blue pill or two in his medicine cabinet.
Erika noticed that Piper's very obvious panties were getting translucent as she wrapped her lips around Saul's cock and began bobbing up and down on it with impressive enthusiasm. "Oh, thank you, sir," she moaned as his dick popped out of her mouth on one upstroke. "Thank you thank you thmmmmf..." Piper swallowed it up again with every sign of rapturous enjoyment.
Erika was a little bit stunned, to put it mildly. She thought of herself as pretty good in bed-she was between boyfriends right now, thanks to a little incident involving a "borrowed" credit card and two hundred bucks in online gambling charges, but she liked to think that the men in her life would agree with her self-assessment as a generous lover. False modesty aside, her blowjobs took a backseat to nobody's. But Piper...
Piper adored it. Piper was slurping on Saul's cock like she had a second clit in her throat, gulping it all the way down and purring like a milk-drunk kitten before sliding it back out to flick her tongue all around the head. The whole time she was moaning and grinding the heel of her free hand against her crotch. When she did speak, it was more of the same babble of "Thank you sir, I love to obey you sir," over and over. It should have sounded stupid coming out of the mouth of a girl whose BDSM experience probably extended to a dog-eared copy of '50 Shades of Grey', but it didn't. She was too sincere to sound silly. She really wanted to please him.
"That's a good girl," Saul said, holding the back of her head with his hands. He wasn't forcing her down or anything, though; he didn't seem to be using any force at all. He'd just asked her for a blowjob, and she was acting like it was the best thing in the world. Erika could actually see a damp spot on the chair now where Piper was sitting.
"That's right, sweetheart," Saul said as Piper licked all the way along Saul's shaft like he was candy-coated. "You know what you need to do to cum for me, don't you?"
