Page 33 of For Pleasure Or Worse

“Do you do it with other men?” Mateo asked quietly and directly. “Make…content like that with them?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have physical relationships with anyone. It’s purely parasocial. I’ve never filmed with a partner before. This all started in my dorm the summer after graduation. I stuck around to finish a ridiculous unpaid internship and needed the money. I didn’t want to ask my parents to help me, and my major was working in cameras and film media. I had the equipment, and the expertise, and…I was alone, and single. It’s always just been me and the camera.”

He wrung his fingers around each other, working through something in his head. “Would you?”

“Would I…?”

“Film with a partner.”

I struggled for the right words. because he’d asked me that question as if he was imagining dating me while I made porn with other men. I would never commit to that. Never want to. If I ever decided to start bringing other people into my work, having a boyfriend on the side would be out of the question. There were too many emotional variables. Not to mention the health screenings and regular tests to stay physically protected.

“That’s something that would require an intense level of trust for me,” I told him. “I wouldn’t invite just anyone into such an intimate, personal moment, or give them power over me that wasn’t deeply discussed and consented to. It’s more than just fucking on camera.”

“What about with me?”

All the blood in my body slowed to a crawl. My pulse thumped in the side of my neck, trying to acclimate. I was still so far into my head that part of it was telling me to run, but the rest of me was an inferno, and he was stoking the flames. My voice was low and doubtful. “Is that something you would want to do?”

“I want you, Tally. There’s a lot of things I would do if that was the result. Don’t you get that yet? I’ll have to warm up to it, and get over the preconceptions, but I think I owe us that much. Throwing this away can’t be the right thing to do. You work in that bank for a reason; Imetyou there for a reason. Maybe it’s something to do with this, I don’t know.” He chuckled. “I’m not much of a romantic.”

“This is romantic,” I confirmed with a blithe smile, trapping his hand holding my wrist. It was also egregiously sexy that Mateo was secure enough in himself that my work wasn’t an immediate dealbreaker. He might change his mind, but for the time being, I was holding on to his willingness to make us work with everything I had. “You don’t have to do this, you know. You don’t have to pretend to be okay with it. I’m giving you an out.”

“Stop trying to get rid of me, Natalia. It’s not going to work.”

My lips twisted upward into a smile that I tried to hide behind the rim of my beer as I brought it to my mouth. “All right, I’ll stop.”

“Will you show me?” He finally let go of my wrist to dig back into his plate of wings. The pressure that had been buildingin my chest that entire time released in one deep breath. His nonchalance caught me off guard.

Show him the most secret, intimate, vulnerable part of me? The woman I was on camera was not the same one sitting across from him. She couldn’t be. But if this was going to work, I needed to let Mateo in completely. No secrets, no lies. “Okay,” I said softly.

“And to be clear about what I said before, watchingyoudo porn isn’t the same as watching porn, is it?”

My cheeks budded crimson. “I think you get a hall pass for this one.”

“I can’t believe you tried to convince me this was something negative.”

Maybe this could work, I thought. Maybe I had finally, actually met my match in Mateo. I didn’t want to get my hopes up too soon, but all signs pointed to the promise that I had.

chapter eleven

Mateo

There werea few things in life that made me nostalgic. The smell of fresh wood shavings off a hot circular saw. Cigarette smoke and candied pecans in the summertime, a revved engine and the sweet scent of gasoline idling in a muscle car. Garlic and onions crackling on a stove.

Mom spent every Sunday when I was growing up bent over the gas burners in the kitchen. When she cooked, the entire neighborhood knew it. Every window in the house was open to offset the heat of the oven, and the sound of news playing on the radio whistled through the windscreens.

Just like we knew when the streetlights turned on it was time to ride our bikes home, when the dishes started clinking together and Dad hobbled off the couch toward the dining room, it was time to eat.

For my family, food was most definitely a way to the heart, and Natalia’s idea to get back in my parents’ good graces with a bowl of spaghetti and a bottle of wine was better than any other option I’d come up with.

Tally was pulling pots and pans from the cabinets when I stepped into the kitchen. She’d tied her long dark hair up into a big knot on the top of her head and was wearing an apron Ididn’t even know we owned. A perfect pair of leggings hugged her ass, the sleeves of an oversized sweater were pushed up to her elbows, and she slid across the floor in a pair of fluffy slippers that swallowed up her feet. It was my favorite thing I’d ever seen. Like both my worlds colliding into one, that Sunday afternoon nostalgia and the girl I was going to spend the rest of my life with rewriting those same memories in our own font. Something about it felt like a snapshot into the future I’d envisioned with Natalia from the moment I first saw her. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more.

She melted into the curve of my body as I stepped behind her and closed my arms around her waist. We swayed back and forth in front of the counter and I breathed the subtle, flowery scent of her in. “You have never looked hotter than you do right now.”

Tally’s head turned toward me, a kittenish smile playing on the corner of her mouth. “I haven’t even showered.”

“I’m so serious, all this”—I tugged her hair and pulled on the neckline of her apron—“it’s doing something to me.”

“I’m ready to be a stay-at-home house wife whenever you are,” she said, gesturing to her comfy clothes. “This is the dream. Rotating from one pair of yoga pants into another slightly different pair of yoga pants.”

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